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Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

That’s fantastic. My very rough ideas are definitely more along the lines of identification and not vigilanteeism...However I am with you 100% and am pro glitter bomb.

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I think even just the sink bomb part that instantly emptied as soon as it was opened would have the same effect. It's probably easier to build and could all be done mechanically. You can get some pretty foul stink bombs, then triple it.

If it made their car unsellable out their house miserable I'd call that a success and no one got hurt.

They have artificial cadaver scent for training police dogs. It might work well. https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/analytical-chromatography/analy...

There's a line that might open you up to being sued over it. Ridiculous as that would be, I wouldn't really be surprised if the right lawyer in the right court could pull it off.

There's already the precedent from Katko v. Briney[1] that establishes a person can't use deadly force to defend property. Since courts prioritize the avoidance of bodily injury over property it's definitely not much of a leap for a lawyer to argue that a thief who suffered any bodily injury at all from a boobytrapped package has a case.

Whether a prosecutor and/or a jury would be interested in that argument is another story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney

Sure. It's all hypothetical, of course. Though, hypothetically, I might also thank them for intercepting a booby-trapped package that was meant for me.

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