Fixed (YC S14) Parking Ticket Service Gets Blocked in San Francisco, Oakland and LA

techcrunch.com

9 points·bandhunt··5 comments

It doesn't seem that Fixed was doing anything that contravenes the law.

We still are a nation of laws, and not of men. One would think that, in the interest of justice, governments couldn't ban an automatic appeals system like Fixed. People do have the right to an appeal.

It doesn't seem like SF did anything that contravenes the law either.

For example, the law allows Fixed to send in statements by fax machine. Does it require SF to have a fax machine to receive those messages?

If the department decided to only accept hand-delivered or USPS mail, people would still be able to appeal, but it would change the economics for Fixed.

The whole sidestepping-the-CAPTCHA-on-a-government-website is a rather gray area in terms of legality.

Possibly, although if you were to think about the purpose of a CAPTCHA, wouldn't it run roughly like this:

To ensure that a given submission is the affirmative action of an individual human being.

And, if an individual human being stuck with a $100 parking ticket has asked Fixed to send an appeal on his behalf, and Fixed has a script that fulfills the CAPTCHA, and Fixed never does this without being hired and paid by a unique individual, then I don't think the purpose of the CAPTCHA is being violated at all.

why not just provide their mobile app the ability to submit things directly?

Just need a basic scriptable browser interface (i.e. a scriptable httpclient), this might change day to day (but no different if all server side). If one could just have a sufficient api (what to GET, what to post, what state needs to be saved, how to get user to enter captcha....) one should be able to keep the instructions updated on the server side and have it always be submitted from the phone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com