Thursday 404 Media reported that Flock taught America's cops "how they could surveil the No Kings protests" against President Trump (as well as "small parades") in a webinar last year that described "using a mix of Flock's technology and law enforcement's own databases."

In the webinar, Flock's director of market management Caity Peak explains how real time crime centers — which are police surveillance centers that utilize Flock cameras and other surveillance cameras — can be used for emergency response, but can also be used to surveil "established events" like 4th of July fireworks displays, parades, bike races, Mardi Gras, and protests. The webinar shows just how routine the idea of always-on surveillance has become, and how casually it is used during extremely innocuous events. Peak explains that police can use FlockOS, a software platform that combines Flock's automatic license plate readers (ALPR), drones, gunshot detectors, 911 data, and other surveillance cameras (including ones Flock does not own) into a "single pane of glass" or single piece of software to look at various types of surveillance in one place during both emergencies and relatively mundane events in a city or town.
"Imagine that you're an incident commander, and you're working this No Kings Protest," Peak explains while a dashboard shows a series of surveillance tools overlaying the city of Denver. "If I'm somebody assigned a traffic post that's working this No Kings Protest, I really don't have time to go in [...] and look at all these places [for different intelligence]. This is an example of viewing all of that in one place...." The dashboard Peak shows includes traffic information, a "response plan" for the protest, the floor plans of nearby buildings, as well as a series of video feeds of both outdoor-mounted cameras and cameras inside businesses and government buildings.

404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation previously showed that police have specifically used Flock cameras to monitor the No Kings protests and other First Amendment-protected activity... This webinar shows this type of surveillance is not anomalous, and is specifically taught by Flock. The webinar also shows that Flock's latest public stance — that its ALPR cameras are noninvasive technology, that they take only static images at a single place and time, and that they are primarily used to solve the worst crimes — is wildly misleading. Flock has time and time again pitched itself to police as a sort of operating system to solve crime and do real-time surveillance and predictive policing. ALPRs are just one part of this broader surveillance apparatus that Flock has created, markets to police, and teaches them how to use.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/05/0659243/flock-offered-webinar-teaching-cops-how-to-surveil-no-kings-protesters?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

TiVo is notifying customers about changes to "one of its longest-standing and most popular DVR features," reports the blog Cord Cutter News:

Starting November 2, 2026, the current version of SkipMode that allows users to jump over commercial breaks with a single button press on the remote will no longer be available. The company is instead preparing to test a new paid add-on called Premium Auto Commercial Skip.

SkipMode has been a core part of the TiVo experience for years. After a supported show finished recording, the service added markers that let viewers leap from the end of one program segment directly to the start of the next, bypassing the ads in between. On newer TiVo Experience 4 devices, users could even set the feature to automatic so commercials were skipped without any remote interaction. The feature was limited to popular prime-time programming on major networks, typically appearing a short time after a show aired.

Under the new plan, that one-button and automatic functionality will disappear from the standard service. Viewers will still be able to skip commercials the traditional way by using the 30-second skip button or the fast-forward control on their remotes. Those manual methods have existed on TiVo boxes for more than two decades and do not rely on the company's commercial-detection data.
In November, TiVo will offer a 30-day free trial of the new Premium Auto Commercial Skip service. After the trial ends, customers who want to keep the automatic or one-button skip capability will need to add it to their accounts for an extra monthly fee.

The company has not yet published the price.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/09/06/0347252/tivo-will-start-charging-fees-for-its-automatic-commercial-break-skipping-feature-skipmode?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.