Hacker News Reader

Comment by bastardoperator | Hacker News Reader

If someone was actively stealing your car, and 911 told you they're an hour out, would that be acceptable? Having carte blanche access to someone else's network equipment seems like the highest emergency a company like Ubiquity could have.

I don't know if the time frame is acceptable, but I know I would have reached out to the customer versus waiting around for a DM once the alarm was rung.

View on HN

> If someone was actively stealing your car, and 911 told you they're an hour out, would that be acceptable?

In Seattle they don't even show up anymore, they tell you to fill out a form online...

You have to search the streets yourself and be your own advocate if you want to recover your stolen car.

In the last 8 years SPD has become completely unmotivated to do their job despite never having their budget cut. Adjacent police departments like Kirkland and Lake Forest Park are much more willing to do their job, but they fire officers who don't do their job, while SPD retains these caustic, non-performing officers.

So long as we let our officers in Seattle getaway with billing fraudulent hours that weren't worked, ignoring core job duties, and slow rolling the duties that they do do, we will be stuck with an ineffective police force.

>In the last 8 years SPD has become completely unmotivated to do their job despite never having their budget cut

The budget was absolutely cut.

https://apnews.com/article/business-police-seattle-6730ec66e...

>The Seattle City Council has approved a 2022 budget that cuts police department spending from previous years [...]

2022 was not 8 years ago.

I do not read "In the last 8 years" as 8 years ago, but within in the last 8 years. Do you read it differently?

In your interpretation the number 8 has no significance in that sentence, since "In the last 1000 years" would have the same meaning.

I could say the exact same thing for your interpretation. Why not just say 1000 years ago the budget wasn't cut? It would have the same meaning. Oh wait, it wouldn't have the same meaning because 8 and 1000 years are quite a bit different.

8 years is probably not meaningless for the poster. He probably moved there 8 years ago or had his car stolen back then and is saying nothing has improved since then despite there being no budget cuts.

It makes no sense to say in the last X years if the poser just mean X years ago. It would cause unnecessary confusion.

>I could say the exact same thing for your interpretation. Why not just say 1000 years ago the budget wasn't cut? It would have the same meaning.

Because it would not have the same meaning. The point of the phrasing is that the time the Seattle PD stopped being motivated to do their job was close to eight years ago, and they have continued to be unmotivated since then.

"1000 years ago the budget wasn't cut" does not convey that information.

If the poster meant 8 years ago they stopped being motivated he would have just said that. The post didn't say that. You are just tangling yourself in word play to try to get the post to mean something different than it does.

You’re parsing this incorrectly mate. “In the last 8 years” means in any of the last 8 years, which is different than in the last 1000 years.

The SPD has lost hundreds of officers and hasn't recouped them.

"Defund the Police" has consequences.

The SPD has lost officers, yes, despite offering hiring bonuses higher than ever. This is not because they don't have enough money, but because the prestige of being a police officer in Seattle has declined.

While defund the police was ill-though out, let's remember that it was a response to the continued use of excessive use of force by police. As one of the parent commenters said, SPD has a poor track record of disciplining misconduct of their officers. People will take increasingly desperate measures if they feel like they're not being heard. The idea that you'd do away with police was short sighted and didn't make sense since the beginning, but the situation SPD finds itself in is partially a self-inflicted wound.

The police chief is appointed by the mayor. If people feel like they are not being listened to or there is too much abuse maybe they should elect a mayor that will deal with it?

Yes and no. Traffic enforcement and dispatch positions were moved to another funding line item outside of the SPD. This was the city council attempting satisfy calls to "defund the police", while not actually reducing the amount of money allocated to policing.

https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/09/14/opinion-debunking...

"The new budget includes funds for 1,357 officers and SPD says right now, there are 1,120 officers on the force—which leaves 237 open jobs."

20 years ago in school our English teacher had us read a science fiction short story about a robbery. I wish I could remember the name of it. The essential idea was that robbery was at some point legalised and nobody really cared because they just claimed on insurance. With more and more of our possessions being basic commodities (cars, electronics, IKEA furniture etc.) and everything of importance being digital, this seems to be coming true now.

From very dim memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatlander_(short_story)

Anymore? They've never shown up for this kind of stuff as long as I can remember.

Do you think Ubiquiti has hundreds of people on staff to watch their forums to triage every issue within seconds of it being posted? I'm curious what level of support would be satisfactory to you, in this instance.

Not OP but you don't need 100s of staff monitoring the forum. You need a webhook that filters on "security" in the title and post it in the relevant slack channel. I do expect UI have a 24/7 paid support/security team and I'm sure someone could say "uh, this looks real what's going on?"

Ah yes the typical engineer response of "just <insert system>".

Yes, damn those engineers for coming up with solutions to problems I personally believe are unsolvable based on nothing but personal feelings.

Ignoring the fact that flagging when certain keywords are posted is probably built into the forum software itself... I had that with phpbb back in 2001.

I just find it funny when engineers trivialize solutions that they themselves wouldn't employ. Like yeah, I'm sure your phpbb solution was a proper vulnerability reporting and triaging system.

You must not have had any dealings with the police in any US city if you think that they will come running in minutes if someone is stealing your car.

There is an escalation path for security tickets at most large companies, and a community forum post is not it.

You sure about that?

Chicago: 3.46 minutes

Los Angeles: 5.7 minutes

Seattle: 7 minutes

Dallas: 8 minutes

Miami: 8 minutes

New York City: 9.1 minutes

Atlanta: 9.5 minutes

Houston: 10 minutes

Detroit: 12 minutes

Denver: 13 minutes

Go on any of those city subreddits and read the stories of 911 not picking up or refusing to come out because "you can file a report online".

That's called anecdotal evidence. I've had police come slow and come fast. 911 also prioritizes calls, so it's possible you're being rate limited by them and not the actual police. The data from their apps tells a different story, maybe they're fudging it, I just don't think making blanket statements about timing based on someone else's story gives me an accurate picture.

The problem is calls that are never picked up, and calls that are "resolved" by telling the caller that a stolen car is no biggie, ruin these "stats".

Yep, the stats are bogus because the party that they are measuring are also creating the stats.

Even crime stats are bogus in NYC, I speak from experience as cops literally tell you to fuck off if you want to file a police report. You can be stabbed, bleeding out and walk into a police precient, and they'll drag you outside so they don't have to write a report

This is pretty simple, if you cannot be down for an hour… don’t buy Ubiquity.

Enterprise sucks a lot of the time, but this is what you are supposed to be paying for.

That's not a good comparison.

911 is paid by taxes for being 24/7 available. It is also a public service. Ubi is free (at least I don't pay for any of my Unifi consoles, besides the initial cost). It is also a private company, free (as in beer) to do as they like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com