<i>Imagine a passive system scanning fellow motorists for an abductors car that automatically alerts authorities and family members to their current location and direction.</i><p>That's the same argument that police departments use "Well we'll only use it to capture child abductors and stolen cars and stuff".<p>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.<p>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.
Any project in a heavily regulated environment is not measurable that way.<p>The cost comes from compliance, audits, paperwork. Trials, PoCs, etc.<p>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.<p>Those are moats, once you're able to deliver the above, you're set for a long time.<p>Good luck!
> Although, the solution would occasionally have issues with particular letters.<p>A mistake like this can and has destroyed lives.<p><a href="http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/" rel="nofollow">http://thisiscriminal.com/episode-18-695bgk/</a><p>> 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.
Author here, hi HN/Reddit.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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)<p>Obviously complicated requirements exist but I think there's a way of embracing this with some skilled workers<p>I think that the digital service is trying this a bit
<i>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.</i><p>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.
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.": <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-governments-$10bn-bill-rivals-newstart-cost/8849562" rel="nofollow">http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-28/federal-governments-$1...</a>. And you wonder why?
$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.<p>Not that I'm saying $86M is justified - rather that I can start to see how things might add up.
> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>References:
<a href="http://www.caradvice.com.au/350313/victoria-police-to-consider-implementing-86-million-live-video-anpr-system-for-patrol-cars/" rel="nofollow">http://www.caradvice.com.au/350313/victoria-police-to-consid...</a>
<a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victoria-polices-hightech-bluenet-cars-are-nabbing-thousands-of-motorists-by-scanning-numberplates/news-story/b17e68dabe72879c26528e70176689c4" rel="nofollow">http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victoria-polices-...</a>
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.
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.
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.
This is fantastic!<p>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.<p>You don't need thousands of employees and $86M, you need a couple of smart people and a weekend.<p>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.
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.<p>"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.
> Imagine a passive system scanning fellow motorists for an abductors car that automatically alerts authorities and family members to their current location and direction.<p>Seriously? You jumped the shark from interesting tech, to think of the children it's ok to go all Orwell here.<p>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.
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.<p>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.