Has Your Car Been Recorded or License Plate Been Searched?

If you’ve ever wondered if your car has been recorded, or if someone has searched for your license plate, you can now find out. Flock is a public safety and mass surveillance technology company that provides AI-powered automated license plate reader cameras for law enforcement agencies, businesses, and neighborhood monitoring systems. The “Have I Been Flocked” website compiles logs that allow drivers to see if their license plate has been run by law enforcement agencies or a Flock camera system. If a person’s license plate pops up in the database, it means not only that their license plate was photographed but that an operator on the Flock system searched the database for that license plate using the Flock application or website. Included in the audit log is the stated reason someone in law enforcement gave to look up a license plate. The database doesn’t show when or if your vehicle passed one of the Flock Safety cameras. Those searching Flock databases are not necessarily police officers, and showing up on the site doesn't mean that a person is or was under investigation. Those in favor of the camera systems argue that they're a valuable tool for law enforcement, but backlash against the camera system is mounting, with those opposed citing privacy concerns.

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The Icelandic TV Show That Has 98% of the Televisions Tuned In to Watch

Trapped is an Icelandic mystery television show that was first broadcast in 2015. The series follows Andri Ólafsson, the chief of police in a remote town in Iceland, solving the murder of a former townsman whose body was found by fishermen. The series is so popular in the country that it achieved a 98 share, which means 98% of the televisions turned on were tuned into watching Trapped at the same time. A share that high is extremely rare today because audiences are split across streaming and hundreds of channels. Normally, a share that high only happens during massive live events like the Super Bowl or a major national crisis. In the United States, Viceland began broadcasting the first season of Trapped in 2017, and in 2019 Amazon Prime began carrying it.

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How One YouTuber Landed a 300-Page iPhone Bill

Nowadays, paperless billing is the standard, but a couple of decades ago, paper-based bills that came in the mail were the standard. We’ve all received the shock of an itemized bill ending in an eye-watering total at least once in our lives, but YouTuber Justine Ezarik (inset), better known as iJustine, went viral back in 2007 when she became the recipient of a 300-page cellular bill. The itemized bill, outlining every last text message, email, and data transfer handled by her device, went viral, amassing more than 3.8 million views. So what was behind this extreme example of wasted paper? At the time, AT&T was the only cellular carrier for Apple’s inaugural iPhone, and the one to blame for the billing fiasco. After the first iPhone users activated their carrier service contracts, they were given the option to select their go-to billing preference. Customers who failed to make a selection automatically defaulted to the detailed billing option. As it turned out, AT&T’s take on “detailed" was exactly that. A full itemized breakdown of every single data transfer processed found its way onto the final bill. Sent and received texts? All present and accounted for. Web browsing activity? Each session was made available for review. Outgoing emails? Every last thing to leave an outbox made the cut. Needless to say, the pages quickly stacked up, resulting in reams of pages. Not long after iJustine went viral with her initial video, AT&T reached out to her with an offer to make the switch to electronic billing. In response to customer backlash against the bothersome bills, AT&T was quick to address the situation, and by late 2007 e-billing selection became mandatory during the activation of new iPhones.

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Forget About Getting Around An Article’s Paywall

The era of the free Internet is long over. As the online ad market has collapsed in recent years — largely thanks to changes Google has made to forefront AI summaries — countless websites have added paywalls. That means if you want to read their articles, you have to sign up and pay a monthly subscription fee. Some sites have a “metered” paywall — meaning you can read a certain number of articles for free before they ask for money — and others have a hard paywall, where you’ll have to pay to read even one article. There used to be ways around the paywalls, such as browser extensions and websites that helped bypass them, but most of those once-reliable methods of bypassing paywalls have stopped working almost entirely. You may be able to use one of these methods successfully today, but that could change in the future as websites clamp down on bypass methods. There's still one site that might still work…….at least for now — smry.ai is a tool that shows you a cached version of the article page. What sets this one apart is AI integration: Click the purple "generate" button on the results page to get an AI-generated summary of the article's key points.

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