Park your bike. Stop worrying | Hacker News Reader

Park your bike. Stop worrying

vengecycle.com

4 pointsviach7 comments

This is not insane enough to be a funny joke, but it is too insane to be real.

So which is it? Joke or real?

Booby traps like that are also, unlike what the FAQ suggests, completely illegal. Theft of a bicycle is insufficient grounds for injuring someone's hands.

There are legitimate reasons for people to move a bicycle without authorization from the owner, such as if it's blocking a fire hydrant during a fire.

The dependency on GPS and active power is its Achilles heel. How often do you need to charge the batteries? Can you store it in a covered bike parking area with bad signal? What if someone covers the handle with a can and it loses signal? Or glues the USB connector so it can't be recharged?

And of course, simply ride hands-free for the first 100 meters.

I'm really leaning toward it being a bitter joke.

It sucks getting your bike stolen, and some of my car-less friends have had it happen multiple times. What's worse is that there isn't a great, cost-effective way to prevent it.

I can definitely see this being someone's outlet for wanting to blow the hands off a bike thief.

Searching now, I see this was covered in detail a few weeks ago at http://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling/comments/2mtava/new_bike_l... :

> VengeCycle is not a joke, it is a very real product designed to make our user's lives better and safer. We've been working hard on development of our consumer version for the past 2 years and are very proud of what we have accomplished. We believe our customers will be very satisfied with the product.

It's signed 'Peter Moore Director of Sales & Customer Service, VengeCycle', who is also the contact for the domain's whois.

Yup, found a LinkedIn profile for him.

You're absolutely right that this is illegal in the US, and I'd imagine most modern countries would have similar laws against it.

Since it has a battery-operated device, including a beeping alarm, you'd think a better solution would be to just make a loud/obnoxious noise when the bike leaves the 50m radius.

But now I really feel like I'm wasting my time pointing out flaws in an idea from a Wiley Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon.

I hope this is real, if only for the entertainment value of the shitshow it would cause.

While it's obviously illegal in the US and most other civilized nations, maybe there's a legal market for it in places like South Africa. The testimonials on the website, while probably fake, are from people in Nicaragua and Poland.

No word about security, but I'm sure there's no possible way for it to detonate against the owner's wishes.

I wonder how it manages to use GPS from within a metal tube... or how it behaves when there's no signal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w39o6eSI06Y

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