Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero
saveflipper.ca
saveflipper.ca
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.
there you go, letting logic get in the way of a politician looking to score points
Let me double down…
https://ideas.lego.com/projects/40434532-eaa1-4926-8621-3629...
Right or wrong re: Flipper's uses, the "just take this and go" is part of it.
I do wonder, right now lockpick tools are banned, unless you are a locksmith. I wonder if one day, you'll be charged with "hacking tools", because you have some hobby project in your backpack.
"You locked out? Hang on a moment"
Goes into a Subway, comes back with a coat hanger.
Less than a minute later the car is unlocked.
"Wow you're pretty good at that"
"I literally just got out of prison today... for car theft."
Laughter all around
But modern vehicles detect these relay attacks and drop your message when you are too far away (ToF Measurement), you could maybe instrument that. But then when you walk to your car on an open field, you may also trigger the alarm because your key is out of range for a short time.
Note: I’m not advocating banning the flipper zero anymore than I’d advocate banning lock picks. I just don’t think the analogy is apt.
FZ is intended to clone keys and bypass security, I suppose in significant part for users' lawful convenience, but is kind of intended to do what it should not.
Coat hangers aren't engineered with intent to be shoved into the weather seal on a door.
Which were absolutely engineered with Internet to be shoved into locks to open them without a key.
To be clear: purchasing ans owning lockpicks is perfectly legal in Canada [2].
I don't think your logic applies to why that legislation was introduced. They're treating Flipper as a lockpick, but legislate it differently nevertheless.
Cheap, misguided hype seems to be a more plausible explanation.
[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Professional-Accessories-Suitable-Hand...
I'd say it's more of an educational/'hacker' toy than it is a useful security bypasser/key cloner.
Purpose built(and better aot their job) those things cost significantly less. The flipper zero is a toy that the Canadian government are about to misclasify.
There was some talk of banning them in some areas, because people love treating symptoms rather than causes.
Nowadays the tow truck drivers have a little inflatable bag they slide into the top of the door and inflate so they can press the unlock button from the inside. Quite effective!
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...
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.
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.
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 :)
A lot of damage can be done and things successfully owned without needing to hack or exploit the device (car/phone).
You have any reference regarding how prevalent that is? Everyone I know switched to biometrics a decade ago.
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.
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.
I still see a lot of iCloud phishing messages, but also understand that Apple has made this vector harder.
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.
This isn’t about extracting encrypted data, but bypassing systems to start a car.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a system needs to be perfect to be worthwhile.
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.
This sounds like the old desktop mentality you mentioned. You can’t just reflash things to bypass a secure boot process – the entire point is to prevent things like that! You’d design the driver’s key to pair with the various onboard systems and those systems to do a challenge-response cycle during the boot process so someone can’t easily drive away without the key or resell those parts, with both sides using a private key which never leaves that component. Yes, that kind of design can still be attacked but the goal here is to make it more expensive than it’s worth: needing a flatbed to take it somewhere for a rogue EE to work on it, for example, just isn’t going to make sense except for the most expensive luxury vehicles.
This brings me to:
> Infotainment? That's almost literally an aftermarket parts.
Yes, and those cost money. The entire point is that you don’t need to make it perfect, just expensive. If someone has to replace the display and speakers, that means they’re making less profit on the sale and making it more obvious that the vehicle was stolen which increases risk and reduces the number of buyers, especially for the most valuable vehicles.
The actual real problem I failed to explain is manufacturers don't want to deal with networked authentication, broken physical keys, or day-to-day repair shop operations, so they keep most of the processes offline and send out re-pairing tools that leaks. Very few cars require breaking chain of trust to swap out parts which makes "If they need to create a custom engine controller, ..." part unrealistic as of now. It takes few more years before Apple starts delivering cars.
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.
Every piece of tech has tradeoffs, and for cars this one is just not worth it.
Why does no one steal Teslas?
You are damn good then :)
One can protect against such that's by using well placed cryptography.
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.
The FDA should be less strict with their cybersecurity stuff. The amount of lives lost to the increased cost of care is not worth the increase in cybersecurity.
If medical devices have just enough security to stop people who don't have physical access to the device, just enough to make attacks at scale unfeasible, then that should be good enough IMO.
Headline the next day: "Crime rate on Earth now at an all-time low 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 ;)
Probably a "NewsBot" of some sort?
So the question is: how should the OBD-2 plug (or wiring) be protected?
https://www.amazon.com/Tune-Saver-OBDII-OBD2-Lock/dp/B0BRF5D...
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.
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.
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.
The answer is, when a person "inevitably lose[s] it", they need to pay to get their electronics refit.
The number of people who lose their keys vastly dwarfs the number of people who are having their car stolen with a flipper zero.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
No idea, but my point stand on how they achieve this in the first place..
> towing cars is neither difficult nor suspicious in many places
because it's not a recognised method of theft. Also, buying a registered tow truck to commit a car theft doesn't sound easy to me.
One can also purchase, rent, or steal a trailer and attach it to a vehicle. There are several types of trailer which can haul a car, which are all widely available to the public.
Same issue we have now with ghost guns honestly. CNC mills are powerful tools, with the right software you can essentially just place the properly sized chunk of metal in the box and hit go.
The big switchover was in '96 when OBDII/CAN bus became mandatory. At that point it became pretty cheap to do things electronically, often cheaper than mechanically, so lots of things started switching over around then.
Of course they'd need to do a good job securing that database since inappropriate access to it would make stealing cars very easy.
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.
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.
The dealer can spend the two hours necessary to replace the encryption module, but thieves would have to also spend that same two hours.
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.
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.
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.
1. As a result, we'll see costs like losing the keys to a rental car go from a $250-500 fee to a $2500-5000 fee, due to the additional costs to process and the additional loss of use.
2. Criminal rings that steal high value cars will go from often using tow trucks, to exclusively using tow trucks.
3. The number of cars stolen via stolen keys will remain unchanged.
Yes, the key itself will be more secure, but I'm not really sure it will actually improve anything. More security is not better if the costs do not create real-world results.
The third point may be true for classic theft but would not be true for the growing category of thefts caused by abusing wireless keys. If you can’t easily get a new key, the resell value for that car is going down dramatically.
> If you can’t easily get a new key, the resell value for that car is going down dramatically.
Most of the vehicles that are stolen for resale are high value and sent overseas to parts of the world where the labor cheap to do something like entirely rip out all of the security components. I don't really think that these criminals will stuff a G-wagon in a shipping container for $100,000 but they won't do it for $80k or $90k.
Again, it’s possible but do you really think there isn’t even one thief who lacks easy access to a tow truck or will be caught firing up noisy equipment at 3am but not if they fumble around in their pocket while walking up to a car? Not a single teenager looking to joyride won’t give up if it’s harder than the Kia video they saw on Tik Tok?
Similarly, yes, people will still steal vehicles and ship them overseas but the more work they do the lower the resale market and value will be, and that will make it less tempting since you’d only be able to sell to people who are content never getting service from the manufacturer. Even if we assume that there are countries with skilled technicians and effectively no law enforcement, only something like 10-15% of stolen vehicles are shipped according to U.S. officials so even if you wrote those off entirely you would have plenty of room to improve by reducing the majority of thefts which never leave the country.
> Again, it’s possible but do you really think there isn’t even one thief who lacks easy access to a tow truck or will be caught firing up noisy equipment at 3am but not if they fumble around in their pocket while walking up to a car?
Canbus attacks, OBDII reprogrammers, and similar are typically pretty intrusive, they require cutting into fender liners, removing lamps, busting a window, or otherwise gaining physical access to the bus. They also require specialized tooling and expertise that are harder to get than the tools which physically move vehicles.
The one that might be an exception, and some savvy street criminal might be able to get their hands on is a tool to do is a relay attack, which is usually good enough to steal belongings from a car, but generally not capable of stealing the car.
> Not a single teenager looking to joyride won’t give up if it’s harder than the Kia video they saw on Tik Tok?
Definitely not. Vehicles with immobilizers are essentially never stolen by joyriders unless they have also stolen the keys.
> Even if we assume that there are countries with skilled technicians and effectively no law enforcement, only something like 10-15% of stolen vehicles are shipped according to U.S. officials
Yes, and almost all of the other ones either just lack immobilizers, or the thief also stole the keys.
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.
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.
Even so, it would be possible, I think.
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.
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.
That they are using the OEM software indicates that there is some authentication going on with the ECU to start the engine anyway. I bet they didn't truly plan for key rotation.
+ Some credential exchange between devices to establish a web of trust
+ Devices are locked similar to Apple partsAndroid (adb) and iOS (iTunes backup) have solved this issue years ago.
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.
It makes it less plug-n-play than the OBD2 connector, but thieves will still be able to do it.
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.
Good take, though.
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.
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.
Its actually a fair bit cheaper to buy a $25k car than a $250k car.
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
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.
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.
I'm sure its the same in Chicago, LA, Portland, Tampa, etc and I don't even need to ask.
Qualified immunity doesn’t exist in other first world countries with effective policing, in fact, the police in America have a lot of latitude to do all kinds of insane shitfuckery that doesn’t fly elsewhere.
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/
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.
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.
(The problem with crypto is the $10 safety MCUs used all throughout cars are only like 20MHz and they can’t really do the 2000+ crypto ops/sec on top of their current workload. Also the tooling support for crypto ATM is really poor in the model based design tools that are used for this safety relevant SW)
BTW I personally don’t believe that anything that involves cutting into a vehicle is negligence of anyone. I mean, from my perspective, anyone can just pop the hood and drive the car with their own BYO ECU. It’s just a hunk of metal and once you start cutting it up you can make it do whatever you want.
I am an automotive systems engineer.
Both car manufacturers and police are useless and it's fucking inexcusable, imo.
- 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).
It is perfectly fine to let an 11 year old walk a couple blocks unsupervised. And if they steal a car at that point, it is not a supervision problem.
but, somehow, i manage to ensure that none of them are stealing cars at 11
"it is not a supervision problem"
hmm. maybe i should have said "parenting issue"...
look, i am blessed to have had good kids. but i have had friends with struggles. if i had a kid that somehow stole a car (at 11) and i had to pay for repairs and meet with CPS and deal with courts and fines and maybe even juve and a lost year of school, we'd get through it.
Imo for removing security for the US market they deserve to be properly thrashed and dragged through the mud, regardless of the fact that they are offering upgrades from free if I read the following correctly.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/hyundai-kia-campaign-pr...
It's not exactly an over the air "recall", and I understand a huge number are still out there unprotected.
Most cars in are stolen here using key thefts or wireless relay.
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?
Yes!
-Apple
https://osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/iphone-4-ant...
Let's not paint Apple with an altruistic brush.
The point was that the didn’t, as you suggested they would, charge people on this occasion.
When physics caught up the Apple marketing, it took months for Apple to roll out a cheap bumper guard and acted like they were doing everyone a favor.
They never reimbursed people who bought a case to mitigate the issue. They did reimburse those that did have to purchase a rubber bumper.
While you are technically correct, that's about it. The whole thing was a shitshow and Apple acted like the users were the problem until enough of the world mocked them into providing a work-around for a problem that they should have addressed before it was even sold.
Making a defective product should not be free.
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.
it's not negligence to simply not provide a feature they didn't promise to provide and weren't required to (in the US). it is simply not their responsibility in any way to ensure your car's safety from theft. if you assumed it was and that they provided a feature you wanted because everybody else usually does, then the negligent party would be you for not RTFM. except that's wrong here too.
nobody is negligent here. you do not have a social responsibility to have an immobilizer on your car to prevent it from being stolen. and neither does the manufacturer. having it locked is plenty to legally make it "breaking-and-entering". and even if you leave the keys in the car and the engine running, it's still grand theft and your insurance will indeed pay out, which they would not do if they could claim negligence. the criminals are 100% at fault here. and bad things can happen without someone being negligent.
arguing about anything beyond that is just a fight about how good that anti-theft system has to be. are you negligent if you don't have an armed guard on your car?
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.
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.
that's exactly right. i was somewhat surprised that insurance was outright dropping people instead of simply increasing rates. and by the way, you can get a discount if you add x/y/z security alarm/immobilizer. the public outcry already has forced the issue with kia anyhow.
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.
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
Does MasterLock making famously easy to pick / rake locks count? I'm sure they reduce crime compared to no lock but they are not as secure as the customer expects.
https://www.art-of-lockpicking.com/how-to-pick-a-master-lock...
yes. exactly. if boeing ever makes a cheap plane, i would definitely avoid it.
you are comparing a company that cheated on legally mandated safety requirements with a company that didn't put a non-legally required car immobilizer on a lot of their new cars. and then didn't lie about it.
> But currently companies will simply defraud you
but kia didn't do this
You wouldn’t even know that airline is putting you on such a plane
But I get it, it's easier to think about applying technological or even legal solutions instead of thinking about how to fix a societal problem.
Jewelry, TV’s, bitcoin wallets etc aren’t just left in the open. Your house, front lawn etc is valuable and accessible but not generally mobile.
If you just roll in and let the salesman take you for a ride then you deserve the outcome.
/sarcasm
and not knowing even that simple fact is what makes it "deservedly" so.
(And if you say you mean outside of regulation, that people need to be responsible in general for other aspects of life, then your argument is no longer connected to the original comment you replied to.)
i'm definitely not deluding myself. that is life. you need to have both the freedom and the inclination to take care of yourself, if you don't have both you'll suffer.
Mandating basic safety and security features is not always going to protect me, but it will mostly protect me. It's not stupid to want that tradeoff. I don't care if you define "fix" as 100% so therefore it's not a fix. I want the 95%. I want defense in depth, regulation on top of personal investigation.
you need the right to decide for yourself if the lock is defective or not.
if you give that away, you will instantly be given the "freedom" to buy a lock that is defective-by-design. perhaps the lock designer's brother is a friend of the govt. perhaps the govt. agency does not want bad publicity, whatever.
the point is "defense-in-depth" (cliche) or not, you are ultimately responsible for you. there can be no other way.
> you need the right to decide for yourself if the lock is defective or not.
This sounds like you agree with me. This kind of regulation sets a minimum, not a maximum.
We don't need freedom to buy very bad locks. We do need freedom to buy the best lock we want to buy.
But the rest of your post implies that regulation will change both minimum and maximum and mandate a specific lock. I disagree with that premise.
> (cliche)
Are you trying to imply something there?
> you are ultimately responsible for you. there can be no other way.
I am "ultimately" responsible, but product makers should have responsibilities too. If I fail at something, I should not be 0% safe. The baseline should be pretty high before I apply my own efforts.
This may be the "age of information", but information is only useful as your ability to find, understand, and evaluate it.
I bet you had to know exactly what to look for, and "problems with kias" wouldn't get the average person there.
Sure, it sucks that you have to unexpectedly spend money on it, but when you bought a cheap car you knew you were taking the risk of having to deal with unknown unknowns.
The age of information was great.
In the age of misinformation, knowledge outside your specialty is no longer cheap enough to reliably obtain.
Its not social darwinism, the lack of critical thinking skills among the general population is alarming. Americans have apparently been coddled to the point that they arent worried about basic needs; if you go to buy a car you should have some simple considerations, is this car safe? What are the typical maintenance costs? Is it common for this car to be stolen?
Things like, housing, transportation, education, those are really central aspects of peoples lives. Its all well and good that you want to draw symbols on paper and make all these things safe, but it appears to have come at a pretty serious cost. That cost, is the inability for the US population to use critical thinking.
The negligence you speak of, how widespread would you say it is? Would you say the EPA dropped the ball preventing the east Palestine Ohio train derailment? Would you say that having some hard cutoff for how many chemical train cars until the train is reclassified? I imagine you would agree, that the chemical company sending 59 (oh w/e) train cars instead of 60 so that they are under easier rules, is kind of bullshit.
If the company is following the rules then they can largely get away with it when things go wrong; if that company had actual liability for whats in the train cars, then they would have insurance. That insurance would be prorated on the safety profile of the train, and it would fix the hazzard or pay the claimants their due. These regulations only exist to cement decrepit companies monopoly over you.
I have no faith that "negligence" in the public sector will improve. The roads, the enforcement of driving conduct, that will not improve. The safety, security, and reliability of cars will improve, because there is still competition from self aware drivers.
Weird takeaway. Those aren't primarily places with security measures, they're places where trusted people outweigh untrusted ones.
I'm not super familiar with the East Palestine derailment, but based on what I do know about it I think your 59/60 train cars example is sort of disingenuous. American freight rail operators are well known for skimping on safety in multiple dimensions; issues like obsolete brake technology, stretched-thin crews, insufficient maintenance, and excessively long/heavy trains have all been discussed to death before and after that accident. The problem isn't some off-by-one miscalibration, but rather that our regulators (and I'm including lawmakers under that umbrella, especially since they're usually the ones taking the bribes AFAIK) are simply not willing to demand that these industries put public safety over profits in areas where there are well-understood systemic safety problems. AIUI, efforts to improve rail safety during the 2010s and earlier have been largely stillborn, sabotaged by rail company lobbying.
Just to illustrate what I'm talking about via another example: if the MCAS system that killed 346 passengers on two 737 Max aircraft within the span of a few months had been an honest design flaw rather than a hack devised to juice sales by dodging retraining requirements, cheaply and shoddily implemented ignoring the misgivings of Boeing personnel and rubber-stamped by the FAA, then it would have been a simple tragedy. As it actually happened, it's an atrocity—a failure on multiple levels by many people who ought to have known better, holes in the Swiss cheese all lining up, 346 lives sacrificed on the altar of avarice. That's where the invisible hand gets you when you let it take the wheel, but I suppose next you'll tell me that those people ought to have done their own safety audits of the aircraft that got them killed.
Its about who is signing off on whats safe. The government has proven that thry are at best incompetent, they do not have the incentive. A private company has to maintain their reputation through quality of service, they dont have the seemingly endless faith of people because they are "government".
I don't assume this and I don't think I have even slightly implied that I do. It's obviously, trivially, verifiably false.
Your mistake is in assuming that cost is the primary motivating factor for consumers^[1], and that corporations and their stakeholders won't favor paying higher insurance costs (and fines, etc.) today over paying even more toward safety improvements that won't break even wrt. insurance costs for many years. As I mentioned above, the observable state of the real world explicitly disproves the claim that market forces will drive positive trends in safety outcomes.
^[1] Look how many huge, expensive pickup trucks are on the road in America today. Look at the monthly payments their owners are enduring to satisfy their vanity; look at their spotless paintjobs, empty beds (except perhaps the token equally spotless toolbox), and mud-free fenders.
I don't understand your argument. Do you expect every potential car buyer regardless of tech literacy to go to a dealership with an SDR setup on-hand, asking if they could test-out the key fobs, capture some signals, try to figure them out and look for common vulnerabilities on the new models? Do you expect the seller to explain the technical details of the key fobs at a depth you can be sure there's no vulnerabilities?
Determining that the key fobs were implemented securely is not something the buyer or even the seller will be able to determine. I would imagine a regulator has the ability to inspect them as they're being designed/built.
> if you go to buy a car you should have some simple considerations [...] Is it common for this car to be stolen?
By the time vulnerabilities are found and people start stealing them, there should already be plenty sold and roaming the streets.
Put it another way: if it's all market based, your choices in buying just get 2x more complex. Is this car easily unlocked? Do the brakes often fail? Can it resist a collision?
Or even another thought: since most people don't think about security, companies will flood the market with insecure cars. Want a secure car? That would be niche and cost you double.
i think this issue is overblown and is being used as a smokescreen for the rash of vehicle thefts caused, not by bad kia security, but large-scale organized crime.
if kids didn't want lead in their apple sauce they'd start their own testing labs.
for example, if a company made a car alarm called "SUPER EXTRA SECURE ELITE++ V5" and told me it had a "guaranteed thief proof" immobilizer. but then we find that a viral Tik Tok video shows how to with a hairpin and spit we can completely disable it and in 5 seconds and take the car for a drive and access the owners credit card info. and then also the car often bursts into flames while parked and turned off. and we of course find out that this was no "oops" and the corporations involved full-well knew about these issues and hid them to get a bonus. well, that'd certainly be a job for consumer protection laws.
but this is a case of "you got what you paid for". there's a place in the market for crank-up windows and basic plain cars without keyfobs and fancy alarms. that isn't wrong, and it definitely isn't "negligence" just because other carmakers pick different places in the market. and the fact that criminals do bad things doesn't change that.
and, thank you very much, i don't need consumer protection against that kind of thing. let's start with the lying and cheating corps and work our way up to collusion and price fixing. then let's get onto repair...
whether or not it makes sense to you
Though your other comments make it sound like you don't want a car without an immobilizer, in which case it feels like you're manufacturing something to disagree with rather than making a real argument against what I said.
yes. if that's not true, i retract.
what i want is:
- it's not an act of "negligence" when neither the owner nor the manufacturer choose to not include an extra security feature, even one that a majority of other cars have.
- it's nobody's business what "people ought to want". so that means an arguments based on "nobody should..." or "no rational person..." and "there's nor reason that..." and so on are invalid.
I don't think this gets to count as "extra".
> - it's nobody's business what "people ought to want". so that means an arguments based on "nobody should..." or "no rational person..." and so on are invalid.
I'm making a general claim about value, nothing personal. Because of that, I don't think it should matter whether wanting it is "nobody's business".
But in particular, I'm saying there's no benefit to avoiding an electronic key. We can remove the word "want" entirely. The downsides are large and the implementation cost is a rounding error. This differs from power windows and "fancy alarms".
It's pretty simple: if some car manufacturers have much higher rates of theft and are easier to steal than others, they are negligent. If by catching up to industry-standard anti-theft practices, their cars become harder to steal, not doing so is negligent.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.)
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.
What's the actual wording, is it a ban on the FZ specifically? Could anyone sell a "Zipper Flero" clone?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Though this is in US law, not Canada as related to the news story.
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.
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.
Banning the tech is a bandaid to deeper problems. It's also great advertising that these tools are effective.
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
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).
"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.)
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.
"Ban insecure vehicles" is chasing the technology of locks; there's always another circumvention.
https://www.hbsslaw.com/press/hyundai-kia-car-theft-defect/c...
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.
The responsible party should be the automaker that built or installed the security system, not the person who was sold a lie.
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.
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.
The locks are not the problem. Stealing cars is the problem.
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.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/autos/kia-and-hyundai-vehicles-in-can...
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.
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...
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.
Kia needs to fix their fuckup AND organized gangs need to be investigated and broken up.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
No; willfull negligence is something that should engender liability.
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.
Insurers aren't usually charities. Those costs are still borne by the insured.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
the "there are always bugs" refrain is horribly corrosive - it doesn't absolve the victim in any sense.
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
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.
Flipper Zero on the other hand is a toy with no/little actual utility that enables users to perform illegal/dangerous tasks like steal cars, that would not otherwise be possible except via less accessible/illegal means.
Do you understand now?
And so is flipper zero.. have another analogy, flipper zero is like Swiss army pocket knife, you can use it open your package box and also kill someone, zipper can be used as a toy -literally- or an IR remote, and can also steal a car, except I don’t think it can steal a car in the first place, it’s too weak, you need an advance SDR/ special antenna, zipper can’t even defeat garage remotes with a rotating keys unless you have an access to the garage unit.
Flipper Zero on the other hand is a toy with no/little actual utility that enables users to perform illegal/dangerous tasks like steal cars, that would not otherwise be possible except via less accessible/illegal means.
Do you understand now?
> Swiss Army Knife does not provide any functionality that can't be provided by any other basic household object
That is true, but you don’t go around carrying all these individual tools in your pocket, do you? That’s the whole point of it, portability. The same goes for the flipper zero, you have a bunch of useful tools that you can buy off the shelf yourself, but they are not convenient to carry with you all the time.
> Flipper Zero on the other hand is a toy with no/little actual utility
Who says that? Anything can be a useful utility in the right time and in the right hands for a specific purpose. Maybe one tool is useless to you, while useful to another.
Some people might use it to store hundreds of keyfobs, so instead of carrying all the hardware for each, they can use one device instead. Others might use it to control their home devices, either the IR remotes, or other smart devices, and instead of having 15 remotes (I personally do), they can use one device. Some other person might use it to monitor their TPMS in the tires, others to monitor a serial GPIO port, and so on. All these are not only legal, but you can perform all the individual tasks with a “collection” of tools, like reading the serial GPIO, you can buy a dongle for $10, IR remote? You can use some android devices, etc. However, with flipper zero, it’s all-in-one.
> that enables users to perform illegal/dangerous tasks
Just like any other tool out there, any tool can be repurposed to do illegal tasks, either the tools I mentioned or any other ones, including your smartphone, you can load a custom OS (say Kali linux) and perform illegal tasks, do you ban smartphones? Do you ban Kali linux? No, but if someone is found guilty of performing these tasks, you prosecute them. The same goes for anything, your car, can be used for everyday tasks, or even illegal stuff.
> like steal cars that would not otherwise be possible except via less accessible/illegal means.
Flipper zero can’t steal a car, it’s too damn weak for that job. If you are too concerned about that, will you ban ALL SDR in the market too? Because if someone has a bad intention, and you banned flipper zero, they will go and buy BladeRF SDR for example (that’s very accessible and legal to buy), far more superior than flipper and proceed to commit whatever they want. How’s that flipper zero ban working to prevent the crime? Not at all.
Sure, you can make that point, but No Reasonable Person would accept it, which is where I draw the line.
Grandfather in people who already have such make models or give some time to manufacturers to improve security.
https://youtu.be/RCR-5-rf3MM?si=0vFozL7NKMC14NB2
00:29
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.
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.
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.
Also most car dealers make more profit from ongoing maintenance and servicing than selling you a new car.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_...
We are in a conservative moment in the US right now.
Yes, there are some, at least some of the time, but very few.
To me, the length of sentences in the US suggest that a primary purpose is deterrence, not merely keeping dangerous people off the street.
- Rehabilitation
- Retribution
- Deterrence
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.
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.
> another crime severe enough to end them up back in
Then ramp up the penalty for repeat offences.
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.
The Kia Boys notwithstanding, basically all cars that are stolen these days are either stolen with the keys, or towed.
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.
What a lousy reason to buy something. It makes me feel shitty about the world.
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.
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.
This is the most funny thing I've read in a while. Thanks for writing it man -- wiping tears.
But I agree that Flipper Zero has no reason to be banned
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.
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...
It's like someone points out a problem, and then you stick your head in the sand and wait for things go away - or just let others deal with your issues. It's simply not the right approach.
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...
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.
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.
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."
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).
Why do you believe this?
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.
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.
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
Our real problem is just the pendulum swinging too far towards assuming people want to be good and they just need some compassion.
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.
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".
But for car theft & other profit-driven commodity thefts, I do think targeting the markets can often be very effective.
The drug addicts are much more organized in comparison (steal legos at Target, fence at some place for fentanyl).
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.
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 caïds (basically local slumlords and drug dealers). Some local caïds 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.
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-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/catalytic-converter-th...
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
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.
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.
There is likely significant political shielding for the operation of these criminal groups in many Canadian ports.
one gets constantly brought up while the other is celebrated.
Yes! Which makes our lack of action even more tragic.
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?
Do you think we didn't have crime when the church was in charge?
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…
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...
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.
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.
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.
The 13 year old driver was not released and will remain in jail until his trial.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
It's also one many other countries don't have, so we have plenty of examples to benefit from. I'd say a few "easy" patches would be things like: treating people with mental health issues, treating addicts, housing homeless people, clearing most people's records when they've severed their time/making it illegal for most employers to ask about past arrests/convictions, providing better assistance to people post-release and lessening or delaying some of the additional burdens we put on them (fines, fees, inflexible meetings/appointments), etc.
The biggest challenge will be convincing the fearful and the revenge/punishment fetishists that more and harsher punishment isn't the solution and that they aren't being endangered by making the needed changes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_and_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.
- if you can drive to work, school, shopping, etc. and not see some junkie panhandling, or a squatter in an RV dumping sewage on the street or needles or trash or human shit, then great for you. you live in a entitled bubble. if you can park your car on a public street without a good chance that it's windows be broken or it's cat be thieved, then good for you. the reality speaks otherwise to most of the rest of us.
> Record numbers of Americans can't afford rent.
true
> Is it any wonder that drug use, homelessness, squatting, and crimes like shoplifting/theft are rising?
nope
> Punish addicts instead of helping them?
you can't help them unless you can force treatment. you can't force them into treatment if they are "free". i'm not saying that this is how it is now except in a few places, but the obvious solution is to enforce, strongly the laws and then allow them to choose treatment as a diversion, with the proviso that failing means back to square one. in my book doing anything more lenient is not "helping", it's actually a death sentence.
> 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?
no and no. a stint in juvee is what the damn kid needs. sadly if you're stealing cars and carrying guns at 12-13, you're a piece of shit and probably beyond help.
> Hard disagree. There is plenty of research...
bullshit. you didn't respond to what i actually wrote: "it's a symptom, a result". this whole thread is about a string of car thefts so obvious that it makes global news. you can't plausibly argue that there's not enough incarceration or that crime is at a multi-generational low.
at the end of the day here the deal: if i (wisely) forfeit the responsibility of my own protection to the state, i really expect that it simply holds it's end of the bargain. which means: if i catch someone stealing from me that the state somehow does something to make sure that doesn't happen again. i really don't care if it's cheaper or not to re-rehabilitate vs. incarcerate. i certainly don't give 2 shits about his broken family, etc. if the best thing for society as a whole is for diversion and therapy, etc., i don't oppose it. but he better the f*ck not do it again to me or someone else. if that fails, then screw it, it's not better than anarchy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Uhh noo, this philosophy already there as old as Chinese Legalism ca 400 BC
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.
That's literally what the law itself is, since the dawn of time.
Truly confused why `religious` norms come into play here.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
USA, each suspect is registered, then suspect gets acquitted. Stats show 100 suspects, 50 acquitted = 50% convicted. Japan there is no suspect registered unless they're already sure it will stick. In other words they've already done the investigation. So 50 suspects = 100% convicted because the 50 that there wasn't enough evidence for were never even registered as suspects.
> Only about 8% of cases are actually prosecuted, and this low prosecution rate is the reason for Japan's high conviction rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Jap...
If true this makes sense some cultural sense. Japan is super privacy conscious. It's Japan that got google maps to remove people's faces from street view. It's also illegal to take pictures of people in public. Being labeled a suspect would mark someone unjustly if it turns out are not likely guilty. No actual idea of that plays into the difference. Just thinking out loud.
2. Go look up what happened to the last prime minister of Japan.
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)
> 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.
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.
Unfortunate people take ideas so far... we are so sure we are right.
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.
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.
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/
Not all societies are so law-heavy, especially the ones that are more shame-driven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%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.
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.
And yet, somehow, that hasn't solved the Software Problem at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Outliers stealing cars is not a demonstration that some part of society finds that ethetical.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> "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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is likely driven in part to raise the floor in outcomes but it simultaneously lowers the ceiling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If that's a definition of "common law" then sure, but it seems like a different thing to me.
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…
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.
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.
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).
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.
I think you may be thinking of the Candaian conception of a cultural mosaic.
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.
Honestly, I see little evidence it is doing any worse at assimilation than in, say, the early 1900s.
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?
Perhaps, but if so, I think its impact is, at the very least, net negative, not net positive.
Many nations have continued to commit crimes against humanity since the UN was founded, without any shaming at all. Some of them have had their leaders praised and given awards and invited to be keynote speakers at conferences at the same time that their crimes against humanity were in full swing (for example, Robert Mugabe). And two of the most egregious such nations, Russia and China, have permanent seats on the UN Security Council.
It is true that the UN has shamed some nations for crimes against humanity (the Milosevic regime in Serbia, for example). But that just makes the lack of shaming in so many other cases worse, especially when the cases that are ignored are at least as egregious as the cases that are shamed.
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.
And neither I, nor you can make such a contrast fairly. It immediately goes hard into speculative-fiction territory, and such an exercise would educate us about our own biases, more than we'd learn about the UN.
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.
Point being that the norm in question would be "not having the war".
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.
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.
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?
Well, they both are rooted in the idea that individuals are important, which is a relatively new idea, all things considered.
> How about I use the expression "greed driven societies" instead?
You can do, except I think it's not helpful, as you're joining the ranks of the people who misuse the word "society" to mean "how I happen to think about the stuff I don't like in the world".
Helpful to who?
I see it differently. I think it helps us all to aspire to clear values. Karl Popper thought "there is no society". Lady Thatcher thought we merely misused the word society, not as you say - to universalise social facts - but to forget our "duty" (Thatcher's words) to ourselves and our neighbours (my emph). Thatcher sincerely saw business as a social good, as do I. Using the word society in that way is avoidant. You seem to think that's what I am doing?
Social facts exist, at least in Durkheim's view as behaviours and attitudes. They definitely include greed and selfishness as psychologically measurable traits. You may not think much of sociology and psychology, but to a lot of people they are solid sciences.
Moral judgements are also social facts. And for us Christians (as a moral framework), greed is more than a neutral, observable fact. It is an ugly weakness.
The hoarding of power and wealth by a tiny minority to assuage their insecurity , while returning nowt but "disruption" to the world is objectionable. Being parasitic upon the rest of the population is a harm.
So I've no problem declaring, greed, vanity, megalomania as "stuff I don't like in the world". Others may or may not agree with me. As an individual, you may disagree. But as an individualist you must concede my equal right to call out greed and selfishness as harmful to the rest of us - even without a "Logical basis". Further, you must do so without criticism.... unless you deny the existence of social facts, or yourself find greed attractive and virtuous?
But which "us"? That's my point. You aren't talking to all of society (assuming "us" was all of society), so you using it like that doesn't even theoretically do this.
> Social facts exist, at least in Durkheim's view as behaviours and attitudes.
This isn't the same as "society". My point is that the definition of "society" changes dramatically based on where you live and what you consume. It's like a giant straw man.
> So I've no problem declaring, greed, vanity, megalomania as "stuff I don't like in the world". Others may or may not agree with me. As an individual, you may disagree. But as an individualist you must concede my equal right to call out greed and selfishness as harmful to the rest of us - even without a "Logical basis". Further, you must do so without criticism.... unless you deny the existence of social facts, or yourself find greed attractive and virtuous?
It's hard to make sense through the purple prose, but maybe I can pick something out. You're not calling out greed; you're calling an entire society greedy. That's the problem. All the rest of what you said here doesn't seem relevant.
I agree you said that. I disagree that it's true. If I go to my kid's football kickabout, run mostly by volunteer parents, or I attend a local street party, or go for a pub quiz night, or any of many societal endeavours, I don't see greed.
As of 2019, the US had 50 million immigrants[0] living there, either 1st or 2nd generation. Far more than any other country. Are those immigrants really all just idiots for moving there?
If you think the US is a wasteland, it sounds like you're American.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/...
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.
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.
No leader, or force required. People just acting according to their consciences.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
"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)
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").
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.
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.
prompt engineering before it was cool
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Did I miss anything?
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.
Policy changes for cars or technology will not solve the lawlessness in Canada.
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.
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.
More spot checks and inspection resources are needed at our border.
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.
We've given up on that part in many instances.
It shouldn't be any different than a car sold with headlights that are too dim
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.
The whole point is that what was sold (some kind of key security) was half-assedly implemented.
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.
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.
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.
The goal is cars that are harder to steal and electronic security measures that follow something resembling best practices.
You're creating a false dichotomy. We could prosecute criminals and not take initiative to remove rights for queer atheists. These are in no way related so it's weird to lump them in.
Besides, "That Other Other Party" who presumably doesn't want to take personal rights from queer atheists could simply prosecute the criminals themselves. If you like "That Other Other Party" overall and want to see criminals prosecuted, that's what you would pursue. But if you don't pursue that it's pretty clear you just don't want to see criminals prosecuted.
You'll have to ask a Canadian about the specifics of the various provinces.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Also, they don't need to steal the car - if they can freely open it can can just steal anything inside.
Rapid scanning of export shipping containers with AI processing to detect the contents might help curb the demand for the stolen cars.
Car thefts have made people paranoid and vigilant.
If it was in an urban environment, there might be cameras around anyway that could capture the reg plate.
After a hit and run I once had an officer tell me that running tags would be "a lot of work".
Last time I was victim of a hit and run in a motor vehicle the police had an eye witness statement and the physical vehicle itself. They declined to investigate. They told me it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't be prosecuted unless someone confessed.
The police do not exist to act as your personal investigation team.
That said, a hit and run isn't the same as organised car thieves with tow trucks.
"They aren't doing enough about car hackers! Car hackers are just running free and the gubmint won't stop them!"
Ridiculous.
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.
Plot them on a graph. There is basically no correlation.
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
Locking up violent criminals and their affiliates for extended periods of time works. We give way too many chances to people today.
I can guarantee you the vast majority of people in prison can be reformed and reintegrated. But most prison systems don't want that. They work towards punishment/revenge, and as a bonus, give out slave labor for dirty companies.
Suggesting "locking more people up" is a good solution is so bad that it's laughable in my view. It's so short-sighted and simplistic that it's not worth arguing about. Locking more people up translates to locking more poor people up, for the crime of being poor.
I even added a "/s" to make it clear I was being ironic, but clearly that didn't work as I intended.
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.
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.
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.
Ha ha, what are your erudite bookmarks? I read dumber things just over coffee this morning.
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.
I pulled up with a grinder and destroyed the lock in a busy downtown district in the middle of the day, loaded the bike into my car, and nobody said a thing. I was actually a little shocked since I had come ready with the receipt for the bike and everything.
Even if it took longer, it still looks more legitimate to bystanders than a broken window.
> 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.
Or buy a 200-dollar device and walk up to a car in a hoody and steal it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only infants refuse to think through their statements.
Every person having upon him or her in his or her possession a picklock, crow, keybit, crowbar, screwdriver, vise grip pliers, water-pump pliers, slidehammer, slim jim, tension bar, lock pick gun, tubular lock pick, bump key, floor-safe door puller, master key, ceramic or porcelain spark plug chips or pieces, or other instrument or tool with intent feloniously to break or enter... is guilty of a misdemeanor.
Basically, if you are carrying anything that will be used for breaking and entering, with the intent of breaking or entering, that also is a crime.
These sort of devices are nuisances with very low positive utility, and there is plenty of precedence for banning them.