Reminds me of the story of Ireland's worst Polish driver who never got caught: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171....
Annyong!
NULL license plate not such a bright idea
451–460 of 484 posts
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#452Earlier 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.
I find the German language funny because "mit" just means "with". I remember search engines having trouble with this in the late nineties.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#453Earlier this summer I decided that I'd found a loophole and ordered 'N0 TAG' and 'N0NE' (zeros) for my motorcycles. The license plate font doesn't distinguish between 0 and O but the computers seem to account for visually similar characters -- I could not order the same plates with Os after they'd issued. Haven't caught anyone else's tickets so far. SunPass won't accept 'N0 TAG' being associated with my transponder t…
> The license plate font doesn't distinguish between 0 and O
When the German license plates were redesigned in the mid 1990-ies, also a different font was incorporated, which was engineered explicitly to thwart similar-shape attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've also heard a similar story of a Finnish man who got a ticket in the UK, and on closer inspection found his name on the ticket listed as Mr. Ajokortti Körkort. Thats "driver's licence", first in Finnish, then Swedish, and is written at the top of the driver's license card. That said, I find these stories a little hard to credit, since you'd expect police officers in the EU to be fairly familiar with the standard…
> you'd expect police officers in the EU to be fairly familiar with the standard EU driver's license layout The common design for all the EEA countries was supposed to be implemented by the members by the start of 2013 according to Wikipedia. Until 2033 there will be valid licenses that were issued before the common license, so there's still a lot of different designs out there.
Also, the common design, like with passports, provides numbers for the boxes, so e.g. 1 is "Name" and 2 is "First Name" and 5 is your license number with whichever authority issued the license. But it doesn't take a _very_ stupid person to write down stuff that's in the wrong box or not in a box at all when all of it seems like moon language to you.
Probably better to have a machine scan the identity document, not least because the machine can trivially avoid freaking out over "Nick Smith, born 2000-01-04" when the wanted criminal was actually "Mick Smith, born 2000-04-01".
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#455Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Square Enix's account management on the PS4 allowed me to set a password with a space on the end, but their website strips spaces from the password field when you sign in. Fun fact: it's actually really easy to submit a string with a space on the end when entered via a PS4 controller.
Trimming spaces is the one evil that is kind of necessary. Way to many text selection tools select trailing spaces. Firefox and Chrome both do when selecting words. Got a mail with a reset password and want to copy it over? Yeah, good chance the space is copied as well. On a few occasions even ended up in my password manager. Please, just apply password rules everywhere consistently.
> Please, just apply password rules everywhere consistently.
This would honestly fix all of it, without even needing to communicate information about how passwords are handled. Although, I think those rules should be communicated as well, so users can make good choices about password security. If spaces are removed, that lowers entropy and users may want to add additional characters or restrict spaces in their password generator.
It may not be easy. You might have dozens of different client applications with different requirements or abilities. But it is simple: Figure out your best practices and your lowest common denominator. Then apply those rules to every password every time in every context.
Alternatively, if you have clients which (for whatever reason) need a special case, create a separate hash for that special case and then use that only for that client. (Likely, this will reduce the overall security of the account, but if this is your lowest common denominator, allowing other clients to have greater security certainly doesn't hurt you.)
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is terribly annoying, often there is a minimum length but no mention of maximum length. I see this on many, many websites...
What kind of range limits are you talking about? 30? 100?
It's honestly a crapshoot. I've seen as low as 8 (a sibling poster says 6), but 10, 12, 15, 16, and 20 are not unusual. It's usually an even number, so you can just knock 2 characters off your password at a time (after making it an even number) until you're down to the maximum to figure it out.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on "traveler's checks", I'm going to guess at least a couple decades ago. Cashier probably called 911 because they thought GP was trying to commit fraud with "fake money".
I mean, in what world can you cash travelers cheques at a dairy queen?
It's been a very long time, but my grandmother always used to give me spending money for vacations in the form of Amex traveller's checks. IIRC you could use them in essentially any situation where you could use an ordinary paper check (which was substantially more common back in those days).
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
All we had to do was register our cars in each others names. When I was married, my car was registered to her and vice versa. The redlight/photoradar laws in my state required that the company operating the devices had to match the pic of the driver violating the law, to the pic of the registered owner via the license plate. If they couldn't match them, no ticket was issued as you can't prove who was driving. That's…
So, you were just running red lights, and you think this is a hack worth bragging about?
Typically, like they did here, they also lower the yellow light duration when they install these devices, causing more people to "run red lights" and collect $$$ for the jurisdiction. For nothing. This was proven in my state. Accidents have also gone up in these areas because now when the light turns yellow people have been trained to know they don't have enough time to make it through traveling at a normal speed, so they gun it to make it though. If you think I purposefully speed and use this to avoid red lights, you're assuming too much. I don't feel bad one bit circumventing a rigged system.
Edit: https://www.motorists.org/issues/red-light-cameras/yellow-li...
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Yeah, we're on Hackernews so I assume most people on here make at least 50+ an hour. The CA DMV will cost $200+ at least.