Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NULL license plate not such a bright idea

knrs.iheart.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 484 posts

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#401

Post by crazygringo »

elihu wrote: post #304
cortesoft wrote: post #11

I love when people double down out of principle, when the only person getting hurt is themselves. He refuses to change it because he did nothing wrong...sure, but you are also the only one being hurt by it. Is this really the hill to die on?

The DMV made a mistake, they know it, and they aren't fixing it. In this case, the problem is relatively inconsequential but it is an institutional failure. The DMV is a government agency which is, at least in theory, somewhat indirectly accountable to the people. Which means that if they're treating one particular citizen unfairly, one option that citizen has is publicly shaming them. (Another option is to file a la…

But they're only performing a public service if it gets fixed -- which there's no indication in the article is happening.

And frankly, why would it? Different government agencies likely have zero reason to cooperate on it. Especially if, say, the DMV is responsible for the error, but the courts are the ones dealing with the cost.

So unless this guy has a reason to think it will get fixed because of him... he's just wasting his time, no?

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#403

Post by bigiain »

k_sze wrote: post #378
nvplates wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has happened multiple times. NULL, NV, XXX, MISSING, NO PLATE

I wonder if the system is also vulnerable to SQL injection via vanity plates.

[1');DROP TABLE tickets; --]

(Damn. Way too many letters...)

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#404

Post by 2_listerine_pls »

raviolo wrote: post #391

I’ve seen several combinations of B’s and 8’s - like “8B88B8”. Wonder how effective they are at confusing plate readers.

It would be the same as having a single 8, but I guess it's not a problem or plate readers wouldn't be in use.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#405

Post by read_if_gay_ »

moisto wrote: post #387
distances wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I’ve seen a parked car with 3+ tickets on the windshied (didn’t count but there was a small stack of them) in Austria. Had a foreign license plate though so probably just didn’t care and wasn’t gonna pay.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#406

Post by foxylad »

mbuinl989 wrote: post #356
kevinmchugh wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Special characters in passwords were highly recommended when rainbow tables were an effective way to attack password hashes. See this old Coding Horror blogpost for an idea what it was like at the time: https://blog.codinghorror.com/rainbow-hash-cracking/ Salted hashes have made rainbow tables less effective. Password managers have made single-use passwords more tenable. Not knowing how a system will store my passwor…

Password Managers are the new goto for obtaining all passwords and web browser zero days make it very easy to lift and then use for a variety of purposes. A simple lined small note book is good, but made secure is best, yet how would you make a pwd note book secure from someone else? This even applies to devices like bank cards and other things which needs a security code of sorts.

Make the passwords one character longer than what is noted in the book? Only you know the character and where it is added.

For bank cards with fixed lengths, increment/decrement the nth character, swap two characters, or do a circular shift.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#407

Post by tjpnz »

ohazi wrote: post #189
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/1105/

I actually saw a car with a license plate like this last week. Some combination of I's and 1's. White Ford Mustang driving around Santa Clara.

I've seen something similar in New Zealand. Probably wouldn't be fooling anyone given the size of the country and how distinctive the car was.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#408

Post by Iv »

perspective1 wrote: post #98
Iv wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Starcraft 2 community it is called barcoding. Basically, I 1 | l are all accepted characters for a name and I think some do look actually identical on most fonts used in the game. So yeah, one person doing that you call "barcode", 2 persons doing that, you already have deniability. Be more than 10, and that's a crowd.

Google's AlphaStar StarCraft bot did just this under different accounts. Along with some other fingerprinting, many of the accounts and replays were found by the SC2 community.

To my knowledge, it played with only one account. It played exactly 50 games with every race. It was outed mainly because of two things: A very high win rate (above 80% IIRC) and the fact that as a zerg it produced units by selecting larvas directly, which no one ever does (someone explains that it uses control groups but they are hidden and dont show up in replays, I dont know how accurate it is)

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#409

Post by kelnos »

elihu wrote: post #304
cortesoft wrote: post #11

I love when people double down out of principle, when the only person getting hurt is themselves. He refuses to change it because he did nothing wrong...sure, but you are also the only one being hurt by it. Is this really the hill to die on?

The DMV made a mistake, they know it, and they aren't fixing it. In this case, the problem is relatively inconsequential but it is an institutional failure. The DMV is a government agency which is, at least in theory, somewhat indirectly accountable to the people. Which means that if they're treating one particular citizen unfairly, one option that citizen has is publicly shaming them. (Another option is to file a la…

Considering that the DMV in most places already has a lot of shame heaped on it, I doubt this extra spoonful meaningfully moves the needle.

This guy is really just wasting his own time for no actual benefit to anyone. If he genuinely enjoys it, then sure, I guess each to their own, but if not...

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#410

Post by bsimpson »

cgriswald wrote: post #236
linker3000 wrote: post #132

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…

Many, many websites will happily accept passwords of $X characters and then hash only $(X-Y) characters on registration, but try to hash all $X characters on login, so of course the hashes don’t match. And at no point do they tell you the maximum number of characters.

For many years, Schwab ignored any characters after 8 in its password. Discovered that when I knew I flubbed one of the last characters, and it still worked.

I still can't believe a major bank got away with that for so long, apparently unharmed.

Post reply on HN