posted by
janrinok
on Thursday December 19, @06:36AM
from the she-can't-take-much-more-of-this-Captain dept.
from the she-can't-take-much-more-of-this-Captain dept.
Years ago, a lady in New York randomly received the automobile license plate number NCC-1701, an identifier well known to Star Trek fans.
Around 2020, she began losing eyesight, stopped driving, sold her car and surrendered her license plates.
Later people began buying novelty license plates with this ID, placing them on their cars, and, when these people got OCR issued tickets for traffic violations, the bills got sent to this poor woman. Hundreds of them.
The issue seems to have been resolved, but it does raise the question of how much trust we can put in automated identification systems and automated traffic fines.
The YAHOO story about this can be found here.
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Traffic, OCR and Automated Fines Run Amok
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by HeadlineEditor on Thursday December 19, @01:16PM (4 children)
In December of 2023, I got a snail mail notice from New York City that I'd somehow violated a bus lane restriction. I hadn't been in NYC for many years; I live and register my car in Pennsylvania. But here's the incredible part: they had a photo of a vehicle and a license plate, neither of which was mine or had ever been anything like mine. It showed some generic silver SUV with some random plate, while I drive an obnoxious red Porsche with a custom plate.
I was able to work with a local notary to get a Pennsylvania DMV report that says the plate was not mine and never even existed in the state of Pennsylvania. Fortunately, the charge was dismissed (all of this happened via postal mail). But the question remains: how did I get flagged as the owner of some random license plate from a different state? That guy could still be out there, committing random crimes and somehow the database record still points back to me. In this context, what happened to this poor woman in the story is almost reasonable!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday December 19, @04:30PM
Presumably as the universe increases with automated facial recognition software and similar, which is a much harder problem than number plate recognition, the problem will get worse.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by datapharmer on Thursday December 19, @05:51PM
My dad had the same thing with an nyc parking ticket. It took him months to resolve their mistake with no recourse for his lost time and money fighting it. He had to go all the way through an appeal as the initial judge obviously never even read the case notes. He had never had his vehicle to NYC, and had it in a shop at the time with receipts, testimony and security snapshots showing the car was at that shop thousands of miles away from where the violation happened The ticket even noted a different car color from his andthe cops had no evidence other than the word of the meter maid
Separately, I got fines for sunpass violations which weren’t for a tag I’d ever had registered, the tag in the photo wasn’t hr one claimed, the vehicle was a totally different make, model, and color, and I have a sunpass transponder so it should have been billed to the account if it was in fact me. They took over 2 years for them to realize they were wrong and to quit pestering me about it.
There really need to be ramifications for them getting this wrong as it really is a nuisance at best. It was pretty stressful for my Dad in particular.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday December 19, @05:53PM
This has been major problem recently from a report I saw. They started issuing fines based on cameras mounted to buses that were supposed to be double checked by people. And there were thousands of tickets written and sent off to people in completely legal parking spaces.
I think the issue is a lack of time and incentive to get it right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19, @08:55PM
Similar to my experience about 5 years ago: the toll bill that came in the mail was from a bridge in Baltimore -- where I had not been for 20+ years. The car in the B&W pic they sent was a light color sedan, my car a dark blue station wagon with rear wiper--nothing like the car in the photo.
I mailed this information back with a request to confirm that they had reversed the bill. When I heard nothing back after a month, I called. The phone call (voice) was what it took to solve the problem. The nice, but harried, woman at the toll company explained that these cases of wrong identity happened all the time. She pulled my case up on her screen and voided it out.
My conclusion -- don't waste time on mail or email for this kind of crap, get someone on the phone that you can talk with to solve the problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday December 19, @06:52PM (1 child)
None.
But people are stupid. So they will put ALL their trust in it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19, @09:02PM
Latest scam -- some company has been selling electronic display license plates that can flash messages to the following car. Of course the plate number is locked to your car on purchase.
The news item I saw recently (last couple of days) noted that someone had worked out how to break into the display computer and allow it to display anything, including other plate numbers. Toll thiefs were displaying legit plate numbers that went with other cars--as they went through toll points--so that the other car owner would get their toll bill!
(Score: 2) by dwilson98052 on Thursday December 19, @08:58PM (5 children)
...didn't use NULL...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19, @09:10PM (3 children)
That would be one way to see if the DMV's database has suitable input filtering...
[There's an XKCD for this, but I don't remember the title to search for it.]
(Score: 3, Funny) by janrinok on Thursday December 19, @09:21PM
https://xkcd [xkcd.com].com/327/
"Bobby Tables"
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Mezion on Friday December 20, @01:41AM (1 child)
I am not sure they used to. I expect it is checked more these days.
In 2018 someone got a licence plate for "NULL", with half the thought that any readings/fines would fail.
What they didn't expect was to receive the fines that were intended for vehicles whose license plates could not be read.
link [theverge.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday December 20, @02:09AM
That's a training issue. The people writing the tickets should have been given a specific thing to write in that blank that was guaranteed to not correspond to a car. It's sort of like how phone numbers in movies use 555 as the exchange to guarantee that nobody will ever have a phone number that corresponds to what's in the move no matter what. Specifically to avoid things like Tommy Tutones 867-5309.(IIRC, the song was written after the convention was established)
(Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Friday December 20, @06:59AM
Can you fit [object Object] onto a license plate anywhere? Asking for a friend...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19, @10:05PM (7 children)
It's your fault. Government is incompetent, and yet you vote for the losers who think government should be allowed to tax, fine, and license your right to travel freely. You lick boots and set up strawmen that if somehow cops couldn't do 120 MPH and pull you over at gunpoint for doing 60 in a 55 millions of minivans full of soccer moms and kids will die every date due to drunk drivers, and you'll have to call crackheads or something.
Yeah. You caused this. Because you love forcing other people to do what you want and so you're gonna vote really hard to make sure the boogeymen you've dreamed up in your head don't get you.
(Score: 3, Funny) by cmdrklarg on Thursday December 19, @11:04PM (5 children)
Do tell. That's a very impressive hyperbole you've constructed there, well done! I see you've been practicing with your projection too, nice.
... I'm only seeing one person here dreaming about "boogeymen".
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19, @11:56PM (4 children)
It's almost as impressive as the one where you claim we need taxes or the roads won't get built or that we need to sacrifice virgins into volcanoes to ensure the sun rises every morning.
Really? You think taxes don't exist? You think there's never been a bad cop who murdered someone over a tail light being out?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20, @12:32AM (2 children)
Fact is... we haven't quite mastered the knack of crowdfunding highways.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20, @12:55AM (1 child)
You see...that's where you're retarded. Before 1913 Americans kept the entire paycheck, and we still had roads and schools.
But I guess you went to government-run schools seeing as how you're dumb enough to think that Government is the only thing that can manage to build a long flat surface.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20, @10:14AM
Dude says we need to Make America Great Again - like it was in 1913 - with all them highways and horses and ox-carts and asses...
and higher education...
Don't worry. We'll be there [longisland.com] again real soon now.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday December 20, @10:59PM
I haven't said that yet, but I'd be interested in exactly how you'd manage to get roads paid for and built.
You're the one frothing at the mouth about dat ebil gubbermint (that was elected by voting SO HARD!!!!) that's forcing you to lick boots and gun down millions of soccer mom minivans while they tax, fine, and build strawmen to keep you from traveling!
Go home, take your meds, and go to bed. You're starting to sound like one of those sovereign citizen crackpots.
Good day sir!
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 4, Touché) by aafcac on Friday December 20, @02:11AM
It never ceases to amaze me that it's mostly the same people who think the government can never do anything right that tend to be the folks that vote for politicians promising to break the government and make it work even worse than it had.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Friday December 20, @05:44AM (1 child)
Connecticut prints "Do Not Forward" on registration renewal envelopes. If you move, especially out of state, you never know that your fee for registration renewal is due. But it gets even worse than that. Connecticut does not then decide that your car will no longer be on the road. Ct. thinks that you're just refusing to pay, and starts accumulating fines and interest for more than a year, and then turns it over to a collection agency. All this time you know nothing until the collection agency starts badgering you. If you've had the bad taste to die, the collection agency starts badgering the next of kin. This is a deliberate policy of entrapment engaged in by the state of Connecticut. You'd be wise never to live there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20, @03:51PM
While I agree that this policy by Connecticut isn't very nice...
> you never know that your fee for registration renewal is due.
...hardly seems true -- when you first register a car you learn that it needs an annual (every two year in NY) renewal. When moving that's just one of many things that needs cancelling/updating.
(Score: 2) by tbuskey on Friday December 20, @01:52PM
1st, at a certain level "the computer is right". So if the software is doing the wrong thing, the human gets the consequences.
ex: software for hotel expenses need a scanned receipt. The user needs to fill out a form that has hotel room cost, state tax, federal tax.
However, the hotel charges a resort fee. There is no entry on the form. If you mix the resort fee into the hotel room cost, the receipt numbers don't match up. The software might calculate the expected taxes.
The poor users submitting receipts will have to spend time talking to the poor user who answer the calls & corrects the computer (IFF they can convince a PHB that the computer is wrong).
Meanwhile, the supplier of the software faces no issues for a design flaw. There is no feedback to correct it
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday December 20, @09:21PM
Why not skip the OCR?
A lot of that data is public or cheaply purchased. If you can get 100K sets of registration information and sending fake tickets for $1K and you an optimistic scammer expects $1000.01 of paid fake fines (even if they only get $100 IRL) then someone is going to send them given an infinite supply of scammers.
Note that I continue, even in 2024, to get fake invoices in the physical postal mail trying to bill me for domain registration service and occasionally webhosting.