A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019)

A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019)(wired.com)

25 points by danielyaa5 4 years ago | 11 comments

bell-cot 4 years ago |

Generic wishful suggestion for courts, regarding any sort of computer-processed data which is a basis for legal action: Coin some fancy-sounding Latin phrase meaning "obvious computer failure", and make liberal use of that phrase in curtly dismissing legal actions (with prejudice) where some key piece of the assertion is clearly a product of "garbage in, garbage out".

That might at least give some incentive to those running GIGO-excreting computer systems to clean up their sh*t.

karmakaze 4 years ago | |

Exactly.

> “null” is also a text string that in many programming languages signifies a value that is empty or undefined.

I can't think of a single language that does this. A null interpolated into a string or concatenated with an empty one could produce such a string. If that string value is then used to signify an empty/undefined value is misuse of the language.

cestith 4 years ago | | |

SQL is more of a data language, but things like T-SQL or P-SQL I guess count. Lots of programming languages interacting with SQL databases mistreat NULL values. This guy's plate should never be "IS NULL" but should be a string that "plate = 'NULL'".

openasocket 4 years ago |

There's definite grounds to sue the Citation Processing Center, at least to get them to stop assigning these tickets to him.

theandrewbailey 4 years ago | |

It should be easy to prove harassment, if he can prove that a majority of these vehicles aren't registered in his name.

tpoindex 4 years ago |

For those who like podcasts, Radiolab also had this story recently, along with a few other cases of bad programming (“Are you suggesting I change my name to “quote N-U-L-L quote”, to match the databases you’re working with?”)

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/null

gunshai 4 years ago |

I'm surprised that NULLs weren't filtered out with what ever stored procedure is running on the database that sent the workload for mail ticket dispersal.

Although I suppose it is an edge case because NULL is supposed to not ever get joined with an address or UID.

grenran 4 years ago |

On the other hand, this could allow him to easily contest any future parking ticket.

rad_gruchalski 4 years ago | |

But they have to respond to each one of them. Is it worth their time?

cestith 4 years ago |

Great story from 2019. https://dev.to/michaelpaulkunz/what-we-can-learn-from-sir-ch... relates the same story back to Sir Tony Hoare.