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Flock haters cross political divides to remove error-prone cameras
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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Problem is that many are clustered and in high-traffic areas. There's a triplet of them in one area near my neighborhood, covering entrance and exit of said area, so it's impossible to avoid detection.
Remove the devices. Like, go up to it and destroy it.
Obviously, wear a mask and common clothing
I bet they'd search for cell location records, in order to find who damaged the cameras. I hear that even turning your phone off won't help. Surely they'll be caught unless someone also leaves their phone at home.
You should always leave your phone at home for that kind of thing. The same goes for protests.
Well, don’t commit crimes with person items on your body of any kind.
A paintball gun is a good option
I figure sniping them from a long distance would be a good tactic. Of course, I neither own a rifle nor have any sort of marksmanship training so I could be wrong.
Well, be careful… You would not want to miss and have that bullet hit someone.
But it does start an interesting conversation: what are some ways, that don’t involve guns, that could take one out from a relative distance or… If they had to get close, take it out quickly?
Unfortunately, blowing something up is always a good idea until you lose a hand.
Having never flown a drone - a drone?
A drone would work, but you would have to stomach the fact that it would be a one-way trip for each unit, otherwise it would be easily tracked.
Easily tracked how, given that the point of the flight would be to destroy the tracking devices?
I definitely think there could be a situation where a drone could have some kind of spray paint device connected to it and the drone could be used to access difficult locations, like over freeways, something high up, or even just for some anonymity. Blocking the view of the camera I think is the number one goal. Obviously creating policies that prevent these cameras from existing would be best, but I just don’t see any of that happening in the United States at least for the next few decades.
I used a bregen clone (it’s a big R/C helicopter, sometimes used for aerial photography/film) to deal with a box elder infestation that was causing problems.
Soapy water, inside a sprayer that may or may not have been based on ww2 era flamethrowers. (The water tank was charged from a pressurized air tank.)
i imagine that was pretty loud. Did you use some kind of FPV screen to target or just eyeball it from the ground?
mostly just eyeballed it. to be honest, the nozzle/water tank were both pressurized to about 50psi, and it didn't take a lot of accuracy. I used a pump-and-spray canister that I made a new top for, to take a pneumatic line coming off a pancake air canister as the charging bottle.
the nozzle itself was at the end of boom that could point straight down (it could elevate between 0 and -90 degrees,) (the line to the nozzle was just the flexible hose coming off the weed sprayer normally.)
The hardest part is dealing with the constantly changing CoG as you spray.
If I hadn't already had the big boi, I'd have figured something else out, but i did, and it worked well.
As for noise... its' a freaking huge helicopter... so yeah. it's noisy. it wasn't a gasser though, so there's that. (It was a homebuild thing that happened because my hobby shop had a deep clearance on the rotor blades and hubs- the disk is 1m,)
if your goal was hitting flock cameras, I'd recommend strapping a paintball marker to a 250. (or a quad if you prefer, but I'll save that rant for elsewhere.) just stay away from systems that go through the internet or are made by companies that 'automatically' register you for a sUAS license with the FAA. They typically nark. (Especially DJI.) And a lot of those systems will frequently prevent you from flying in "sensitive" areas, even if it would be otherwise legal.
I’m much more into printing my parts, soldering my own components, and using the “dumbest” tech available.
… Honestly this is mostly because I don’t want them telling me where I can and cannot fly… And also tracking easily. It’s not like I’m flying over airports or anything. I do take the laws mostly seriously. But if I want to, I don’t want there to be a Geofence.
If flying paintball marker sure does seem like a fun project though… Do you think they will let me play on the field with that? Lol
A paintball marker is just as effective.
Does a paintball marker destroy the device permanently?