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Comment by fargle | Hacker News Reader

stupid on stupid.

- 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).

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Nobody knows a vehicle is insecure when they buy it. It's simpler, more cost efficient, and more valuable to society just to require cars to have basic security features. Your idea of market correction doesn't work in this case, because it's never advertised as having shitty security, and the average (or even informed) consumer will have no idea this is a problem until after they've bought the car.

Should other physical objects also be subject to this same regulation? What about bitcoins? Your proposed response is unsuccessful as policy reasoning.

My proposed response has been making cars safer and more reliable for years. I don't care if it applies to bitcoin or not, we're talking about cars. Next!

The ability to leave your car in a public space while shopping is a major part of their utility. Cars are therefore common, left in the open, and valuable, but not particularly portable without being turned on.

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.

Yes, and they generally are. In almost all states, sellers have to ensure that the things they sell are "fit for purpose". It's reasonable for us to ensure that they meet the basic requirements of being whatever they are - and for cars, part of their basic purpose is to sit in insecure areas and ensure only authorized users can operate them.

In the age of information ignorance is no longer an option, Before I buy a car, most often the second largest purchase a person will make in their life next to housing. I do i TON of research, I look at insurance rates, I look at Theft Rates for that model, I look on Car Complaints and other Database for common failure items for that model, I have it inspected by a independent mechanic having them pay extra attention to the common failure items. etc

If you just roll in and let the salesman take you for a ride then you deserve the outcome.

Yes anyone who doesn’t have the knowledge/time/motivation/cynicism to prevent themselves getting taken advantage of is basically asking for it, nay “deserves” it.

/sarcasm

Yeah, and if you did not read T&S and now going to become a part of human centipede, that’s on you. I mean, how hard can it be to read a 22 page legalese, before going through a sign up flow, that was heavily optimized to increase conversion?

anyone who thinks there is anybody in the universe other than themselves that is going to take responsibility for their safety, security, happiness, etc. absolutely "deserves" what they get.

Nobody can or should be expected to know about every the safety and security aspects of every single minute detail in their lives.

i didn't say they did! i said they need to take responsibility for their own safety/security or suffer the consequences. whether they should be expected to... is totally irrelevant. i'm not stating a preference, i'm stating a fundamental law of nature.

and not knowing even that simple fact is what makes it "deservedly" so.

Regulation can remove those consequences for any chosen safety/security feature by making every choice have it. Fundamental law of nature? You're deluding yourself.

(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.)

regulation is part of the universe. to expect that it protects you exactly when you'd want it to, but does not inhibit you want you'd not want it to is stupid. trying to offload your responsibility onto some "them" is not a fix.

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.

I do not need the freedom to buy a defective lock.

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 are right. you do NOT need the freedom to buy a defective lock.

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 are right. you do NOT need the freedom to buy a defective lock.

> 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.

Do you look up the software security measures implemented by the keyfob too? That information would be very difficult for a layperson to find and make sense of.

This may be the "age of information", but information is only useful as your ability to find, understand, and evaluate it.

Lets see, oooo tiktok, heres the kia challenge. Or maybe google "are kias secure". Whatever format you can understand, you will be presented several sources that explain the situation quite clearly.

And if you googled that three and a half years ago when you were actually buying the car?

I bet you had to know exactly what to look for, and "problems with kias" wouldn't get the average person there.

Isn't there an aftermarket solution you can buy that would make the kia you bought three years ago more secure?

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.

If you googled kias at any time ever you would have seen they are absolutely riddled with issues. People on HN seem to think buying a car is like designing a CPU or investing in a portfolio of stocks, you could try doing some research.

> In the age of information ignorance is no longer an option

The age of information was great.

In the age of misinformation, knowledge outside your specialty is no longer cheap enough to reliably obtain.

What world do you live in? The statistics are pretty clear and accessible. Are you so obsessed with something you cant attend to your own basic needs?

so in what age was ignorance a good option?

Car thefts are extremely dangerous for everyone on or near the road. It's obviously better to just not allow car manufacturers to neglect basic security practices. There's also entire categories of issues you don't have to research anymore because they've been optimized out of every modern car. Soon cars being hacked with toys will be added to that list for you. Notably, "airbag explosion rate" wasn't on that research project of yours.

It's obviously better to just kill anyone that steals a car. I doubt anyone would try to steal a car after a few examples have been made.

Should we allow cars without seatbelt? Everyone knows cars with seatbelts are safer. If consumers don’t like it, they can just choose to buy the ones with seatbelts.

I never understand this arguement. I hear it in the form "we should just regulate cars to be safer", why dont you just buy a safer car? "What do you take me for? I got a mustang GT, the last thing that car is worried about is safety". Interesting, you bought a car because its fast, not paying any consideration to whether it could safely get you from point A to B, and this is what you rely on to get you to work?

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.

We should regulate cars to be safer because I don't get to decide which car (or, more likely, truck) the moron who puts me/my family in the hospital (or the grave) was driving. Given the trends in traffic and pedestrian deaths in the US, our regulators are grossly negligent in this regard.

Sure, in the context of broad safety you have a point. Of course, you are more likely to die in places where police are responsible for your protection. The safest places people inhabit are their home, their work, places with private security measures.

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.

> The safest places people inhabit are their home, their work, places with private security measures.

Weird takeaway. Those aren't primarily places with security measures, they're places where trusted people outweigh untrusted ones.

Those are places where you only call the cops ('public security') because the situation has seriously degenerated. Their security measures are the ones you are already familiar with; locks and keys, the understanding that you need specific permission to be present, some sort of fridge policy etc.

I don't have much faith that our regulators are going to get their shit together either, but that doesn't mean I can't hold them responsible for the consequences of their negligence. As for the theory that the invisible hand of the market will drive better outcomes in traffic safety, that is obviously not happening in aggregate. It may even be having the opposite effect, given the unchecked proliferation of pickup trucks and large SUVs that are known to be more dangerous to pedestrians and the drivers of other vehicles.

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.

Depending on the make and model of a car, you might save money because insurance companies have determined those cars to be safer. If you have a lowjack, your location, your history, there are a lot of factors that go into insurance costs. Insurance companies adjust insurance prices based on risk. Why would you assume private insurance wouldnt also price their policies based on how safe a train is, what the risk is that it crashes, etc.?

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".

> Why would you assume private insurance wouldnt also price their policies based on how safe a train is, what the risk is that it crashes, etc.?

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.

You make a good point. The government should not impose rules about what companies do and also the government should hold companies liable for what they do, which is a different thing from having rules

Yes, im not saying you shouldnt be able to sue. Im saying the government shouldnt set a magic bar that if companies hurdle they are without fault.

Exactly. If an insurance company writes rules for a company to follow, it is a good thing. If the government writes those same rules it is a bad thing as the goal is not to reduce the number of thefts but rather make whole the people that get their car stolen and have the money to sue

You shouldn't have to consider if the car's locks work, because working locks should be a baseline in cars produced in a first world country. It's that simple and easy. You aren't nearly as smart as you think you are and having basic standards of how corporations should operate isn't coddling.

Then by the standards set by government, I guess the united states isnt a first world country.

> I never understand this arguement. I hear it in the form "we should just regulate cars to be safer", why dont you just buy a safer car?

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.

Or, google.

Doing a security analysis of a car is a complex task that most laymen cannot do, so the argument for laws and compliance among specialists is quite reasonable.

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.

if people cared, they would know

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 kia makes a cheap car with crappy locks either don't buy it

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.

How about Jaguar Land Rover making expensive cars with allegedly crappy locks? https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/range-rover-owners-str...

it'd be bad to advertise that they have in immobilizer or anti-theft when providing either nothing or a badly broken implementation (like you often see in IOT).

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?

The problem with Kia cars not having immobilizers is wholly american. It is illegal to sell a car in Canada without an immobilizer.

funny thing is the part where this article is about a canadian car theft epidemic...

Tik-Tok-inspired Kia thefts weren't a problem in Canada because they've required immobilizers since 2007, something Kia skimped on for the US market.

Speaking as an outsider: How are Kias sales going these days? How's their reputation as a result of this?

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.

Same thing in Australia since 2001.

Most cars in are stolen here using key thefts or wireless relay.

> i'm not negligent for not doing enough to prevent the crimes of some other asshole.

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

> If you entire job is selling locks and they don’t prevent crime

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...

> And if Boeing makes a cheap, unsafe plane, don’t fly on it

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

> if boeing ever makes a cheap plane, i would definitely avoid it

You wouldn’t even know that airline is putting you on such a plane

the point is that boeing might make a good plane or it might make a dangerous plane, but it will never make a cheap plane.

The problem occurs when a vendor makes claims that are false or fails to disclose known issues. I don't think either insecure cars or security tools should be banned. However, I think disclosures should absolutely be made.

Nobody is mentioning about how this is a social problem with the US that needs fixing, for example I often times forget to lock my car's doors in the Eastern European capital where I'm living and yet I've never had anyone "steal" stuff from it.

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.

Yup, and you get downvoted for even trying to discuss it. Need the Overton window to shift slightly so it can be discussed on HN. It is a societal problem and I hope for our future we can fix it.

The last point is a hard one when the perpetrator is a 11 year old kid who watched a TikTok video online on how to steal a Kia/Hyundai.

Punish the kid’s parents.. (oh wait, there might be a problem here)

not hard at all. where is CPS? obviously someone isn't giving an 11 year-old appropriate supervision at all if they are driving, let alone stealing a car. there absolutely should be consequences for both the parents and the child in this situation. i'm not saying one mistake, send the kid to prison, take away parental rights. but it should be severe enough to matter, including several thousand dollars restitution.

Thanks for your contribution to the total destruction of outside roaming and play for children.

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.

dude, i am 100% all for free-range-children.

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.

Indeed, it is dumb to ban anything.

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.

Hrmm I wonder what would happen if I made a bank that used an unencrypted website for online banking lol.

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.

> If the cars are too easy to steal insurance will increase accordingly

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.

Let's say a hardware exploit for iPhones becomes obvious and is spread through social media. Something absurd like "attaching a shorted iphone cable".

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?

>And everyone should also have to purchase an add-on?

Yes!

-Apple

When the iPhone 4 came out and antennagate happened, they gave everyone a plastic case for free.

I thought that they teached people to hold it right

It was a feature!

https://osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/iphone-4-ant...

They gave everyone a plastic case for free, after the world went nuts over just how stupid that issue was.

Let's not paint Apple with an altruistic brush.

Of course they’re not altruistic, it was a damage limitation PR exercise.

The point was that the didn’t, as you suggested they would, charge people on this occasion.

They cost people a lot of time and grief over a goddamn boutique phone, that they were warned would have antenna issues, by the guy that was...Apple's most senior antenna expert, Rubén Caballero, and he was ignored.

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.

I'd expect Apple to refund the cost of the phone and mail a box to send the faulty device in for recycling.

Making a defective product should not be free.

It's called a recall, it happens all the time. Ask elon, lol.

> 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.

if kids didn't want lead in their apple sauce they'd start their own testing labs.

Good thing the government has those testing labs and prevented that from ever happening.

>- 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 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.

Do you believe that consumer protections should not exist?

yes, almost.

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...

Fobs are very cheap. There is no reason to want cars without them.

none of your business what i want, honestly

whether or not it makes sense to you

Did I imply what you want is my business?

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.

> Did I imply what you want is my business?

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.

> - 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.

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".

Ignoring the strawman of an assailant deserving compassion or not, that’s a self serving and narrow definition of negligence. Any mechanism to protect from misuse has to weighed against the magnitude harm of the event occurring and the possibility of misuse. I would not expect my asset manager to have weak authentication systems to access my portfolio but don’t expect any at all from a free online game. I expect both of these to consider the threats and make reasonable choices. And they would be negligent if they did not do this exercise. Whether is an active threat or a passive act of god.

Sure "don't ban anything", if your car crashes and kills you, "should have read Consumers' Reports". Those botulism eggs? Keep an eye things, damn it. /s

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.

You provide no structural basis or reasoning for these cynical assertions, nor for the implied responses. Seems to be founded on a philosophical foundation of individuals requiring safety from “elsewhere,” and assuming that “elsewhere” actually provides it.

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