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> you may have to think both about protecting your data by technical means, and about not angering the agents more than you plan to That's the same problem wit
by lentil_soup 4mo ago
> you may have to think both about protecting your data by technical means, and about not angering the agents more than you plan to
That's the same problem with technical solutions to crime.
I come from a very dangerous city and I used to have a car that needed a PIN to work. You could turn then engine on and drive but after a minute if you didn't input the PIN it would turn off without warning and start blasting the alarm. The idea being that if the car was stolen the thief would be stranded not far from home unsure about what's happening. Great technical solution but it ignores that a lot of the time the car is stolen with you in it (in a kidnapping, for example). Having the car shutoff in the middle of a highway next to a panicking guy with a gun and trying to remember a PIN is not a situation you want to be in, so I just had the PIN number written down on the dashboard, which worked very well when I was eventually kidnapped and just pointed at the piece of paper with the number.
- eru 4mo agoWhy are you staying in this place? (Is this in South Africa?)
- Hendrikto 4mo agoBrazil maybe?
- hammock 4mo agoIceland I think
- ChoGGi 4mo agoWashington most likely
- ryan_j_naughton 4mo agoI live in Washington DC, and even though carjacking is a problem here, not to a degree that people plan on it happening to them. I would be surprised if OP's situation took place in DC.
- alistairSH 4mo agoCarjackings ramped up in 2021 through 2024. They appear to be headed back down the "low and steady" of the early 00s. Looking at the numbers, DC isn't alone in this trend - Chicago was pretty bad as well.
- cestith 4mo agoGee… A lot of people lost their jobs at once and crime went up? Then when the economy recovered crime went down? It’s almost like keeping people educated and employed actually does work better than more police and longer sentences.
- datadrivenangel 4mo agoAlso the rise of stressed delivery drivers leaving their cars running, and the kiaboys social media meme / subculture contributed.
- outworlder 4mo agoEven for Brazil, even for the most dangerous cities, that's still an insane number of kidnappings. They happen enough that you need to be aware and be careful to not be an easy target, but it's still a rare event overall.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- lentil_soup 4mo agoWas born there. It was Caracas in the 00s
- imglorp 4mo agoIn phone terms, that's the $5 wrench problem. The elaborate tech is not relevant if you can be simply coerced somehow to bypass it. Again in phone terms, maybe bring a blank phone through that border.
- leonidasrup 4mo agoCoercion was the reason from start, it's explained in the article. "A motion filed by his defense argues the interrogation focused on child sexual abuse material as a pretext for investigating his connections to the protest movement." So the message was simple: don't protest and you will be not harassed.
- ryanbrunner 4mo agoA blank phone is suspicious in and of itself and probably invites more questioning and suspicion. And from personal experience, once a border guard is suspicious of you and you're a non-citizen, you're fighting a losing battle to get into that country, regardless of whether you're doing anything shady / illegal. The most straightforward answer I think is to use common apps for more commonplace social media activities and separate apps that can be removed from your phone when you're crossing a border for things you want to keep private. It's not perfect privacy, but I think a border is one thing that for better or worse you'll need to accept some compromises on.
- mapt 4mo agoAs one does. Why, six of the eleven times I've had my car stolen, it was a carjacking with myself or my family member in it.
- ryan_j_naughton 4mo agoSix of the eleven times... Crazy. What city was this, if you don't mind me asking?
- yeahforsureman 4mo agoJesus, what country?
- hyperbovine 4mo agoAlso what decade.
- ngc248 4mo agoprobably South Africa?
- u8080 4mo agoSan Andreas?
- UltraSane 4mo agoThat is insane. Where do you live?
- FinnKuhn 4mo agoMust be Gotham City
- dbetteridge 4mo agoJoburg?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- deltoidmaximus 4mo agoAnd there's the problem that if the PIN or worse a biometric version of this becomes remotely well known you've now created an incentive for a car thief to kidnap people even if they only want the car.
- nilamo 4mo agoLike when fingerprint readers were added to car doors in the 90s, and carjackers started cutting fingers off to get away...
- pinkyboy 4mo agoThat is a largely incorrect statement that is loosely based on a single incident, not a trend. The single incident was an individual in Malaysia who added an after-market finger-print based engine immobilizer to his car in 2005. The attackers threatened the individual with machetes, so that he would put his finger on the sensor, and then drove off with him in the car. The attackers later cut off his finger believing it would let them restart it without him present.
- TeMPOraL 4mo agoOr anything else you can't easily transfer. I can't help but point at passkeys in particular (or 2FA in general). A variant of this is the well-known scene from a previous century's movie involving extracting an eye to bypass retinal scanner.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Itoldmyselfso 4mo agoMany cars already have internal/cabin view camera. I'd imagine it will sooner or later get detection for potential theft and kidnapping situations, where it can simply detect the driver by face and prevent driving if it doesn't recognize the invidual as one granted driving privileges.
- ryan_j_naughton 4mo agoWhat city was this, if you don't mind me asking?
- lentil_soup 4mo agoCaracas
- ethbr1 4mo agoI have no idea what it was like to live there, but did visit circa-late-90s. Remember noticing that "walls" in Caracas meant 10' high concrete or brick, topped by glass shards or razor wire. And there were walls around everything: university professors' homes, social clubs, etc.
- Mawr 4mo agoYeah, it would have been way better not to have an alarm, and instead make it appear like the car broke down. Could even maybe somehow actually break it programmatically.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4mo agoOh god, I am glad you can still write here. That sounds terrifying