If Flock truly believed that the domain name infringes on their trademark, they would file an ICANN UDRP complaint instead of Cloudflare and Hetzner abuse reports.
But they don't, because the former would require them to perjure themselves, and the latter just requires them to lie to a hosting company.
Cloudflare would have to bring that suit since they were the ones defrauded. The site owners probably can't sue Cloudflare because of their contract. So the site owners probably have to go basic "tortious interference" and be ready to show actual damages.
The "resulting damages" is pretty small though, they just had to move off of cloudflare. I'm not sure it would be worth it, especially if the other side doesn't end up paying their legal costs.
Knowingly filing false DMCA claims will also perjure them.
However, ICANN has a whole procedure they follow where complaints are fact-checked, whereas DMCA takedowns put an unreasonable burden on hosting providers that requires immediate action, and many hosting providers will take such action automatically to protect themselves.
I doubt they care about perjury. They care about results, and the DMCA gets them exactly that.
The phishing reports are interesting, providers aren't necessarily required to act as fast on those. Although, I suspect companies like Cloudflare who get used by countless phishers will probably also set up some kind of automated anti phishing system.
>Knowingly filing false DMCA claims will also perjure them.
You are confusing false claims with filing DMCA requests on behalf of someone you don't have permission from.
>and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed
Those take on the order of months to go through. Even if they did so, you wouldn't notice until much later. Meanwhile cloudflare and hetzner are faster. If you want to reduce harm by taking down a site you can't just let it stay up for weeks while the ICANN process plays out.
> But they don't, because the former would require them to perjure themselves, and the latter just requires them to lie to a hosting company.
Doesn't stop anyone with DMCA... DMCA is coming up on almost three decades of being a law, and requires statements made under penalty of perjury.
However many millions (likely billions) of DMCA takedowns issued, who knows how many false/bad faith... I wonder how many have led to prosecutions for perjury, even when filing tens of thousands, en masse...
No need to wonder, the answer is simple. Starts with a "Z" and ends in "ero".
The local credit union in Eugene had installed Flock cams at the entrances to all their branches. They took em down after only a few of our community members began protests out front a few branches and emailing with the CU's leadership before our city terminated our contract and removed the cams
> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested)
License plates are trivially short, hashing them accomplishes no additional level of privacy if the hashes could be bruted in seconds on an antique GPU.
They have indexed publicly available data. The privacy was long gone before you even entered a license plate number.
Or do you think other actors didn’t have the same data but without a frontend to show it to you?
Being able to say "Our server never sees user-input license plate numbers", even though from a technical perspective the hash is just as identifiable, does have value. Even though it offers no additional privacy, it does let non-technically-minded users and so on feel safer, and that's valuable.
Well aware of these, however that would not benefit in this case. Their main protection is against pre computed lookup tables. But since the operator needs to be able to lookup the license plate within their own database, then they would not be using either of these.
If the operator really wanted to do this in a safe way for the user then the whole database should exist client side.
If these folks get in trouble, they might try hosting with Freedom.nl . It's +/- the old xs4all crew, and they might be in for some more fun in the 21st century.
You can romance Shadowheart as Laezel if you want and they hate each other at the start of the game.
Don’t need Gale for that. You can “win” in act 1 with Gale though.
Readit News
But they don't, because the former would require them to perjure themselves, and the latter just requires them to lie to a hosting company.
However, ICANN has a whole procedure they follow where complaints are fact-checked, whereas DMCA takedowns put an unreasonable burden on hosting providers that requires immediate action, and many hosting providers will take such action automatically to protect themselves.
I doubt they care about perjury. They care about results, and the DMCA gets them exactly that.
The phishing reports are interesting, providers aren't necessarily required to act as fast on those. Although, I suspect companies like Cloudflare who get used by countless phishers will probably also set up some kind of automated anti phishing system.
You are confusing false claims with filing DMCA requests on behalf of someone you don't have permission from.
>and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed
A false DMCA request is misrepresentation.
Those take on the order of months to go through. Even if they did so, you wouldn't notice until much later. Meanwhile cloudflare and hetzner are faster. If you want to reduce harm by taking down a site you can't just let it stay up for weeks while the ICANN process plays out.
Doesn't stop anyone with DMCA... DMCA is coming up on almost three decades of being a law, and requires statements made under penalty of perjury.
However many millions (likely billions) of DMCA takedowns issued, who knows how many false/bad faith... I wonder how many have led to prosecutions for perjury, even when filing tens of thousands, en masse...
No need to wonder, the answer is simple. Starts with a "Z" and ends in "ero".
But I think the real issue with Flock will be private security. Random Home Depot parking lots, etc.
https://www.29news.com/2025/12/17/charlottesville-ends-flock...
If someone would like to engage in grassroots activism on this, may I suggest the perfect domain: getTheFlockOutOfMyCity.com
https://haveibeenflocked.com/news/cyble-part2
License plates are trivially short, hashing them accomplishes no additional level of privacy if the hashes could be bruted in seconds on an antique GPU.
I think it'd sound pretty dumb.
(Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(cryptography) off you want to be fancy)
I don't support this decision but I respect it.
Curious what the Cloudflare HNers have to say about this debacle.