In today’s “News from the Dystopia” segment, we have a story about fighting retail theft with drones. It centers on Flock Safety, a company that provides surveillance technologies, including UAVs, license plate readers, and gunshot location systems, to law enforcement agencies. Their flagship Aerodome product is a rooftop-mounted dock for a UAV that gets dispatched to a call for service and acts as an eye-in-the-sky until units can arrive on scene. Neat idea and all, and while we can see the utility of such a system in a first responder situation, the company is starting to market a similar system to retailers and other private sector industries as a way to contain costs. The retail use case, which the story stresses has not been deployed yet, would be to launch a drone upon a store’s Asset Protection team noticing someone shoplifting. Flock would then remotely pilot the drone, following the alleged thief back to their lair or hideout and coordinating with law enforcement, who then sweep in to make an arrest.
Police using aerial assets to fight crime is nothing new; California has an entire entertainment industry focused on live-streaming video from police chases, after all. What’s new here is that these drones lower the bar for getting aerial support into the mix. At a $1,000 per hour or more to operate, it’s hard to justify sending a helicopter to chase down a shoplifter. Another objection is that these drones would operate entirely for the benefit of private entities. One can certainly make a case for a public interest in reducing retail theft, since prices tend to increase for everyone when inventory leaves the store without compensation. But we don’t know if we really like the idea of being tailed home by a drone just because a minimally trained employee on the Asset Protection team of BigBoxCo is convinced a crime occurred. It’s easy enough to confuse one person for another or to misidentify a vehicle, especially on the potato-cams retailers seem to love using for their security systems. We also really don’t like one of the other markets Flock is targeting: residential HOAs. The idea of neighborhoods being patrolled by drones and surveilled by license plate cameras is a bridge too far, at least to our way of thinking.
Are you old enough to remember when having access to a T1 line was a true mark of geek cachet? We sure are, and in a time when the plebes were stuck with 9,600-baud dial-up over their POTS lines, working on a T1 line was a dream come true. Such was the allure that we can even recall apartment complexes in the tech neighborhoods outside of Boston listing T1 lines among their many amenities. It was pretty smart marketing, all things considered, especially compared to the pool you could only use three months a year. But according to a new essay by J. B. Crawford over at “Computers Are Bad”, T1 lines were actually pretty crappy, even in the late 90s and early 2000s. The article isn’t just dunking on T1, of course, but rather a detailed look at the whole T-carrier system, which can trace its roots back to the 1920s with Bell’s frequency-division multiplexing trunking systems. T1 was an outgrowth of those trunking systems, intended to link central offices but evolving to service customers on the local loop. Fascinating stuff, as always, especially the bit about replacing the loading coils that were used every 6,600′ along trunk lines to compensate for capacitance with repeaters.
We’ve heard of bricking a GPU, but ordering a GPU and getting a brick instead is something new. A Redditor who ordered an RTX 5080 from Amazon was surprised to find a plain old brick in the package instead. To be fair, whoever swiped the card was kind enough to put the brick in the original antistatic bag; one can’t be too careful, after all. The comments on the Reddit post have a good selection of puns — gigabricks, lol — and good fun was had by all, except perhaps for the unfortunate brickee. The article points out that this might not be a supply chain issue, such as the recent swap of a GPU for a backpack, which, given the intact authentication seals, was likely done at the factory. In this case, it seems like someone returned the GPU after swapping it out for the brick, assuming (correctly, it would seem) that Amazon wouldn’t check the contents of the returned package beyond perhaps weighing it. How the returned inventory made it back into circulation is a bit of a mystery; we thought returned items were bundled together on pallets and sold off at auction.
Speaking of auctions, someone just spent almost half a million bucks on one of the nine estimated remaining wooden-cased Apple I computers. It’s a lovely machine, to be sure, with its ByteShop-style wooden case intact and in excellent shape. The machine is still working, too, which is a nice plus, but $475,000? Even with a Dymo embossed label in Avocado Green — or is that Harvest Gold? — that seems a bit steep. There’s apparently some backstory to the machine that lends to its provenance, including former ownership by the first female graduate of Stanford Law School, June Blodgett Moore. This makes it the “Moore Apple-1” in the registry (!) for these machines, only 50 of which were ever made. One wonders if the registry makes allowance for basic maintenance of vintage electronics like these machines; does routine recapping affect their value?
And finally, continuing with the vintage theme, we’ve been following the adventures of [Buy It Fix It] over on YouTube as he attempts to revive a Williams Defender arcade machine from the 1980s. We remember this game well, having fed far too many quarters into the one at the Crazy 8s Pool and Arcade back in the day. This machine is in remarkably good shape for being over 40 years old, but it still needed some TLC to get it running again. The video documents a series of cascading failures and maddening intermittent faults, requiring nearly every tool in his kit to figure out. At the end of the second video, [Buy It] reckons he put 60 hours into the repair, a noble effort with fantastic results. Enjoy!
