Patterns on goods designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers | Hacker News Reader

Patterns on goods designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers

adversarialfashion.com

171 pointsvanderburgt58 comments

A week ago I was sitting at work and a civilian car drove by the office window with a plate reader system and went up and down every row of cars in our parking lot.

The car was obviously trespassing, you can't be on the property unless you're a tenant or guest. But due to the spongy ethics of tech companies, I'm sure my license plate is uploaded to some database and people know exactly where I work and what time I'm away from my house.

I have seen this in my office parking lot. I speculate that they upload and match against cars behind payment, then contact the repo men.

Does your office or property management company hire someone to do parking enforcement or security? It would not surprise me to learn that they’re subcontracting the task of identifying cars which aren’t on a list somewhere.

Definitely not. This is a pretty cheap rental.

its most likely a tow company looking for repos.

With a digital license plate it should be possible to display a random number or no number while in those locations(work or mall parking lots, your driveway, etc.,) where there is no legal requirement to show the plate number. Alternatively the digital plate could be configured to flash the plate number at an interval longer than the typical plate reader vehicle takes to pass your parked vehicle. That would at least cut down on the capture rate of government and auto loan companies that cruise parking lots which is a good portion of all scanning activity. Unless the digital plate is reporting it's location via cell network.

I was just thinking the other day that we need to have e-ink based license plates. The plate number could be generated and changed every n minutes. There would have to be a government run system that would be able to link the generated number to the owner of the car, but hopefully there'd be some checks, balances and logging on the use of it (ie: a warrant would be required, etc). It wouldn't prevent a government from abusing it, but at least private companies scanning activities would be rendered null.

Interesting, something like TOTP for license plates.

Wouldn’t ever pass because of amber alerts... an easy way to stop it with a “won’t someone think of the children” argument.

Do you believe governments will accept it when license plates are merely able to be turned off digitally? You could argue, they won't find out.

Ha:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15606675 (2017)

Sure hope you did it!

https://i.redd.it/lhg8owl4pkz21.jpg

Check out Dazzle, it might interest you.

https://cvdazzle.com/

Another similar project: https://cvdazzle.com/

That site claims that OpenCV is a facial detection algorithm...

It’s simply claiming that it implements one...

cvdazzle is several years old, is that style still effective?

Always been a dicey business. I'd worked on one back in the 80's(!) and the issue then was, bumper stickers that had the same aspect ration as a license plate. Plus license plate frames (which must by law not cover any part of the plate with info on them, but often do anyway).

Someone tested this shirt out on EasyALPR Parking Enforcer a recently and it did scan. (I’m putting EasyALPR through Startup School right now)

I was wondering about it—-though it was only tested against the image of the shirt, I suspect it would be picked up at close enough range.

Most of my work is creating great workflow for handling incorrect or unwanted data gathered using alpr on iOS.

If you were waltzing through a the parking lot of one of my commercial property customers and a patroller somehow scanned you—-some admin later that day might frown for a few moments before marking the “vehicle sighting” invalid.

was thinking about some sort of product line of eyewear or mask that would mess with facial recognition.

wonder if people would purchase it if it wasn't too obnoxious.

It's called "sunglasses".

Typical sunglasses do not hide your face from facial recognition!

Sunglasses + HEPA mask + a beanie works, but you look pretty spooky by that point.

These do: https://www.reflectacles.com/

yup, even with huge mirrored aviator-style sunglasses, my iphone face unlock still works

That would likely run into problems with anti-mask laws. However, it might be possible to either skirt around it with socially acceptable masks (e.g. smog masks) or to get away with it if one is a member of a more privileged group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws

Ultra bright LEDs + Battery unless their cameras have great IR filters (usually not).

Usually they don't have any filter, so they can work at night on the IR spectrum. A baseball cap with a string of SMD LEDs on the edge should do the trick, at least at night. During the day, a cap and a surgical mask will do it. If you go indoors, remove the mask and keep your head low, since most cameras are on the roof.

Waiting for a real scramble suit from "A Scanner Darkly" https://youtu.be/5fac6aHFa_k

Like Dazzle? https://cvdazzle.com/

These t-shirts will look nice when they make versions addressing Automated Face Readers.

i dont have a link to the paper but there's patterns already on sale https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.310496356.4049/gptr%2Cx900%2...

That particular pattern looks like it came out of the Hyperface project.[1]

Also here's an actual purchaseable link at RedBubble [2]. No affiliation with the seller (nor does it look like they're connected to the original project).

[1] https://ahprojects.com/hyperface/

[2] https://www.redbubble.com/people/naamiko/works/24714049-anti...

That’s what the Juggalo makeup is for

Check out https://www.reflectacles.com/

Echoes of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition book.

If you're gonna put a target on your back, this seems like a solid way to go about it.

If we think like this, we are either paranoid or already live in a totalitarian society.

It's a thin line.

We already do.

There are plenty of paranoid people. We have a ways to go before we reach authoritarian.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1105/

Solution: coordinate 128 people to get license plates in all combinations of 1s and Is, on identical vehicles.

Those plateholders that you can only view the plate from straight on were pretty popular for a time.

Get a shirt with Washington DC license plate 800 002 (Presidential limo)

I need an lcd bumper sticker that displays these randomly very quickly.

how does this help unless the license plates are valid? And multiple people have your plate on their shirt and are walking in front of readers all across the country?

Yeah I doubt it, unless they're retroreflective and you're in the habit or running down roads.

Well in plain sunlight it should work OK.

The problem is the plate numbers are limited, you are not injecting random data, just repetitive data.

If you got two different shirts displaying two different plates, you could flip a coin each morning to decide which one to wear before starting your daily jog down the freeway.

Guaranteed randomly sampled data

I think the parent wanted to point out that it’s fairly trivial to blacklist the plates on these shirts and thus remove the injected data. The number of available plates on the shirts is limited, likely they’re not valid plates either.

This would imply the ability to get your own plate blacklisted.

That would only really work for the distributor of these shirts, as it would add enough random/inaccurate data to make the real data meaningless. If you made your own with your plate on it, it'd just help the cops identify where you were even when not in your car.

It's very unlikely, unless you mass distributed a shirt with your plate, that you could inject enough junk data for your plate to make distinguishing the real data impossible. And while junk plates may add a tiny bit of additional data storage, it's unlikely to actually disadvantage the cops in any way pulling up the data they want on real cars.

They have no real reason to blacklist a plate just because someone put it on a shirt.

It would likely be more expensive, but it seems plausible that it would be possible to manufacture shirts that each have a random license plate number. That would at least make it so that they would have to make the blacklisting local to the area where a given shirt owner regularly travels.

individually would be prohibitive, but specifying a different set of plates on each order from the supplier shouldn't be too hard. The printing is done digitally anyway, as long as the cuts don't change it should be trivial to specify a new pattern.

disclaimer: I have very little idea about the details, I've just advised startups that got clothing manufactured offshore.

The not so random coin toss: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=169747...

it is still random, it just samples from a slightly different distribution to the uniform distribution over coin-sides.

for purposes of jogging down the freeway tagged like a car, the lack of perfectly uniform sampling probably ain't at the top of the list of issues

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