Georgia State Patrol used its system of Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) surveillance cameras to issue a ticket to a motorcyclist who was allegedly looking at his cell phone while riding, according to a copy of the citation obtained by 404 Media. The incident is notable because Flock cameras are not designed for traffic enforcement or minor code violations, and many jurisdictions explicitly  tell constituents that the cameras will not be used for traffic enforcement. 

The incident happened December 26 in Coffee County, Georgia. The ticket lists the offense as “Holding/supporting wireless telecommunications device,” and includes the note “CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND.” 

A spokesperson for the Georgia State Patrol told 404 Media that the ticket was issued because of a “unique circumstance” in which a Flock camera happened to capture a traffic infraction, and that Flock cameras are not usually used by the department for traffic enforcement.

“This incident was a rare and unique circumstance where the captured image from the camera exposed an additional violation beyond the vehicle’s expired registration,” the spokesperson said. “This situation does not reflect a standard enforcement endeavor by the Department of Public Safety.” The traffic citation obtained by 404 Media does not mention that the man’s registration was expired. 

Still, the incident is notable because Flock cameras are often pitched to police as tools for solving serious crimes, finding stolen vehicles, and locating missing people. They distinctly are not traffic cameras and are not pitched as such; the use of a Flock camera in this way shows that the images they capture can sometimes be detailed enough to be used as the pretext for a traffic violation, anyway. 

Many police departments go out of their way to tell community members that Flock cameras are not used for traffic enforcement. For example, the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, states in a FAQ that “GSPD [Glenwood Springs Police Department] does not use Flock cameras for traffic enforcement, parking enforcement, or minor code violations.” El Paso, Texas, tells residents “these are not traffic enforcement cameras. They do not issue tickets, do not monitor speed, and do not generate revenue. They are investigative tools used after crimes occur.” Lynwood, Washington tells residents “these cameras will not be used for traffic infractions, immigration enforcement, or monitoring First Amendment-protected expressive activity” (Flock cameras have now been used for all of these purposes, as we have reported.) 

The fact that police in Georgia did use Flock cameras for traffic enforcement highlights yet again that, essentially, law enforcement agencies are able to use these cameras for whatever they want. There are very few limitations on what Flock cameras can be used for, and police do not get warrants to search Flock’s network of cameras, either locally or nationwide. Network audits, which are spreadsheets of Flock searches we have obtained via public records requests, have shown that police use Flock for all sorts of reasons; they often do not list any reason at all for searching a license plate. 

The man who was cited in Georgia posted about the incident in an anti-Flock Facebook group asking for advice. He said that he showed up in court and the ticket was dropped. The man did not respond to multiple requests for comment from 404 Media and because he is a private citizen cited for a minor traffic violation, we are not naming him. 404 Media independently obtained the citation. 

moser's frame shop wrote:

I Am An AI Hater

And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.

And to what end? In a kind of nihilistic symmetry, their dream of the perfect slave machine drains the life of those who use it as well as those who turn the gears. What is life but what we choose, who we know, what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines.

…

I'm a bit late to the party, but I was just linked Anthony Moser's poetic and impassioned evisceration of LLMs today and I think anyone who hasn't yet read it should do so. I cosign it as an articulation not just of my position on the subject, but of my emotional stance towards it as well. The techno-cultural nexus that we have recently taken to calling "artificial intelligence" is deeply corrosive, and we must not tolerate it. We must not give it air to breathe. When this all falls to an ignominious end, we must dance on its grave that it may never rise again.

I've assumed for a while that gamers would have mild distaste for genAI material, in the same way that they have distaste for asset store assets and, for some reason, the Unity engine. It turns out that I was wrong - they hate it a lot more than either of those things.

I saw Liz England posted about a market research survey from a reliable vendor, Quantic Foundry, which showed that audiences genuinely loathe the technology. Unsurprisingly, players who care more about story hate it even more than the rest of them. Less than 8% of gamers have any positive feelings toward it at all.

62.7% of the survey respondents have very negative feelings about it. Over 85% of all the respondents had at least some negative feelings about it.

This is wild as hell. GenAI boosters are very common on Reddit, Bluesky, and other platforms where people speculate about What Gamers Want and what the future of game development will be like. As long as these survey numbers hold, I'm going to dismiss that kind of boosterism out of hand, and you should, too. There's no reason to assume that this tech will be the norm going forward for game art, audio, or story. The people who insist the audience will prefer it have no idea what they're talking about.

Within moments of opening OpenAI’s new AI slop app Sora, I am watching Pikachu steal Poké Balls from a CVS. Then I am watching SpongeBob-as-Hitler give a speech about the “scourge of fish ruining Bikini Bottom.” Then I am watching a title screen for a Nintendo 64 game called “Mario’s Schizophrenia.” I swipe and I swipe and I swipe. Video after video shows Pikachu and South Park’s Cartman doing ASMR; a pixel-perfect scene from the Simpsons that doesn’t actually exist; a fake version of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, or La La Land; Rick and Morty in Minecraft; Rick and Morty in Breath of the Wild; Rick and Morty talking about Sora; Toad from the Mario universe deadlifting; Michael Jackson dancing in a room that seems vaguely Russian; Charizard signing the Declaration of Independence, and Mario and Goku shaking hands. You get the picture. 

Sora 2 is the new video generation app/TikTok clone from OpenAI. As AI video generators go, it is immediately impressive in that it is slightly better than the video generators that came before it, just as every AI generator has been slightly better than the one that preceded it. From the get go, the app lets you insert yourself into its AI creations by saying three numbers and filming a short video of yourself looking at the camera, looking left, looking right, looking up, and looking down. It is, as Garbage Day just described it, a “slightly better looking AI slop feed,” which I think is basically correct. Whenever a new tool like this launches, the thing that journalists and users do is probe the guardrails, which is how you get viral images of SpongeBob doing 9/11.

The difference with Sora 2, I think, is that OpenAI, like X’s Grok, has completely given up any pretense that this is anything other than a machine that is trained on other people’s work that it did not pay for, and that can easily recreate that work. I recall a time when Nintendo and the Pokémon Company sued a broke fan for throwing an “unofficial Pokémon” party with free entry at a bar in Seattle, then demanded that fan pay them $5,400 for the poster he used to advertise it. This was the poster:

With the release of Sora 2 it is maddening to remember all of the completely insane copyright lawsuits I’ve written about over the years—some successful, some thrown out, some settled—in which powerful companies like Nintendo, Disney, and Viacom sued powerless people who were often their own fans for minor infractions or use of copyrighted characters that would almost certainly be fair use. 

No real consequences of any sort have thus far come for OpenAI, and the company now seems completely disinterested in pretending that it did not train its tools on endless reams of copyrighted material. It is also, of course, tacitly encouraging people to pollute both its app and the broader internet with slop. Nintendo and Disney do not really seem to care that it is now easier than ever to make Elsa and Pikachu have sex or whatever, and that much of our social media ecosystem is now filled with things of that nature. Instagram, YouTube, and to a slightly lesser extent TikTok are already filled with AI slop of anything you could possibly imagine.And now OpenAI has cut out the extra step that required people to download and reupload their videos to social media and has launched its own slop feed, which is, at least for me, only slightly different than what I see daily on my Instagram feed. 

The main immediate use of Sora so far appears to be to allow people to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, blogs, books, images, videos, photos, and pieces of art that OpenAI has scraped from people far less powerful than, say, Nintendo. As a reward for this wide scale theft, OpenAI gets a $500 billion valuation. And we get a tool that makes it even easier to flood the internet with slightly better looking bullshit at the low, low cost of nearly all of the intellectual property ever created by our species, the general concept of the nature of truth, the devaluation of art through an endless flooding of the zone, and the knock-on environmental, energy, and negative labor costs of this entire endeavor.

Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of U.S. hacking laws, according to screenshots of the tool shared with 404 Media.

The screenshots highlight the intrusive methods some landlords use when screening potential tenants, taking information they may not need, or legally be entitled to, to assess a renter.

“This is a statewide consumer-finance abuse that forces renters to surrender payroll and bank logins or face homelessness,” one renter who was forced to use the tool and who saw it taking more data than was necessary for their apartment application told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation from their landlord or the services used.

“I am livid,” they added.

The person said earlier this year they were verifying their income in order to start a lease at an apartment complex in Atlanta. The apartment complex used a tenant screening service called ApproveShield, the person said. The landlord required 60 days of pay history, or four pay stubs, the person said.

ApproveShield is in-part powered by a tool called Argyle, which verifies peoples’ income. It does this by having people log into their corporate employer HR services, such as Workday, and scraping information stored within. I’ve covered Argyle before, when I found it was linked to a wave of suspicious emails that offered people cash for their workplace login credentials. 

The renter said ApproveShield’s Argyle-powered widget asked them to log into their employer’s Workday. That's when they noticed something unusual.

“Argyle hijacked my live Workday session, stayed hidden from view, and downloaded every pay stub plus all W-4s back to 2024, each PDF seconds apart,” they said. “Workday audit logs show dozens of ‘Print’ events from two IPs from a MAC which I do not use,” they added, referring to a MAC address, a unique identifier assigned to each device on a network.

“ApproveShield knew the 60-day limit yet mined everything,” they added.

The person provided 404 Media with a screenshot which shows them receiving a wave of emails from Workday saying the PDF of their paystub is now available for download. The screenshot shows 14 emails concerning payslips, many more than the four the service was supposed to download.

As I previously covered, Argyle’s approach of having individual people give up login credentials for their employer’s corporate environments may violate U.S. hacking laws. Broadly, employees do not have the authority to share corporate login credentials. In 2013, journalist Matthew Keys was indicted, and later sentenced to two years in prison, for providing hackers with his credentials for the Tribune Company. Christopher Correa, a former executive for the Cardinals, was sentenced to four years in prison for logging into a system owned by his former employer.

The renter 404 Media spoke to said the same “credential-harvesting model now dominates Georgia rentals.” They pointed to other companies such as PayScore, Nova Credit (whose leadership includes an Argyle co-founder), and Snappt which also uses Argyle.

Realistically, if a potential tenant doesn’t give up their login credentials, they won’t be able to rent the apartment. “Opt-out means no housing,” the person said.

Neither ApproveShield nor Argyle responded to a request for comment.

Hi! My book Lessons in Magic and Disaster has been out for a month, and I’ve been blown away by the response so far. So many people have told me that my fantastical mother-daughter story has made them cry or spoken to something in their own lives. I loved this review in Cannonball Read, where Emmalita calls Lessons “an achingly beautiful book” and talks about how personal her response to it has been. You can order Lessons everywhere! You can get a signed/personalized/doodled copy at Green Apple.

This Saturday, I’m going to be at Marin MOCA for Feminist Futurism vs. Project 2025 with Angela Dalton, Faith Adiele, Tamika Thompson and moderator Isis Asare.

Next Weds 10/1, I’ll be at Pegasus Books for Bay Area Sci-Fi Wizards, with Sarah Gailey, Susanna Kwan, Annalee Newitz and Lio Min.

On Thurs 10/2, I’ll be at Cafe Suspiro for the Stir reading series.

I keep trying to make sense of our violent times

Violence has been a major theme in my work ever since, well, 9/11. In the aftermath of those attacks, I saw people driving themselves into a frenzy of violent retribution, and the marshaling of groupthink towards driving us into two foolhardy wars, and I felt like I needed to find some way to speak to this moment.

Nearly twenty-five years later, I'm still trying to find ways of talking about our love of violence as a species — and our obsession with using force to control people and reinforce our beloved hierarchies.

After 9/11

So yeah, I was freaked out and furiously angry in 2002-2003, watching all the militaristic posturing and the disingenuous drumbeat to war. I needed to find a way to talk about it.

At that time, I was also obsessed with writing comedy, including a lot of gonzo physical comedy. I loved watching characters try to maintain their dignity and sense of reality while slipping and sliding, knocking over everything in their path, careening toward chaos.

And I remembered something my dad used to say: he couldn't watch a Charlie Chaplin movie when he was a kid, because he found Chaplin’s brand of slapstick too sadistic. He felt like a lot of slapstick comedy, such as the Three Stooges, involves a certain amount of violence that is played for laughs because you are laughing at the person on the receiving end. (See also “splatstick,” where gory body horror is played for laughs, e.g. Dead/Alive.)

So that led to my novella Rock Manning Goes for Broke, which I started writing as a novel sometime in 2002. The story of a slapstick performer who gets swept up in a fascist takeover of the United States, Rock Manning felt like the perfect way to explore the intersection of slapstick comedy and real life violence, and the ways in which we can witness horrible atrocities being done to people as long as we can either laugh or dissociate ourselves from empathizing with them some other way.

The Society for Ethical Violence

In the novel-length version of Rock Manning, there’s an organization called the Society for Ethical Violence — a group of progressives who argue in favor of using violence to make the world a better place. They claim to hate violence, but have decided that it’s impossible to avoid because it’s part of human nature and therefore ought to be harnessed for good. The leader of the Society for Ethical Violence is a charismatic older white guy named Guthrie Hirsch who rose to fame as the next Howard Zinn.

In this version of the story, Rock has a girlfriend named Carrie who falls into Guthrie’s orbit. And Rock is almost sucked in as well:

Carrie said it all made sense when Guthrie talked, and he could look straight into you and see not just the hurting part, but the part that wanted to hurt others. He could make you feel safe from yourself. What had happened to Guthrie during that year or so he was missing, nobody knew, but he'd come back ten years older and with twice as much energy.

The leaflet showed him, eyes glowing, long gray beard with no mustache, one leather fist up. It said our potential for physical aggression was the engine that built civilization, which then turned around and tried to repress that potential, and that's why civilizations fail. So we could save our civilization if we reclaimed our love of violence. …

"We talk about the social contract," Guthrie Hirsch said when I met him a few days later, "but people forget, all contracts are enforced. Meaning, we use the threat of force to make people honor them." Blah blah blah. It was like being back at school, except we were outdoors and there was no desk for me to set on fire by accident.

I was sad to lose Guthrie Hirsch when I turned Rock Manning into a novella, but for various reasons neither he nor Carrie quite fit anymore. And I’m glad I revised Rock Manning and was able to release it at last, because its depictions of fascism were becoming more and more relevant.

Still, that stuff about “contracts are enforced” feels like it’s laying down a theme that’s come up in my work ever since: violence is baked into all of our systems and we are so used to it that we’ve stopped seeing it. A couple of other more recent examples feel especially relevant just about now.

My novel The City in the Middle of the Night includes a character named Mouth who is a self-proclaimed bruiser. In fact, I make a huge point of showing from early on how Mouth’s internal monologue classes with the story she tells about herself. In her very first chapter, she's boasting about taking down a group of thugs who tried to rip off her smuggler crew, but meanwhile her inner monologue is endlessly worrying about whether all of that killing had really been necessary and whether she could justify ending those lives. Mouth comes from a spiritual background, and has never fully accepted the kill-or-be-killed ethos of the smugglers she’s joined.

Later in the book, Mouth has a kind of breakdown, and finds that she can no longer do violence. She freezes up when she reaches for a weapon or tries to make a fist. She still wants to protect her beloved Alyssa, but has to find ways to do it without hurting anyone. The dilemma of being thrust into violent situations without being able to commit violence felt really interesting to me, but so did the visceral disgust towards violence and the self-loathing that comes with it, which force Mouth to become a pacifist.

I basically explored the same notion a second time in my young adult books. (It’s only hitting me now just how much I was exploring some of the same territory in a different way.)

Victories Greater than Death is about a teenager named Tina, who is secretly a clone of the galaxy's greatest hero, Captain Argentian. Tina is supposed to get all of Captain Argentian's memories, but the process fails and she's left with only the Captain’s skills and knowledge. Tina is desperate to prove that she can live up to the legacy of this legendary hero, and that longing powers the entire first book of the trilogy.

When I was writing Victories Greater than Death, I had a pretty solid outline that involved a lot of space battles and fighting. Somewhere in the middle, I decided to write a bunch of short little adventures that Tina and the rest of her starship crew could go on, so Tina could bond with her shipmates and get some experience. When I was writing a bunch of those little vignettes, I wrote one scene where Tina kills some bad guys for the first time — and I hadn't consciously anticipated what that would be like.

The process of ending someone's life — watching them transform in real time from a person with opinions and ideas and joys and pain to just nothing — is overwhelming. Tina goes into a tailspin, and by the end of the first book, Tina has reached a decision: she vows never to take a life again. Needless to say, this was one of the things that torpedoed my carefully laid plans for the second and third books of the trilogy.

But it also opened up a lot of interesting story lines that I hadn't expected. The third book of the trilogy, Promises Stronger than Darkness, culminates in a huge dilemma: do we kill a few thousand morally compromised people to save the galaxy? Tina just forced to wrestle with this choice, and — spoiler alert! — only figures out another alternative at the last possible moment.

What I believe

Writing these books definitely forced me to think a lot about where I stand with regard to violence. I have a deep and visceral revulsion toward the notion of committing violence, and I sure as heck don't want to be on the receiving end of it. I'm not sure that I'm an absolute pacifist — if I were under attack by genocidal maniacs or invading imperialists, I might not have any choice but to take up arms. My objections are at least in part emotional rather than moral.

But I do believe that violence is disgusting and shameful. Sometimes you have to do revolting things to survive, but you don't brag about them or glorify them, and you try like hell to avoid doing them. That's my baseline belief, I think.

Coming back to what Guthrie Hirsch says about the social contract, I also think that there are a lot of things that we don't consider violence, which are actually quite violent.

Probably the most the second most quoted line in The City in the Middle of the Night is when Mouth says:

Part of how they make you obey is by making obedience seem peaceful, while resistance is violent. But really, either choice is about violence, one way or another.

Combine that with what Guthrie Hirsch says about the social contract, and that sums up a lot of stuff.

Society runs on violence, and no aspect of society can function without it. Taxation is the government taking your wealth from you by force, with the threat of imprisonment if you fail to comply. Most of us are aware on some level that there are forms of behavior that are intrinsically harmless to others, but which will expose us to the to a high risk of violence if we engage in them. Until recently, being openly trans was punishable by violence almost everywhere, and it still is in many situations.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster isn’t as explicitly about violence, but my protagonist Jamie has an epiphany in the latter part of the book, that she’s been committing a kind of violence against her partner Ro by trapping them in a story they didn’t choose. Jamie reflects:

If forced imprisonment is a form of harm, then trapping someone in a toxic narrative could be considered an actual assault.

I think often about Batman #587, written by the always essential Greg Rucka with art by Rick Burchett and Rodney Ramos. The cops throw Commissioner Gordon a birthday party and he rewards them with a lecture about why handcuffs are the ultimate symbol of police power:

Gordon goes on to say, “We are the only people in this free nation who have the power to deprive a citizen of their freedom. Of their liberty. The only people with the authority to hold them against their will.” The power of arrest is the most awesome weapon in a cop’s arsenal, even more than a gun.

When people decry the horribleness of political violence, what they're really saying is that they want those who have been designated by the state to have a monopoly on the use of violence. Or perhaps, that those who have been committing violence with impunity for decades should continue to have a monopoly on it.

So… I'm super interested in questioning the necessity and usefulness of violence — when is it justified to fight back?

But I'm also increasingly interested in exploring how violence is embedded in every part of our world, from law enforcement to the sheer brutality of late stage capitalism. And the extent to which we pretend that we're not participating in violence when we clearly are, but we also treat certain kinds of violence as natural and praiseworthy.

We are all the Punisher

Lately, I keep thinking about that punishment is such a huge part of our worldview — to the point where many religions include some aspect of supernatural punishment for wrong actions. Either reincarnation into a form that causes suffering, or unending torture in a cosmic barbecue pit. When people say that they don't believe you can be a good person if you do not believe in God, I feel as though they are really saying that they don't believe people will behave decently without the threat of punishment.

It's not just that we encourage people in uniform to mete out brutality on our behalf. It's not just that we know on some level that our whole economy is built on mistreating people. It's also that deep down, we believe that all good behavior comes from the existence of a supernatural torture chamber. This is the backdrop against which we ask ourselves if violence can be justified. Until we’re honest about how much our culture sees violence and punishment as essential and beneficial, then our conversations about violence will always be carried on at the level of peevish little children.