8 ms·

> Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an unethical behavior, the discussion is about preventing some thing from being sold or existing, whether

> 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 a minimum standard to ethically sell a vehicle which buyers would, presumably, expect to have locking mechanisms suitable to prevent theft.

katbyte 3y ago
And Canada already did this with immobilizes. We also used to do bait cars. Both these things helped a ton, until the new wave of weak car security Iirc the Kai stealing spree didn’t hit Canada as hard because of said immobilizer law too
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. We had police catch 12 and 13 year olds (Kia Boyz) this weekend in a car with guns, and they are out already. They will get some restorative justice, but no real correction in behavior and I’m sure they will do it again. Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    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 the default in the USA for some time.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      USA crime is still very low compared to pretty much the entire 20th century, it seems early to proclaim certain approaches as a failure. FWIW, catalytic converter theft was recently a big problem in the US and the classic approach of getting the FBI involved, identifying the high-level fencers and arresting, was incredibly effective and cat thefts have plummeted. I suspect disrupting the organized crime in Canada would work similarly well at reducing car theft.
      - rvnx 3y ago
        It's only the case if people don't deny that the crimes exist, and Canada might suffer a bit from that lack of recognition. In France as well, if you mention that there is criminality, people will frown upon you. "No it's 100% safe country, it is a feeling of being unsafe".
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        I am someone you would label a ‘crime denier’ because I feel the problem is definitely smaller than in the past and it is generally overstated in the media. That is precisely why I think we should focus on organized crime and the driving clearing houses rather than individual street-level criminals.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        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 windows bashed in at night (you know, typical drug addict crime), but nope, we have another problem.
        whimsicalism 3y ago
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > 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. Society had better correct that problem quickly or those two 12/13 year old kids are going to have ruined their lives by the time they turn 18. Something drastic has to be done, a slap on the wrist and sending them back to their parents isn't sufficient. Right now we fail on both sides of the pendulum, maybe its time to rethink things. I do think Europe does deal better with this. Even in France, they have a fairly aggressive/intolerant police force, but a real correction focus once arrests/convictions have occurred.
    - immibis 3y ago
      The problem cannot be corrected by locking them in a room until they're 25, then releasing them.
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        The problem also cannot be corrected by letting them run wild until they are 18, and then locking them in a room until they are 50, and then releasing them.
  - cltby 3y ago
    Criminality is congenital. Social interventions will not fix the kid. Neither for that matter will prison, but at least it will protect the rest of us from his increasingly violent depredations.
    - anticorporate 3y ago
      > Criminality is congenital. This is a categorically disproven view. Thankfully, it's no longer widely held, but unfortunately not before it was used to justify millions of cruel acts from eugenics to genocide.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  Sounds like they had some rich parents to bail them out. I highly doubt they had court in less than a week.
- evilantnie 3y ago
  Just to help not spread misinformation, the 12 year old was released as he was a passenger and police believe he was forced by the driver (his brother) into the car. The 13 year old driver was not released and will remain in jail until his trial.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  people as organizations are a larger problem that people as cultural products.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion. There's an entire field of study covering how ineffective punitive justice is. Unless the perpetrator at hand is literally an irredeemable monster, locking them away in a box until they're later released with even more stigmas, even further behind the curve, and without the ability to earn a living does nothing except push them right back to the anti-social behavior that put them on the radar of the justice system in the first place. All evidence on the subject points to the same thing: the best predictor of who will be a criminal and who won't is their zip code, because of things like under-served communities and generational poverty. When you give people no options to make a living in a pro-social way, they will do it in an anti-social one. Does that mean every person in the justice system just needs a firm pat on the back and to be released? Fuck no. But if you long term want to actually reduce crime, the evidence is in: you do that by improving home lives and giving communities the resources they need to grow, not by locking people up.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    To be honest, there's also entire fields of study of how God makes everything in the world happen, so I doubt I'm much convinced by how many fields of studies there are. People have been able to bullshit each other over obvious things for eons. The existence of such fields means nothing.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      God doesn't have many peer reviewed studies. This is a non-sequitur. You don't get to hand wave away reality that you don't like
      - renewiltord 3y ago
        Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway was peer-reviewed so that isn't convincing either.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. In the US we lock more of our citizens behind bars than any other nation on Earth. Conviction for even a minor offense can make it extremely difficult to get employment or housing. People rarely get a clean slate after serving their time and even an arrest record without a conviction can haunt you. Nearly all other developed countries have abolished capitol punishment. We haven't gone a single year since 1981 without an execution. The pendulum has already swung too far towards punishment and law enforcement, to the point that abuses by police and our mass incarceration problem are a total embarrassment for a country that tries to call itself "the land of the free" with a straight face. There's little doubt that many of the people arrested in the US would do better with some compassion than they would with harsher punishment. This is especially true for literal children. One example where compassion is the better option would be treating addiction instead of punishing drug addicts. That would save billions in tax dollars, reduce crime, and help the addict to recover their lives and remove several barriers that could prevent them from getting work and being productive members of society. If we'd done that decades ago instead of feeding US citizens to the prison industrial complex we'd be so much better off as a nation today. There's a risk for over-correcting, but there's also a massive amount of space between "do nothing" and our usual method today which amounts to "torture then never forgive" or "torture then kill" so there's plenty of opportunity to find some improvements.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    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&gclid=CjwKCAiA29auBhBxEiwAnKcSqlpwRKaEdXdgqFadBu01DjlB34kb-BpRdYZFl88wZzu7PW7c6dsNmRoCAvQQAvD_BwE 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).
    - autoexec 3y ago
      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 the US can't do any better when it comes to locking citizens behind bars.
iraqmtpizza 3y ago
false advertising and fraud are already banned. car theft is banned. cars below a certain price are effectively banned by regulations. poorly lit parking lots are almost certainly partially banned. soon, leaving one's car in a dark parking lot will be banned.
bonestamp2 3y ago
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 issue is found with a vehicle, there could be laws that govern how quickly a fix needs to be available, how it's made available, and how far back it goes in model years. I would suggest that the severity of the issue (life threatening | theft | inconvenience) and the number of vehicles affected, should dictate how much time they have to resolve it.
- cogman10 3y ago
  > 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.
- bsder 3y ago
  > There's no such thing as a secure system This is tautologically true. However, the car manufacturers haven't even tried. They had the same default password for every car. Then they had wireless systems that were vulnerable to replay. Then they had wireless systems that were vulnerable to relay. etc. The wireless systems on cars need two things: encryption and time of flight detection. The problem is that adds a couple dollars of cost per car and will lock out users some amount of time inversely proportional to the development cost (which the car manufacturers will shirk on so the system will suck). So, no manufacturer will do it short of being forced by legislation. From an engineering point of view, the main limitation is the battery in the keyfob. If you interrogate the keyfob too often, it will drain the battery and consumers will complain.
happiness_idx 3y ago
Every car on the market now has a flaw where I can put a air wedge on your door and a coat hanger on the lock button.
- vkou 3y ago
  Given those two tools, can you steal the car, or does that require a lot more effort for some models?
jack_h 3y ago
This seems really bizarre to me and kind of dismisses the entire premise of this subthread. So we have a particular activity - theft - which we as a society have deemed to be inappropriate and codified the punishment of such behavior into law. The law doesn't prevent such behavior, it merely lays out the punishment if one is caught and convicted which can be seen as a deterrent. However, vehicle theft still happens which leads us to this entire topic. The suggestion is to impose requirements via law onto companies who make vehicles to prevent this theft; although interestingly enough no legal requirements for the manufacturer of the tool used in the commission of these crimes. The companies complying with such regulations will pass on the cost to the consumer just like the mandated safety features such as back-up cameras and so forth. So in essence we would be punishing all consumers by increasing the cost of a vehicle to prevent an unrelated third party from committing an already illegal act. Of course what is secure changes over time, so what is secure today may not be tomorrow for a variety of reasons. I'm not sure how that fits into the equation. Keep in mind this is just one aspect of a vehicle out of many. We already have loads of regulations around vehicles from safety features to emission standards. When you say that a buyer presumably expects a lock to be resistant to this sort of attack you are adding to a very long list of things the buyer may or may not actually care enough about to spend their money on it. When do we admit that many, many different groups have convinced legislators to regulate what vehicles the public is allowed to have rather than pretending we are speaking for the consumer? Please note that I am not saying all laws and regulations are bad, far from it. I do believe that there are no solutions in law, merely trade-offs which I alluded to above. My point here is to question if another law will actually fix the issue and if the knock-on effects are worth it. As a society we tend to pass laws that stay on the books long after we learn how damaging and counter-productive they actually are; e.g. the war on drugs. We also have an uncountable number of laws and regulations on the books; we literally don't know how many there are. So saying the only solution is more laws seems a bit like saying everything is a nail because all I have is a hammer. You also brought up ethics in relation to manufacturers. I have to ask though, why do they have an ethical responsibility to prevent a bad actor from using a tool to steal their product from their own consumers? I'm having a really, really hard time agreeing with such an ethical responsibility. How much ethical responsibility can we really put onto manufacturers to prevent crime?
- 3y ago

katbyte 3y ago

And Canada already did this with immobilizes. We also used to do bait cars. Both these things helped a ton, until the new wave of weak car security Iirc the Kai stealing spree didn’t hit Canada as hard because of said immobilizer law too

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. We had police catch 12 and 13 year olds (Kia Boyz) this weekend in a car with guns, and they are out already. They will get some restorative justice, but no real correction in behavior and I’m sure they will do it again. Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
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.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  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 the default in the USA for some time.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    USA crime is still very low compared to pretty much the entire 20th century, it seems early to proclaim certain approaches as a failure. FWIW, catalytic converter theft was recently a big problem in the US and the classic approach of getting the FBI involved, identifying the high-level fencers and arresting, was incredibly effective and cat thefts have plummeted. I suspect disrupting the organized crime in Canada would work similarly well at reducing car theft.
    - rvnx 3y ago
      It's only the case if people don't deny that the crimes exist, and Canada might suffer a bit from that lack of recognition. In France as well, if you mention that there is criminality, people will frown upon you. "No it's 100% safe country, it is a feeling of being unsafe".
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        I am someone you would label a ‘crime denier’ because I feel the problem is definitely smaller than in the past and it is generally overstated in the media. That is precisely why I think we should focus on organized crime and the driving clearing houses rather than individual street-level criminals.
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        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 windows bashed in at night (you know, typical drug addict crime), but nope, we have another problem.
        whimsicalism 3y ago
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > 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. Society had better correct that problem quickly or those two 12/13 year old kids are going to have ruined their lives by the time they turn 18. Something drastic has to be done, a slap on the wrist and sending them back to their parents isn't sufficient. Right now we fail on both sides of the pendulum, maybe its time to rethink things. I do think Europe does deal better with this. Even in France, they have a fairly aggressive/intolerant police force, but a real correction focus once arrests/convictions have occurred.
  - immibis 3y ago
    The problem cannot be corrected by locking them in a room until they're 25, then releasing them.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      The problem also cannot be corrected by letting them run wild until they are 18, and then locking them in a room until they are 50, and then releasing them.
- cltby 3y ago
  Criminality is congenital. Social interventions will not fix the kid. Neither for that matter will prison, but at least it will protect the rest of us from his increasingly violent depredations.
  - anticorporate 3y ago
    > Criminality is congenital. This is a categorically disproven view. Thankfully, it's no longer widely held, but unfortunately not before it was used to justify millions of cruel acts from eugenics to genocide.
withinboredom 3y ago
Sounds like they had some rich parents to bail them out. I highly doubt they had court in less than a week.
evilantnie 3y ago
Just to help not spread misinformation, the 12 year old was released as he was a passenger and police believe he was forced by the driver (his brother) into the car. The 13 year old driver was not released and will remain in jail until his trial.
cyanydeez 3y ago
people as organizations are a larger problem that people as cultural products.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion. There's an entire field of study covering how ineffective punitive justice is. Unless the perpetrator at hand is literally an irredeemable monster, locking them away in a box until they're later released with even more stigmas, even further behind the curve, and without the ability to earn a living does nothing except push them right back to the anti-social behavior that put them on the radar of the justice system in the first place. All evidence on the subject points to the same thing: the best predictor of who will be a criminal and who won't is their zip code, because of things like under-served communities and generational poverty. When you give people no options to make a living in a pro-social way, they will do it in an anti-social one. Does that mean every person in the justice system just needs a firm pat on the back and to be released? Fuck no. But if you long term want to actually reduce crime, the evidence is in: you do that by improving home lives and giving communities the resources they need to grow, not by locking people up.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  To be honest, there's also entire fields of study of how God makes everything in the world happen, so I doubt I'm much convinced by how many fields of studies there are. People have been able to bullshit each other over obvious things for eons. The existence of such fields means nothing.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    God doesn't have many peer reviewed studies. This is a non-sequitur. You don't get to hand wave away reality that you don't like
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway was peer-reviewed so that isn't convincing either.
autoexec 3y ago
> We aren’t very serious about enforcing our laws, especially when kids are involved. In the US we lock more of our citizens behind bars than any other nation on Earth. Conviction for even a minor offense can make it extremely difficult to get employment or housing. People rarely get a clean slate after serving their time and even an arrest record without a conviction can haunt you. Nearly all other developed countries have abolished capitol punishment. We haven't gone a single year since 1981 without an execution. The pendulum has already swung too far towards punishment and law enforcement, to the point that abuses by police and our mass incarceration problem are a total embarrassment for a country that tries to call itself "the land of the free" with a straight face. There's little doubt that many of the people arrested in the US would do better with some compassion than they would with harsher punishment. This is especially true for literal children. One example where compassion is the better option would be treating addiction instead of punishing drug addicts. That would save billions in tax dollars, reduce crime, and help the addict to recover their lives and remove several barriers that could prevent them from getting work and being productive members of society. If we'd done that decades ago instead of feeding US citizens to the prison industrial complex we'd be so much better off as a nation today. There's a risk for over-correcting, but there's also a massive amount of space between "do nothing" and our usual method today which amounts to "torture then never forgive" or "torture then kill" so there's plenty of opportunity to find some improvements.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  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&gclid=CjwKCAiA29auBhBxEiwAnKcSqlpwRKaEdXdgqFadBu01DjlB34kb-BpRdYZFl88wZzu7PW7c6dsNmRoCAvQQAvD_BwE 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).
  - autoexec 3y ago
    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 the US can't do any better when it comes to locking citizens behind bars.

iraqmtpizza 3y ago

false advertising and fraud are already banned. car theft is banned. cars below a certain price are effectively banned by regulations. poorly lit parking lots are almost certainly partially banned. soon, leaving one's car in a dark parking lot will be banned.

bonestamp2 3y ago

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 issue is found with a vehicle, there could be laws that govern how quickly a fix needs to be available, how it's made available, and how far back it goes in model years. I would suggest that the severity of the issue (life threatening | theft | inconvenience) and the number of vehicles affected, should dictate how much time they have to resolve it.

cogman10 3y ago
> 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.
bsder 3y ago
> There's no such thing as a secure system This is tautologically true. However, the car manufacturers haven't even tried. They had the same default password for every car. Then they had wireless systems that were vulnerable to replay. Then they had wireless systems that were vulnerable to relay. etc. The wireless systems on cars need two things: encryption and time of flight detection. The problem is that adds a couple dollars of cost per car and will lock out users some amount of time inversely proportional to the development cost (which the car manufacturers will shirk on so the system will suck). So, no manufacturer will do it short of being forced by legislation. From an engineering point of view, the main limitation is the battery in the keyfob. If you interrogate the keyfob too often, it will drain the battery and consumers will complain.

happiness_idx 3y ago

Every car on the market now has a flaw where I can put a air wedge on your door and a coat hanger on the lock button.

vkou 3y ago
Given those two tools, can you steal the car, or does that require a lot more effort for some models?

jack_h 3y ago

This seems really bizarre to me and kind of dismisses the entire premise of this subthread. So we have a particular activity - theft - which we as a society have deemed to be inappropriate and codified the punishment of such behavior into law. The law doesn't prevent such behavior, it merely lays out the punishment if one is caught and convicted which can be seen as a deterrent. However, vehicle theft still happens which leads us to this entire topic. The suggestion is to impose requirements via law onto companies who make vehicles to prevent this theft; although interestingly enough no legal requirements for the manufacturer of the tool used in the commission of these crimes. The companies complying with such regulations will pass on the cost to the consumer just like the mandated safety features such as back-up cameras and so forth. So in essence we would be punishing all consumers by increasing the cost of a vehicle to prevent an unrelated third party from committing an already illegal act. Of course what is secure changes over time, so what is secure today may not be tomorrow for a variety of reasons. I'm not sure how that fits into the equation. Keep in mind this is just one aspect of a vehicle out of many. We already have loads of regulations around vehicles from safety features to emission standards. When you say that a buyer presumably expects a lock to be resistant to this sort of attack you are adding to a very long list of things the buyer may or may not actually care enough about to spend their money on it. When do we admit that many, many different groups have convinced legislators to regulate what vehicles the public is allowed to have rather than pretending we are speaking for the consumer? Please note that I am not saying all laws and regulations are bad, far from it. I do believe that there are no solutions in law, merely trade-offs which I alluded to above. My point here is to question if another law will actually fix the issue and if the knock-on effects are worth it. As a society we tend to pass laws that stay on the books long after we learn how damaging and counter-productive they actually are; e.g. the war on drugs. We also have an uncountable number of laws and regulations on the books; we literally don't know how many there are. So saying the only solution is more laws seems a bit like saying everything is a nail because all I have is a hammer. You also brought up ethics in relation to manufacturers. I have to ask though, why do they have an ethical responsibility to prevent a bad actor from using a tool to steal their product from their own consumers? I'm having a really, really hard time agreeing with such an ethical responsibility. How much ethical responsibility can we really put onto manufacturers to prevent crime?

3y ago