After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
But the fact that they can ease up on background checks and see an immediate large bulk of car thefts is damning evidence that the background checks were truly having a real impact on preventing theft. It really is fascinating.
Which, could be the case, or it could be that announcing the policy change was the equivalent of announcing your upcoming month-long backpacking tour on Facebook after posting your address and photos of most of your valuables.
(It might be less declaring open season on theft, than a perceived increase in vulnerability triggering a surge in attempts to exploit it, more of which succeed than usual due to some actual increase in the odds of successful theft, complicated by the additional security risk posed by the confusion associated with a major policy change.)
You'd really need to dig into the surrounding data to find out which model is valid and in what proportions.
Nextel didn’t seek out street drug dealing networks as a customer base. But the cops figured out that they weren’t traceable and had great loud speaker phones, started buying them, word got out and suddenly you have a market.
It's not as much the background checks preventing the thefts as the basic identity checks. Even people with some criminal background would find themselves disincentivized to steal/vandalize the car knowing their identity is linked to it. But someone who goes out of their way to create a fake identity and become untraceable, known criminal or not, has no such disincentive.
No, it isn't “damning evidence”, it's at best a suggestive indication which is easily consistent with other alternatives.
In fact, there is extremely compelling evidence that the old background check policy was not what was protecting them in the article: “By midweek the company suspended service in Chicago altogether, an acknowledgment that it couldn’t figure out how to distinguish legitimate customers from the group of thieves.” The obvious first guess of how to distinguish legitimate customers from thieves would be exactly the method they had been using right before the event that has supposedly prevented similar evebts—suspend every new account that was checked until they agree to a background check and it is completed and, if the old method was really working, everything would be fine. This is so obvious that if they just threw up their hands and couldn't figure it out, it means either they didn't believe the system was doing it or they didn't believe the problem in Chicago represented a general problem that should be protected against, just a local aberration; either way, it doesn't really seem consistent with the idea that even they believe there is some widespread general problem that the background checks were preventing.
I don't see anything here that would exclude coincidence.
Simply put, I imagine there is more money is stealing cars.
As to "selling the house", this often requires a serious amount of paperwork and is harder to do.
80% of the rentals I've been in weren't their primary home, so even if someone was to rob the place, there wasn't much to take. The most valuable thing would probably be the TV, but most places only had a 32-40" tv which goes for a few hundred bucks new.
While people aren't robbing Airbnb homes, there are several cases where they are getting completely destroyed.
The article is pretty clear about theses instances happening when they deactivated their background check. They may still provide more, but if they aren't check, it's meaningless.
> I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed.
Sure easier, but as the comment you were responding to said, theses aren't primary home, they doesn't contains much things that are worth stealing. Sure the renter will be able to claim he isn't guilty, but at the end of the day, if it takes you a day and cost you 100$ to steal 120$, it's not worth it.
> From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t became a gold mine for the professional thieves.
It's more like a coal mine, sure there's money to be made, but you can't always make them profitable.
Especially when you have announced who you were and provided contact details before you stole the TV. Maybe the theft just isn't worth it at that point.
If I want to steal a TV, it would actually be better to rob my neighbor's house when they are away. They will never know it is me, and I don't have to pay them for access to their house.
Your average AirBnB probably has under $1k worth of stuff with any sort of resale value - a TV or two, maybe the smaller appliances.
You could cause plenty of monetary damage by smashing holes in the walls, but that doesn't benefit the thief much.
Accounts that abuse houses can and do get negative reviews visible to future hosts, fines/fees from the homeowner enforced by the platform, or even banned (along with government IDs and Facebook accounts they have verified).
They updated the app sign-up process with a step where you had to take a photograph of your driver's license with your phone, and then take a photo of yourself (to confirm that the license you were signing up with was indeed yourself). These two photographs were not checked manually but were "analyzed" but a facial recognition thing. They did this to streamline the sign up process and get people access to the vehicles with an active membership quicker.
But, when this feature was introduced it was almost immediately abused by a network of fraudsters that had stolen driver's license and stolen credit cards. They used GIS (google image search) to find photos of similar faces to the faces that were on their stolen driver's licenses and uploaded a photo of that face with their phone.
I discovered this when tracking unusual car activity and investigating the new accounts that were driving them and seeing the weird staged headshots of US Senators and other professionally taken photographs that populate GIS results as the submitted "selfie" photo's that were supposed to confirm the new member's identity.
BTW, much like the article mentions, our European counterparts were surprised with this abuse and "hacking" of the system and said they never experienced it over there while running this feature for months before us.
Personally, I really miss Car2Go's old SMART cars. They sucked. They sucked sooooo bad. They were terrible cars. I hated them! But they were damned easy to park, they were dead-simple to operate, and they were easy to spot on the street. I want those back, and would rather not drive a 'luxury' car where I spend the first two minutes of my rental trying to figure out how to adjust the seat and turn off the radio.
So maybe making the cars more luxurious makes them less likely to be abused.
It works and apps cannot tell the difference
You really have to think like a thief when you want to serve the public because the public provides a cover to the crook and if you let your guard down it’ll bite you in this day and age.
It takes more than being poor and downtrodden to turn to well planned theft.
(I mean harmless in the sense that only the person using drugs has potential harm.)
Student loan cannot be written down in a personal bankruptcy process.
Many people have insufficient money for medication.
... and so on, so they dip their toes into crime, just selling weed at first, or laundering money, and then naturally they either get greedy, or get pressured into taking more risk, or simply get caught. (or maybe some successfully get out.)
and then there are people fleeing from very rough places (drug cartel warzones, etc.) and they usually don't have much more than their name, so they can try to do whatever makes some money.
Do circumstances make theft right? No. Of course not. But sitting idly while people are starving is also a form of wrong, which quickly turns this into a hard pragmatic question with only grey answers.
Sure, but "deep poverty" today is what "middle class" life used to be for their grandparents or great-grandparents and normal student life is like for most college students. Having to cook from scratch rather than eating out every day, or maybe even only having meat a few times a week. Having to go to a laundromat rather than having your own washing machine, and riding public transit or a bike/motorbike with rudimentary knowledge on how to fix it.
These are hardships only when compared to extremely lofty standards of living - and if that makes you become a career criminal, it is hard to have sympathy.
Also, never understatement status-seeking when it comes to motivations for crime, even if your current conditions would have been considered high status 100 years ago, if you are seeking social/sexual relationships you are only going to be judged by your relative status today.
This relative status-seeking is why even rich people will still risk their positions and jail over felonies that will only make them 5% richer.
Health outcomes, (obesity, nutrition, drug addiction ) could easily be worse.
Security outcomes, (violent crime, domestic violence, police violence) could easily be worse.
Economic outcomes (job security, lifetime earning expectations, minimum wage) could easily be worse.
Social outcomes ( close friends, community ties, connection to close family memebers) could easily be worse.
Remember that looking at averages is misleading if the distribution is changing around a constant mean.
Further, the idea that crime is an economic choice, and not a socially determined choice is highly suspect. For instance, street level drug dealers make very little money [1], the average US bank robber steals ~$4,000 [2]. Crime is rarely a "rational decision" it's made in a socially constructed context.
[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/5049.pdf [2] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/06/11/what-you-sho...
Do we have an obesity problem? Sure, that's kind of a self caused issue. You could blame our food being too cheap, but the alternative is starving to death which is far less in your realm of control.
Minimum wage is at its highest in direct value, luxury goods are at their cheapest. Now instead of writing a letter or traveling significant distances, you can chat with your friends all damned day.
Is life hard and imperfect? Of course it is, but to suggest that somehow life is harder now than in the past 25 or 50 or 500 years is absolutely foolish.
Life Expectancy in the US is going down [1]. That's happening as many people are living longer than ever. The difference comes from plummeting life expectancies at the bottom.
Real minimum wages peaked in the 1980's [2]
Calling obesity "self caused" is unreasonable. Access to food, particularly for poor people is very different today than at any time in the past, Malnutrition is totally possible alongside sufficient caloric intake.
Why is the cost of "luxury goods" relevant to anything?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/21/health/us-life-expectancy...
[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-real-value-u-s-...
Remember that real wage is a deflection based on cost, but the cost of living is absolutely localized whereas the minimum wage is federal unless overridden by the state. Therefore as an average that might be true, but is generally incorrect for any given actual datapoint. Just because minimum wage is garbage in Mountain View doesn't mean it's not perfectly fine in Ohio. https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_microeconomics-theory-th... https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/index/north-americ...
Obesity is absolutely self caused unless you're on a feeding tube. You can get 2400 cals a day for about $4 from McDonalds - don't even need to cook. Yes, your fresh organic vegetables that had to be trucked in from halfway across the US costs more than a bag of processed corn chips that can sit on a shelf for 2 years. You can still eat very healthy for very little money.
The cost of luxury goods is relevant because things like laptop computers, the internet, cellphones, cars, and so on are considered luxury goods. And hey, it turns out it's pretty hard to get a job if you can't email, and it's hard to be connected if you don't have a phone. You can get a functional phone for $20 and a plan for about $15 or less a month - something mind boggling compared to a few decades ago, not to mention more portable than a telegraph or a landline.
CoL in NYC/SF has almost no effect on the overall price index, it's much more representative of middle america.
Completely missed my point about someone being malnourished because they get all of their calories from Mickey D's.
You'd be surprised how many poor people continue to have low access to email and find jobs by physically walking into retail stores to apply.
Are you making the claim the rich now live forever and the poor die much younger compared to previous years? They do still include the poor in the average.
CoL has everything to do with the poor and their quality of life. A $0.10 raise in the price of a gallon of milk has no effect on the middle class and a dramatic effect on those living in poverty.
While there are nutritional issues with McDonalds (far too much fat, not enough vegetables, too much sugar in many of their products), you probably aren't going to be malnourished if you eat their food. Chicken/Beef, bread, some starches and fats. That's not an altogether terrible diet, it certainly isn't unsalted rice for 3 meals a day.
Regarding cost of living, the question is whether minimum wages have gone down , and the answer is yes, because cost of living has increased, they have. It's isn't just mountain view CA.
It's common knowledge that mcdonaldds cannot provide a fully nutritious diet. Take a look at Super Size Me, the book or movie. It's pretty amazing.
[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/9/16860994/lif...
In another Hacker News article, these would all be things we should be striving for
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opinion/poverty-united-st...
Extreme poverty in the US is real: https://www.al.com/news/2017/12/un_poverty_official_touring_...
Neither are in deep poverty? I happen to live in Hungary, and well, see for yourself:
https://budapestbeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/one-qu...
https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/buffett/hungary/img/single/ma... (this is from Slovakia)
Your typical street criminal isn’t sad about student loans, nor are they stealing to buy medicine. They are victims of a culture, not circumstance.
> but sitting idly while people are starving is also a form of wrong
In the United States, find me one person that has starved to death in the past year. Not only are there food stamp programs, but many churches and charities all over the country have some sort of food program. You would have to be supremely incompetent if you are literally starving to death in the United States. It’s so extremely rare as to be a news story if it happens. Poor people in the US are more likely to be obese than starving.
That's why crime is usually modelled as an infection.
> starving
I haven't said 'to death'.
- 'pas touched upon the amount of people in poverty; add to that mental problems, losing the IQ lottery, being born into a pathological family and a host of other concerns, and you'll see you're severely underestimating the amount of people who are forced into crime through circumstances.
- There's lots of people who for some reason don't care about such ideals as niceness, community and civilization. For those, committing a crime isn't meaningfully different than any legal activity - it just have a slightly different risk/payoff profile. If you look around carefully, get to know more people, you'll discover plenty of crime happening around you - not murder and robbery, but tax evasion, skirting environmental laws, health&safety laws, etc.
It may seem that in 2019, life of crime shouldn't be rewarded, and yet 2019 brought us a multi-billion-dollar IPO of a company whose primary business model is law-breaking at multinational scale.
What you may be suggesting is that our policy should care less about subjective well being and more about objective well being, but this goes against the progressive milieu.
H. L. Mencken
I would think the incentive to steal could be thought of as something like (relative reward) * (social modifier) / (probability of failure) * (consequences) or something like that.
This is not a fact.
How come they haven't contacted the police immediately after that?
Also, they mentioned that people sublet their cars at inflated prices. This means they don't have the most basic foreground checks in place. Here in Moscow carsharing companies have cameras in their cars and the face of the driver is compared with the photo ID they have provided. I think it also tracks unsafe behavior, like holding a phone to talk or text.
If they really relaxed their checks to the point where a single credit card was all that was needed, they brought this upon themselves.
This happened in Chicago. Police response times are... more than a little slow.
As we learned in another thread here on HN (some photo equipment sharing site), this is a case of 'voluntary parting' in which the cars weren't necessarily stolen, they were obtained fraudulently, which apparently is a civil matter.
The purpose of the police is to maintain order and enforce personal and property rights, not to educate the population on concepts of responsibility.
That's just a silly statement. Anything can be physically disabled; the question is how difficult and time-consuming disabling it is. Maybe it's encased in a steel block in the engine compartment in series with vital wiring connections but even then some work with an angle-grinder and a soldering iron could get around it given a couple of hours.
Simply shield the electronics from being able to emit. Then deal with it at a later point
You could try stopping the GPS signal from getting in, but you could also stop the (likely) GSM signal from getting out.
[not condoning their use]
I do wonder what their rates of theft are here...
We even got bike sharing now which I'm still skeptical of, seeing how it failed in many European cities so far either due to reckless vandalism or by people parking them in the most idiotic ways. The ones here at least have fixed spots where you have to pick up or return them so that should at least solve the second problem, but it also makes things a lot less flexible.
In my neighbourhood car2go are the most likely to be recklessly driving and harassing people in the streets. They should be tightening their policy not loosening it.
I really believe there needs to be a standard for this (if one doesn't already exist).
People who don't really know how to drive a truck are suddenly put in control, and lots of accidents happen...
A few years ago, they even stopped asking customers at the start of the rental whether there were any “new” damages with the car, since it's impossible to verify that with dozens of damages, and people would just press “No”. So now these cars all have small damages that nobody cares about, which accumulate until they get repaired.
a) My main worry is hurting someone else; I will be responsible for this either way.
b) If I do damage the rental, chances are I'll be held accountable at the end of the rental, and chances are the repair fees will be extortionate compared to fixing my own car at a shop of my choosing.
Secondly, take away the lesson that there's a reason that banks/stores/merchants don't lower their standards and go into certain neighborhoods, in the name of "lowering barriers to entry". (or demographics in this case) It comes with a lot of crime/fraud/loss, and unless you're actively fighting it or have figured a way around it, you will lose.
There’s a reason banks secure credit cards from people with no credit history. There’s a reason insurance in Florida is different than the rest of the U.S. etc
Second, the whole concept of “bad neighborhoods” where people aren’t trustworthy is partly a racist trope (there are good and bad people everywhere), and partly the result of generations of well-documented racist policies by the government and banks that prevented those areas from being developed.
Third, nobody said the cars were getting stolen from “bad neighborhoods”. What the article says is that the vehicles were being driven to an area just outside of the Car2Go coverage area and dumped there.
The concept of a "bad neighborhood" comes from crime statistics, not racist tropes. Either crime (theft, robbery, fraud, et all) is high, or it is not high, race be damned. Subscribers to a particular political ideology need to calm down with the whole "your facts/science are racist" bit, because it hurts everyone overall in the long run.
Ouch man, you're not even going to try to dog whistle?
From your link:
As of 2003 West Virginia Blacks accounted for just 3.2% of the total population and 34.9% of the total prison population.
Simply translated: White areas are safer areas. That is an irrefutable fact. The poverty argument, or excuse more accurately, can be torn to shreds time-after-time.
There are so many conclusions being jumped to there that you've probably worn the mat out already. All of that racist bullshit completely ignores the disparities in enforcement, prosecution, and sentencing. As an added bonus it completely misinterprets how the FBI categories race. But hey, maybe you can get a good deal on a dog whistle for Prime Day.
There are plenty of "bad neighbourhoods" with white people and every nationality. These same bad neighbourhoods exist in UK, Canada, across Asia and Latin America, etc. It's quite rare to find any large urban area without one. It's a human problem not a race one and it's hardly a trope. It's very much real.
The issue here was fraud. My credit score doesn’t help you assess risk if someone else is impersonating me.
As but one component to this a person who never takes on debt has, tautologically, managed to live a life without any need of debt. That implies he would have little difficulty continuing to live a life without access to credit. Because of this, he will generally have substantially less concern about his credit rating than a person who depends on credit for their basic livelihood.
If I avoid debt for a decade, suddenly seeking debt should be a bit of a red flag, and I should have a correspondingly low credit score.
Credit score likewise plays a role.
There are many many attributes taken into account when discussing fraud. Some models use methods which take in all attributes. There’s many kinds of fraud as well, some of which will be impacted by credit score (for instance if you have more credit, and use your credit card more often, you’re more likely to be a target for a “hacker”. This means fraud will be more likely to occur on your account).
For reference: I’ve built fraud detection models being used at banks.
The use of data from credit reporting agencies is not to predict the outcome of lending to a specific person, but to predict the outcome of many, many loans to many, many people. For which I would say it succeeds, as the entities utilizing it seem to be economically successful due to making a smaller proportion of bad bets than entities who would not, for example in the linked article.
Yeah no.
Credit scores, being a composite set of observations of recent financial behavior, are literally the opposite of an immutable genetic characteristic fixed from birth.
Credit scores are far, far, from perfect, but if you have a better way of judging the future actions of a human than compiling a list of their recent actions do speak up.
If you do not live in a flood zone, it varies a lot. Florida requires new homes to be built to appropriate hurricane proof codes since Andrew, so newer homes insurance are about like anywhere else in the nation. Older homes are somewhat more expensive, but usually not insane.
Funniest thing: most folks griping about this try to avoid the same areas and aren't volunteering to deliver high-value goods to them to address any perceived gaps. That's because they think the same things as or aren't much more inclusive than the people they're griping about. Virtue signaling and slacktivism over real activism for the groups they supposedly want to help every day.
I don't think it's fair to claim that that who don't volunteer are virtue signaling slacktivists; they may simply believe the solutions must come from larger institutions than individual action.
It’s mostly because this type of worldview filters everything through the lens of power and when viewed through this context the way to ‘fix’ it is by tipping the scales culturally by not acknowledging the things that may cause a stigma and prevent ‘access’ to resources and jobs.
So it’s probably less about what they believe to be true vs they think it’s not helpful to say it out loud.
In other words, food truck entrepreneurs have been around for decades, so why doesn't the service you imagine exist yet? Because so far no one with the right motivation, i.e., no one with their heart in the right place, has tried what you imagine?
Are you saying that the demand just doesn't exist? That people in food deserts just want to be unhealthy because of some unspecified and perhaps unknowable reasons? I don't get it.
(The reason for my earlier mention of bias is because those that haven't understood that usually believe the obstacle to be systemic bias.)
> The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States
> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24094
https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDe...
Here's your main issues in those "poor minority neighborhoods" which, having grown up and lived in them, I consider neighborhoods with very low profit, lots of theft, and a high amount of rape/murder:
1. Even they have been trained to be picky about their produce. Unless it's food bank, there's going to be spoilage from them ignoring some percentage of the produce that doesn't meet their standards. The profits of the operation must cover those costs on top of things like the truck and person's paycheck.
2. Like ice cream trucks, the truck will need to be refrigerated to reduce that. Produce is normally stored close to 40 degrees in grocery coolers. I don't know how much this adds to the cost of a truck.
(Note: Both of these issues might be addressed by having people order stuff like Instacart, they go pick good ones at a warehouse with maybe some extra cases of fast movers, and there's a limited window of delivery time in each area.)
3. The big one: the driver might get jacked with the money taken or the vehicle might get stolen/vandalized. The odds go up with the number of gangs present. The local Piggly Wiggly's and Kroger's that closed in Memphis had so much theft that security guards couldn't keep up with it. One had six. I was told some were paying for extra insurance for employees' cars that were stolen or vandalized. Then, there was gang violence with 10-20 on 1 attacks on employees that came out of nowhere. Although pretty common, I've only seen two put on YouTube. (NSFW) Here's an example of what they might face which they won't in any other type of neighborhood (poor or otherwise):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxBIVnjlKos
It stems from a mindset where it's considered fun. I don't know why there's all this speculation about environments causing it given any of them will tell you they just enjoy dominating other people. Example from that or another attack:
https://wreg.com/2014/09/30/young-men-say-kroger-mob-attack-...
So, the person running the food truck was to take on all this risk to their physical and mental health to serve folks in these communities making about no money. Most people who talk about these issues don't volunteer to do that. They usually aren't volunteering even at local food banks or donating fresh produce to them. Yet, they expect businesses to operate nearly at a loss when they can make a profit elsewhere. They also expect other people to take on enormous stress and risk their money/lives to serve people in areas with high theft and violence. I don't think it's a reasonable expectation. Given the theft and attacks like the vid, I don't think avoiding those areas is some kind of discrimination. Self-preservation and maximizing personal happiness/profit will lead to same decision for most folks. That includes minority members that usually move out of the same areas the second their finances or college situation allows.
I expect those communities to do more to get that stuff in check to lower the risk of people supplying them. Responsible folks, cool folks, rebels... all of them should take a stand against thug culture with no apologies for their unnecessary love of violence, esp against locals. Gotta pull them in other directions where they can feel like they're being rebellious or bad without that level of damage being done. Once crime goes down, you'll see more kind, but risk-adverse, folks accept low profit to invest in those areas and help them out. An example of people doing that, even more given the crime, are the Stepherson brothers (Superlo Foods) that took over some areas Piggly Wiggly and Kroger left. Walmart also operates near lots of poor neighborhoods.
https://www.superlofoods.com/about
It was also interesting bias that so much media reported the companies "creating food deserts" in Memphis with barely any treatment of the white family that eliminated several of them. Also, (IIRC) none of the well-off minority members invested in a coop, franchise, non-profit store, etc to serve the areas they came out of. Piles of minority members shop at Costco, Whole Foods, high-end department stores, jewelry stores, etc. Zero coverage of or blame for their apathy in the news. So, I call political posturing (i.e. BS) on all that while pointing out the tiny few that are actually doing something about these problems.
This is Hacker News, after all. This is a system and someone hacked it.
"In several cases, hackers with lists of email addresses and passwords have written scripts to locate car-sharing accounts using those credentials. Once they find the accounts, they sign out cars and disable their GPS trackers, causing them effectively to disappear."
This does not sound like it's related to businesses going to certain neighborhoods due to demographics. It sounds like smart thieves took advantage of your biases and drove to certain neighborhoods in order to get you to suspect an Other of their crimes. That's sure what I would do
People were just refusing to give back cars, parking them inside private garages, using immobilizers, and stuff like that.
FTA:
> There was little indication that the people who took the cars had more than joyriding in mind. According to police reports, all the pilfered cars had functioning GPS trackers and license plates that started with the letters AX, and many still had visible Car2Go stickers on them, so officers patrolling the area had little trouble spotting them. On a single day they arrested almost two dozen joyriders.
> She adds that the other types of fraud have been rare at Car2Go and that its GPS trackers can’t be physically disabled.
Other than physically disabling or jamming the GPS what other ways of disabling it are accessible to the potential thief? And what makes Car2Go's GPS impossible to disable physically when we're talking about people with the willingness and ability to steal and strip down a car?
Sorry, but stealing and robbing is not something clever in this case.
None of the links ever work for me, but it seems that I can access it anywhere but my home network.
Most ISP's just use DNS-filtering to block it, so getting around it is as easy as changing your DNS settings.
My isp's nameserver responds with "REFUSED". Quad 9 works just fine:
$ nslookup archive.is 125.253.59.220
Server: 125.253.59.220
Address: 125.253.59.220#53
** server can't find archive.is: REFUSED
$ nslookup archive.is 9.9.9.9
Server: 9.9.9.9
Address: 9.9.9.9#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: archive.is
Address: 51.38.113.22422.7k vehicles were stolen in 2018 in Chicago (metropolitan statistical area) alone. That seems like a huge number.
Article doesn't report problems in other cities...
My initial thought was that this was allowing individuals to rent out their cars and my reaction was a hard 'oh hell no.' What's the term from the various "my expensive camera /lens was stolen" stories? Voluntary parting? Pretty sure that would apply to your nice car as well.
You can rent a car2go for an hour to do a big grocery run, that's not economical or practical with avis.
Having face-to-face interactions with renters is surprisingly effective both at maximising upside and minimising downside.
They then proceed to print off paper forms which they staple other forms to, scan them in, print them off again, fax them to the headquarters before emailing them as well, and print them out a third time just for luck, before finally handing out the keys to the car.
Either the whole industry is unreasonably scared of theft, or theft is an actual problem and they need to do everything that can to keep it low to stay profitable.
I can see why they haven't moved to app-based rentals. It's hard to fax handwritten sketches of your ID card via an app...
They also only have one location in the city where you can get cars, and it's usually much further away than the closest car sharing option.
For longer trips (and one-way rentals which are great for moving city) they are still a good option, but if you need a car for an hour to get some heavy tools from the hardware store they're out.
(The other option would be to borrow a cargo bike which is free from the city, but again only when they're open and requires more travel to and from the place.)
That may just be you. It is most certainly not the case in the US.
I actually wonder how profitable these very short term rentals are on their own. Maybe part of their profitability is long term brand development? Certainly city dwellers like me, who gets by with bicycles and public transport mainly, are exposed much more easily to the experience of driving a nice, modern BMW or Mercedes than they would without these "car sharing" offers.
Enterprise is just as easy and they'll even bring me the car.
Presumably there's an implied distinction between this model, where people share ownership of their primary car, and the typical rental car model, where people are presumed to be traveling or otherwise renting the car to supplement their existing car ownership.
Not saying it's some brilliant insight, but there is an internal logic to the use of the term.
Well - that's why then!
Then one day Car2Go, a single car sharing service has 75 vehicles stolen in one day. That is 110% the amount of the entire city of Chicago from a single company with a fleet of a few hundred cars.
Keep in mind that Chicago likely still lost their average number of cars that day, but the car2go thefts more than doubled the number of thefts for the entire city.
That sounds abnormal to me.