
When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job - xelfer
https://medium.com/@taitems/how-i-replicated-an-86-million-project-in-57-lines-of-code-277031330ee9
======
Johnny555
_Imagine a passive system scanning fellow motorists for an abductors car that
automatically alerts authorities and family members to their current location
and direction._

That's the same argument that police departments use "Well we'll only use it
to capture child abductors and stolen cars and stuff".

But the truth is that there just aren't that many real child abductors out
there (especially with known license plates -- and when they are known, it
tends to be a child-custody dispute rather than a stranger-abduction), and
meanwhile a huge database of every driver's whereabouts is being amassed with
no good controls over who owns the data or what it's used for.

I'm surprised companies aren't offering the service for free in return for the
database. There must be huge marketing possibilities... John Doe drives past
this oil change place twice a day, let's send him a coupon, or better... John
Doe's car goes to Jane Smith's house twice a week and parks there for two
hours, let's send his wife an ad for a private investigator.

~~~
taitems
Oh dear. That's so creepy someone might actually do it!

I'm getting into home automation at the moment, so a use case that I think I
deleted from the article was just letting you know that your mum or someone
had pulled up in the driveway. License plates vs. a known list of visitors. Or
as is happening here in some of our suburbs, "Alert: A group of 4 men have
arrived in a stolen V8 Commodore"

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
> That's so creepy someone might actually do it!

It's only creepy if it's done on a targeted, individual basis, which it won't
be.

As it is - in many countries you legally have no expectation of privacy in a
public place, so I have no problem with en-masse ANPR. If the police
eventually develops a very dense sensor network that can track every car's
movement across every intersection then there would be too much information
recorded for me to personally worry about it - and I still believe it would
help with crime in general. The usual reactionary bullet-points based around
the usual bogey-men of terrorists and child-abduction are weak and I think
distract from more meaningful and impactful, but sedate arguments: e.g. it
would reduce the need for inherently-dangerous hot pursuits to follow a
vehicle as the cameras would do that anyway. Uninsured vehicles could be
identified immediately before they get stopped for a broken taillight or
involved in a collision. And cynically: APR systems could be used to compute a
car's average-speed between points to determine if the car broke the speed
limit).

I don't feel mass ANPR is comparable to other bulk-surveillance schemes like
Internet snooping, because I believe that we do have an expectation of privacy
regarding what goes through our home connections, and acting on Internet
surveillance is inherently subjective - whereas ANPR can indicate if a car is
known to be stolen or uninsured, that's not something that's open to
interpretation.

~~~
Johnny555
_it would reduce the need for inherently-dangerous hot pursuits to follow a
vehicle as the cameras would do that anyway._

It wouldn't really reduce the need for the infamous hot-pursuits because often
in these hot pursuits, the car is stolen so the driver is not who the car is
licensed to.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Hot pursuits are not primarily about identifying the driver either - it's
about following the car so they know where it is so they can apprehend the
driver. With a pursuit there's a panic, a high probability of the car being
damaged or destroyed, and possible injury or death for the driver, the police
involved, and of course, any pedestrians caught up in the way.

With a large enough ANPR network, there is no need to chase the car - so the
driver won't necessarily panic or act irrationally to evade the police -
leading to a higher probability of recovering the vehicle in good condition,
and a successful non-dramatic apprehension of the suspects as it makes it
easier to catch them by surprise, for example.

~~~
Johnny555
Right, it's not about identifying the driver, it's about apprehending the
driver.

I hope I never live in a society where the driver of a stolen car can expect
to be apprehended no matter where he stops because he'll be tracked by a
camera network so ubiquitous that he can't escape it.

Because such a ubiquitous network means that all of my travels are being
tracked and recorded too - which will likely include facial recognition, so
there really will be no escaping Big Brother... and I don't trust any
government with so much power and information over citizens to be benign.

------
shadowtree
Any project in a heavily regulated environment is not measurable that way.

The cost comes from compliance, audits, paperwork. Trials, PoCs, etc.

You also need to prove security and a long term lifecycle for the solution.
Those open source packages - are they being updated? Who validates patches?
etc etc.

Those are moats, once you're able to deliver the above, you're set for a long
time.

Good luck!

~~~
anitil
You're very right.

At a quick glance, this thing is going to need power, probably from the car
battery. You don't want it to catch fire and kill the occupants, so there's
going to be R&D in power supplies, material etc, along with regulation and
testing.

~~~
taitems
Emergency services vehicles run so much equipment they have isolated power
from engine power.

~~~
mchahn
I have noticed here in California the the police always leave their patrol
cars running when parked. I was entering a restaurant a saw a patrol car
running. I saw the officer inside and asked him why they leave the cars
running. I asked him if was to be ready to take off fast.

He laughed and said that there is so much electronics inside that the battery
would run down during lunch.

I didn't think to ask why they didn't turn off the electronics. I also didn't
ask what they do at the end of the day.

~~~
KGIII
Boot up times for the computer(s). That takes a while, though I imagine it is
getting faster.

------
mintplant
> Although, the solution would occasionally have issues with particular
> letters.

A mistake like this can and has destroyed lives.

[http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/](http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/)

> Police officer John Edwards was patrolling a quiet neighborhood in Bellaire,
> Texas when he saw an SUV driven by two young African-American men. It was
> just before 2am on December 31, 2008. Edwards followed the SUV and ran the
> license plate number. His computer indicated that the SUV was stolen, and
> Edwards drew his gun and told the two men to get down on the ground. It
> wasn’t until later that he realized he’d typed the wrong license plate
> number into his computer. He was off by one digit. By the time he realized
> his mistake, one of the men had already been shot in the chest at close
> range.

~~~
anitil
This sort of thing doesn't really happen in Aus. I could see someone getting
arrested and spending a night in jail unnecessarily or maaaaaaybe tased (and
to be clear, whether we consider this a fair price to pay is a different
question), but police rarely shoot people here.

~~~
andrewstuart
Yes it does.

Just the other day the trigger happy cops shot a couple of people at a
swingers party.

~~~
anitil
This is what I get for not following the news. I also remember a case years
ago on Bondi beach where a guy having a psychotic break and brandishing a
knife was killed. If I remember correctly this was used a justification for
introducing tasers.

I should have said rarely.

~~~
camillomiller
A knife in the hands of a psycho is much more dangerous than you might think.
If he's at close enough range a shooting reaction is correct.

~~~
vincnetas
You don't need to shoot to kill. You only need to disable a attacker, not kill
him. "German Police shoot a knife wielding man in the leg in self defense"

[https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cfe_1440199540&comments=1](https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cfe_1440199540&comments=1)

~~~
jmnicolas
Anybody that shot a handgun at the range will tell you that hitting a small
moving target like a leg is not a guaranteed shot even by an experienced
shooter (add stress, low visibility etc and this becomes even trickier).

If you come at cops with a knife I think it's "reasonable" they shoot you.
What is not reasonable in the case of US cops is that they seem to shoot even
non dangerous people and get away with it.

~~~
DanBC
And yet UK police don't tend to shoot people with knives.

------
taitems
Author here, hi HN/Reddit.

I had hoped I'd made it clear enough, but by no means am I recommending
something I cobbled together in an hour on the couch be rolled out as a
competitor to BlueNet. I mean shit, I'm web scraping their database and using
compressed footage from cheap dashcams. The algorithm is also untrained.

I was, on the other hand, hoping to promote healthy discussion and pose some
good questions related to IT procurement here in Australia. There needs to be
a happy medium between what I've wired up and an $86M solution.

For a full disclaimer, many many years ago I did work on various Victoria
Police IT projects in a previous company. While our projects were delivered on
time and on budget, we did hear some horror stories about what the
multinational consulting firms were charging.

~~~
hoodoof
I worked in government once and could not believe the cost required to get
what I saw as small projects done.

In the end I understood, when I came to understand, as other in this thread
have pointed out, that there's support, rollout, training, documentation,
project management, planning and it goes on and on. The technical solution can
be just a small company of providing a sustainable solution to an
organization.

Having said that, you should be packing this up and selling it.

~~~
taitems
I've worked with state government and fortune 50(0)s, so I get where you're
coming from. Costs that are just part of doing business seem like enormous
waste to outsiders. That being said, I've heard some horrible war stories.
NDAs but.

------
rtpg
I feel like there's a killing to be made in "bidding for government contracts
as a service". Plus you'd be doing A Good Thing (at least in theory)

Obviously complicated requirements exist but I think there's a way of
embracing this with some skilled workers

I think that the digital service is trying this a bit

~~~
anitil
In much (all?) of Australia all government tenders have to be publicly
advertised so this is something you could definitely look in to if you were
interested. In particular, Victoria's listing is at :
[https://www.tenders.vic.gov.au/tenders/index.do](https://www.tenders.vic.gov.au/tenders/index.do)

~~~
ecdavis
I read an interesting article earlier today about IT spending in Australia:
[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-
governments-$1...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-
governments-$10bn-bill-rivals-newstart-cost/8849562)

> It found public servants were too afraid to make major changes to IT
> procurement and were not talking with other departments to avoid
> duplication.

> "A fear of external scrutiny of decisions — such as through Senate estimates
> and audits — leads to a low-risk appetite and a culture where it is 'not OK
> to fail'," the report said.

> "This means that old and familiar ICT solutions are preferred to newer and
> more innovative, but perceivably riskier, solutions."

Nobody in the APS gets fired for hiring IBM, and nobody in IBM gets fired for
screwing up major government projects.
[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-
and...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and-on-could-
have-prevented-census-outage/7963916)

~~~
anitil
While I agree, Aus has also had some success with IT projects.

Many federal projects are now under a single sign on portal that works very
well. Our taxes take less than an hour to fill out as most details are pre-
filled.

And speaking for NSW, the RTA/RMS/Whatever-they're-called-these-days (our
equivalent to the DMV for US readers) is almost fully functional without an
in-person visit.

------
kafkaesq
_Don’t ask me why, but one afternoon I had the desire to prototype a vehicle-
mounted license plate scanner that would automatically notify you if a vehicle
had been stolen or was unregistered._

Don't ask me why, but something tells me there was a bit more to the actual
Victoria Police project than just the image-scanning component. But the title
makes for good clickbait, at least.

------
kripy
Particularly relevant now that the Australian Federal Government has come out
and said that "the cost of Government IT has jumped to nearly $10 billion.":
[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-
governments-$1...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-
governments-$10bn-bill-rivals-newstart-cost/8849562). And you wonder why?

------
ruytlm
$86M does sound high, but glad to see the author at least acknowledge that
some of this would likely have been spent on improving existing
software/databases etc to support the new system. Also probably worth noting
is the cost of the labour required to develop the new system, and upgrade the
old, and design and fit out the interior of the vehicles, and to make sure
it's all done in compliance with privacy laws, and so on.

Not that I'm saying $86M is justified - rather that I can start to see how
things might add up.

------
jldugger
> I would expect part of that budget includes the replacement of several
> legacy databases and software applications to support the high frequency,
> low latency querying of license plates several times per second, per
> vehicle.

Well, if we're just checking to see if a car is registered stolen, that's
hopefully a very small database. A simple hash table should be sufficient for
a yes/no decision. But God only knows what goes on inside the DMV, and getting
that data out into a rapidly queryable state could be tricky.

~~~
bigiain
I would have thought the number of known-stolen plates would be small enough
you could push the entire list out to the device.

Google reckons there's only 4.5 million registered vehicles in Victoria (.au)
- with 6 character [A-Z0-9] = 36bit/5byte plates that's only gonna need ~22
meg to store them all and you've got a few bits for "flags" \- even if 10% of
them are listed as stolen at any time, you'd only need a couple of meg for the
"stolen car list" \- even without handwaving away the overhead for the data
structure, this seems a reasonable solution. If you want the make/model/colour
info you could then just query the remote db when you get a hit for a plate
with the "stolen" flag set (or perhaps the "vehicle of interest" flag).

Of course nobody's gonna build it that way, because then you lose the data set
of plate locations you can own without needing to ask for consent. This will,
of course, store GPS location and timestamp of every plate is acquires, and if
they're being particularly audacious, the actual imagery captured as well.
That's how you make this a $80mil project... :-/

(Of course private industry already has this - tow trucks carry alpr rigs and
sell the data to repo agencies in the US, I'm told...)

------
bradfa
The local populace has a $170 million/year problem of stolen cars. Government
spends $86 million (one time cost? estimated cost over X years? it's unclear)
to help solve this problem. Doesn't seem like that bad of an economic tradeoff
on the face of it, really.

I can understand that the $86 million seems like a lot until you realize the
kinds of capabilities that an automotive camera system like has to comply with
and all of the integration needed with other software/systems/services and the
fact that this cost is likely a total cost over many years as it sounds much
more sensational. Just the initial report from Deloitte cost the government
$115,000.

In their first trial in 2014-2015, which lasted 15 months, with only 6 cars
outfitted, ended up identifying and impounding 240 stolen cars and increased
revenue from additional tickets by hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
That's pretty impressive! Now they're rolling out to not just 6 cars but to
220 total, which in theory should improve policing efforts.

References: [http://www.caradvice.com.au/350313/victoria-police-to-
consid...](http://www.caradvice.com.au/350313/victoria-police-to-consider-
implementing-86-million-live-video-anpr-system-for-patrol-cars/)
[http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victoria-
polices-...](http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victoria-polices-
hightech-bluenet-cars-are-nabbing-thousands-of-motorists-by-scanning-
numberplates/news-story/b17e68dabe72879c26528e70176689c4)

------
aaron695
> Imagine a passive system scanning fellow motorists for an abductors car that
> automatically alerts authorities and family members to their current
> location and direction.

Seriously? You jumped the shark from interesting tech, to think of the
children it's ok to go all Orwell here.

First App I'd make. Cheating spouse app. Is your partner or Ex hiding from
you. Pay here for tracking info. Part of which goes to the people collating
data.

~~~
bigiain
Nah - go B2B not B2C. Collect all the data and sell it to insurance companies.
Let the health insurance companies increase people's rates for regularly using
McDonalds drivethroughs. Let the auto insurance companies bump up your rates
because you are seen near racetracks or vehicle modifiers. Charge income
protections and disability insures to search for claimants to see what they're
doing when they think they;re not under scrutiny "Mr Smith, you claim to be
unfit to return to work, but you're paying golf twice a week!"

------
ChuckMcM
Yup. I did something similar with a RasPi camera and OpenCV. On my house it
store and record every license plate that drives by and/or stops. It certainly
leads to some ethical questions (not that you couldn't record this data going
all "Rear Window" on the neighborhood but it's quite easy to understand all
the coming and goings of your neighbors.

------
throwawayjava
I wonder about the cost of licensing patents for a project like this one.

------
z3t4
When reaching 90% completion, like an MVP, those remaining 10% will take much
longer. I also get angry when tax money is seemingly being wasted. What should
you do though ? Offer to do it for free ? I'm a developer and I like building
stuff, I do not like selling stuff. Thankfully there are people that actually
like selling, so I suggest finding such a partner and be prepared to spend
five years completing the last 10% and hopefully make some money.

------
gleenn
Amazing and super sad that a government contract could ever be submitted for
such an embarrassingly high amount. I hope more people buying gov software
contracts read this.

------
grecy
This is fantastic!

I honestly believe it is examples like this that clearly show how quickly the
world is changing, and how massive organizations are a thing of the past.

You don't need thousands of employees and $86M, you need a couple of smart
people and a weekend.

Uber and Air BnB have to some degree done this already, I have no doubt the
exact same thing will happen in health, education, transportation and many,
many other aspects of our lives.

------
analognoise
You can't say it's expensive without knowing the requirements - this is not
only misleading, but it says something negative about the overall level of
discourse we have.

"Why did this system cost 86 million dollars" would be much more informative.
It could be that the whole thing is a waste, but that would require an actual
analysis.

------
hoodoof
You could now integrate auto gun aiming on the felon and give them 20 seconds
to comply.

------
5_minutes
How did you get to the number 220 of vehicles?

~~~
taitems
It was sourced from an article. I originally built the tool to see if it could
be done (given I knew the DB existed), and then did some Googling and found
BlueNet. I wasn't actually trying to do it better/cheaper, it just so happened
it had been done before.

------
master_yoda_1
The author is just calling some api, I don't know how much technical knowledge
people here at hacker news has, but this person is talking BS. No open source
software are used here.

To the author: please spend some time and try to analyze the problem first. I
don't think you even get the problem right, or know what open source is. A
free api IS NOT an example of OPEN SOURCE.

~~~
taitems
Not sure if trolling, but:

I'm using an open source license plate recognition system (OPENALPR), taking
the produced registration number, and THEN querying the (yes, closed source)
records database via web scraping. All tools used to achieve this, bar where
the records are kept, are open source (openalpr, cheerio, node-horseman etc).

