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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

#411

Post by kelnos »

exfed wrote: post #42
xxs wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Die on? But how - he can challenge the fines in a court of law. Since it's a vanity plate, adding an extra notoriety won't hurt.

On top of that, if anything, forcing the government to fix it's bad code ( insert snarky ambiguity between software code and legal code ) can't be a bad thing. I'd buy the guy a beer.

I'm pretty sure the government will continue to just waste money processing his appeals instead of making an effort to fix the system.

So in reality, this guy is indirectly wasting taxpayer money. Sure, the government is wrong in not fixing it, but knowing that the government won't fix it, but continuing to behave this way, is his fault.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#412

Post by droogie1xp »

For those interested, you can find the slides for the presentation here: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/DEF%20CON%2027%20pre...

This article is garbage and a lot of the discussion here revolves around the spin and emphasis on facetious scenarios I mentioned in the presentation

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#413

Post by kelnos »

shawnz wrote: post #232
alanbernstein wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two options: die on the hill, or retreat. He is not retreating. Therefore he has chosen to die on the hill.

Those would be the options if there was an attack against him, but there's not any attack against him. Wrongly addressed tickets are hardly even a minor inconvenience. I think that's what the parent is saying.

It's a figure of speech; when used colloquially in this manner, it has nothing to do with any kind of attack.

It just means "argue a point on principle when you know you aren't going to affect change".

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#414

Post by kelnos »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #50
xeromal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Court isn't cheap. You're paying for it with a lawyer or with your own time

> Droogie contacted the DMV who told him to change his plate. He refused because he didn't do anything wrong. While they wiped the fines off his record, unfortunately for him, they didn't fix the problem in the system so once again, Droogie has accrued another $6,000 in tickets that he had nothing to do with. He says he won't be paying those either. Except he just contacted the DMV. No lawyers necessary.

... and then the second half of the parent's sentence (which you conveniently ignored) applies: he's paying with his own time.

I dunno about you, but I value my time way too highly to voluntarily use it to spend time on the phone with the DMV every month or three.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#415

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #377
madcaptenor wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a cab driver take me to MIT. Cab driver: "what is this place?" Me: "MIT" Cab driver: "what's MIT?" Me: "the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Cab driver: "what's Massachusetts?"

Not to be confused with the world class educational institution the Manukau Institute of Technology :P I always find it funny when I drive by that and I see the sign MIT.

Move over plebs, some people study at the Royal MIT: https://www.rmit.edu.au/

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#416

Post by kelnos »

vageli wrote: post #163
xeromal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Court isn't cheap. You're paying for it with a lawyer or with your own time

> Court isn't cheap. > You're paying for it with a lawyer or with your own time At some point surely you can countersue for harassment?

For the first time or two, maybe. But you'll be paying for it with hours, possibly tens of hours, of your own free time. And the US legal system is a fickle beast; what seems to you like a slam dunk might not actually be so certain.

After the second or third time, the judge will ask, "why didn't you just change your license plate to something else and avoid all this hassle?" And when you answer, "I've grown fond of the plate, and want the DMV to fix its systems", the judge will sigh, and rule against you for wasting his/her time instead of just changing your license plate.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#417

Post by DCoder »

FabHK wrote: post #346
gruez wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which doesn't make sense. I randomly generated an 8 character alphabetical (all lower case) password "jraxxhwr". According to keepass it has 32 bits of entropy, but the entropy should be 26^8 = 37.6 bits because the search space is all 8 character letter permutations. There's no way you can reduce the search space from 37.6 bits to 32 bits unless you have an oracle that says which characters I used.

It does make sense, because the keepass entropy estimate presumably (like the excellent zxcvbn) tries to approximate the empirical distribution, not the theoretical uniform one. In theory, "68703649" and "12345678" are equally likely to be pulled from the hat, but in practice one is a much better password than the other. You can reduce the search space by trying the passwords with higher (empirical) probability first…

> the keepass entropy estimate presumably […] tries

KeePass sources are available [0], you can see the specific algorithms it uses in [1].

[0]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/keepass/files/KeePass%202.x...

[1]: https://fossies.org/windows/misc/KeePass-2.42.1-Source.zip/K...

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#418

Post by shawnz »

kelnos wrote: post #413
shawnz wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those would be the options if there was an attack against him, but there's not any attack against him. Wrongly addressed tickets are hardly even a minor inconvenience. I think that's what the parent is saying.

It's a figure of speech; when used colloquially in this manner, it has nothing to do with any kind of attack. It just means "argue a point on principle when you know you aren't going to affect change".

It's a figure of speech which means to argue on a point of principle without regard to the cost when you know you aren't going to affect change. It absolutely doesn't make sense in the context where there's no attack. Otherwise how does the dying come into play in the analogy?

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#419

Post by danek »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #90

Tangentially related somewhat-common bug: YAML files will interpret the literal 'no' as boolean false if it's not quoted, instead of as a string. Many developers have wondered why, when they stuck country-specific configurations in a YAML file, that things suddenly stopped working when they expanded support for Norway.

I am one of those developers.

Afterwards I just try to avoid yaml if I can. While it looks cleaner than json, I don’t find it especially easy to read and there is unnecessary ambiguity due to unquoted strings. And it seems to have a thing against Norway ;)

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#420

Post by mikorym »

kens wrote: post #43

I read years ago in comp.risks about a similar story. A guy in 1979(!) requested a personalized plate "SAILING", with second choice "BOATING". He didn't want a customized plate if he couldn't get those, so for his third choice he put down "NO PLATE". Of course, he ended up with "NO PLATE". He ended up getting 2500 parking tickets, since cars with no plate had "NO PLATE" written on the ticket. References: http://www.m…

This reminds me about my own name. Everyone always gets it wrong (including people from where I am from). Except the Dutch. They always get it right, every single time!

There was also a meme about a person that wrote on her ID application "note the hat on the 'e'" and of course her name was Sarah Note The Hat On The E on the issued ID.

EDIT: Yes her name was not Sarah and there is no 'e' in Sarah.

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