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Comment by _lo3k | Hacker News Reader

When I was a foolhardy college student I figured out that if the cited vehicle make on my city parking ticket didn’t match my registration, I could get appeal the ticket via a web form very easily and succeed every time.

Naturally I removed the badges from my car and put on different badges from another manufacturer. After a while they started to cite me as “other” and the trick no longer worked.

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All we had to do was register our cars in each others names. When I was married, my car was registered to her and vice versa. The redlight/photoradar laws in my state required that the company operating the devices had to match the pic of the driver violating the law, to the pic of the registered owner via the license plate. If they couldn't match them, no ticket was issued as you can't prove who was driving. That's probably changed now that a lot of DMV's are doing facial scans with datapoints. They probably just scan the whole DMV DB now to find the driver. Wear a mask.

Or get a right-hand drive car:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1081607/Speeding-pu...

Is it true that in England, the person sitting next to the driver IS the driver?

It is true in Norway if someone is practice driving; the grown up in the passenger seat is the driver.

I took my motorcycle driving test with my licensed driver and the examiner following in the car behind me.

Only if your last name is Bucket.

LOL totally got that joke. Made my day, thanks!

Or just don't speed.

Where i am from the ticket is issued to the vehicle owner, doesn't matter who was driving. On the plus side it means that you can get a photoradar ticket for driving 300km/h and not lose your licence, just pay the fine.

P.S. If the driver must be recognized does it mean that motorcyclists are exempt from photoradar fines?

I thought that motorcycles already didn't really show up on the photoradar scanners. That's the way it is here, but I can totally see that being a jurisdiction by jurisdiction thing.

Here it is easier to avoid getting a photo with motorcycle because there are places where it targets front plate. If photoradar targets back plate then you will get a ticket for a motorcycle just like any car.

It really depends. The newer traffic control bridges we have on our highways take a picture from both the front and back.

At least here in Finland, the cameras take pictures of speeding motorcycles, but they are not used. No front license plate.

Here I think you are asked to directly wire transfer the penalty amount or you can challenge the ticket, then you will be heard as a witness for who drove the car. If you refuse to tell that or don't know, the judge can order you to keep a log of all joruneys of your car that can be inspected for finding the culprit of a future offense.

Or use Juggolo face paint.

Here in AZ, they'll lookup and assume the spouse. Of course, they're also required to serve the ticket in person.

In the UK we fixed this by making it a legal requirement for the owner of the car to identify the driver (obviously unless there's a valid reason you can't, such as it being stolen).

Two MPs have actually been caught out by this law, convicted of perverting the course of justice and sent to prison:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Onasanya

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Huhne

> On 3 February 2012, Huhne resigned from the Cabinet when he was charged with perverting the course of justice over a 2003 speeding case. His wife at the time, Vicky Pryce, had claimed that she was driving the car, and accepted the licence penalty points on his behalf so that he could avoid being banned from driving. Huhne denied the charge until the trial began on 4 February 2013 when he changed his plea to guilty, resigned as a member of parliament, and left the Privy Council.[7][8][9] He and Pryce were sentenced at Southwark Crown Court on 11 March to eight months in prison for perverting the course of justice.

Going to prison for lying about speeding 10 years ago seems insane. Did they punish these MPs especially heavily just to make a point?

He didn't get sent to prison for speeding. He got sent to prison for having the audacity to think he could pull a fast one on them and the balls to actually try.

Generally the courts punish "crimes against justice" such as perjury very harshly as it is seen as an attack on the rule of law itself, something much more valuable than any amount of money. When I was a juror they made it clear that if we got caught talking about the case or did any independent research, we could and would be going to prison.

So, you were just running red lights, and you think this is a hack worth bragging about?

It is, that’s a great hack

Typically, like they did here, they also lower the yellow light duration when they install these devices, causing more people to "run red lights" and collect $$$ for the jurisdiction. For nothing. This was proven in my state. Accidents have also gone up in these areas because now when the light turns yellow people have been trained to know they don't have enough time to make it through traveling at a normal speed, so they gun it to make it though. If you think I purposefully speed and use this to avoid red lights, you're assuming too much. I don't feel bad one bit circumventing a rigged system.

Edit: https://www.motorists.org/issues/red-light-cameras/yellow-li...

I knew a kid in college who would get a ticket, and then look around the parking lot for another Black Nissan Maxima. Most people don't actually look at the plate number, just the make model. I think he got one ticket paid this way ... guy was kinda an asshole.

Someone tried that on me on campus but I noticed. I wasn’t supposed to be parked there either and was skating by on a technicality that worked as long as no one looked too closely into it. Otherwise I’d have called security and made his life uncomfortable for awhile. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fraud.

I've had a friend do the reverse: parking in illegal spot, and borrowing a ticket from another car that already received one. Upon return some hours later, he returned the ticket to the correct windshield.

Quite brazen, and frankly a bit of an asshole thing to do.

Also pure genius. The worst kind, but hey! Gotta credit where some is due.

But what did he do if the other car had already left when he returned? It's much more than a bit of an asshole thing to do.

That, or received a second ticket. It all went to the plan that time, at least.

Creative... I've not done it, but it seems if I get a really good scan of a ticket, put my info on it, and use it as needed, they don't have a record of it. So I'd never get a fine.

Around my area they almost always open existing tickets to check for the time/date. In addition many parking enforcement people patrol the same area all day and remember whether or not they already ticketed that vehicle.

I did this once, too. YMMV based on meter maids in your city;

My own unpaid ticket from weeks ago should become an asset. protect my car from violations with cast Invisibility.

I put the decoy on windshield, under the wiper blade, and wandered off for a bit.

But this upset the coin gods. When I went to my car an hour later, neatly tucked above my original ticket was a fresh new one. Balls.

Maybe using 2 old tickets will work. :)

I’ve seen a parked car with 3+ tickets on the windshied (didn’t count but there was a small stack of them) in Austria. Had a foreign license plate though so probably just didn’t care and wasn’t gonna pay.

I really enjoyed my parkingservices@ email address at my university. Took them many years to catch up and take that alias away.

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

In the Starcraft 2 community it is called barcoding. Basically, I 1 | l are all accepted characters for a name and I think some do look actually identical on most fonts used in the game. So yeah, one person doing that you call "barcode", 2 persons doing that, you already have deniability. Be more than 10, and that's a crowd.

Back when I used to play Ingress, that was really common. The Enlightened in Dallas had a ton of barcode names.

The new client makes it much easier to distinguish the characters, but there are still plenty of barcodes in the game.

You can reuse names in SCII, so it’s more a convention than anything else. The important bit is to have many accounts with similar names.

There was a time where call of duty ghosts was exploitable, and people could wipe/delete the accounts of anyone whose username/gamertag they knew. Streamers and pro players had to use barcode usernames to avoid getting their accounts deleted.

Google's AlphaStar StarCraft bot did just this under different accounts. Along with some other fingerprinting, many of the accounts and replays were found by the SC2 community.

To my knowledge, it played with only one account. It played exactly 50 games with every race. It was outed mainly because of two things: A very high win rate (above 80% IIRC) and the fact that as a zerg it produced units by selecting larvas directly, which no one ever does (someone explains that it uses control groups but they are hidden and dont show up in replays, I dont know how accurate it is)

this goes back at least as far as the original Unreal Tournament, I even saw a player using it in the fairly obscure Shogo: MAD multiplayer community. Never knew why it was done back then, I assumed it was just to be cute, but it did make it troublesome to mention them in ingame chats.

I actually saw a car with a license plate like this last week. Some combination of I's and 1's. White Ford Mustang driving around Santa Clara.

I've seen something similar in New Zealand. Probably wouldn't be fooling anyone given the size of the country and how distinctive the car was.

In UK number plates I and 1 are the same character, as are O and 0:

https://www.dafont.com/uk-number-plate.font?text=O0I1l

Number plates existed for decades before ASCII was invented. Before computers, people often used mechanical typewriters which didn't have keys for 0 and 1: you typed 0 as O and 1 as l. I threw away one such typewriter recently. It was in good working condition, with its instruction manual. It had been made in a country that no longer exists. You may imagine how sad and nostalgic I felt.

Saw a similar one on the road in front of me with a combination of N's, M's and I think a W ... man it was impossible to get straight while moving.

Bobby tables we call him

Nope, that one is different.

https://www.xkcd.com/327/

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