Set Number License Grátis

This video was made possible by Curiosity Stream. When you sign up for any subscription at CuriosityStream.com/HAI, you’ll also get access to Nebula—the streaming service that HAI is a part of. One day, I’m going to make a joke that is so bad, so unconscionably corny, that one of you is going to snap. You’re going to march right down to your nearest DMV, slam some bills down on the counter, and demand a shiny new vanity plate with “SAMSUCKS” emblazoned on it. Unfortunately for you, the DMV guy will probably shrug and tell you that while you make a compelling argument, “SAMSUCKS” is just one of those things you can’t put on a license plate. And, before you get any other ideas, you also can’t put death threats, names of reproductive organs, suggestions that you’re a cop, religious references, swear words, calls for mass genocide, claims that you’re wildly intoxicated while driving your car, or, after a small debacle back in 2016, ‘NULL.’ Not “null” as in nothing, but “null” as in, y’know, the word “null.” Now, it’s not that “null” is secretly offensive or some kind of really vague innuendo. Rather, it has something to do with how police databases work, but, in order to explain how, we first have to look at what happened to the one guy who made the terrible mistake of changing his license plate to “NULL.” In 2016, security researcher Joseph Tartaro decided to get a dorky pair of matching license plates for him and his wife—“NULL” for him, and “VOID” for the missus. Y’know, like… that legal doublet meaning “having no binding power or validity!” Cute, right? Now, as romantic as that sounds, Romeo here had a secondary motive in mind: he thought that these cute matching license plates could, theoretically, confuse citation systems and enable him and his wife to live out a life of petty crime completely undetected—I mean, what’s the last time your pathetic box of chocolates did that? You see, “null” is a common marker used in all sorts of different computer databases to indicate missing or inapplicable information; Tartaro figured that this also applied to whatever database dealt with California license plate numbers, and, unfortunately for him, he was 100% right. Or, like, 95% right, since the only part he got wrong is what would happen to him if he was right. Instead of cruising under the police’s radar, blowing past stop signs and running down pedestrians without so much as a slap on the wrist, Tartaro started racking up tickets right and left—but not for violations he had committed. In fact, he hadn’t committed nearly any violations since he’d registered the plate, and he definitely hadn’t committed violations in every single Californian city with dozens of different vehicles over a timeline of two years, before his plate even existed. Or maybe he had, and lied to every media outlet that interviewed him. Who knows? The simplest explanation, however, is that every time a lazy California cop forgot to plug in the license plate number for a ticket, the...