12 ms·

Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

197 points by lafond 9mo ago

rozenmd 9mo ago
I did something similar to get OnlineOrNot's twitter handle - I realised that unclaimed names would 404 and so I set up a check to get an alert when that happened.
hippich 9mo ago
One thing that stopped me from seeking the vanity plate - I learned that at least in Texas all plates are made by minimally paid prisoners. So any desire to finance that system beyond what's absolute possible minimum (i.e. regular plates) evaporated.
- rsstack 9mo ago
  In New York it's the same, they make the license plates and also school furniture, and maybe other things too. I was scared for a moment when I was told by USPS Informed Delivery that I have incoming mail from Auburn Correctional Facility - but it was a license plate.
  - reactordev 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - embedding-shape 9mo ago
      > Yes, it’s borderline slave labor I'm sorry, how is it "borderline" slave labour and not straight up forced labour? These people are imprisoned, and I'm assuming forced to do this work, or what happens if they say no? It's quite literally known as "penal labour" and I thought most of the world figured out that we're not supposed to treat people like that anymore.
      - MangoToupe 9mo ago
        Even our legal system recognizes it as slave labor. The thirteenth amendment specifically says: "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
        reactordev 9mo ago
        yes but except as a punishment for crime whereof has been refined with further case law I believe. You can be forced to do small jobs, clean up. You can be assigned Road Crew and pickup trash. You can do small jobs that the system won't hire and pay for, they'll use you. So long as you aren't a risk of flight, to the officers, or to society if you have to interact with the public. Beats sitting in a cinderblock white-painted cell with a metal cot and 4" mattress.
        kelnos 9mo ago
        > Beats sitting in a cinderblock white-painted cell with a metal cot and 4" mattress. Does it, though? One might prefer that over slave labor.
        qingcharles 9mo ago
        Yes, you don't need to be convicted to be forced into labor under the 13th. Pretrial detainees can be forced to do "housekeeping chores" and not violate the constitution.
        reactordev 9mo ago
        That actually is a good point, in the US justice system, you’re guilty until proven innocent (for most people). Just the fact that you have a case has ruined lives.
        LocalH 9mo ago
        This shows that the government (all branches) has always ignored the Constitution. It clearly says in the 13th that it requires the person to be "duly convicted".
    - komali2 9mo ago
      > To the readers out there. Do not be put off by where it was made, how it was made. It was made. And if it never sells, the profit margins for the slave drivers decreases. I mean, I really, this post is trying to justify slave labor. Is that not... A little bizarre to find yourself doing that?
      - reactordev 9mo ago
        I'm not justifying slave labor. I'm pointing out that they should be paid more. They'll gladly make the plates and be happy doing it. Getting outside means the world to them. Don't hate them for making the plates, hate the system for putting them into slave labor, but at the same time show some compassion for those who are trying to live and be, normal productive members of society (even if it is at shotgun point). My point is, it's not the employee and where that employee makes the product, it's the company that abuses that employee to make the product for you. So no, not justifying slave labor, but I am justifying using prison labor (at minimum wage) to give them a chance at rehabilitation and/or restitution.
        squibonpig 9mo ago
        Not to nitpick, but you're saying they presumably appreciate the opportunity to go outside for a while and such. Leaving aside they could be granted that just fine without the slavery, aren't most prison jobs worked inside the prison? The only exceptions I can think of are agricultural work or road crews.
    - knome 9mo ago
      Selling prisoners as underpaid slave labor means everyone else now has to compete against companies using that slave labor. It's essentially cutting us twice. We both pay to house and feed the employees/contractors of the company benefiting who then undercuts us by not bothering to pay them. Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center. The ramifications of doing so create gross incentives.
      - reactordev 9mo ago
        >Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center. That ship sailed post American Civil-War. We've made it part of our culture. Every prison charges their inmates to be there. Per Diems. It used to be tax payers but... they found out they could double dip.
        squibonpig 9mo ago
        This is the kind of thing it's relatively viable to address legislatively, and which would be well within the overton window if it were given more attention.
    - mc32 9mo ago
      Also these are people found guilty of a felony and it costs us non prisoners tax money to keep them housed and fed. Is it unfair if we extract under paid or unpaid labor from them? Is it also unfair to ask drivers convicted of DWD to do free community labor?
      - reactordev 9mo ago
        Yes, it's unfair to force a human being into labor. Paid or unpaid. It should be voluntary. Community Service as a punishment is different. That's a do labor or else do time so you're trading labor for hours/time. Paid in trust. I have issue with do time and do labor as a form of punishment without reward. Most inmates are incarcerated due to circumstance. They lacked the ability to better their lives and required monies to live, so they resorted to crime. Given a chance, many inmates get degrees behind bars, learn skills, write books, practice art.
    - fleroviumna 9mo ago
      [dead]
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > I learned that at least in Texas all plates are made by minimally paid prisoners Lol, wasn't slavery outlawed in the US, or were some states still allowed to keep it? That's absolutely bananas if true.
  - paulddraper 9mo ago
    No, Thirteenth Amendment permits it as punishment for a crime. This a good reminder to all Americans to read the Constitution. The amount of bizarre understandings (not necessarily this one) that I see is very high.
  - dogleash 9mo ago
    Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
    - rimunroe 9mo ago
      For anyone unaware, that is nearly[1] the entirety of the text of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution from 1865. This exception is rather (in)famous. I remember being quizzed on it in an elementary or middle school history or social studies class. [1] the only excluded bit is the followup "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Without this, the power to enforce the 13th Amendment would be left up to the states due to the 10th Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."), which would have slightly useless given the whole war that had just been fought over some states wanting to keep slavery.
  - grimgrin 9mo ago
    Since you didn't know about for-profit prisons, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison
    - 9mo ago
- htx80nerd 9mo ago
  they shouldnt be paid at all. they're in prison for a reason. they have a debt to society. a great many of those people didnt do 'one bad thing' then got caught. it was just the last bad thing they were caught for. any many of them did 'the bad thing', then continued doing other bad things up until the point they were put in prison.
  - pavel_lishin 9mo ago
    I don't agree with your "slave labor is ok if the slave committed a crime" position, and find it morally indefensible.
    - antonymoose 9mo ago
      Stepping aside the fact that I think most everyone here is playing fast-and-loose with the “slave” terminology here… Why do you feel prisoners doing low wage labor to be wrong? Practically everyone in human history since the dawn of time has had to go out and produce something of value. Why, all of a sudden, should a murderer or rapist get to sit on their ass and consume what we all produce? I find nothing questionable about a humble job for them at all.
      - pavel_lishin 9mo ago
        Two answers: 1. Why should they be restricted to ludicrously low wages? If they're producing something of value, they should be compensated. Not only is it morally wrong to, you know, enslave people, on a more practical level it would be very helpful for people who are leaving prison after serving their sentence to actually have some money saved up, so they have better opportunities, to avoid recidivism. 2. The reason they can sit on their ass and consume what they produce is that they effectively become wards of the state. They're still human beings, and if we have decided to incarcerate them, we become responsible for them, and they still have rights as human beings. A humble job is fine; I'm not saying they should be sitting in an aeron chair bullshitting on Slack for 8 hours a day. But slavery for pennies on the hour is wrong.
      - 7bit 9mo ago
- alexfoo 9mo ago
  > One thing that stopped me from seeking the vanity plate I'm sure it differs between countries but in the UK vanity plates have become reasonably contentious. As a gross generalisation they're fine if the car is worth hundreds of thousands or the plate itself is worth hundreds of thousands. The UK plate "F1" last sold for just under £1m (about US$1.3m) over 10 years ago and it's rumoured that there are offers for ten times that from someone who wants to buy it now. It comes down to a classic British issue of "class", which is inherently difficult to explain. If you have the money to have, say, a Ferrari 250 GTO then you can do what the hell you like with it, including getting a vanity plate for it. You are rich enough that you don't care what anyone else thinks about you. Anyone seeing you and that car will know you are rich. If you have the money to spend close to £1m on a plate like "X1" and decide to put it on beat up 15 year old 1.2 litre Ford Focus then, again, it shows you have stupid amounts of money and some delicious irony in putting it on an old beater of a car. But if don't have a supercar and you get a relatively cheap vanity plate like "RMZ 1327" and stick it on a Range Rover Evoque that's only a couple of years old then it just shows that you're trying too hard and just aspire to be seen as rich. You don't have enough money for a really nice car, or a really exclusive vanity plate. I guess the other way of looking at it is that people who don't have the money to get a vanity plate aspire to being able to do so as it would mean they have more money than they have now. Once they get to having that amount of money most realise that the money is best spent elsewhere (or not spent at all). Once they have so much money that having a vanity plate is inconsequential to their finances they may as well do it. So it's natural that some people want to pretend they've reached the "rich" state by buying a vanity plate preemptively - the problem is that this is so easy to spot it just looks gauche. All of this obviously doesn't apply to countries where vanity plates aren't traded for stupid amounts like famous pieces of art.
  - mtrovo 9mo ago
    Loved your description of the class system. There's a general theme of old money wealthy people not caring about vanity purchases because they don't know how much stuff costs nor if that is a too much money or not. It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.
- BurningFrog 9mo ago
  Imprisoning people for years seems like a much worse thing to do to people than underpaying them for work they do while locked up. Is it that the latter can be called "slavery" that makes people upset?
  - retrodaredevil 9mo ago
    There are a lot of incentives to lock people up. Cheap labor is one of them. We should support incentives such as "keeping society safe", but incentives such as "profits and cheap labor" are incentives that may actually incentivize locking up innocent people. So it's not about which one is worse, it's about not supporting something that could lead to corruption or an unfair system.
- paulddraper 9mo ago
  “The morally correct thing is to pay them even less.”
Svip 9mo ago
In Denmark, you can buy a vanity plate (ønskenummerplade) for 8'000 DKK (needs renewal every 8 years), and it can be between 2 and 7 characters long; but the best part is that they permit all Danish letters, including Æ, Ø and Å. One could likely write a script quickly to check these platforms for short combinations, such as ØÅ, which appears to be available.
- neilv 9mo ago
  ØØ7 Don't forget that the cost is not only the bureaucratic fee; you also have to buy a vintage Aston Martin or Lotus, to display the plate.
  - reactordev 9mo ago
    Shouldn’t be a problem with all that medieval money lying around. /s Does a kit car count? You can build a Lotus for around the cost of a Honda civic. Like a Lotus 7.
    - MisterTea 9mo ago
      Money? You mean you don't just go to Q and procure one?
      - reactordev 9mo ago
        I guess you could get the tax payers to pay for it.
  - josteink 9mo ago
    While clever, as a Scandinavian I regret to inform you that I would read that as: Uh Uh Seven, not (double) Oh Seven ;)
    - cobbzilla 9mo ago
      a money-saver! uh uh seven belongs on a vintage Ford Pinto!
valleyer 9mo ago
You should not be getting notifications while driving.
moralestapia 9mo ago
Hehe, I do a similar thing for phone numbers and I got real good ones almost for free :)
- tetraodonpuffer 9mo ago
  phone numbers seem risky, years back I got randomly assigned a "cool" number (I think it ended with 8888 or something) and it seems it was on all possible fax spam lists, constant calls all hours of the day and the night, had to change it asap.
  - bsimpson 9mo ago
    I have my HN name @gmail.com. I've never actually used that account, because there are too many anonymous Bart Simpsons (and old people who don't understand email addresses) who use that one. The shitty thing is that I use Google Apps for Your Domain (a.k.a. Dasher/GSuite) to get around this. For years, things like Photos and Music were stuck to my useless Gmail account, because the PMs involved never bothered going through the approvals to get those things to work on custom domain accounts (which Google ret-conned to be for businesses only). A lot of these are resolved now, but there are still frustrating places where it comes up: - I pay twice for YouTube Music - once for myself, and once for my family. I can't share my account with them, because it's attached to my domain name. - I similarly can't join their Google Home accounts to do things like have my voice recognized when I visit them. - Gemini CLI thinks I'm a business and quotas me like one.
  - dhosek 9mo ago
    My then-fiancée had a cell number that ended with 5 zeroes and a 1 and she got many wrong number calls from people who were trying to reach numbers that ended with 0-001x
moduspol 9mo ago
I found out recently that in my state, the online vanity plate checker shows plates that were PREVIOUSLY registered but NOW available as NOT available. I wanted to get one of my own plates I had years ago and assumed there was some process to have it transferred, but was told by a DMV rep that after two years of non-registration, they're up for grabs. Apparently the web page does not take this into account. That means there are probably a lot of great plate names up for the taking that people are just assuming are taken. You'd need to call the DMV to verify. Hopefully Florida's web page does not have that limitation.
dustfinger 9mo ago
What we need is a "Little Bobby Tables" vanity plate that exploits a buffer overflow in speed cams.
- Liquix 9mo ago
  https://i.imgur.com/hhlg100.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/hhlg100.jpeg
- kijin 9mo ago
  Unfortunately they seem to filter special characters on input, that is, when you apply for your plate. But don't despair! Depending on how crappy the cam's firmware is, NULL might just do the trick.
  - pavel_lishin 9mo ago
    Or it might do the opposite: https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/ https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-ha...
    - dustfinger 9mo ago
      Ouch!
- bombcar 9mo ago
  Isn’t there an xkcd abut a license plate of zeros an Os and ones and LS and the cops just say “it’s the guy with the plate again”.
  - Liquix 9mo ago
    https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
    - dhosek 9mo ago
      That plate wouldn’t be allowed in Illinois where there is a hard requirement that all digits follow any letters on the plate.¹ The thing that I find mystifying is that they charge more for a vanity plate that’s all letters than one that’s letters and digits. ⸻ 1. Although some specialty plates end up having suffixed letters, usually shown on the plate stacked.
sltkr 9mo ago
It's a fun story of course, but it also seems that people like OP who abuse public APIs are why we can't have nice things, and why so many web pages these days are bogged down by Cloudflare and Anubis interstitials that waste human time.
- abound 9mo ago
  Yeah, also running a scraper with no rate limit against a government website is a pretty risky endeavor.
- LikesPwsh 9mo ago
  Skiddies targeting an individual site are a drop in the ocean compared with the industrial scale LLM scraping, so blaming them for it is in bad taste.
  - Someone1234 9mo ago
    The difference is that the government won't charge a major LLM vendor with a crime, but they may kick in John Smith's front door and ruin their life.
  - wiseowise 9mo ago
    > Skiddies targeting an individual site are a drop in the ocean compared with the industrial scale LLM scraping They're not. Both are bad, but at least there's some utility to LLMs.
pavel_lishin 9mo ago
> Most people never think twice about the random mix of letters and numbers the DMV assigns them. I started thinking about it when someone parked next to me in a nearly-identical model - same brand, year, etc, the only difference was some roof accessory - and a nearly identical license plate. (Think ABC D12 and ABC E12). I started trying to open their car door, and was confused until I noticed some things in their front seat that were clearly not ours. Later that week, I was shopping around for car tires, and saw that some shop - PepBoys or something - let you punch in your license plate and let you know what kind of tires you need, and that their API response included the car make and model. I thought about poking around it, and seeing if there was a pattern to the way my state assigned license plates, but never got around to it. (They live in town, too, and I've seen where they park. I should go introduce myself to our car twin.)
- giarc 9mo ago
  https://www.pepboys.com/tires https://www.pepboys.com/tires They have a license plate checker on their site. I don't live in the states, therefore I don't have a plate to check. Or do I..... HY in Florida.... @lafond - do you own a 2010 Subaru Legacy with the 2.5L SOHC engine?
  - pavel_lishin 9mo ago
    Yep. I wonder where and how they get this information.
- bombcar 9mo ago
  When you realize the total combos of car key possibilities, you have a decent chance your key would work, too!
  - culi 9mo ago
    I borrowed my friend's Prius once and accidentally opened the door to the wrong one and got in for a second before slowly realizing things felt off.
tantalor 9mo ago
I'm not seeing what TypeScript brings to the party here? Looks like regular old JavaScript plus a vanilla dashboard.
- sphars 9mo ago
  He used TypeScript for the scripts he wrote to pull the data. He also used Next.js to build the dashboard which is written with TypeScript
yesitcan 9mo ago
This has nothing to do with TypeScript
- sphars 9mo ago
  The scripts he wrote to pull the data were written in TypeScript, though all the TS I see is in the parameters in the function signature. Also he used Next.js for the dashboard
  - kelnos 9mo ago
    I think the GP's point was that the part of the article that's most interesting is the investigation into how the DMV's plate system works. The fact that Typescript was used is incidental (of course this could have been done in pretty much any language), and it's an odd choice to include the language choice in the article title.
- bsimpson 9mo ago
  Generally speaking, if someone specifies "TypeScript," I expect the type system to be the interesting part of the writeup. Otherwise, it could say "JavaScript." (It could say "React," but still, the interesting part is that you built a scraper/visualizer, not that it used React.)
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- wvenable 9mo ago
  If the headline said "Using Python to obtain one of the rarest license plates" you wouldn't think twice.
  - yesitcan 9mo ago
    That’s true. But the analogy is more correct if it said “Using Mypy to obtain…”
vachina 9mo ago
I got my vanity phone number this way too. However key point is to have a registrar with an insecure lookup endpoint like in the article. Most endpoints now only give you a list pre generated numbers to choose from, AND that endpoint is rate limited to the tits with reCaptcha. No more script kiddies.
masfuerte 9mo ago
If anyone else was wondering why it says NASCAR on the plate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Florida#Specialty_plates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
komali2 9mo ago
I swear I read some case a couple years back where a kid was facing serious prison time for automating requests to w publicly available government website. "Unauthorized access of a computer." I think the author may have just admitted to what the government considers a serious federal crime, as stupid as it is to consider it a crime.
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago
  Arguably the most famous one is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
  - theSuda 9mo ago
    Whoa. That was an interesting read.
  - bsimpson 9mo ago
    I once had a flatmate who worked in IT at MIT at the time that happened. I don't remember the details, but it was a sad fluke that the feds even got involved - something like it was reported at the wrong time of day/when the person who should have got it was off-shift, or the feds happened to be doing something with the state police when the report came in and wanted to make a big news splash. Whole thing was incredibly fucked up. Interesting to see how much more thorough the Wikipedia page is now.
- wing-_-nuts 9mo ago
  Just because you can hit a backend without a rate limit, doesn't mean you should. In my experience, government IT is very humorless about this sort of thing. Far better to blend in with normal traffic than to stand out as a bad actor.
  - Scaevolus 9mo ago
    Especially given how the response time doesn't matter much here! If you're just looking at 2-character license plates, that's 676/5=136 requests to check them all, and you could easily space that out to something like one request per minute to scan the space every two hours.
jconley88 9mo ago
In CO, there isn't an online search. When you apply, you have to list your top options and hope one is available. I'm also not a normal person. I'm an engineer and this was not good enough for me. I emailed government employees until I figured out who was responsible for license plate records. I submitted a CORA (Colorado Open Records Request) for the entirety of their dataset. I had hoped to get the data on some regular cadence to build a simple online service for others. Unfortunately, they flat out refused and wouldn't discuss options. When I told my family what license plate I wanted, they laughed at me and said "No one has that, just go get it". And so I did and it worked. I now have what I consider to be the best possible license plate in Colorado: "LCNZPLT" Occasionally I'll see someone walk by my car, see the plate, think for a few seconds and then start laughing. Mission accomplished!
- rsync 9mo ago
  The best possible license plates in Colorado all start with ZG …
- bombcar 9mo ago
  Oh I get it your license plate is “License Plate” LCNSPL8
mkw5053 9mo ago
Very similar to this post from a few months ago - https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker
rgovostes 9mo ago
Hah, in California I used to have HX. The short plate came back to bite me: Years after I had moved to another state, an automatic license plate reader on a toll road (91 Express Lanes) in Los Angeles misread someone else's plate as mine. It was kafkaesque: My public records request for photographic evidence was blocked because, if I was correct that the offending driver was not me, the law prohibits the release of records revealing others' driving patterns. The other plates available when I did a similar search were BO and IR. In retrospect IR wasn't a bad choice.
- ProllyInfamous 9mo ago
  I have an iteration of NO PLATE, and have received numerous citations and impound notices. At this point, I just ignore them. Registration renewal is possible, only because my local county office understands the situation (years of this). Of course I could change my license plate, but not'gonna.
jonluca 9mo ago
I did something similar with CA a few months back - https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker Next steps would be to make it LLM assisted and to generate common number/letter replacement combos
- lafond 9mo ago
  Great minds think alike! Tough you weren't able to find anything cool with it, but glad I wasn't the only one thinking to automate it :)
zzo38computer 9mo ago
What character set does it use? For example, can "O" and "0" considered different characters or same character, and are some letters/numbers not used? If so, then how many they say are possible is not quite that simple, since some might match (so they cannot simply be added together) and some might not be possible.
- chatmasta 9mo ago
  I was hoping “using TypeScript” was going to be more along these lines, i.e. using the type system as a constraint solver for some combination of homoglyphs that resembles a target string.
turtlebits 9mo ago
Aren't all license plates rare since they're unique? I would also not call it rare unless everyone wants that specific combo of characters. Personally, I wouldn't pay extra every year to have an easily recognizable vehicle.
paradox460 9mo ago
I used to have a fun novelty plate when I lived in California, but when it came time to get new ones, I went with the most boring, plain plate I could. With how many crazy assholes there are on the road these days, anything I can do to promote my own inconspicuousness is something I'll do. No bumper stickers, no cute plate frames, nothing. When I'm not carrying skis, the rack comes off
- hu3 9mo ago
  In a world where people scratch sports cars painting out of pure envy. It's hard to criticise someone trying to stay under the radar of the crazy.
hmokiguess 9mo ago
I’m boring. The process for us was: Wifey and I thought of cool names, went to register with our shortlist written on paper, most didn’t work, until one did. Though now we’re considering dropping it because it costs too much.
resurge 9mo ago
Hey, would you please consider adding an RSS feed to your blog? I remember liking your post about Waffle house and now also this one, so I tried to add it to my RSS reader. But unfortunately no feed is available.
- lafond 9mo ago
  It's now available! https://jack.bio/feed https://jack.bio/feed :-)
eurleif 9mo ago
>EVENTVALIDATION is (was?) a novel security measure implemented in 2006 by the ASP.NET team to "prevents unauthorized requests sent by potentially malicious users from the client [..] to ensure that each and every postback and callback event originates from the expected user interface elements, the page adds an extra layer of validation on events". The attack it prevents is called XSRF, and this security measure wasn't novel in 2006.

197 points by lafond 9mo ago

I did something similar to get OnlineOrNot's twitter handle - I realised that unclaimed names would 404 and so I set up a check to get an alert when that happened.

hippich 9mo ago

One thing that stopped me from seeking the vanity plate - I learned that at least in Texas all plates are made by minimally paid prisoners. So any desire to finance that system beyond what's absolute possible minimum (i.e. regular plates) evaporated.

rsstack 9mo ago
In New York it's the same, they make the license plates and also school furniture, and maybe other things too. I was scared for a moment when I was told by USPS Informed Delivery that I have incoming mail from Auburn Correctional Facility - but it was a license plate.
- reactordev 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    > Yes, it’s borderline slave labor I'm sorry, how is it "borderline" slave labour and not straight up forced labour? These people are imprisoned, and I'm assuming forced to do this work, or what happens if they say no? It's quite literally known as "penal labour" and I thought most of the world figured out that we're not supposed to treat people like that anymore.
    - MangoToupe 9mo ago
      Even our legal system recognizes it as slave labor. The thirteenth amendment specifically says: "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
      - reactordev 9mo ago
        yes but except as a punishment for crime whereof has been refined with further case law I believe. You can be forced to do small jobs, clean up. You can be assigned Road Crew and pickup trash. You can do small jobs that the system won't hire and pay for, they'll use you. So long as you aren't a risk of flight, to the officers, or to society if you have to interact with the public. Beats sitting in a cinderblock white-painted cell with a metal cot and 4" mattress.
        kelnos 9mo ago
        > Beats sitting in a cinderblock white-painted cell with a metal cot and 4" mattress. Does it, though? One might prefer that over slave labor.
        qingcharles 9mo ago
        Yes, you don't need to be convicted to be forced into labor under the 13th. Pretrial detainees can be forced to do "housekeeping chores" and not violate the constitution.
        reactordev 9mo ago
        That actually is a good point, in the US justice system, you’re guilty until proven innocent (for most people). Just the fact that you have a case has ruined lives.
        LocalH 9mo ago
        This shows that the government (all branches) has always ignored the Constitution. It clearly says in the 13th that it requires the person to be "duly convicted".
  - komali2 9mo ago
    > To the readers out there. Do not be put off by where it was made, how it was made. It was made. And if it never sells, the profit margins for the slave drivers decreases. I mean, I really, this post is trying to justify slave labor. Is that not... A little bizarre to find yourself doing that?
    - reactordev 9mo ago
      I'm not justifying slave labor. I'm pointing out that they should be paid more. They'll gladly make the plates and be happy doing it. Getting outside means the world to them. Don't hate them for making the plates, hate the system for putting them into slave labor, but at the same time show some compassion for those who are trying to live and be, normal productive members of society (even if it is at shotgun point). My point is, it's not the employee and where that employee makes the product, it's the company that abuses that employee to make the product for you. So no, not justifying slave labor, but I am justifying using prison labor (at minimum wage) to give them a chance at rehabilitation and/or restitution.
      - squibonpig 9mo ago
        Not to nitpick, but you're saying they presumably appreciate the opportunity to go outside for a while and such. Leaving aside they could be granted that just fine without the slavery, aren't most prison jobs worked inside the prison? The only exceptions I can think of are agricultural work or road crews.
  - knome 9mo ago
    Selling prisoners as underpaid slave labor means everyone else now has to compete against companies using that slave labor. It's essentially cutting us twice. We both pay to house and feed the employees/contractors of the company benefiting who then undercuts us by not bothering to pay them. Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center. The ramifications of doing so create gross incentives.
    - reactordev 9mo ago
      >Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center. That ship sailed post American Civil-War. We've made it part of our culture. Every prison charges their inmates to be there. Per Diems. It used to be tax payers but... they found out they could double dip.
      - squibonpig 9mo ago
        This is the kind of thing it's relatively viable to address legislatively, and which would be well within the overton window if it were given more attention.
  - mc32 9mo ago
    Also these are people found guilty of a felony and it costs us non prisoners tax money to keep them housed and fed. Is it unfair if we extract under paid or unpaid labor from them? Is it also unfair to ask drivers convicted of DWD to do free community labor?
    - reactordev 9mo ago
      Yes, it's unfair to force a human being into labor. Paid or unpaid. It should be voluntary. Community Service as a punishment is different. That's a do labor or else do time so you're trading labor for hours/time. Paid in trust. I have issue with do time and do labor as a form of punishment without reward. Most inmates are incarcerated due to circumstance. They lacked the ability to better their lives and required monies to live, so they resorted to crime. Given a chance, many inmates get degrees behind bars, learn skills, write books, practice art.
  - fleroviumna 9mo ago
    [dead]
embedding-shape 9mo ago
> I learned that at least in Texas all plates are made by minimally paid prisoners Lol, wasn't slavery outlawed in the US, or were some states still allowed to keep it? That's absolutely bananas if true.
- paulddraper 9mo ago
  No, Thirteenth Amendment permits it as punishment for a crime. This a good reminder to all Americans to read the Constitution. The amount of bizarre understandings (not necessarily this one) that I see is very high.
- dogleash 9mo ago
  Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
  - rimunroe 9mo ago
    For anyone unaware, that is nearly[1] the entirety of the text of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution from 1865. This exception is rather (in)famous. I remember being quizzed on it in an elementary or middle school history or social studies class. [1] the only excluded bit is the followup "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Without this, the power to enforce the 13th Amendment would be left up to the states due to the 10th Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."), which would have slightly useless given the whole war that had just been fought over some states wanting to keep slavery.
- grimgrin 9mo ago
  Since you didn't know about for-profit prisons, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison
  - 9mo ago
htx80nerd 9mo ago
they shouldnt be paid at all. they're in prison for a reason. they have a debt to society. a great many of those people didnt do 'one bad thing' then got caught. it was just the last bad thing they were caught for. any many of them did 'the bad thing', then continued doing other bad things up until the point they were put in prison.
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago
  I don't agree with your "slave labor is ok if the slave committed a crime" position, and find it morally indefensible.
  - antonymoose 9mo ago
    Stepping aside the fact that I think most everyone here is playing fast-and-loose with the “slave” terminology here… Why do you feel prisoners doing low wage labor to be wrong? Practically everyone in human history since the dawn of time has had to go out and produce something of value. Why, all of a sudden, should a murderer or rapist get to sit on their ass and consume what we all produce? I find nothing questionable about a humble job for them at all.
    - pavel_lishin 9mo ago
      Two answers: 1. Why should they be restricted to ludicrously low wages? If they're producing something of value, they should be compensated. Not only is it morally wrong to, you know, enslave people, on a more practical level it would be very helpful for people who are leaving prison after serving their sentence to actually have some money saved up, so they have better opportunities, to avoid recidivism. 2. The reason they can sit on their ass and consume what they produce is that they effectively become wards of the state. They're still human beings, and if we have decided to incarcerate them, we become responsible for them, and they still have rights as human beings. A humble job is fine; I'm not saying they should be sitting in an aeron chair bullshitting on Slack for 8 hours a day. But slavery for pennies on the hour is wrong.
    - 7bit 9mo ago
alexfoo 9mo ago
> One thing that stopped me from seeking the vanity plate I'm sure it differs between countries but in the UK vanity plates have become reasonably contentious. As a gross generalisation they're fine if the car is worth hundreds of thousands or the plate itself is worth hundreds of thousands. The UK plate "F1" last sold for just under £1m (about US$1.3m) over 10 years ago and it's rumoured that there are offers for ten times that from someone who wants to buy it now. It comes down to a classic British issue of "class", which is inherently difficult to explain. If you have the money to have, say, a Ferrari 250 GTO then you can do what the hell you like with it, including getting a vanity plate for it. You are rich enough that you don't care what anyone else thinks about you. Anyone seeing you and that car will know you are rich. If you have the money to spend close to £1m on a plate like "X1" and decide to put it on beat up 15 year old 1.2 litre Ford Focus then, again, it shows you have stupid amounts of money and some delicious irony in putting it on an old beater of a car. But if don't have a supercar and you get a relatively cheap vanity plate like "RMZ 1327" and stick it on a Range Rover Evoque that's only a couple of years old then it just shows that you're trying too hard and just aspire to be seen as rich. You don't have enough money for a really nice car, or a really exclusive vanity plate. I guess the other way of looking at it is that people who don't have the money to get a vanity plate aspire to being able to do so as it would mean they have more money than they have now. Once they get to having that amount of money most realise that the money is best spent elsewhere (or not spent at all). Once they have so much money that having a vanity plate is inconsequential to their finances they may as well do it. So it's natural that some people want to pretend they've reached the "rich" state by buying a vanity plate preemptively - the problem is that this is so easy to spot it just looks gauche. All of this obviously doesn't apply to countries where vanity plates aren't traded for stupid amounts like famous pieces of art.
- mtrovo 9mo ago
  Loved your description of the class system. There's a general theme of old money wealthy people not caring about vanity purchases because they don't know how much stuff costs nor if that is a too much money or not. It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.
BurningFrog 9mo ago
Imprisoning people for years seems like a much worse thing to do to people than underpaying them for work they do while locked up. Is it that the latter can be called "slavery" that makes people upset?
- retrodaredevil 9mo ago
  There are a lot of incentives to lock people up. Cheap labor is one of them. We should support incentives such as "keeping society safe", but incentives such as "profits and cheap labor" are incentives that may actually incentivize locking up innocent people. So it's not about which one is worse, it's about not supporting something that could lead to corruption or an unfair system.
paulddraper 9mo ago
“The morally correct thing is to pay them even less.”

Svip 9mo ago

In Denmark, you can buy a vanity plate (ønskenummerplade) for 8'000 DKK (needs renewal every 8 years), and it can be between 2 and 7 characters long; but the best part is that they permit all Danish letters, including Æ, Ø and Å. One could likely write a script quickly to check these platforms for short combinations, such as ØÅ, which appears to be available.

neilv 9mo ago
ØØ7 Don't forget that the cost is not only the bureaucratic fee; you also have to buy a vintage Aston Martin or Lotus, to display the plate.
- reactordev 9mo ago
  Shouldn’t be a problem with all that medieval money lying around. /s Does a kit car count? You can build a Lotus for around the cost of a Honda civic. Like a Lotus 7.
  - MisterTea 9mo ago
    Money? You mean you don't just go to Q and procure one?
    - reactordev 9mo ago
      I guess you could get the tax payers to pay for it.
- josteink 9mo ago
  While clever, as a Scandinavian I regret to inform you that I would read that as: Uh Uh Seven, not (double) Oh Seven ;)
  - cobbzilla 9mo ago
    a money-saver! uh uh seven belongs on a vintage Ford Pinto!

valleyer 9mo ago

You should not be getting notifications while driving.

moralestapia 9mo ago

Hehe, I do a similar thing for phone numbers and I got real good ones almost for free :)

tetraodonpuffer 9mo ago
phone numbers seem risky, years back I got randomly assigned a "cool" number (I think it ended with 8888 or something) and it seems it was on all possible fax spam lists, constant calls all hours of the day and the night, had to change it asap.
- bsimpson 9mo ago
  I have my HN name @gmail.com. I've never actually used that account, because there are too many anonymous Bart Simpsons (and old people who don't understand email addresses) who use that one. The shitty thing is that I use Google Apps for Your Domain (a.k.a. Dasher/GSuite) to get around this. For years, things like Photos and Music were stuck to my useless Gmail account, because the PMs involved never bothered going through the approvals to get those things to work on custom domain accounts (which Google ret-conned to be for businesses only). A lot of these are resolved now, but there are still frustrating places where it comes up: - I pay twice for YouTube Music - once for myself, and once for my family. I can't share my account with them, because it's attached to my domain name. - I similarly can't join their Google Home accounts to do things like have my voice recognized when I visit them. - Gemini CLI thinks I'm a business and quotas me like one.
- dhosek 9mo ago
  My then-fiancée had a cell number that ended with 5 zeroes and a 1 and she got many wrong number calls from people who were trying to reach numbers that ended with 0-001x

moduspol 9mo ago

I found out recently that in my state, the online vanity plate checker shows plates that were PREVIOUSLY registered but NOW available as NOT available. I wanted to get one of my own plates I had years ago and assumed there was some process to have it transferred, but was told by a DMV rep that after two years of non-registration, they're up for grabs. Apparently the web page does not take this into account. That means there are probably a lot of great plate names up for the taking that people are just assuming are taken. You'd need to call the DMV to verify. Hopefully Florida's web page does not have that limitation.

dustfinger 9mo ago

What we need is a "Little Bobby Tables" vanity plate that exploits a buffer overflow in speed cams.

Liquix 9mo ago
https://i.imgur.com/hhlg100.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/hhlg100.jpeg
kijin 9mo ago
Unfortunately they seem to filter special characters on input, that is, when you apply for your plate. But don't despair! Depending on how crappy the cam's firmware is, NULL might just do the trick.
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago
  Or it might do the opposite: https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/ https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-ha...
  - dustfinger 9mo ago
    Ouch!
bombcar 9mo ago
Isn’t there an xkcd abut a license plate of zeros an Os and ones and LS and the cops just say “it’s the guy with the plate again”.
- Liquix 9mo ago
  https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
  - dhosek 9mo ago
    That plate wouldn’t be allowed in Illinois where there is a hard requirement that all digits follow any letters on the plate.¹ The thing that I find mystifying is that they charge more for a vanity plate that’s all letters than one that’s letters and digits. ⸻ 1. Although some specialty plates end up having suffixed letters, usually shown on the plate stacked.

sltkr 9mo ago

It's a fun story of course, but it also seems that people like OP who abuse public APIs are why we can't have nice things, and why so many web pages these days are bogged down by Cloudflare and Anubis interstitials that waste human time.

abound 9mo ago
Yeah, also running a scraper with no rate limit against a government website is a pretty risky endeavor.
LikesPwsh 9mo ago
Skiddies targeting an individual site are a drop in the ocean compared with the industrial scale LLM scraping, so blaming them for it is in bad taste.
- Someone1234 9mo ago
  The difference is that the government won't charge a major LLM vendor with a crime, but they may kick in John Smith's front door and ruin their life.
- wiseowise 9mo ago
  > Skiddies targeting an individual site are a drop in the ocean compared with the industrial scale LLM scraping They're not. Both are bad, but at least there's some utility to LLMs.

pavel_lishin 9mo ago

> Most people never think twice about the random mix of letters and numbers the DMV assigns them. I started thinking about it when someone parked next to me in a nearly-identical model - same brand, year, etc, the only difference was some roof accessory - and a nearly identical license plate. (Think ABC D12 and ABC E12). I started trying to open their car door, and was confused until I noticed some things in their front seat that were clearly not ours. Later that week, I was shopping around for car tires, and saw that some shop - PepBoys or something - let you punch in your license plate and let you know what kind of tires you need, and that their API response included the car make and model. I thought about poking around it, and seeing if there was a pattern to the way my state assigned license plates, but never got around to it. (They live in town, too, and I've seen where they park. I should go introduce myself to our car twin.)

giarc 9mo ago
https://www.pepboys.com/tires https://www.pepboys.com/tires They have a license plate checker on their site. I don't live in the states, therefore I don't have a plate to check. Or do I..... HY in Florida.... @lafond - do you own a 2010 Subaru Legacy with the 2.5L SOHC engine?
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago
  Yep. I wonder where and how they get this information.
bombcar 9mo ago
When you realize the total combos of car key possibilities, you have a decent chance your key would work, too!
- culi 9mo ago
  I borrowed my friend's Prius once and accidentally opened the door to the wrong one and got in for a second before slowly realizing things felt off.

tantalor 9mo ago

I'm not seeing what TypeScript brings to the party here? Looks like regular old JavaScript plus a vanilla dashboard.

sphars 9mo ago
He used TypeScript for the scripts he wrote to pull the data. He also used Next.js to build the dashboard which is written with TypeScript

yesitcan 9mo ago

This has nothing to do with TypeScript

sphars 9mo ago
The scripts he wrote to pull the data were written in TypeScript, though all the TS I see is in the parameters in the function signature. Also he used Next.js for the dashboard
- kelnos 9mo ago
  I think the GP's point was that the part of the article that's most interesting is the investigation into how the DMV's plate system works. The fact that Typescript was used is incidental (of course this could have been done in pretty much any language), and it's an odd choice to include the language choice in the article title.
bsimpson 9mo ago
Generally speaking, if someone specifies "TypeScript," I expect the type system to be the interesting part of the writeup. Otherwise, it could say "JavaScript." (It could say "React," but still, the interesting part is that you built a scraper/visualizer, not that it used React.)
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
wvenable 9mo ago
If the headline said "Using Python to obtain one of the rarest license plates" you wouldn't think twice.
- yesitcan 9mo ago
  That’s true. But the analogy is more correct if it said “Using Mypy to obtain…”

vachina 9mo ago

I got my vanity phone number this way too. However key point is to have a registrar with an insecure lookup endpoint like in the article. Most endpoints now only give you a list pre generated numbers to choose from, AND that endpoint is rate limited to the tits with reCaptcha. No more script kiddies.

masfuerte 9mo ago

If anyone else was wondering why it says NASCAR on the plate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Florida#Specialty_plates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...

komali2 9mo ago

I swear I read some case a couple years back where a kid was facing serious prison time for automating requests to w publicly available government website. "Unauthorized access of a computer." I think the author may have just admitted to what the government considers a serious federal crime, as stupid as it is to consider it a crime.

pavel_lishin 9mo ago
Arguably the most famous one is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
- theSuda 9mo ago
  Whoa. That was an interesting read.
- bsimpson 9mo ago
  I once had a flatmate who worked in IT at MIT at the time that happened. I don't remember the details, but it was a sad fluke that the feds even got involved - something like it was reported at the wrong time of day/when the person who should have got it was off-shift, or the feds happened to be doing something with the state police when the report came in and wanted to make a big news splash. Whole thing was incredibly fucked up. Interesting to see how much more thorough the Wikipedia page is now.
wing-_-nuts 9mo ago
Just because you can hit a backend without a rate limit, doesn't mean you should. In my experience, government IT is very humorless about this sort of thing. Far better to blend in with normal traffic than to stand out as a bad actor.
- Scaevolus 9mo ago
  Especially given how the response time doesn't matter much here! If you're just looking at 2-character license plates, that's 676/5=136 requests to check them all, and you could easily space that out to something like one request per minute to scan the space every two hours.

jconley88 9mo ago

In CO, there isn't an online search. When you apply, you have to list your top options and hope one is available. I'm also not a normal person. I'm an engineer and this was not good enough for me. I emailed government employees until I figured out who was responsible for license plate records. I submitted a CORA (Colorado Open Records Request) for the entirety of their dataset. I had hoped to get the data on some regular cadence to build a simple online service for others. Unfortunately, they flat out refused and wouldn't discuss options. When I told my family what license plate I wanted, they laughed at me and said "No one has that, just go get it". And so I did and it worked. I now have what I consider to be the best possible license plate in Colorado: "LCNZPLT" Occasionally I'll see someone walk by my car, see the plate, think for a few seconds and then start laughing. Mission accomplished!

rsync 9mo ago
The best possible license plates in Colorado all start with ZG …
bombcar 9mo ago
Oh I get it your license plate is “License Plate” LCNSPL8

mkw5053 9mo ago

Very similar to this post from a few months ago - https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker

rgovostes 9mo ago

Hah, in California I used to have HX. The short plate came back to bite me: Years after I had moved to another state, an automatic license plate reader on a toll road (91 Express Lanes) in Los Angeles misread someone else's plate as mine. It was kafkaesque: My public records request for photographic evidence was blocked because, if I was correct that the offending driver was not me, the law prohibits the release of records revealing others' driving patterns. The other plates available when I did a similar search were BO and IR. In retrospect IR wasn't a bad choice.

ProllyInfamous 9mo ago
I have an iteration of NO PLATE, and have received numerous citations and impound notices. At this point, I just ignore them. Registration renewal is possible, only because my local county office understands the situation (years of this). Of course I could change my license plate, but not'gonna.

jonluca 9mo ago

I did something similar with CA a few months back - https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker Next steps would be to make it LLM assisted and to generate common number/letter replacement combos

lafond 9mo ago
Great minds think alike! Tough you weren't able to find anything cool with it, but glad I wasn't the only one thinking to automate it :)

zzo38computer 9mo ago

What character set does it use? For example, can "O" and "0" considered different characters or same character, and are some letters/numbers not used? If so, then how many they say are possible is not quite that simple, since some might match (so they cannot simply be added together) and some might not be possible.

chatmasta 9mo ago
I was hoping “using TypeScript” was going to be more along these lines, i.e. using the type system as a constraint solver for some combination of homoglyphs that resembles a target string.

turtlebits 9mo ago

Aren't all license plates rare since they're unique? I would also not call it rare unless everyone wants that specific combo of characters. Personally, I wouldn't pay extra every year to have an easily recognizable vehicle.

paradox460 9mo ago

I used to have a fun novelty plate when I lived in California, but when it came time to get new ones, I went with the most boring, plain plate I could. With how many crazy assholes there are on the road these days, anything I can do to promote my own inconspicuousness is something I'll do. No bumper stickers, no cute plate frames, nothing. When I'm not carrying skis, the rack comes off

hu3 9mo ago
In a world where people scratch sports cars painting out of pure envy. It's hard to criticise someone trying to stay under the radar of the crazy.

hmokiguess 9mo ago

I’m boring. The process for us was: Wifey and I thought of cool names, went to register with our shortlist written on paper, most didn’t work, until one did. Though now we’re considering dropping it because it costs too much.

resurge 9mo ago

Hey, would you please consider adding an RSS feed to your blog? I remember liking your post about Waffle house and now also this one, so I tried to add it to my RSS reader. But unfortunately no feed is available.

lafond 9mo ago
It's now available! https://jack.bio/feed https://jack.bio/feed :-)

eurleif 9mo ago

>EVENTVALIDATION is (was?) a novel security measure implemented in 2006 by the ASP.NET team to "prevents unauthorized requests sent by potentially malicious users from the client [..] to ensure that each and every postback and callback event originates from the expected user interface elements, the page adds an extra layer of validation on events". The attack it prevents is called XSRF, and this security measure wasn't novel in 2006.