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Comment by valine | Hacker News Reader

A piece of tape over the cameras is probably enough to immobilize most SDVs. Works on humans too.

Guarding against vandalism isn’t really the car makers job. Tires have always been easy to slash. That’s why we have laws and penalties for breaking them.

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Is this vandalism, though? No actual damage is done to the car. It's even less invasive than a piece of tape, because the cone is just sitting there. It could even be done without touching the car itself. Just place a few mannequins in front and behind the car, so it can't go anywhere.

I can't imagine this counting as vandalism in any reasonable world. Vandalism involves actually damaging things. Coning damages nothing.

As you suggest, putting tape over cameras is closer to actual vandalism because it could leave tape residue on the lens.

Yup. If the car is not smart enough to realize that it can drive with a cone on its hood, or that it can run over mannequins that have been purposely placed in front of it, then that's no one's fault but the manufacturer's.

Most human drivers would probably not want to run over a mannequin sized object intentionally for fear of damaging their vehicle.

Imagine someone kept doing that to a car with a human driver. Do you think they would be breaking no law?

I suppose it would count as harassment, but that's because it'd be done to a person. I don't think it's possible to harass a computer program. If we ignore the harassment side of it, then I don't know what law it breaks, if the object can be trivially removed by the driver.

Criminal law - mischief - which generally includes altering of property and isn't limited to damage or destruction of property. Common law - tortious interference - if the vehicle is a taxi being summoned by a customer, and it cannot fulfill the contract because of the interference of a third party intentionally preventing its movement.

You are not a lawyer.

As we all know, there is a law which says you are not allowed to talk about the law unless you are a lawyer.

"Altering" would have to include a permanent change or anything that's difficult to undo, such as completely repainting the car, or putting it upside down in such a way that it's not damaged. It could not include simply placing a lightweight object on top of the hood that anyone can remove at any time.

Tortious interference, as the name implies, is a matter of civil courts and could open up the person doing it to being sued, depending on the circumstances under which it happens. It doesn't mean they're breaking any laws.

> Tortious interference, as the name implies, is a matter of civil courts and could open up the person doing it to being sued, depending on the circumstances under which it happens.

True.

> It doesn't mean they're breaking any laws.

Yes, it does. Civil law is law (and a larger portion of the law than criminal law is), and torts are as much violations of law as crimes.

Fair enough, but still, the violation arises from the circumstances surrounding the act, not from the act itself. You could very well place a cone on top of someone's car at every available opportunity without running into this tort issue.

> Fair enough, but still, the violation arises from the circumstances surrounding the act, not from the act itself.

That's an arbitrary distinction you could equally apply to any civil or criminal violation of the law; its “the circumstancrs surrounding the act not the act itself” that distinguishes murder from perfectly legal self-defense.

Its the circumstances surrounding picking up an item and walking off with it that distinguish lawful activity from theft.

There's a definite distinction there, though, with regards to immediacy of cause and effect. "Picking up an item and walking off" is a crime or not depending on circumstances that are present at the moment the item is picked up, even if both you and I don't realize the item doesn't belong to me; the same is true for self-defense vs. murder. If I do something to you as innocuous as placing a traffic cone on the hood of your car that triggers a "for want of a nail" situation that ends up in someone terminating a business partnership with you, that's something that neither you nor I could have predicted at the time I did whatever it was to you.

It's arguably either or both of criminal malicious mischief and/or public nuisance, and it's also pretty clearly civil trespass to chattels.

> That’s why we have laws and penalties for breaking them.

Which aren't really enforced in many places. Leading to tyre slashing to become a fashionable form of criminal 'activism' in a social media world:

https://twitter.com/T_Extinguishers

(And promoting that sort of behaviour on social media is apparently just fine, destruction of property apparently isn't 'real violence', yet in many other cases, mere words are now considered to be violence)

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