
Digital license plates finally hit the road in California - ALee
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/17409112/digital-license-plates-california-reviver-auto
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King-Aaron
Aside from the advertising angle, there's not many of those 'benefits' listed
there which couldn't be achieved more cost effectively than with a traditional
sticker (i.e. the handicap badge, etc). Police cars tend to already identify
stolen or unregistered vehicles, and I don't see why adding vanity messages
would be worth the additional money. All I can see here is increased
complexity and cost, with a much shorter lifespan than a traditional aluminium
or plastic plate.

Of course, setting it up to have a refresh rate that was out-of-sync with
multinova speed cameras (and distorting any captured image of it) would be
interesting.

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closeparen
I always thought digital license plates would be privacy controls against
ALPR. You could thwart casual trackers by displaying a rolling code that only
police could link to a specific vehicle registration, ideally generating an
audit trail along the way. Or skip plates entirely and do a cryptographic
challenge/response with a transponder. Updating registration stickers is such
a weird non-problem to solve. They could've done that server-side years ago.

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raggi
Instead the plate embeds "targeted messaging" and makes tracking even easier.
Cheap at only $7/mo!

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ConcernedCoder
Direct to consumer advertising in stop-n-go traffic...of course that's a
thing.

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oceanghost
This idea seems so, hostile. I'm not allowed to use my phone in my car but I
can look at advertising that turns bad traffic into a revenue stream?

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jakeogh
Finally? So typical to embed the propaganda at the lowest level.

only took 3 years "finally!":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8950403#8950625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8950403#8950625)

Whew, glad that "finally" happened!

CA is like the England of the US. Collapsing under it's regulatory weight, but
not fast enough.

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rdiddly
Oh boy, a new attack surface! drool, drool

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jenhsun
So it's basically an iPad in the back. Can it play TV?

