759
Flock Says Its Cameras Worked 'Correctly' When Police Tracked and Ambushed Me for No Reason
(www.thedrive.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
759 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
86426 readers
3295 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- 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.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Each state has different levels of customization with different background images. I like plate customization, its a form of self expression.
You have bigger problems if you're relying on a custom license plate to express a personality...
Risk isn't worth "reward', especially when you hear things like certain backwards states trying to mandate a default " in god we trust" of other biblical theme so that people then need to opt out intentionally, in turn their vehicles becoming potential targets for zealots and cops to harass.
Just mandate national design with black text on white background
The story goes on to talk about specialty plates and designs with confederate flags.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/434-artistic-license/
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.
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?
A UK plate is 2 letters, 2 numbers, 3 letters. That's over a billion combinations.
There are no standard plates in the EU. The only matching thing is the country code on the left side.
That’s a lot closer to standardized than the Canada or the US.
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 :)
Just in Minnesota, and I don't even think that's all of them
Colorado has a ton. I couldn't find any images showing all of them though, just a couple collections of older plates.
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
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LICENSEPLATES/comments/1ux71nl/the_whole_sqz_a55_story/
Ewwww I'm not reading anything on Reddit
What about 7 characters?
You wouldn't believe it. Even more!
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.
Plates should be standardized. Bumper stickers and other things can be used for personalization.
Says who, you?
I wrote the words, so yes.
Oh, well you’re nobody. They don’t need to be standardized and will remain as they are lol.
The American freedom!
To choose the license plate...
The day is saved
Not the guy you replied to, but plates have a purpose that are not necessarily compatible with Art and personalization. Not defending a broken society, just pointing it out.
They work perfectly fine. I'd argue these custom ones are easier to read and remember.
Honestly there's no issues if you're not a flock camera
If the same combination is issued multiple times then no, they don't work as intended.
The issue here wasn't that the license plate was too colorful, it was that the missing national standardisation allows for over a thousand cars with the same plate.
Which is why they don't do that. 1 combination per state
So theoretically you can have the same combo 50 times, but it would be on 50 different state plates which are labeled as such.
You've made up a fake scenario that does not occur. There are not thousands of cars with the same plate.
Their purpose is perfectly compatible with art and personalization.