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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   26094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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"Within a minute of attempting to shoplift [...] the police arrest you" is quite possible at reasonable (if significant) cost. Put policemen at all store exits so that the RFID tags going off (or using an emergency exit in a non-emergency, or triggering the metal detectors with a Faraday cage) gets you immediately arrested.

Car theft is harder, though. You could do okay with mandatory biometrics and self-driving and having cars drive thieves to the police station, but it'd be very expensive in money and false positives and still wouldn't get to 100%.

The 'minute' part was hyperbole, but I think a day or two should be trivial? If we can modify the design of the car, just have it disable itself in a way that can't be undone without the owner's consent (have many different components do the verification on their chips so the thief can't just swap out one), and broadcast its location. Just location broadcasting (only with the owner's consent once it's stolen) would be trivial to retrofit existing cars with very cheaply. And then you just, like, have the cops go pick up the car whenever it's stolen.

Wouldn't get 100% (most obvious and effective bypass is to turn the theft into a robbery - "turn over control of the car or I shoot you" - and there's also "EMP the car, pick it up with a truck and repair it later"), and would still be expensive in false-positives (i.e. when the car doesn't recognise the owner).

Also, with most forms of "disablement" that can't be worked around, you'd need to clean up auto manufacturers' cybersecurity to avoid megadeaths the next time somebody goes to war with you and mounts a cyberattack, although frankly some of the "safety features" of modern cars (as well as ~all self-driving cars) are already reaching that threshold (TTBOMK without the necessary cybersecurity in nearly all cases) because safetyists are apparently Mr. Topaz and assume blithely that software will do what they want and not what they don't want (and also don't think probabilistically and thus dismiss the tail risk of the Long Peace failing to hold).

I think those are reasonable points, I'm not expecting that a few minutes of my thinking about this will solve it, just that a few years of smart tech people will. But I think just the location sharing part would be enough - you'd have to make it hard for the thieves to disable without totaling the car, but I think that's doable (just put it on the car's main board? put it in a random location? idk), and then if the cops just reliably physically repossess the car a few days after it's stolen that should make car theft a lot less attractive. A lot of new cars already have GPS and data.

  1. The adversary knows the location of X if X is transmitting EM.
  2. I think it might be hard to render it impossible for thieves to disable without totalling the car without catastrophic issues. After all, the chip's no good without the antenna, and it might be a bit tricky to enforce "the antenna is capable of transmitting to something" (not broken, and also not shielded) without enforcing "the antenna is in communication with a specific system" (the latter of which means any failure in that system or in connectivity bricks All Of The Cars).

The adversary knows the location of X if X is transmitting EM.

At an extreme, make it only transmit for a few seconds every 24h?

For 2 I don't mean enforce it at a software level, just make it physically difficult to disable

This sounds like it would require a lot of cops.

I don't think so? Grocery stores have security guards, you can just let them arrest people.

You'd have to beef them up significantly and/or alter the design of stores (emergency exits unusable unless triggered by central authority (and even then, I suppose there's the "set a fire so that you can shoplift" option), main entrance with lockable gates after the RFID scanners) to avoid the "shoplifter outruns security guard" problem; lots of security guards are would-be police that are too fat to pass the physical.

I mean fixing the laws would allow stores to do the cost/benefit analysis on that themselves, and if they think it isn't then they're probably right.

Robot cops!

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