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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

> People can also help by double-checking anybody's licence before lending them their car, said Theresa-Anne Kramer, a spokesperson for MADD Montreal.

> The SAAQ says visually checking a driver's licence may not be enough, as a hard copy does not always provide up-to-date information. The agency reminds people that their car could be impounded for 30 days or more if the driver breaks the law.

> For a fee of $1.75, the SAAQ will verify a licence through its website.

> "That would be a wise thing to always do whenever you lend your car, even to your best friend," said Kramer.

> "That person might have kept it secret that they have an alcohol interlock in their own vehicle. Family members might not be aware of it. Friends might not be aware of it."

They want you to pay $1.75 for a single query against a database? That makes AWS prices look cheap.

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I hate it when governments do this, and they seem to do it a lot. The socially optimal price is the marginal cost of providing the service. In this case, the marginal cost is essentially 0 so the search should be free. They're leaving welfare gains on the table by setting such a ridiculous price.

Unfortunately, this is one of the most effective methods of discouraging wanton scraping.

I’m not sure about the laws in Canada, but aren’t these convictions public domain? Presumably someone could just scrape that and build a free API?

> Unfortunately, this is one of the most effective methods of discouraging wanton scraping.

Maybe they could require you to add (and verify) a credit card and then not charge it for fewer than 30 queries a month.

Of course, it's a solution that brings other problems, but it's one way of using payment systems to provide the service and keep it free for everyone but the scrapers.

Hmm.. hold my, no wait.. take my beer.

Ask for name and date of birth. Voila, no scraping.

With the current state of PII leaks, I'm not so sure.

A simple, pretty much unscrapable system: App on your phone that you use to take a picture of the license. The system returns the current status.

That is far from unscrapable. Could probably be done within hours with the Android emulator.

And I’m sure it would be openALPR on the backend, which would gladly parse a dynamically generated “picture” of a license.

If you had a picture of the license you could certainly scrape it--but then you're doing it legitimately anyway, no need to scrape. Without a picture of the license it's not going to return anything but an error.

They could have just added a captcha.

I'd imagine that the socially optimal price is _below_ marginal cost, since it's improving compliance with a law that (I hope) is uncontroversially utility-increasing

Probably don't want tabloid newspapers just checking everyones status regularly

Turning everyone into deputies to enforce that their friends not borrow their car seems pretty lousy to me. Reminds me of those felony murder laws, or the laws that punish parents where their children host binge drinking parties without their knowledge.

This isn't much different from lending your car to someone without asking if they have a driver's license, period? I mean it's slightly different (I'm not sure if the car is automatically impounded for driving without a license) but I think they're making a big deal out of a fairly minor detail. If your friend borrows your car knowing full well that if they're pulled over it's going to be evaluated... maybe in general a good sign it's time to reevaluate that friendship?

Addiction is hard. And some people hide it really well. There are many high functioning alcoholics out there, and you can be sure that many of their friends don't know how bad the situation really is.

Letting a visibly drunk person get behind the wheel is obviously a big no no, but there are many shades of grey here. You should not be responsible for other people's failures.

There is a world of a difference between knowing full well that your friend has lost his license and lending him your car after he has shown you a license that is no longer valid.

The obvious solution is to never lend your car out to anybody, but that is not the optimal solution.

I for one am a fan of the felony murder law and the laws that punish parents who negligently create opportunities for kids to hurt themselves.

They want you to pay $1.75 for a single query against a database? That makes AWS prices look cheap.

They want to set a price that's high enough to stop people invading the privacy of everyone they know for a cheap laugh, but low enough that it won't put people off checking if they're genuinely concerned but also very poor. Making it, say, $5 would cause some people to seriously think whether or not they can afford it.

Stop spam I would imagine. If you have to pay such a "high" price for the query, then you're not going to enumerate every license combination (unless you had deep pockets)

That is what rate limiting is for. You can also give free queries up to the p95 of usage and then start charging for another example.

Probably because usage volume is low, so they have to amortize the fixed costs (eg. payment to the government IT consultants) over a smaller number of requests.

That seems like a weak excuse. The capability needs to exist for SAAQ staff regardless, and something like this can either be implemented as a human service where it's an email request (low volume) or a form on the website.

I could be mistaken but I believe it was the SAAQ that had "business hours" for one of their online services where you could only submit a form between 9 and 4 or something ridiculous like that.

Aeroplan had this until recently too, the website shut down at 9PM PST and re-opened at 6AM PST. Last employee out turn off the servers? What is it about Canadian IT haha.

Looks like this service has business hours as well. Very strange.

It’s an accessibility regulation. If a government website has to be equally accessible to people who are deaf / hard of hearing, blind, etc. then the website can only be live when services for those people are up. There are some sites that rely on humans to provide backup services like filling out forms, and they only work business hours.

I am not sure volume is going to be low. Won't every car rental have to do this check? Now every time anyone uses a ZipCar or rents a car, it costs an extra $1.75.

Interestingly, neighbouring Ontario provides the service for free by phone and online.

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