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NULL license plate not such a bright idea

knrs.iheart.com

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Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#381
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the plus side, he could also contest legitimate tickets unless they recorded other information.

I managed to do this at my university. I had vanity plates with a design made by my local Australia shire, which had the shire emblem between two parts of the plate. The plate was something like "123ABC" but I'm guessing emblem read as an O, so their scanners saw "123OABC", which was not a plate registered with the uni. Each day there was a 10-20% chance I would get a ticket on my windshield. I would collect them and…

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Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#382

A colleague used an app's "generate secure password" feature to change their ISP's web portal login - which then also became the WAN router's password - which they didn't realise. It was about a week before the router dropped its connection and needed to re-authenticate - and that's when I was called in to investigate the loss of connectivity - which Windows 10 very unhelpfully reported as the network cable disconnec…

I once had the bright idea to use a backslash as a one character password for my girlfriends computer, thinking it would provide amazing convenience – a single character, just above the enter key. Turns out this doesn't work very well, even on a Mac, which you would think would have gone through fairly robust testing.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#384
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fraud or libel, it's an unavoidable problem with in-band signalling [1]. I assume the government entry system doesn't have an explicit way to set the data as missing, so they work around it like this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-band_signaling

Guess they should have used the Maybe monad!

They'd type in: Just "NULL"

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#385
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If passwords are hashed should any character be prohibited at all?

Some do MD5($password) in a sql string. I don’t... but i’ve seen it

MD5 and all other hashes still take arbitrary bytes as input, so they wouldn't be the source of any restrictions; I suspect the majority of them are due to character set/encoding issues more than anything else.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#386

A colleague used an app's "generate secure password" feature to change their ISP's web portal login - which then also became the WAN router's password - which they didn't realise. It was about a week before the router dropped its connection and needed to re-authenticate - and that's when I was called in to investigate the loss of connectivity - which Windows 10 very unhelpfully reported as the network cable disconnec…

> avoid backticks in passwords

I learned that lesson a different way: When I had a Windows phone my email password had a backtick, and the only way to enter it on the phone was to long-press the apostrophe, pick backtick from the three or four apostrophe variants that appeared, and pray I didn't fat-finger it and enter the wrong character. In general, there are just some second class citizen characters you should always avoid, because you never know how hard they're going to be to enter when you're on a phone or a kiosk or whatever. (Tilde, I'm looking at you, too.)

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew a kid in college who would get a ticket, and then look around the parking lot for another Black Nissan Maxima. Most people don't actually look at the plate number, just the make model. I think he got one ticket paid this way ... guy was kinda an asshole.

I've had a friend do the reverse: parking in illegal spot, and borrowing a ticket from another car that already received one. Upon return some hours later, he returned the ticket to the correct windshield. Quite brazen, and frankly a bit of an asshole thing to do.

I did this once, too. YMMV based on meter maids in your city;

My own unpaid ticket from weeks ago should become an asset. protect my car from violations with cast Invisibility.

I put the decoy on windshield, under the wiper blade, and wandered off for a bit.

But this upset the coin gods. When I went to my car an hour later, neatly tucked above my original ticket was a fresh new one. Balls.

Maybe using 2 old tickets will work. :)

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#389

I own a rare collector car with a three-digit VIN. This has caused endless hassles at the DMV as well as the insurance office. Sometimes we find success by prepending the necessary number of zeros, before the VIN. Other instances in the same system require appending zeros after the VIN. The true VIN has a hyphen but that never makes it into the DMV's system. One time I got stuck in a particularly nasty loop where the…

Is it possible to register it as a "custom" with a completely new (and more friendly to the systems) VIN?

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some do MD5($password) in a sql string. I don’t... but i’ve seen it

MD5 and all other hashes still take arbitrary bytes as input, so they wouldn't be the source of any restrictions; I suspect the majority of them are due to character set/encoding issues more than anything else.

Presumably he's talking about code like this:

   $cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$username' AND hash = MD5('password')")
Allowing any value would allow for SQL injections, so the programmer does the lazy thing and "sanitize" the inputs ($username/$password) with a roll-your-own "sanitizing" function that throws an error if there are "evil" characters.
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