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Forbes reports that a security researcher in California registered the vanity plate "NULL," partly for fun and partly in the hope that this spoofed the system into returning errors whenever his plate was seen.
Instead he received more than $12,000 in fines, as his plate became a dumping ground for erroneous data records.
Every single speeding ticket for which no valid license plate could be found was assigned to his car. The Los Angeles police department eventually scrapped the tickets but advised the man to change his plates, or the same problem would continue to occur. In response, the man has apparently said: "No, I didn't do anything wrong," insisting to his Def Con audience that, whatever happens, "I won't pay those tickets."
Also covered in the Guardian.
(Score: 1) by jurov on Friday August 16 2019, @08:07PM (1 child)
Not long ago, the mentality in the IT industry was the same: "crashes are blamed on operator by default", as exemplified by UNIX gets() call.
(explanation: gets() reads a line into a buffer, with no checks whatsoever, if the input is longer than buffer it blithely overwrites memory past the buffer. Today it is still found in *all* operating systems, just marked deprecated.)
(Score: 3, Informative) by jb on Saturday August 17 2019, @07:14AM
gets(3) is specified by the C standard (every one, all the way back to C89) -- not by POSIX or its predecessors -- so it hardly seems fair to blame Unix...