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?
In a considerable part of the world. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_driving_ages
Oh, guess NA bias is showing.
Yeah, I assumed most of the world was at least 18. I was surprised when I moved to the US at 15 and could get a learner’s permit and drive with an adult, and drive by myself at 16.
Growing up in a rural part of Ohio it was needed. Everything was 20-30 miles away. Need milk and eggs, well see you an a hour
Yeah, I totally understand how it’s necessary across many parts of the US. There’s so much I couldn’t have done in high school, like having a job, if I couldn’t drive. I didn’t live in a rural area, but between the sprawl and lack of public transportation…
In a rather large part of the world (the solid green parts of that map).
Almost everywhere… there are very few places where you can drive before you’re 18. There are like junuor permits and you can get them when you’re 16, but your parrents are the ones responsible for your driving. Something happens, they get ringed. So, yeah, they can also not give you the license if you cause too much trouble.
Poland and probably most of Europe. You don’t need a car here for everyday living, so there is no point in giving licenses and care to kids.
Sweden.
NYC without drivers ed
In the US you don’t get your full driver’s license until 18. 16 is permit and requires an over 21 license driver with you, and 17 is a provisional license so it has restrictions on how late you can drive and how many people can be in the car.
I got my license at 16, permit at 15. I live in the U.S…
Yeah but I think what he’s saying is that you can have a license, but there are still restrictions for a certain amount of time. In California when I got my license on my 16th birthday, I think it was 6 months that I couldn’t have anyone in the car under 18 without someone over 25, and I couldn’t drive past 10 or 11 pm (unless I was coming from work or some kind of emergency). It’s been a minute (almost 20 years lol) and I remember changes to the rules not long after my restrictions were lifted (I think they extended them to a year), but yeah, it’s not like they handed you a license and you were a free agent.
Old Millennial, here. Gather round!
In most of the USA, you could get a permit at 15 1/2 years old, and this came with the restriction of needing someone over 18 with you.
Then at 16, if you passed the test, you were given a license and could drive all you want. No restrictions, no limits, have your friends in the car, no one really cared. Then people started to realize that giving 16 years olds free rein to drive causes a lot of accidents. Over the past ~15 years more states have adopted the graduated driver’s license and it has caused a notable drop in fatalities.
Isn’t this the same country that made the drinking age 21 because of car accidents?
I think that may be a state restriction. For sure you can get a permit at 15, and 16 should be provisional, but iirc the only restriction is that those under 18 cant drive after 11pm, atleast in FL.
Pretty sure the US allows individual states to set the ages. In Canada, it’s provinces that set it. Lowest age I’ve ever heard of was 12 (for limited permits to move farm machinery along back roads in Saskatchewan, although that was decades ago and it might not still be a thing). I had a full and unrestricted license at 16, but the rules have changed since then.
Only if you live in New Jersey
Admittedly it’s been a long time since this was relevant to me, so this may have changed, but where and when I grew up in the US you could get a learner’s permit (unlimited driving with another qualified driver in the car) at 15 yrs and 9 mos, then a full license (able to drive by yourself and transport anyone over 18) at, I think, 16 and 6 mos. At 18 the restrictions on whom you could transport disappeared, but I’ve never heard of anyone paying attention to or enforcing those rules anyway.
There may also have been a restriction about driving after midnight, but I don’t recall for sure.
I only had my learner’s permit for 6 months before getting my intermediate, and my full license 6 months after that.
that xkcd is… completely irrelevant to the post.
Replace “all 1’s or something” with “drop database or something” and it 100% applies.
and replace pork steak with tofu chilli bowl and it is now vegetarian food. what is your point?
And if my grandma had two wheels she would be a bicycke. What are we talking about again?
And if my grandma had two wheels she would be a bicycke.
No, she would be human with two wheels. That is not what a bicycle is
What are we talking about again?
We are talking about the fact that when someone says “that is not relevant”, countering with “if some facts were different, it would suddenly be relevant” is not very useful answer.
You also have to “change facts” to have the Bobby Tables xkcd apply here, because this is about plates and not children.
It doesn’t have to apply 100% to be a relevant xkcd, they just posted it because, like op’s pic, it’s about a person trying to be clever by messing with speed cameras, but everyone would know whose fault is it the second time it happens because of how weird the plate is.
Your one obviously applies more, but there’s no need to gatekeep.
because this is about plates and not children.
but this isn’t about plates, it is about sql injection.
but everyone would know whose fault is it the second time it happens because of how weird the plate is.
this is obviously not official plate that would be registered to his name, so they would have no idea unless they caught him red-handed.
but there’s no need to gatekeep.
well, yes, i could have phrased that differently
But if you stuck a license plate to a child then it would be a car
Im suddenly hungry for carbonara
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.
So if you’re driving like an ass with the drop tables-“plate” that is pretty relevant.
the only thing they have in common is the license plate. that is like saying that every joke that starts with “three people walk into a bar” is basically the same joke.
but here, have a photo that is actually relevant to the submitted xkcd ;)
is this your car?
no
I feel like one Z should be a 2 for good measure
The license plate cameras near me simply take a photo when motion is detected and send it to the server or stores it until connection is reestablished. Then they use image recognition on the car to determine the make and model and on the license plate. They also claim that they can record items such as bumper stickers or body damage. I think that they probably have humans review cars that don’t match exactly. My guess is that they use object detection to isolate the license plate, but you could probably make one by printing text onto a piece of paper and gluing it onto some cardboard. I also think you could mess with it if you put a decal of a letter or number next to your license plate.
Mvp
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.
ok, but while that is wild in itself, i assume that is under the assumption of them actually being your tickets. here we talk about situation where they demand the hero pays someone else’s tickets just because of the fault of their system.
That aligns perfectly from what I’ve seen from the California DMV. They do not give a fuck. They will do whatever their stupid little antiquated computer program tells them to do.
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Did you read the article? All those fines were from other people, erroneously applied to him when the police officer didn’t fill in the information on the citation.
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“There’s no way to know if he used the plate on dozens of vehicles in dozens of states, some at the same time.”
So then he’s innocent, case closed.
The standard is to assume innocence, not assume guilt
“There’s no way to prove him guilty so he should have to pay!”
I doubt the guy had several different car makes on hand to commit some sort of nationwide parking violation spree with the same plate but different cars in places where it’s impossible to even drive between the two places in the time between both timestamps.
Huh? They’re not his fines. The software is just shit so it puts all fines with no license plate as matching his.
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?
Javas Christ.
But even in JavaScript a string representation of null is not equal to a null literal. ‘null’ or “null” are not the same as null
“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
Ah, the joys of being European and only getting a nag screen. Here you go:
Joseph Tartaro never meant to cause this much trouble. Especially for himself.
In late 2016, Tartaro decided to get a vanity license plate. A security researcher by trade, he ticked down possibilities that related to his work: SEGFAULT, maybe, or something to do with vulnerabilities. Sifting through his options, he started typing “null pointer,” but caught himself after the first word: NULL. Funny. “The idea was I’d get VOID for my wife’s car, so our driveway would be NULL and VOID,” Tartaro says.
The joke had layers, though. As Tartaro well knew, and as he explained in a recent talk at the Defcon hacker conference, “null” is also a text string that in many programming languages signifies a value that is empty or undefined. To many computers, null is the void.
That setup also has a brutal punch line—one that left Tartaro at one point facing $12,049 of traffic fines wrongly sent his way. He’s still not sure if he’ll be able to renew his auto registration this year without paying someone else’s tickets. And thanks to the Kafkaesque loop he’s caught in, it’s not clear if the citations will ever stop coming.
Null Set
In his Defcon talk, Tartaro played up the idea that he had initially hoped a NULL plate might get him out of tickets—that, once fed into the database of offenders, the violation quite literally would not compute. But he says now that pranks weren’t actually his initial focus. If anything, he was surprised that the California DMV website let him register NULL in the first place.
That first year as a NULL driver was uneventful. But when it came time to renew in 2017, the DMV website no longer accepted NULL as an option. “It broke the website,” Tartaro says. Specifically, the site told him that the license plate and vehicle identification number he had entered, known as the VIN, were invalid. But Tartaro was still able to use a reference number to renew. He didn’t think much more of it.
He also didn’t think much of the ticket he got in early 2018, for not having the appropriate registration sticker on his license plate. Tartaro suspects someone scraped it off to use on their own car. He thought about fighting it, but the fine was only $35, so he decided to just pay it and move on with his life.
Then came the citations. Dozens of them, deposited in bulk to his mailbox. Parking violations, stand-stop violations, fines of $37, $60, $74, $80, from Fresno to Rancho Cucamonga. “I’ve never been to Fresno,” Tartaro says of the California city.
Nor had Tartaro gone on a statewide, parking-related crime spree. Instead, by paying that $35 ticket, it appears that a database somewhere now associated NULL with his personal information. Which means that any time a traffic cop forgot to fill in the license plate number on a citation, the fine automatically got sent to Joseph Tartaro.
The tickets were for Hondas, Toyotas, Mercedes vehicles. (Tartaro has an Infiniti.) At one point, Tartaro says, he received two tickets written at Cypress College within hours of each other—for two different vehicles. He would have had to swap the registration during his lunch break. Worse yet, the incoming citations seemed to apply retroactively.
“I have tickets from 2014,” Tartaro adds. “I didn’t have the plate back then.”
Citations ‘R’ Us
The fines were all sent by a private company called the Citation Processing Center, which, well, processes parking citations. But calling them, Tartaro says, proved fruitless. “I reached out to this company, and they’re basically saying that I have to prove without a doubt that these hundreds of tickets aren’t mine. Trying to speak to a manager went nowhere. He’s like, you’ve got to mail all these back to us.”
Tartaro declined, worried about potentially losing the paper record of the misallocated fines. But the next day, he says, he noticed something odd in the public online listing of citations maintained at the Citation Processing Center’s website. He had given them an example of a specific ticket he had gotten that implicated a Honda. Online, that record had been changed to an Infiniti with Taranto’s VIN. Taranto shared a side by side comparison of his paper copy and the apparently altered database version as part of his Defcon talk.
“After I had the phone call, directly after the phone call, those same tickets where I still have the physical printouts in front of me right now that say their make and model were modified,” Tartaro says. A Citation Processing Center employee said that while she was aware of Tartaro’s situation, the company was unable to comment.
Tartaro next turned to the DMV, which he says worked with the Citation Processing Center to void out the bulk of tickets that had errantly come his way. That successfully got the amount owed down to $6,262 as of last weekend, but didn’t solve the core problem. More tickets continued to trickle in. The database still had him pegged.
Even through all this, Tartaro remained mostly unconcerned. The CPC was just a private company; he could keep working with the DMV to void the fines as they came in, which was an annoyance but not a catastrophe. He had successfully registered his car the previous year despite CPC citations piling up. But just days before Defcon, 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.
“Now that the DMV is enforcing these tickets that are falsified, it changes everything,” he says. “At the moment, I cannot reregister my vehicle without paying the tickets. But I can’t pay the tickets because it admits guilt, and the minute I admit that it opens me up to all the other tickets. I’m basically in a really bad situation.”
The situation has improved somewhat in recent days, at least. Tartaro calculates that tickets assigned to his car still tallied over $6,000 when he last checked on Sunday. When WIRED looked up the NULL plate in the CPC database Tuesday, after asking the company about the charges, it showed only $140 worth of tickets remaining—both from Fresno.
Infiniti and Beyond
Tartaro doesn’t see this as much of a reprieve. He’s glad the tickets have vanished, but he would still need to pay $140 to reregister his car. And there’s no guarantee that more fines won’t show up along the way.
It’s also hard to know where to turn for resolution. “Mr. Tartaro’s situation appears to stem from policies set by local parking authorities—which the DMV has no control over,” California DMV spokesperson Marty Geenstein said. “From the DMV’s perspective, our system recognizes his personalized plate and shows he is eligible to renew his registration online.” Assuming he pays the fee. Most Popular
Prank or not, Tartaro was playing with fire by going with NULL in the first place. “He had it coming,” says Christopher Null, a journalist who has written previously for WIRED about the challenges his last name presents. “All you ever get is errors and crashes and headaches.”
If anything, Null says, the problem has gotten worse over the years. “The ‘minimum viable product’ concept has pushed a lot of bad code through that doesn’t go through with the proper level of testing,” Null says, adding that anyone affected is inevitably an edge case, a relatively small problem not worth devoting a lot of resources to fix. Null has himself had to deal with countless annoyances, from American Express dropping his last name altogether, to Bank of America refusing to accept emails from his “nullmedia.com” domain.
Still, Tartaro says he’s determined to keep his problematic license plate, and not just as a point of pride. “I still have tickets associated with me. The moment I change my plate I just know it’s going to be even more convoluted, and more confusing,” he says. “I didn’t feel comfortable changing it until I knew it was actually solved.”
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.)
So he’s into water sports?
the cop is.
Dude, settle down a little, or a lot.
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But then he’d be stuck being a cop for the rest of his life.
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.
I don’t see how. The premise of these cameras is that anybody is allowed to film in public. All you’re doing is showing something in public which is perfectly legal. It doesn’t damage the camera. If they decide to use the image from their camera to enter text into a database, then that’s on them if something bad happens. You have no control over what happens inside of their computer. It’s no different than someone blindly copy pasting commands into their Linux terminal and deleting system 32.
As far as I’m aware cybercrime is generally: “anything done maliciously involving a computer” intentionally sticking a drop table command over your plates because you’re expecting something to read your plate and input it into a db might count.
I highly doubt cameras would be able to recognize this as a valid plate.
No, because it is a widly known meme and would be considered free speech as satire. Since you did not access the system, there is no crime. If a person was manually entering license plates and entered it into a database, would it be your fault? No, you had no control over that person’s actions, and no reasonable person would mistake that as a licence plate. If a computer enters it on its own, then that is also not your fault, the programmer is responsible. You have no responsibility to know how a system handles its database inputs in order to avoid messing it up.
Sure, so you just get a fine for obstructing your license plate then.
Some us states don’t require a front plate, or you could put it next to your rear plate or in the rear window.
All you’re doing is showing something in public which is perfectly legal.
no, it is not, showing something in public is often not legal, it - as is often the case - depend on the context.
It doesn’t damage the camera.
it damages the database.
then that’s on them if something bad happens. You have no control over what happens inside of their computer.
no, that is on you, because you made that clearly intentionally malicious input. it is the same as if you had used the keyboard, the input method is really not important.
do you think that if you successfully hack a bank and steal some money you will get away with the defense of “all i did was send your computer some input, sending input to computers is perfectly legal and i really don’t have any control over what is going inside it”?
that is 5 year’s old idea of how law works.
So what you’re saying is that anytime sometime is filming or photographing someone else in public the person being filmed or photographed is
Responsible for what the camera sees
Is a direct user of any database or computer used to process the images
The person filming is allowed to impose restrictions because they are filming other people in public
That doesn’t sound quite right to me
So what you’re saying is (…)
no, that is not what i am saying.
That doesn’t sound quite right to me
it would help if you stopped putting fabricated nonsense into other people’s mouths. then you wouldn’t have to wonder whether that nonsense “sounds quite right.”
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I made a joke elsewhere about Amazon’s search thing using AI to generate a string that would crash the Amazon server and thought about that too afterward. If that actually worked, could someone be charged with a crime?
Id guess maybe, if I generated a string using AI and intentionally crashed their stuff, it might be crime.
I’m only using the tools provided, not accessing anything that’s clearly pointed out I shouldn’t. If anything, that question field is specifically designed for me to use.
If I go to a hardware store and start taking a sledgehammer to the walls “I’m only using the tools provided” is not going to be a valid defense.
Not a good comparison, the sledgehammer isn’t meant to be used in the store, the search function in the website is, don’t be dumb.
Okay, the hardware store has a saw for customers to cut planks to the length they need. There are many ways they could “misuse the tool provided”
Knowingly doing something that could be malicious is still malicious.
You’re right on that one. Just seems like they brought it upon themselves.
If that were true we’d see lots more charges on corporate stuff.
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.
Cars can still be identified by the VIN which is on the windshield.
You mean that tiny little plate of numbers you can only see by being up close to inspect? How does that help find, say, a suspect in a hit and run? You’re sure as hell not gonna be able to read the VIN off a moving vehicle unless you’re hanging onto the hood for dear life.
Did you even read my post? I said that you need plates to drive, but you don’t need plates if you are parked (or on private property). If a car is parked, you have plenty of time to read the VIN. Driving on public roads without plates is illegal and you risk jail time.
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.
Sanitizing your data is programming 101 when dealing with database entries
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:
not working in two different browsers, should it?
It’s a link to a comment on this subject that says:
Ok, so to explain. This DID happen,literally 500m from my home :) the system was designed to store reg plate numbers and later turned to a speed camera. The stunt was done by a few students of the Technical University, it did bring the whole db down. They tried to revive it, but ultimately the boards have been dead for the past 5 years or so. Mind that this hack was performed around 7 or 8 years ago:) I can provide pics of the dead board now and exact coordinates too:)
And then later in the replies they do give the coordinates of the camera billboard thing they broke, and someone posts a Google Maps screenshot of the board at the coordinates they gave that just looks like a little digital billboard that’s turned off and is just black, and the OP confirms that it is the board they mentioned.
Hope that all makes sense; I’ve got a lot brain fog/stress brain and stuff and it felt like too much to screenshot lol
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?
This is complete guess work but I’m pretty sure its the kind of things that was put together by some office assistant not a developer.
Real parks and rec vibes.
I don’t know what a database is and it’s been too long im afraid to go ask
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
Just pop a bike rack on your back plates and you are good to go.
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.
