I get why some residents want this, but won't the result be that criminals will do one of the following:
- Remove their plates before committing a crime
- Use stolen plates
- Make fake plates and put them on other vehicles and have friends drive them around far away places at the same time so they can say, "Your readers must be broken!"
- Make note of where the readers are (since they're fixed) and avoid using those streets during their crimes?
- Other stuff I'm probably not thinking of
The amount of abuse by the police that this opens the citizens up to is just ridiculous.
We have this in the UK and my understanding is if a car removes their plates or uses a plate which is invalid it will be flagged up and they will be inviting police attention.
Although, I think where this comes into play most is that in the UK our police cars are also fitted with the same technology so if a car has a valid plate which doesn't match their vehicle or simply has an fake plate they will be immediately pulled over, so you'd be kinda stupid if you were driving around frequently committing crimes with fake plates on.
I know that California's doesn't match plates to car make/model, at least the toll and red light cameras. Someone faked my friend's license plate on their car and he's been getting all their tickets. Their cars aren't even the same color.
I lived in the UK for 10x the time I've lived in San Francisco, but here in SF I've witnessed many more instances of cars driving with obscured plates or no plates at all.
I don't think the camera system is picking up that the plate doesn't match the car; more if the vehicle has been reported stolen, or doesn't have tax/MOT/insurance.
It's not just plates. A big part of the point of Flock is that it does historical make/model searches, so if a beat-up black minivan is (say) used to carjack someone, you can track the minivan across the municipality, find out where else it had been in the previous days/weeks, and spot it if it comes back.
I can't speak for Palo Alto, but here in Chicago, the cars are almost always stolen. So the LPRs are pretty darn helpful. Nobody is removing plates from a stolen vehicle (no time, gotta get away), and after the victim calls police, they can flag the plate.
Except (at least where I live) the cars are stolen and used in crimes immediately, well before they're reported stolen and entered into the database. The rightful owner is more likely to be shot in their own home by some trigger-happy cop coming to arrest them, than actually catching a criminal through this mass data collection joke.
Ridiculous. Cops don’t typically storm homes because of stolen vehicles. Cars are stolen All. The. Time. Law enforcement officers know a car’s original owner is not typically the guy going for a joyride.
That doesn't disprove the previous statement. Maybe cops are almost always aware of that and do the right thing, but the system is even more useless. In that situation you'd get more arrest shootings than caught criminals.
Or even easier, simply drive in the middle lane while adjacent to another vehicle to block the camera's view of your plate. Flock's cameras mount in the center median or sidewalk and are only capable of reading plates from the two nearest lanes of traffic. There are better solutions out there which mount onto traffic signal poles and monitor each lane from above, making it much more difficult to circumvent (intentionally or by happenstance).
Of course this isn't much of a concern when installed onto a two-lane residential street for targeted enforcement. Though I know most municipalities opt to only place cameras at points of egress/ingress on their borders with other cities, and those roads tend to be more than just two lanes.
I highly recommend reading 'Confessions of a Jewel Thief' which are memoirs of, you guessed it, a jewel thief who almost never got caught. In fact, he technically only got caught once and received amnesty for hundreds of other ones just so the police could find out how he did it.
In my early years, I was a hacker. The only reason the FBI tracked me down was because I told a 'friend' who dropped an anonymous tip. I basically got off without jail time because they wanted to know how I did it.
In both cases, the motive was 'for the thrill.' In both cases, the only reason we ever got caught -- despite much searching by the authorities -- was due to stupid mistakes after a long string of successful 'adventures.'
Once the word is out that something simple will break a system, yes they do it. It isn't Moriarty to think "if I take off my plates they can't see my plates".
I got my car broken into and several laptops stolen from the back of the car, in daylight at a restaurant parking lot. The restaurant had footage. The car didn't have plates. The cop took my info down so I could tell insurance I reported the problem - the cops had no intention of doing anything.
And I guarantee I can drive a five mile stretch of highway right now and I'll see paper plates or no plates on a shitty car.
You know I agree with you in general but I think people underestimate the amount of organized crime that goes on. A lot of criminals may not be the sharpest pencil in the drawer, but especially when it comes to theft often things are organized, planned coordinated and run a bit better than random crimes of opportunity.
Did you not read the article? It says if they notice a car with reported stolen plates or no plates drive up to the Stanford Shopping Center, they can dispatch police to deal with it right then and there. If they get there quickly enough they would hopefully stop the theft before it occurs or stop them from getting away.
Stanford Shopping Center has an Apple Store which has had problems with theft in the past.
They could avoid the readers, true, but they might not even realize they need to. It’ll definitely help some percent of the time.
Poorly written laws make things harder for everyone, so that most of the burden falls on law-abiding people. Utilitarian policy prescriptions are often based on a misplaced sense of omniscience and a disregard for negative externalities.
This system doesn't work on just plates, it also makes a "fingerprint" of the vehicle. It's specifically designed to handle people trying to fool an ALPR system.
One opportunity with this kind of technology is to identify when a plate is mismatched with the car. If you assume that stolen plates and stolen cars are a problem, which I think is a good assumption, you can make the adversary's life harder by forcing them to match plate to car make/model/color/year by deploying an ALPR that alerts on mismatches.
There's a good story here about flipping the current economics for criminals--it's trivially cheap to steal plates and cars--towards a world where they have the harder problem of matching plate to car.
Not to mention that you may not have a choice. I've seen government sites have this shit on them. We're quickly approaching the satirical society of the movie _Brazil_.
Unverified: 27B/6 derives from George Orwell's address.
I'm wondering how long it will be before we have memory holes considering how, apart from the internet archive, there is perpetual bitrot and silent updates.
But I don't want any of those companies knowing which websites I visit. I only do business with one of them, and even then, they have no need to know what I'm doing outside of interacting with their sites. These companies have enough power already. Leaving it to them to decide whether you're trustworthy or not is just as dystopian as what's happening now. You've just moved the problem from Cloudflare to one of those companies. Plus, if they suddenly decide your account is invalid for some arbitrary reason that you aren't allowed to know, now you're completely fucked.
I've probably mentioned this story here, but my first job out of school was working for a nationally known cash register manufacturer, writing front-end software for the cashiers to use. This didn't happen to me but was told to me by an old-timer my first week there (mid-90s).
A group had done an install at a grocery store. They did in-house testing of the new system, then rolled it out to 1 or 2 lanes to try it out for a few days before upgrading all the lanes with the new system. It was a fairly normal roll-out with a few minor issues, but nothing major.
The day they rolled it out, about 2 or 3 transactions each day started including an extra charge for 10 cents worth of deli meat. This was weird because it would be pretty hard to buy only 10 cents worth of meat, and certainly any deli counter worker who had rung it up would have remembered doing so because it would have been a really bizarre order. None of them had seen such an order come through.
The only thing the transactions had in common was they were paid for with a debit card. Worried about compliance issues and the possibility that there might be a bug in the new card readers, they turned off the debit card functionality. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you work in compliance), it happened again to someone paying with cash. While that was a relief because it meant the card readers were fine, it also meant they had no leads on the problem.
The on-call engineer got called in to work on the problem just before the store closed one night. He checked all the obvious things - problems with the cabling; an incorrect value in the database; some data getting mangled between the cash register and the database; a problem with the scanner; etc. There were no problems he could detect.
In order to keep the last few customers from entering his lane, he moved a shopping cart in front of the lane. In fact he did it to the one next to his as well because he'd be walking around the entire lane working on cabling and such. He crawled under the register to check something things just as the scanner beeped to indicate it detected an item. Sure enough it was for 10 cents worth of meat. He looked around and noticed a mother scolding her child, "Leave to empty carts alone! That lane is closed!" That's when he noticed that the cart had an ad on front of it for some random product. He jiggled the cart, and the scanner beeped again. Another 10 cents of meat.
It turned out the artist who put together the ad thought that the packaging without a barcode on it looked weird, so he grabbed something he had laying around and made a fake barcode that looked similar. By some miracle, the barcode was actually valid and was ringing up 10 cents of deli meat at this store. Mystery solved!
A few times in my life I've been in some store where the barcode reader would not make an audible *BEEP* when scanning something. I wonder how long would it take to discover the cause of the issue you described in one of such stores.
This was a great show I can't say enough about. It really mad me laugh out loud far more than any other show in recent memory. (And in the end, if I recall, both groups of writers learned that the other was actually pretty decent at their jobs and had a lot of good ideas.) Unfortunately, it didn't do spectacularly in the ratings and was immediately canceled. I seriously hope someone else picks it up, but I don't know how likely that is.
I've never seen the show but it sounds good and reviews were decent.
Given that it was killed off after one season, is it still worth the watch? Does it end well?
What? Has this changed recently? I mainly use their AppleTV app, and sometimes their web app. With the AppleTV app, there are a bunch of thumbnails that look like DVD covers. When you swipe over to one of them, at first nothing happens, but just as you're about to move to the next one, the one you're on expands shoving everything to right off the screen. Moving one-to-the-right, then causes everything to collapse down again for a second, until the newly selected thing suddenly expands for no reason. It's incredibly spastic and makes it very hard to get to a specific item.
I could have sworn it auto-played a preview, too, but I might be misremembering that.
If that's changed recently (I haven't browsed the app since "The Last of Us" ended), then great! But using it for the past year or two has been a non-starter. I just look up their shows in the search section of the AppleTV and add them to my Up Next queue so I can avoid interacting with their app at all costs.
Hulu and Netflix seem to not be so painful to use. AppleTV+ used to be perfect but a recent update made it equally unusable. I set the Home Row on my AppleTV to be my "Up Next" queue, and now only interact with the TV app from the home screen. It has less functionality that way, but it also has none of the suckage.
It doesn't help that their software changes so much from device to device. It's been pleasant to use on phone, PS5, and roku but I haven't tried apple+
Even when you're using the same device they A/B test on us. Netflix recently introduced a weird sound effect as their main ad loads (it plays after their usual intro sound effect) but other's I've spoken to hadn't heard it.
For me it’s the fact that everything about it seems to be about making the tool easier for the developers who wrote it to write it rather than making it easier for the people actually using it. It periodically tells me that garbage collection has given up and I need to run a specific git command to make it work again. Why doesn’t it just run it since it knows the command? Also, as a user, is there any benefit to me knowing that garbage collection happens at all? I’ve never had to know or care about that with any other source control tool. Either it didn’t exist, or it worked so well that it never came up.
There’s a bunch of modal-ness (modality?) throughout git. You can’t be explicit about things so it’s extremely easy to make a mistake. I’ve frequently gone to make a branch only to realize I had the wrong parent checked out, so now my branch is branched off the wrong thing. In other systems I could say “<tool name> create branch x from parent y”. In fact, this has happened so frequently in our group at work, that several reminders have gone out to “make sure you branch off the correct branch…”
It handles large files really poorly and requires a 3rd party tool to make it work reasonably. But then if you use lfs or a similar tool, several other 3rd party tools that work with git don’t work.
> In other systems I could say “<tool name> create branch x from parent y”.
While the default of `git branch` is to branch from the commit you have checked out, the command does take an optional argument for the start point of the new branch:
I wonder if some sort of "do not call"-style list that the government keeps would do the trick? The government maintains the list so some company can't say, "We never received any notice from them!" and the government can also audit whether each person on the list has data associated with them in any given company's database. The government would have to audit companies when a consumer contacts them (or just do it periodically for all companies, if that's feasible).
I think the bigger problem is how does a consumer know whether any random company has data on them? I mean, sure, I can figure that Google, Amazon, and Meta probably would be on that list, but the real problem is all the smaller 3rd party resellers of such data. I don't even know their names, let alone how I would figure out if they have info on me.
It would not work. Not enough people would use it, for myriad reasons.
The real answer is privacy by default. Opt-in for invasive harvesting. The science of design is well enough known that we could even legislate against dark patterns if we wanted to.
- Remove their plates before committing a crime
- Use stolen plates
- Make fake plates and put them on other vehicles and have friends drive them around far away places at the same time so they can say, "Your readers must be broken!"
- Make note of where the readers are (since they're fixed) and avoid using those streets during their crimes?
- Other stuff I'm probably not thinking of
The amount of abuse by the police that this opens the citizens up to is just ridiculous.