If You Don't Want Your Car Stolen, Make It Pink 390
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the how-to-quit-smoking-too dept.
from the how-to-quit-smoking-too dept.
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.'"
Hm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution to theft (Score:5, Insightful)
Have stuff nobody wants.
Maybe it's simpler than that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the thieves prefer to drive something hard to pick out of a crowd?
Pretty easy to find the stolen pink anything. Not as easy to find the stolen blue Civic. If you have a choice of cars (and in most cases thieves do) you'd pick something you can get away with for longer.
Or you could (Score:3, Insightful)
Drive a stick shift :)
Resale Value (Score:5, Insightful)
Only part of the story (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, pink cars might garner a greater degree of derision, leading to a greater incidence of vandalism. They might be pulled over more for speeding. Their owners might be more often victims of other crimes. Mechanics might inflate prices more.
What you want to look at is the "total cost of ownership" for the car over a period of time, as a function of color.
Re:Hm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux servers don't generally hang about in the average family home being badly managed by the average non-techy person like the average Windows box does :)
Linux servers are usually seen hanging out in specially constructed and managed server farms (a.k.a. dungeons), administrated by gangs of pale, bespectacled geeks and BOFHs and generally up to date with decent security.
to get slightly back on topic, the only pink cars I see in Holland tend to be bubblegum pink Nissan Micras, poverty-spec MINIs plastered with estate agency stickers and random old stuff that's been hand-painted by hippies. None of these would be particularly attractive targets even if they were black.
Re:Or you could (Score:3, Insightful)
Not in the Netherlands; and most of the world for that matter.
Re:Hm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solution to theft (Score:4, Insightful)
My dad drove a POS 94 Ford Ranger up until a few months ago and he never locked the doors. The only time it was broken into in the whole time he owned it was when kids were going around the movie theater parking lot stealing change out of cars. I bet they made a whole lot of money doing that...
I had a cousin who never locked his doors because if someone was going to steal his shit he didn't want them breaking his windows to do it. Eventually someone got into his car to steal his stereo, but even though the doors were unlocked they had smashed the driver side window.
Re:How to fail with statistics (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, that's not necessarily true. Looking at the theft rates for all the non-standard colors (everything besides black, silver, and blue), it looks like a 0.1% theft rate is common. This means that if there are fewer than 1000 cars in the study, having no pink cars stolen could be expected without representing a thief's real aversion to pink (since it's impossible to steal half a car).
Re:How to fail with statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solution to theft (Score:4, Insightful)
Electricians I used to work with would replace the guts of their old broken power tools with the guts of the new shiny ones, leaving the old busted plastic casing.
To be funny, they would then put the old guts into the new shiny cases and leave them lying around for people to find and steal. Eventually people stopped stealing tools from their job sites because even their new pretty tools didn't work.
Re:Or you could (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, not so much a luxury as something for "people who don't know how to drive a car". The extra cost isn't the issue, so much as the image.
Re:Hm... (Score:3, Insightful)
As for targeting the applications, Gnome or KDE... Exactly the same issue as with the rest of the OS. You write two simple front ends. One for KDE and one for Gnome, or you just hope the user doesn't notice that you are using the wrong widgets. It is the exact same issue as malware on various versions of windows. Media players? Target VLC or MPlayer. Even better target any of the libraries that get heavily reused like the ogg decoder.
If you target any application that is installed by default by both Fedora and Ubuntu, you have targeted most users, and the percentage would only rise with more users switching from Windows.
Re:Hm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or Susie, or plain Debian, or slackware. From the Distrowatcher, Debian based distros are the mos common, they are 1/3 of them. Of course, saying "Debian based" isn't enough information for an attacker (unless he targets synaptic, or should he target aptitude instead?), the most used is Ubuntu (all versions of it) with something near 20% of the instalations. So, the best you can target at is 1/5 of the population. Also, Ubuntu systems are mostly low profile, if you want to get the best computers, you'll have to go for Red Hat (the most used on that segment), and you'll discover that from the point of view of the attacker, one Red Hat install (or any distro on a hight profile system) differs way more from another HR install (even of the same version) than a Windows NT install differs from a Windows 2008 one.
Anyway, diversity alone is not the end all explanation for Linux machines not being infected so often. Usability, bug count, the expertize of users and admins, and even the smaller number of instalations (on some segments) are also important.