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Digital license plates now available as option for Arizona motorists
Arizona drivers now have another option for their license plates, one that the tech savvy will love - electronic digital plates.
The new plate option is called Rplate Digital License Plates. According to the Arizona Department of Transportation, they are LTE wireless connected devices similar to a tablet. The license plate number is constantly displayed, and the technology allows for added messages such as "invalid," "stolen" and other notifications if needed.
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Arizona Drivers Can Now Use Digital License Plates
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human kind.
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:20AM (2 children)
Ohhh, that's easy. Wrap it up in some spin about how citizens benefit or some crap, and then lobby like hell for the sweet government contract to provide one for every vehicle in the state. Considering that is more than likely millions at the low-end (even Rhode Island), so the payday can be immense. Not to mention since this is electronic, you have service and maintenance contracts for the platform. It's attractive because it gives police and marketers the ability to detect consumers movements with a fucking identity beacon.
You've also forgotten some of the other incredibly stupid bullshit considering we have the Internet and databases these days. Why the fuck do you even need to put a registration sticker on in the first place? It's tiny as hell and redundant as fuck. The point of it, is if you exist currently in the state of being registered for that vehicle, not whether or not you have a piece of plastic attached. Now we have LTE connected police cars FFS. Why the hell does a private vehicle need anything electronic or extra? Put a damn QR code on it or something, and then look up all the metadata. Like registration state, is it stolen?, make and model, etc.
The best situation we could have for our privacy is an actual number that has to be read by the police officer into a system. After that, the officer should easily be able to tell if there is anything wrong or illegal driving that particular car before moving on to traffic violation.
Being forced to pay for all the dumb registration bullshit to support the stickers is offensive enough, paying an order of magnitude higher at least for electronics is just a pork project to get the rich richer.
ON TOP OF THAT, add the IoT security nightmare with this bullshit. How many different scenarios of pwnage can you think of? Not to mention becoming invisible for by forging your license plate with false identities. How fucking stupid would it be in 15 years when the infrastructure for water and power was taken out by an organized attack using license plates, blenders, and margarita mixers?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 17 2019, @09:55AM (1 child)
The cops already have plenty of beacons. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/forget-scanning-license-plates-cops-will-soon-id-you-via-your-roof-rack/ [arstechnica.com]
A small increase in the computer power available to an officer on the highway will enable him to identify your vehicle a dozen different ways, before he ever pulls you over. Body damage, bumper stickers, stick figure families https://ugc-02.cafemomstatic.com/gen/constrain/740/1500/75/2014/06/05/15/4f/is/phcpjw8k6c1.jpg [cafemomstatic.com] and more. A stolen plate is more than obvious when it doesn't match make/model, much less the crumpled fender or the Reese towbar.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Sunday February 17 2019, @10:13PM
So in addition to being hard to reverse-engineer, our vehicles will inevitably have to have cosmetic descriptors documented by licensed service technicians to be street legal? Because that's the only way you'll have the database usefully up to date. Not that the criminals won't find a Jiffy Lube patsy to bribe, the way they already do for state inspections.
Burning Man is going to start getting a lot less interesting. Land of the free, indeed - all mired in red tape, and free only in theory.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"