2 hours ago
I used to have a fun novelty plate when I lived in California, but when it came time to get new ones, I went with the most boring, plain plate I could. With how many crazy assholes there are on the road these days, anything I can do to promote my own inconspicuousness is something I'll do. No bumper stickers, no cute plate frames, nothing. When I'm not carrying skis, the rack comes off
12 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
> 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.
11 hours ago
> 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.
2 hours ago
In many states it's, at the very least, coerced.
Having a prison job often comes with deals of better behavior and a shorter sentence (!!!). When you're being told that just working for 2 dollars an hour might lower your sentence from 20 years to 15, do you really have a choice?
For example, in Georgia, prisoners often work outside of the prison for well below minimum wage in order to earn "good time". This means they might get more visits to their family. It also increases their chances of parole. However, the labor is coerced as well. Showing up late or not coming in results in in-prison punishments. So, many prisoners work in cotton fields or McDonald's on the promise of an easier life, while most of their wages are siphoned away and businesses get to pay very little.
8 hours ago
Prisoners are charged rent. The hourly wages have no minimum wage and are usually cents on the dollar. Definitely not enough to pay their rent for their cell.
It's slavery. The South fought hard to include the "except as punishment for crime" clause in the 13th amendment. The US has never fully abolished slavery.
5 hours ago
Say what? Prisoners pay rent?
4 hours ago
Yup!
> Fees for room and board—yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic “boat” bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food—are typically charged at a “per diem rate for the length of incarceration.” It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
11 hours ago
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
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
> 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.
10 hours ago
>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.
only the last sentence here is true.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
many prisoners receive a bill for their incarceration and will come out of prison with debt, even if they're working while in prison.
it varies prison to prison, but even basic toiletries may not be provided. the most commonly purchased items at commissary are food.
> 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.
the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery contains a single exception: prisoners.
the largest maximum security prison in the united states is a slave plantation, operated continuously since the 1830s. they still farm cotton.
9 hours ago
They don’t understand that not only tax payer funds go to these systems but the systems turn around and create victims of those in their care.
Paying to stay in jail should be done on an availability of funds, like bonds are (mostly), else it costs the tax payers. The shell companies that operate these prisons shouldn’t be allowed to charge inmates per diems if they are receiving tax payers dollars for them.
People think it’s all murders and rapists when that’s only 5% of the population at most. Most are in there for petty crime, drug charges, 3 strike rules, administrative chains, or mental health issues.
Yet for 27¢/day, will pick cotton for a local textile.
2 hours ago
Yes, this is something people miss about prison. Many criminals are forced to repeat crime because prison is designed to economically ruin people. It's also designed to emotionally, physically, and mentally ruin people.
Point blank, the system is not meant to prevent or discourage crime, it's meant to enact torture for people we feel deserve it. Whether that helps our society does not matter at all - nobody cares if a rapist leaves prison just to rape again, so long as they are sufficiently punished for it. The punishment is more important than real, tangible outcomes, because ultimately we've built it so the punishment is what makes us feel good and safe.
10 hours ago
All true, but on the flip side they get free room and board...
Joking aside, read the 13th amendment https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/ and pay close attention to the bit that reads, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. In the United States, involuntary labor, slavery, and locking someone in a cell are all equally not allowed. And all equally allowed - as punishment for crimes of which you have been convicted.
If you think that this is ripe for abuse, you'd be exactly right. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing. We got rid of chattel slavery - and immediately accomplished the same effect with the black codes and convict leasing. As the name suggests, this was overwhelmingly directed at the same black people who had just theoretically been emancipated.
10 hours ago
It's not free everywhere. Many institutions in the USA charge you for your stay. You can stay in jail for a year and have the case dismissed and still be on the hook for thousands of dollars in rent.
9 hours ago
True. If you win your case, the taxpayer no longer pays. Lots of places have those pay to stay laws.
But if your case has not been officially lost, you can't be set to forced labor either.
(Of course our BS system in many places still charges exonerees after the fact despite the fact that it was a wrongful conviction.)
5 hours ago
Sadly, you can even be set to forced labor even if you're unconvicted, based on SCOTUS case law. A jail can legally force you to perform "housekeeping chores" to maintain the facility.
9 hours ago
Where? I've never heard of that
9 hours ago
It's called pay-to-stay. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-to-stay_%28imprisonment%29 for more.
This happened in Oregon to my kind of brother in law. (Married to half sister of my half siblings - what do you call that?)
He's Native American, so the local police thought that they could target him with a BS charge. They lost. The private jail that he'd been kept in, now that they weren't getting paid by the state, sued him for the cost of keeping him. Incidentally the counter sheriff is on the board of directors for the private prison in question.
Can you spell conflict of interest? Of course you can! Can you spell corruption? That too, wow!
Can anyone do a danged thing about it? Of course not! As long as they are only targeting people that nobody likes, like Native Americans, their victims won't get the time of day in our wonderful United States of America.
(I really wish I was making this up.)
5 hours ago
And that's Oregon... there are worse places, too.
10 hours ago
They certainly can say no in a lot of states, but that is often very much against the best interests of the prisoner because almost all work programs shorten your sentence.
I knew one guy who was doing a 30 day jail sentence for some misdemeanor and was told they would reduce it to 14 days if he worked in the kitchen. He took the job and lost most of his thumb in a very unsafe meat slicer. This put his 17 year career with UPS in jeopardy since the nerve damage made it hard for him to handle things.
4 hours ago
This is very unrelated in most ways, but when I was 9 I managed to take a hatchet and remove about 1/4" off my left thumb (via cutting bailing twine against a tree, and apparently terrible, terrible aim).
I'm far older than 9 now, and the tip of my left thumb still gets very cold in the winter and if I directly bump it into something, it hurts a whole heck of a lot.
Rant is because while that moment sucked pretty hard (I immediately put my thumb in my mouth, eating the bit of thumb apparently..) it didn't take very long for me to realize that any lower and it would have certainly been a life changing event.
Bad aim, but in the best way possible.
I can only imagine the difference. Has to be harsh.
11 hours ago
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."
11 hours ago
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.
10 hours ago
Yes, you don't need to be convicted to be forced into labor under the 13th. Pretrial detainees can be forced to do "housekeeping chores" and not violate the constitution.
9 hours ago
That actually is a good point, in the US justice system, you’re guilty until proven innocent (for most people).
Just the fact that you have a case has ruined lives.
10 hours ago
> Beats sitting in a cinderblock white-painted cell with a metal cot and 4" mattress.
Does it, though? One might prefer that over slave labor.
2 hours ago
I would certainly prefer to jerk off in my cell over working for pennies on the dollar.
But it doesn't matter, really. Either we have rights as humans or we don't. Qualifying them erodes protections for us all.
11 hours ago
> 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.
11 hours ago
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.
10 hours ago
> 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...
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
>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.
11 hours ago
> 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?
10 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
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?
10 hours ago
Yes, it's unfair to force a human being into labor. Paid or unpaid. It should be voluntary. Community Service as a punishment is different. That's a do labor or else do time so you're trading labor for hours/time. Paid in trust. I have issue with do time and do labor as a form of punishment without reward.
Most inmates are incarcerated due to circumstance. They lacked the ability to better their lives and required monies to live, so they resorted to crime. Given a chance, many inmates get degrees behind bars, learn skills, write books, practice art.
11 hours ago
> 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.
8 hours ago
Loved your description of the class system. There's a general theme of old money wealthy people not caring about vanity purchases because they don't know how much stuff costs nor if that is a too much money or not.
It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.
4 hours ago
Yes, the classic description for a member of the British Upper Class is someone who looks down on people who have to buy their own furniture.
(One classification of "upper class" is someone who has never had to buy their own furniture because they inherit it and pretty much everything else they need.)
6 hours ago
In CA and AZ vanity plates are first come, first served. You cannot sell them either. You either keep them on a car, or you can keep on paying to keep it out of circulation forever. But once you give it up it goes back to the pool, and someone can get it.
Also, my vanity plate is $0 more than a normal plate. Why wouldn't I?
3 hours ago
I guess you're in AZ? In CA, the absurd yearly cost is enough to keep me from bothering with anything more than the basic olates.
3 hours ago
This. When I moved from Ontario, Canada (where they charge a yearly fee for them), to CA, I was all excited to get a vanity plate - until I saw they also charge a yearly fee..
In the most ironic twist of all - Ontario did away with license plate renewals a few years ago, and now, I would actually consider a vanity plate..
I've always wondered if a regular plate was better for avoiding speeding tickets - a vanity plate is much easier to validate, IMHO.
11 hours ago
> 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.
3 hours ago
> The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
>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...
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
> 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...
9 hours ago
It's technically optional in most institutions, but not practically optional. For instance, a lot of labor can reduce your sentence, can give you better housing and can enable you to afford things on commissary you might need (e.g. phone time, hygiene products etc).
6 hours ago
Sounds like optional to me. With benefits for exercising the option.
11 hours ago
Since you didn't know about for-profit prisons, here:
11 hours ago
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"?
6 hours ago
Not sure why you are bringing up private prisons. Private prisons are a tiny percentage of federal prisons and prison labor is used throughout the USA.
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
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.
10 hours ago
> they're in prison for a reason.
Often that reason is "too poor to afford proper representation" or "looked vaguely like the actual criminal" or "took a plea bargain because the justice system was threatening them with an immorally-long wait for a trial and a likely worse outcome".
10 hours ago
Often that reason is "committed a horrific violent crime"
10 hours ago
Not really? I mean, when you compare the number of people who have committed a "horrific violent" crime to the total number of people caught up in the US prison system, I expect it's not "often".
7 hours ago
The numbers are fuzzy but they indicate that at least a simple majority of (and possibly up to an extreme majority) of prisoners have committed violent crimes.
10 hours ago
Weed, though. In some states, now legal.
7 hours ago
Non-violent marijuana users haven't ever materialized as a large cohort of the prison population. Sorry, I too used to believe that prisons were overflowing with them
6 hours ago
I mean if this was the 90s, yes it was true but you are also correct that it's very rare for anyone to be in prison for just marijuana alone in the US. Even in states where it's "illegal."
10 hours ago
Often it is.
Often it is not.
Often, they too are a victim of our judicial system, and we can't just ignore them due to the peers we locked them in with.
32 minutes ago
That doesn't justify ignoring our established punishments. Good luck with a system that sets everyone free just in case.
11 hours ago
I don't agree with your "slave labor is ok if the slave committed a crime" position, and find it morally indefensible.
5 hours ago
Stepping aside the fact that I think most everyone here is playing fast-and-loose with the “slave” terminology here… Why do you feel prisoners doing low wage labor to be wrong?
Practically everyone in human history since the dawn of time has had to go out and produce something of value. Why, all of a sudden, should a murderer or rapist get to sit on their ass and consume what we all produce? I find nothing questionable about a humble job for them at all.
5 hours ago
Two answers:
1. Why should they be restricted to ludicrously low wages? If they're producing something of value, they should be compensated. Not only is it morally wrong to, you know, enslave people, on a more practical level it would be very helpful for people who are leaving prison after serving their sentence to actually have some money saved up, so they have better opportunities, to avoid recidivism.
2. The reason they can sit on their ass and consume what they produce is that they effectively become wards of the state. They're still human beings, and if we have decided to incarcerate them, we become responsible for them, and they still have rights as human beings.
A humble job is fine; I'm not saying they should be sitting in an aeron chair bullshitting on Slack for 8 hours a day. But slavery for pennies on the hour is wrong.
9 hours ago
Punishment is only one reason of inprisonment, another is correction. Majority of prisoners do not serve lifetime sentence, at some point they wikl return to society and ideally you don't want them to get right back to what they have been doing before because they have no other options or they don't know nothing better.
10 hours ago
In many cases, their earnings are confiscated as part of restitution.
9 hours ago
Imprisoning people for years seems like a much worse thing to do to people than underpaying them for work they do while locked up.
Is it that the latter can be called "slavery" that makes people upset?
2 hours ago
There are a lot of incentives to lock people up. Cheap labor is one of them. We should support incentives such as "keeping society safe", but incentives such as "profits and cheap labor" are incentives that may actually incentivize locking up innocent people.
So it's not about which one is worse, it's about not supporting something that could lead to corruption or an unfair system.
12 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
Arguably the most famous one is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
5 hours ago
I once had a flatmate who worked in IT at MIT at the time that happened. I don't remember the details, but it was a sad fluke that the feds even got involved - something like it was reported at the wrong time of day/when the person who should have got it was off-shift, or the feds happened to be doing something with the state police when the report came in and wanted to make a big news splash.
Whole thing was incredibly fucked up.
Interesting to see how much more thorough the Wikipedia page is now.
10 hours ago
Whoa. That was an interesting read.
11 hours ago
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.”"
8 hours ago
That didn't actually happen. The governor threatened to prosecute, and ordered the police to produce a report on their investigation into the matter. The police complied producing a report saying the person the governor wanted to prosecute did nothing wrong.
10 hours ago
Isn't html copyrightable and thus it is a publication? (And thus exposed by the author). Or am I in the wrong ballpark here?
2 hours ago
No. Imagine you wrote a personal diary entry in a text file on your computer, and only afterwards wrapped it in HTML tags. Did you just make it a document intended for broad publication?
9 hours ago
It doesn't matter. The judges who pass these sentences don't know enough about the systems to understand whether or not a crime has been committed and they simply don't care.
11 hours ago
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.
10 hours ago
Especially given how the response time doesn't matter much here! If you're just looking at 2-character license plates, that's 676/5=136 requests to check them all, and you could easily space that out to something like one request per minute to scan the space every two hours.
10 hours ago
The fun thing about the computer fraud and abuse act is that just about anything can be made into a federal crime with it!
9 hours ago
Just about, indeed!
"Nonprofit hires woman, but she quits after a few days, asks for pay for that time; they refuse, and things get worse from there. But! They don’t turn off her email access to a board member’s email. She and a friend comb through the account, download internal documents, and then ask for a lot of money. Federal crime? Third Circuit: Not until they actually revoked her access."
10 hours ago
Considering it was created during a major moral panic after the movie "War Games" came out, by a bunch of politicians who knew nothing about computers (aside from, again, watching the movie War Games).
As a direct result, anything and everything can be a crime (e.g. violating a private company's Terms & Conditions), and the punishments are completely disproportionate to the actual criminality.
See the AT&T/iPad data leak, where AT&T were leaking private information on the internet with no security checks at all. Someone found it, told the press, who in turn told AT&T, but the FBI still investigated it as a "crime", raided their home, charged them with "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization." AT&T go no punishment at all.
9 hours ago
See the AT&T/iPad data leak, where AT&T were leaking private information on the internet with no security checks at all. Someone found it, told the press, who in turn told AT&T, but the FBI still investigated it as a "crime", raided their home, charged them with "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization." AT&T go no punishment at all.
Should they have had better security? Yes. Was the vulnerability extremely basic? Yes. Doesn't change much, a vulnerability was used to dump a bunch of private data.
8 hours ago
Exactly. If you find an unlocked warehouse, even if you are supposed to pick up something of yours, and instead of directly complaining you also ransack everything, you’re going to catch some heat.
6 hours ago
> I think you are missing some nuance here. They found a vulnerability where they could just increment an "id" and get access to another user's information.
That's not nuance; the information was publically available on the internet without any security. Even search engines had indexed it before it was patched.
> They then went ahead and scraped as much as they could.
They told the press instead of releasing it.
> AT&T did not leak the information, Andrew did!
So AT&T dumping it all onto the open internet without any security isn't culpable, but the person who let the press know that their information was available to everyone is. That's quite an interesting take.
I'm struggling to see the nuance... You just repeated back what I already said, but added that you dislike the person personally, which is absolutely fine, but we're talking about miscarriages of justice not running a popularity contest. If you feel like they committed other crimes (which they likely did per Wikipedia), that is unrelated to THIS supposed crime.
> Was the vulnerability extremely basic? Yes.
There was no vulnerability. You just needed to request a record from a public web-server, which the server happily provided with no extra steps.
Let me ask this: When you request e.g. google.com, and they return a HTTP response, why is that not a "vulnerability?" Because we'd both agree it objectively is not. So then, why, when AT&T provides a URL with information they're meant to keep private but available to the public, and you then request it, that is suddenly a "vulnerability?"
Here is the actual URL you needed to call:
https://dcp2.att.com/OEPNDClient/openPage?IMEI=0&ICCID=<consecutive id>
You just needed to take any iPad's ICC ID and +1 for the next customer's record. So what is the "vulnerability?" Being able to count consecutively?
5 hours ago
"The guy who did it sucked" is generally not a good justification.
It's an easy trap to fall into (we all want consequences for shitty people), but it's also a blurry line to hold.
"First they came…"
10 hours ago
I was charged with felony unauthorized access of a government computer years ago for an even stupider reason. Nobody should underestimate the state's willingness to prosecute over anything.
11 hours ago
This has nothing to do with TypeScript
5 hours ago
Generally speaking, if someone specifies "TypeScript," I expect the type system to be the interesting part of the writeup. Otherwise, it could say "JavaScript."
(It could say "React," but still, the interesting part is that you built a scraper/visualizer, not that it used React.)
11 hours ago
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
10 hours ago
I think the GP's point was that the part of the article that's most interesting is the investigation into how the DMV's plate system works. The fact that Typescript was used is incidental (of course this could have been done in pretty much any language), and it's an odd choice to include the language choice in the article title.
12 hours ago
What we need is a "Little Bobby Tables" vanity plate that exploits a buffer overflow in speed cams.
12 hours ago
8 hours ago
Isn’t there an xkcd abut a license plate of zeros an Os and ones and LS and the cops just say “it’s the guy with the plate again”.
7 hours ago
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
Or it might do the opposite: https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-ha...
11 hours ago
Ouch!
12 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
While clever, as a Scandinavian I regret to inform you that I would read that as: Uh Uh Seven, not (double) Oh Seven ;)
2 hours ago
a money-saver! uh uh seven belongs on a vintage Ford Pinto!
12 hours ago
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.
5 hours ago
Money? You mean you don't just go to Q and procure one?
5 hours ago
I guess you could get the tax payers to pay for it.
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
> 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-...
10 hours ago
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.
Edit: Obviously, they don't bother to a degree; severe infractions will obviously make local law enforcement do something, but it's a rather manual process. Most countries are signatures to a treaty, that recognises other countries' plates.
10 hours ago
>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.
Based on my experience, the UK approach is to not even bother and try and collect fines from owners of foreign registered vehicles. They do sell them to some private company that has been sending me scary letters for 10 years soon.
8 hours ago
So what happens when ÁÀÂÅÅÀÄ run a red light?
8 hours ago
Hah, in California I used to have HX.
The short plate came back to bite me: Years after I had moved to another state, an automatic license plate reader on a toll road (91 Express Lanes) in Los Angeles misread someone else's plate as mine. It was kafkaesque: My public records request for photographic evidence was blocked because, if I was correct that the offending driver was not me, the law prohibits the release of records revealing others' driving patterns.
The other plates available when I did a similar search were BO and IR. In retrospect IR wasn't a bad choice.
4 hours ago
Aren't all license plates rare since they're unique? I would also not call it rare unless everyone wants that specific combo of characters.
Personally, I wouldn't pay extra every year to have an easily recognizable vehicle.
11 hours ago
> 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.)
11 hours ago
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?
8 hours ago
Yep. I wonder where and how they get this information.
8 hours ago
When you realize the total combos of car key possibilities, you have a decent chance your key would work, too!
5 hours ago
Had two GM 3500 cargo vans, one a 2002 Chevy Express, the other a 2001 GMC Savannah. Same vehicle different badges. Noticed the keys were a bit similar and found that the Chevy key could in fact unlock the GMC with some wiggling but not the other way around. It did not work in the ignition lock.
4 hours ago
Ignition locks were always better machined - the door locks were the first to get loose enough for “alternative keys”
Eventually a screwdriver works for both.
8 hours ago
I borrowed my friend's Prius once and accidentally opened the door to the wrong one and got in for a second before slowly realizing things felt off.
8 hours ago
It's a keyfob, and it didn't open his door when I tried to get in :P
11 hours ago
If anyone else was wondering why it says NASCAR on the plate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
11 hours ago
I'm not seeing what TypeScript brings to the party here? Looks like regular old JavaScript plus a vanilla dashboard.
11 hours ago
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
5 hours ago
What character set does it use? For example, can "O" and "0" considered different characters or same character, and are some letters/numbers not used? If so, then how many they say are possible is not quite that simple, since some might match (so they cannot simply be added together) and some might not be possible.
4 hours ago
I was hoping “using TypeScript” was going to be more along these lines, i.e. using the type system as a constraint solver for some combination of homoglyphs that resembles a target string.
11 hours ago
In CO, there isn't an online search. When you apply, you have to list your top options and hope one is available. I'm also not a normal person. I'm an engineer and this was not good enough for me.
I emailed government employees until I figured out who was responsible for license plate records. I submitted a CORA (Colorado Open Records Request) for the entirety of their dataset. I had hoped to get the data on some regular cadence to build a simple online service for others. Unfortunately, they flat out refused and wouldn't discuss options.
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"
Occasionally I'll see someone walk by my car, see the plate, think for a few seconds and then start laughing. Mission accomplished!
8 hours ago
Very similar to this post from a few months ago - https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker
6 hours ago
I did something similar with CA a few months back - https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker
Next steps would be to make it LLM assisted and to generate common number/letter replacement combos
12 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
Yeah, also running a scraper with no rate limit against a government website is a pretty risky endeavor.
11 hours ago
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.
4 hours ago
> Skiddies targeting an individual site are a drop in the ocean compared with the industrial scale LLM scraping
They're not. Both are bad, but at least there's some utility to LLMs.
10 hours ago
The difference is that the government won't charge a major LLM vendor with a crime, but they may kick in John Smith's front door and ruin their life.
11 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
Hehe, I do a similar thing for phone numbers and I got real good ones almost for free :)
12 hours ago
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.
5 hours ago
I have my HN name @gmail.com.
I've never actually used that account, because there are too many anonymous Bart Simpsons (and old people who don't understand email addresses) who use that one.
The shitty thing is that I use Google Apps for Your Domain (a.k.a. Dasher/GSuite) to get around this. For years, things like Photos and Music were stuck to my useless Gmail account, because the PMs involved never bothered going through the approvals to get those things to work on custom domain accounts (which Google ret-conned to be for businesses only).
A lot of these are resolved now, but there are still frustrating places where it comes up:
- I pay twice for YouTube Music - once for myself, and once for my family. I can't share my account with them, because it's attached to my domain name.
- I similarly can't join their Google Home accounts to do things like have my voice recognized when I visit them.
- Gemini CLI thinks I'm a business and quotas me like one.
12 hours ago
You should not be getting notifications while driving.
