Food robots delivering bombs? Oregon State campus shut down by 'prank' Food delivery robots became a source of fear for students at Oregon State University on Tuesday after a bomb threat claimed explosives had been placed in an autonomous Starship bot. "Do not open robots," OSU urged in a post on X at 12:20 p.m. local time. "Avoid all robots until further notice." In a little over half an hour …
If Stock, or anyone else, attempts to "break into, damage or pick up the robot" to steal an order or plant a bomb "a loud siren will sound as a deterrent,"
Bin liner and can of expanding foam.
I suspect a remote controlled can of expanding foam attached to one of these robots would supply all the lulz a bored engineerring student could want.
That's easy. Order some food to be delivered via robot (ideally using a stolen ID/credit card). Presumably the person ordering the food has the ability to open the robot's cargo container using same credit card. Remove food item and replace with nefarious item. Done.
That said, hopefully the developers thought to include safe guards against that sort of thing...
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Calls about hoax bombs can cause just as much panic and distress as calls about real bombs, which is why the perpetrators of such hoaxes often get charged with the same terrorist offences. Looks like one student won't be finishing his degree any time soon
What one senior police officer referred to as 10p terrorism in a conversation. He said that the ability of a person or a group to paralyse London would be (and this is going back a good few years now) their ability to put the correct amount into a payphone and call a news organisation with a hoax.
Isn't that why the IRA (who we now know were not terrorists but just a misunderstood Irish folk dance group) had agreed code words ?
- leaving the interesting question of how they agreed them. A senior special branch officer covered in silver braid meeting an Irish gentleman in a black Balaclava on a park bench ?
Meals on wheels was running for many years, and provided hot meals to those elderly who were not physically capable of safely cooking (or safely shopping) - it was a sensible and compassionate scheme that I remember some elderly neighbours relying on when I was a kid...
Starship was trialled in London but first operated in Milton Keynes where there were around 200 robots last time I checked. Now also in Northampton, Cambridge, Bedford, Leeds and Manchester plus other countries including Finland and Estonia.
“ Starship has been in business since 2014”
From memory, the real robot design and development was and is still conducted in Estonia,
The San Fransisco HQ was only established to get better access to investment and the US market. I suspect many in the US think of Starship as a US company.
Yes, they're different lengths. A metric hour is 0.1 day. (Used briefly in France after the Revolution, though I can't imagine it got a _lot_ of use.) 10 metric hours per day, 100 metric minutes per metric hour, 100 metric seconds per metric minute.
Still doesn't work out, though. 6 kilometers in a metric hour would be about 1.5 miles/imperial hour.
This is NOT something I intend to do, but the aim of terrorism isn't to kill people it's to cause fear and panic and expense.
If an organisation put duffel bags onto like 20-30 trains in a single day. No bombs, just a card that said "this could have been something bad" it would cost that country hundreds of MILLIONS in inspectors/police time etc no-one would die, but it would literally cause terror and horror.
And technically it wouldn't even be illegal as it didn't say there was a bomb, just a vague threat.
Fortunately terrorists are stupid.
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