[HN Gopher] Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security too...
___________________________________________________________________
Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the
Flipper Zero
Author : pabs3
Score : 1114 points
Date : 2024-02-21 11:20 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (saveflipper.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (saveflipper.ca)
| h2odragon wrote:
| Or, _enforce existing laws against theft_ ...
|
| "Ban insecure vehicles" is chasing the technology of locks;
| there's always another circumvention.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Companies that put out _egregiously_ vulnerable vehicles should
| be held liable, though.
| miohtama wrote:
| Justice is being served
|
| https://www.hbsslaw.com/press/hyundai-kia-car-theft-
| defect/c...
| tromp wrote:
| 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.
| elif wrote:
| Crashes are such an outsized component of insurance
| coverage compared to theft that this would not be a
| substantial motivation for manufacturers.
| shagie wrote:
| From this month a year ago - State Farm declares 105 Kia,
| Hyundai models 'ineligible' for new insurance in
| Louisiana - https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/kia-
| hyundai-models-in... (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642224 40 points |
| Feb 3, 2023 | 90 comments )
|
| Which then - Dealers still sell Hyundais and Kias
| vulnerable to theft, but insurance is hard to get
| https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173048646/hyundai-kia-
| car-th...
|
| And in October - Wheels Of Steal: Some Kias, Hyundais
| Easy To Hotwire; Owners Sue Carmakers, Get $200 Million
| https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/kia-hyundai-
| ant...
|
| The Challenges of Insuring a Kia or Hyundai in 2024 -
| https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/insurance-
| services/insuri...
|
| ---
|
| I suspect that this has lead to Kia and Hyundai taking
| note of insurance rates and changing things.
| drdaeman wrote:
| This penalizes unaware pre-existing car owners. Not only
| they got a crappy car, they now have to pay more for it -
| all because the vendor was sloppy. Doesn't seem fair to me.
|
| The responsible party should be the automaker that built or
| installed the security system, not the person who was sold
| a lie.
| jonhohle wrote:
| 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 expectation that using them
| to commit a crime should result in penalty for the
| individual committing a crime using those tools, not the
| target of the crime they are committing.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| jonhohle wrote:
| What harm did Kia cause its customer? How are those locks
| adequate in say, South Korea, where there are 1:20,000
| car thefts per capita yearly vs 1:350 in the US.
|
| The locks are not the problem. Stealing cars is the
| problem.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > What harm did Kia cause its customer?
|
| They sold a negligently defective product.
|
| > How are those locks adequate in say, South Korea...
|
| They aren't. If I write code with a SQL injection in it,
| it's bad code even if no one winds up attacking it.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| One of these problems is far easier to solve than the
| other.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I agree with the article; that regulating car
| manufacturers who make insecure cars is the correct
| approach. This specific case illustrates the
| effectiveness of the approach.
| sokoloff wrote:
| (I agree with the article as well.)
| jonhohle wrote:
| I read this view as: it's fine to steal a car without an
| immobilizer. That's an insane take (and why we can't have
| nice things).
|
| Meanwhile other modern countries (albeit with much
| stricter law enforcement and a more unified value system)
| can operate with 0.1% of the equivalent crime and that's
| not what we aspire to. Instead we want to blame the
| manufacturer who must have certainly enticed antisocial,
| destructive behavior. What an awful and poisonous
| worldview.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's worth noting that Hyundai and Kia actually ship
| different anti-theft technology in some of these other
| modern countries, because regulations in those other
| modern countries require it. The fact that the US doesn't
| require it (this article is about Canada, but other
| subthreads are talking about those manufacturers
| specifically).
|
| It seems entirely reasonable to take the article's point
| of view which is "don't ban FlipperZero just because it
| can be used to facilitate car theft [among 1000 other
| uses], but rather regulate cars so that they become
| harder to steal".
|
| Further, I realize you didn't put a ton of thought into
| the specific 0.1% figure, but I seriously doubt that
| other modern countries are 1000x better on equivalent
| crime measures than either the US or Canada.
|
| Even New Zealand, with quite strict gun laws, has a
| firearm death rate that is a little over 1/12th that of
| the US's: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/gun-death...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I read this view as: it's fine to steal a car without
| an immobilizer.
|
| No. Car manufacturers should still take reasonable steps
| to prevent it.
|
| To make an analogy, people should not steal from banks...
| but it would still be negligent to leave the bank
| unlocked at night.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's very "both/and".
|
| Kia needs to fix their fuckup _AND_ organized gangs need
| to be investigated and broken up.
| hansvm wrote:
| > 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).
| lupusreal wrote:
| We'll end up banning windows at this rate, they're an
| _egregious_ vulnerability in cars and buildings alike.
| American cities, soft on crime, can 't stop thieves from
| breaking windows so maybe they'll go after car manufacturers
| and construction firms instead. Going after companies instead
| of criminals is more aligned with their left-wing
| sensibilities, I think that's what this is really about.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's not what egregious means.
| fargle wrote:
| yeah it kinda is
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No. Windows balance a variety of competing needs -
| security, ventilation, egress during emergencies, mental
| health, lighting, etc. It would be, perhaps, egregiously
| negligent for a maximum security prison architect to
| install large plate glass windows in their cells, but
| having windows isn't automatically egregious. A car
| without windows (or with unbreakable ones) is a deathtrap
| in an accident; omitting them would be _egregiously_
| dangerous.
|
| The same isn't true for, say, Kia/Hyundai's decision not
| to include immobilizers:
|
| https://www.ctvnews.ca/autos/kia-and-hyundai-vehicles-in-
| can...
|
| > CNN reported that only 26 per cent of Hyundai and Kia
| models from 2015 to 2019 were equipped with electronic
| immobilizers in the U.S., compared with 96 per cent of
| all other vehicles in those years, making the Hyundai and
| Kia models roughly twice as likely to be stolen.
|
| Those stats make it pretty clear that immobilization was
| already the industry standard. Skipping them was like
| knowingly writing open SQL injection holes in a web
| application.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Egregious is subjective. You think it's egregious for
| cars to have locks which can be circumvented by thieves.
| Maybe I think it's egregious that construction firms
| don't install iron bars on all ground floor windows.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://www.ctvnews.ca/autos/kia-and-hyundai-vehicles-in-
| can...
|
| > CNN reported that only 26 per cent of Hyundai and Kia
| models from 2015 to 2019 were equipped with electronic
| immobilizers in the U.S., compared with 96 per cent of
| all other vehicles in those years, making the Hyundai and
| Kia models roughly twice as likely to be stolen.
|
| If 96% of buildings in a neighborhood have iron bars over
| the ground floor windows, and you build a development in
| which only 26% of them do, yes... that's probably
| negligent, unless there are other factors to explain the
| discrepancy.
|
| If theives start disproportionately breaking into your
| development's properties, your tenants can probably be a
| bit miffed about your lack of security measures.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Seems reasonable. Doors, windows, walls, roofs and sub-
| basements should be such that you cannot simply pass
| through them. After all it is now quite trivial to break
| through. And surely this is failure that builders should be
| responsible for.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I genuinely cannot tell if this (specifically the last
| line) is satirical or not.
| PeterisP wrote:
| In a bunch of scenarios (mining, military, boats, planes) the
| vehicles explicitly don't have locks or ignition keys, you
| press a button and it starts up, you're good to go - should
| the manufacturer be liable if one gets stolen?
| rascul wrote:
| US military vehicles might have a cable that locks to the
| steering wheel. So if you try to drive it, you can't steer
| well. But if not setup properly, it can be steered just
| fine.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| US military vehicles are protected by the "people with
| guns who will shoot you" industry standard.
| adolph wrote:
| > US military vehicles are protected by the "people with
| guns who will shoot you" industry standard.
|
| Unless you are an MP, that stuff stays in the armory
| cage. And if you are headed to the range, ammunition is
| delivered separately to the range and systems are
| stringently checked for ammo before returning, afterwards
| they will do a lockdown inspection of the barracks and
| everyone's personal vehicles.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No; each of those scenarios involves external access
| controls that are standard for those industries. (Fences,
| guards, controlled access.) It's nothing like the
| Kia/Hyundai scenario, where such vulnerabilities stemmed
| from _not_ doing the industry standard thing
| (immobilizers).
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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?
| nordsieck wrote:
| > 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 response times that's largely
| impossible anyhow (well, outside of traffic violations).
| They largely deter crime by catching criminals after the
| fact.
|
| The examples given like military facilities have secure
| fences, 24 hour guards, etc. They are actually secure
| facilities. As opposed to someone's driveway.
| philwelch wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| Even a surveillance state like China has crime - it's not
| possible to deploy a police officer to every block and
| most people would find that objectionable for other
| reasons. Very few threats can be solved by a single
| countermeasure because the enemies are also intelligent
| and motivated.
| Ekaros wrote:
| As long as they are regulatory compliant, there should
| absolutely not be any liability. If regulations are not
| updated fast enough maybe people responsible for that should
| be removed from office or punished.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > As long as they are regulatory compliant, there should
| absolutely not be any liability.
|
| No; willfull negligence is something that should engender
| liability.
| acdha wrote:
| This is true in absolute terms but over simplified because it
| glosses over the differences in scale. We require cars to have
| seatbelts because even though people still die in crashes, it's
| a statistically certainty that many fewer die when seatbelts
| are used.
|
| Setting minimum standards is a critical function of governments
| in maintaining healthy markets because it prevents cheating
| from being cost effective. If you make a safety feature
| optional, you will have some fraction of people say that they
| don't need it and then cost society money when it turns out
| they were wrong. In the case of poor locks, even if much of the
| cost is paid by the owners' insurance there's still a lot of
| expense from the extra police and court costs, and stolen cars
| are often used to support other crimes.
| thfuran wrote:
| >even if much of the cost is paid by the owners' insurance
|
| Insurers aren't usually charities. Those costs are still
| borne by the insured.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes. That's why I listed it first as a separate category -
| it's easy to see a stolen car as a loss of, say, $20-30k
| for the private insurance company and owner but there's
| also going to be a cost for the time the police spend
| investigating, the city might spend disposing of a wrecked
| vehicle, the courts spend processing a car thief, etc. and
| potentially other significant costs if, say, a Kia
| challenge teenager hits another person or the vehicle is
| used to rob a house or business. While we can't prevent it
| in absolute terms, there is still a significant social
| benefit to reducing car theft rates.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Thank you. Reading through these comments I was surprised at
| how illogical so many of these comments are. People talking
| about towing cars or picking locks acting as if it's not
| obvious what the distinction is here.
|
| Yeah people, nothing can have perfect security. That's a
| given anyway. I think the point is that if you can steal it
| with a $250 device SDR device, the car's level of security is
| the issue not the device and that should be acknowledged by
| their government before they ban something that will do
| nothing except put these things in the hands of only the
| bigger crime groups. These things likely wouldn't be hard to
| manufacture by hand if these criminals wanted to get a hold
| of them.
| armada651 wrote:
| > Thank you. Reading through these comments I was surprised
| at how illogical so many of these comments are.
|
| Many commenters on HN lean libertarian, thus some will go
| through great lengths and mental gymnastics to avoid the
| conclusion that government regulation is (part of) the
| answer.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| > We require cars to have seatbelts
|
| Seatbelts are not adversarial. A better seatbelt does not
| encourage other drivers to crash their cars into you even
| harder or anything like that, it's people versus nature.
|
| Security systems are in a permanent arms race, people versus
| people. You could have a more expensive lock that requires a
| more expensive device to defeat, but this makes your car more
| expensive to make, so it has a higher price, so it becomes a
| more valuable target, and so on.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| The problem is that I think these hands free remote start
| locks are more expensive than actual real physical locks
| which are immune to the types of attacks so that argument
| just actually doesnt work at all.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| My bad, I was thinking in terms of the expensive remote
| start lock vs an even more expensive and safer remote
| start lock.
|
| But if the fancy insecure lock is more expensive, the
| problem should fix itself eventually, right? Consumers
| will switch back to the cheaper system of their own
| accord.
|
| It sucks for the people who bought the insecure cars
| without knowing, but banning insecure cars is not going
| to help them retroactively in any way.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| Where I live the used car market is _hot_. It is hard to
| find a car made before 2012 because for the most part
| they are as reliable and fuel efficient as modern cars,
| are cheaper to repair, and cheaper to insure.
|
| I dont think they are so desirable just because they are
| more secure but they dont have remote start options so
| they are at least in part more secure than modern remote
| start cars. The problem I am getting at is that there are
| no secure modern car options. None.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| > there are no secure modern car options
|
| I don't think there can be such a thing as a secure
| remote start option. The only way they can make it more
| secure than traditional keys is if they also make it less
| convenient to use than traditional keys, and then there
| is no point because the traditional keys will be easier
| and cheaper.
|
| What happened is that consumers did not know that the
| remote keys were unsafe, and now they know.
|
| What I don't understand is why insecure cars should be
| banned by law. Now that everyone knows about the issue,
| surely everyone will switch to a more secure system of
| their own accord.
| markhahn wrote:
| since there's "always another circumvention" we shouldn't even
| bother right?
|
| the "there are always bugs" refrain is horribly corrosive - it
| doesn't absolve the victim in any sense.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I think the point is not that we don't regulate locks, but
| that we don't ban lockpicks.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| You can always smash the window, but that can draw negative
| attention.
| badRNG wrote:
| It seems like the most straightforward path here is to ban auto
| thefts all together.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Yeah! If we make it illegal, then people will stop breaking the
| laws. That is how it works, right?
| lupusreal wrote:
| Maybe we could try enforcing those laws with no mercy given
| to the "wayward teens who don't know any better" (they do.)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We tried that sort of approach; it's pretty widely
| considered a mistake.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law
| _...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 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.
| jen20 wrote:
| This story is about Canada, though...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The VCCA is a US law, ask the above poster why they
| wanted this one.
| jen20 wrote:
| It was a reply to the thread generally, which devolved
| into a US-centric response to a Canadian OP.
| markhahn wrote:
| This logic depends on law-breakers being fully rational
| agents.
|
| Yes, there are some, at least some of the time, but very
| few.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| If they're not rational, they can go to jail? Isn't that
| the idea of jails: take people out of the system if they
| refuse to act by the rules of the system at other
| people's detriment.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Think there is not a clear 'idea of jails'.
|
| To me, the length of sentences in the US suggest that a
| primary purpose is deterrence, not merely keeping
| dangerous people off the street.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That is one of 4 reasons for jails. The other 3 are:
|
| - Rehabilitation
|
| - Retribution
|
| - Deterrence
| Ekaros wrote:
| Couple years in prison would mean that they cannot soon
| reoffend. Seems like reasonable solution to me.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Do you know what the recurrence rate is for U.S. prisons?
| It's around 44%. 44% of people released from prison,
| within a year, go on to commit another crime severe
| enough to end them up back in prison
| sokoloff wrote:
| That doesn't seem overly surprising. Just as the people
| who acted in 2010 in a fashion that did not land them in
| prison probably acted in a way in 2015 that also did not
| land them in prison, it's not shocking that people who
| acted in 2010 in a way that landed the in prison might
| also act in 2015 in a way that lands them in prison.
|
| I don't think that being in prison from 2011 to 2014
| _caused_ them to act that way in 2015.
|
| We're not going to randomly assign (mostly) law-abiding
| citizens to prison to measure whether prison adds
| propensity to [what would be re-]offend, but there
| probably is something that is different about the never-
| imprisoned vs previously-imprisoned population that
| informs future likelihood to be imprisoned.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > I don't think that being in prison from 2011 to 2014
| caused them to act that way in 2015.
|
| You would be surprised. There's no concrete evidence
| pointing to this, but some suspects, when asked, will say
| that they did it because they have nothing left to lose.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| What's the recurrence rate for people who commit a crime
| but aren't locked up?
|
| > another crime severe enough to end them up back in
|
| Then ramp up the penalty for repeat offences.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This has to be one of the dumbest things I've read in a while.
|
| All vehicles are insecure. I can hook a tow truck to almost any
| vehicle, including an 80,000 lbs tractor trailer and drive off
| with it. That'd actually attract less attention that outright
| hotwiring a vehicle.
|
| The solution is to identify, arrest, and prosecute criminals.
| Which the government is not obligated to do in the US.
| officeplant wrote:
| This is about Canada, but rant away.
| merpnderp wrote:
| We already identify, arrest, and prosecute criminals, we just
| don't hand out custodial sentences. Being in jail/prison sucks
| and is a good incentive to not steal cars. Plus it is
| impossible to steal cars while locked up.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > We already identify, arrest, and prosecute criminals...
|
| We've given up on that part in many instances.
| eli wrote:
| 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
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| 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 loved ones.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think there is a meaningful and useful difference between
| "defective" and "not comprehensive".
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| This is a different discussion. There doesn't seem to have
| been any abuse of a loved one before the perps drove off in
| the cars. The cars weren't sold as "unstealable".
|
| The whole point is that what was sold (some kind of key
| security) was half-assedly implemented.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| You can extrapolate this argument to almost anything
| about a vehicle in North America. I've been working on
| them for decades. The way manufacturers make money is by
| half-assing things. Where a chain should be used, a belt
| is used. Where a 10 cent switch should be used, a
| touchscreen replaces it. Where a shifter should be, some
| knob is used to replace which actually kills a guy
| because he didn't realize his SUV was in gear.
|
| I had to replace part of the engine on my personal truck
| recently because it was made of plastic and obviously
| failed. The replacement parts were metal because all I
| did was order the previous generations part number which
| works perfectly fine but costs more.
|
| What you call "half assed" is what everyone in the
| industry calls a profit margin.
| riskable wrote:
| You are _so_ wrong it 's unreal!
|
| Quality switches suitable for use in a vehicle don't cost
| $0.10, they cost $0.01!
|
| -at the volumes they'd be purchased for auto
| manufacturing.
| HPsquared wrote:
| You don't need just the switch. It needs a housing, a
| cap, lighting, wiring, and connectors at the other end of
| the wire too. And all this needs to be designed in a
| "waterfall" style, with long lead times. Overall, a
| virtual button is going to be cheaper to engineer and
| manufacture than a hardware button. It's not big,
| overall, but these small savings accumulate over the
| whole vehicle.
| cute_boi wrote:
| I think instead of making excuses we should harden the
| security and regulation should enforce such things. There
| is always a hole in security, but we gotta choose the best
| option we have.
| ytx wrote:
| > Security measures deter criminals, they can never stop
| them.
|
| Right, but in practice deterrence and incentives can be
| much more effective (from a cost and practical standpoint).
| I imagine the government would have a much harder time
| stopping people from randomly chaining vehicles than
| tracking stolen ones. There just doesn't happen to much
| incentive for the former.
| babypuncher wrote:
| So, because any lock I put on my front door can
| theoretically be broken, I shouldn't bother putting on a
| good one?
| eli wrote:
| This is a silly argument that could be deployed against
| ever trying to regulate anything. Of course the government
| can't mandate _perfect_ security. There 's no such thing as
| perfect security.
|
| The goal is cars that are harder to steal and electronic
| security measures that follow something resembling best
| practices.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yet they're probably more secure than just a regular car
| that's on the older side.
| ngetchell wrote:
| What do you mean they are not obligated?
| hackernewds wrote:
| The govt actively chooses which individuals violating the law
| to prosecute and not especially in progressive cities like
| San Francisco and Seattle, based on a set of their own
| principles vs the constitution written by their elected
| representatives.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| At least in the US the role and responsibilities of the
| police is to protect the government. They may protect the
| citizens, but they can never be held liable for a failure to
| protect the citizens.
|
| You'll have to ask a Canadian about the specifics of the
| various provinces.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > 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.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| 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 crime is rare and
| criminals will pick the easiest targets. If crime ceases to
| be rare, it falls apart very quickly.
|
| [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-
| rule-po...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 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.
| eli wrote:
| Discretion about whether or not to protect a citizen?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Are there any examples where that _is_ the case?
| eli wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-
| rule-po...
| HPsquared wrote:
| I mean places where the police do have such an
| obligation.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Cars are insecure on purpose because people accidentally
| lock their keys inside all the time
|
| Can't remember the last time I've had a car that would let
| me lock the keys inside. Even the low tech ones won't let
| me lock the doors from inside the car unless the doors are
| closed. The slightly more advanced ones (which is most,
| these days) honk the horn when the keys are left inside the
| car, and unlock the doors.
| notatoad wrote:
| >This article is about Canada
|
| but really it applies to the US as well, since the US has a
| similar rate of car theft (~280 thefts per 100k people, vs
| ~220 in canada, if you trust statista) and is also working to
| ban the flipper zero.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Canada has much more non-recovered car theft where
| (especially luxury) cars are stolen and shipped off.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| axus wrote:
| A tow truck costs more than a tablet. The guys and the
| tablets performing the theft are disposable, tow truck is
| not.
|
| Rapid scanning of export shipping containers with AI
| processing to detect the contents might help curb the
| demand for the stolen cars.
| bluGill wrote:
| True, but you can find them used once in a while for
| cheap enough. It only takes a few stolen cars to pay off
| the tow truck (you want to be legal here as this is easy
| to track), and then each one is pure profit.
| mywittyname wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| No idea where you are at but I wouldn't think twice about
| someone towing a car. If someone was hotwiring a neighbor's
| vehicle I think I'd definitely at least start videoing them
| as a deterrent.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| If thieves started towing cars, presumably people would be
| more observant, esp where it isn't obvious why a car is
| being towed.
|
| If it was in an urban environment, there might be cameras
| around anyway that could capture the reg plate.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I'm always dumbfounded by this obsession with video &
| license plates. What are you going to do with that
| information?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| The US has the most prisoners per capita, but go on.
|
| "They aren't doing enough about car hackers! Car hackers are
| just running free and the gubmint won't stop them!"
|
| Ridiculous.
| philwelch wrote:
| That's actually not true anymore. El Salvador has the most
| prisoners per capita now.
|
| They also have a lower murder rate than the US. The lowest
| murder rate in the entire Western Hemisphere, actually.
| Previously they had the highest murder rate in the world.
|
| Mass incarceration works. It doesn't work in the US because
| we didn't do enough of it.
| rjmunro wrote:
| Download the CSVs of
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-unodc and
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prison-population-rate
|
| Plot them on a graph. There is basically no correlation.
| philwelch wrote:
| Different countries have different base rates of
| criminality. Japan, for instance, has very few criminals
| but incarcerates almost all of them. The US has more
| criminals so the US incarcerates more people, but it
| probably doesn't incarcerate the same proportion of
| criminals that Japan does.
| Draiken wrote:
| Works for who? The corporations profiting from slave prison
| labor?
|
| If we at least arrested the corrupt white collar criminals
| that never get punished, then we could look at this as
| something more than an uninformed extreme measure.
|
| Imagine if wage theft wasn't merely a fine? Imagine if
| corruption was actually prosecuted? Then we can talk! /s
| philwelch wrote:
| It works for the people of El Salvador who are no longer
| being murdered by the gangsters who are all now in
| prison.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Which is completely irrelevant to the US which is largely
| not a land under gang control.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Your argument is that because in your opinion we don't
| arrest enough white color criminals that we shouldn't
| bother with violent criminals? I don't understand how
| these are related? This isn't a trade or a negotiation.
|
| Locking up violent criminals and their affiliates for
| extended periods of time works. We give way too many
| chances to people today.
| threetonesun wrote:
| Sure pros will always steal cars that way, but you never want
| to end up with a vehicle that any bored person can steal for
| the lulz.
|
| Late 90s - Early 2000 Honda/Acura owners went through this.
| Even though they were very good cars they became undesirable
| because you could hardly park them anywhere without coming back
| to missing parts.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Because the SK versions of KIA/Hyundais have anti-theft
| measures. It's only USDM cars where they cut corners to
| remove the immobilizers.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| 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.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| This is like saying "bank transactions have been getting MITMed
| and peoples money has been stolen. All crypto protocols are
| insecure I can hook a supercomputer up to any transaction and
| decrypt it given enough time
|
| The solution is to identify, arrest, and prosecute criminals"
|
| Do you see why this is not a coherent idea? Aside from the fact
| that locking people in cages is disgusting and wrong and
| something no reasonable adult should do to another person the
| entire premise of this argument is nonsensical and a little
| weird when you actually think about it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > This has to be one of the dumbest things I've read in a
| while.
|
| Ha ha, what are your erudite bookmarks? I read dumber things
| just over coffee this morning.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > That'd actually attract less attention that outright
| hotwiring a vehicle.
|
| Disagree. Depending on the approach taken, the theft can look
| like a legitimate owner getting into a car. Even the break the
| window and reprogram a key via ODBII port technique takes about
| a minute to complete. Plenty of people have posted videos of
| their cars being stolen (I'm part of several Camaro
| communities, which are big theft targets) via this technique
| and it's crazy how fast the thieves are.
|
| Tow trucks attract a shitload of attention. My neighbor had her
| car towed yesterday and two neighbors came out to check on it.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yeah, I broke into my own car recently using a coat hanger,
| nobody cared.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| In college a friend of a friend locked themselves out of a
| car. A nearby police officer loaned him some tools to break
| the window of the car so he could get home that night.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I've seen cars towed in less than 30 seconds from parallel
| parking spots.
|
| Even if it took longer, it still looks more legitimate to
| bystanders than a broken window.
| IshKebab wrote:
| https://youtube.com/shorts/WLCxzvKJniQ?si=RVf9vuAmsA2NiGFZ
| janalsncm wrote:
| We can ban theft, ban/regulate theft facilitation devices, and
| also mandate that cars have some minimum level of security.
|
| > I can hook a tow truck to almost any vehicle
|
| If there was a spree of that happening, you can bet your next
| paycheck there would be laws about it. Laws aren't about a
| philosophical distinction between flipper zeros and tow trucks,
| they're practical tools for law enforcement.
| what-the-grump wrote:
| Right, so let me get a tow truck, register it to a location,
| get caught going down the road with it on cameras... etc.
|
| Or buy a 200-dollar device and walk up to a car in a hoody and
| steal it?
| hot_gril wrote:
| Was gonna say something like this. In software security land,
| security measures are cleaner and hacking tools are impossible
| to regulate, so it's really on the creators to make things
| secure up to a point. The real world is different. Even the
| software security philosophy kinda stops at DDoS.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >The solution is to identify, arrest, and prosecute criminals.
| Which the government is not obligated to do in the US.
|
| The solution is to pass laws that allow citizens to defend
| property with the same force that they can defend their own and
| others bodies from injury.
|
| It should be pretty clear that humans are pretty good
| optimizers. Its never about if the activity is legal or not,
| its about what is the reward is, vs what the actual risk is
| (i.e, getting arrested is not really a risk when your source of
| income doesn't depend on your criminal history)
|
| The only way to stop humans from doing said behavior is
| increase the risk of doing it. If laws were passed that allowed
| citizens to freely own guns, and use those guns to defend
| themselves and property, you would see massive decrease in
| property crime.
|
| And yes, you do get an increase in shootings. Statistically
| though, the shootings happen more in alteractions where tempers
| flare rather than home invasions or robbery situations.
| Suicides still preside overwhelmingly as the leading cause of
| gun deaths.
|
| Overall, from a personal harm perspective (amount of harm *
| risk), its much safer if you have loose gun/self defense laws.
| Unless of course you are so well off that you can just replace
| stole stuff indefinitely, but again, the humans taking your
| stuff will optimize for that over time as well.
| KTibow wrote:
| In other terms:
|
| There's 3 ways to assign blame, to the maker of the tool, to
| the user of the tool, and to the target of the tool.
|
| I think we can all agree that if the tool isn't designed to
| cause trouble we shouldn't blame the maker. I think blaming the
| target really depends on the situation - for example, when HP
| themselves decided to make ink cartridges use a chip and didn't
| sufficiently isolate the chip causing a security vulnerability,
| that's on HP. If the manufacturer could easily prevent or patch
| the vulnerability, that's on them. Tow trucks are something the
| manufacturer can't prevent.
|
| But regardless, if you use it for malice I agree that you're
| the one who should be liable.
| kludgemaker wrote:
| Insecure people should be banned, not security tools like
| firearms.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| I know this is tongue in cheek, but the proper phrase should be
| "insecure people should be held responsible for their insecure
| decisions, not security tools like Flipper or firearms."
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Security flaws are not born equal. I think there is supposed to
| be a clear distinction between flaws inherent in technology --
| since you only know what you know nobody should be expected to
| develop impenetrable digital fortresses since that doesn't exist
| and would actually be harmful for the consumer -- and those flaws
| born out of neglect. The latter should be specified and treated
| accordingly, because it isn't a valid excuse that technology
| can't be 100% secure that the industry should accept poor
| standards.
|
| Also, Flipper Zero can be made DIY, so I don't know if I get it,
| but the law will be DOA, and actually work against the
| democatization and awareness of such flaws by the public.
| hcfman wrote:
| Europe expects you to. Otherwise you will be fined 15,000,000
| euros. Thank you cyber resilience act.
| whiterknight wrote:
| Guns can be made DIY, but laws still mitigate.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| There is a big difference in putting together deadly
| artifacts and electronic devices you can fabricate using off-
| the-shelf chips and open protocols. Not saying you can't
| discuss regulating them, but to me they are in a different
| set of categories. Weapons are by default dangerous, their
| sole purpose being to cause physical harm, while a flipper
| zero can be used for instructional purposes and research.
|
| As much as I hate the concept, it would be ridiculous for me
| to propose regulating Alexa because a kid can cause financial
| harm to the parents using it, but a weapon can't be in any
| imaginable circumstance reachable by anyone untrained.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| > but a weapon can't be in any imaginable circumstance
| reachable by anyone untrained.
|
| I agree with your main point that the FZ is easily
| reproduced. I think you miss the mark with this one.
| Firearms are easily made at home with simple tools and off-
| the-shelf materials. For example, the United States has a
| rich tradition of home-made firearms. To provide a concrete
| example, a shotgun can be made with a length of steel
| plumbing pipe, electrical tape, a nail, and a cap. Yes,
| it's that simple.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Well that is not my main point in the comment you
| responded to
| engineer_22 wrote:
| If I understand now, your argument is that flipper zero
| is not a social danger, while firearms are, am I correct?
| gchamonlive wrote:
| If by social danger you mean I would be really impressed
| if you managed to throw a flipper zero into someone and
| kill him, then yes that is the gist. It's a matter of
| degree.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| ok - well I agree with you. You had a good comment, and I
| appreciate it :)
| gchamonlive wrote:
| cheers! I also liked to be put to test in whatever
| argument I find myself in. Hope it was as interesting for
| you as it was for me.
| wang_li wrote:
| >while a flipper zero can be used for instructional
| purposes and research.
|
| Only in the same way a weapon can be used for instructional
| purposes and research. Someone buying an off the shelf
| product and using it in the way it was intended isn't doing
| research except in the loosest sense of the word. E.g.
| "Does the radio transmission open this garage door? Does it
| open this garage door? Does it open this garage door?" v
| "Does this rock swung hard cave in this skull? Does it cave
| in this skull? Does it cave in this skull?"
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Genuinely curious, outside of sports, can you name other
| functions for guns that don't involve killing things?
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Driving nails, launching flares, deterring physical
| violence
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Security flaws are not born equal.
|
| Absolutely. And let's bring risk into this.
|
| Security risks are not born equal.
|
| Serious security thinkers evaluate according to factors of
| likelihood, impact, mitigation cost etc.
|
| A car is a dangerous weapon, especially in the hands of a group
| of giddy kids, maybe drunk or way too high to drive. The
| likelihood of someone getting seriously injured or killed by
| joyriding is high. It's really high. And there's no mitigation
| to a dead child. The penalty? A very firm "please don't do that
| again!"
|
| But then a kid like Aaron Swartz downloads some files and gets
| nine felony counts totalling 50 years in jail and a $1 million
| fine.
|
| A justice system with these values has no concept of risk and
| proportionality and is beneath contempt.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > especially in the hands of a group of giddy kids
|
| Also the scenario where it's being used as a disposable
| battering-ram to smash into a store. (As you might expect,
| those are the stolen cars with lesser potential resale
| value.)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Your point are generally good.
|
| I should say I drive a twenty year old car with an immobilizer
| chip and basic logic sounding the alarm when someone breaks a
| window to open a door. As far as I can tell, that makes it very
| secure. So it seems like the onus in the car manufacturers to
| create a vehicle at least as secure as this simple system.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > Also, Flipper Zero can be made DIY
|
| What's the actual wording, is it a ban on the FZ
| _specifically_? Could anyone sell a "Zipper Flero" clone?
| Forge36 wrote:
| Someone once stole my grandfather's car with a screwdriver. The
| ignition switch was broken off (probably with a hammer), and the
| starter could be actuated with the screwdriver. I don't remember
| how long he drove it that way.
|
| Banning the tech is a bandaid to deeper problems. It's also great
| advertising that these tools are effective.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| Sooo they have been stealing Infiniti's from my area recently
| with relative ease allegedly by using a Bluetooth obd2 reader
| connected to an android tablet running a pirated copy of some
| Nissan service tech software.
|
| Nobody from any of the Infiniti groups is 100% certain how they
| are doing it, but the best theory out there is above.
|
| Just the other night, a crew of dudes stole 3 Q50's from my
| neighborhood with relative ease.
|
| Here is the ring cam video my neighbor posted:
|
| https://video.nest.com/clip/8ef4d060588d4c7289f87cccb00cb55a...
| bpoyner wrote:
| The answer is simple, we need to ban android tablets. /s
| hoofhearted wrote:
| Fix the cars.
|
| A brand new $60,000 car shouldn't be so simple to swipe.
|
| They probably spent less time stealing my neighbors car than
| he did waiting on the credit check to buy the car lol... it's
| crazy these days with cars.
| newsclues wrote:
| 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.
| caskstrength wrote:
| > 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" I
| meant OP's neighborhood car thieves, not you :)
| eertami wrote:
| 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).
| caskstrength wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You have any reference regarding how prevalent that is?
| Everyone I know switched to biometrics a decade ago.
| newsclues wrote:
| This is done by organized crime with engineers on staff.
| Sure it's drug addicts stealing cars but the people
| shipping them are smart and have access to capital.
| caskstrength wrote:
| I agree, but that brings us back to my original question:
| why can't same smart organized crime people unlock my
| smartphone then? Because Apple/Google give a damn about
| security and car manufacturers do not.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Also: When your phone or computer is hacked, most people
| think "Wow, the device is flawed." But when your car gets
| stolen, most people think "Wow, we should stop those
| criminals." Apple/Google are incentivized to give a damn
| about security because incidents reflects poorly on their
| products. We need to start making thefts _via security
| exploits_ reflect poorly on the car manufacturers and
| their products.
| newsclues wrote:
| Economic incentives.
|
| People will buy a $150,000 SUV for 50k and they can still
| make money. Phones have less incentive and Apple is going
| to be better at bricking the phones than carmakers will.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Apple and Google don't sell insecure cheap phones, but
| lots of other manufacturers do.
|
| I suppose organized crime doesn't systematically take
| advantage of that because cheap phones are cheap, and the
| people who own them are poor. You don't get that much
| benefit from pwning them.
|
| Alternatively, maybe organized crime does take advantage
| of them but we haven't heard about it. They could have a
| giant botnet of them for all we know.
| acdha wrote:
| > What do we know about computer security and physical
| access? If I can touch the machine, I can hack and own
| it.
|
| It's not the 2000s any more. Even national security
| agencies have trouble with phone decryption, and that
| suggests a path forward for cars using a tamper-resistant
| secure element since car thieves won't spend more money
| attacking something than they can resell it for. Cars
| need service regularly you can have a way to replace a
| damaged SE which is more restricted so a legitimate owner
| can regain control of their stolen property - if you
| required, say, a government photo ID check for the owner
| on the title to reset the encryption keys, car thieves
| are highly unlikely to spend time getting high-quality
| fake ID since the odds of getting caught would go up
| dramatically, and you could deter shady auto shops by
| requiring them to submit proof of their ID verification
| for that service.
| newsclues wrote:
| They get exported overseas and any technology lock or
| security device gets ripped out and replaced.
|
| This isn't about extracting encrypted data, but bypassing
| systems to start a car.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, because the current design is lax. Now think about
| what happens if the engine computer won't start with a
| bad signature or the entertainment system won't work. How
| would that affect the overseas market?
| newsclues wrote:
| The part that requires a signature will be taken out and
| replaced. Infotainment systems will get gutted and
| replaced with aftermarket ones.
| acdha wrote:
| Again, all of those lower the value to the thieves. If
| they need to create a custom engine controller, they're
| going to need to pay a lot more than the $0 they
| currently spend. If they need to replace the
| entertainment system, the cost of doing so will cut into
| their margin.
|
| Don't make the mistake of thinking that a system needs to
| be perfect to be worthwhile.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think you're in a desktop computer "whole product is
| one computer" moddel. A car is a set of computers, almost
| nothing in a car is central to itself.
|
| There's probably a body controller ECU that ties into
| engine ECU and driver's key systems. So theives would
| just generate and flash a new key/cert, that'll be
| certainly possible.
|
| Infotainment? That's almost literally an aftermarket
| parts. American reviewers tend to see it as integral part
| of a car or even a central computer, surely it's
| important in terms of product experience but
| architecturally it's more like a printer over Ethernet
| than a laptop integrated display.
| eertami wrote:
| > No level of technology will stop this.
|
| Except for you know, the technology of a physical car
| keys and an immobilizer. There's a reason it's the
| keyless entry start/stop button cars that are being
| targeted by thieves, it's simply so much easier.
|
| The frustrating thing is that new cars are being produced
| that _only_ offer keyless entry, and so eventually the
| choice is taken away or you have to drive a very old car.
| Levitz wrote:
| The level of technology that stops this is cars not being
| computers.
|
| Every piece of tech has tradeoffs, and for cars this one
| is just not worth it.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| What are you proposing? That we go back to being able to
| turn the ignition switch with a screwdriver?
| rjmunro wrote:
| > No level of technology will stop this.
|
| Why does no one steal Teslas?
| newsclues wrote:
| Think about where these cars end up, it's not near a
| service centre.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| > What do we know about computer security and physical
| access? If I can touch the machine, I can hack and own
| it.
|
| You are damn good then :)
|
| One can protect against such that's by using well placed
| cryptography.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > No level of technology will stop this.
|
| Tell that to the FDA.
|
| I work in medical devices. It's no longer sufficient to
| throw up your hands and assume "well, they have their
| hands on the device, we can't stop them from doing
| anything." The new cybersecurity guidance anticipates an
| attacker having physical access to your Device and you
| are expected to understand and mitigate any impact that
| can have.
|
| Cars shouldn't be any different.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Or make grand theft auto an offense that is actually
| prosecuted. Make hard penalties for violating another
| citizens by stealing their property. Start with 5 year
| minimums off the bat and every offense afterwards adds
| another 5 years. You'll see car theft plummet.
| blooalien wrote:
| "Kill all humans!" ~ Bender B. Rodriguez
|
| Headline the next day: "Crime rate on Earth now at an all-
| time low of _zero_ percent! "
| phoe-krk wrote:
| How do you calculate this value of zero percent? Divide all
| the crime cases of the previous day by the number of
| humans? And who wrote the headline?
| hansvm wrote:
| > How do you calculate this value of zero percent?
|
| This gets messy for obvious topological/continuity
| reasons, but a shocking number of applications are both
| correct and simple to reason about if you choose to
| define 0/0 == 0 (kind of like how if you choose to
| universally define sum(empty_set) == 0 and
| product(empty_set) == 1 then tons of higher-level
| formulae just work and don't have to special-case a base
| case).
|
| In context, there's no good reason to pick that
| definition of 0/0 per se (other than my prior that 0/0 ==
| 0 probably simplifies some downstream math), but it's
| kind of nice to see that if crime is at 0% then there is
| also zero crime.
|
| > And who wrote the headline?
|
| Now we're asking the real questions ;)
| sokoloff wrote:
| "Kill all humans except for one" would be a way to
| resolve this (at least for 1-80 years).
| blooalien wrote:
| > "And who wrote the headline?"
|
| Probably a "NewsBot" of some sort?
| aosmith wrote:
| Given what's going on in Canada maybe they should just ban
| OBD tools all together with the flipper. /s
| markhahn wrote:
| Obviously, we want owners to have full access to their car's
| CANBUS.
|
| So the question is: how should the OBD-2 plug (or wiring) be
| protected?
| hoofhearted wrote:
| The people in the Infiniti groups were recommending this obd2
| lock haha
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Tune-Saver-OBDII-
| OBD2-Lock/dp/B0BRF5D...
| irobeth wrote:
| seems like a sophisticated theft ring would have access to
| the keys for the most common guards like this, reminds me
| of the TSA key debacle[1]
|
| [1]: https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys
| macNchz wrote:
| The TSA locks have widely circulated master keys because
| that's a basic requirement of the system-every airport
| has to have some to be able to open bags. I don't know
| anything about these OBD port locks, but I don't see any
| reason they'd have a master key, other than laziness on
| the part of the manufacturer.
|
| Additionally, I'd imagine that such a tiny fraction of a
| percentage of cars have these kinds of locks that it'd
| barely be worth it for thieves to figure out how to
| bypass them, at least until there's more widespread
| adoption.
| kube-system wrote:
| > I don't know anything about these OBD port locks, but I
| don't see any reason they'd have a master key
|
| Look at it in the picture and the review pictures.
| They're all 'keyed' alike. It's just a single offset pin.
| Also one review says it just holds on with friction and
| can be pulled off with force.
| raizer88 wrote:
| All CANBUS packages that are useful to drive a car should be
| encrypted using a public/private key that is in the owner
| key. Decryption chips are cheap and fast.
| acdha wrote:
| Maintenance is a big key management problem though: if only
| the owner has it, there will be problems when people
| inevitably lose it. If there are shared keys for service
| departments or databases, thieves will get access to them.
|
| Things like time-limited on-demand keys can limit those
| problems but now you can't get your car serviced when
| Toyota's servers go down and they need to commit to not
| breaking API compatibility for multiple decades.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| The same problem exist for car keys.
|
| The answer is, when a person "inevitably lose[s] it",
| they need to pay to get their electronics refit.
| kube-system wrote:
| The result of that may be that losing a key is
| financially devastating enough that it totals many
| vehicles. And/or if the odometer and other local storage
| is affected, that may cause permanent title issues for
| the car.
|
| The number of people who lose their keys vastly dwarfs
| the number of people who are having their car stolen with
| a flipper zero.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Perhaps, or perhaps not.
|
| It has to be hard enough it can't be done in the street
| (without getting attention), but maybe it could be easy
| enough to do in a garage.
|
| But even if it is expensive, the result would be that
| either people with take more care, or they'll lose their
| car.
|
| Maybe it's not a bad thing that people who can't manage a
| key are less likely to be on the roads - or that its more
| likely they lose access to their car then it ends up in
| the hands of criminals. A car can be a dangerous thing,
| even an inexpensive one.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, but this wouldn't prevent dangerous street criminals
| from stealing cars. Many of them steal the keys with the
| car. They go down to the gas station, and wait for an old
| lady with a nice car to pull up to the pump, and when she
| hops out they hop in.
|
| The criminals doing more skilled attacks typically aren't
| joyriding or using it to commit other crimes, they
| typically doing it for financial gain: they want the car,
| its contents, or its parts.
|
| Ultimately the overlap between the violent street
| criminals and those skilled at attacking digital security
| systems is not much.
|
| > But even if it is expensive, the result would be that
| either people with take more care, or they'll lose their
| car.
|
| The entire reason keys were explicitly designed with the
| functionality to program new ones is because that's not
| considered by most to be an acceptable solution.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| That kind of expands the scope of this conversations to
| mugging/carjacking, which also comes with a higher
| penalty, and probably higher priority to the police.
|
| And, it involves interacting with someone, who presumably
| can call the police afterwards, and activate any lojack /
| immobilisation device before it can be removed.
| Presumably the appeal of stealing a parked car it may be
| a while before it has been discovered and reported
| stolen.
|
| Also, doing such a thing in a gas-station where there are
| likely cameras and even other people / attendants make it
| seem pretty risky to me. Are these dudes just hanging
| around the pumps in masks? What country is this?
|
| > not considered by most to be an acceptable solution
|
| Things change, but also, it's as much up to the
| government and/or insurance corps what's acceptable.
| kube-system wrote:
| The only reasonable way to evaluate risk is as a whole.
| Real world attackers pick whichever realm is easiest to
| exploit, they aren't going to waste their time doing
| something difficult when there are easier ways to
| accomplish their goal.
|
| > who presumably can call the police afterwards, and
| activate any lojack / immobilisation device before it can
| be removed.
|
| Yes, people who carjack usually aren't looking for a nice
| daily driver to hang on to for the next 3 years. Usually
| they want to joyride, or use the car for some other
| crime, in the immediate term.
|
| > Also, doing such a thing in a gas-station where there
| are likely cameras and even other people / attendants
| make it seem pretty risky to me. Are these dudes just
| hanging around the pumps in masks?
|
| Stealing a car, and being in possession of a stolen car,
| is pretty risky already. I think someone who does this
| type of crime is probably not very risk averse. Wearing
| masks is a pretty common way to thwart cameras when
| committing a crime in many places, I don't think this
| potential security issue is specific to certain
| countries. I think what you might be hinting at is that
| fewer people _want_ to do carjackings in different
| places, but the same applies to canbus exploits. Nor do I
| think anyone really needs to "hang out" to find a car at
| a gas station. Many have cars filling up at them
| regularly throughout business hours.
|
| > Presumably the appeal of stealing a parked car it may
| be a while before it has been discovered and reported
| stolen.
|
| Yes, and while there are some instances of this happening
| electronically, I don't think closing those avenues will
| change anything, because towing cars is neither difficult
| nor suspicious in many places. Again, security is only as
| good as the weakest link. Nearly all criminals cut locks,
| even ones are very easily picked.
| TylerE wrote:
| A traditional car key can be trivially duplicated at any
| hardware store. That's the difference. You can make as
| many spares as you want for a couple bucks a pop. No
| dependencies. No network.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Why can't electronic keys be duplicated / backed-up?
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| GP said the key is in the car key. You already give the
| car key to a mechanic, I don't see how this would make
| maintenance any harder.
| acdha wrote:
| Think about what happens when people lose their keys,
| which will reliably happen.
| Zak wrote:
| In the old days, most or all car companies had the
| ability to look up the bitting code to cut a replacement
| key (the mechanical kind) from the car's VIN. There's no
| reason they can't do the same with an encryption key.
|
| Of course they'd need to do a good job securing that
| database since inappropriate access to it would make
| stealing cars very easy.
| Reubachi wrote:
| There is a very good reason that isn't possible/analagous
| to traditional rekeying.
|
| Mechanical keys are not secure. They can be reproduced
| with basic skills. That's why there used to be a giant
| key cutting industry where much of the business was car
| keys (Thanks, GM.)
|
| The whole idea of CA PKI and all modern TPM architecture
| on devices is that they CAN'T be reproduced or replaced
| in context without massive effort that would make the
| intended use moot; IE replacing the TPM and associated on
| both the key and car. This would require some
| bureaucratic pointless process to prove your identity,
| and it would be very expensive and frustrating, and
| completely at the manufacturers will.
|
| Further, if the car CPU could allow this, it would be
| >.0001 second before theives use the same exact tools
| that the manufacturers use. This is basically what's
| happening now with current NFC/Radio Keyfobs. Basic
| access to existing cpu through canbus makes NFC/Radio
| moot.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > If I left a million dollars out on my front porch, and
| someone stole it, that would not be my fault in any sort
| of way
|
| Pretty much all of human history to this point says that
| this is a practical impossibility. If there is such a
| database/secret, it will get out.
| K0balt wrote:
| Most modern keys already have cryptographic rfid
| transponders which must be in place to turn off the
| Immobilizer system.
|
| Unfortunately, Immo can be trivially
| disabled/bypassed/reprogrammed on many cars using the
| canbus or odb2 interface.
|
| Also trivially editable in many ICUs is the mileage,
| airbag (crash) history, etc.
|
| The main vector is that this data typically exists
| alongside performance parameters and user data like
| registered keys and fobs, so is accessible either by
| catching the ecu in bootup/program mode, by buffer
| overrun attacks, or often just by asking nicely.
|
| This is basically doable by anyone who can to chip tuning
| or ECU remaps. It's technical, but not that technical.
| Many ECUs require JTAG access inside the ECU housing or
| even desoldering the serial flash chip, but many do not.
|
| I just bought a whole setup for this from AliExpress for
| about 100 dollars and it's worked well for me so far,
| just a specialised JTAG adapter with some cables really.
|
| Pretty sure if you wrote drivers for chip tuning software
| to use a buspirate it would work just as well if not
| better.
| twodave wrote:
| The manufacturer should maintain a root cert that can be
| used. If that root cert is compromised then they should
| have a way of rotating keys if the vehicle and physical
| keys are present. Breaches then constitute what amounts
| to a software recall, putting the onus on the
| manufacturer to report them or be held liable for thefts.
| The recall notice puts the liability on the driver to
| have their vehicle updated (for free) in a timely
| fashion.
| kube-system wrote:
| To do that, we'd probably need to accept one of these as
| a consequence:
|
| 1. all cars must be internet connected so they can pull
| CRLs
|
| 2. dealers and locksmiths are no longer able to replace
| keys, you will have to ship the car back to the
| manufacturer if you lose your keys.
|
| Because there's no secure way to hand out the root cert
| to the thousands of organizations authorized to replace
| keys today.
| acdha wrote:
| The situation doesn't need to be as strict as #2: you
| could have a way for a registered service shop to get a
| per-device rekey by shifting some liability to them.
| Making it per device prevents bulk usage and an active
| communication with the manufacturer would mean the cops
| could ask the owners of a shady auto shop some questions
| when 80% of the stolen cars in the area are being rekeyed
| at a place the owners have never been to. I lost a car
| key once and the locksmith who showed up checked my
| drivers license against the title database because he
| could have been penalized for unlocking a vehicle without
| doing so - we could make the same model work
| electronically because while car thieves are anonymous,
| legitimate repair shops have a business presence and
| reputation to preserve. Even someone amoral isn't going
| to look the other way for something which will cost them
| their primary revenue stream.
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't think that the dealer equipment being used to
| steal cars today is coming from dealers where management
| is knowingly engaging in car theft. It is other people
| who are misusing those tools. There are many hundreds of
| thousands of people who work at dealerships, and many do
| not care about their employers reputation. Also, many
| dealerships are broken into.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, which is why I suggested a combination of measures
| to change that. An active per-device transaction would
| make it clear when a dealer's access is being misused,
| and if it affects their business viability it would turn
| out that they could do a better job of controlling
| access. Hundreds of thousands of people work at banks,
| too, and many of them do not care about their employers
| but thefts from customer accounts are rare because the
| companies are incentivized to set appropriate safeguards.
| There's no reason why car repairs couldn't be the same
| other than that it costs more than what they've been
| doing, and there aren't strong enough incentives for them
| to take on those costs.
| kube-system wrote:
| What would that look like in reality? Expecting
| dealerships to have the same physical security,
| procedures, and security vetting of a bank? There's
| already a shortage of workers in these roles, now we want
| the guys busting their knuckles on vehicle repairs to
| have a good credit score and good background check and
| perform elaborate opening and closing procedures with a
| buddy system? Storing tools in a vault?
|
| I really don't see how any of this is merited or
| reasonable, especially when the vast majority of the cars
| being stolen in my neighborhood are either stolen with
| the keys or with a tow truck.
| acdha wrote:
| Simply requiring the dealers to take seriously ownership
| validation and track which workers used the reset system
| (no shared logins, etc.) would do most of it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| My Ducati bike had immobilizers that would prevent the
| bike being started without the key or the per-bike code
| card. When it was stolen, the thieves tried all manner of
| things to start it, including drilling through the
| ignition keyhole. I managed to get it all fixed and the
| bike still ran. Without the immobilizer, someone else
| would be riding my bike.
|
| That's no different from this proposal. You just give
| them the keys, or the key card (or red key) if you've
| lost the keys.
| skunkworker wrote:
| From what I've been seeing with Toyota and their ECU
| Security Key, it hasn't been cracked yet but it's close to
| being cracked and extracted from a running car and the
| private key extracted (so things that look at CAN bus
| messages can work again, like comma.ai)
| mywittyname wrote:
| Some of the tools used to steal cars are the legitimate
| tools used to repair cars. Key programmers aren't cheap,
| but at under $5k for decent ones, they aren't crazy
| expensive either. It pays for itself in one job.
|
| You could make these tools more difficult to obtain, but
| that won't stop the crime.
|
| Immobilizers and requiring a PIN to start the car are
| cheap, effective ways of preventing car theft without
| negatively impacting our ability to repair vehicles. It
| would behoove government agencies to include a list of
| anti-theft techniques on the window sticker and it would
| behoove insurance companies to be very upfront with the
| anti-theft features they think vehicles need.
| K0balt wrote:
| CANbus protocol makes this hard. Payloads are limited to 64
| bits, to start with. But the payload for each message could
| be encrypted, even though secure key exchange would be
| difficult.
|
| Even so, it would be possible, I think.
| 0x457 wrote:
| It's so hard that (almost) every European manufacturer
| figured it out.
|
| There is also FlexRay. There is nothing interesting you
| can do with CANbus on new mercs. Even unencrypted CANbus
| messages go through gateways that (could) prevent
| headlights from reporting key presence.
|
| There is a reason that some cars don't have reasonable
| attack vectors (excluding parachuting the driver out of
| the car) and some can be started with a screwdriver (or
| slight more involved way with CANbus). It's not
| complexity, it's cost.
| ngneer wrote:
| Allow me to offer a different opinion. There is little
| sense in applying logical security when physical security
| is lacking. CANBUS should not be accessible by taking apart
| headlights. Communication buses must be protected from
| physical access, i.e., trip the alarm system or disable the
| car upon unauthorized access. There can be no logical
| security without physical security.
| 0x457 wrote:
| It would be very hard to make CANBUS inaccessible from
| headlights, since that what controls it. However, the
| headlight shouldn't be able to tell the rest of the
| system that the key is in the car.
| Reubachi wrote:
| I work in CA/PKI, particularly IOT device
| registration/security via TPM keys.
|
| I cannot imagine a scenario after years working with our
| own infra and clients where a car manufacturer would
| restrict access to the vehicle with a private key
| decryption on the FOB tpm, (that can't be exported or
| copied.)
|
| Lost/broke fob? 4000 pound paperweight, to no ones benefit.
| Insurance nightmare that would also be violating right to
| repair in many states (which is a different issue) .
|
| There SHOULD be a standard like every person has some
| device or process that is also a CA, who can then generate
| and dictate what keypairs can access a device, car etc. But
| we are very very very far away form that.
| adolph wrote:
| As I understand it, CANBUS is a message network among
| relatively low-power devices. There are two ways of doing
| this: + Some credential exchange between
| devices to establish a web of trust + Devices are
| locked similar to Apple parts
| amluto wrote:
| Perhaps the OBD port should only work when the car is validly
| unlocked and the engine immobilizer accepts a key? Maybe it
| could stay unlocked thereafter while a device is connected?
|
| Android (adb) and iOS (iTunes backup) have solved this issue
| years ago.
| sokoloff wrote:
| When I installed a remote starter on my old Jeep, I had to
| also install a CAN interface that would command a door
| unlock followed by a door lock command.
|
| That was enough to tell the ECM that it was okay to start
| the car by simulating the key switch closure for "run" and
| a temporary closure for "start". Prior to adding the CAN
| interface, jumping "start" would set off the alarm.
| rolph wrote:
| place the port in the lockable cabin of the vehicle instead
| of behind a headlight.
| rasz wrote:
| Start by not allowing thieves connect thru wheel well
| https://kentindell.github.io/2023/04/03/can-injection/
| mysterydip wrote:
| Instead of technical/computational solutions, maybe there's a
| low tech cage/shell that can be put around it so anyone can't
| just plug in?
| sokoloff wrote:
| The CAN+ and CAN- wires run around the car in, well, a bus
| and tapping into them anywhere is enough to inject CAN
| messages onto the bus.
|
| It makes it less plug-n-play than the OBD2 connector, but
| thieves will still be able to do it.
| punnerud wrote:
| Seems like the CANBUS is deactivated when the car is turned
| off on Volkswagen. Guess that is one way to fix it?
| sokoloff wrote:
| On some cars, hitting the door lock/unlock is enough to
| wake the CANBus.
| numpad0 wrote:
| You can't unlock the car with the bus dead. CAN is not like
| switched Ethernet, it's a bus topology network like LAN
| over coax cables. They can be split or bridged, that's
| probably what they do.
| michael1999 wrote:
| Put the powertrain lockout system on a signed and physically
| protected network segment. Let the headlights, mirrors, etc
| live on a less secure segment.
|
| This will impose higher costs when replacing these systems,
| because it will require key management of some kind. Either
| central cert management (with 20 year expiry?) or local key
| management. So only impose this on a tiny subnet for the
| starter/immobilizer.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Sadly, this involves costs, so it'll never happen.
|
| Good take, though.
| cogman10 wrote:
| You don't protect the wiring, you protect the start protocol.
| Similar to asking "Can we protect the internet by protecting
| the ethernet cables?"
|
| Put a public key on the engine controller, have it challenge
| the key with a random start number, have the key respond with
| the signature of that number, engine starts.
|
| You can do that challenge over the can bus.
| junon wrote:
| Damn. That's a wild video (wish there was a fast forward
| though). Curious how they did it. Is this a CAN bus back?
| rlt wrote:
| Locksmiths can make new key fobs for nearly any car with access
| to the OBD2 port and the right software (though I don't know if
| it requires a connection to the manufacturer)
| swozey wrote:
| I will never, ever keep a car I care about outside anywhere
| near the city.
|
| I know everyone doesn't have the funds for that, but I'm sorry,
| we all know how rampant car thefts have gotten since before
| those 3 Q50s in this video were even purchased. I live in the
| busiest neighborhood in downtown Denver with which has rampant
| property theft, cats cut out etc non-stop.
|
| I own 2 vehicles and _neither_ of them are ever parked outside
| if I can help it. It means I have to pay pretty much twice for
| rent because now I need a 1-2 car private garage, which means I
| 'm probably now in a condo or townhouse so every expense just
| gets higher and higher.
|
| But you're in the bracket of living downtown with a brand new
| Q50. So I don't care what your excuse is, buying a
| luxury/attention-getter car and parking it outside in cities
| with rampant car thefts is just absolutely stupid.
|
| Especially the people who buy the $80k luxu-box with the $5k
| 22" wheel add-on that gets ripped out of their mid-rise
| apartment parking garage a day later.
|
| I've had a car stolen and insurance does NOT treat you well
| when it happens and I never, ever want to deal with having a
| car stolen again no matter how much gaap/etc. I have.
| blitzar wrote:
| > I know everyone doesn't have the funds for that
|
| Its actually a fair bit cheaper to buy a $25k car than a
| $250k car.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Shhh! Don't tell anyone.
| 14 wrote:
| It would be trivial to hard wire a kill switch to your fuel
| pump and have it hidden somewhere so no matter what thief's
| can't drive off with your car. Much cheaper and more secure
| as cars can be stolen from parking garages.
| swozey wrote:
| Put a kill switch in it they tow it. Put a Club in it they
| tow it and cut off the steering wheel. Put GPS on it they
| throw it in a faraday cage paintshop/train. Put a
| Dronemobile system in it the Police just won't
| investigate/track it down.
|
| Really just have to not keep property outside anymore. I
| used to do the "It's not a big deal, i have full coverage"
| but had a car stolen and they (insurance) treat you like
| absolute trash when it happens.
|
| So no more outside for my cars as much as I can
| 14 wrote:
| Lock it in your garage and now they break into your house
| and hold a gun to your head....ya maybe they tow it but
| not likely as they want to do this discreetly but at the
| end of the day of course if they were determined they
| could take anything. My point is a kill switch would stop
| 99% of theft.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| > had a car stolen and they (insurance) treat you like
| absolute trash when it happens.
|
| You've said this twice, but what does it mean? I have had
| my car stolen twice and the insurance company didn't give
| me any trouble at all and just paid out.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| Some of the issue here is that it's actually a pretty nice
| area here in Baltimore, but our police force is currently
| understaffed and overworked.
|
| One big issue here regarding policing is that our city
| elected officials can't tell the city police force what to
| do.
|
| You see, when the civil war broke out, the state took control
| of the police force so that the mayor couldn't lead a
| confederate coup.
|
| Flash forward to today, and those powers still have never
| been returned to the city. The mayor and city council set the
| police budget, but the chief of police takes direction from a
| state run board.
|
| So there is a big disconnect between citizens voicing
| concerns to city council members, and those members only
| ability is to "talk to the major".
|
| When the cats away, the mice will play off with some stolen
| cars.
| swozey wrote:
| If you haven't traveled/lived in many major cities since
| covid, they are all the exact same now. None of the police
| are working. I'm in Denver now, previously Austin in 2019,
| Dallas 2020, Denver 2020+, and Denver banned qualified
| immunity so the police work even less. Seattle just did the
| same thing + IIRC king county is doing that "police cant
| lie on stand" or whatever law. I lived on 2nd and congress
| in Austin for 12 years until 2016 and the entire downtown
| has turned to absolute trash.
|
| I'm sure its the same in Chicago, LA, Portland, Tampa, etc
| and I don't even need to ask.
| rasz wrote:
| Infinite Infinity car hack, came with two, left with three
| Q50s.
|
| They do crouch an awful lot near front wheel well. Reminds me
| of this Toyota hack where thieves plug into headlight canbus
| wiring thru wheel arch
| https://kentindell.github.io/2023/04/03/can-injection/
| aosmith wrote:
| That's exactly what's happening. This is not a wireless
| attack, it's a physical access problem.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Hard to prevent theft of something parked on the street.
| Thieves can show up with a tow truck, hook the car, and
| drive away.
| aosmith wrote:
| See all that time the thief spends near the drivers side
| headlight? The headlights are on the can bus, if you can tap a
| couple wires in there the cars is yours.
| millzlane wrote:
| It was easy enough to do with https://www.uprev.com/.
|
| We had a specialist shop in the same area. You can disable
| Security+ with uprev.
|
| Hell we would even use it to remove engines from nissans to
| make them run in whatever we put them in without the ignition.
| I can make the start signal just come from a momentary push
| button.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Well for one thing the OBD port shouldn't be designed so that
| it has direct access to any useful CAN bus. It should go to a
| gateway that requires authentication to do anything except read
| OBD, and all of the IDs that you are allowed to send should be
| whitelisted.
|
| The issue people are mentioning with the headlights is easily
| solved by just moving the starter CAN to its own CAN bus
| between the immobiliser and the ECU (physically isolating the
| headlights), which costs about $5 total and requires no crypto
| unless thief is willing to cut the car nearly completely in
| half.
|
| I am an automotive systems engineer.
| markhahn wrote:
| always first blame the flawed security.
|
| sure, also blame attackers. never blame the attacker's tools.
|
| this is a place where "victim-blaming" is exactly the right thing
| to do. we can be supportive, even empathetic, of victims, who may
| have attempted to be secure, but failed due to bad tools, third
| parties, etc.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Why even ban them? In this context "insecure" seems to mean
| "vulnerable to theft". If somebody wants to buy something that's
| easy to steal, that's their issue.
|
| If people _inadvertently_ buy easy to steal vehicles that 's an
| issue, and maybe there should be labeling, or or a testing
| initiative, or maybe it's just a temporary blip that will work
| itself out as independent parties pick up testing.
|
| If it's known which vehicles are prone to theft the market should
| work everything else out. Insurance can price it in, and buyers
| can factor it in to their purchasing decisions.
| jacknews wrote:
| Indeed, the flipper-zero ban is obviously ridiculous, especially
| in light of the complete lack of even a hope of a ban on certain
| other tools that are often used for much more serious crimes;
| personal crimes rather than property crimes.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| how are major car manufacturers so far behind in security?
|
| and why can't they go back to the old solutions that didn't have
| these problems? its just such a stupid thing to watch
|
| IF these fancy keys that let you start your car without inserting
| anything cause your car to become extremely vulnerable THEN maybe
| its a bad idea, jesus christ
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Because whenever it's even vaguely cold outside, my neighbor
| likes to be able to start and idle her giant truck in her
| driveway without leaving her house (for 40 minutes before she
| drives a mile to work).
| evandale wrote:
| Car ownership is way too cheap and accessible in North
| America for the amount of damage they cause.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| This. Owning cars should be something that corporations and
| the rich and hobbyists do. If you dont want your car broken
| into maybe dont leave it lying around unattended in public?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I wouldn't go that far, but we should certainly stop
| subsidizing them so heavily that we forget there are any
| other options, or that humans were capable of happy,
| prosperous lives for millennia before they existed.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| Yeah maybe I shouldnt put both those statements together
| when really I think they are seperate opinions. I dont
| think society should be so car heavy. I also dont think
| its realistic for people to leave something lying around
| in public and expect it not to get broken into or stolen.
| Would you leave a backpack lying around on the public
| street in a big city and expect it to not get
| stolen/broken into?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Remote start is not to blame here. A manufacturer installed
| remote start system will shut the car off if a door opens.
| And the car should also shut off automatically after 5 to 10
| minutes.
|
| Unfortunately, after market remote starter does not offer
| this capability, so with the new trend of monthly charges, if
| you like certain brands like Toyota, and you want that type
| of secure remote start, you have to pay $20 per month or more
| for the life of the car.
| carleton wrote:
| 2021 Honda here, OEM remote start system does not shut off
| the car if a door opens.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Interesting. I have had a Subaru, Lexus, and Volvo over
| the past 15 years or so that all shut off if a door is
| opened after remote starting. I assumed it's a no brainer
| anti theft mechanism (but one that can only be
| implemented by manufacturers).
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Because the old solutions had other problems that made them
| less secure.
| gadders wrote:
| Try insuring a Range Rover in the UK:
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/range-rover-...
| newsclues wrote:
| Canada needs to reinstate the national port police, and actually
| do their job in policing.
|
| Policy changes for cars or technology will not solve the
| lawlessness in Canada.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Agreed. I am not sure why Canada has had so much comparative
| trouble with organized crime
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| The port in question is in Montreal which is in the province
| of Quebec. The province of Quebec is a political minefield
| with special status that most politicians don't want to deal
| with.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This is a problem throughout Canada. BC also has a serious
| problem.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| B.C. is no where as special as Quebec. The province of
| B.C. has never held a referendum to split. It does not
| have a special language police. Nor does it call itself a
| country :)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm talking about the organized crime problem, not the
| thing you brought up. BC has a problem with organized
| crime in its ports.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| Ahh okay, yeah. Its easier for the federal government to
| deal with in B.C. (ports are federal jurisdiction in
| Canada) without the political sensitivity problem.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Too busy jailing and freezing the bank accounts of political
| enemies.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Canadian police are shockingly bad at higher level crimes.
|
| We have had a series of expensive public inquiries in BC
| about high-level money laundering that is very obvious to
| most citizens for years, and has had any number of whistle-
| blowers come forward over the past decade. The estimated
| amount is in the 10s of billions per year for just BC.
|
| Currently we are at the point where BC has decided to create
| its own money-laundering investigation team since the
| findings are basically: the feds are completely unable to
| manage this crisis.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cullen_Commission
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Yup!
|
| Was your car stolen? It may have left Canada through the Port
| of Montreal
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-port-stolen...
|
| >A worker at the port, who asked not to be identified because
| they are not authorized to speak publicly, suggested the Canada
| Border Services Agency (CBSA) doesn't do enough spot checks.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Yes this is the real problem. We aren't stopping fentanyl from
| coming into our ports from China/Mexico and we aren't stopping
| stolen cars from being sent out to Africa and the Middle East.
|
| More spot checks and inspection resources are needed at our
| border.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Personally I think FOBs for cars are simply not worth it. The key
| with the remote for starting, locking and unlocking is ideal.
| Ford's with the on door key pad is pretty good too imo. Probably
| hackable tho. Down with fobs!
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Honestly, think a major problem with this is that Canada has not
| managed to resolve their organized crime issues.
|
| I don't know why the US federal apparatus has been so much more
| effective at disrupting organized crime, but Canadian groups
| fencing a lot of these stolen cars.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| The port in question is in Montreal which is in the province of
| Quebec. The province of Quebec is a political minefield with
| special status that most politicians don't want to deal with.
| MR4D wrote:
| Politicians are always going to do what's easy, not what's hard.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Security via obscurity is your friend when it comes to vehicle
| security. There are dozens and dozens of no-start conditions for
| a vehicle. Just pick two and deal with the minor inconvenience.
| applied_heat wrote:
| Indeed, hidden switch on a circuit somewhere and away you don't
| go!
| tylerchilds wrote:
| At this point, banning security tools a violation of the second
| amendment.
|
| Microsoft suffers breach after breach after acquisition after
| acquisition. I verbally note them to my wife to remember, "This
| is not normal." and even she said, "Why do the numbers keep
| getting worse and worse." and I told her, "The database keeps
| getting larger and larger ever since they were only slapped on
| the wrist for not letting me boot straight to firefox since
| childhood."
|
| If you took away my ability to understand why the world around me
| is failing, we'd fall into further disrepair than we already are
| and we're not really allowed to repair anything, now are we?
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| Again this is not the US. This involves Canada, there is no
| second amendment.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'm struggling to connect how the banning of security tools
| would be a violation of the (US) second amendment.
|
| A violation of the first, fourth, and ninth? I can see that. A
| propensity to violate the fifth? I can see that. But I can't
| see a strong connection to the second.
| lithos wrote:
| There was a point in the US where encryption was barred from
| export based on arms export laws. Lots a pretty famous open
| source stories from such. So it's not far fetched at all for
| the most part.
|
| Though this is in US law, not Canada as related to the news
| story.
| hn_acker wrote:
| > There was a point in the US where encryption was barred
| from export based on arms export laws.
|
| Are there any US court cases that suggested treating
| encryption as something covered by the Second Amendment? It
| would be more strange than putting malware under the Second
| Amendment. I can appreciate the gotcha of "if the US
| government defines encryption as arms then the second
| amendment applies" to disincentivize such a definition, but
| the government could simply call encryption something other
| than "arms" and thus avoid the Second Amendment.
|
| I think the general consensus in the US is that encryption
| falls firmly under the First Amendment. It's not as if the
| First and Second Amendments are necessarily mutually
| exclusive with respect to any given tool, but I think case
| law is such that the Second Amendment doesn't apply to
| encryption.
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| A way of looking at the second amendment is as a reduction in
| imbalanced power structures. Its purpose, depending on how
| you read it, but as practiced in the US, is to put the
| citizenry on more level footing with the government so the
| government doesn't get too excited with their power.
|
| Security bypasses/tools/exploits in that context are useful
| for leveling the playing field in a conflict, for instance we
| know the NSA is hoarding them for militaristic purposes. So
| if we call them cyber weapons rather than security tools it
| starts to make sense that, per that reasoning, citizens
| should have access to them too.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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 pass laws to
| supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting.
|
| This scenario is a great example of this phenomenon. 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.
| It's designing the playground so that kids _can 't_ get hurt, not
| teaching them how to play responsibly.
|
| My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the
| general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with
| enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms.
|
| I really don't like the way this is going, because the end result
| is a world where limitations are hardwired into the environment,
| while at the same time you have zero ethical expectations of your
| fellow humans. It's very _Hunger Games / Battle Royale_, at a
| less hostile level.
|
| Edit: just to clarify a point here. I'm not saying that there was
| no theft in the past, or that having ethical expectations instead
| of laws will somehow reduce all theft. I'm commenting more on the
| fact that the "new method" results in a different kind of world
| than the previous one (see the paragraph before this one.) It's a
| subtle point, but hopefully one I communicated well enough.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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?
| keiferski wrote:
| 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."
| sokoloff wrote:
| I get that, but given the observed existence of a subset of
| the population where this is currently acceptable, what
| does "enforcing [] religious or ethical norms" to fix the
| problem look like?
|
| I agree with you there's a societal or communal failure
| here. I don't see what the solution is (other than jail
| time/etc).
| keiferski wrote:
| My immediate answer is to say something like "we need
| more ethical education" but that's obviously kind of a
| weak response. The long, slow answer might be that
| society may re-organize itself into sub-units that _do_
| enforce ethical behaviors, and those sub-units eventually
| prevail over those that don 't.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >and those sub-units eventually prevail over those that
| don't.
|
| Why do you believe this?
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't know if it's necessarily going to be the case,
| but I do think one can look at contemporary society and
| see that certain groups with "rigid" ethical systems are
| prevailing over those that don't. Economically,
| sometimes, but even moreso in a reproductive sense. I'm
| thinking of groups like the Mormons, Amish, Orthodox
| Jews, and so forth.
| Draiken wrote:
| That makes zero sense to me.
|
| Theft is not acceptable by any means. People that steal do
| so by several motives, most commonly because they feel like
| they have to due to poverty, addiction, etc.
|
| You also already get punished for it with harsh penalties.
| But no matter how dystopian a government gets, it can't
| guarantee 100% enforcement of any law.
|
| To fix that, we'd have to create a society that takes care
| of those motives that drive theft, so it doesn't happen
| anymore.
|
| Unfortunately that will never exist in our current society.
| nulbyte wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| In the US* but in Canada (subject of this article) many
| are shipped off - ie. 10% are never recovered in US, 40%+
| never recovered in Canada.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Yep. I don't know anything about car theft outside of
| where I live (Seattle), so its not even generalizable to
| the rest of the states, and I'm commenting specifically
| on Kia Boyz car thefts...I'm sure Seattle has actual car
| thieves who are stealing cars to sell them off and not
| just cause general very visible chaos. Although
| statistics show most stolen cars are recovered here in
| Seattle:
|
| https://www.seattle.gov/police/crime-prevention/vehicle-
| thef....
|
| 86%.
|
| > The vast majority of auto thefts are committed by
| criminals looking for temporary transportation. Thus,
| most vehicles are recovered within a few weeks to a month
| and with relatively little damage. Very few vehicles are
| stolen for parts.
|
| Nearby Vancouver, at least, tracks Seattle:
|
| https://www.ufv.ca/media/assets/ccjr/reports-and-
| publication...
|
| > It should be noted, however, that British Columbia also
| had the highest rate of recoveries of stolen cars (91 per
| cent) compared to the national average (73 per cent)
| (Fleming, Brantingham, & Brantingham, 1994).
|
| That data might be outdated though.
| orwin wrote:
| It really depends where you live in France. You have a
| big fence left in the west, a 'casse' near bordeaux, but
| you won't really find anything from violent crime
| (copper, stolen cars, phones and bikes at most, and most
| of the activity is genuine).
|
| It's also a good way to know if organized crime is
| present in your area. If water distribution and/or trash
| collection is privatized to a 'local' company, you
| probably have some :)
|
| The rest of the west, even Nantes and Rennes are really
| chill.
|
| The issue in France is the resurgence of organized crime
| since 2004-2006. The tough on small crime policy jailed
| small magrebi caids (basically local slumlords and drug
| dealers). Some local caids gangs were strong enough to
| endure the storm and to emerge as stronger gangs, but
| organized crime from southern France (Grenoble,
| Marseille), and new gangs used that time to carve parts
| of Lyon and Paris. New crime families emerged around
| 2012, and around 2015 (I was living in Paris at that
| time) it could have turned really bad. Rumors of missile
| launchers, ak47 and other nice stuff in every shop.
| Things calmed down for no reason (I think the travellers
| families and magrebi gangs decided to share territory
| after the terror attacks and Sentinel), nothing really
| exploded, I left Paris.
|
| To me, the only true violence left in 2023-2024 is around
| Marseille, near Monaco (Russian mafia left a big hole
| recently), in camargue (because of the new travellers
| families). Maybe it'll start again in Paris and Lyon,
| hopefully not.
| alwaysrunning wrote:
| The premise that catalytic converter thefts have
| plummeted in the last few years is incorrect. In fact,
| recent data indicates that vehicle-related thefts,
| including catalytic converter thefts, have surged.
| According to a report by the National Insurance Crime
| Bureau (NICB), the nation experienced more than 64,000
| catalytic converter thefts in 2022, with California and
| Texas leading the country in these incidents[3]. This
| represents a significant increase from 16,660 claims in
| 2020 to 64,701 in 2022, indicating a rising trend in
| catalytic converter thefts[3].
|
| Furthermore, overall vehicle thefts have also increased.
| The FBI's annual crime report showed that there were
| 721,852 car thefts across the country in 2022, up from
| 601,453 incidents in 2021 and 420,952 reported in
| 2020[2]. This surge in car thefts has been attributed to
| various factors, including economic downturns, supply
| chain issues, and the high demand for cars and parts[4].
| Additionally, a viral TikTok challenge encouraging the
| theft of Kia and Hyundai vehicles for joyrides, known as
| performance crime, has contributed to the uptick in car
| thefts[2].
|
| Therefore, the data clearly indicates that catalytic
| converter thefts, as well as overall vehicle thefts, have
| not plummeted but have significantly increased in the
| last few years.
|
| Citations: [1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-
| statistics-auto-the... [2]
| https://nypost.com/2023/10/18/car-theft-soared-20-last-
| year-... [3] https://www.nicb.org/news/news-
| releases/catalytic-converter-... [4]
| https://www.deepsentinel.com/blogs/car-theft-statistics/
| [5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2023/11/06/
| report-... [6]
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-
| motor-ve... [7] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/car-thefts-
| are-on-the-rise-why-... [8]
| https://stateline.org/2024/02/09/car-thefts-and-
| carjackings-...
| Domenic_S wrote:
| No, you're looking at old data. Cat thefts in 2023 halved
| compared to 2022.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/catalytic-
| converter-th...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| My comment was confusing so let me address what you are
| saying:
|
| 1. This is a very recent thing I am discussing, the
| fencers were only arrested in the beginning of 2023 and
| the thefts have fallen in 2023, specifically second half.
| This should be available in more fine-grained crime stats
| or simply by looking at like google trends of catalytic
| converter replacement searches.
|
| 2. Crime is much lower than in the 20th century, but I
| agree there has been a post-pandemic upshift.
|
| e: found some news articles
| https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/california-
| catalytic-...
|
| this trend is after they busted a billion dollar auto
| parts company for being heavily involved in fencing these
| parts, seized 500 million dollars, and other anti-fencing
| provisions were made
| autoexec wrote:
| > this trend is after they busted a billion dollar auto
| parts company for being heavily involved in fencing these
| parts
|
| Do you mean DG Auto Parts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| 2020-2022_catalytic_converter_...) or is there another
| auto parts chain I should avoid.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Ah yes, that's the one. Misremembered the apprehension
| date slightly. There have been subsequent arrests in the
| Bay Area of people who were part of the supply chain for
| this group.
| glitchc wrote:
| Agreed, it really is a paperwork issue. Just have
| transport and shipping companies require proof of
| ownership prior to accepting the car, and these thefts
| will evaporate overnight. Without a channel to market, it
| eliminates the incentive for thieves to steal your car in
| the first place.
|
| It's not a tech problem, rather a legislative one. Too
| bad it won't fly because the current govt. has made it a
| habit of treating every issue as a wedge issue.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think part of the problem is also that as criminal
| trade becomes lucrative & there are more crackdowns in
| other potential venues, more and more capital is being
| spent to basically build up these ports in Canada as
| criminal strongholds.
|
| There is likely significant political shielding for the
| operation of these criminal groups in many Canadian
| ports.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| if someone is 12 or 13, they're far more receptive to
| change than a CEO whose spent their life stealing wages.
|
| one gets constantly brought up while the other is
| celebrated.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > if someone is 12 or 13, they're far more receptive to
| change than a CEO whose spent their life stealing wages.
|
| Yes! Which makes our lack of action even more tragic.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| when we consider wage theft as a significant driver of
| poverty, punishment for the 13 year old is more useless
| than anything.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| So you would condemn the 13 year old to a (likely short)
| life of hardship because wage theft is a more important
| problem?
| Domenic_S wrote:
| > _counseling, a better home and school environment, food
| in the belly, and so on might._
|
| This seems right for preventing criminals from forming
| out of otherwise-blank-slate children, but what do you do
| with _these_ kids? There 's no magic wand that turns
| their home & school life right.
|
| On the other hand, there are plenty of kids who had a
| perfectly fine and financed upbringing who turned into
| criminals and terrors, they just tend toward white-collar
| crime.
|
| This brings us full circle to the original comment that
| religion used to serve a useful purpose for society
| that's been largely lost -- a set of ethics & morals, and
| if those don't take real well there's always the all-
| seeing entity watching you at all times. In modern times
| the all-seeing eye of God has been replaced by
| surveillance cameras, but what is the base of morals
| replaced by?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >a set of ethics & morals, and if those don't take real
| well there's always the all-seeing entity watching you at
| all times.
|
| Do you think we didn't have crime when the church was in
| charge?
| Domenic_S wrote:
| Is that really what you think I said? How about making a
| point with less snark to it that I could respond to?
| withinboredom wrote:
| The first thing is that there are no universal sets of
| morals. Ethics is a totally different beast but it's
| something I'm not sure a young kid can wrap their heads
| around. But following "the rules" is something you can
| teach a kid and works until they are old enough to know
| when to break the rules.
|
| One thing we stressed to our son is: if you break the
| rules/laws, you will eventually get caught. So make sure
| whatever you are doing is worth the consequences.
|
| There's no need for some magical god to punish people,
| just the fact that, eventually, someone will figure out
| what you did (or more likely, they'll tell on
| themselves). It's worked so far...
| Domenic_S wrote:
| > _The first thing is that there are no universal sets of
| morals._
|
| That's a belief presented as fact. I'm not super excited
| about getting into a philosophical debate, but just
| something to consider:
|
| "The rules: help your family, help your group, return
| favours, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources
| fairly, and respect others' property, were found in a
| survey of 60 cultures from all around the world." --
| https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-02-11-seven-moral-rules-
| found...
| withinboredom wrote:
| It's a fact because I think we can agree there is at
| least one person on this planet who has counter-morals to
| any morals you present, for example. As long as one
| person on this planet has a difference of opinion on what
| morals they abide by, there can be no universal morals.
| That IS a fact, not an opinion.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| Your unstated assumption is that universal agreement is
| required for universal morals to exist
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Even better, we could focus on educating them properly
| the first time!
| xipho wrote:
| What teachers are saying is that socio-economics prevent
| any type of education from happening in many cases, i.e.
| there are many, many children who are going to struggle
| mightily unless the totality of their life systemically
| improves. Could teachers improve? Probably. Are teachers
| the underlying problem? I used to think so, but in
| dealing with our own school board/system it's very clear
| this is not the case.
| vkou wrote:
| That's easy. We just need to halve class sizes, fire half
| of the administration, double the pay for teachers in the
| worst districts, and raise the floor of the child social
| safety net to the point that even having complete fuckups
| for parents won't ruin your life.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The problem cannot be corrected by locking them in a room
| until they're 25, then releasing them.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Sounds like they had some rich parents to bail them out. I
| highly doubt they had court in less than a week.
| evilantnie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| people as organizations are a larger problem that people as
| cultural products.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in
| relation to JAK /STAT signaling pathway_ was peer-
| reviewed so that isn't convincing either.
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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).
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| I fully agree with you regarding situations where people
| get put into the system. Our justice system in practice,
| if not philosophy is very much based on punishment rather
| than rehabilitation. In my personal opinion this is
| medieval and really needs to change.
|
| However, what GP I suspect is seeing and what many others
| have seen as well, is a recognition that the system is
| broken, and thus a reluctance on a part of authorities to
| move forward with prosecutions for certain people. The
| goal of not institutionalizing them and setting them up
| for a difficult future is noble and laudable, however, I
| worry that this will ultimately be counterproductive. It
| is going to cause a swing much like what we are seeing,
| where people conclude that we are not tough enough on
| crime and thus we need to get more extreme, more
| punishing, and more authoritarian, which is the exact
| wrong way in my opinion.
|
| I would much rather we focus on fixing a monstrously
| broken and outdated system, rather than trying to work
| around it. That also makes for much more equality and
| Justice, because then you don't have to hope that you are
| one of the lucky ones for whom The system looks the other
| way.
|
| It doesn't have to be a massive revolution either. We can
| iterate towards it in a progressive manner, starting by
| removing absurdities like mandatory minimums, victimless
| crimes or crimes for whom the victim is some nebulous
| "society", and other things like that.
| immibis wrote:
| To reiterate what you just wrote in the second paragraph:
| Punishment ruins lives, so people vote against ruining
| each other's lives, so a group of people (who are but you
| did not refer to as fascists) who are disappointed with
| the amount of lives not being ruined will increase the
| level of punishment even further to maintain or exceed
| life-ruining equilibrium?
|
| It may be true or false, that I don't know, but the blame
| for it should lie squarely on the people who seek to
| increase life-ruining instead of the people who seek to
| decrease it.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Then don't punish. Reform, correct, fix. A lot of people
| will still see that as punishment (like they would see
| army bootcamp as punishment), but then we would just
| start disagreeing.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. It can be
| difficult to sync on terminology and philosophy though
| because in theory for most people the justice system is
| supposed to be about rehabilitation. The idea that you
| should serve your time and _return to society_ is almost
| universally agreed saving the most extreme cases. Yet our
| system doesn 't achieve that because a lot of the
| structures are based on "punishment" and "deterrence."
| Simply raising awareness and following the trail of logic
| is usually enough to find a lot of common ground. But it
| being a systemic problem, there isn't really anything an
| individual can do (that isn't IMHO counterproductive, see
| earlier thread about the unintended consequences of well-
| meaning DAs and LEOs letting people go to avoid the
| pitfalls of the system). It's a tremendously challening
| problem.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _the blame for it should lie squarely on the people who
| seek to increase life-ruining instead of the people who
| seek to decrease it._
|
| I don't disagree, but assigning blame won't get us
| anywhere. In fact I think it actively works against us
| because:
|
| 1. It just further causes divisions. If people feel like
| they're being blamed, they will get defensive which
| usually also includes a double down and a shift to
| amygdala-based reasoning rather than PFC-based reasoning.
|
| 2. It shifts the conversation to a debate about "whose
| fault" or "who is to blame" rather than "is the system
| ethical, efficiacious, and what can we do about it?" That
| debate will then take all the energy, and even if it got
| resolved it's all wasted because simply assigning blame
| doesn't do anything toward solving the problem.
| autoexec wrote:
| > The goal of not institutionalizing them and setting
| them up for a difficult future is noble and laudable,
| however, I worry that this will ultimately be
| counterproductive. It is going to cause a swing much like
| what we are seeing, where people conclude that we are not
| tough enough on crime and thus we need to get more
| extreme, more punishing, and more authoritarian, which is
| the exact wrong way in my opinion.
|
| I totally agree. I also worry that people will continue
| to push for more extreme forms of punishment. It's gross
| that we accept how prisoners and ex-cons are treated as
| it is. I think there are still a lot of people who would
| already prefer if our legal system was even more cruel,
| but even if most of us want reform all we can really do
| is vote for the people willing to do it. Our strongest
| point of leverage here is jury nullification, but I
| wonder how popular that would actually be with jurors and
| since most cases never reach trial we're denied the
| opportunity to use nullification to prevent defendants
| from being subjected to excessive, inhumane, and unjust
| punishments anyway.
| fargle wrote:
| this is an absolutely _insane_ position to take in 2024.
| all around we have junkies in the streets, squatters,
| shoplifters, car thieves, burglars operating with
| impunity. you are replying to a post about 12-13 year-
| olds stealing cars and carrying guns, ffs. this should
| involve at least several years in jail. _maybe_ a 2nd
| chance at 18.
|
| the pendulum has definitely swung too far, but the
| direction it's swinging is not what you think. the last
| decade has been an wonderful experiment in reversing some
| of the "tough-on-crime" laws. the results of which have
| basically completely disproven the idea that sentencing,
| bail, etc. reforms would ever have a net benefit.
|
| mass-incarceration is not a "problem" to be solved - it's
| a symptom, a result. the problem is an increasingly
| lawless society. measuring how many people are
| incarcerated is meaningless without comparing it with how
| much crime is happening.
|
| compassion, i agree with. but what's needed is to put
| effort into better sorting in the justice system. some
| people, for example juveniles, deserve and will be well
| served by compassion. others will simply take massive
| advantage of it. the later need to be locked up, not for
| rehabilitation, but to prevent crime. a great way to
| differentiate it is repeat offenders. there's basically
| no excuse for this. 2nd chances? maybe. 3rd, 4th, etc...
| no way.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| None of these things are new. Junkies aren't new,
| organized criminal groups aren't new, car thefts aren't
| new.
|
| There has been a pandemic uptick, but the broader trend
| is way, way less common than in your parents lifetime.
|
| The thing about policies that are redistributive and the
| media is that generally the people writing the stories
| will be closest to those who have been hurt, not helped.
| I am sure there are plenty of people (criminals, yes) who
| have been helped by bail reform.
| autoexec wrote:
| > all around we have junkies in the streets, squatters,
| shoplifters, car thieves, burglars operating with
| impunity.
|
| This is the insane take. Maybe that's your personal
| bubble talking, but there are millions of people who go
| about their daily lives without seeing a single junkie in
| the street. America has always had "bad" neighborhoods
| filled with junkies/squatters/shoplifters/car
| thieves/burglars but they have not and do not operate
| with impunity. You can easily find examples of all of
| those things resulting in someone being
| arrested/convicted/shot by police.
|
| Record numbers of Americans can't afford rent. Household
| debit is at all time highs as well. There are also
| historic numbers of Deaths of Despair. Is it any wonder
| that drug use, homelessness, squatting, and crimes like
| shoplifting/theft are rising? It doesn't excuse the
| behavior, but it does explain much of it. Give Americans
| zero help for mental illness, don't act surprised when
| you get a bunch of crazy people around you. Punish
| addicts instead of helping them? Enjoy your junkies I
| guess! Allow massive numbers of people to live in
| desperation and you can't act shocked when they act out
| of desperation.
|
| "Tough-on-crime" laws will not fix those issues because
| they do nothing but making the underlying causes even
| worse. "Tough-on-crime" laws are exactly what have been
| failing us, and why people have started looking for
| alternatives.
|
| > you are replying to a post about 12-13 year-olds
| stealing cars and carrying guns, ffs. this should involve
| at least several years in jail. maybe a 2nd chance at 18.
|
| A 12 year does not benefit from a prison sentence. Do you
| honestly think that's going to keep them from committing
| crimes later on in life? We should expect children to do
| stupid things. Their undeveloped brains are wired for
| risk taking, and failing to see/consider the consequences
| of their actions. (https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_a
| nd_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...). That doesn't mean they are
| incapable of making good choices, but it does make it
| much more likely (and natural) for them to fail to make
| good choices from time to time. Not all acts of teenage
| impulsivity will lead to stealing cars, but those 12-13
| year olds mentioned would be far from the first kids to
| do it. Perhaps you could argue that it's the parents who
| should be punished for not raising their child properly
| or for failing to keep them away from guns, but I'm
| skeptical that it would prevent other families from
| having the same problems. Children need to be allowed to
| grow and learn from their mistakes. There need to be
| consequences for when they screw up, but is sending a
| child off to get tortured and raped for years the best
| solution you can come up with?
|
| > mass-incarceration is not a "problem" to be solved
|
| Hard disagree. There is plenty of research into the
| problems it causes and enables to continue. It's hugely
| wasteful and expensive. Not only do tough on crime laws
| and mass incarceration fail to prevent crime (see
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/crime-and-
| punishment...), it actually makes things worse! It rips
| families apart. It hurts communities. It hurts the
| economy, It hurts the people who are abused in prisons.
| It prevents people from being contributing members of
| society. No good comes from mass incarceration.
|
| It's also not about how much crime there is. Look at
| this:
| https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/NATO_US_2021.webp
|
| Do you honestly think America has so much more crime than
| the rest of the planet? It's not as if our incarceration
| problem only got that bad recently either. It's been
| insane for a very very very long time.
|
| "how much crime is happening" isn't really the issue
| anyway. It's "what crimes are committed, should they be
| crimes in the first place, and do we need people behind
| bars because of them".
|
| A massive percentage of the people who are locked up have
| never even been convicted of a crime
| (https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/pie2023.webp) and
| many who have been are there for non-violent and drug
| related offenses, often with no victim at all!
|
| > others will simply take massive advantage of it. the
| later need to be locked up, not for rehabilitation, but
| to prevent crime.
|
| Everyone should be free to take advantage of compassion,
| but compassion doesn't mean that people can just get away
| with whatever they want either. I agree, that prison is
| no way to rehabilitate someone. That said, a night or two
| in jail can be a nice "time out"/wake up call. There will
| always be some people who need to be kept locked up to
| protect the rest of society. It should be a last resort
| though and those people shouldn't be subjected to torture
| or substandard conditions. They should be allowed to live
| a safe, healthy, good life - just one kept apart from the
| rest of the us and without their freedom.
|
| > a great way to differentiate it is repeat offenders.
| there's basically no excuse for this.
|
| You can't imagine why someone who gets out of jail, is
| suddenly saddled with massive debt, fees, and fines from
| the experience, but whose record means they cannot get a
| job or an apartment might turn to crime again? Why
| someone who has spent years being beaten, raped, tortured
| behind bars might come out of prison with problems that
| lead them to drugs and the problems that causes? Why
| people who are locked up for mental illness and released
| without treatment or the means to get treatment might
| reoffend?
|
| Again, it doesn't justify the crimes, but it does help to
| explain them. If we don't give people who get out of
| prison a chance to get their life back together what else
| do we expect? Our current system makes it extremely
| unlikely for someone to have a normal decent life once
| they are out of prison. Especially if that person had
| very little money/support, or had mental illness or an
| addiction, or very little education (maybe they were only
| 12-13) when they went in. The vast majority of the people
| who enter the justice system have a mental
| illness/impairment, an addiction, or both. That has to be
| dealt with or it's just going to cause more issues. Many
| leave prison with mental problems due to the trauma of
| their experiences. That has to be dealt with.
|
| This isn't an unsolvable problem. Other countries do so
| much better than we do, so we can draw from their
| examples. Suggesting that we should ignore all those
| examples and be even more draconian and oppressive is a
| very weird take.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| vkou wrote:
| > There's no such thing as a secure system
|
| Nobody's demanding that auto manufacturers build a _secure
| system_ , we are just expecting them to meet an incredibly
| low bar of security.
|
| The manufacturers in question, unlike their peers, have
| failed to clear it.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I agree with you, I'm just not sure how you'd wright the
| law that makes them clear the low bar when that bar might
| need to move up before the bill even becomes a law.
| That's why I would prioritize some kind of "security
| update bill" instead of trying to legislate the low bar
| that needs to be crossed.
| happiness_idx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Given those two tools, can you steal the car, or does that
| require a lot more effort for some models?
| jack_h wrote:
| 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?
| WWLink wrote:
| I get where you're going with this. At the same time, I am
| reminded of the Kia Boyz incidents - where the immobilizer
| was pretty much expected on every new car, and Kia had
| decided to maximize profits on their low end models by just
| omitting that feature.
|
| It would be like if you built a new house and decided not
| to install smoke alarms. (Except, of course, this is
| regulated.)
|
| And yea, regulations right? Why should we regulate stuff
| like that anyway? :P
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This is a very interesting point, but it is genuinely easier to
| simply ban flipper zeros, or insecure vehicles, then to try to
| change the Judiciary and prosecution system wholesale.
|
| It might very well take longer than the remaining lifespan of
| most folks reading this, so it's a moot point for anyone that
| wants to not have their car stolen.
| eunos wrote:
| >My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the
| general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with
| enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms.
|
| Uhh noo, this philosophy already there as old as Chinese
| Legalism ca 400 BC
| engineer_22 wrote:
| OP is talking about western culture - there is no Chinese
| Legalism tradition in Western Culture so yours is a red
| herring.
| LunaSea wrote:
| > 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.
| immibis wrote:
| So, laws for the rich assume good faith. Laws for the poor
| and middle-class - e.g. "go to jail if you have a flipper
| zero" - do not.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > the replacement of ethical expectations with specific,
| written down laws
|
| That's literally what the law itself is, since the dawn of
| time.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| > religious or ethical norms
|
| Truly confused why `religious` norms come into play here.
| keiferski wrote:
| Because the modern Western world is in a "religion hangover"
| where it wants to reject all outwardly religious ideas, while
| simultaneously denying that a) religions have been the
| foundation of pretty much all ethical behavior since the
| beginning of civilization and b) many supposedly secular
| belief systems are really just extensions of religious ones
| with the "I believe in..." statement cut off.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| I think the important distinction is not
| similarity/distance as a vector of meaning, but the ability
| to update those vectors in response to new data.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| > religions have been the foundation of pretty much all
| ethical behavior since the beginning of civilization
|
| I reject this statement wholeheartedly, and find it a
| pretty disgusting stance. The idea that the only reason not
| to kill someone (or otherwise act ethically) is due to
| religion is horrendous, especially given most religions
| historical track record on murdering others and other
| ethical violations.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think you'd have a pretty difficult time constructing a
| history of morality that doesn't involve what we refer to
| as "religion." Certainly that doesn't mean that all
| religious beliefs are good or justifiable, but that isn't
| what I claimed, either. I just claimed they were the
| foundation.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| I would argue it's the opposite.
|
| "Maybe killing people is bad. How do we get people to not
| do that? Tell them god said not to!"
|
| It starts from the ethical perspective, and uses religion
| as the blunt hammer to drive it into the masses.
| efdee wrote:
| Sure, but that is hard because religion is such a big
| part of our history. There aren't many large scale things
| from the past you can describe without talking about the
| influence of religion, because well, religion was there
| and it was pretty prominent.
|
| However, that doesn't say much about whether religion was
| necessary for morality to substantiate. In fact, so many
| immoral things have been carried out in the name of
| religion, that you might as well wonder if we would have
| been much more morally advanced by now if it hadn't been
| for religion.
| keiferski wrote:
| > if we would have been much more morally advanced by now
| if it hadn't been for religion.
|
| Kind of an unanswerable question, but I think my
| tentative answer is "not really." Mostly because the
| moral viewpoints that underly atheistic criticisms of
| (usually Christian) religion tend to themselves be
| derived from earlier Christian ideas. I don't think it's
| likely that we'd have a universalist sense of
| democracy/human life without the underlying Christian
| soul concept. The Romans, for example, had no qualms
| about human life being divided into "valuable" and "not
| valuable" groups.
|
| You could use the criticisms of someone like Nietzsche
| against Christianity and say we'd be more advanced
| without it, but I don't think this is probably the type
| of "advanced" that most people today would have it mind.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > I just claimed they were the foundation.
|
| That's an extreme claim that requires extreme evidence.
| You don't just get to pretend your preferred
| interpretation of a history that humans don't even have
| (prewriting society) is correct just because you want it
| to be.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| How many European states where founded as theocratic
| monarchys? The United States is found on the idea that
| "All men are created equal, and endowed by their creator
| (God) with certain unalienable rights"
|
| Yes people have done horrible things in the name of
| religion. But you still can't talk about morality without
| talking about religion. (And I'm an atheist)
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Not sure about Western world as a whole here. Some
| countries do not have such hard separation between church
| and state, but governing parties with clear religious
| affiliation, constitutions referencing God, religious
| holidays with bans on certain activities, etc.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Because the bible probably says _" Thou shall not use a
| Flipper Zero to break into thy neighbor's chambers."_
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Religious norms guide behavior. They are a course in ethics
| for those without undergraduate education.
| pnut wrote:
| Nietzsche gave us a religion-free solution in the concept
| of Ubermensch 150 years ago, it's still too controversial
| today.
| keiferski wrote:
| The Ubermensch is fortunately/unfortunately not a mass-
| market kind of product, but one designed for isolated
| individuals.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Yes, another example is Humanism.
| ytx wrote:
| I think it's partially a size/scale problem. If 1000 people
| have access to flipper zeroes, the probability of an unethical
| actor might be low, and normative ethics may be enough. But if
| 1 million people have access to flipper zeroes, the probability
| of at least 1 bad actor is high, and
| laws/enforcement/deterrents must be enacted, even if the
| baseline ethical rate is still high.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| And the crux of the argument is whether you believe the law
| will prevent the bad actor from acquiring one or not. Or if
| the law will only prevent the other 999 law abiding ones.
| Personally, my take/view on it is that (deeply) unethical
| people are going to break the laws regardless of what society
| says or encodes. This probably is a commentary on the
| failures of policing to enact what we've encoded in law. Part
| of it being a problem that many laws are overstated (eg It's
| illegal to own a flipper zero vs It's illegal to use a
| flipper zero on someone else's car without permission) ...
| Teever wrote:
| The problem isn't the million people with flippers, the
| problem is the million+ people profiting in an industry that
| produces defective products like cars that are trivial to
| steal.
|
| People sign contracts to buy very expensive automobiles
| because they reasonably believe that they are safe and secure
| to own and operate.
|
| If car manufacturers are selling a product that they know to
| be unsafe and they're not telling prospective buyers that and
| that's fraud.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is a necessary consequence of civilization. If you have a
| city of 8 million people, then you have 80,000 people in the
| bottom percentile of behavior by normative ethics. If some
| behavior is so outre that only 1 in a million people would do
| it, then there are 300 people in the US about to do it.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sure, but it seems like _enforce these ethical behaviors and
| punish the bottom 1% that goes against them_ is just as much
| of a solution as _redesign society and the environment so
| that everyone can 't act like that 1%._
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Great - and how is that different from the law again?
| keiferski wrote:
| Because the law is only punishing people that break the
| rules, not teaching them what ethical behavior is in the
| first place. It's fundamentally a reactive process.
|
| In other words, you want people that don't steal cars
| because they feel bad about it. You don't want them to
| not steal cars because they're afraid of the law.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Sorry - you edited your comment substantially, the
| process you initially described was identical to the law.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >because they feel bad about it.
|
| You do realize that some portion of the population can't
| feel bad about it right?
|
| Needless to say, I pray to whatever deities that you do
| not work in computer security. You would be laughed out
| of existence by saying "Just tell the world to be nice"
| rather than say, not write SQL injections.
|
| How about "Tell all the viruses to be nice and not infect
| cells".
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Why do you believe this isn't happening? Things like the
| golden rule and other normative ethical ideas are
| literally being taught in schools today, from
| kindergarten all the way up through required college
| classes.
|
| The vast majority of people don't do bad things
| explicitly because they think it would be "bad". The vast
| majority of human behavior IS normative ethics right now!
| Next time you go to the grocery store, pay attention to
| what percentage of carts make it back to the cart corral
| vs are just left in parking lot, despite zero legal
| framework or forcing behavior to make it happen.
|
| The human brain however has no difficulty squaring such
| "good and bad" concepts with doing bad things though.
| Everyone believes they are the hero of their own story,
| and the brain is willing to lie to itself to reinforce
| that belief.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| People don't want their cars stolen. Punishing the thieves
| doesn't undo their actions.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You seem to suggest that parents and schools are not
| teaching ethical behavior.
|
| Do you think this is happening at a large scale?
|
| I know some leftists (I'm liberal) who don't seem to care
| about minor theft or crime because it seems like peanuts
| next to the civilization-wrecking greed and pollution and
| wealth transfer underway by the owners of capital.
|
| But I don't think that is a majority thought. I personally
| think the criminal justice system has decided they either
| won't do their jobs, or that they are so understaffed that
| they can't do their job of investigating and punishing
| crime.
|
| Again, my take is that most people of all political stripes
| want crime to be punished.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't really get the impression that teachers are
| expected to instill strong moral values, more just teach
| the subject and then leave.
|
| With parents, my feeling is not so much that society
| expects them to instill strong ethical values in their
| children, but rather something more pragmatic,
| Machiavellian, "making it in life," and so forth.
| nox101 wrote:
| The largest metro area on the planet, Tokyo, 34 million
| people, is also the one of the safest with the extremely low
| crime. Seoul, and Singapore are both around 10 million and
| are also safe with low crime.
| Nursie wrote:
| Japanese criminal procedure is ... interesting from what I
| can tell. There is a very high conviction rate,
| suspiciously so.
|
| Singapore is questionably democratic, utilises corporal
| punishment and is described by some as a police state. I
| think it's fair to say that while a strong sense of
| community ethics may be present in Singapore, it's
| certainly not the only thing holding people in line.
|
| Seoul I know little about.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's also illegal to possess a gun in Tokyo, not just
| illegal to shoot somebody.
| slily wrote:
| 1. Go look up how relevant guns are to overall crime
| rates in the US.
|
| 2. Go look up what happened to the last prime minister of
| Japan.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The context is talking about whether we should regulate
| the environment or just normative ethics; Tokyo has a lot
| of laws regulating the environment.
| slily wrote:
| I don't know if you're pretending to be unaware or
| genuinely ignorant, but no. Japanese society places
| extreme emphasis on teaching children to behave
| respectfully in society and these values are taught from
| early childhood to adulthood. If you want to attribute
| their low crime rate to gun control you'll have to bring
| something halfway convincing to the table.
| WWLink wrote:
| I've learned not to trust those sorts of statistics. It's
| like the "<ethical group A> commits way less crime than
| <ethical group b>" argument you see on reddit sometimes by
| the ACKSHUALLY crowd. The problem with those statistics is
| they only count the people who were CAUGHT (and convicted
| and punished) breaking said laws.
|
| People break laws and get away with it all the time -
| probably the majority of the time. My friend, when was the
| last time you saw a $100,000 Mercedes on the side of the
| road with 3 cop cars behind it, the driver sitting on the
| curb, and a K-9 sniffing the inside of the car? Yet I can
| count plenty of times I've seen such a car run red lights,
| roll stop signs, and flagrantly disobey posted speed
| limits. (Especially when a BMW badge is involved lol)
| fellerts wrote:
| English law often refers to "the man on the Clapham omnibus".
| Quote from Wikipedia:
|
| > The man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical ordinary and
| reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it
| is necessary to decide whether a party has acted as a
| reasonable person would - for example, in a civil action for
| negligence. The character is a reasonably educated, intelligent
| but nondescript person, against whom the defendant's conduct
| can be measured.
|
| He would fit your description of "normative ethics". I think
| the trend you describe mostly (?) applies to the US.
| MikeSchurman wrote:
| Ishmael or My Ishmael touches on this subject. Thank you for
| reminding me.
|
| I forget exactly, but, the basic idea is primitive people
| didn't have all these laws about what to do. They expected you
| to behave, and if you did not, the tribe did not necessarily
| punish you, they taught you and made it right somehow
| (justice).
|
| Any MY description does not give this idea justice, so I need
| to go back and find the reference in the books.
| nativeit wrote:
| Good pull. I used to obsess over Daniel Quinn's novels.
| They're kind of perfect for the college kid finding
| philosophy for the first time.
| nativeit wrote:
| Do you remember the guy who took hostages at the Discovery
| Channel offices in Washington DC, and tried to force them to
| promote his Ishmael-based manifesto on television? He was
| part of a MySpace group that I frequented where we discussed
| Quinn's work. I remember having pretty strong disagreements
| with him in the forums, before he took up arms anyway...
| MikeSchurman wrote:
| I don't remember that happening, I think I wasn't watching
| the news much during that period in my life. But I did hear
| about it in past year after reading Quinn's books and
| following some mental threads afterwards. Wild that you had
| conversations with him!
|
| Unfortunate people take ideas so far... we are so sure we
| are right.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| That works at the scale of a tribe. We do the same thing with
| kids in a family: punishment (should) only happens after
| multiple attempts at "teaching" have failed and it's clear
| that what's happening is disobedience.
| eruci wrote:
| You can say the same thing about banning guns (although I just
| realized that's a bit of a stretch) If people acted responsibly
| we would not need to ban guns.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > If people acted responsibly we would not need to ban guns.
|
| Nearly everyone that does own a gun acts responsibly with it.
| The very few that don't do cause damage however. But the same
| with cars and many other things. Nearly everyone is a
| responsible driver but there are some that choose to drive
| too fast, while intoxicated, not paying attention, etc.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| The problem with this is all it takes is one bad actor to cause
| a lot of chaos and destruction. The laws are needed.
| samtho wrote:
| This is a dangerous road to travel, as the exact same thing
| can be said about most other tools that can be abused. Knee-
| jerk reactions like this are shortsightedly ignorant and do
| nothing to mitigate actual harm being done.
|
| Flipper zero's capability is not based on some super advanced
| technology, it can be replicated. Banning stuff is an easy
| way to cover the problem up but instead of actually fixing
| anything, it is sent out of view of the mainstream and into
| shallow obscurity.
|
| People who steal cars already break the law, breaking an
| extra one by possessing the tool is not going to be a
| deterrent. Researchers and security auditors who stay above
| board will no longer have access to this tool if they expect
| to exist in a professional capacity, effectively kneecapping
| their ability as our allies to help us create more secure
| systems.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I think one word you might be looking for is "technocracy" [0]
|
| Although the Wikipedia definition focuses on the appointment of
| experts to political power, there is an attendant
| dehumanisation where technical and legal approaches to
| everything replace human values.
|
| Another important term might be "instrumental reason" [1]. This
| goes beyond simple quantitative utilitarianism to declare all
| areas of human discourse and relations as quantifiable,
| measurable and logically decidable.
|
| My personal opinion is that way beyond Neil Postman's
| "Technopoly" we actually have a fully fledged new religion in
| which technological values have not _replaced_ ethical
| discourse, they _are_ the new ethical discourse.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
|
| [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-
| instrumental/
| solardev wrote:
| That may be a slight oversimplification? I think there's whole
| fields dedicated to these questions, like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_law?wprov=sfla1 or
| the overarching
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics?wprov=sfla1, with overlaps
| into sociology and anthropology.
|
| Not all societies are so law-heavy, especially the ones that
| are more shame-driven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%8
| 0%93shame%E2%80%93fe.... As a random example, Japan during the
| pandemic had a really high mask wearing rate despite it not
| being a legal requirement; there was just a strong social
| expectation for it.
|
| That's not to say that their approach was better or worse than
| the West's, just that different societies will naturally evolve
| different means to regulate group behavior.
|
| Families, villages, cities, states, nations, cults, religions,
| companies, departments, teams... every community has their own
| framework for defining and moderating acceptable behavior, and
| sometimes they can be more important than the national laws, or
| may be just one variable in a complex algorithm of behavior.
|
| It just depends.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yes I think the shame and guilt discussion is probably
| relevant here. Although Japan has a shame culture, and the
| West supposedly has a guilt-based one, I'm not convinced that
| guilt is all that widespread anymore.
| solardev wrote:
| I think that specific subquestion is an interesting one for
| sure (whether guilt has been replaced by strong authority,
| like it's not wrong unless you're caught and punished).
|
| I'd love to see how it trends with factors like
| responsiveness in the political system (Canada vs the USA
| vs Russia or whatever), wealth inequality and social
| mobility (both between and within classes), softer things
| like expectations of "honor", etc.
| keiferski wrote:
| The idea that guilt has been replaced by a strong
| authority sounds like a more precise framing of what I'm
| talking about, definitely.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| You see the exact same thing in programming, where tooling is
| made to enforce everything because somehow we can't trust devs
| to do anything right so we need to hard-wire as many restraints
| in as possible.
|
| And yet, somehow, that hasn't solved the Software Problem at
| all.
| zecaurubu wrote:
| Sounds like the idea of "obedience to the unenforceable" - the
| unwritten rules of society that we comply by personal choice.
| This Econtalk episode has a nice discussion about it -
| https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-obedience-to-the-...
| quatrefoil wrote:
| Religious norms and laws were the same for much of history. You
| could get stoned for adultery for a good while... The
| decoupling of the two is a pretty recent phenomenon.
|
| For a while after, religious and secular norms still provided a
| fairly rigid template for how you're supposed to behave, but we
| dismantled a lot of that too. For good reasons, just with a lot
| of unforeseen consequences.
|
| I don't think the phenomenon you're describing is a matter of
| replacing the old system with something completely different.
| The laws we're passing are a consequence of belief systems too.
| One of the beliefs is that businesses are inherently greedy /
| immoral / destructive. Another is that individuals are. For
| people who see the world that way, these beliefs are
| unfalsifiable, just like the belief in an adultery-hating god.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| > For good reasons
|
| I wouldn't be so sure...
|
| > just with a lot of unforeseen consequences.
|
| Exactly, a classical case of Chesterton's fence.
|
| > The laws we're passing are a consequence of belief systems
| too.
|
| Some of them are (and you're making a very good point here!),
| but some of them may be just pragmatic.
|
| > For people who see the world that way, these beliefs are
| unfalsifiable
|
| Again, very true.
|
| > just like the belief in an adultery-hating god.
|
| As a Catholic, I think I can tell you that it might be more
| nuanced. I believe that ethical norms are not some arbitrary
| rules, but are a bit like the part of a manual for some
| device that says under what conditions the device works
| properly and under what conditions it may break, only for
| humans. As in "if you commit adultery, you will end up
| unhappy; you have been warned". (Cf. 1 Corinthians 12, 6 -
| https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/6#54006012)
| Although IANTP ("I am not the pope";-)), of course, and
| neither am I a theologian, so take this with a grain of salt.
| darkwater wrote:
| > As a Catholic, I think I can tell you that it might be
| more nuanced. I believe that ethical norms are not some
| arbitrary rules, but are a bit like the part of a manual
| for some device that says under what conditions the device
| works properly and under what conditions it may break, only
| for humans. As in "if you commit adultery, you will end up
| unhappy; you have been warned".
|
| Forewords: I was raised in a Catholic family, in a Catholic
| environment and I was a practicing Catholic up to almost
| 18yo. Then, I changed my mind through reading and
| experiencing the world as a young adult, and now I 'm
| probably biased the other way round (just like smoke
| quitters). No offenses intended, don't feel attacked.
|
| I really struggle to understand how nowadays we are still
| somehow blind to the fact that religions were always
| basically a way to pass ethical behaviors to the
| population, playing the "almighty divine being" card.
|
| Just like you would tell a child that Santa Claus is
| bringing their gifts and he and his assistants are watching
| you all the time, and know if you are good or naughty, and
| bring presents accordingly. Our society has - or should
| have - grown up by now, and we should be able to teach a
| shared ethical background without the need to use the God
| device. There is no need for a God that will give you his
| love Heaven or Hell to treat someone that is just like you,
| the same way you would like to be treated.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| You could make a similar argument about capitalism. We
| _should_ have grown past it by now, but we haven't, and
| every time we try to invent a replacement system we end
| up making things worse.
|
| You can see the ethical decay unfolding in real-time as
| societies turn replaced the old, rigorously tested system
| of religion with shiny new secular ethics.
| brabel wrote:
| > You can see the ethical decay unfolding...
|
| The Nordic countries are all among the least religious
| countries in the world, yet they seem to have some of the
| most ethical societies on the planet if you consider
| human rights, democracy and low violence to be the result
| of an ethical society.
|
| The most religious countries in the world are all at the
| very bottom of rankings taking into consideration any of
| those factors.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| I think your example is not a good one. Nordic countries
| have the concept of Jante law. If you can verbalize such
| a concept and also recognize that it exists in your
| society, by definition it makes your society more
| intolerant than a culture that has no such concept (such
| as the USA).
|
| In fact, I would argue the open-ness and tolerance of
| nordic culture is specifically exploitative of the
| cultural expectation that you do not raise concern or
| object and are expected to be in agreeance with everyone
| else that "this here is a tolerant society". It's a valid
| theory that the fastest culture to adopt any philosophy
| will be the one that has the population with the greatest
| number of people who don't disagree.
| petsfed wrote:
| I think a case could be made (although I'm struggling to
| do so myself) that the growth of mercantilism, and then
| capitalism, could be understood as direct challenges to
| Abrahamic-religion-based ethics, especially as capitalism
| directly discourages altruism.
|
| I think this is a thesis I need to do some work on to
| either reject it or let it mature, but I think this is an
| interesting starting place. It is worth noting that the
| early Christians frequently practiced collectivism and
| rejected the concept of individual property rights,
| although that was ~2000 years ago, the faith has evolved
| sine then.
|
| All of this to say, I do not believe its that secular
| ethics _per se_ are the cause of the decay, but rather
| that the religions of the world have not made a
| compelling enough case to sway people away from rejecting
| altruism in the name of personal enrichment. The
| situation is made considerably worse by the fact that a
| fair number of the global religions see the spoils of
| personal enrichment as evidence of righteousness, and
| altruism as at least adjacent to sin.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| it's in some ways fitting that the same people who threw
| away roughly two thousand of years of the most successful
| philosophy have doomed themselves to a demographic death
| spiral lol
| petsfed wrote:
| > the same people who threw away roughly two thousand of
| years of the most successful philosophy have doomed
| themselves to a demographic death spiral
|
| I don't think this is true. Falling birth rate is
| positively correlated with key markers of quality of life
| (especially infant survival rate, education, overall
| lifespan, and productivity) irrespective of dominant
| religion or religiosity in general.
|
| edit: changed "infant mortality" to "infant survival" so
| as to not contradict "positively correlated"
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| You're telling on yourself a bit here. Why should I think
| highly of the religious when they are as petty as you?
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| Not everyone is as smart as someone that thinks of the
| golden rule "on their own", therefor religious ethics has
| its place.
|
| Also, we grew up in a society that already had this in
| place, essentially you could have grown up on this planet
| instead: https://memory-
| alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_Lines_(episode), and you
| would probably grab a gun, shoot someone because they had
| something you wanted rather than thinking of the golden
| rule at all.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are a lot of cultures around the world that hate
| adultery, not just Christians. Some of them had a double
| standard there (men could have sex with other anyone but
| women could only have sex with their husband), but many
| historical cultures had concepts of adultery.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Why put all Western countries into the same bucket? Car theft
| is much more prevalent in the US than Germany, for example.
| keiferski wrote:
| Fair point. It may have more to do with Anglo or American
| culture than with the West at large, although I think the
| same deeper trends are still at play.
| electriclove wrote:
| There is little or no consequence in America to breaking
| the law - especially for those who have nothing to lose
| gnarbarian wrote:
| Which country is more diverse culturally? the answer to that
| feeds directly into op's argument.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Italy also has a high rate, so have, for example, New
| Zealand, Australia, Sweden. Not sure that is all that
| supportive (and how do you define cultural diversity?).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The reality is that if you can't deploy force in support of
| your 'ethical norms' and you live in a pluralistic society,
| both of which are true of the US and Canada - then you have to
| resort to the law.
|
| > 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. It's designing the playground so
| that kids can't get hurt, not teaching them how to play
| responsibly.
|
| ...okay? I am still left with the question of "what do we do"
| and how do we do it without leveraging a legal apparatus.
|
| Surprised this is the top comment, it seems sort of inane and
| faux-deep.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an
| unethical behavior
|
| What's to discuss? Is there any ambiguity about whether
| stealing cars is unethical? What are you bringing to that
| conversation that moves us forward?
| keiferski wrote:
| I am pointing out that the response to this problem isn't,
| "Hey, there is a cultural problem with society finding this
| acceptable" and is instead "how can we re-engineer things to
| prevent this?"
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I don't think society finds stealing cars acceptable.
| That's why stealing illegal, that's why they're _trying_ to
| outlaw a device that makes stealing cars easier, and why
| this article is trying to make it illegal to have easy-to-
| steal cars.
|
| Outliers stealing cars is not a demonstration that some
| part of society finds that ethetical.
| slingnow wrote:
| Society largely finds marijuana use acceptable, and yet
| it remains a federal crime. When someone cuts me in line
| at the store, I don't see that as ethical or acceptable,
| but we don't have laws against it. So your argument that
| unacceptable == illegal isn't set in stone.
|
| We may have laws for things that we don't bother to
| enforce as a society. It's easy to see the possibility
| that society just views car theft as a normal occurrence
| ("insurance will cover it"), or perhaps too burdensome to
| enforce, and therefore society just accepts some amount
| of it without blinking an eye.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> It 's easy to see the possibility that society just
| views car theft as a normal occurrence ("insurance will
| cover it"), or perhaps too burdensome to enforce_
|
| Does society believe it's acceptable behavior though? I
| haven't seen any evidence to support the theory that we
| do. After all, if we did, we'd be out there stealing
| cars.
| kredd wrote:
| I heavily doubt you can "fix the culture" in a short period
| of time, especially when it's causing problems right here
| and right now. And frankly speaking, I don't think society
| finds it acceptable, it's just not that easy to prevent it
| unless you start putting draconian measures and hardcore
| surveillance with enforcement. and even that isn't really
| that easy especially in huge countries like US and Canada.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I don't think that society finds this acceptable so much as
| predictable. There's a big difference, especially when
| you're eeking out the last fractional bits towards a higher
| quality of life.
|
| Even if 99 out of 100 people will behave ethically around a
| car with the keys literally sitting on the windshield (and
| I suspect the ratio is actually much higher), if 1 out of
| 100 causes you to have a loss of tens of thousands of
| dollars, you're going to want better protections than "that
| was unacceptable".
|
| Our political system is currently demonstrating this - in
| theory, public servants should be altruistically motivated,
| making informed and wise decisions about how to govern for
| the good of the people, and elections should select for
| these individuals. Unfortunately, this system is highly
| vulnerable to narcissistic, wealthy, greedy, power-hungry
| famous sociopaths willing to lie and compromise their
| ethics. We should not be surprised or disappointed when out
| of a nation of 300 million people, a few of those people
| emerge to take those positions.
|
| The sensible response is not to throw up our hands and
| moralize about corruption in politics, it's to design the
| system so that this perfectly predictable outcome doesn't
| keep happening.
|
| Also, while the courts are not entirely fair and free of
| bias, trying to enforce cultural norms about not stealing
| by public shaming is not likely to be any more fair. I'd
| rather take my chances with a lawyer, prosecutor, and jury
| than to have the rumor mill spread falsehoods about an
| immoral act I may or may not have committed.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Are you asking yourself the correct questions?
|
| For example, what unethical behaviors do you take part in
| that are not illegal? And if you do, why have not stopped
| doing them even without a law?
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| there is a lot of ambiguity about it in places like san
| francisco. better to lock up the deoderant than lock up a
| human being, the logic goes
| crandycodes wrote:
| I disagree. If just expecting good outcomes worked, why would
| we have any laws at all?
|
| Before we had laws on child labor, we had children working and
| falling into heavy machinery. Before we had laws on food
| quality, you had to guess which milk provider was going to give
| you the least amount of formaldehyde poison. Before we had laws
| enforcing civil rights, over half the adult population in the
| US was disenfranchised. Was Western society exhausted at
| enforcing religious/ethical norms back then or is it just a
| recent thing?
|
| Using the "social contract" theory for why governments and
| countries exist, you could say that we don't need laws until we
| do. Once an undocumented part of the social contract (e.g.
| ethical or religious norm) is no longer sufficient to maintain
| the integrity of the contract, it must be written down and
| enforced via government as a last measure. I do expect my car
| manufacturer to sell me a car which is relatively secure. If
| they are failing to meet that expectation from society, then it
| falls to that last measure to enforce compliance with that
| norm. Laws are also often used to add clarify where there is
| ambiguity. Different cultures and religions have different
| norms. If those norms conflict (does the gender of my partner
| matter in a marriage?), it falls to law to clarify.
|
| It's a fair debate about how much guardrails should we put in.
| There's likely value in allow kids to hurt themselves as long
| as they aren't at risk of being permanently maimed or dying.
| It's a fair debate to discuss the root causes of criminal
| behavior, be it the issues with modern religion or systemic
| issues which prevent people from successfully participating in
| mainstream society and the economic opportunity therein.
| However, there is no value in allowing easily stolen vehicles
| (a good which has been regulated for almost a century) to be
| sold, where they can then be used to enable other crimes.
| Lockranor wrote:
| Governments are formed by single cultures with a shared value
| set, and a set of ethics that they believe in. Your statement
| that laws aren't needed until they are is accurate.
|
| As those shared values are lost, the ethics built upon them
| erode, more laws are constructed. However, there comes a
| point where this system of check and balance can no longer
| function properly, and eventually, the system either becomes
| too unwieldy to function, or else the system is destroyed due
| to rebellion or anarchy.
|
| Why? Because law is an attempt to encode ethics based on
| shared values. No culture which does not share values can
| long endure when attempting to solve the problem through
| increasingly complex rules with no underlying theme.
| Szpadel wrote:
| I observed the same, especially with recent abortion movements
| (from what I heard those were also in USA and I'm assuming from
| what I saw on internet, it look similar to what is happening in
| my country)
|
| I believe that car thieft could be exactly the same.
|
| basically people behave like legal abortion means that women
| will have to perform it and that's bad. especially I hear that
| from religious people that they don't approve such actions in
| their religion. the thing that I don't get is that religious
| people should not perform abortion even when it's legal, so
| they should not care about legalizing
|
| this is the same, you can buy knife in any store and it's
| legal, but this could be used to murder someone isn't that
| basically the same?
| mp05 wrote:
| > basically people behave like legal abortion means that
| women will have to perform it and that's bad
|
| So let me get this straight: you're suggesting that because
| abortion may be legalized at a federal level that religious
| people are upset because women will "have to perform it"? And
| this is your broad stroke assumption of why people are upset?
|
| Not to derail the thread but you just made a wild statement
| to me and I want to ensure you're saying what I think you're
| saying.
| Szpadel wrote:
| Sorry I had very little spare time to write that comment
| and communicated pourly what I had in mind. Let me rephrase
| it:
|
| When I hear arguments against legalized abortion from
| religious people their argumentation is basing that women
| will "have to perform it" what is of course very false.
|
| They are ignoring fact that because something is legal it
| only means that people can do it but they are still able to
| decide that it's against their belives and resign from
| doing that procedure.
|
| In my country they passed laws that forbid such procedures
| unconditionally even if that means that women might not
| survive it. So we had cases when women and unborn died
| because they could not remove deformed unborn.
| throwaway240221 wrote:
| Theology warning:
|
| > "the replacement of ethical expectations with specific,
| written down laws"
|
| There are two things that are simultaneously true.
|
| 1) This law is not a replacement of ethical expectations, but a
| poor attempt to codify them.
|
| 2) This law is bad on it's own right, and the website is
| correct.
|
| But I would like to discuss point 1. In an interesting way, you
| are making the precisely the same error of the people who are
| proposing to ban Flipper Zero's, just on the other side of the
| coin.
|
| The anti-F0 people think "If we do away with this tool, car
| thieves will cease to exist! Since car thieves are otherwise
| good people, when we remove the tools, they will cease to be
| thieves!"
|
| You think, "Such people will still exist, we just need to make
| sure they understand our ethical expectations! Since car
| thieves are otherwise good people, when we teach them not to
| steal, they will cease to be thieves!"
|
| > we tend to assume they [people] will behave in the worst way
| possible
|
| Because they do. The depravity of man is at once the most
| empirically verifiable fact, and they most intellectually
| resisted. If you make F0's illegal to own, criminals will still
| own them. If you "educate" them that this is bad behavior, they
| will laugh and nod their head. "Why do you think we do this at
| night?"
|
| Now, your attribution to relativism and cultural exhaustion
| with regards to religious and ethical norms is SPOT ON! I
| absolutely agree. But what you will find, if you return to
| religious instruction, is that Christianity teaches that people
| behave in the worst way possible. Regardless of education,
| regardless of law: the human nature is sinful from birth.
|
| The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who
| can understand it? - Jeremiah 17:9
| ajross wrote:
| > a noticeable trend to me is what I'll call "the replacement
| of ethical expectations with specific, written down laws."
|
| That seems silly. Previous generations were far _more_ likely
| to ban random things they didn 't like vs. trusting to "ethical
| expectations". Prohibition? Sedition laws? Segregation? "Papers
| please"? Even something as comparatively benign as the Steve
| Jackson Games raid wouldn't happen today. Things are getting
| inexorably better and not worse in essentially every democracy
| in the world.
|
| In fact, a noticeable trend I've noticed is one where sheltered
| geeks in privileged careers tend to take infringement on their
| personal hobbies as a general problem with society and not just
| a minor blip in the forest of liberty.
| yayitswei wrote:
| Ethical norms are sufficient in a homogeneous society, but the
| "trustless" trend has enabled collaboration with ever larger
| groups of people with reduced need for trust. I'm thinking
| blockchains, cryptography, the stock market, the concept of
| limited liability, and law itself.
| keiferski wrote:
| Ah yes, I completely forgot about blockchain. Trustless is a
| perfect example of what I'm talking about.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Limited liability is more trusting than trustless.
|
| Blockchain and crypto are great examples of the true _value_
| of trust, and the true _cost_ of not having it - in fact,
| Bitcoin gives a way to measure trust in physical unit of
| _kilowatt hours_ , that is the amount of energy you need to
| keep burning to replace trust in a system.
| Nursie wrote:
| > My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the
| general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with
| enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms.
|
| Because prior to this period of decay in the west, we don't
| have a rich history of theft and violence going back as long as
| there has even been civilisation?
|
| These "ethical expectations" have always been weak, and always
| been ignored to a greater or lesser extent. There's never been
| a golden age that was crime-less due to societal ethics and you
| won't find such a thing outside of the west either.
| fasthands9 wrote:
| It also seems like a straightforward resource coordination
| problem.
|
| If a city has 10 car thieves and all cars are relatively hard
| to steal, the city can manage the police resources to
| investigate the crimes. If a city has 10 car thieves and half
| of all cars are very simple to steal, the city needs to
| devote a lot more police resources to investigate the crimes.
|
| Of course the worst fear is the number of car thieves has
| gone up. This is probably true in some specific cities. But
| even if it hasn't, other people owning an easy to steal car
| hurts everyone since it drains resources.
| mhh__ wrote:
| McGilchrist on left vs right brain will interest you.
| jcims wrote:
| The same phenomenon can apply to organizations as well.
| Teachers and doctors in the US, for example, seem to have lost
| a substantial degree of discretion in how ply their respective
| trades. They instead must operate in compliance with an ever-
| growing number of runbooks prescribed to them by their relative
| authorities.
|
| This is likely driven in part to raise the floor in outcomes
| but it simultaneously lowers the ceiling.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Teachers and doctors in the US, for example, seem to have
| lost a substantial degree of discretion in how ply their
| respective trades.
|
| Mostly that is good. Discretion implies different results for
| different people and if you are on the bad end of that
| because you got a bad teacher/doctor that is a bad thing.
| Most people need the standard treatment in both education and
| medicine. Learning styles has been debunked in the
| literature, kids don't need a teacher who believes in that.
| Likewise most people have the same thing as everyone else -
| but there are a few one in a million exceptions that mean we
| need to go through the entire checklist before giving the
| regular treatment even though odds are the doctor will never
| see the exception. (sometimes that is give the regular
| treatment but see you again in 2 weeks to see if it is
| working which is annoying when the doctor normally says all
| is well)
|
| There is a time for discretion. However that time is when you
| are a proper researcher looking for other treatments (under
| the watch of an ethics board), or when you have clearly
| exhausted all the normal things and they don't work
| (sometimes the checklist even says we don't know what to do
| here, try something and if it works we will adjust the
| checklist for next time.
|
| The above is how flying got to be so safe. Decades of
| examining everything that went wrong - including near misses
| - and figuring out how to prevent them. Some doctors still
| struggle to remember to properly wash their hands by
| contrast.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| postulate: the less people share
| culturally/ideologically/morally with their countrymen the more
| numerous and specific (micromanaged) the laws will become. this
| is a direct result of people not being able to navigate or
| predict expectations, or empathize with each other.
| snarfy wrote:
| 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 more metal, spikes, and other sharp things. Make
| them more dangerous, like something Sauron would drive.
| basil-rash wrote:
| 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.
| snarfy wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Drivers have not gotten more dangerous because of all those
| things though - they have stayed the same. (Larger cars are
| more dangerous - but this is about drivers)
|
| We should be training drivers more, but I don't know how to
| get nearly every adult to agree to spend several weeks a year
| in a classroom.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You just described the "rule of law" and this is the basis for
| how modern governments are formed and function
|
| A constitution is written and codifies the process for making
| ratifying and enforcing laws. That then is the common standard
| for some subset of behaviors as defined by the constitution
| which defines who it does and does not apply to. Different
| constitutions outline different processes but the structure of
| the "Rule of Law" is the same.
|
| This is in contrast to other structures like pure monarchies
| (unlike constitutional monarchies) which have a "divine"
| process for defining the structure of the governed land.
|
| What you seem to want is for civil law to be subordinated in
| favor of common law, but that simply kicks the can and doesn't
| actuall solve the problem.
|
| What's actually happening right now is that society at large is
| questioning the foundational assumptions of society. To Wit
| this is a perfect example of effectively questioning the
| foundational function of governance in the post World War II
| world while also not being aware of it apparently.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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 expect your co-workers to steal your stuff), Japan,
| Poland, and a few other countries, and many others.
|
| If that's a definition of "common law" then sure, but it
| seems like a different thing to me.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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...
| keiferski wrote:
| > has not shown to create functional long term societies
| that are resilient to exogenous threats.
|
| I don't think I agree with this. If anything, it seems
| more like the reverse: societies have been less-and-less
| willing to enforce assimilation and a certain set of
| society-wide cultural behaviors, and therefore they "fall
| back" to the rule of law as described by you.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| As a melting pot, the US takes in a lot of folks from
| countries that are not doing very well... so in a way, if
| we keep importing folks from cultures that failed without
| trying to integrate them to our culture, and instead
| celebrate their original culture, eventually our amalgam
| culture will fail just like theirs did.
|
| Its why we have signs that say to "sit, not stand on
| toilets". You dont think we would need to write it down,
| but if you import hundreds of thousands of toilet
| standers, "the norm" goes out the window.
| graemep wrote:
| Bad example. I believe squat toilets are actually better
| for you (less strain to use) so really there is a case to
| be made we (those who do not use them) should follow
| those who do.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This was not about squat toilets, but about people who
| squat on sit-down toilets, which is dangerous and dirty.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The melting pot is a way of integrating people into our
| country. It has been criticized as being too
| homogenizing; and now I think (for the better) most
| people see it as a nice lumpy stew. We shouldn't ask
| people to give up all their traditions or change
| completely to become American, it is a give and take
| communication process that we both benefit from.
|
| WRT toilets, I think it has been shown that squatting
| actually reduces the strain when using the toilet; I
| think those signs reflect the fact that we are
| integrating new toilet information. They are part of the
| natural back-and-forth pushing process. Hopefully we'll
| converge on a toilet that is lower to the ground but
| doesn't have accessibility issues.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > WRT toilets, I think it has been shown that squatting
| actually reduces the strain when using the toilet; I
| think those signs reflect the fact that we are
| integrating new toilet information. They are part of the
| natural back-and-forth pushing process. Hopefully we'll
| converge on a toilet that is lower to the ground but
| doesn't have accessibility issues.
|
| Squatting toilets are fine, maybe they are even better.
| But the signs are about people squatting with their feet
| on the toilet bowl on a sitting toilet. That is dangerous
| (the bowl can easily break from the pressure of your
| feet) and dirty (you are very likely to leave the area
| around dirty, and there are typically no ways to clean
| the outside of the bowl in typical western bathrooms).
| bee_rider wrote:
| What I wanted to highlight is that this confusion, people
| coming to the toilet with different assumptions and
| misusing it as a result, is part of the process of
| improving by integrating additional information. Sure,
| they are being misused, but the way they are being
| misused gives us a chance to reflect on how they could be
| better.
|
| If we want to be obnoxiously neutral, haha, we could just
| say there's a mismatch between the design and the user
| expectations. Maybe we could look at retrofitting some of
| these toilets with a retractable foot platform, or
| something along those lines, instead of a sign.
| kerowak wrote:
| If American culture "fails," I'm gonna blame xenophobes
| like you who are incapable of adjusting to a dynamic
| world, not the "toilet standers."
| mydogcanpurr wrote:
| Your terms are acceptable.
| monknomo wrote:
| you know that the melting pot analogy is meant to say
| that we integrate immigrant cultures into "our" culture
| by both changing the immigrant culture and the dominant
| culture. The contents of the pot as a whole are less
| changed than the individual components are.
|
| I think you may be thinking of the Candaian conception of
| a cultural mosaic.
| nearlyepic wrote:
| Go on, tell us more.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Erm, how exactly do you think we're going to educate
| people on the "normal" way of using a toilet, if it's not
| educational signs above toilets?
|
| Do you imagine some kind of toilet license? Where people
| have to take toilet train and demonstrate their
| competence in front of an examiner?
|
| Or perhaps at every border, non-citizens are given
| mandatory toilet training.
|
| Or perhaps you're gonna follow everyone into to the
| toilet and tell them how to use it correctly.
|
| Your issue is with people not learning your native
| culture, but your evidence for people not learning is
| educational material that teaches people your culture. So
| it does rather seem your problem is that your specific
| culture isn't the world wide norm.
| concordDance wrote:
| I'd like to note that the United States is in fact
| extremely good at assimilating immigrant groups and has
| done so successfully numerous times.
|
| Honestly, I see little evidence it is doing any worse at
| assimilation than in, say, the early 1900s.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> This is why the UN exists and the LON before it_
|
| Um, you do realize that the League of Nations was a
| _failure_? And that the UN, although at least it still
| exists (unlike the LON, which only lasted a decade or
| so), has not accomplished anything meaningful in terms of
| enforcing actual norms of behavior?
| tomrod wrote:
| Are you kidding? UN has had tremendous impact in the
| world.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> UN has had tremendous impact in the world_
|
| Perhaps, but if so, I think its impact is, at the very
| least, net negative, not net positive.
| stevofolife wrote:
| That's a wild statement to make about UN's
| unproductiveness in the history of its existence. I'd
| like some evidence please.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I 'd like some evidence please._
|
| Um, the state of the world today? Read the preamble of
| the UN charter and ask yourself how well the UN has
| actually done at moving the world in the direction of
| those things.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > the UN [...] has not accomplished anything meaningful
| in terms of enforcing actual norms of behavior
|
| That's because the UN isn't an actor in its own right, it
| is merely a forum through which countries can co-operate
| if they want to.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Dude. I was just listening to my taxi driver tell me
| about how the UN helped him escape from war at 14 and got
| him to this country (Norway) where he's been able to have
| a decent life. I'm not sure you know what you're talking
| about.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > accomplished anything meaningful in terms of enforcing
| actual norms of behavior?
|
| Point being that the norm in question would be "not
| having the war".
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Statutory law fits perfectly with our capitalist
| society, efficient, inflexible, uniform, quick and cheap.
| Judges and juries are expensive.
|
| This seems a bit of a false equivalence. Capitalist
| societies are the ones that are based on liberalism and
| think individuals are important - important enough to
| make companies and agreements between each other. They
| quite often are the ones that also think individuals are
| deserving of justice in and of themselves, not based on
| what group someone has put them in.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Are you not confusing democratic societies with
| capitalist ones?
|
| I mean, there's some overlap, but if we're talking about
| clumsy equivalences... :)
|
| And to be honest I see ever less intersection between
| actual current "late stage" capitalism and the "rule of
| Law". Those I know in the legal profession complain we
| are in state of "lawfare", a state in which most of the
| common principles of justice have broken down in favour
| of "justice for the rich" (I realise many Americans take
| that to be perfectly normal)
|
| How about I use the expression "greed driven societies"
| instead?
| vkou wrote:
| > This is why the UN exists
|
| To split hairs - the UN does not exist to be a world
| police (Its charter is explicitly built to ensure that it
| fails at that task).
|
| It exists to be a _forum_ for countries to talk to
| eachother. But its a purely voluntary engagement.
| mecsred wrote:
| I don't think your evidence supports your argument at
| all. Pick any consistently governed region, even one with
| regime changes. Compared to the UN, which is unable to
| affect some of the worst genocides in recorded history.
| As well as the League of Nations, an institution notable
| for accomplishing nothing. Nothing is immune to external
| threats but institutions that avoid them by doing nothing
| on critical issues are not the most inspiring examples.
|
| The rule of law is our best attempt at codifying
| _Individual_ freedoms, outside and above the power of the
| state. Definitely a noble goal, but leads to the
| observations made by the parent comment.
| verisimi wrote:
| You are describing anarchy.
|
| No leader, or force required. People just acting according
| to their consciences.
| CalChris wrote:
| But you DO have a second line of defense even in your
| culture because that sort of thing DOES happen even in your
| culture only perhaps less often.
|
| With respect to the Flipper Zero, I don't understand how
| culture solves this particular problem. I'm not sure I'd
| want to be in a culture that solved this particular problem
| a priori. I think I'd prefer to be in an imperfect Rule Of
| Law society that adapted albeit imperfectly to new problems
| as they appeared.
| zaphar wrote:
| I think what he actually described is why the rule of law is
| not a replacement for a good ethical framework that is shared
| culturally.
|
| I didn't read his post as advocating for no laws or replacing
| the legal framework. I read it as advocating for rebuilding a
| shared ethical framework for the culture.
| lainga wrote:
| And now we come to the unfortunate fact that there is no
| equivalent in English for the distinction between _Recht_ and
| _Gesetz_ , or _droit_ and _loi_ , both being subsumed under
| the term _law_. The former is an immanent thing, a "shared
| search after justice". The latter is temporal, it is written
| down and itemised in _Strafgesetzbuche_ and _Codes Civiles_ ,
| and is very appealing to HNers because we can read "common
| standard for some subset of behavior" and think "I can put
| this into a computer". But that Law is not The Law. And The
| Law is not even Society. It's something we yearn for or
| desire, and our confidence in society varies with our
| confidence that our neighbours are also yearning for it with
| us. The rule of law is a feeling, man.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Isn't this explained in the phrase "the spirit of the law"
| vs. "the letter of the law", or is there more to the
| concept.
| lainga wrote:
| I think "spirit of the law" can be interpreted as how the
| (written) law was trying to get at The Law. But even that
| spirit is not The Law. Here's an example - modern Germany
| defines itself as a _Rechtsstaat_. On the face of it this
| is a "State of the rule of law". But this fails to
| capture what distinguishes it from a hypothetical
| _Gesetzstaat_ , so Wikipedia also tries on "state of
| justice and integrity" and "constitutional state" to get
| the distinction across. And the absence of _Recht_ - a
| _Nichtrechtsstaat_ - is one "based on the arbitrary use
| of power".
|
| The historical context is that of trying to define what
| in a state should set it apart from both the 3rd Reich
| and the DDR.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat
| araes wrote:
| I suspect many Germans have varying personal
| interpretations (not being German). However,
| StackOverflow has a question/answer [1] where the most
| general answer is "right or freedom as in Recht auf freie
| Meinungsausserung being 'freedom of speech'".
|
| Otherwise, tends to represent "the encompassing scope of
| all laws" vs "the interactions of a single law."
|
| The "the spirit of the law" tends to be more like: "what
| did we believe the law was supposed to do vs what does it
| actually result in if you're a rules lawyer."
|
| Games have a lot of that with little oversight, legal
| laws tend to get publicly challenged. We made a rule
| where all the miniatures have to stand in squares, except
| now all anybody does is abuse the facing and distance
| rules.
|
| [1]
| https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/30384/what-s-
| the-...
| Thrymr wrote:
| English common law is largely not codified but the result
| of practices and precedent, and is still part of the legal
| system in most English-speaking countries, as opposed to
| continental-style civil codes that you mention which are
| more explicit. I do think that distinction exists in the
| English-speaking world.
| cactus_joe wrote:
| Perhaps what you are trying to express as "shared search
| after justice" could be thought of as a "Social Contract";
| a non-codified agreement of how society (should) co-exists,
| in context of said Society.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| 'Rule of law' is the concept that no one is above the law, as
| opposed to having a specific ruler that can do as they
| please. It doesn't really have anything to do with the
| comment you're replying to, which would be the same idea if
| it were decreed by an untouchable supreme leader.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> You just described the "rule of law"_
|
| What the article is describing is _not_ the rule of law.
|
| The rule of law would be: make theft a crime, and enforce
| that. _Not_ : criminalize the use of security research tools
| to show which vehicles are more susceptible to theft.
|
| _> What you seem to want is for civil law to be subordinated
| in favor of common law_
|
| I think what the GP poster wants is to have the law limited
| to criminalizing things that are actual crimes, like theft,
| not things that are inconvenient to the rich and powerful.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Please list all of the "actual crimes"
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| I don't remember the terms but there's a category of
| crimes that are "crimes because that's what the written
| law says"(i.e. driving without a license) and "crimes
| that morally abhorrent and actual harm to someone"(i.e.
| murder, theft)
|
| "Actual crimes" would be category 2.
|
| Building or owning a flipper zero would be in category 1.
| (As would laws that ban things like owning/carrying
| lockpicks without being a licensed locksmith)
| mindslight wrote:
| I'd say OP actually talked about two different things. The
| abstract description in the first paragraph is the rule of
| law (which I agree happened a long time ago, and is a good
| thing for a democratic society), but the concrete gripe in
| the later paragraphs is a different thing.
|
| Rather, it's something like the difference between laws
| applying to individuals who may violate normative behavior
| ("it's illegal to steal"), or whether laws (in this context
| aka "regulations") apply continuously to above board
| businesses, with the goal of a priori _preventing_ individual
| violations of normative behavior ( "it's illegal to make a
| car that can be easily stolen").
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I have to object that the _rule of law_ isn 't about the
| extent of laws and enforcement but rather about making
| whatever enforce exists systematic, fair and so-forth.
|
| The concept of rule of law never implied the replacement of
| custom with bureaucracy - although that often happens. It
| implied the replacement of the venal authority of kings and
| nobles with codified principles. Especially, as the parent
| points out, customary honesty isn't based on any enforcement
| system.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "What you seem to want is for civil law to be subordinated in
| favor of common law,"
|
| I must have missed that. I do not see them making that point.
|
| "To Wit this is a perfect example of effectively questioning
| the foundational function of governance in the post World War
| II world while also not being aware of it apparently."
|
| I don't know that I would call this a perfect example. This
| is extremely narrow and doesn't dive into many aspects of the
| relationship. I'd say it's more focused on individuals giving
| up freedoms on the notion that those freedoms don't benefit
| them personally, but could pose some harm to them if others
| are allowed to exercise them, without realizing that the same
| thoughts can be used against them in the future. More a
| tyranny of the majority than role of government discussion,
| even if somewhat related.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I... don't think what they described is "rule of law" in any
| way.
| foobarian wrote:
| The problem with rule of law is that it's like a very sloppy
| program that relies heavily on global variables. Whether it's
| the constitution or any of the million codes they all have
| implicit assumptions or vague language that requires a
| certain cultural or ethical baseline to interpret properly.
| Just the 2nd amendment is already a plenty popular example.
| enonimal wrote:
| law:
|
| prompt engineering before it was cool
| emilfihlman wrote:
| This has literally nothing to do with rule of law.
|
| Rule of law simply means that the laws of the land are
| respected and enforced (no matter what law it is). Ie
| codified rules are followed.
|
| This has nothing to do with how the rules are written or what
| they are.
| newaccount7g wrote:
| Really this a good IQ test for people. If you think anyone will
| be negatively affected by this you have a low IQ. If you can
| see this just a ploy to raise awareness of the Flipper Zero you
| have average intelligence. We get a "product is being made
| illegal OMG!" post every single hour on this site. Use context
| clues
| bee_rider wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'm a bit off-track from your point here, but to some extent I
| think it is just because there isn't anything interesting to
| say about car theft being unethical. It is, but what do we want
| to discuss? Flipper Zero is interesting to talk about because
| it's a new device and there's a bit of perceived grey-area
| around the ethics of selling it.
|
| > My theory is that this is a consequence of relativism and the
| general cultural exhaustion Western society seems to have with
| enforcing any sort of religious or ethical norms.
|
| > I really don't like the way this is going, because the end
| result is a world where limitations are hardwired into the
| environment, while at the same time you have zero ethical
| expectations of your fellow humans. It's very Hunger Games /
| Battle Royale, at a less hostile level.
|
| We've always had a strain of ruthless FYGM capitalism in the US
| (including when the country was more religious). I think that
| is what those stories are mostly criticizing?
|
| Lack of ethics is a competitive advantage to be exploited by
| some. You would think there'd be strong norms like "don't dump
| toxic waste in the river" but here we are with an EPA.
|
| So I think this isn't new. What might be new is the "I'm going
| to exploit the rules to maximum advantage" mindset becoming so
| widespread? This doesn't seem that surprising; it is the
| default mindset of powerful people after all, and as
| communication tech has gotten better everybody can see that.
| trabant00 wrote:
| We know a lot of people will behave in bad ways. We don't have
| to assume anything. We have thousands of years of experience.
| Under every possible form of ethical and religious setting
| imaginable.
|
| And then what does this have to do with the Western society?
| There's no stealing in East? Or anywhere on this planet? At
| this time or any other? And you think religious morals are
| better for a society than secular laws? Like we haven't already
| tried that and don't know how it goes. And what the hell does
| any of this have to do with some pretty stupid movies?
| necovek wrote:
| I think you have a great point, but I still subtly disagree.
| One thing free market dynamics have not established is proper
| responsibilities for failing to build stuff to specification.
|
| Tools are simply tools, and tools like Flipper Zero are
| fundamentally usable in legal scenarios.
|
| Other tools like cars come with locks that advertise providing
| some level of security: if cars fail to meet that, it is
| manufacturers' responsibility for the theft (nobody would claim
| that if a truck came by and simply towed the car away).
|
| Now, neither the buyers have effective means to choose secure
| products themselves (it requires deep knowledge or possibly
| open protocola and source code for cars), nor do the
| manufacturers worry enough about it. When markwt does not make
| things happen, you make it happen with legislation.
| verisimi wrote:
| > 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 pass laws to
| supposedly prevent that behavior from manifesting.
|
| Imo, this is part of a long-running de-individualisation
| process imo, in reverse, the 'making people governable'
| process. One writes rules that cohere with reality, more or
| less. Then one encourages others to refer to the laws rather to
| conscience. This enables what I call the 'externalisation of
| morality' as someone is now deferential to some set of laws
| that can and are changed to confer advantage to whoever is
| paying for the rules. (Eg the work done via paid lobbyists.)
|
| In this case, I assume it is easier, cheaper for car companies
| to 'illegalise' a tool, rather than take responsibility for
| their fragile product.
| hostyle wrote:
| Perhaps. Or perhaps we are just seeing push back against the
| long tail of effective corporate lobbying, where every problem
| is caused by somebody else. See: Coca Colas campaigns to
| undermine plastic recycling efforts; or Big Oil hiding their
| own research about climate change since the 1970s; or Monsanto
| spending millions trying to legally bury the long term effects
| of the chemicals in their products; or Big Tobacco doing what
| big corps do.
|
| The problem was never Flipper Zero. The problem was always
| insecure cars (and other devices). Shareholders don't care
| about security defects, they only care about the bottom line.
| Therefore spending a relatively small amount of money on
| propaganda denying all responsibility and foisting it upon
| other innocent parties is deemed a success, rather than
| spending a larger sum on fixing the real issues. Its not FUD,
| but its something similar.
| samstave wrote:
| Philosophy warning, also: (my comment is martial arts related,
| my experience, no flames, please)
|
| Your comment lit gave me goosebumps...
|
| This is fundamentally, what is being taught in my experience in
| martial arts. I've been in Budo since a teen... I have trained
| with incredible people whose understanding of movement was
| without compare. (bjj is not a martial art, its a marketing
| fraud - there is no soul in anything bjj - only idiots do bjj)
|
| If you expect a behavior from the other, youre charging that
| behavior with energy... expect is a gravity-pull. (gravity is
| thought) instead of pulling, direct - but as a gravity well,
| direction only as it applies to the flow of the other persons
| intent (their push) or expectations (their pull)... (deception
| is planting both the others' expectations (fear) & intentions
| (desire) for the resultant outcome (action).
|
| Thats where nothingness comes from, like a black hole - you
| bend light (thought) around you - only choosing to join, direct
| (push (add energy)) when it reflects your desire (vision of
| outcome)...
|
| This doesnt happen in some slow, flowy fashion, like a kata,
| mantra, or Sarah McLaughlin song...
|
| This can happen at planck scale... directed by awareness (the
| owner of thought) (the owner of the owner of thought, is the
| YOU)... (THINK) (the planck scale of awareness is what you're
| looking for, not the profundities in the universal scale -- the
| universe of awareness is available if you think like a quark)
|
| so take that to the macro, and you can easily see the imbalance
| of consciousness we have in general society - those that think
| they THINK, and those that THINK.
|
| Those that think they think, are the ones disconnected and
| controlled easily by those that think.
|
| (common masonic, esscenes, mayan, rosicruician concepts)
| cubefox wrote:
| This is rarely talked about explicitly, but if the population
| of a country (or substantial subpopulation) has a high
| propensity for crime, for cultural or other reasons, the
| country needs harsher and more pro-active crime laws. In
| countries where this is not the case, like Japan, Switzerland
| or Finland, the crime laws can be much more liberal, because
| people can readily trust each other in a society with a low
| propensity for crime.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Unfortunately, without some kind of laws or regulations it
| appears I may not be able to buy a secure car.
|
| I suppose we can all go back to installing The Club on our
| steering wheels and adding an alarm that cycles through a half-
| dozen tired sounds.
| demondemidi wrote:
| > It's designing the playground so that kids can't get hurt,
| not teaching them how to play responsibly.
|
| This basis makes enormous assumptions about humans. As we've
| seen in the past 4 years during the pandemic, adults are
| already "broken" ethically, and there will be generations of
| Americans born who think they don't have ANY responsibility,
| and parents and leaders who refuse to teach them
| responsibility.
|
| It is a US cultural cancer that I fear cannot be excised. Some
| people simply refuse to behave with the accountability
| necessary for a society to exist, that it is their natural born
| entitlement to ignore they live in a society.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It falls out naturally from game theory and the increasing
| population and complexity of society. Model these sort of
| interactions as multi-party sometimes-repeated Prisoner's
| Dilemmas. Everybody is better off if society functions in a
| high-trust way: you don't need to spend expensive resources
| ensuring compliance, and yet nobody takes unfair advantage of
| other parties. However, _if_ somebody is going to defect and
| take the pot unfairly anyway, it 's better that it's you,
| because otherwise you don't get to play another round. Under
| these scenarios it makes sense to cooperate if you have
| reasonable confidence that nobody else is going to defect.
|
| How do you get reasonable confidence? Well, one way is to
| simply have a small number of other players and play with them
| repeatedly. If you have 4-5 competitors, it's a pretty good bet
| that you will know who all of them are, and you can shut them
| out of further deals if they screw you over. Everybody knows
| this condition, and so they cooperate to preserve future
| payouts rather than defect to take the pot now. But if you have
| a million competitors, you know _somebody_ is going to defect,
| just through sheer numbers. And knowing this, your incentive is
| to have it be you, because the pot will disappear, there will
| be no future interactions, and there 's hence there's a higher
| payoff to defecting than cooperating.
|
| Same dynamic plays out in markets over and over again. If you
| have an oligopoly, you can cooperate on things like holding
| wages down or copying competitors' moves. If you're an
| unskilled laborer, you _know_ somebody else is going to come in
| and underbid you, so all you can bargain for is subsistence
| wages. If you 're buying a house and are the only buyer, you
| can name your price. If there are 4-6 other offers, you can
| afford to offer a "reasonable" price (similar to comps) and
| have a reasonable expectation nobody else will offer better. If
| you've got 13 other offers, you better bring everything you got
| because somebody else will.
|
| The phenomena is usually self-limiting, because the act of
| defecting usually destroys the trade pathways that led to the
| transaction becoming possible in the first place. If the
| Internet becomes filled with scammers, nobody will do business
| on the Internet. If all your mail is junk solicitations, you'll
| throw it all in the trash immediately. If the roads are filled
| with bandits and criminals, nobody will be able to haul goods
| to market. If war starts, productive capacity will be
| destroyed. And then little pockets of high-trust areas arise
| from people just trying to get things done in the post-collapse
| landscape, they become more successful than the low-trust
| wasteland surrounding them, their communications & commerce
| systems spread, and the cycle repeats.
|
| But this is why we can't have nice things.
| tomrod wrote:
| Oh man, I'm getting echos of political philosophy and _The City
| of God_ vs _The City of Man_. One reason I became an economist
| is because it explained things to me quite well. It is
| reasonable within economic frameworks to assume everyone is
| self interested. I 've found I'm rarely disappointed working
| with that assumption.
| graemep wrote:
| You need both. You need the majority of people to do the right
| thing, and the law to deal with the minority.
|
| The problem is that you do need to take precautions against the
| minority for some things - especially high reward (e.g. car
| theft) or high harm (assaults) in public spaces.
|
| I think there is a another problem here. How can car companies
| sell insecure vehicles? Why do people buy cars from companies
| with a track record or bad security, why do they buy cars with
| high risk systems (e.g. keyless entry), and why are those
| selling insecure cars not being made to compensate their
| customers? The problem should be fixed by the markets or the
| normal operation of the courts.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I think in the general case you're describing, it seems like
| law enforcement & strong arm politicians are generally leading
| the charge. Others pick it up from there, top down in fancy
| slogans, like law & order, tough on crime, or scare tactics
| etc. It's part of the prison industrial complex - make many
| things illegal, jail who you want, get a kickback, bonus if you
| end up disenfranchising them in the process.
|
| This specific case is closer to outlawing encryption - the
| government doesn't fully understand or care about this
| product's uses but suspects it could make it harder for them to
| do what they want.
| lucideer wrote:
| 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.
| electriclove wrote:
| It is sad that this is where our society is at. You are right,
| many do not want to discuss how car theft is fundamentally
| unethical. Many want to think that simply passing laws is a
| solution. Many laws that do not get enforced. Many do not want
| consequences or punishment for those who do unethical things.
|
| Unethical behavior will only change if there is a consequence.
| In the US, there is no consequence for many people for
| unethical behavior. Implementing consequences here is frowned
| upon.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Instead of discussing how car theft is fundamentally an
| unethical behavior,
|
| Discuss it if you want to. Do you think you will find many who
| disagrees with you? What new outcome or insight do you hope
| from that discussion?
|
| > we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible
|
| We don't assume anything. We observe what is happening. People
| do steal cares. If you want to change that you have to change
| something.
|
| > the "new method" results in a different kind of world
|
| Is it a new method? We use locks and gates and etc since before
| history began. How is this suddenly a "new method"?
| keiferski wrote:
| It's not about "disagreeing with me." The point I'm making is
| that the discussion is not about how to change this unethical
| behavior, it's merely about changing the environment to
| prevent the behavior from being possible.
|
| And yes, it is a "new method" because it's a self-reinforcing
| one. Not too long ago, it was common for people to leave
| their doors unlocked, as the idea of car theft was simply
| _not a thing_ that happened in that community. It 's still
| largely a think in many places; e.g., rural Japan.
| latexr wrote:
| > we tend to assume they will behave in the worst way possible,
| and then pass laws to supposedly prevent that behavior from
| manifesting.
|
| It seems to be a fairer assessment to say "when we see a
| concerning amount of them behaving in the worst way possible,
| we then pass laws to attempt to prevent that behavior from
| manifesting".
|
| > It's designing the playground so that kids can't get hurt,
| not teaching them how to play responsibly.
|
| Which is a great philosophy in theory, as well as in practice
| like (so I've heard from multiple sources) in Japan you being
| able to comfortably leave your belongings unattended in public
| space. It would be great if everywhere were like that, but we
| have to work with the society we live in and changing behaviour
| on a mass scale is a gargantuan task.
|
| > the "new method" results in a different kind of world than
| the previous one
|
| You described _an ideal_ , not a method. If you have specific
| suggestions on how to collectively educate people to act for
| the greater good in any given matter, I'm genuinely interested.
| We need some of that _fast_ (e.g. regarding climate change).
|
| I'm skeptical we can achieve those necessary urgent goals
| without any policies, but I'd welcome being wrong.
| gumby wrote:
| We have long operated this way. Banks have security guards even
| though there are laws against theft. Greengrocers often have
| fresh fruit outside with no way to stop people from grabbing
| some and running off.
|
| It's simply the way of the world. I don't believe it's change
| materially, except to the degree that the ability to self
| defend (e.g. better locks) and to identify miscreants (e.g.
| cameras) has improved.
|
| I do feel that there are more private security guards than
| there used to be but when I watch old movies I'm not sure my
| impression is correct.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Another way to frame it (IMHO) might be not to think of laws as
| a deterrent - especially because people break them anyway. The
| law codifies what circumstances the government can and cannot
| restrict your rights. Codifying this serves 2 primary purposes.
| It informs people in advance what is allowable so people cannot
| be arbitrarily arrested for doing things they don't know is
| illegal. Secondly it prescribes the penalty for that behavior
| so that in extreme cases we can remove a person that insists on
| that behavior. If there is no law prohibiting a behavior the
| gov't effectively cannot do anything about it. I see laws as
| only being useful after the crime has occurred.
|
| Yes this system gets gamed and abused. Curbing that requires
| constant effort just as deciding what laws need to be codified
| is a ongoing process.
| petsfed wrote:
| And one of the core questions to be answered when prescribing
| how and when the government can restrict your rights is
| "which is the worse outcome for society as a whole?"
|
| The question of abortion really crystallizes this question
| perfectly for me: Which is worse? That a small number of
| people use infanticide in lieu of pro-active birth control?
| Or that a small number of people are forced to carry a
| nonviable pregnancy to term (even at the cost of their own
| life), or carry and raise a reminder of their rape (up to and
| including providing visitation/custody to their rapist)?
|
| There's a reason this is so controversial, and its because
| people (rightly) can't agree on which outcome society must
| necessarily be an accessory to.
| Levitating wrote:
| If crime is economically possible, it will exist. With a
| society large enough, statistically some people will fit the
| persona needed to be a criminal.
| darepublic wrote:
| Thank you for this comment. I've had some similar thoughts and
| it's comforting to know that some people out there at least
| think like mindedly. Recently on my city they have been rolling
| out myriad automated speed cameras and red light cameras and my
| feeling about them is quite mixed. I feel like it's trying to
| create a world in which all infractions are flagged
| automatically without need for subjective judgement. Many
| people laud this kind of so called justice but I am quite
| concerned about it.
| nostromo wrote:
| This is related to high-trust and low-trust societies.
|
| In a high-trust society, norms prevail and in general you can
| expect a certain level of treatment from everyone: your
| government, your employer, your neighbor, and the person next
| to you on the train.
|
| In a low-trust society there is no guarantee of norms being
| universal, so you rely on physical security, contracts,
| lawyers, and law enforcement to enforce standards of behavior.
|
| Low-trust societies are very taxing. Every transaction is an
| opportunity to be scammed. Every unlocked door is an
| opportunity to be robbed. It forces everyone to be highly
| defensive about everything.
|
| The US has always been somewhere in the middle, compared to
| high-trust countries like Japan, and low trust countries like
| South Africa -- but it definitely has regressed to lower-trust.
| And part of that regression means that more norms have to be
| encoded as actual laws to maintain order.
| WWLink wrote:
| I'd argue that it went higher trust? If you look back at
| labor law history, for example... or read a book like the
| grapes of wrath....
|
| There are interesting localized extremes. Like you can find
| small family farms that have 'self service shops' on a shed
| next to the road they're on. They rely totally on the honor
| system and afaik theft is minimal enough that they don't
| worry about it. Then you have places where you can park a car
| and someone will immediately break into it to steal 50 cents
| out of the cupholder lol.
| toss1 wrote:
| Great concept.
|
| But the reality is that there _IS_ , and likely always will be
| (short of wholesale genetic engineering of the race), a
| significant portion of the population that _WILL_ act as you
| describe -- i.e., have zero ethical boundaries and will behave
| according to whatever they can get away with.
|
| The prevalence of psychopathy in the general population is
| about 4.5% [0], so about one in 20 will be entirely immune to
| any ethical expectations.
|
| Moreover, up to 30% [1] have significant tendencies including
| low empathy and remorse, grandiosity, impulsivity, and/or
| aggressive or violent behavior.
|
| So, the large majority, around 70-85% of the population will
| indeed be subject to, and indeed welcome a society primarily
| based on high ethical expectations.
|
| However, a far too large minority will be immune to ethical
| expectations and will relentlessly prey on that majority.
|
| Simply put, your idea is wonderful, but does not match reality,
| and would fail badly in practice.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8374040/
|
| [1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy
| karaterobot wrote:
| I agree that Flipper shouldn't be banned in Canada, but I think
| the headline won't help them make their case. For many reasons,
| it's easier for people to support banning a device they don't
| personally care about than it is to call for millions of cars on
| the road to be made illegal, or for instituting new regulations
| on an industry with entrenched lobbyists. If the option you are
| presenting is to ban the Flipper (easy, painless) or turn the
| auto industry on its head (hard, painful) guess what they're
| going to do? The option you want to present is between going
| through a lot of work to ban a device that is ultimately
| harmless, and not doing any extra work and letting it go.
| alfnor wrote:
| You mean like how fentanyl is a banned substance so nobody
| sell- oh wait...
| greesil wrote:
| This could be solved easily by insurance companies
| iwontberude wrote:
| Or maybe we don't ban anything?
| uconnectlol wrote:
| correct, someone says something right for once. also vehicle
| theft will happen no matter what since they have _physical
| access_ to your vehicle. scammy, scummy, corporate pitches like
| "you just press this button and it opens for you" with zero
| research on how to implement that securely (even thought it was
| known in the 70s), which just make the hacker be able to press a
| button and open it, are not anyone's problem aside from the clout
| chasing consumer "who doesn't have time" to research any
| "sophisticated tech" he buys, and the corporation. consumers
| should know by now that "smart tech" = a teenager can hack it.
| bitslayer wrote:
| In Richard Feynman's book, "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!" he
| tells the story of his exploits in safe cracking. And the
| eventual "solution" that the bosses come up with... not to make
| their safes safer, but to ban Feynman.
| moose44 wrote:
| Is this not the same argument with gun control?
| alfnor wrote:
| And same counter-argument: those who are more likely to abuse
| tools are less likely to care about the legal status of said
| tool (they will illegally import or DIY the tools).
| superkuh wrote:
| Stop computerizing vehicles. Computerized vehicles are so bad in
| so many ways.
| nicklo wrote:
| This is not a tenable position. Most cars are older than these
| devices- and even big tech co's like Apple were late to patch
| flipper vulnerabilities. I was on a plane last month and someone
| was flipper-jamming DOS-ing via continual bluetooth connection
| requests and completely bricked all iOS devices in range for the
| 4 hour flight.
|
| These sort of devices are nuisances with very low positive
| utility, and there is plenty of precedence for banning them.
| macromagnon wrote:
| There's a conflict of interest on the part of car manufacturers,
| if insurance just pays out and they get to do another sale,
| they're happy that your car got stolen.
|
| Also, I agree with the main point of the article, but it
| shouldn't be so easy for any 16yo Tom, Dick or Harry to buy a
| gadget and start stealing cars. If it's so easy to make with off
| the shelf parts, then let the 'security experts' create their
| own.
|
| Consumers need to be educated about keeping their keys away from
| doors/in a faraday cage.
| rjmunro wrote:
| If insurance pays out often enough that this might actually
| work as a sales tactic, they don't get another sale, everyone
| goes to another manufacturer because insurance is so expensive.
|
| Also most car dealers make more profit from ongoing maintenance
| and servicing than selling you a new car.
| kube-system wrote:
| Banning either is silly. Locks on things in the physical world
| can only be a deterrent because physical objects are subject to
| much easier brute force attacks than a problem in the digital
| world is. If you forced automakers to make their digital keys
| more secure, it wouldn't improve security, because you could
| still winch the whole car on to a rental trailer in 30 seconds.
|
| The Kia Boys notwithstanding, basically all cars that are stolen
| these days are either stolen with the keys, or towed.
| fragmede wrote:
| Replay and CANbus attacks are easy enough that I don't think
| that's the case.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vIrqKRIUCiE
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E3lkT9Fa1lA
| kube-system wrote:
| Those are way harder than this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgs3LCp1F3I
|
| And in major metro areas of the US, crime rings targeting
| newer cars for export, have just started using tow trucks.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Banning Flipper in an effort to prevent car theft is like banning
| blank keys in an effort to prevent burglaries.
| tinted_knight wrote:
| Yeah, let 99% of honest people suffer to prevent the potential
| risk from the actions of 1%. Why bother with educating and
| raising people, why rethink the work of the police and the state.
| Let's just ban.
| davej wrote:
| Ultra Wideband (UWB) is the solution for keyless entry and
| regulators should make it a requirement that new cars use it if
| they want to support keyless entry.
|
| Tesla just rolled out an OTA update to support UWB. It uses Time-
| of-Flight (ToF) Measurement to calculate distance which is much
| more secure than simply using signal strength.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Why don't cars have security ratings just like they have safety
| ratings? Surely publicizing failing scores across the board would
| encourage them thi improve so they can advertise as being better
| than the rest.
| smalu wrote:
| It is funny since there are devices other than Flipper Zero which
| are designed specifically for stealing cars with key-less systems
| AKA "SOS opening" and they come in GameBoy-like enclose. Keywords
| - "SOS Autokeys Bulgaria".
| 14 wrote:
| Here is my favorite YouTube lawyer Ian Runkle a Canadian firearms
| and criminal defence lawyer discussing the flipper zero. This guy
| is very enjoyable to watch in all his videos highly recommended.
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=djqKqr-qh8c
| tonymet wrote:
| If you arrest and convict car thieves you may be accused of
| discrimination. If you ban FlipperZero you can pretend to be
| addressing the problem with no such risk
| crorella wrote:
| If anything they should promote the commercialization of these
| type of devices so the cars and other tech products get safer.
| They are just trying to hide the real issue.
| glitchc wrote:
| I've always disliked keyfobs. They felt like an insecure
| replacement for keys, especially after so much effort went into
| tumblers and other security measures designed to prevent hot-
| wiring. It's extremely difficult if not impossible to hot-wire a
| modern car. And yet we throw all of that innovation away for
| what, convenience?
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| My car has keyless entry but does not have the push button to
| start. You still need to put in the physical key and turn the
| ignition. My car has been broken into but without damage. They
| rummaged through stuff and took some random things but we keep
| nothing of value in the car. I'm not sure how they broke in but
| I've seen videos[1] online on how a tow service can get your car
| door open using an air-wedge. Maybe they did that, maybe they
| used something that repeated the key fob signal, not sure. But
| I'm glad that my car still needs a physical key. I'm not looking
| forward to the day when I need to get a new car and all that is
| available is keyless start. I'd happily go back to needing a key
| for everything, even the doors.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEMzTDiXC6A
| rootusrootus wrote:
| There is very little distinction between your physical key and
| a pushbutton. When you turn the key, it's just pushing a button
| internally that does the same as a button you'd hit with your
| finger. Few cars these days have any kind of direct connection
| between the ignition key and the starter.
| cubefox wrote:
| There is a real danger of "victim blaming" here. A similar thing
| occurred recently for the South Korean car makers Kia and
| Hyundai, which experienced soaring car thefts in the US due to
| relatively low car security standards and the high US crime rate.
| Some US American journalists, politicians [0] and judges [1]
| blamed the car makers for the steeply rising car thefts.
|
| However, these manufacturers come from a country where there are
| much fewer car thefts than in the US and where these cars didn't
| cause a comparable theft problem. The people blaming Kia and
| Hyundai would have been well-advised to identify at least as a
| major part of the problem the US-specific crime rate, not just
| the South Korean car manufacturers which weren't sufficiently
| adapted to to this crime.
|
| It's kind of similar to a young naive woman from South Korea
| doing her vacation in the US, and walking home at night, alone
| through a dark park in a shady neighborhood. A thing she could
| expect to safely do in South Korea. But in the US, the worst
| thing happens. Who is to blame? The women may bear some part of
| the responsibility by wrongly assuming the US is as safe as South
| Korea. But I think it's clear the main fault lies with the US
| criminals, not the victim.
|
| People easily get used to things like that and don't notice it.
| Until they travel to a country where very different things are
| normal, and get a culture shock.
|
| [0] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/hyundai-kia-stolen-car-
| thef...
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/hyunda...
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Let's suppose that hypothetically the Flipper Zero could be
| banned...
|
| OK, so then what about the (Texas Instruments) TI CC1101 rf
| (Radio Frequency) Transceiver chip/IC that powers it?
|
| Is whoever is going to ban the Flipper Zero also going to ban the
| TI CC1101 rf transceiver chip?
|
| Because if they don't -- then many other clones of the Flipper
| Zero can and probably will exist in the future...
|
| OK, but let's take things a step further...
|
| Let's suppose that whoever is trying to ban the Flipper Zero --
| is able to ban the Flipper Zero _AND_ the TI CC1101 rf
| transceiver chip that powers it!
|
| OK. So what about all of the other rf transceiver chips that
| exist?
|
| Is whoever is going to ban the Flipper Zero -- going to also ban
| ALL other transciever rf chips?
|
| But let's take things a step further...
|
| Let's suppose that whoever wants to ban the Flipper Zero -- also
| is able to successfully ban ALL transciever rf chips! (Highly
| unlikely, since many are used in highly popular consumer products
| including but not limited to Routers, Smart TVs and Cell Phones!)
|
| But let's suppose they could pull that one off...
|
| OK, so now the next question is (to the party or parties that
| wish to ban the Flipper Zero!), if you can successfully ban all
| of the rf transciever chips, then can you ban all non-IC based
| radio circuits?
|
| You know, like analog electronic radio circuits, capacitors,
| coils, antennas, stuff like that?
|
| Can you ban all of it at the same time?
|
| ?
|
| But let's even go a step further... let's suppose whoever wants
| to ban the Flipper Zero -- bans it, and also successfully bans
| all rf transciever IC's, and all analog radio circuits, and all
| previously analog electronic parts for making a radio circuit...
|
| OK, so final question (to whomever would wish to ban the Flipper
| Zero!):
|
| Can you ban all of the electrons, which flow through wires, which
| could be used in creating radio circuits?
|
| To accomplish this, you'd need to ban all batteries, all power
| lines, and all generators! (Highly unlikely, because power in is
| various forms creates transactions which in turn create taxes
| which in turn fuel local, regional, state and country
| governments!)
|
| So -- good luck with all of that!
|
| I myself would never use a Flipper Zero for unlawful purposes (if
| I possesed one), and I would never drive a car which could be rf
| hacked by a Flipper Zero or other rf device on the other side of
| things.
|
| In other words, both sides of the argument are stupid.
|
| A person could probably kill someone else with a pillow, a roll
| of paper towels, or some other incredibly soft object, "never
| before did we think that it could be used as a murder weapon"
| item (George Carlin: "You could probably kill a guy with the
| Sunday New York times by beating him to death with it if you were
| so inclined")-- but we don't pass laws banning those items
| because of an isolated case of misuse!
|
| Heck, now that I think about it, someone could probably kill
| someone else with a _single roll of the softest toilet paper_ --
| if they really put their mind to it!
|
| But we don't pass laws banning ultra-soft Charmin(tm), now do we?
| ("A gang of 12 or 13 year old youths used it to murder their
| parents -- so it must be banned!" :-) )
|
| ?
|
| Point is, there are some really stupid arguments being advanced
| here...
| jedberg wrote:
| All cars are insecure but what the government should be doing is
| forcing auto makers to allow customers to install their own
| security add-ons.
|
| Car manufacturers are now locking down the OBDC ports because
| people were using them to add functionality to the car that they
| want you to pay for, like 3rd party adaptive cruise control. But
| this also prevents you from adding your own security.
|
| They also fail to encrypt security systems but block you from
| replacing them with encrypted versions.
|
| They claim they do it "for safety", and while there is some merit
| to that, they are drawing the line way to far in the "we make
| money at the expense of your security and customizability"
| direction.
| happiness_idx wrote:
| All I am reading is, big corporation should be held responsible
| but not maladjusted individuals whomst purchased a $50 hacking
| tool online. Seems like BOTH is the solution here.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Hypothetical: Should I be allowed to sell a magical device that
| unlocks any phone, car, safe, computer, etc?
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I admired the Flipper Zero, but it's not something I have skills
| to exploit. Canada banning them ensured my order. It was in the
| mail on the day that I saw an article about the USA considering a
| ban. It's on my desk. I have no use for it. But I damn sure made
| sure I'd get one before I couldn't.
|
| What a lousy reason to buy something. It makes me feel shitty
| about the world.
| fragmede wrote:
| Can you actually use a FlipperZero to steal a car though? There's
| aftermarket firmwares which unlocks additional capabilities, but
| as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been a break in car fob
| encryption that would actually let you use a FlipperZero to steal
| a car without having the key in the first place, at which point
| you could just use the key.
| myself248 wrote:
| If the environment can be presumed to contain at least one wolf,
| then building houses out of straw and sticks is considered
| negligent and lazy pigs deserve to get eaten.
|
| Responsible pigs who build from brick, sacrificing some profit in
| the name of security, are celebrated for their sound judgment and
| foresight.
|
| A fairy tale has been telling us this for at least 200 years and
| probably much longer, history is unclear on how far back it goes.
|
| It's amazing seeing this thread take the side of the negligent
| lazy pig. "But my thousand-dependency framework is mostly made of
| straw!", they say. "My boss won't give me time to even use
| sticks, much less brick!", they say. "It has to be this way!",
| they say.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's not about lazy people versus diligent people, though. The
| companies are blaming the wolves, and arguing that they don't
| need to fix the issues since only the wolves threaten us (right
| now). _That_ is a bad security model, and with or without
| Flipper Zero it will fail.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The argument for the Flipper Zero is that it's an independent
| building inspector.
|
| People are being sold houses where the builder says they're
| made of brick, and if not for this product, the pigs might live
| in a house believing it's brick until a wolf blows it down and
| reveals a thin layer of stucco over straw.
|
| The home sellers are saying "but wolves and building inspectors
| alike can use this tool to blow down houses!" (porcine building
| inspector use rather crude inspection methods). But it would be
| irrelevant if the houses were made of brick and not straw.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| An overpriced script-kiddie tool developed by russians launches a
| marketing campaign as a small market hands them the gift of
| making them seem like a relevant tool for criminals by banning
| it.
|
| Did I miss anything?
| dang wrote:
| You may have missed the HN guidelines which ask you not to be
| snarky, not to cross-examine, and not to post in the flamewar
| style.
|
| Could you please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the
| intended spirit of this site more to heart? We'd appreciate it.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Obviously, this is the answer. Make the manufacturers simply
| recall their cars and fix this easy exploit.
|
| However it won't happen because politicians are in the pocket of
| big industry, and also banning a flipper zero makes them look
| good with almost no political capital expended (a quick win).
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| i will lmao if it gets banned. there is no secret sauce to these
| devices
| _heimdall wrote:
| We don't necessarily need yet another pile of laws and
| regulations here. If consumers want secure vehicles they should
| prioritize buying vehicles that don't offer internet icon necked
| features.
|
| Its crazy that most consumers prioritize convenience and novelty
| above all else then turn around and demand even more government
| authority to protect them from features that aren't needed in the
| first place.
|
| I 100% agree with the author's argument that banning security
| research is a bad idea, but no matter how much research is done
| we can never guarantee consumers that their vehicle can't be
| taken over. If you can unlock and start your car from your phone
| there is always a possibility of attack. Period.
| kazinator wrote:
| I don't agree with the logic of their argumentation. It reads a
| little bit like this:
|
| "Lock-picking tools are based on metal stick technology. If you
| ban possession of lock-picking tools, you will hamper the entire
| economy of tools based on metal sticks: everything from
| screwdrivers to knives to scissors. Instead, you should ban all
| entrance doors that are not of bank vault pedigree."
|
| (Which is not to say that I agree with criminalizing the
| activities of genuine security researchers, while giving a free
| pass to bad security. I'm only remarking on the form of
| argumentation in the article.)
| Zak wrote:
| I agree with their logic and would generally agree with its
| conclusion when applied to other technology, including lock
| picking tools. As an aside, criminals rarely use those;
| burglars are more likely to use a crowbar or hammer.
|
| Lock picking tools are not banned in most jurisdictions. In
| some cases, carrying them in public combined with some other
| evidence of intent to commit burglary could be a crime, but
| that's also true of a crowbar, hammer, rock, or anything else
| that could be used to gain entry.
| schaefer wrote:
| I have a younger brother that recently bought a Kia as his first
| car. It's been broken into 3 times in less than a of ownership
| year.
|
| Kia sent him a cheep "Club style" steering wheel lock... -- From
| my perspective, getting stuck with this lemon will significantly
| compromise his quality of life and finances for years to come.
|
| Where are our consumer protections? Kia should be on the hook for
| fixing the problem or buying back the vehicle at cost.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Unfortunately, the only consumer protection for this is in the
| form of brand reputation. Even before this incident, I would've
| never bought a Kia (or a Hyundai).
| ggreer wrote:
| It's been broken into three times or it's been stolen three
| times? Because any car is easily broken into. Just smash a
| window.
|
| South Korea's car theft rate is 5.3 per 100,000 per year. In
| the US it's 282. Canada is 217. Fewer cars had immobilizers a
| decade ago but theft rates were lower then. The main reason why
| car theft is higher is because of car thieves.
| sesm wrote:
| I want to own an insecure vehicle that is also so
| cheap/old/damaged, that it's not worth stealing. Should I be
| allowed to do that?
| jbombadil wrote:
| There are cars where the security is trivial to bypass. Create a
| list of those make/models. 1) Raise insurance premium on those
| models. 2) Force dealers that every time they sell such a car,
| they must get a signature from the buyer on a piece of paper that
| says "I recognize that the security of this car is borderline non
| existent and I will be paying a lot more in insurance because my
| car is trivial to steal".
|
| Grandfather in people who already have such make models or give
| some time to manufacturers to improve security.
| Oras wrote:
| You know there is a manufacturer who doesn't offer insurance to
| their own cars. I don't think it has stoped people from buying
|
| https://youtu.be/RCR-5-rf3MM?si=0vFozL7NKMC14NB2
|
| 00:29
| jbombadil wrote:
| Lol.
|
| I don't think that'd even be an issue. A manufacturer
| wouldn't be allowed to offer insurance directly to customers
| in Canada. At least in BC there are mandatory insurance
| through ICBC.
|
| So if the intent of the government is to increase security,
| make those cars less appealing by making them more expensive.
| betimsl wrote:
| Thank God I have an account so I can say this:
|
| This is the most funny thing I've read in a while. Thanks for
| writing it man -- wiping tears.
| speransky wrote:
| for me the issue us flipper team itself, not a device. they are
| ruzzianz, buying this device directly or indirectly supports
| criminal regime
| gepeto42 wrote:
| One of the authors here. Someone just told me we were on the
| HackerNews front page, made me happy we just went with a static
| website on GitHub pages.
|
| I will go through the comments later, but for now, if you are
| Canadian, please get in touch with your MPs.
|
| I am working with some media as well for additional coverage in
| the next week, but if you know Canadian journalists that might be
| interested in this, please get in touch with them, educate them
| directly if you want or send them to me (my LinkedIn is in the
| signatures, the first two names in bold = authors).
|
| Thanks for helping this story reach more people.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The childishness of this headline is something else. People who
| like 'security tools' feel entitled to demand everyone else
| exhaust themselves in a never ending security arms race.
|
| Here's a compromise; things like Flipper Zero stay legal, but if
| you get caught with one, you're treated the same way as someone
| walking around with a crowbar.
| topspin wrote:
| I had exactly the opposite reaction. Tools like flipper zero
| are trivial. Banning these make as much sense as banning the
| next designer drug. Yet that's the idiocy we default to, and
| the logical conclusion is the "War On Electronics."
|
| Manufacturers have been reckless, featurizing their products
| and ignoring basic expectations of their customers. It isn't
| unreasonable to expect that some low life knucklehead can't
| just toy with your car for a minute using a ~$5 transceiver and
| drive way without so much as an alarm going off.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't disagree with the premise that car manufacturers
| should do better, but the same people that insist messing
| around with a Flipper Zero is Serious Business tend to be the
| same people who say regulation of things like vehicle
| standards and an unwelcome interference with the free market.
| I stand by my claim that the headline reflects a childish
| mindset instead of looking at both sides of the issue.
| topspin wrote:
| > the headline reflects a childish mindset
|
| The mature mindset being the frictionless acceptance of new
| laws to empower more minders and more law enforcement to
| utterly fail at preventing new "crime."
|
| Understood.
| fargle wrote:
| stupid on stupid.
|
| - it's incredibly stupid to ban the flipper zero because it's
| factually not even part of the problem
|
| - but it's equally stupid to "ban insecure vehicles". if kia
| makes a cheap car with crappy locks either don't buy it (because
| maybe insurance) or _add and aftermarket immobilizer_ or a
| steering wheel lock. if it was really negligent of kia to "save
| a couple bucks", then it's equally negligent on you for not
| spending a couple bucks.
|
| - i also cringe at the idea that we throw the word negligent
| around when talking about failing to prevent other peoples
| crimes. i'm not negligent for not doing _enough_ to prevent the
| crimes of some other asshole. nor is kia. meanwhile, there 's
| sibling threads here that point out that the us is far to hard on
| the criminals. so wait - kia and me and other law abiding
| entities are "negligent", but the asshole who stole the car
| deserves compasion, etc.?
|
| - it's stupid-on-stupid-on-stupid to sit here discussing the
| problem of car thefts, caused by lack of enforcement of the
| existing laws against it, and the proposed solutions is making
| more things illegal (and arguing about which things).
| grubbs wrote:
| The last point is a hard one when the perpetrator is a 11 year
| old kid who watched a TikTok video online on how to steal a
| Kia/Hyundai.
| foxyv wrote:
| The problem occurs when a vendor makes claims that are false or
| fails to disclose known issues. I don't think either insecure
| cars or security tools should be banned. However, I think
| disclosures should absolutely be made.
| rmauge wrote:
| Ignoring the strawman of an assailant deserving compassion or
| not, that's a self serving and narrow definition of negligence.
| Any mechanism to protect from misuse has to weighed against the
| magnitude harm of the event occurring and the possibility of
| misuse. I would not expect my asset manager to have weak
| authentication systems to access my portfolio but don't expect
| any at all from a free online game. I expect both of these to
| consider the threats and make reasonable choices. And they
| would be negligent if they did not do this exercise. Whether is
| an active threat or a passive act of god.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| Tik-Tok-inspired Kia thefts weren't a problem in Canada because
| they've required immobilizers since 2007, something Kia skimped
| on for the US market.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Ok? That doesn't make it Kia's fault. It's the fault of the
| person who steals it. Every single time.
|
| If I left a million dollars out on my front porch, and
| someone stole it, that would not be my fault in any sort of
| way, it would not be the U.S. Treasury's fault in any sort of
| way for designing easily stealable money, it is the fault of
| absolutely nobody except for the person who stole it. That's
| all there is to it. Anything else is nothing short of victim
| blaming.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Nominally, you are correct, but if we can collectively make
| decisions that decrease the risk of theft, is it not
| immoral bot to take action?
| franga2000 wrote:
| The manufacturer is not the victim here, the buyer is. If I
| pay a contractor to install a new door and lock on my
| apartment and it turns out they did a terrible job which
| made it trivial for a thief to break in, the contractor
| should be liable.
|
| Crime exists, this is the world we live in. Failing to
| implement even the most basic security measure, which is
| considered industry standard, in a high-value product that
| is known to be very attractive to thieves and then selling
| that product to consumers with no warning that "unlike most
| other cars on the market, which have many layers of
| security features, this car can be stolen using a cheap
| toy" makes the inevitable thefts absolutely Kia's fault.
|
| It's not like people are saying the thieves did nothing
| wrong, both sides are at fault: the thieves stole people's
| cars to enrich themselves and Kia secretly omitted a basic
| security feature which in turn enabled thousands of fully
| predictable and preventable thefts from their customers,
| again, to enrich themselves.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Failing to implement even the most basic security
| measure, which is considered industry standard, in a
| high-value product that is known to be very attractive to
| thieves and then selling that product to consumers with
| no warning that "unlike most other cars on the market,
| which have many layers of security features, this car can
| be stolen using a cheap toy" makes the inevitable thefts
| absolutely Kia's fault.
|
| I don't think this logic works. If you buy a classic
| vehicle, they don't have these kinds of things either.
| People make replicas that likewise don't. And there is no
| clear line here. Basically any car can be stolen by, if
| nothing else, replacing the car's computer with one that
| accepts the thief's key.
|
| Meanwhile a car is a large purchase where people can
| reasonably be expected to do some research. If you're
| about to buy a car you should read some reviews, and the
| reviewers should tell you if their security is bad. Then
| you know and can make your decision. People who learn of
| this may want to buy a different car, or take some other
| countermeasures if they buy this one.
|
| Kia doesn't have any kind of a monopoly in this market.
| There are many other carmakers. Maybe you don't care that
| their security is bad because you always park your car in
| a garage. Maybe you like the discount you got because
| other buyers wanted a car with better security. Why does
| it have to be illegal, instead of letting the market sort
| it out in the presence of actual competition?
| filoleg wrote:
| > If you buy a classic vehicle, they don't have these
| kinds of things either
|
| Not a good analogy, because buying a classic vehicle
| automatically waives a bunch of safety and other features
| that are not only expected in modern day, they are
| straight up legally required.
|
| A car manufacturer cannot remake a classic vehicle from
| the 80s and release it in the US in 2024. Or, probably,
| EU too, I cannot speak for that due to my unfamiliarity
| with vehicle laws there, but afaik they are more strict
| than the US. It would be just illegal to sell that car.
| Thin pillars that won't pass any modern safety tests, no
| backup camera (which makes it illegal to sell as a new
| car in the US), not enoug crumple zones, etc.
| franga2000 wrote:
| This all assumes the "perfect information, even playing
| field" theory that capitalists love to use but is
| completely unrealistic.
|
| Reviews rarely talk about things like this, this
| information is not explicitly given to reviewers or
| customers and neither can be expected to find out on
| their own (i.e. by trying to hack the car themselves),
| the car manufacturer spends insane amounts of money
| advertising to the buyer using every psychological trick
| in the book, the buyer is often under time pressure, the
| savings from cost-cutting are rarely passed down to the
| consumer...
|
| Buying things in the current market landscape is a
| battle, not an optimization problem.
| deepsun wrote:
| Just use "passw0rd" everywhere. It's the fault of a hacker
| who steals your account, not your fault. Every single time.
|
| Especially that no security is absolute. Effort matters.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| You are conflating "what's right" and "how the world
| actually works".
|
| Trust me. I have similar issues, to a clinical level, in
| fact.
|
| Does this sound familiar?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive_
| p...
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > If I left a million dollars out on my front porch, and
| someone stole it, that would not be my fault in any sort of
| way
|
| It's possible for multiple people to share the blame for
| something. You _are_ the victim. The person who stole it
| _is_ the bad guy / criminal. But you _both_ share the
| blame, because you did something to put yourself at risk
| when you had better options.
|
| If I'm out late at night, wearing expensive jewelry and
| have 2 ways home; one longer but down a well lit road, the
| other shorter but through a dark alley in a crime ridden
| neighborhood; and I chose the dark alley and got mugged...
| I would be the victim AND be partially to blame for making
| a stupid choice.
|
| Making choices that put yourself at risk by ignoring the
| realities of the world, when you don't need to, mean you
| share the blame.
| madmountaingoat wrote:
| So you're saying that women wearing sexy clothing are to
| blame for rape?
| elzbardico wrote:
| apparently, only on dark alleys at night.
| whycome wrote:
| Let's say a hardware exploit for iPhones becomes obvious and is
| spread through social media. Something absurd like "attaching a
| shorted iphone cable".
|
| Are you going to be the first to buy an add-on lock or
| immobilizer? And everyone should also have to purchase an add-
| on?
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| >And everyone should also have to purchase an add-on?
|
| Yes!
|
| -Apple
| badgersnake wrote:
| When the iPhone 4 came out and antennagate happened, they
| gave everyone a plastic case for free.
| jrockway wrote:
| I'd expect Apple to refund the cost of the phone and mail a
| box to send the faulty device in for recycling.
|
| Making a defective product should not be free.
| rale00 wrote:
| > if kia makes a cheap car with crappy locks either don't buy
| it
|
| Immobilizers were a standard feature on cars for decades. If
| you went to buy a car, no one was putting immobilizer on the
| list of features, and they certainly wouldn't let you try
| breaking the ignition lock on a test drive.
|
| If they had advertised that their vehicles were insecure, then
| sure, it's on the buyer, but they didn't.
| FerretFred wrote:
| How about Jaguar Land Rover making expensive cars with
| allegedly crappy locks? https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-
| news/range-rover-owners-str...
| jjav wrote:
| Indeed, it is dumb to ban anything.
|
| A tool is a tool, it doesn't make the product weak, it already
| was.
|
| Also it is silly to ban insecure cars, that's quite the
| slippery slope. If the cars are too easy to steal insurance
| will increase accordingly and that will provide incentives to
| fix that without banning anything.
| WWLink wrote:
| Hrmm I wonder what would happen if I made a bank that used an
| unencrypted website for online banking lol.
|
| The problem with your solution here where the insurance
| company raises rates... yea they already did that with
| regards to Kia/Hyundai cars and Kia Boyz thefts. The problem
| is, well, put it this way...
|
| The last time you bought a car, did you check that the car
| had immobilizer software/hardware present on it? They don't
| really advertise that stuff anymore. About the only way you'd
| know on some brands is a nondescript red dot that shows up
| for a moment when you start the ignition.
|
| Really, I'd bet a lot of people only found out their car
| didn't have an immobilizer feature until their insurance
| company dropped them or jacked their rates up... and that's a
| problem. See, you can buy a car NOW, and everyone thinks it's
| a good safe car.. until it turns out it wasn't.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Sure "don't ban anything", if your car crashes and kills you,
| "should have read Consumers' Reports". Those botulism eggs?
| Keep an eye things, damn it. /s
|
| This ill-informed attitude goes over well here unfortunately.
|
| And security may not be quite as pressing safety but poor
| security cost _society_ besides costing the individual. When
| poor workers can 't get to work 'cause stolen car, their bosses
| also suffer, when stolen cars are used in further you also get
| a social cost. etc.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > i'm not negligent for not doing enough to prevent the crimes
| of some other asshole.
|
| If you entire job is selling locks and they don't prevent
| crime, then it's not negligent, it's fraudulent.
|
| You want to be in the clear? Sell a car without a lock, see how
| many people buy that.
|
| > if kia makes a cheap car with crappy locks either don't buy
| it
|
| And if Boeing makes a cheap, unsafe plane, don't fly on it
|
| I would be happy to run this experiment if lying to a customer
| about safety/properties of your product led to capital
| punishment. But currently companies will simply defraud you by
| lying about their product, and suffer no consequence
| bachmann1234 wrote:
| Seems like most everyone here is ignoring that the flipper is not
| even an effective tool for car theft. It's capabilities have been
| exaggerated by staged videos.
|
| You would have to get access to the original fob. Activate it
| near the flipper but out of range of the car. At which
| point...yes. You get one chance to unlock the original car which
| you lose if the original fob is used before you get there. Oh and
| then you gotta start it?
|
| I don't know man. I feel like real car thieves use better tools
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > Security tools like Flipper Zero are essentially programmable
| radios, known as Software Defined Radios (SDRs)
|
| The Flipper Zero is not a SDR, it is less capable than that.
|
| That's the ironic part, the Flipper Zero is a rather weak hacking
| tool.
|
| It can open car doors, but it is so impractical that it is not
| much more than a party trick. You have to record the code by
| pressing the button on the keyfob out of range of the car and in
| range of the Flipper. You can then open the door to the car,
| once, and only if the owner didn't open it first. There is a more
| advanced and maybe practical attack called rolljam, but I don't
| think the Flipper is capable enough to do that.
|
| The only thing is that the Flipper Zero is fun, cheap(ish), and
| popular, but real thieves already have better tools for their
| job.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > but real thieves already have better tools for their job.
|
| there you go, letting logic get in the way of a politician
| looking to score points
| happytiger wrote:
| The idea of banning the flipper is like banning legos because
| you can build lockpicks out of them -- it's just nonsensical
| politician logic.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Soros funded district attorneys should be banned for refusing to
| enforce laws.
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