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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

I recently saw a car with a license plate of B8B88BB8 (or something to that effect) that I am almost certain the owner chose to make it hard to read and transcribe correctly by either humans or computer vision systems.

I was honestly kind of impressed.

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I read that someone tried to register a license plate with a random sequence of Os and zeros (e.g. "OO0O00"). Unfortunately, it worked too well because the person doing data entry at the DMV ordered him a plate with all Os. :)

Or all 1's, L's and I's with a license plate frame that "accidentally" covers up the differentiating marks. >:)

PS: Reminds me, I should get one of those LPR T-shirts with license plates all over it.

https://xkcd.com/1105/

It doesn't take much to break some of those though.

I have a custom plate that is two common words, on a California 60s vintage plate (black plate with yellow lettering) and most parking garages that check and print your plate on the ticket always butcher it. Instead of (replaced for privacy) "FOO BAR" it will say "8A2M31W" or some garbage.

I'm surprised more places don't do what Nintendo did with course ids in Super Mario Maker 2. They intentionally removed some characters that are visually similar to avoid confusion when writing out codes.

base32? "an alphabet of A–Z, followed by 2–7. 0 and 1 are skipped due to their similarity with the letters O and I (thus "2" actually has a decimal value of 26)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32

No they removed Z, I, & O from A-Z+0-9. They removed Z because it looks similar to 2 in some cases too I bet.

This thought had come to me a few years ago and I've always wanted to try it. Never got around to it, though.

- 1Iil

- B8

- 0Oo

Examples:

- i1lIil1I

- 8BBil8I1

Most states don't use lowercase, but otherwise a solid plan

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1105/

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