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Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

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Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#131

Post by LunaSea »

keiferski wrote: post #98

Philosophy warning: I don't know if there is a term for it, or if a philosopher/etc. has written about this phenomenon, but: a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws." Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics ) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pas…

> Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting.

I would disagree and have the inverse position.

If you look at the laws regarding removing Supreme Court Justices, senators and other representatives trading, removing misbehaving countries from the EU and Nato, etc. I would say that overall they are mostly optimistic in the sense that they aren't prepared for such worst case scenarios.

Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#132

Post by nonameiguess »

keiferski wrote: post #98

Philosophy warning: I don't know if there is a term for it, or if a philosopher/etc. has written about this phenomenon, but: a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws." Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics ) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pas…

Frankly, regardless of anything else, I think it's going to be a result of the sheer size of human communities. Internalizing and enforcing ethical norms without state action is one thing when communities are roughly Dunbar number sized and loosely related to each other. It's another thing entirely when the global population approaches 10 billion and a normal metro area has 20 million people who are overwhelmingly total strangers to each other. You're never going to achieve 100% adherence to "don't steal" no matter what, but whatever residual percentage will always do it becomes more and more people as there simply are more and more people. Like it or not, unethical behavior is going to happen and not for the pet cause reason you think, post-structuralism and cultural Marxism or whatever. Arguably, there was more theft when western people were more religious a few centuries ago, just the theft itself was normalized. Whether outright chattel slavery or serfdom, most people had no claim to the fruits of their own labor and aristocrats simply took whatever they wanted.

Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#133

Post by keiferski »

sokoloff wrote: post #106
keiferski wrote: post #98

Philosophy warning: I don't know if there is a term for it, or if a philosopher/etc. has written about this phenomenon, but: a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws." Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics ) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pas…

What would "enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms" look like in a society that used those methods to effectively prevent the exploitation of vehicle owners by car thieves?

The obvious answer would be to harshly punish theft via jail time/etc., but that's sort of not my point, and I don't think that's actually the root issue.

Because it's more that stealing cars is apparently an acceptable activity for a lot of people to do. By acceptable, I mean socially, to friends, to family members, to themselves. That seems like a major societal failing to me, much moreso than "this car isn't designed with the optimal security system."

Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#134

Post by whimsicalism »

bdw5204 wrote: post #109
whimsicalism wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which the government is not obligated to do in the US. Just a talking point - and the US has one of the most extensive criminal justice apparatuses of any country. This article is about Canada - which has largely failed to control its organized crime+ports situation, unlike authorities in the US where most organized crime is organized from abroad and so difficult to disrupt but also less effective.

According to the US Supreme Court, the police have no duty to protect citizens[0], even if they obtain a court-issued protective order. Cars are insecure on purpose because people accidentally lock their keys inside all the time so locksmiths need to be able to get into them. Likewise, locks on homes are insecure on purpose because people lock themselves out. The entire system of locks is based on the assumption that…

There is no developed country in the world that does not have legal and LE discretion.

It’s only the fact that the US has a common law system that this case even got far at all. Go find me somewhere where you can successfully sue the government for not arresting someone.

And again: this is a case about Canada - so this has literally 0 relevance to the topic at hand.

Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#135

Post by sokoloff »

ceejayoz wrote: post #76
jonhohle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, the people _stealing_ cars. I feel like this is bizarro world where what was previously accepted as adequate deterrence is now penalized because actual criminals have fewer and fewer incentives to follow established normal behaviors. “Maybe your face shouldn’t have been so punchable” is not a reasonable position to take, imho. Flipper, lock picks, bolt cutters, etc. are all reasonable tools. So is the e…

Kia and Hyundai saved like $20/car by skimping on a part that all the other major manufacturers include by default, leading to cars that were insecure by design. That's negligent. Punishing people for taking advantage of that vulnerability is certainly warranted, but it's also closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted.

In the context of this article (Canada focused), do the relevant Hyundais and Kias have the same security problem?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/autos/kia-and-hyundai-vehicles-in-can...

Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#136

Post by philwelch »

nordsieck wrote: post #104
Ekaros wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't police the external control? It is just that governments have failed to provide enough of these controls... So maybe they should be punished collectively for it?

> Isn't police the external control? It is just that governments have failed to provide enough of these controls... I can only speak about US law, but there has been repeated case law that the police do not have a duty to protect any person in particular (except possibly when people are in their custody which isn't really relevant here). The function of the police isn't to stop criminals in the act - given their resp…

If you remove enough of the criminals from the population, you end up preventing crime in the long run. When it comes to car theft in particular, police also set up bait cars and then arrest the people who try and steal them. Well, at least that’s what they do in cities that still bother enforcing property crimes.

Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#137

Post by eertami »

caskstrength wrote: post #87
newsclues wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are computers now. What do we know about computer security and physical access? If I can touch the machine, I can hack and own it. No level of technology will stop this. But cutting off the profit motive by making it very hard to export cars will have a massive impact on these crimes, and for old and new cars.

> What do we know about computer security and physical access? If I can touch the machine, I can hack and own it. Can you hack and own my fully patched Pixel phone? Or my GF's iPhone? Sure, sophisticated state-sponsored actors can sometimes do it by burning several million dollars worth of 0days in the process, but some two-digit IQ riff-raffs? Probably not so much. EDIT: just to be clear - by "two-digit IQ riff-raff…

Phone thieves will watch over peoples shoulders for them to input a passcode, which isn't that dissimilar to a lot of the replay/signal extension attacks.

A lot of damage can be done and things successfully owned without needing to hack or exploit the device (car/phone).

Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#138

Post by scotty79 »

keiferski wrote: post #98

Philosophy warning: I don't know if there is a term for it, or if a philosopher/etc. has written about this phenomenon, but: a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws." Rather than expecting a human being to behave in certain ways intrinsically (i.e., normative ethics ) we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible, and then pas…

> the replacement of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws

That's literally what the law itself is, since the dawn of time.

Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#139

Post by whimsicalism »

jen20 wrote: post #80
whimsicalism wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that 7 years ago it was widely considered a mistake, but I think we are currently reaching by a new consensus based on the opinions I have been seeing more commonly in the last 3 years. We are in a conservative moment in the US right now.

This story is about Canada, though…

The VCCA is a US law, ask the above poster why they wanted this one.

Re: Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

#140

Post by hansvm »

tromp wrote: post #9
ceejayoz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies that put out egregiously vulnerable vehicles should be held liable, though.

Insurance companies should reflect unlock vulnerability of a car model in its premiums. That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium when choosing what car to buy. What would help is a widely used certification system kept up-to-date by certification authorities in cooperation with insurance companies, similarly to what we have in place for a car model's fuel consumption.

> That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium when choosing what car to buy.

It doesn't help that premium calculations are nonlinear and trade secrets. In the real world, it would take a computer and a large database to fuzzily estimate the impact of a particular car purchase on your personal premiums forecasted over the next few years with an error margin any less than a few hundred dollars per year (unless your life is particularly stable and well aligned to some major stereotype you can use to get a closer estimate).

If each insurer just published a table of the incremental impact of a given model of car (or better yet, how linear contributions for theft vs crash-rate vs death-rate-on-crash vs ...) then that'd be easy enough to use during purchasing. If you own a 90s civic in Oakland vs Redwood City though you're much more likely for the defective security measures to be used, and the insurers use a proxy for that information in their calculations, so in practice you have to get a personalized quote for every single car you might be interested in purchasing. Moreover, if you buy the car in a low-car-crime locale and move you can still be surprised by the massive rate hike [0]. And so on; modeling arbitrary risk is complicated, which is (part of) why professionals get paid the big bucks to do it. If there are other workable solutions, I'd prefer most of those to requiring the general public to have to do non-trivial math and statistics for every car purchase, especially above and beyond what they already have to do when estimating the total lifetime costs due to fuel economy or whatever.

[0] My personal solution was just to sell the car in that low-car-crime locale where it had a market value and buy a new vehicle in my destination, but then you're trading premiums for transaction costs, which isn't easy to model if you don't know how often you'll move in 5yrs either (hindsight, definitely worth it by a wide margin).

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