If You Don't Want Your Car Stolen, Make It Pink 390
pickens writes "A study in the Netherlands illustrates car thieves' preferences. From 2004-2008, the most commonly colored vehicle stolen was black. This may be because black vehicles look more luxurious. Following close behind black were gray/silver automobiles. Of the 109 pink cars in the study, not one was stolen. A bright and uncommon color, like pink, may be as effective deterrent as an expensive security system. Ben Vollaard, who conducted the research, wrote, 'If the aversion to driving a car in an offbeat color is not too high – or if someone actually enjoys it – then buying deterrence through an uncommon car color may be at least as good a deal as buying deterrence through an expensive car security device.'"
Re:Hm... (Score:3, Informative)
Both operating systems allow a user program to access, modify, and delete content in the users home directory; can automatically start background tasks at user login by modifying .profile or .bashrc or similar; and will allow external communications for user executed programs on high ports.
A trojan would work just as well with a person on Linux as it does for that same person on Windows but the odds of that person using Linux at the moment is lower and there isn't critical mass for it to spread.
I'm far far more protective of the contents of /home than I am /usr. Do whatever you want to /usr, it takes less than 10 minutes to reinstall but the contents of /home can represent significantly more work.
Re:How to fail with statistics (Score:5, Informative)
All of them. At least, new-ish cars in the Netherlands, in 2004-2008. ...you could have easily looked that up, TFA links to its sources.
Re:More lies with statistics... (Score:5, Informative)
Zero. There were exactly zero pink cars stolen. (The study, if you had bothered to look at it, includes all reported thefts of all cars less than 3 years old in the Netherlands from 2004-2008).
I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics.
Re:Or you could (Score:3, Informative)
Direct link to the study (Score:3, Informative)
Here:
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5262 [voxeu.org]
I generally agree with you though, I'm not sure the conclusions are valid from what's given. It basically says 0.26% of black cars, the most stolen colour, get stolen, whilst 0.16% of red cars, the least stolen get stolen. Apparently there's something like 6.8 million vehicles in the Netherlands, but it's hard from the data to tell how many cars this actually translates to in practice, particularly as the graph given changes over time, and older cars will most likely be off the road. I'm sure you could figure it out by averaging the amount bought over the period and factor in an exponential decrease in those taken off the road, but it'd be more reasonable if the author had done this. The very fact he does seem to have basically left things half finished and come to a conclusion without providing better supporting evidence and clearer data does leave me a little skeptical I'll admit, the level of work done would be fine for a high school science class, but for a professor of economics? a bit of a poor show to be honest.
Re:Or you could (Score:2, Informative)
He was probably not planning to pull the trigger. Murder isn't easy to get away with.
Re:Pink everything, including ponies!@£ (Score:3, Informative)
Societal norms would quickly change anyway. Less than a century ago, in western culture, blue was the color for girls...and pink for boys.
Re:Or you could (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, that's smart. Discharging a gun at a gas station, of all places. He really didn't think things through, did he?
I suspect most people who use firearms to try to coerce people don't actually intend to use them until alternatives have been exhausted.
Pink is just a color (Score:1, Informative)
It has always blown my mind that some people (even females) shy away from anything pink. Sure, society has associated pink with femininity, but somehow people view these as being inextricably linked.
Around here anyway, A male possessing anything the color pink (with the explicit exception of a bottle of Pepto Bismal) automatically suggests to people that he is one of those "evil sicko" homosexuals.
Pink is a perfectly cromulent color! Get over it people!
Re:Hm... (Score:5, Informative)
As another example, consider the number of viruses that exploit buffer overflows in Windows Media Player. I have seen these files, played in another media player, and they display a simple message: to play this properly, use Windows Media Player. Would such a strategy work for a desktop Linux user? Well, again, which media player would you target? There is no one universally installed media player across different distros or different "flavors" of a single distro. Your trojan is going to be less successful if you need to force people to open their package manager and search for a given media player first.
These sort of things basically dull the impact of viruses. It is still possible to write viruses, of course, but it will be harder to spread a single virus as rapidly.
Actually... No. It is quite the opposite. (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5262 [voxeu.org]
It's resale value, not the fear of getting caught
Is it only resale value that drives the preference of thieves for cars in common exterior colours or does the probability of apprehension also play a role?
The recent history of car theft gives us some idea. Red is obviously a bright colour that attracts attention - including that of the police.
Red is also a colour that has fallen out of fashion since the turn of the century (Figure 1).
In the beginning of the 1990s around 25% of all new cars were red, now the number is close to 5%.
The decline of red doesn't only go for the Netherlands, but is a worldwide trend according data from DuPont.
If thieves are primarily interested in resale value and do not care much about being spotted in a bright coloured car, then we should see higher rates of theft for red cars in the 1990s.
That is exactly what we find. Figure 3 shows that, just with the colour silver/grey, the popularity of red in new car sales is tightly linked with the prevalence of red among stolen cars.
This suggests that car thieves do not seem to be particularly worried about being picked out from traffic by police.
Figure 3. Popularity of colour in new car sales vs. theft risk by colour, the Netherlands
http://www.voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/Vollaardfig3.png [voxeu.org]
Source: CBS/RDW
Conclusion
Differences in theft rates between cars in common and uncommon colour suggest that resale value is on the mind of car thieves.
We find evidence that it is indeed the resale value rather than the fear of getting caught that is driving this difference.
If the aversion to driving a car in an offbeat colour is not too high - or if someone actually enjoys it - then buying deterrence through an uncommon car colour may be at least as good a deal as buying deterrence through an expensive car security device.
Re:More lies with statistics... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, if you really want to be pedantic (and this is /., so who doesn't?), the 95% upper confidence interval of 0 events out of 109 is 2.7%. This does not compare favorably to the average risk of car theft of ~0.25%. I'd need more data to calculate the confidence intervals for risk of theft for black or average cars, but it's likely to be much tighter than +/- 2.5% given the total number of car sold.
So the only think you can say from this study is that there's insufficient data to determine whether pink cars are more or less at risk than cars of another color.
Re:More lies with statistics... (Score:3, Informative)
I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics.
And I really hate it when others start prattling about errors with statistics when they don't know when to take an adequate sample.
In the linked 'study' [voxeu.org], we find that the highest risk category is for black cars, with a theft risk of approximately 0.25% during the length of the study. We also learn that the number of pink vehicles included in the study is just 109.
If car thieves had an identical preference for pink cars and black cars (don't ask me why), then in a sample this size, there's still only about a 25% chance that any of the pink cars would be stolen over the study period. The sample is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. It could be that car thieves desperately want to take pink cars, but are having too much trouble finding them.
The data used in this study are insufficient to show that pink cars are less likely to be stolen than the other less-common colors; they aren't even a big enough sample to show that pink cars are safer than the most-stolen colors.
My pink $3mil Bugatti won't be stolen? (Score:2, Informative)
I highly doubt the case. The pink cars are always a repaint. Theives know that pink is not a color that is sold off a car lot. But, paint a Porsche, Lexus, Bugatti, etc pink, and the car will still be stolen.
Re:Solution to theft (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Or you could (Score:3, Informative)
Less control could still be irritating sometimes - when I see a stretch where higher torque at the wheels might get handy, I want to have it instantly at the push of gas pedal; hence downshifting in advance. Heck, with how often I use the engine to return steering wheel to "neutral" after a bend, I probably prefer to be sure that the gear ratio will certainly remain constant.
Now, if only people tought themselves to regularly brake with an engine; that's, I guess, a beauty of automatic - it kinda goes with it?