Threat modelling case study: bicycles | Hacker News Reader

Threat modelling case study: bicycles

calpaterson.com

74 pointscalpaterson122 comments

The battery powered angle grinder gave thieves the advantage, but you'd think bike owners would have the advantage now that a battery powered transmitter can be tiny and easily hidden on a bike. People could (if police isn't interested in provoking crime which is illegal in some jurisdictions) plant nice looking bikes with transmitters, wait for them to be stolen, and follow the bike to what's presumably some kind of stash of stolen bikes. Repeat for a few years until thieves feel it's too dangerous.

This sort of presumes that the cops would care even if they knew exactly where all the stolen bikes were. My experience in San Francisco is they couldn't possibly care less. There was for decades an open-air bicycle chop shop under the highway overpass at what is now the corner of Market and Octavia, which was directly across an alley from a coffee shop and diner popular with SFPD patrols, and no cop ever cared about the bicycles.

Police indifference seems to be a problem everywhere. Bike theft really discourages people from cycling. If governments want more people to cycle they need to make bike theft prevention a priority. Even a fraction of what is spent on cycling infrastructure would make a difference.

Police are probably paid low enough that they have to schlepp hours into town for their job and as a result they probably enjoy not being required (by some property loss threshold) to help the tech elite. If the constituents (not the governments) want to fix bike prevention they need to pay for a local police force.

I'm not sure how owning a bike qualifies you as "the tech elite"

There's only two kinds of people in San Francisco: there are "Techie Scum" who are people who walk, bicycle, and ride buses to jobs where they work for a paycheck. The other class of people inherited fortunes from railroad barons, 19th-century bonanza wheat magnates, and Mexican land grants, who went to private schools, then Little Ivies, and have never worked a day in their lives. These people for some reason are known as "community organizers" or, weirdly, "tenants-rights activists."

Are there no restaurants in San Fransisco?

In most locations, police salary is public information. According to Transparent California, in 2019 the average salary in San Francisco for a "Police Officer 3" was $171,950.26 and their benefits were worth another $43,036.34 for annual total compensation of $214,986.30.

Police are generally the most well paid social servants anywhere in the US.

Yup, already a thing for expensive bikes.

Example: https://www.vanmoof.com/en-NL/peace-of-mind

> People could (if police isn't interested in provoking crime which is illegal in some jurisdictions) plant nice looking bikes with transmitters, wait for them to be stolen, and follow the bike to what's presumably some kind of stash of stolen bikes.

Number One Rule of Internet Legal Advice Forums: "No, that isn't entrapment."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car

Those bikes would be equivalent to bait cars, which are well-established tools to catch car thieves. The car doesn't do anything except sit in a "bad" neighborhood; everything else is entirely the work of the would-be thief. It's about as far on the good side of entrapment as you can get without someone's actual car being lifted. The reason police don't do it for bike thefts is because police have (or think they have) better things to do than hunt down someone's Huffy.

> Bait cars are not considered entrapment because they merely afford criminals the opportunity to steal the car; entrapment, on the other hand, constitutes law enforcement persuading or encouraging a person to commit a crime that they would not have committed otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment

> Entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent or agent of the state induces a person to commit a "crime" that the person would have otherwise been unlikely or unwilling to commit.[1] It "is the conception and planning of an offense by an officer or agent, and the procurement of its commission by one who would not have perpetrated it except for the trickery, persuasion or fraud of the officer or state agent."[2]

"But officer, the bike was just sitting there!" doesn't rise to the level of persuasion.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/seattle-bike...

In Seattle, if you are "homeless" you won't be prosecuted for crimes, and guess who most of the bike thieves are?

I mean police probably want to avoid some things that stop well short of entrapment.

Our local police have $0 budget assigned to bike theft. Anything less than $5000 is petty theft, and their service is limited to recording a formal report for insurance claims.

a crowdfunded statistical effort in modeling bike theft ?

let's have 500 bike with stealth gps trackers with cams and let the data flow

Any recommendations for battery powered transmitters? I was planning to buy a tracker for my bike

Police won’t do anything on this information. You’d follow your radio transmitter to a homeless encampment with 20 more bikes piled up, then comes the question of whether you can talk your way out of that desperate thief not getting a hit of a drug or bottle and giving you your bike back. Good luck.

The Lock Picking Lawyer discusses why he uses a thick chain lock for his cheaper bike. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpVOTEOMRuE

This is kind of my approach. I figure, nothing will defeat an angle grinder, but a piece of chain will defeat a wire cutters if there's a nicer bike parked nearby. Riding a sub-$100 jalopy completes the picture.

dudes did try social response toward bike theft in plain NYC, the heavier the grinder the less people assume it's theft. 'nobody would try something that obvious' reasoning.

I wonder if you're thinking of an old Casey Neistat video. And another explanation for people's behavior is that they don't want to get stabbed defending some strangers bike.

Hmm no I don't think it was him, also there was a few other dudes that did the same. The point you noted is valid though. It's tough to intervene, and in one case, a black guy pretending to operate a bike in a park, people did come to tell him to stop, although it was probably .. not morally motivated :)

Over the 30 years I've been commuting by bicycle, I get a bike stolen once every 3 years or so. My bikes cost in the neighbourhood of $1k each. It costs me about a buck a day to travel by bike, which is really cheap relative to other transportation options. The cost of replacing a stolen bike seems to be less of a concern for people than the feeling of having been violated and taken advantage of.

That's certainly the case for me. I think I value my bikes more than my car, though most of my bikes were assembled from piles of old parts. But a bike is a bike, and a car is just an appliance. ;-)

I’m surprised he’s not using a cheap lock and a cheap insurance policy instead. Chain or no, any bike can be stolen. Why drop money on the kryptonite chain when thieves still can angle grind through it like any other lock?

"This prevents opportunistic theft but if this space is shared with others (apartment blocks and offices) it in fact serves to increase the economies of scale for prepared thieves who break into your storage area late at night with a van. It's not uncommon for office bicycle stores (with many fancy, expensive bikes inside) to be emptied out completely overnight by professional thieves."

At the shop I used to work at, we had some guys back a pickup truck through the front window of the store, load the pickup with five or so $8-10K bikes, and then drive off. We got it all on security camera and it took less than a minute. They made off with more value than most small banks keep in cash.

That's a bike shop, right? I assume that means the bikes weren't locked to anything, or even locked at all.

Where I live, to get to my bike you'd need to:

1. Pass a keyed electric door.

2. Enter locked floor-specific cage (think datacenter cage, but more heavy-duty)

3. Cut lock attaching bike to bike rack.

All while being watched by about 5 cameras. The best part? It's student housing!

I'd expect any appartment block or office building to have similar or better security. I have literally never heard of that kind of smash-n-grab happening. It's just too much risk for way too little reward.

The bike room at my friend's apartment building has two entrances. One is to the lobby, the other is out the back... No one keeps expensive bikes in there, they are all junkers.

Risk/reward is relative though. For a lot of people 5 years in jail isn't worth $30k in bikes. For others it's worth the risk or they don't even realize the risk. I mean, people still rob banks for what, <$20k?

My previous apartment building was secured by electronic badges, several camera, and security sitting 50m away (they didn’t have a direct line or sight though). No one stored their bikes longer that 4–6 months there before getting theirs stolen. Thieves would go behind people when the door was being operated and in the case of the parking garage used a van and just fit the rack off, or for the upstairs bike room cut the locks and loaded the bikes in their van just outside the back.

It took very little time, it was all on camera, the police never did anything. I’m actually pretty sure it was the same thief hitting the building every time because the MO was the same. It was actually safer to lock your bike anywhere else than these purpose built bike rooms.

Cameras don’t do anything at all, and neither does the police. Thieves know it.

But a stolen car? The police will be very interested and keep looking.

I had a pretty secure spot too and thieves still took everything out of that apartment. The crime takes 3 seconds, and you only look like a criminal for those three seconds. At all other times you look like any other resident.

“What about bicycle insurance? It's fairly expensive here in the UK, usually 10-15% of the bicycle's value annually and insurers typically only pay out when the whole bicycle is taken (so if if your front wheel is nicked, you're on your own) and when you can demonstrate that it was locked to their standards. Often these standards require that it is locked up indoors which means you're chancing it whenever you park away from your home or office.”

None of that is true. I founded a UK bicycle insurer (not your usual one though).

Our price is locked in max at 10% per year but it’s less if people claim less in our collective. On average people have been paying 6.5%.

We settle partial and full theft claims. Stolen handlebars are more common than stolen wheels.

It makes no sense to have customer prove to you as an insurer that the bike was properly locked beyond asking “was it locked to an immovable object?” and “did you own a lock of a certain standard at the time of theft?”. It’s almost impossible to prove and by that you could always reject a claim.

I haven’t heard of a specialist bicycle insurer which requires you to lock a bike inside all the time. Why would you buy theft insurance? A lock of certain rating is enough, depending on insurer between 24h-48h - after that you abandoned your bike in the eyes of many insurance contracts.

Last note.. of course this article focuses on theft but you’d also be covered for damage which can be the bigger risk depending on your use case (e.g road cycling or mountain biking).

For damage, how do you handle things likely caused by poor maintenance? I used to work as a bike mechanic, and there were plenty of times where a customer's bike got completely trash if they had just learned how to do some very basic routine maintenance and had brought it in to the shop once a year. Thinks like riding the bike when the the headset or bottom bracket are obviously loose, or riding on wheels that are very noticeable out of true.

Maintenance is indeed tricky.

Our way out is probably that the minimum bike value has to be £500 but the average customer has a multiple of that value and bikes at home. Passionate cyclists buy into our concept.

We are looking into how we can institutionalise maintenance a bit more because there is a strong case to drive down cost further for everyone if a decent mechanic sees your bike at least once a year.

My personal top tip are chain catchers. It’s a matter of time until the chain drops and if the front mech is not well adjusted. And if you get unlucky and have a carbon frame you might rip a hole into the frame.

Yep, I've seen that multiple times. Just knowing how to check your limit screws occasionally would save a lot of people some future headaches. It would be cool if for a certain price range and kind of bike you could get insurance that would cover certain routine maintenance costs. Maybe something that would help cover annual suspension services on high end mountain bikes, or that helped cover routine tune-ups. As a mechanic I'd hate to have to navigate that kind of system in order to get paid, but as customer I'd love it.

Most people just don't realize that they'll save money in the long run if they just put some money into their bike every year. We had customers that would buy an S-Works every year or two because they just pounded out miles but never wanted to pay for maintenance. If they put $500-1000 into the bike every year they could have kept it 5-6 years instead of the 1-2 they were getting out of them.

Seriously, my renters insurance covers all my possessions including my bike from theft for like $8 a month. Bike is insured for 1k.

I have had two bikes stolen, both of which fit into the "bike shaped object" category. Your bike can still be a target even if it is cheap, the main difference is that you have less to lose.

> Backing up your important data ...

If only I could run an inexpensive piece of software to restore my bike to the condition it was in before I put several thousand kilometres on it!

Even cheap bikes are being stolen by crackheads, it is not a deterrent.

I recently brought a 4500€ e-mountain bike, and my solutions are :

- a 20/20 motorcycle U-lock from Abus

- a 15/15 bike folding lock with a vibration alarm from Abus

- a LoRaWan GPS and movement/vibration tracker hidden in the bike

- only keeping it in my secure parking at work, inside my house or a few minutes at the grocery market.

I sadly lost my old bike due to this thinking:

- cheapo 90s brand

- ugly design / color

- no seat

- missing one pedal

- low end shimano shifter (manual lever above handlebar)

- rust, broken brake handles

ps: how is the vibration alarm working ?

I think the best solution is to assume theft. Even with the GPS position, not much you or law enforcement will do once its in a homeless encampment with 20 other bikes.

Buy a cheap lock to deter walking off with the bike, and buy insurance. I pay $8 a month and if my $1k of bike is stolen, I pay nothing more to get a brand new one.

I built my bike (as in assembled it - i didn't build the frame or the wheels). It cost something like £2000, or would have cost about that if i'd bought it ready-made. I chose all the parts to fit my needs as closely as possible - nice frame, nice but off-brand wheels, cheap bottom bracket because that's all you need, handlebar and stem reused from an old bike, decent headset, wide gear ratio, etc.

Because it's built from a random assortment of parts, all of which are now filthy and scratched, it looks horrific. I do lock it carefully, but i don't worry about it. Nigel the junkie won't get through the lock. Nor will Rupert, and he won't see anything he can sell on (except maybe the saddle). Percy knows perfectly well it's not worth his time.

Having said that, of course, it will get nicked next week.

Any resources good for learning bicycle assembly and maintenance that you could recommend by chance? There’re so many available, but if you have started doing this more or less recently perhaps you remember which would help a beginner the most?

Sheldon Brown for theory stuff. Youtube for hands on. But of course practice to gain experience is really all there is for learning mechanical sympathy.

I'd also recommend trying top make friends with someone who is already doing it (at a level high enough beyond you that you'll learn useful stuff from them).

Car/motorcycle/bike maintenance - it's always better to have someone who has a fair bit more experience than you sitting in your shed drinking your beer and eating your pizza while you do your own work.

I learned how to adjust caliper brakes watching a bike mechanic swap out my front cable in about 90 seconds. I saw it was entirely a matter of feel and visualization.

> I saw it was entirely a matter of feel

Depends, I guess, on where you're starting from. Some people know how hard you should/shouldn't push on a 10mm spanner or a 6mm allen key. That kind of "matter of feel" comes from someone who's already got it showing you and letting you feel it, or from a trail of stripped bolts and/or crashes where your brakes failed or fell off 'cause you didn't torque them up tight enough...

In person expertise is not essential, but I do think launching into repairing your own brakes is perhaps the _worst_ example of something you should learn from Youtube... (Although adjusting bicycle brake cables is not nearly as bad an example as, say, removing callipers and swapping out brake pads on a motorcycle...)

If you can find someone to help teach you, it's well worth the pizza and beer it usually costs...

I suspect you haven't replaced CV joints using a Chilton's Manual. Bicycles are easy. They don't require force or working overhead in a tight space next to a hot shop light, and don't leak fluids into puddles with your face in between. They're not scary except in the sense that someone doesn't have expertise. There's nothing there that can't be done right by trial and error and mechanical reasoning. It just takes putting it together wrong and taking it apart a few times until its right. Anyone can overhaul a bike in four days.

Uhhh, yeah I have. More often using Haines Manual. But I've done CVs on 69 and 72 Beetles, a bunch of early 70s Leyland Mini race cars, two different late 80s Suzuki Swifts, late 90s Ford Laser, and Alfa Romeo Sud and a Sprint, and a 2005-ish RAV4.

I've also totally stripped and rebuilt several VW Beetle motors (and a Kombi one), a 13B Mazda rotary (which ended up in the 72 Beetle eventually), and my Ducati Monster 900 (engine/gearbox). I own one motorcycle that needs a new top end rebuild every 10,000km (A Cagiva Mito 125cc two stroke). I've done the desmo valve clearances on that Ducati every 20,000km since 1999 (it's got over 320,000km on it now.)

So I'm not particularly scared of most mechanical things (I'm more put off by the pains of a 50year old body crouching down next to a motorcycle in the cold these days than worried about working on the mechanical stuff...)

But I _am_ acutely aware that many (most?) people didn't have fathers who taught them how to work on cars/lawnmowers when they were 7 or 8 years old, and have no clue at all how tight fasteners should be or much force you can put on them before starting to worry about whether you need to start checking if you've missed the lock nut or split pin. People who have no feel for whats "About right" for a 10mm fastener compared to a 17mm or 32mm one. People who don't read a torque spec of 10Nm for an M6 fastener and realise "Oooh, that's not very tight, must be a stainless fastener into a soft-ish allow..."

I _strongly_ stand by my advice of making a more experienced friend and having them oversee things and be there for when you're not sure if you're doing things right.

But did you win the Putnam?

I am now unfortunately in a location where it is non-trivial to befriend a person to shadow like that (language barrier etc.), but thanks for thoughtful advice. Pizza/beer point noted!

Ahhh, Covidtown? Yeah, I have that problem too...

yeah I have.

So it’s possible to perform a new mechanical operation without a personal guide present?

For VW’s Haines is definitely better. I had both for my 64. No CV joints on that one. Swing axel.

And static timing. Which is an example of trial and error and eyeballing. That’s essentially how the Haines described it.

> So it’s possible to perform a new mechanical operation without a personal guide present?

Oh sure.

But I reckon learning the 4th, 5th, 100th new thing is _way_ less learning curve than learning the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd things. It's that early steep learning curve of all the assumed knowledge that Haines/Chilton/Ducati workshop manuals where a workshop buddy is hugely beneficial.

Happy to disagree on this. But I also will continue to recommend finding a more experienced person to help out when you're starting out, and will regularly offer to be "that guy" for people who show interest.

(Also, didn't the '64 still have inboard CV joints? My '69 had the "two joint rear end" with CVs up against the transaxle but none at the wheel hubs and the bendy trailing arms (according to most info that means it was probably a '68, but it had a 1969 Australian compliance plate of it :shrug:). The '72 had the four joint rear end.

I don’t disagree that having someone to hold hands is a good idea. That doesn’t make YouTube the worst way to learn. It’s better than a Haynes manual because there is an experienced person showing how it’s done. In the case of brakes, it might even be a Park Tool factory mechanic.

For VW’s I think model years and features vary by region.

> That doesn’t make YouTube the worst way to learn

Oh no, I agree there too. It's probably the second best way to learn. (Though for me, I have more of a "read the words and look at the pictures" kind of brain, I'd choose a decently written blog post or manual over video content every time...)

But I _think_ the part of my comment you're pushing back against didn't suggest that Youtube was the worst way to learn - but rather that brakes were that _last_ thing I'd recommend someone starting out learns by themselves on Youtube. (It's entirely possible I didn't write that clearly enough though...)

Start out learning (whether by Youtube or with an experienced person) how to replace light bulbs and fill you windscreen washer fluid and upgrade your stereo, then move on to more safety-critical but low risk things like oil changes, ignition timing, carb/fuel injection service - the sort of things that if you get it wrong make you stop. Leave the things that if you get it wrong you _don't_ stop until you're totally confident you know you are going to get it right.

Brakes are one of the few things I say no to helping friends out with. If they start to work on them while I'm around, that's OK, but if they invite me round to show them how to do it I'll tell them "No, take your brakes to a licensed/insured mechanic."

My concern with trial and error is that from lack of experience I might ruin the expensive parts (perhaps over time) or make the bike unsafe to ride.

Don’t be afraid. It’s only a bicycle. Parts can be replaced. The whole bike can be.

Perhaps you can easily replace hundreds of dollars in parts but I’d rather avoid that. Besides, as I wrote, if my bike fails during an aggressive ride, replacing its parts might be the least of my problems.

Genuinely curious how frequently the bike is ridden aggressively, who maintains it, and how frequently they do so. For my own safety, I try not to ride aggressively, but I do ride frequently and maintain my own bike so I don't have an intuition about your experience.

By trial and error, I mean small scale and safely. Like truing a wheel. Spin, adjust, spin, adjust, spin, adjust...and eventually the wheel is true. That's when it's ok to ride on it.

Brakes and bearings are spin, adjust, spin, adjust too. The difference experience makes is fewer spin, adjust loops to get it right enough to ride on.

I often ride a little (or a lot) faster than the situation calls for in urban context and rely on emergency braking.

The bike I bought at a dealership is just a couple months old and no maintenance work had been done so far.

I am feeling it’s about time for some adjustments (rim brakes are accumulating some leeway now), and thought I could as well replace some parts while at it and start to learn how to put together a fully custom ride (to use the skill in future after I move to a more permanent location).

Part of the reason replacing parts is attractive is because shopping is easier than maintenance...and in practice it's easier than riding because it can be done sitting at a computer eating a sandwich.

But if that's your plan, then you'll need tools. Not many. Mostly basic bicycle tools. Not specialized tools for most situations, that's why those tools are specialized.

The tools I'd recommend starting with to keep your bike safe -- these handle everything that occurs day to day. They focus on the wheels.

  hex wrenches. so nothing that's loose stays loose.
  cheap ones are fine.
  I mostly use a set of tee handles bought
  from Harbor Freight for about $12. Sometimes
  L-shaped hex wrenches for tight spaces.
  
  track pump, it just makes keeping tires properly
  inflated easy. Inflation makes a huge difference.
  Tires lose significant air in a week.

  tire levers.

  a patch kit that uses rubber cement.

  truing stand - a cheap one from china is more than good
  enough. Without a trued wheel, brakes cannot be optimally
  adjusted. Trued wheels create a huge ride difference.
  Anyone can true a wheel, it just takes time and patience.

  spoke wrench. not just for truing wheels but for
  insuring spokes are not loose. not-loose is not quite
  the same as tight. spokes need the right amount of tension.
  the right amount is loose enough to for the wheel not
  to run to that side and tight enough for it to stay true

  chain lube. 

  screw driver for adjusting derailleurs if the chain
  rubs AND you're not riding cross chained.

Second level tools for bearings. Wheel bearings don't require much attention but can need periodic service. If the wheel moves laterally when the brakes are applied or doesn't spin freely and isn't rubbing, adjust the bearings.

  magnetic parts cup. when something comes off the bike
  that's where it goes. even if it's not magnetic.
  especially if its small. It will also find ball bearings
  when they are lost.

  cone wrenches to adjust wheel bearings. these are just
  flat wrenches.

  white lithium grease for wheel bearings. don't put it on
  your seat post

Everything else is pretty rare - modern cartridge bottom brackets have removed a lot of maintenance and the associated tools. Pick them up when you need them. You need them when a job with the tools you have seems to require a lot of force or not be possible.

Lastly, not doing maintenance doesn't make your bike safer. If something requires maintenance and you break it and can't ride, that's safer than not doing required maintenance and going for a ride.

If you're really worried about over-torquing something, you can throw money at it. There are torque-wrench versions of bicycle tools that are used for torque sensitive operations.

Good luck.

Thank you! When I asked the original question I didn’t imagine I’d get the help I needed right here in the thread. I didn’t quite realize it myself but knowing what’s the minimum set of tools I need to have had indeed been among the biggest obstacles.

I'm glad if you find it helpful. The most expensive bit is the pump. I have a Lezyne floor pump that was $60 from Amazon. Truing stands are about $40 on eBay. Spoke wrenches are available for around $5-10. Tire levers all about equal. The Park Tool patch kit is small and comes with rubber cement.

The Park Tool youtube channel is good at explaining things in a lots of detail without being convoluted. It should cover 95% of what you'd need to learn. The hardest part is trying to figure out what components are compatible with what. There are more standards for bottom brackets than there are for character encoding.

The Park Tool videos are phenomenal.

I particularly like the Tech Tuesday videos, partly because Calvin Jones is so fun to watch (although he's not just a pretty face [2]), but also because, for example, this is the first explanation i ever heard of how hydraulic brakes self-centre that actually makes sense:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQXFFgRButo&vl=fr

[2] https://www.probma.org/blog/calvin-jones-more-neednt-be-said

get an old bike. take it apart and put it back together.

i built my own bike without help when i was a teenager.

there aren't that many parts and your main struggle will be to decide what from the different options for each part to choose.

there are different gear and brake systems to choose from, and if you don't know what's better for you, your bikeshop can advise you.

for my bike i used mostly standard parts, that is the common stuff found on every other bike and available in every shop. the only thing where i splurged is a good leather sattle from brooks.

Check if there is a community bicycle workshop where you live. They’re usually run by volunteers in universities where they have all the tools, you come with your bike, tell them what you want to fix or adjust, they show you how to do it, and then you do it yourself. They usually let you bring your own parts or have a stash of used parts. That’s how I learned almost everything I know on the subject and it didn’t even take that long to learn. And the park tools videos are very well done.

Personally, i grew up cycling, learned a lot from my dad, and have learned a lot from trial and error (mostly the latter) over a couple of decades. Continuing education comes from the Park Tool Videos, bicycles.stackexchange.com, and reading threads on random forums started by people with the same problem as me.

I suspect an organised person could learn much more efficiently than this.

One pitfall to watch out for is that in cycling, everyone has their opinions, which they will proclaim as absolute truth. If you're just following one person, it can be hard to distinguish universally agreed common sense from opinion.

People who want to steal a bike to feed a fix don’t care about your groupset, they care that you have 20 pounds or so of good scrappable metal. Anything is fair game. Any lock can be cut. Crackheads have battery powered angle grinders too, and they are emboldened because law enforcement doesn’t go after bike theft in the US at least. The best lock is a renters or homeowners insurance policy that can cover your bike when it’s inevitably stolen.

My favourite solution would be something like this:

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/q=japanese+underground+bicycle+parkin...

I recently bought an expensive ebike to commute, and I decided to get a kryptonite lock. The primary reason was because of their anti-theft offer:

https://shop.kryptonitelock.com/atpo_landing_pages/register-...

I bought a lock that would fully insure the bike, so if it does get stolen I would at least get the value of it back.

Note that you need to recover the broken lock in order to make a claim. Now I can't think of why the thief would take your lock after defeating it, but I don't understand the criminal mind.

Yep I noted that. My thought is really if someone has to go through the trouble of taking an angle grinder to the lock, there is a bunch of noise (and sparks) that have to happen first. I admittedly know mine is a juicier target than most bikes, but there is some serious dedication needed for it.

Having bikes stolen 3 times, I have never found the broken lock at the bike place. Thief take all because the owner will lose time trying to remember if it was the correct place, it leaves no clue if a police car happens to pass a few seconds later after the bike is stolen.

My ebike was stolen. It had a good lock, and was on street with significant passersby. It seemed like there was nothing I could do to prevent that from happening again.

My solution was to buy a foldable bike that was half the price, and half the weight of my ebike.

I didn't even buy a bike lock because I never leave the foldable bike parked on the street. Wherever I go I bring it inside.

I am very impressed by this electric bike that optionally comes with a theft insurance that will simply return your bike or otherwise replaces it: https://www.vanmoof.com/en-US/peace-of-mind (not affiliated)

I would expect the justice system in SF to come down hard on those bike hunters. Wonder how they get away with it.

Curious - is there something illegal in the way the system works?

I would imagine there would be similar pitfalls to what you see in places with legalized bounty hunting

That would be about appropriate for SF: ignore the bike thieves, go after the guys going after the bike thieves.

Why? They’re doing the work the police won’t bother to do.

My summary from the article: take down the fence — the middleman criminal who provides a market where thieves can sell their stolen bicycles — and be especially ruthless about it.

This is an option only really available to the police. Perhaps there’s a reason for law enforcement to tolerate fencing though? Maybe there are nuances downsides to society if we eliminate the black markets?

Do fences act as some kind of lubricant to the underclasses? Do we allow fences to exist because, if we didn’t, the desperate / evil thieves would resort to violently extorting cash instead of non-violently stealing bicycles?

Imagine a future, for example, where the black market for stolen goods is quashed. It is much safer to lock bicycles up outside, but ATM knife extortions go up tenfold.

Get a larger knife (up to machete), a can of bear spray, a tazer or gun. Don't go alone, pay cashless, etc.

My wife finds it hard to believe my tales of how things in the US would grow legs if left unattended, and how sidewalk cafés there would lock the tables to the pavement and bring the chairs inside at night. (caveat: the "big city" where I lived when I met her is 30k, hers was 80k)

So I do believe rampant petty crime is a deliberate societal choice, but as to whether it serves a purpose or why it would be tolerated, I have no clue. All I can say is that in at least some jurisdictions, lack of bike theft does not translate into increase in mugging.

Tangentially related (education instead of petty crime) but I still find it darkly amusing that people who call Brave New World's five colour-coded castes a dystopia voluntarily sort themselves by five-digit ZIP code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269640

"I'm really awfully glad I'm a 94301"

In the U.S. bike theft is not pursued since it isn’t a felony usually. People don’t spend a lot of time in jail for bike theft even when they do get caught, so not much downside for a very high possibility of an upside.

Worth reading to the very end:

>When threat modelling, a good starting point might be take your attackers "needs" and then instead of striving to 'surprise and delight' you instead strive to "bore and frustrate".

> No thief is going to bother cutting my locks when there is a Campagnolo on the next rack.

Exactly, lock your bike close to a better one with a similar lock. The thieve will start from that one and could have no time left for yours.

This reminds one of this old joke about two people running away from a bear. One of the guys says to the other: why are you running? You'll never outrun a bear! And the other says: I don't need to be faster than the bear. I only need to be faster than you.

Although the National Park Service officially recommends not pushing down friends when running from a bear, or otherwise using friends as bait or sacrifices.

https://m.facebook.com/nationalparkservice/photos/a.74409236...

I think this in point. "[Treat] the attacker user personas with the same primacy as those of the customer user personas — [put] them on a wall in the office and [have] everyone conversant in their "needs".

Another solid piece that goes into more of the details of threat modeling: https://increment.com/security/approachable-threat-modeling/

>"Powertool Percy" will be kept at bay by:

> Nothing, save ensuring that your bicycle doesn't look valuable enough to be worth his time this probably means keeping its value down below a few hundred pounds

There actually are a handful of products that will successfully defend against power tools, such as the SAF lock: https://altorlocks.com/products/saf-lock

Isn’t it easy to attack the post itself then? They are rarely solid.

At what point does the thief just cut your frame? They want scrap metal, functional bike be damned.

My insurance policy (renters or homeowners) covers bike theft. Yes, there is a $1k deductible, but my bikes range from $3-5k each. Is this not a thing in the UK/EU?

This is definitely a thing in Ireland and generally seems to be better value than specialist bike insurance. From my limited research, the latter is not worth getting for most people, but if you already have home insurance it's almost certainly worthwhile making sure it covers your bike, sometimes at a small extra cost to include bikes stolen not from your home.

Could you change the deductible? Mine is $500, and it's just not worth losing any sleep over it. I still lock the bike because it's a hassle to not have your bike when you need it, but life is too short to be lived in obsessive anxiety over locks.

The Netherlands here. Homeowners insurance usually only covers bike theft when the bike is actually stolen from inside the home or garage, and there must be entry damage to prove this.

If you want to to insure against bike theft, you need a separate form of bike insurance. They generally have no deductible, though.

But it's usually not worth the effort. Daily-use bikes are too cheap to worry about, and expensive racing bikes / mountain bikes never leave your line of sight while outside your home.

Is bicycle theft taken seriously in the Netherlands? Meaning, do the police work to stop it? I’ve wondered since there’s such a strong cycling culture there.

What about damage? Can you get any insurance for that?

You can even get this with zero deductible for some policies. I pay $8/mo for that with my renters.

I think this is a good list of things to consider for the first two personas. As for the last persona "Powertool Percy", there are a few tactics you can deploy. Especially for folks in dense urban areas.

* If have an expensive bike don't ride it for errands, get a junker that rides well but looks worthless.

* Remove the branding or make it camouflaged with stickers.

* Ride dirty. Obviously keep the components lubed, but let your frame and wheel stay dirty

The overall idea is to make it not worth the effort.

Making your bike look shit will decrease the perceived value. Other nearby bikes will look comparatively more valuable, and are thus a more attractive target.

Using overkill locking will make it too much effort to steal. When choosing between bikes of similar value, the one which is easiest to steal will be choosen.

Make it hard to offload. Giving it a shitload of stickers or a weird paintjob will make it too recognizable. It will be too obviously stolen to sell, again making other bikes more attractive.

I don't usually support the death penalty, but for persisting bicycle thieves, I do wonder if, like street-mimes, the pit of snakes is the best option?

I seem to recall that in former times caught horse thieves in the plains and the "wild west" were quickly hanged. Understandable, as the owners usually depended on them for their livelihood.

Why not create a bicycle whose frame is itself the lock, such that if you cut the lock, you are destroying the bicycle itself.

Thieves often cut the frames anyway, because it takes only seconds to cut tubular frames with a pipe cutter and the rest of the bike is still valuable as parts.

Yep, the most expensive components on an ebike are the battery and motor, you can cut the top tube and pull those components out and sell them for 500+ a piece on the used market. The batteries usually have a lock that is supposed to keep them from being stolen, but even on the high end brands they can just be shimmed open with a credit card in a second. I used to work as a bike mechanic, so learned all the tricks of the bike theft trade just from the stories from customers coming in after they had their bike stolen or stripped.

If I was a bike thief I wouldn't even be bothering stealing full bikes, you can just walk around with a set of allen wrenches and a chain tool and make off with a nice derailleurs, carbon wheelsets, full stem and handlebars mounted with expensive shifters. You will look less like a thief and more like a guy working on his bike, and if you're afraid of someone questioning you, just stuff a card with your name and information on it in the seat-tube while your stripping it, and if anyone ask you can just pull that out as 'proof' that the bike is actually yours.

Indeed, you can often get more for parting the bike out. People selling old bikes have found this to be true.

VanMoof used to sell that! https://cpsc.gov/Recalls/2017/VanMoof-Recalls-Bicycles

There have been several such designs. The first I remember was the Puma bike whose downtube was a pair of steel cables: http://www.designagainstcrime.com/projects/puma-bike/

That was over 15 years ago. They sold some. Yerka is a newer one: https://yerkabikes.com/us/

Useless because the thief would just cut the pole with some powertools, or pushing it fast back and forth until it breaks at the socket, or snaps out of that. They aren't that massive as they look.

Takeaways:

1. Make attacker user personas part of your threat model.

2. Create the threat model openly inside your organization. Get input from knowledgeable people. Help people to get familiar with it.

I live at a uni campus, and use a pretty good bicycle. But it's in a sufficiently bad shape to pass as worthless.

I almost never lock it, but use a fixed rear wheel lock that I put in an almost-locked position sp that it looks locked.

The only time I lost it was when it was confiscated by the school due to bad parking during clearing of snow. I found it in a nearby locked yard a couple of months later. I won't describe in detail how I got it back.

Mostly for the hilarity... How much would it cost to make a bicycle lock out of Inconel?

If want to have it machined for you, several thousands. If you just want a chain, maybe $100.

I don't think it is a good material for a bike lock anyways. It has excellent heat and corrosion resistance but for strength, I think you are better off with regular hardened steel.

If you are looking for an unconventional lock, the one I found the most interesting has a sheaf made of loose Kevlar fibers that fouls angle grinders.

To defeat grinders, some locks contain ball bearings and ceramic inserts. Ball bearings spin with the cutting disc preventing abrasion and hard ceramic insert quickly wear off tools. I've never seen these on bike locks though.

The kevlar fibers don't really work in practice. Turns out you can just use a pair of shears or a boltcutter.

Examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7ah3RA0Alo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On0DGcDlc

It is not this.

I don't remember where I found it but only the sheif has Kevlar fibers, there is what I think is a hardened steel chain in the middle.

The loose Kevlar fibers don't offer any strength, instead, they make a mess if you try to cut through the sheif.

You can probably cut through the sheif and Kevlar with shears to reveal the chain and then use your angle grinder but it will slow you down, especially if everything is entangled.

https://altorlocks.com/products/saf-lock sounds more like what the parent was referring to. It's a good example of clearly addressing a specific threat model: it doesn't try to be impossible to cut (although the marketing material says otherwise...). Instead it's just so thick that a 5" angle grinder can't reach all the way through it in a single cut, and the coating material is specifically designed to be slow to cut through so that it takes a long time and requires multiple batteries.

Of course, it still has the obvious problem that the thing you're locking it onto is probably a lot easier to cut.

Holy cow, 6.2KG!! That’s almost as much as a good bike weighs, and enough weight to seriously feel it lugging that around.

I guess if you really have to leave your bike locked in public for long periods of time it could be worth it, but wow, that would not be a nice or convenient thing to lug around.

"More often than machining, water-jet or laser, grinding is a preferred and economical method for forming nickel alloy components to shape and finish. Due to the hardness of the abrasives used, the grinding wheels are not as affected by the material work hardening and remain sharp and durable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconel#Machining

recent comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24340190

We invited the submitter to repost that one but didn't hear back, so I told calpaterson it was fine if he did.

I can see why.

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