This article appears to be a coordinated attack on Perplexity.

Also posted today is this HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536375

Containing this link:

https://trellner.com/reports/manufactured-sources-behind-ai-...

Which has the exact same layout and very similar About page as "trellner.com"

https://hausresearch.com/about/

https://trellner.com/about/

Agree.

>>Both URLs were registered yesterday!<<

The "Leadership" photos all look the same, with the AI-airbrushed style. Also amazing how they both only have three people. What a coincidence.

I can't find any of the supposed "Leadership" team on Linkedin. Some of them have unusual names, which cut through the hundreds / thousands of results.

It's a worrying how easily this sort of BS is becoming. It takes far more time to debunk it then to create it. Now you could basically script this and have 100 pages by this time tomorrow, with different styles and URLs and leadership teams (along with professional portraits)...

If they'd let the URLs age a bit, and maybe not registered them on the same day, used slightly more common names, and changed the styles, it would have been much harder to definitively debunk.

Is it just me or am I seeing more and more of this stuff happening on HN?

i am actually curious how they get upvoted though? Are the bots really out of control

It seems reasonable that Axon, the #1 police body camera vendor, would benefit from a national social media wave of hate towards it's competitor Flock.

People who get angry enough to tear down the Flock cameras in their area get rounded up and classified by the Feds as "leftist terrorists".

Axon gets a major boost to it's revenue by landing fat .gov contracts for it's own version of 24/7 surveillance.

Government employees who approve the contracts get rich on insider trading.

https://www.axon.com/

Personally the line for me is a human police officer with reasonable judgement and accountability.

If an officer was standing next to every Flock camera in America, the public would be hyper aware of the situation we are now in.

Mass, warrantless, and perpetual surveillance is incompatible with liberty and unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans.

It has to be stopped, or we are doomed.

Been thinking about this today and I agree. If the actionability is reliant on a human in the loop making a decision to create some incident (e.g. traffic stop) then there is a limit to the surveillance while still scaling the law to apply to our growing population.

In that vein, I wouldn't be 100% against Flock cameras if their purpose was limited.

The problem in the concept is that they store all license plate hits for later retrieval regardless of if anything is actively tying that license plate to some form of illegal activity. Even with a short retention window, this is mass surveillance because it allows later viewing of hits based on any kind of search given. And you can never limit that search query in a 100% effective manner, but you could very well tell police departments "tough luck, we only have hits if the plate was involved in something at the time of scan".

I asked my local sheriff about the Flock cameras that are located on my street.

He swore that they were only "ALPR" (Automatic License Plate Readers) and "definitely not Flock cameras".

I went and looked again, and they definitely are Flock cameras, so that's nice.

I think they fully understood, which is why they all got jail sentences.

"Stand back and stand by."

At a minimum the data center should be responsible for paying for noise mitigation on all houses within a half mile of the site.

That work could be done within a few months, upgrade all the window treatments, replace all doors with solid core, add sound mitigation fencing, etc.

The problem with noise is that it follows inverse square law. It is several orders of magnitude more efficient to simply abate the noise at the source.