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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

#421

Post by jonathanlydall »

philwelch wrote: post #110
nonethewiser wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is to identify, arrest, and prosecute criminals. Which the government is not obligated to do in the US. I think it will take a multi-pronged approach that includes exactly this. Individuals must be held responsible for their actions. Car security also needs to be beefed up though. It's clearly not good enough.

Korean car brands like Hyundai and Kia are commonly criticized for being too easy to steal. Yet somehow the rate of car theft in South Korea, where these companies have a much higher market share, is a fraction of that in the United States.

My understanding of the situation is that their cars for the US market lacked immobilisers or something, while in the rest of the world this was not the case.

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

#422

Post by MSFT_Edging »

ryandrake wrote: post #217
bryanlarsen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's anything more guaranteed to turn a 12 or 13 year old into a lifelong criminal than what I think you're implying by "real correction in behaviour"; aka a multi-year prison sentence.

If someone is stealing cars at 12 or 13 years old, they're already well on their way down the path towards irredeemability. Society has to do something or they will turn into a lifelong criminal. A multi-year prison sentence is probably not going to help them, but counseling, a better home and school environment, food in the belly, and so on might. You have to do something besides "catch and release" which has been t…

Do you know about the endemic of illiteracy in the US right now? More likely than not that child can't even read above a 2nd grade level.

We could have real rehabilitation centers focused on educating the kids, treating them like human beings with respect, and show them how to live life well.

Or we could put them in kid-jail and be put at a higher risk for all sorts of violence and abuse just to punish them.

As long as people hold the opinion that a 12 year old is "well on their way down the path towards irredeemability", we won't ever move past revenge based for-profit prisons and the crime problem will continue to get worse as these illiterate and stunted children are released back out into society.

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

#423

Post by snarfy »

basil-rash wrote: post #284
snarfy wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember thinking about something similar many years ago. I saw ever increasing safety mechanisms in automobiles. Instead of training to be better drives that don't crash, we add seat belts, crumple zones, multiple air bags, anti lock brake, etc. It's an arms race to mediocrity. It seemed like the end game would be cars made out of nerf. At the time, I thought the solution was to go in the opposite direction. Add m…

Yes. This is why I disabled my car’s airbags: nothing will keep you more alert and defensive when driving than an awareness that any accident will result in near certain death.

I didn't say it was a good idea. It's more an observation about incentives which I did feel was relevant about gp's comment on philosophy.

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

#424

Post by seanmcdirmid »

autoexec wrote: post #398
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US isn't very uniform. Mississippi locks way more people up than Washington state. Both states are pretty ineffective in keeping crime down. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html?gad_source=1&g... Washington is put at around Thailand, Mississippi locks more than twice as many people per capita up (and isn't very comparable to a country).

Well that's depressing. Thailand is not a country we should strive to emulate. They have their own mass incarceration problem (they rank 8th in the world), state executions, their own "war on drugs", lots of violent killings involving guns, high levels of corruption, forced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and a horrible track record for human rights. Thailand is a mess and it's tragic that so much of…

It isn't, but many places in the US are not as bad as it seems if we count the USA as a whole. Mississippi (and Louisiana and most of the south up to and including Texas and Florida) is just really bad.

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

#425

Post by lucideer »

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…

I'm glad you're starting to question things & definitely the wisdom of the "rule of law" is an interesting question to delve into for many reasons.

However, none of what you're exploring is remotely relevant in this particular instance, as the op isn't considering a yes/no comparison (to have a ban or not to have a ban), but is rather comparing & contrasting two alternate approaches to banning (cars vs flippers). Implicit in the discussion is an assumption that a ban is being advocated for in one direction or another.

> I really don't like the way this is going

The rule of law is many thousands of years old; it's not a recent phenomenon. There's an entire industry built around it - a very lucrative one - it's called the legal profession.

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

#426

Post by cogman10 »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #325
nulbyte wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, the discussion is about preventing some thing from being sold or existing, whether that be insecure vehicles or Flipper Zeroes. There are already laws against theft. They apply to vehicles, secure and insecure alike. A law mandating a minimum level of security, as GP suggests, seems to me to fit the suggestion, that auto manufacturers have…

I like the idea in theory, but I'm not sure if it's practical. There's no such thing as a secure system, there are only systems with no known security issues -- a vehicle that has no known security issues one day, is one discovery away from being completely open the next day. So, it would be hard to legislate the security of a system. The solution might be to incentivize a quick resolution. For example, if a security…

> There's no such thing as a secure system

I mean, in modern vehicles you can pretty much get there, but you might have to give up some features. For example, walk up unlock. You need to push a button somewhere to make unlock secure.

The way you get there is through FIDO. Have the engine controller ask the hardware key to confirm who it is through a handshake. Don't start/enable the engine if that handshake fails.

With that in place, the route to theft involves removing/replacing the engine controller which can be a major pain to do fast.

Cars with bad security systems generally involve pulling the steering column off and touching the right two wires together to start then engine.

That said, preventing theft of the contents of a car is impossible. Windows break easy and it's stupid easy to push the unlock button. That can't change.

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

#427

Post by nonrandomstring »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #320
keiferski wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting thought, but I would say instead that I'm in favor of culture being the "first line of defense" and not the law. In other words, I can leave my door unlocked because I am a part of a culture where that sort of thing doesn't happen. Not because there is a law written down somewhere. This has functionally been my experience in a number of spaces, including private workspaces (i.e., you don't expec…

The reason the rule of law exists at the scale it does is precisely because what you describe, has not shown to create functional long term societies that are resilient to exogenous threats. The rule of law is literally humanity’s best attempt so far to explicitly codify human desires into a common set of descriptions. This is why the UN exists and the LON before it etc…

I think what may be missing from the discussion at this point are distinctions between law and equity and different kinds of judgement in statutory versus common law.

The ideal in jurisprudence is that we _always_ have equity - the ability to interpret the law and apply it in each specific cases.

The "opposite" is statutory law. Like you get a speeding ticket regardless of any mitigating situation.

So you were rushing to the hospital in time for your pregnant wife to give birth before your dying father breathes his last.... Cry me a river. $200 fine! Next case.

Mechanical justice is cheap and rough. Statutory law fits perfectly with our capitalist society, efficient, inflexible, uniform, quick and cheap. Judges and juries are expensive.

Others mentioned the Chinese concept of Li (loi?) and the "spirit of the law", which are casualties in a technocratic society.

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

#428

Post by [deleted] »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #77
eli wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These cars are being sold with defective security measures. They don't work the way manufactures promise or customers expect. It shouldn't be any different than a car sold with headlights that are too dim

But that is my point. All security measures are defective. I can always tie a chain to your vehicle and leave with it. Security measures deter criminals, they can never stop them. Only the government can do that. The government is not obliged to do that in the US. Thus, no one can stop criminals To metaphorically put it: no matter how good your 2FA is, I can always get around it if I can torture you or threaten your…

[deleted]

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

#429

Post by seanmcdirmid »

whimsicalism wrote: post #372
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be like that, then I started seeing things happening myself. The first time you see Kia Boyz smashing windows and grabbing purses in a grocery store parking lot at noon on a Sunday is an eye opener (Do they want to get caught? this is pretty blatant, maybe they know we don't have many police these days). I always thought our crime problem was limited to porch piracy and street parked cars getting their wind…

I hear what you're saying, I live in SF. My opinions are evolving on the subject. There is a lot of not profit-driven vandalism and violence that I witness here and disrupting fencers will obviously do nothing for that. But for car theft & other profit-driven commodity thefts, I do think targeting the markets can often be very effective.

I don't know. Many of these kids...they are from war torn communities (legal immigrants, refugees). They might be working through huge trauma, and they don't seem very organized at all (steal a car to...steal another car and/or knock over a gas station...then abandon the car on the street somewhere). There really isn't a market to target, the cars are almost always found after a few days, just trashed and damaged. They are just used for other crimes mostly.

The drug addicts are much more organized in comparison (steal legos at Target, fence at some place for fentanyl).

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

#430

Post by mywittyname »

bluGill wrote: post #95
Chris2048 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but then you'd need a tow truck.. Doesn't seem a lot simpler, anyone could snap a pic of your registration plate. I think towing a vehicle does attract a fair amount of attention, especially if there is no obvious reason for it. Also, they don't need to steal the car - if they can freely open it can can just steal anything inside.

A tow truck attracts attention - there will be a dozen witnesses who watch you do everything - not one will think to remember any details that can identify you. Just replace the vinyl sticker on the door with your false company name on after each job and you are safe from being caught.

This actually happened in my neighborhood yesterday and two people came out to talk to the driver. The moment I saw them pull up I even double checked that my garage door was closed. We came out before the person who called the tow truck did.

Car thefts have made people paranoid and vigilant.

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