News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Everyone's joking but this is a serious problem. Imagine you're a billionaire and someone wants to assassinate you. The would-be assassin could figure out when you have a doctor's appointment (or similar) and force a train to get stuck, blocking their route.
It would leave the billionaire stuck in traffic with no escape until the train(s) started moving again. An entire cavalcade of security personnel would also be stuck (if they had one).
Aside: It could also work for robbing something like a Brinks truck but let's be honest: In this dystopian world it's more likely that this vulnerability would be used to rob a food shipment 🙄
I can finally enact my Red Dead Redemption 2 fantasy and rob a train.
Yeah! Go for it!
I'm curious to see how you'll haul away 19,600 gallons of corn syrup, 3,900 bushels of grain, 100 tons of random auto parts, 80 tons of paper reams, 70 tons of logs, 13,000 gallons of ammonia (or other dangerous chemicals), and the various other things that typically get shipped via rail these days.
You might get lucky and find a boxcar full of canned goods 👍
...or maybe even actual cars but... How would you get them off the train without the necessary equipment/track setup? 🤔
You know a good heist always needs that genius mechanic who can bodge a mechanical solution to such practical problems, or just have a flatbed truck with a crane or something.
If this were a movie, it'd end up with an 18-wheeler and whatever nonsense would be required to steal a whole train car. XD
The 18 wheeler gets picked up by a heavy lift helicopter and the hero has to jump on the truck from the top of a parking garage, fight the driver, then climb the cables to get to the gunners and pilot.
He has a god damn plan, Arthur!
Stop the train and lock it down and hold it ransom. Refuse to release the train’s brakes until they pay $[desired amount].
Billionaires take private jets or helicopters.
To a doctor appointment? Where are they gonna land? Not every hospital or building has a waiting helipad just ready for joe billionaire.
The bigger hospitals most likely do have a helipad.
All 3 in my town have one and it's only 160k population.
Not the ones you can afford! Lol
They certainly don't take trains in the US, that's for sure.
If the doctor is unimportant enough to have a helipad, the doctor can come to the billionaire.
No, they have the doctor driven out to see them.
It’s like playing Mario Kart on Kalamari Desert. Sometimes you’re stuck waiting for a train and Luigi pulls up behind you.
Or they can just get their IED on if they know the route and timeline to the degree that they can stop a train AFTER the point of no return. Otherwise it is just "Oh. 4th street is closed. I guess we'll take 8th street instead"
Its a problem. On the grand list of problems... it should be higher than it is but not all that much higher.
OK, I'm waiting for this movie. Go on, draw stuff. I'll wait right here. Could the good guy be Jacky Chan please?
Imagine being so poor you're driven to a doctor's appointment rather that having them come to you.
Now that is the kind of story that would trigger a new attempt to fix this.
Temporarily stopping a train has only so many useful applications for crime, sabatage or terrorism. Might be useful to rob a train if you can stop it in a remote location and steal some high value goods, but realistically most goods are either bulk commodities or shipping containers which are intentionally difficult to identify the contents of when closed. Basically you're just forced to open some containers and hope you find goods valueble enough to resell and make the risk worth the reward
Potentially you could stop a train with some auto racks and steal the vehicles but the VINs will be immediately marked as stolen so the resale value is immediately trashed, plus you'd have to figure out the logistics of getting the vehicles off of a train stopped in the middle of nowhere (they use specialized ramps to drive the vehicles onto and off of the ends of the train when loading and unloading)
From a terrorism/nation state perspective maybe if you can fly some planes overhead and keep spamming a stop signal for a few days you might be able to cause some logistics chaos by stopping all trains in the vicinity of a busy railroad yard, but given modern flight tracking that's extremely identifiable. Better to setup unmanned ground transmitters but that runs the risk of being caught/identified too quickly, and wireless signal triangulation is so easy there's even hobbiest events where people try to manually triangulate a signal for fun. Maybe if an attacked setup several base stations around the country and only sent the brake application signal extremely rarely they could lower rail reliability enough to cause some issues but to cause enough trouble to actually be useful from a nation state/terrorism point of view they'd have to show their cards. Honestly a terrorist or sabatuer is probably better off just blowing up a few bridges and tunnels which would be far more effective
I don’t see a problem in your hypothetical scenario 🤔