PlateShapez – Tool for generating adversarially perturbed license plate overlays | Hacker News Reader

PlateShapez – Tool for generating adversarially perturbed license plate overlays

github.com

32 pointsRhea_Karty18 comments

Background: from this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ)

Floxk AI is a startup that apparently runs highly suspicious police data collection services. As a fun bonus, it sells this data to private bidders and retains no liability for any mess-ups.

Apparently, it uses a Bluetooth system to relay some of this information. And seems to generally have awful security...

Any thoughts? Or further projects on this?

Flock Safety

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

A lot of news... not too much technical.

The real scandal seems to be the use of data brokers' data, re-selling/owning the data collected from publicly funded cameras, and also using bluetooth and ostensibly other outdated security.

The scandals you mention have been reported on in depth by 404media, which has led to state and congressional investigation. A Google search will provide technical details about their cameras and the Android/hardware stack that operates them.

for such a well-documented repo, the complete lack of sample outputs is surprising.

I don't want to run the code, just show me some perturbed plates!

I guess benn jordan assumed you would watch the video on yt before finding the repo

Aside: this is the third or fourth time this week I've seen a repo/project shared here with some visual output component and no examples shown in the Readme or anywhere and multiple people asking about it. What's with these maintainers missing that key aspect? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Might actually be interaction bait. Just like those Reddit posts with false info or typos. Gets people to interact, just like us

I watched the video, and I think the creator of the repo might be concerned about liability. Also, the perturbed plates don't look that interesting, they just look slightly dirty

Next level: Produce solution for actually dirtying a given plate whith patterns of applied "dirt", easily removable, just in case...

I've been wondering for a long time about adding a layer of UV reflective material to a license plate (maybe even a spray?), built specifically to either alter the image so a camera sees different numbers/letters, or to block it altogether. With this it wouldn't be obstructing the licence plate at all for human eyes, so it's feasible that you could easily get away with it.

Highly illegal in most likely all states.Every state has laws against obstruction of license plates.

Don't get caught I guess

If you see the video, the initial iteration just looks like specs of mud on the plate with the letters+numbers still fully readable. His ultimate goal is a custom plate frame that looks normal to the human eye but can block camera readings.

I can see this as being legal because it's still human readable.

Plate readers aren't expected to be 100% reliable as is (angles, lighting, network goes down, etc.) Plates get dirty, sometimes rusty. Also you can't test your own plate for machine readability against all the different types of systems cops use, so how could you reasonably know the issue is on your end and how to fix it?

Well, you know the issue is on your end if you specifically installed a system which is designed to foil a specific type of license plate reader.

My guess is that either the system flag you as plate-less and warn cops about it.

Or trigger a human read of licence plate capture.

Post COVID, where the streets are full of terrible/reckless/dangerous/uninsured drivers with missing or fake (ghost) tags, I have a hard time opposing license plate enforcement.

Stop stalking me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com