Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer for life

Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by spangry on Thursday November 28, 2019 @09:28PM (#21661536)

I hate it when governments do this, and they seem to do it a lot. The socially optimal price is the marginal cost of providing the service. In this case, the marginal cost is essentially 0 so the search should be free. They're leaving welfare gains on the table by setting such a ridiculous price.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 on Thursday November 28, 2019 @10:15PM (#21661725)

Unfortunately, this is one of the most effective methods of discouraging wanton scraping.

I’m not sure about the laws in Canada, but aren’t these convictions public domain? Presumably someone could just scrape that and build a free API?

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by brandon272 on Thursday November 28, 2019 @10:30PM (#21661797)

> Unfortunately, this is one of the most effective methods of discouraging wanton scraping.

Maybe they could require you to add (and verify) a credit card and then not charge it for fewer than 30 queries a month.

Of course, it's a solution that brings other problems, but it's one way of using payment systems to provide the service and keep it free for everyone but the scrapers.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by LorenPechtel on Friday November 29, 2019 @02:46PM (#21666379)

A simple, pretty much unscrapable system: App on your phone that you use to take a picture of the license. The system returns the current status.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by Mo3 on Friday November 29, 2019 @03:33PM (#21666667)

That is far from unscrapable. Could probably be done within hours with the Android emulator.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by LorenPechtel on Thursday December 05, 2019 @01:20PM (#21714721)

If you had a picture of the license you could certainly scrape it--but then you're doing it legitimately anyway, no need to scrape. Without a picture of the license it's not going to return anything but an error.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 on Saturday November 30, 2019 @01:19AM (#21668856)

And I’m sure it would be openALPR on the backend, which would gladly parse a dynamically generated “picture” of a license.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by lacker on Saturday November 30, 2019 @12:37AM (#21668750)

They could have just added a captcha.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by emsy on Friday November 29, 2019 @02:41AM (#21662791)

Ask for name and date of birth. Voila, no scraping.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by distances on Friday November 29, 2019 @04:56AM (#21663339)

With the current state of PII leaks, I'm not so sure.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by throwaway40324 on Friday November 29, 2019 @01:42AM (#21662557)

Hmm.. hold my, no wait.. take my beer.

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by wutbrodo on Friday November 29, 2019 @12:42AM (#21662321)

I'd imagine that the socially optimal price is _below_ marginal cost, since it's improving compliance with a law that (I hope) is uncontroversially utility-increasing

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Re:Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer fo... by C1sc0cat on Friday November 29, 2019 @04:27AM (#21663207)

Probably don't want tabloid newspapers just checking everyones status regularly

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