As anyone who has been burgled knows, after the initial shock begins to ebb you’re generally filled with a sense of “if I got my hands on those…” which descends rapidly into expletives. But since vigilantism isn’t particularly approved of, how much better would it be if your home extracted revenge?
The eye-catching defence is called the Portal Denial System, and is made by Ionatron; it uses LIPC (laser-induced plasma channel) whereby a virtual wire is formed from the path of a laser leaving behind a stream of conductive plasma. You can then fire a lethal or “less lethal” shot of electricity down that ‘wire’ and give someone a surprise.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like this system will ever be available to general consumers, so we’ll just have to imagine a world where door-to-door salesmen are automatically zapped without us needing to even get up from the computer.






