Engineering students in India have built a prototype for high-tech “anti-rape underwear,” the Daily News reports. It’s like something Inspector Gadget would wear, if Inspector Gadget’s nemesis were the global scourge of gender violence. When pressure sensors inside the garment detect unwanted force, a GPS-enabled device called Society Harnessing Equipment (SHE) delivers up to 82 electric shocks and sends a text message to the wearer’s parents or friends and police — quite the upgrade from Indian officials’ recommendation that women carry chili powder to throw in the eyes of their attackers. Not knowing anything else about the device, my first concerns are that it seems highly accident prone, and that it has the capacity for surveillance. I would have inadvertently panty-Tasered someone on my commute this morning, for example, although mercifully the text to my dad wouldn’t have gone through from underground. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just ask Dr. Claw to stop being such a dick?
