I swear I read some case a couple years back where a kid was facing serious prison time for automating requests to w publicly available government website. "Unauthorized access of a computer." I think the author may have just admitted to what the government considers a serious federal crime, as stupid as it is to consider it a crime.
Just because you can hit a backend without a rate limit, doesn't mean you should. In my experience, government IT is very humorless about this sort of thing. Far better to blend in with normal traffic than to stand out as a bad actor.
Different scenario but it reminds me of when Missouri prosecuted a reporter who found that teacher's SSN numbers were exposed in the HTML of a webpage
> "Parson described the journalist as a “perpetrator” who “took the records of at least three educators, decoded the HTML source code, and viewed the Social Security number of those specific educators” in an “attempt to steal personal information and harm Missourians.”"
Arguably the most famous one is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
One thing that stopped me from seeking the vanity plate - I learned that at least in Texas all plates are made by minimally paid prisoners. So any desire to finance that system beyond what's absolute possible minimum (i.e. regular plates) evaporated.
> One thing that stopped me from seeking the vanity plate
I'm sure it differs between countries but in the UK vanity plates have become reasonably contentious.
As a gross generalisation they're fine if the car is worth hundreds of thousands or the plate itself is worth hundreds of thousands.
The UK plate "F1" last sold for just under £1m (about US$1.3m) over 10 years ago and it's rumoured that there are offers for ten times that from someone who wants to buy it now.
It comes down to a classic British issue of "class", which is inherently difficult to explain.
If you have the money to have, say, a Ferrari 250 GTO then you can do what the hell you like with it, including getting a vanity plate for it. You are rich enough that you don't care what anyone else thinks about you. Anyone seeing you and that car will know you are rich.
If you have the money to spend close to £1m on a plate like "X1" and decide to put it on beat up 15 year old 1.2 litre Ford Focus then, again, it shows you have stupid amounts of money and some delicious irony in putting it on an old beater of a car.
But if don't have a supercar and you get a relatively cheap vanity plate like "RMZ 1327" and stick it on a Range Rover Evoque that's only a couple of years old then it just shows that you're trying too hard and just aspire to be seen as rich. You don't have enough money for a really nice car, or a really exclusive vanity plate.
I guess the other way of looking at it is that people who don't have the money to get a vanity plate aspire to being able to do so as it would mean they have more money than they have now. Once they get to having that amount of money most realise that the money is best spent elsewhere (or not spent at all). Once they have so much money that having a vanity plate is inconsequential to their finances they may as well do it. So it's natural that some people want to pretend they've reached the "rich" state by buying a vanity plate preemptively - the problem is that this is so easy to spot it just looks gauche.
All of this obviously doesn't apply to countries where vanity plates aren't traded for stupid amounts like famous pieces of art.
In New York it's the same, they make the license plates and also school furniture, and maybe other things too. I was scared for a moment when I was told by USPS Informed Delivery that I have incoming mail from Auburn Correctional Facility - but it was a license plate.
To the readers out there. Do not be put off by where it was made, how it was made. It was made.
Many of those prisoners know what they did. Are welcome to the ability to work and get out of their cells. This is a luxury for them. Yes, it’s borderline slave labor and we should probably have laws that enable them to be paid minimum wage to send that home to families, but for them to get out and do something is a blessing for them.
So advocate for minimum wage for all (including incarcerated workers) and enjoy a plate Brian “BearHug” Smith made while serving time for arson.
> Yes, it’s borderline slave labor
I'm sorry, how is it "borderline" slave labour and not straight up forced labour? These people are imprisoned, and I'm assuming forced to do this work, or what happens if they say no? It's quite literally known as "penal labour" and I thought most of the world figured out that we're not supposed to treat people like that anymore.
> These people are imprisoned, and I'm assuming forced to do this work
This is an incorrect assumption, at least in my state. It’s a job that they can apply for and opt in to do.
The debate is about their hourly wage.
There is a possibility of forced penal labor, as I understand it, but it’s mostly things like being forced to do cleaning duties, road cleanup, etc.
Just respond to the existing comments instead of making your own, if you're gonna persist with re-making the same arguments others tried to make already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46314758
They can say no. These Prisons incentivize inmates to opt in by claiming that prisoners develop employable marketable skills and that the work leaves a a good mark on their record. It can also pay out cents to a few dollars an hour (or nothing at all)
It’s not quite slave labor but it probably should be compensated better at the minimum.
Never heard about it myself before, and went to Wikipedia of course, and found this:
> Prison labor in the US is mostly optional. Although inmates are paid for their labor in most states, they usually receive less than $1 per hour. As of 2017, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas did not pay inmates for any work whether inside the prison (such as custodial work and food services) or in state-owned businesses. Additionally, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and South Carolina allowed unpaid labor for at least some jobs. Incarcerated individuals who are required to work typically receive minimal to no job training resulting in situations where their health and safety could potentially be compromised. Prison workers in the US are generally exempt from workers' rights and occupational safety protections, including when seriously injured or killed. Often times, inmates that are often overworked through penal labor do not receive any proper education or opportunities of "rehabilitation" to maximize profits off the cheap labor produced. Many incarcerated workers also struggle to purchase basic necessities as prices of goods continue to soar, meanwhile prison wages continue to stay the same. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
It sounds like it isn't optional everywhere, the pay is beyond inhuman, they don't always get any benefits at all, no training, don't safety and are overworked.
Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.
> It sounds like it isn't optional everywhere, the pay is beyond inhuman, they don't always get any benefits at all, no training, don't safety and are overworked.
Most of these are true, but I would push back on the pay angle. If a person is in jail, they are a ward of the state and have no expenses at all. There is no sense in paying them a "living wage" because they don't have to live off it. In any case, most stereotypical prison jobs would not cover the cost of incarcerating the employee.
A common way this works these days in more progressive states is that prisoners who can hold down a remote job are allowed to keep their income, minus paying a tithe for their incarceration:
https://www.mainepublic.org/2025-08-29/in-maine-prisoners-ar...
> Overall, sounds like a nice idea on paper, but combine it with private companies actually running these prisons and probably making profits on having more f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵ labour available to them and you basically re-invented slavery again, just with a nicer name.
Only about 10% of prisoners are in private prisons. The vast majority of them are in some kind of government prison. The US definitely puts too many people in prison, but that's for cultural reasons and not because of some nefarious plan to get cheap labor.
Even our legal system recognizes it as slave labor. The thirteenth amendment specifically says: "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
yes but except as a punishment for crime whereof has been refined with further case law I believe. You can be forced to do small jobs, clean up. You can be assigned Road Crew and pickup trash. You can do small jobs that the system won't hire and pay for, they'll use you. So long as you aren't a risk of flight, to the officers, or to society if you have to interact with the public.
Beats sitting in a cinderblock white-painted cell with a metal cot and 4" mattress.
> and not straight up forced labour?
Well you’re making the assumption that prisoners are forced to do this work rather than opting to in order to make a little money for snacks and/or make a case for good behavior when they come before the parole board.
> make a case for good behavior when they come before the parole board
It can be a bit more explicit than that: in Colorado, inmates can earn 10–12 days per month of "earned time." Earned time shortens the time until eligibility for parole. Section D in the linked document (from the linked department policies page section 625-02) gives examples of behavior that can add up to earned time. For instance, a day of work at a disaster site is worth a day of earned time (D.4.a.1)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q6IXf-yWnbA3Ujjejola7fiwijv...
It's still slave labor if the most basic of comforts and privileges are locked away from you if you don't participate.
Plus you don't really have choice in the labor you perform, no choice in where you perform it, no choice in when, you aren't really paid, you can only spend money in the commissary (at insanely inflated prices).
Sure it's not a slave on a cotton field getting whipped for not meeting quota, but it really isn't far from that.
Selling prisoners as underpaid slave labor means everyone else now has to compete against companies using that slave labor. It's essentially cutting us twice. We both pay to house and feed the employees/contractors of the company benefiting who then undercuts us by not bothering to pay them.
Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center. The ramifications of doing so create gross incentives.
>Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center.
That ship sailed post American Civil-War. We've made it part of our culture. Every prison charges their inmates to be there. Per Diems. It used to be tax payers but... they found out they could double dip.
> To the readers out there. Do not be put off by where it was made, how it was made. It was made.
And if it never sells, the profit margins for the slave drivers decreases.
I mean, I really, this post is trying to justify slave labor. Is that not... A little bizarre to find yourself doing that?
I'm not justifying slave labor. I'm pointing out that they should be paid more. They'll gladly make the plates and be happy doing it. Getting outside means the world to them. Don't hate them for making the plates, hate the system for putting them into slave labor, but at the same time show some compassion for those who are trying to live and be, normal productive members of society (even if it is at shotgun point).
My point is, it's not the employee and where that employee makes the product, it's the company that abuses that employee to make the product for you.
So no, not justifying slave labor, but I am justifying using prison labor (at minimum wage) to give them a chance at rehabilitation and/or restitution.
Also these are people found guilty of a felony and it costs us non prisoners tax money to keep them housed and fed. Is it unfair if we extract under paid or unpaid labor from them? Is it also unfair to ask drivers convicted of DWD to do free community labor?
> I learned that at least in Texas all plates are made by minimally paid prisoners
Lol, wasn't slavery outlawed in the US, or were some states still allowed to keep it? That's absolutely bananas if true.
To be clear, the prisoners aren’t literally forced to do this work. It’s a job they can choose to apply for and do while in prison. (EDIT: In my state, it might be different in other states)
The contention is about how much they’re paid per hour.
>To be clear, the prisoners aren’t literally forced to do this work. It’s a job they can choose to apply for and do while in prison.
Sorry, do you have a source for that? The requirement to work is a major point of contention, and a very quick check with this[1] directly contradicts your claim in the federal system: "Sentenced inmates are required to work if they are medically able. Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper. Inmates earn 12¢ to 40¢ per hour for these work assignments."
[1] https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/work_programs.j...
Those programs you’re referring to in your quote are work within the prison itself:
> Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper.
Meaning some prisoners work in the kitchen preparing food for other inmates, others are on clean up duty, and so on. You could argue that nobody in prison should have to participate in anything inside their community and that’s a valid debate to be had.
In my state, the jobs that provide things outside of prison are applied for.
> To be clear, the prisoners aren’t literally forced to do this work.
Not 100% true it seems, but happy for someone else to correct me.
> Prison labor in the US is mostly optional - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
Since you didn't know about for-profit prisons, here:
I'm very well aware of private prisons, but I didn't know they also exploited essentially f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵free labour, that one was new to me. Apparently in the constitution and everything. Remind me again why some people believe America to be "the land of the free"?
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
For anyone unaware, that is nearly[1] the entirety of the text of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution from 1865. This exception is rather (in)famous. I remember being quizzed on it in an elementary or middle school history or social studies class.
[1] the only excluded bit is the followup "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Without this, the power to enforce the 13th Amendment would be left up to the states due to the 10th Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."), which would have slightly useless given the whole war that had just been fought over some states wanting to keep slavery.
they shouldnt be paid at all. they're in prison for a reason. they have a debt to society. a great many of those people didnt do 'one bad thing' then got caught. it was just the last bad thing they were caught for. any many of them did 'the bad thing', then continued doing other bad things up until the point they were put in prison.
In many cases, their earnings are confiscated as part of restitution.
I don't agree with your "slave labor is ok if the slave committed a crime" position, and find it morally indefensible.
I found out recently that in my state, the online vanity plate checker shows plates that were PREVIOUSLY registered but NOW available as NOT available. I wanted to get one of my own plates I had years ago and assumed there was some process to have it transferred, but was told by a DMV rep that after two years of non-registration, they're up for grabs. Apparently the web page does not take this into account.
That means there are probably a lot of great plate names up for the taking that people are just assuming are taken. You'd need to call the DMV to verify.
Hopefully Florida's web page does not have that limitation.
What we need is a "Little Bobby Tables" vanity plate that exploits a buffer overflow in speed cams.
Unfortunately they seem to filter special characters on input, that is, when you apply for your plate.
But don't despair! Depending on how crappy the cam's firmware is, NULL might just do the trick.
Or it might do the opposite: https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-ha...
Ouch!
In Denmark, you can buy a vanity plate (ønskenummerplade) for 8'000 DKK (needs renewal every 8 years), and it can be between 2 and 7 characters long; but the best part is that they permit all Danish letters, including Æ, Ø and Å. One could likely write a script quickly to check these platforms for short combinations, such as ØÅ, which appears to be available.
I'm imagining someone driving in England and the police having no way to input those letters into their system.
I wonder if the Danish system would prevent ÆØÅ and AEOA from both being registered. Would the Danish system Match "ÆØÅ" if someone input "AEOA"? There are unicode normalization rules, but I wonder if systems would be built to handle that. If you're Danish, you'd just use those letters so it wouldn't be a useful feature. If you're English, you wouldn't often encounter those letters so it wouldn't be a useful feature.
> I'm imagining someone driving in England and the police having no way to input those letters into their system.
I would assume the UK has worked out a way of dealing with this having had plenty of years of foreign plates being driven around the country.
Any Danish license plate driven in the UK will almost certainly have to a be an EU style plate with the blue band on the left with the "DK" country code. If someone needs to send a fine to the registered owner of this plate I'd guess they'd be handing over the camera footage/images to a contact in the relevant country and letting them confirm what the exact plate is.
(There may be some weird exemptions for old classic/vintage cars that can continue to be driven on their original number plates, in which case you really don't know who to contact.)
The UK is very strict on license plates. I don't think there's any valid reason for driving a car without some form of a license plate on display (cars being driven on trade plates placed in the front/rear windscreens are the closest thing I can think of). I'd expect the UK Police to pull over any car that didn't have plates on it if they spotted it. It's certainly considered very suspicious in the UK if a car is missing either of its plates.
There are plenty of examples of normal ANPR cameras failing to capture plates properly. Or even sillier examples like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-58959930
This story got referenced by the associated Government body here: https://videosurveillance.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/27/the-camera-...
My understanding is that most countries just don't bother; I once drove around North America on Danish plates; since European plates are much wider than North American style plates, none of their cameras could scan my plates; so camera-only toll roads were essentially free for me. I consider that it happens so rarely anyway, that they don't bother.
Similarly, I've been flashed for speeding in France, which does have cameras adjusted to my plates' size, but they also didn't bother sending a ticket. Germany - on the other hand - will send you a ticket, but since they allow Ö, Ü, etc. on their plates, their system can probably handle Æ, Ø and Å as well.
ØØ7
Don't forget that the cost is not only the bureaucratic fee; you also have to buy a vintage Aston Martin or Lotus, to display the plate.
While clever, as a Scandinavian I regret to inform you that I would read that as: Uh Uh Seven, not (double) Oh Seven ;)
Shouldn’t be a problem with all that medieval money lying around. /s
Does a kit car count? You can build a Lotus for around the cost of a Honda civic. Like a Lotus 7.
> Most people never think twice about the random mix of letters and numbers the DMV assigns them.
I started thinking about it when someone parked next to me in a nearly-identical model - same brand, year, etc, the only difference was some roof accessory - and a nearly identical license plate. (Think ABC D12 and ABC E12). I started trying to open their car door, and was confused until I noticed some things in their front seat that were clearly not ours.
Later that week, I was shopping around for car tires, and saw that some shop - PepBoys or something - let you punch in your license plate and let you know what kind of tires you need, and that their API response included the car make and model. I thought about poking around it, and seeing if there was a pattern to the way my state assigned license plates, but never got around to it.
(They live in town, too, and I've seen where they park. I should go introduce myself to our car twin.)
They have a license plate checker on their site. I don't live in the states, therefore I don't have a plate to check. Or do I..... HY in Florida....
@lafond - do you own a 2010 Subaru Legacy with the 2.5L SOHC engine?
If anyone else was wondering why it says NASCAR on the plate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
I got my vanity phone number this way too. However key point is to have a registrar with an insecure lookup endpoint like in the article.
Most endpoints now only give you a list pre generated numbers to choose from, AND that endpoint is rate limited to the tits with reCaptcha. No more script kiddies.
I'm not seeing what TypeScript brings to the party here? Looks like regular old JavaScript plus a vanilla dashboard.
He used TypeScript for the scripts he wrote to pull the data. He also used Next.js to build the dashboard which is written with TypeScript
This has nothing to do with TypeScript
The scripts he wrote to pull the data were written in TypeScript, though all the TS I see is in the parameters in the function signature. Also he used Next.js for the dashboard
I did something similar to get OnlineOrNot's twitter handle - I realised that unclaimed names would 404 and so I set up a check to get an alert when that happened.
It's a fun story of course, but it also seems that people like OP who abuse public APIs are why we can't have nice things, and why so many web pages these days are bogged down by Cloudflare and Anubis interstitials that waste human time.
Skiddies targeting an individual site are a drop in the ocean compared with the industrial scale LLM scraping, so blaming them for it is in bad taste.
Yeah, also running a scraper with no rate limit against a government website is a pretty risky endeavor.
I love this! I went through a similar, but different journey a couple of years ago:
In CO, there isn't an online search. The process to get a vanity plate is to submit an application in person, with a few of your choices. If any of them are available, woohoo, you get that one! I'm also not a normal person and an engineer and this also wasn't good enough for me. I wanted my top choice or nothing at all.
After bothering multiple government employees, I was able to figure out which department and eventually who was responsible for the registration system and database of license plates. I didn't ask if my few choices were available, though. I submitted a CORA (Colorado Open Records Request) for the entirety of their dataset. I thought for sure it would work - that I'd get the data, hopefully on some regular cadence, and could build a simple online service for others. Unfortunately, they flat out refused and wouldn't discuss options.
It was a disappointing result but to be fair, it was my first time attempting to get access to government data and it was likely an unusual request. I suspect that there are other, better ways to work with the government to help them make whole datasets more accessible.
Regardless, when I told my family what license plate I wanted, they laughed at me and said "No one has that, just go get it". And so I did and it worked. I now have what I consider to be the best possible license plate in Colorado: "LCNZPLT"
I often don't see people's reactions on the road when I'm driving. Occasionally though I will see someone walk by my car, see the plate, think for a few seconds and then start laughing. Mission accomplished!
You should not be getting notifications while driving.
Hehe, I do a similar thing for phone numbers and I got real good ones almost for free :)
phone numbers seem risky, years back I got randomly assigned a "cool" number (I think it ended with 8888 or something) and it seems it was on all possible fax spam lists, constant calls all hours of the day and the night, had to change it asap.
