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When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

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Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#91

Post by photonios »

taitems wrote: post #30
Johnny555 wrote: post #29

Imagine a passive system scanning fellow motorists for an abductors car that automatically alerts authorities and family members to their current location and direction. That's the same argument that police departments use "Well we'll only use it to capture child abductors and stolen cars and stuff". But the truth is that there just aren't that many real child abductors out there (especially with known license plates…

Oh dear. That's so creepy someone might actually do it! I'm getting into home automation at the moment, so a use case that I think I deleted from the article was just letting you know that your mum or someone had pulled up in the driveway. License plates vs. a known list of visitors. Or as is happening here in some of our suburbs, "Alert: A group of 4 men have arrived in a stolen V8 Commodore"

I worked for a company that did exactly this. It provides security for the majority of the gas stations in the country. It scans every single license plate of cars entering the premise. It then queries a freely accessible, government provided database for the car's model and whether it was reported stolen. If it was reported stolen, the alarm goes off. Also, if the license plate is on the country-wide blacklist that the company maintains, weeeh, the alarm goes off and the pumps get blocked. They also attempt to match license plates to individuals so they can be recognised when they return. Of course, all of this is linked to transaction history etc.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#92

Post by odabaxok »

tweedledee wrote: post #74
shadowtree wrote: post #3

Any project in a heavily regulated environment is not measurable that way. The cost comes from compliance, audits, paperwork. Trials, PoCs, etc. You also need to prove security and a long term lifecycle for the solution. Those open source packages - are they being updated? Who validates patches? etc etc. Those are moats, once you're able to deliver the above, you're set for a long time. Good luck!

The government is fairly corrupt. This is a make my friend rich project. See the Myki card for another example.

I don't know about Australia, but this is completely true in Central Europe. An average Joe cannot tell how much an IT project can cost, so IT projects are the best place to "make your friend rich". See the slovensko.sk project (https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20429221/governmental-agency-plan...).

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#93

Post by icebraining »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #37
taitems wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh dear. That's so creepy someone might actually do it! I'm getting into home automation at the moment, so a use case that I think I deleted from the article was just letting you know that your mum or someone had pulled up in the driveway. License plates vs. a known list of visitors. Or as is happening here in some of our suburbs, "Alert: A group of 4 men have arrived in a stolen V8 Commodore"

> That's so creepy someone might actually do it! It's only creepy if it's done on a targeted, individual basis, which it won't be. As it is - in many countries you legally have no expectation of privacy in a public place, so I have no problem with en-masse ANPR. If the police eventually develops a very dense sensor network that can track every car's movement across every intersection then there would be too much info…

which it won't be

All of History says otherwise. All surveillance mechanisms have been used to individually track dissidents, personal enemies, ex-spouses, etc. What makes this different?

If the police eventually develops a very dense sensor network that can track every car's movement across every intersection then there would be too much information recorded for me to personally worry about it

The availability of large databases (ex. DNA) have been shown to increase the number of innocent people caught in the net, since the probability of false positives increases proportionally and cops start relying on running wide searches over regular investigation techniques.

it would reduce the need for inherently-dangerous hot pursuits to follow a vehicle as the cameras would do that anyway

Only if you have a complete panopticon, with no gaps, which in a wide enough are will be difficult, if not impossible.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#94

Post by dllthomas »

clusmore wrote: post #62
taitems wrote: post #20

Author here, hi HN/Reddit. I had hoped I'd made it clear enough, but by no means am I recommending something I cobbled together in an hour on the couch be rolled out as a competitor to BlueNet. I mean shit, I'm web scraping their database and using compressed footage from cheap dashcams. The algorithm is also untrained. I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some good questions relate…

> I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some good questions related to IT procurement here in Australia. There needs to be a happy medium between what I've wired up and an $86M solution. A related story for this discussion: QUT students design a $500 cloud-based census server four times better than IBM’s $9 million system [1] [1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/qut-students-…

"four times better"

I have two objections, which the article doesn't seem to fully address.

First, do we know that the server the students designed actually met the spec handed to IBM? Often times a lot of the complexity of a project comes from the interaction of a few features. It's quite possible that the version the students provided didn't actually do the hard stuff. We know from the article that they specifically didn't address any security/privacy ramifications of sitting running in the cloud.

We also don't know how many similar projects were attempted and failed. Sometimes things just come together, way quicker and cheaper than should have been expected.

Re: When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

#95

Post by clusmore »

dllthomas wrote: post #94
clusmore wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some good questions related to IT procurement here in Australia. There needs to be a happy medium between what I've wired up and an $86M solution. A related story for this discussion: QUT students design a $500 cloud-based census server four times better than IBM’s $9 million system [1] [1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/qut-students-…

"four times better" I have two objections, which the article doesn't seem to fully address. First, do we know that the server the students designed actually met the spec handed to IBM? Often times a lot of the complexity of a project comes from the interaction of a few features. It's quite possible that the version the students provided didn't actually do the hard stuff. We know from the article that they specificall…

I'm not endorsing the work done by the student, I just thought it was relevant to the discussion. I agree completely that they probably haven't addressed all of the requirements or gone through the rigorous testing and verification required. Not to mention that when things go wrong you want somebody you can hold accountable.
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