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Comment by ldoughty | Hacker News Reader

I have a family member who's license plate started with "&". The DMV accepts it, plates were ordered online fine, but police systems can't handle it apparently, to my family members ultimate discomfort. I commonly joke it probably gets the individual out of automated tickers for speeding and red lights, but when an officer pulls them over we sometimes need to explain that the "&" is dropped in the system (or so we've been told) and that seems to clear up issues

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In Washington State, you can register period-correct plates for your car. The problem is that you can't register the actual digits that are printed on the plate. The cops and cameras can't pull up your information, and you get stopped and questioned all the time. Explaining how the plates work to the Police gets pretty tiring.

Any word on whether the plate without the preceding '&' is in circulation? I'd be curious if your records in the police systems would be merged with the records of the owner of that plate.

The rules for california are the special symbols (which don't include &) are non-significant. Everything but the plate itself ignores them. Washington doesn't have special symbols, but does have an optional dash, which is also not significant.

I guess it doesn't happen a lot, but they'd have a crazy time if they had to deal with Arabic license plates..

I sometimes see California tags with a heart character in them. Does anyone know if those considered part of the number, or are they just ignored as decoration?

They're a special vanity style plate in CA. They probably just are ignored/not entered when searching. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/online/elp/elp

I recall the heart and plus symbols are being ignored in the system.

I had a standard 8-digit Indiana TK series truck plate which would get flagged as "unregistered" by the broken ALPR systems in other states.

Looks like you can't have the character '&' on a personalized license plate in WA: https://fortress.wa.gov/dol/extdriveses/NoLogon/_/

That link redirects to the DOL homepage.

Thanks for letting me know. Here's the proper link: https://fortress.wa.gov/dol/extdriveses/NoLogon?Link=Persona...

Just out of curiosity, how do you think you missed the rest of the URL?

I have a suspicion that the trend towards browsers being 'helpful' with the URL field is contributing to mistakes like these.

Would this be an example of a bug that could have been detected with contract-style testing?

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ContractTest.html

Well, in their credit, they're the ones whose system won't go down from an XSS payload on a plate.

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