5 ms·

When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job

223 points by xelfer 9y ago

throwawayjava 9y ago
I wonder about the cost of licensing patents for a project like this one.
shadowtree 9y ago
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!
- gridscomputing 9y ago
  You forgot Celebration Dinners!
- boznz 9y ago
  So just add 20 bean-counters to your team and you can bid for the other state contracts :-)
  - koolba 9y ago
    Not quite. You'll also need a minority owned business to act a pass through entity.
- anitil 9y ago
  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.
  - dna_polymerase 9y ago
    Sure, if there never was something before hooked to a car battery. Or if the material would have to be kryptonite. $86 Million is just a way way way to high number for such a project. Of course the 57 lines here won't do it in production and I acknowledge a certain need for R&D but this number is just too high.
    - Retric 9y ago
      Reading plates is likely a small fraction of overall costs. Consider, with 220 people cars in a trial your going to need someone to write a manual / answer help desk questions / etc. which have nothing to do with the actual device but do add costs. As to the device it needs to do more than just read licence plates. It must compare them with something which means it needs to get over the air updates for a list of licence plates. So, now you need some back end system to get important lists of licence plates from various other systems. As to the device, how much coverage does it get aka does it need multiple cameras. And on it goes.
  - taitems 9y ago
    Emergency services vehicles run so much equipment they have isolated power from engine power.
    - mchahn 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        Boot up times for the computer(s). That takes a while, though I imagine it is getting faster.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  Oh come on. Not all heavy-handed regulation would pass a cost-benefit analysis. Nor does it cost 80 million to run some POCs and QA on a project like this. At nearly 400,000 AUD per vehicle, the question should be what better opportunities to help people did the Australian Govt pass up in order to engage this project?
  - alexbeloi 9y ago
    I think the point was that the costs are justified by the burden of meeting regulatory requirements, not the benefit of the regulation.
    - wallace_f 9y ago
      That is understood. My point was that this kind of spending on a project like this should beg the question, "what better opportunities did govt pass up to engage this project," rather than responding w/ complacency; i.e. 'that's just the cost once you factor in compliance.'
  - callmeal 9y ago
    Once you start taking into account audit and recordkeeping requirements, you will quickly run into that figure.
- taitems 9y ago
  As an aside, the trials and PoCs have already taken place as a separate project worth only $100,000.
- tweedledee 9y ago
  The government is fairly corrupt. This is a make my friend rich project. See the Myki card for another example.
  - odabaxok 9y ago
    I don't know about Australia, but this is completely true in Central Europe. An average Joe cannot tell how much an IT project can cost, so IT projects are the best place to "make your friend rich". See the slovensko.sk project (https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20429221/governmental-agency-plans-to-change-slovensko-sk-website-without-competition.html https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20429221/governmental-agency-plan...).
ruytlm 9y ago
$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.
rtpg 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    I read an interesting article earlier today about IT spending in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-governments-$10bn-bill-rivals-newstart-cost/8849562 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-governments-$1... > 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-on-could-have-prevented-census-outage/7963916 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and...
    - anitil 9y ago
      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.
jldugger 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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...)
gleenn 9y ago
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.
kafkaesq 9y ago
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.
mintplant 9y ago
> 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.
- panic 9y ago
  I'm not sure the license plate scanner is the one to blame here. Since when does stealing a car carry a death sentence?
  - fao_ 9y ago
    Exactly, the fault lies with the trigger-happy police, not with the software.
    - mintplant 9y ago
      Of course. But it is precisely this "trigger-happy" nature which makes an introducing a system with an appreciable error rate dangerous. This at least partially (partially) accounts for higher costs.
      - bigiain 9y ago
        I wonder what the comparison of error rates between simple ANPR and "cops typing plates in" looks like...
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
taitems 9y ago
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.
- anitil 9y ago
  Great article, loved it.
- hoodoof 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
- bigiain 9y ago
  I've got a war story about a government project we did for which we invoiced in total ~$80k, which by the time it made it to the media was a "$3.5 million dollar project".
analognoise 9y ago
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.
Johnny555 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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"
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    The FBI basically did this where they amassed hearsay about the important people in groups they didn't like then mailed anonymous letters to their partners, friends, family, etc. The term you should Google is "cointelpro". IIRC recently there was a city in CA that mailed everyone who drove down a certain street a letter in an obvious colored envelope saying "Dear, Whoever, consider yourself informed that prostitutes go here, kthanksbye". This is a public road that people drive down to get from A to B.
  - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
    > 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.
kripy 9y ago
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-$10bn-bill-rivals-newstart-cost/8849562 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-governments-$1.... And you wonder why?
5_minutes 9y ago
How did you get to the number 220 of vehicles?
- taitems 9y ago
  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.
grecy 9y ago
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.
hoodoof 9y ago
You could now integrate auto gun aiming on the felon and give them 20 seconds to comply.
aaron695 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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!"
master_yoda_1 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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).
- keithnz 9y ago
  nope, no one on HN has any technical knowledge whatsover.... all the smart tech peeps have gone over to this thing called "myspace", you might want to give it a go :)
ChuckMcM 9y ago
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.
bradfa 9y ago
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-consider-implementing-86-million-live-video-anpr-system-for-patrol-cars/ http://www.caradvice.com.au/350313/victoria-police-to-consid... http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victoria-polices-hightech-bluenet-cars-are-nabbing-thousands-of-motorists-by-scanning-numberplates/news-story/b17e68dabe72879c26528e70176689c4 http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victoria-polices-...
z3t4 9y ago
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.

223 points by xelfer 9y ago

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

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!

gridscomputing 9y ago
You forgot Celebration Dinners!
boznz 9y ago
So just add 20 bean-counters to your team and you can bid for the other state contracts :-)
- koolba 9y ago
  Not quite. You'll also need a minority owned business to act a pass through entity.
anitil 9y ago
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.
- dna_polymerase 9y ago
  Sure, if there never was something before hooked to a car battery. Or if the material would have to be kryptonite. $86 Million is just a way way way to high number for such a project. Of course the 57 lines here won't do it in production and I acknowledge a certain need for R&D but this number is just too high.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Reading plates is likely a small fraction of overall costs. Consider, with 220 people cars in a trial your going to need someone to write a manual / answer help desk questions / etc. which have nothing to do with the actual device but do add costs. As to the device it needs to do more than just read licence plates. It must compare them with something which means it needs to get over the air updates for a list of licence plates. So, now you need some back end system to get important lists of licence plates from various other systems. As to the device, how much coverage does it get aka does it need multiple cameras. And on it goes.
- taitems 9y ago
  Emergency services vehicles run so much equipment they have isolated power from engine power.
  - mchahn 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Boot up times for the computer(s). That takes a while, though I imagine it is getting faster.
wallace_f 9y ago
Oh come on. Not all heavy-handed regulation would pass a cost-benefit analysis. Nor does it cost 80 million to run some POCs and QA on a project like this. At nearly 400,000 AUD per vehicle, the question should be what better opportunities to help people did the Australian Govt pass up in order to engage this project?
- alexbeloi 9y ago
  I think the point was that the costs are justified by the burden of meeting regulatory requirements, not the benefit of the regulation.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    That is understood. My point was that this kind of spending on a project like this should beg the question, "what better opportunities did govt pass up to engage this project," rather than responding w/ complacency; i.e. 'that's just the cost once you factor in compliance.'
- callmeal 9y ago
  Once you start taking into account audit and recordkeeping requirements, you will quickly run into that figure.
taitems 9y ago
As an aside, the trials and PoCs have already taken place as a separate project worth only $100,000.
tweedledee 9y ago
The government is fairly corrupt. This is a make my friend rich project. See the Myki card for another example.
- odabaxok 9y ago
  I don't know about Australia, but this is completely true in Central Europe. An average Joe cannot tell how much an IT project can cost, so IT projects are the best place to "make your friend rich". See the slovensko.sk project (https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20429221/governmental-agency-plans-to-change-slovensko-sk-website-without-competition.html https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20429221/governmental-agency-plan...).

ruytlm 9y ago

$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.

rtpg 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  I read an interesting article earlier today about IT spending in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-governments-$10bn-bill-rivals-newstart-cost/8849562 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-governments-$1... > 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-on-could-have-prevented-census-outage/7963916 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-25/turning-router-off-and...
  - anitil 9y ago
    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.

jldugger 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
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...)

gleenn 9y ago

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.

kafkaesq 9y ago

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.

mintplant 9y ago

> 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.

panic 9y ago
I'm not sure the license plate scanner is the one to blame here. Since when does stealing a car carry a death sentence?
- fao_ 9y ago
  Exactly, the fault lies with the trigger-happy police, not with the software.
  - mintplant 9y ago
    Of course. But it is precisely this "trigger-happy" nature which makes an introducing a system with an appreciable error rate dangerous. This at least partially (partially) accounts for higher costs.
    - bigiain 9y ago
      I wonder what the comparison of error rates between simple ANPR and "cops typing plates in" looks like...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

taitems 9y ago

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.

anitil 9y ago
Great article, loved it.
hoodoof 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
bigiain 9y ago
I've got a war story about a government project we did for which we invoiced in total ~$80k, which by the time it made it to the media was a "$3.5 million dollar project".

analognoise 9y ago

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.

Johnny555 9y ago

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 9y ago
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"
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  The FBI basically did this where they amassed hearsay about the important people in groups they didn't like then mailed anonymous letters to their partners, friends, family, etc. The term you should Google is "cointelpro". IIRC recently there was a city in CA that mailed everyone who drove down a certain street a letter in an obvious colored envelope saying "Dear, Whoever, consider yourself informed that prostitutes go here, kthanksbye". This is a public road that people drive down to get from A to B.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  > 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.

kripy 9y ago

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-$10bn-bill-rivals-newstart-cost/8849562 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-governments-$1.... And you wonder why?

5_minutes 9y ago

How did you get to the number 220 of vehicles?

taitems 9y ago
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.

grecy 9y ago

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.

hoodoof 9y ago

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

aaron695 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
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!"

master_yoda_1 9y ago

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 9y ago
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).
keithnz 9y ago
nope, no one on HN has any technical knowledge whatsover.... all the smart tech peeps have gone over to this thing called "myspace", you might want to give it a go :)

ChuckMcM 9y ago

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.

bradfa 9y ago

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

z3t4 9y ago

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.