this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
945 points (99.5% liked)

Technology

86512 readers
3270 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
945
Flock Says Its Cameras Worked 'Correctly' When Police Tracked and Ambushed Me for No Reason (www.thedrive.com)
submitted 4 days ago by spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
115 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.

The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 40 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Customized images, yes. Overlapping alphanumeric codes (two vehicles with the same sequence?) NO. Maybe it was necessary in the 1960s, but it is long since past time for issuance of alpha-numeric unique identifiers to become... unique throughout the states.

[–] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

How many digits to we need for 297,500,000 plates (as of 2026).

Plus we should probably include Canada and Mexico, since they have the same sized plates and cross the borders regularly.

Canada also has custom plates and different designs in each province too.

Also unless I’m mistaken, when Britain was in the EU, it didn’t use standardized plates like the rest of the member states, right?

[–] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 29 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There are no standard plates in the EU. The only matching thing is the country code on the left side.

[–] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 19 points 4 days ago (2 children)

That’s a lot closer to standardized than the Canada or the US.

[–] TrollTrollrolllol@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Just in Minnesota, and I don't even think that's all of them

[–] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 1 points 4 days ago

Colorado has a ton. I couldn't find any images showing all of them though, just a couple collections of older plates.

[–] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Well, that's true.

But one fun quirk is that (at least here in Finland) the EU plate isn't mandatory, you can get a clean one with no country code but then if you leave the country you are required to indicate your country of origin with a bumper sticker. So the automated license plate reader might need to be able to figure out from what country this is, and often that sticker will be stuck to the corner of the rear window.

Also a reminder - there will be no sticker on the front :)

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 20 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

6 characters (A-Z 0-9) gives you 2,176,782,336 combinations.

Even if you take out some confusing combos like O0, 1I, 5S, 8B ... 6 characters of 31 different kinds gives you 887,503,681

[–] Bbbbbbbbbbb@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago (4 children)

What about 7 characters?

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 4 days ago

You wouldn't believe it. Even more!

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 10 points 4 days ago

the formula is number of possible symbols (letters, numbers) S to the power of the number of characters on the plate N, or S^N, so if you add one more character out of 31 possible symbols, then you multiply by (another) 31 available combinations.

[–] Kissaki@feddit.org 4 points 4 days ago
  • 31^6=887.503.681
  • 31^7=27.512.614.111
[–] Exatron@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The number drops even more when offensive words or phrases are removed. Nobody's getting a license plate that reads P00 A55 or a bad word for black people.

[–] Jako302@feddit.org 1 points 4 days ago

Then make it 7 or 8 characters like most countries have. Its not like that wouldn't fit on plates. With 8 chars you could remove 2/3 of all combinations and still have an order of magnitude in reserve.

[–] Buckshot@programming.dev 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

A UK plate is 2 letters, 2 numbers, 3 letters. That's over a billion combinations.

[–] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 1 points 2 days ago

It's 3 letters and 4 numbers