Neighborhood crime fighting robot

Technology

robobuster_20080305.jpg

Someone in Atlanta created what appears to be a homemade Dalek to help deal with streetcorner criminal activity:

Rufus Terrill has had it with the drug dealers, petty thieves and vandals he says roam the streets outside his downtown Atlanta bar, O’Terrills. Instead of calling the police or hiring private security guards, Terrill built his own security robot.

Watching the video leaves me with a bit of an uncomfortable vigilante aftertaste, which is a little strange since I can sympathize with the difficulties living in an area like this. It’s just not realistic to head down the street at night and ask people to leave.

All that aside, it’s just an imposing looking tele-operated vehicle with a squirt gun and a speaker. The reality is that it’s probably in more danger of being tipped over sideways than hurting anyone.

The real hack here is that (for better or worse) someone’s invented a home-brew, tele-operated psychology counter-weapon. By removing the immediate threat of violence, the driver is able to communicate in a hostile environment. If you made the thing look like Ronald McDonald and had it sing the theme song to Barney instead of squirting water, the robot would probably be even more effective.

Robot keeps Midtown block safe – [via] Link, Video

5 thoughts on “Neighborhood crime fighting robot

  1. the_angry_angel says:

    Whilst HTMLSafe is a good library, I’m actually in the process of moving an internal project that I develop at work from HTMLSafe to HTMLPurifier.

    HTMLSafe is perfectly fine with the current set of tags and so forth, but should HTML get extended in the future the blocklist that it currently ships with could be an issue.

    My reasoning being that I’m not always going to be a round – I could run over a bus tomorrow, and despite HTMLPurifier being slower, it might be safer in the long run.

  2. astewart says:

    a safe_html alternate – htmlawed
    fantastic, superfast
    bioinformatics.org/phplabware/internal_utilities/htmLawed/index.php

  3. Eric Monti says:

    Good ole HTML tidy has been used this way too:
    http://tidy.sourceforge.net/

  4. SnowLeopard says:

    Sometimes it’s possible to fool filters like this easily.

    I used:

    if ( isset( $_POST[“inputfield”] ) )
    {
    $inputfield = $_POST[“inputfield”];
    $cleaninput = $safehtml->parse($inputfield);
    while ( $inputfield != $cleaninput )
    {
    $inputfield = $cleaninput;
    $cleaninput = $safehtml->parse($inputfield);
    }
    }

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