Remember that $86M license plate scanner I replicated? I caught someone
medium.freecodecamp.org
medium.freecodecamp.org
Plenty of ethics to debate, but when it comes down to being wasteful with tax dollars, there's a monopoly on that.
But a lot of companies fail at even this basic test. It doesn't work, and it's unsupported. Meanwhile, they're getting paid more to 'fix' it while making the users run around in circles.
Is it the government that's being wasteful with tax dollars, or the company that took the money? Why is there this idea that business can be as wasteful as they want, but it's the governments fault?
Every corporation, every private charity, and every public institution that I've worked for has been wasteful, and the corporations have been the worse offenders in that regard.
How would a non-technically competent government official figure out which random hacker to award a contract like this to? They can't. And if they tried they'd probably hire someone that would over-promise and under-deliver and wouldn't be around in six months to fix things if they needed fixing.
> Ultimately, the driver was detected using a prototype of a police-only device. But driving on a 2016 registration (canceled, not expired) is a very deliberate move. Hmm.
For me, the bigger issue is the integrity part of sending each plate to their server. This would in extension allow tracking the location of each car.
I think it would be very interesting with a government founded project with several cheap cameras, each updated daily with a local database of stolen cars. That way the camera only need to notify someone when it actually sees a stolen vehicle. There is of course the risk of this being abused as well, but not as big.
Eh, we aren't good at keeping law enforcement lawful in America. I'd prefer we figured that out before expanding their capabilities.
His examples of camera placement and image distortion alone are non trivial problems to solve. Maybe they need custom made cameras for them to be fast enough and small enough, with good enough resolution.
That said, $86M is a lot of money. If you assemble a team of 5 people. Assume they use $1M a year each in for salary, office, equipment, ect, they can work fulltime on this for 5 years and still have more than $60M left for other stuff.
Correlate the car registration details with the driver ID and you have a way to find cars that are potentially stolen ( authorised drivers of the car would need to on a database )
You’ve never had a spouse borrow your car to go to the store, have you. Also, the cops basically do this now: it’s called “pulling you over and asking for your license and registration”.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-04/pm-calls-for-national-...