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posted by takyon on Tuesday December 18 2018, @06:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the glitter-lining dept.

Hackaday:

[Mark Rober] was fed up with packages going missing. He kept receiving notifications that his shipments had been delivered, but when checking his porch he found nothing there. Reviewing the CCTV footage revealed random passers-by sidling up to his porch and stealing his parcels. It was time to strike back. Over six months, [Mark] and his friends painstakingly designed, prototyped and iterated the perfect trap for package thieves, resulting in a small unit disguised as an Apple HomePod. The whole scheme is wonderfully over-engineered and we love it.

The main feature of the device is a spinning cup on the top which contains a large amount of glitter. When activated, it ejects glitter in every directions. You could say it's harmless, as it's just glitter. But then again, glitter has a way of staying with you for the rest of your life — turning up at the least expected times. It certainly leaves an emotional impression.

The trap uses an accelerometer to detect movement, geo-fencing to determine when the package has left the property, glitter and a fart spray to make the thief regret it, and smartphones to capture the thief's reaction for the enjoyment of the hacker.

Also at BBC.

See also: Jersey City PD, Amazon work together to catch package thieves
Jersey City PD nabs 12 this week in porch package sting


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @09:13PM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @09:13PM (#776049)

    In the law, you need to prove more than the sine qua non, you also need to prove legal causation. In that regard, the glitter/fart bomb, is less proximate than the behavior of the driver, an accident or injury is not reasonably foreseeable despite the heightened risk due to the required intervention of the driver, less efficient than the behavior of the driver.

    In addition, even if you punched through all of that, there is even more layers to such a tort, including whether there was even a duty, a breach, assumption of risk, good faith, comparative negligence or contributory negligence, reasonable defense of property, and more.

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday December 18 2018, @11:00PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday December 18 2018, @11:00PM (#776097)

    Great response- are you an attorney?

    I'm not, but I would argue that the package contents were known to the addressee, so anyone else who opens it assumes all risks and consequences.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @01:03AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @01:03AM (#776131)

    I opened an air-fryer box today and found an arbitration agreement on top. Can't they just include a manditory arbitration agreement with the glitter bomb?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @01:57AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @01:57AM (#776141)

      No, there has to be some sort of communication of acceptance. An arbitration agreement or express waiver are not a situation where acceptance by silence is allowed in most jurisdictions, although your place or his may be different so IANYL, TINLA, and YMMV.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:02AM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:02AM (#776179)

    You need to prove proximate cause, think domino chain -- a sequence of events that rely on the previous event happening. In legalese: But for the glitter bomb explosion, would the driver have lost control and caused the incident? To put this the opposite way: would the driver have lost control in that instant if there was no glitter bomb exploding in his face?

    To top it off, the standard of proof will be a preponderance of the evidence: is it more probable than not probable (*) that the glitter bomb led to a sequence of events that caused the incident?

    (*) if something is more probable than not probable, that means the certainty level is greater than a coin toss, greater than 50%. So if a jury is 50.0001% confident that the glitter bomb set the chain of events in motion, plaintiff wins. The preponderance of the evidence standard leaves a massive amount of room for doubt. Contemplate the implications of a trial in which you could lose everything where evidence that is a feather's weight over pure chance, is all it takes for entry to the poor house.

    IAAL, parent poster sounds like an Allstate defense lawyer. I'd bet every nickel I ever had or ever will have and any I could borrow, that if the glitter bomb went off in a car and immediately thereafter someone unrelated to and wholly innocent of the theft was injured or killed by the car of a driver impaired by that glitter bomb, the bomb maker is going to be paying damages.

    All that said -- his device is pure awesome. Glad nobody did get hurt. He should stop putting it out now.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:44AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:44AM (#776192)

      The problem with that reasoning is that you are not looking at the entirety of the decision chain. After placing the package on your porch, there are countless intervening causes-in-fact, not the least of which is the one where the thief made the decision to open the package. And that act is the proximate trigger to the chain. The driver is the one who decided to open and look at the contents while driving. The driver is the one with the last clear chance of preventing the whole incident and the only way anyone else could be responsible is through the decisions that person makes. If you are driving and opening packages, then anything inside of them could distract enough to cause an incident, whether or not it is a trap. What if he was shipping $30,000 of gold coins and someone stole it and opened it while driving (on a pure causal standpoint, not breach or duty)? Plus, the driver also has the ability to mitigate after it goes off; and if they didn't, then they would have crashed regardless of what is in it, which again means the glitter wasn't the proximate cause of the accident.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:28AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:28AM (#776200)

        But for placing an enticing bomb on the porch, none of the rest of the chain happens. The bomber will get figuratively slain in a civil trial if an injury occurs.

        Like I said, I'd bet everything on the bomber facing liability in this situation (I'll grant that thief will share liability). None of it happens without a bomb and the rest is all just hand-waving what-ifs that may or may not have caused something bad to happen in a comparatively unforeseeable fashion. Bad things happening from a bomb? That's basically a given.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @07:04AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @07:04AM (#776209)

          I better stop ordering live crickets and other feeders from Amazon then. After all, if some porch pirate steals them, opens them while driving, gets more distracted, and crashes, then I'm in hot water since I left them out to be snatched and opened in the car. Better bring in Amazon and USPS as my cross or third-party defendant too, since they sent it to me so it is also their fault it was left on the porch. I'd better also tell the car manufacturers to remove their radios and other car systems that might distract the thief and cause an accident too.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:07PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:07PM (#776356)

            If you can't see the difference between a box of crickets which are not intentionally designed to blow up in one's face, and glitter bomb which is, you are a walking liability machine. Save up, you're going to need it.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @07:32PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @07:32PM (#776454)

              And if you can't see that both have the same distraction potential, and that the only thing that sets off either is the driver's decision to open them while driving. It is the same reason why we hold people liable for people receiving or sending texts while driving, but not the non-drivers who sent or received those texts, even if they know the person is driving. Under your theory, sending a text to someone who could receive it while driving would make you liable to an accident they cause, as it is reasonably foreseeable that intentionally sending them a signal that could distract them at a key moment could cause the accident.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:28PM (3 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:28PM (#776396)

      My not-a-lawyer gut feeling is that the outcome might turn different if the resulting accident is a criminal case vs a civil case, where the threshold to get convicted is lower.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:49PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:49PM (#776429)

        The standard of proof to prove liability in civil cases is "preponderance of the evidence" -- this means if the jury is convinced that the there is connection above pure change between defendant's actions and plaintiff's injuries, plaintiff wins. In other words, if the jury 50.1% certain there is a connection, and 49.9% uncertain about the connection, plaintiff wins.

        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:59PM (1 child)

          by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:59PM (#776435)

          Man, that sucks ... I only have enough proof to get my jury up to 50.0364% !

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @07:19PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @07:19PM (#776445)

            Different AC, but one of the best attorneys around here explains it like this:

            What we are basically asking you to do is to decide, how well did the plaintiff prove his case and then put it on a scale from zero to ten. Zero, you rule for the plaintiff and 10 you rule for the defendant. But what about the numbers in between? You have to round them to either zero or 10. Think back to when you were in school. Do you remember when your teacher taught rounding to you? I bet you know that you round to the nearest number, so 3 is zero and 7 is 10, when you round. Well, what about when it is exactly half way? The extra-smart among you already know that when you are exactly 1/2, exactly at 5, then you round that up to one. Well folks, that is what I want you to do. Put the case on a scale and then round to zero or ten.