Hello everyone! Jason Scott at the Internet Archive. Today, the truck was found abandoned by the San Francisco Police Department, having driven at least once over the Golden Gate bridge during its time away, and is being returned to the Archive tomorrow.
Thanks to everyone for getting the word out - it meant a lot. Hopefully the truck didn't suffer too much for its time away and can be back to transporting data and hardware for the archive shortly.
"But thanks to central locking, alarms and circuitry immune to hot-wiring, stealing a car is far harder than it was. In New York City the annual number of car thefts has fallen by 93% over the past 20 years. According to Graham Farrell, of Simon Fraser University in Canada, reducing car theft may have had broader knock-on effects than just restricting getaway options. Stealing a car for a joyride used to be a “gateway crime”, which would lead teenagers on to other crimes; now such escalation is restricted to Grand Theft Auto games (which, at least one study suggests, may themselves be reducing crime by keeping feisty young men occupied)"
So, video games have made criminals into lazy slobs. I don't buy the car alarm thing - in the 20 years that they've been common, I don't believe anyone has ever called the police when they heard one go off. I'm willing to bet that car thieves are able to disable car alarms faster than the car owner, that can't figure out what button to press on the fob.
The anti-theft measures are really effective. Even if you have the technical know-how to defeat the protections, which most people don't, and requires significant time and/or money, this made many cars completely unattractive to thieves, even in the third world. It is easy to equip even cheap cars with not so cheap security. Ford does it, and probably many others.
This backfires if the country is not safe overall. In that case, it leads to an increase in armed robbery, as they have to get the car keys from the owner. Taking said owner hostage is a common escalation.
I think you may be underestimating how easy some old cars were to steal. Alarms aren't perfect, but they're noisy and paranoia inducing. In some cases starting an old car could have been a matter of opening the door with a clothes hanger (these things weren't sealed too tight), pulling out the key thing, moving it aside and using a coin or something to turn the ignition.
They were also worth something. It just isn't as easy in most places to flog a stolen car. At least not factoring for inflation or something, I guess. The economics of crime shift just like everything else.
Sometimes stuff police or politicians or somesuch do helps too. Anything is possible.
And turning the alarm off typically comprised popping the bonnet once in and just yanking the cables out of the aftermarket crap.
I went through a phase of buying 80's cars, and had to disable more than a few weirdly installed aftermarket alarms the violent way - even did so once in a sainsburys car park, and managed to break the window as I slammed the door in rage at the fucking thing - and nobody batted an eyelid. Could've been stealing it, no problem. Or maybe it was the suit. Nobody suspects the guy in the suit.
This is probably a fantastic example of the ability to solve a problem without implementing huge Silicon Valley style privacy issues. Sadly, most startups today immediately think the best solution to the problem is to transmit data to the Internet.
Car GPS trackers are expensive, hard to install, poorly designed and just plain bad.
It can't be hard to do it better. And if done right there's a massive market. You could get in with insurance companies to cover costs like NEST did with the energy companies. The Business model writes itself.
LoJack is pre-GPS. There's a tiny unit hidden somewhere in the car, connected to vehicle power. Normally it just sits there, transmitting nothing. LoJack has deals with major police departments. When a vehicle is reported stolen, their system picks up the stolen car report, and sends a signal out on a subcarrier of commercial FM broadcast stations, with the ID of the LoJack unit involved. The LoJack unit picks this up, and starts broadcasting its beacon signal, using car power if available and its own battery if necessary. Police cars equipped with LoJack receiver gear (four antennas in a square on the roof) light up a display with direction, approximate range, and info about the target vehicle.
Recovery rate of LoJack equipped vehicles is about 90%. LoJack recovers about 10,000 vehicles per year. It's a 30 year old, effective technology.
> Car GPS trackers are expensive, hard to install, poorly designed and just plain bad.
I don't know about US market, by in my country an anti-theft GPS trackers sold for about $100 (and about $50 for installation). Not a lot compare to a vehicle cost.
Also your need a SIM card (to send/receive SMS by tracker). Even in the US it is not expensive (e. g. T-Mobile for $3/month).
If you're in a making mood, you could DIY something with a Particle Electron 3G for $3/month. 1MB of data ought to be enough for typical idling, and an extra $0.99/MB is pocket change if you need more data to recover the car once it's stolen.
No GPS built in, so you could either add a GPS module or hope that cellular/wifi triangulation is good enough resolution.
I agree this feels like something that should be available off-the-shelf at a reasonable price by now.
Having a recognized GPS tracker in your car can usually get you a 10-20% discount. So if you're driving a reasonably recent and/or higher end car, you'll save more than that on insurance premiums.
It wouldn't be hard to make a product that works 90% of the time. The problem is making a product that is extremely reliable, working 99.99999% of the time. When it comes to GPS car tracking, the system needs to work all the time, so I imagine getting those 5 9s is damn hard.
it's common for sophisticated car thieves going after luxury vehicles to use GPS/cell phone jammers. there are some products using proprietary technology not reliant on a GPRS/3G signal.
For anyone looking for a DIY type thing, you can buy modems that use the Iridium satellite network for maybe $250. Line fees are about $12/mo and from what I remember when I looked, it's actually quite cheap if you just want to transmit short textual data (like location status updates). Worked out a lot cheaper monthly than using 3G from most of the carriers around here.
Of course, it comes with its own downsides. For instance you'll lose reporting if they pull in an underground garage. On the other hand, if they ship your vehicle to the South Pole you'll continue to have reception.
If you want it - it's a commodity, not a startup unicorn (unless you can find a way to give the trackers away, and sell all the tracking data to insurers/local cops/car manufacturer warranty departments...)
That gets into cost vs benefit. Arguably, these things are best as part of the standard package from the manufacturer, but being able to remotely track everyone is going to throw up lot's of red flags for people.
Also, it's easy to drive a car into a truck with a Faraday cage making these things almost useless if they did become common.
Geek utopia version: tech-savvy crims install a hidden faraday cage into the back of a nondescript vehicle transportation semi trailer. After observing the target for days, they cease the perfect opportunity to house the car onto 4 wheel dollies, load it into the trailer, and drive off with their ill-gotten booty, laughing maniacally. The poor owner is none the wiser until coming out from a fancy dinner with his trophy wife to find his treasured luxury vehicle missing.
Real life: dude in a hoodie presses a fake gun into the back of the owner, instructs him to not turn around or call the cops, takes his phone, wallet, and keys, drives off in car with real key. Has a buyer lined up already. Drives car to location and it's promptly put inside a shipping container, which blocks the cell / gps signals by virtue of being made out of steel.
Even if it didn't have the "cops look at me!" paintjob, no offense to the Internet Archive people but it doesn't really look like a nice enough truck to even be worth the effort of dismantling for parts (as opposed to just scrapping it), much less repainting it and keeping it around.
That van has been in production for the past twenty years, with few, if any, modifications to the internals. So nearly everything in that van would be very liquid to a chop shop. It may be a shitbox, but it's a long-lived shitbox, which makes it rather enticing.
You can give any number of asterisked replies about how every criminal is different and motivated differently... and you can attempt to take the following argument to its extremes to say that you can never really get rid of theft. Those may both be true, but focusing on the caveats is a diversion from a fundamental societal issue.
Because we've chosen to use technology for isolated personal enrichment instead of overall humanitarian benefit, we are advancing at a quickening pace toward wealth disparity. Additionally, we've created a religion out of dollars that holds selfishness as a virtue.
It should surprise no one that the selfish actors we've created (and culturally glorified) also behave selfishly when their backs are against the wall.
I hate to be that guy but why is a stolen truck relevant to Hacker News? Only because it's the "Internet Archive" truck? Half a million vehicles get stolen in the US every year.
There's nothing of intellectual interest here, no new phenomenon to comment on, nothing but the tech version of celebrity gossip.
I like to read news about things that happen to the organisations I care about, and evidently at least 123 other visitors of this website like that too.
And I'm going to be that that guy and say you didn't have to look at this story, let alone leave a comment. Like I didn't have to read your comment and leave a comment, but I did nonetheless. Are you and I really so different?
I remember there was some text on the goatse.cx website that used to read "if the image above offends you, simply don't look at it." Below the... shock image. Yeah.
Even the most mundane stuff can generate interesting discussion. From the current comments I've already learned a bunch about car tracking systems as well as the topic of theft. And yes the theft being related to the Internet Archive is notable because of the contents of the truck, as well as its prominent paint job. Maybe you couldn't find much in the story, and that's okay, but I see the phenomenon of truck theft, of archive services themselves losing data, of the susceptibility of physical media compared to digital, and more. I can't find it right now but I'm reminded of a comic in which a group has to repeatedly watch a video of a politician eating a sandwich, and eventually they become critics of the smallest details like the mayonnaise in a specific frame.
