5 ms·

Semi-random idea of the day. Would there be a market for something like a dye pack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye_pack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye_pa

• tclancy 7y ago
  Bonus points if it turns the thief's teeth a satisfyingly deep blue.
  • buckminster 7y ago
    A tempting pack of custom candy next to the macbook might do it.
• gxon 7y ago
  Is an unconfirmed sense of schadenfreude really worth losing more money for a theft? Maybe it's worth it if the device is also streaming video so you can share the experience with the world, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo Also, it's probably more likely that the device gets triggered accidentally than it is likely to get stolen.
• curiouscats 7y ago
  Police departments could do this as they have done with "bait cars" to catch those who engage in this behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car
  • logfromblammo 7y ago
    Bait cars are a police-state tactic. Just normal, Peelian-principled policing for me, thanks. Hunting and tracking, not fishing and trapping. Which is to say make better efforts to actually solve property crimes that occur naturally, rather than manufacturing crimes for the purpose of resolving them more easily.
    • gjs278 7y ago
      anyone that steals a bait car would have stolen a real one given the chance
      • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        In a high enough crime area otherwise honest people are gonna engage in opportunistic crime because "if I don't someone will". That's also exactly the kind of place the police are gonna go fishing. I know of more than one junk car that's been dragged out of a particular swamp (because scrap prices were high) with no attempt made to contact the rightful owner. That would get you a felony charge in my state (I'm sure a good lawyer could beat it but still). I know that that's not the same as stealing a bait car but it's pretty close.
        • freehunter 7y ago
          >otherwise honest people are gonna engage in opportunistic crime because "if I don't someone will" I mean I don't live in a high crime area so maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't sound like the behavior of an "otherwise honest person".
        • waste_monk 7y ago
          >In a high enough crime area otherwise honest people are gonna engage in opportunistic crime because "if I don't someone will". That is probably the weakest excuse for criminal behaviour I've ever heard. "Someone else was going to steal that car, so it might as well be me"? Bullshit. If someone's an "honest person" who only engages in crime when they think they can get away with it due to it being unlikely the police will follow up, they never had personal integrity or principles to begin with - they just hadn't been put in a situation where the cost/value proposition of commmiting a crime was worth it.
          • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
            Maybe stealing cars is a bit of the stretch but if you create more opportunity for crime there will be more crime. A better example is when the cops stick an under cover officer on the street corner as a hooker and of course she gets picked up because someone who would never pick up a hooker sees one that doesn't have a million hard miles on her and decides to give it a go. I know my local police used to leave rolls of copper wire on job sites to bait people to steal them. Of course nobody with a brain would leave an unsecured roll of copper wire around like that so the opportunity for the crime doesn't normally ever exist except when the police are baiting. Both those examples are baiting people who wouldn't otherwise consider the risk reward to be worth it to engage in crime.
  • DrScump 7y ago
    To show how old this concept is: the very first episode (1973) of the TV series "Police Story" featured a bait car being used to track Chuck Connor's character from theft of the bait car to a store robbery.
• Vaslo 7y ago
  Make it extremely hard to clean off so even afterwards it’s like a Scarlet Letter for their day to day for a few weeks
• birdyrooster 7y ago
  Having had my car stolen in the last couple years I want to say that I would feel no satisfaction out of getting revenge for my stolen car (it was recovered using GPS). There is a cost for cruelty even if it seems just in the moment. Stare into the void and the void stares into you.
• dharmab 7y ago
  Dye packs are used by banks which are insured by the government to make it easier for the government to catch criminals and recover their money through seizure/forfeiture (after which they can replace the dyed bills at low cost). The dye pack directly serves a victim of a bank robbery, i.e. the government. A dye pack doesn't serve the victims of a break-in well. The owner's car and valuable gets splashed with dye and need expensive cleaning or replacement, and the owner's insurance doesn't have much practical opportunity to recover damages either. What might be useful is a device that outputs arbitrary bluetooth codes and has a built-in tracker... although a police department might find it more cost-effective to just buy some real devices and install trackers on them.
• freehunter 7y ago
  I'm not a lawyer but generally boobytraps are illegal. You can't set up a device to damage someone if they commit a crime. Banks can get away with it because their dye packs are handed out to criminals with the crime in progress, they're not just left around for someone to accidentally stumble on to. Look at it this way: a child confuses your car with the car of their parents, find that you accidentally left it unlocked, picked up what they thought was their Apple device so they could watch Peppa Pig, and the dye pack goes off. A 400F firebomb is now sitting in the hands of this non-criminal child, with aerosol being sprayed into the enclosed car they find themselves in. Again, I'm not a lawyer... but boobytraps are illegal for a reason.