Good luck speed cameras

lil bobby tables finally get his license?

Lol, my exact first thought, Bobby Tables turned 18!
- Assuming he went to school at a normal age, i dont think he aged 1.2*10^17 years between the comic and now
- Where do you need to be 18 to drive?

that xkcd is... completely irrelevant to the post.
- Replace "all 1's or something" with "drop database or something" and it 100% applies.
- Makes me wonder if the Lucky 10,000 comic came out because of how often people might’ve said “everybody’s seen that XKCD”.
- I'm pretty sure the cameras around here don't use OCR at all or even if it does it only recognizes the format for plates from a thing shaped like a plate. So if you're driving like an ass with the drop tables-"plate" that is pretty relevant.
  The Bobby Tables one I'm quite sure would work at least on some systems if they let you input your kids name by yourself to some sort of digital form. Or at least I would be pretty surprised if every school system on earth would be patched against simple sql injections.
Cool username

Not always a good idea

https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/

according to Tartaro, he says he received a notice that the California DMV would not let him renew his registration unless he actually paid some of those fines.
that sounds so illegal. but i am not an american, so what do i know.
- California will do a lot more than deny a renewal over unpaid fines. First they'll double the fine the first day that you are late, and then they'll add more fees every day until it is paid. Eventually, I think it's after six months or a year, they'll suspend your driver's license, and after that they'll issue a bench warrant for your arrest. So it's entirely possible for your whole life to be ruined over a traffic ticket in California, culminating with you being thrown into prison.
How the heck does a system interpret a string value null as a literal null? That seems insane to me that there really is software out there written like this. "null" != null... Or so I thought, maybe there are languages out there that this can happen in easily? Or someone is storing the string value of null in a non nullable database column?
- May I introduce you to our lord and savior JavaScript?
“He had it coming,” says Christopher Null, a journalist who has written previously for WIRED about the challenges his last name presents.
This is peak nottheonion material
Paywalled
- https://archive.is/Foe1r
God that's such a good idea. Would it work the same if I did #N/A?
- Only if your DMV does everything in Excel, so.... maybe?

Can you explain the joke here? My neighbor has one of these on his truck, and it still doesn't make any sense to me.
- Your neighbor is the joke. (real answer: the sticker implies a cop would find being called gay very offensive, to the point of not pulling this person over. In reality the cop would likely just shoot you and say you were evading arrest or something while pissing on your corpse.)

I think this would get you charged depending on the locality, do not try at home kids

Image is European but I'm pretty sure here in California trying to obscure your plate is illegal. Though I'm not sure what actually counts against it, since I know a couple of people with those bullshit plastic films that claim to obscure your plate from traffic cams but not from people looking at it.
They don't actually work, but I feel like the intent behind using them could get you in trouble.
- I'm pretty sure obscuring your plates is illegal in most places in Europe. How much anyone actually cares probably depends on specific locality.
- I'd be more worried that this could count as some form of cybercrime.
- Where I live, you only need valid plates to drive on public roads. If the car is parked or you drive on private property, there's no problem. The procedure for getting plates requires you to not have plates for like 2 or 3 days.
  Cars can still be identified by the VIN which is on the windshield.
- There's no requirement for front plates in my state.
Charging other people for your own incompetence has a special ring to it.
- Not expecting someone to war drive a drop table query into an EZ pass database isn't incompetence, n'or is not expecting any other vulnerability to be exploited unless you have specific training to look out for it.
  Even master defensive coders won't be able to write something that's impenetrable, just difficult enough to break into that it isn't worth it to 99.99999% of attackers.

I miss ancient memes like this

Reminds me of the woman that got a fine for "driving in a bus lane" here in the UK. When she looked at the attached image on the fine it was of a woman walking in the street of a town she'd never been to. On that woman's jumper was lettering that closely resembled her plates.

Made me think I could attach a sheet of card with the plate details of some arsehole I disliked, ride a bicycle down the bus lane and see if they start complaining about being fined. 😅

They'll get the picture in the fine letter so make sure you give them your best one-finger salute
- Well I was on google streetview giving their camera the finger, LOL!

Is there even a remotely possible chance something like that would work? I have to drive past a ALPR that checks for insurance every day. I wouldn't mind plastering code across my tailgate in a design that resembles a license plate.

It actually did work, apparently:
Source
- not working in two different browsers, should it?
- They tried to revive it, but ultimately the boards have been dead for the past 5 years or so.
  That's a new level of incompetence, even for the government. So, after spending all that tax-payer money, they just let the entire project die rather than have a developer spin up a new database schema, which would take anyone competent like 5 minutes? For real? And these are the people that everyone expects to fix our problems?
- Worth a shot. Wouldn't surprise me if this backwoods town is vulnerable. That being said, I'm open to anyone's code suggestions and I'll slap it on there. My coding abilities are limited to BASIC and just enough C to make microcontrollers work.
- Wow that is impressive
Highly unlikely.

Little Bobby tables learns to drive.

This is smart. When my son was learning, I put a magnetic ‘student driver’ sign on my car, too. More people should do this. It’s just polite.

L plates are a legal requirement here if that's what you mean
- They’re not required here. You just plop your child in your regular car with no changes whilst they’re learning. It’s insane. I bought a magnetic sign to warn people though, because that seems nuts to me.
  I was making a joke tho.

I have been learning some database stuff today. Finally understand the drop table thing better.

This was actually tried btw. Mostly as a joke iirc

Edit: Looking into it, apparently it's not confirmed. Damn, that was a very popular urban myth in french programming circles back in the 2010's

This is awesome. Saved. LOL

It's a Renault Mégane 1. There's not a whole lot of those around anymore so it'd be easy to identify the owner even without a license plate.

identify - maybe, prove it at the court of law - somewhere between hard and impossible.
say you have found all these "not that many" cars, and now what? you would have (may slightly depend on the local law) prove who is the driver. that may be impossible, even if you have photo of the driver and photo of the suspected owner and you "think" they match.
the car also doesn't have to be local, whatever your threshold for what local is is.