Don’t Get Jacked, NoJack Enters The Bike Alarm Fray

This exists for kids with too much money to blow on kickstarter. They’ll lock their bikes up outside their dorm room with their overpriced crowd funded garbage.

I like it, the auto arm is cool (though I don’t own a cellphone, so actually useless for me).

The advice I always give people is buy a decent u-lock – a $50 one is fine – and lock the bike outside the entrance to a busy store, any potential thief will consider the time it will take to defeat the lock and the good possibility that the next person out the door could be the owner and will then look for an easier theft.

Of course you will always have to deal with the crackhead/junkie element who consider getting pinched an occupational hazard, but being smart about how and where you lock your bike goes a long way to preventing its theft.

Car alarms dont really prevent thieves from stealing cars.

i got 2 bikes stolen so far, both locked with decent locks (U locks). one of them in a basement with a locked door, in fact (+u lock).

So .. yeah bikes get stolen even with a good lock. Now, will an alarm deter the thief? I don’t really think so.. this is a gimmick IMO. Just turn it off/destroy it. It’s cool, but i wouldn’t use it. I much prefer the hidden GPS trackers.

Then again, locking a 4000+ bike in the city isn’t exactly smart I guess (even thus i’d like if it was possible to do that without getting paranoid). Having a $200 bike and a ulock seems like a greater safety.

@muf: How are they going to know that they need to disable/destroy it when it’s hidden in the frame? It’s not like there’s going to be a label on your top tube with information about how your alarm works and how to disable it. I’d much rather have a hidden alarm that draws *immediate* attention to the thief than a hidden GPS that lets him take it away in the first place.

If bike thieves have to get smarter to avoid alarms/detection/etc, they will. They’ll pull the seatpost out of bikes after they’ve stolen them and remove the GPS, and you won’t be able to find them. But for an alarm at the point of theft, they would have to disassemble the bike *without triggering the alarm*, as well as cut the locks. That’s rather a lot of extra time and effort that they’re not willing to risk. Bike thieves always opt for the easiest bike in the pack to steal, and a point-of-theft deterrent will likely mean that’s not your bike.

Actually, I’d be halfway tempted to get a professional-looking label to stick on my frame that says “Warning: This bicycle is equipped with an alarm that will trigger if it is moved or disassembled. Think twice before stealing it.”

This is a warning. Please step away from the bike. This bike is protected by Viper.

Dylan, you might want to revise your selfish statement as alarms are intended to scare away the thief. You’d have to be pretty selfish to think that alarms were meant to call you to action.