DMV BLOG

Dan Pursley, Las Vegas

Monday, July 20, 2009 | 2:03 a.m.

The other day my wife and I went to the Sahara Avenue office of the Department of Motor Vehicles. After a half-hour or so of waiting in line just to check in, we joined several hundred people waiting to be served.

Then, after another two-hour wait, we spent about 10 minutes with a friendly government employee until we were finished.

On that note, for those of you who want it, when you think “single-payer health care,” think “DMV.” Do you really want the government to run the health care system?

So to all of you that are a:

SpeedingTicket Hoe
Court Hoe
Obstruction of Justice Hoe
License Plate Hoe
DMV Hoe
TrafficSchool Hoe

…and so on…

Read Article below:
—-

It’s not slang! Nev. court permits ‘HOE’ license
By BRENDAN RILEY – 4 days ago

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — A Las Vegas man won a courtroom battle Wednesday with the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles over his “HOE” license plate, which the agency tried to cancel on grounds that he was using a slang reference to prostitutes.

The high court said the DMV based its opposition to William Junge’s plate on definitions found in the Web-based Urban Dictionary, which includes user contributions. Justices ruled that the contributed definitions “do not always reflect generally accepted definitions for words.”

Junge, whose case was pursued by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, said he got the “HOE” plate in 1999 for his Chevy Tahoe, after being told “TAHOE” wasn’t available.

“It’s nonsense,” Junge said of the state agency’s efforts to pull his plates. The 62-year-old said he was referring to his vehicle’s model and not to prostitutes with his plates, adding: “That was their interpretation. Shame on them.”

The high court said Urban Dictionary “allows, if not encourages, users to invent new words or attribute new, not generally accepted meanings to existing words.”

But “a reasonable mind would not accept the Urban Dictionary entries alone as adequate to support a conclusion that the word ‘HOE’ is offensive or inappropriate,” the justices wrote.

Rebecca Gasca of the ACLU of Nevada said the attempt by a DMV supervisor to cancel Junge’s license plate violated constitutional First Amendment protections. Junge dropped out of the litigation after the DMV appealed to the Supreme Court, but the ACLU continued the fight.

“While the Urban Dictionary might be an entertaining Web site about the English language, the court acknowledged it’s not a reliable source for DMV decision-making about whether a license plate is vulgar,” Gasca said.

In written briefs submitted to the state Supreme Court, an attorney for the DMV argued there was no First Amendment violation and the state has a reasonable basis for regulating vanity plates on vehicles. It also said the term “hoe” was derogatory toward women.

Credit: AP for this article

It is possible to use publicly available data on state and date of birth to predict someone’s Social Security number, particularly if they were born after 1988 and in smaller states, according to an article published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The ability to use statistic inference to predict the sensitive data exposes the Social Security numbers to identity fraud risks on “mass scales,” the article said.

Social Security numbers “were designed as identifiers at a time when personal computers and identity theft were unthinkable; today, abused as authentication devices, they enable an ‘architecture of vulnerability,’ in which losses are incurred even in absence of fraud, because of costs caused by attempts to defend, and exploit, the system,” the article concluded.

The researchers from Carnegie Mellon University analyzed Social Security numbers of people who have died to detect statistical patterns in the assignment of numbers. They were then able to use those patterns to predict a range of values likely to include a living person’s Social Security number. Birth data, meanwhile, can be inferred from data brokers, voter registration lists, online white pages, and social-networking profiles, the report said.

The researchers identified in a single attempt the first five Social Security digits for 44 percent of the records of the people listed as dead from 1989 to 2003 and the complete Social Security numbers in fewer than 1,000 attempts for 8.5 percent of those records.

On average, the researchers matched on the first attempt the first five digits for 7 percent of all records for people born nationwide between 1973 and 1988.

“Extrapolating to the U.S. living population, this would imply the potential identification of millions of SSNs for individuals whose birth data were available,” the article says.

The report goes on to give an example of how someone could get the entire Social Security number by renting a botnet to apply for credit cards impersonating 18-year-old West Virginia-born residents. Following numerous assumptions, including that the attacker can find birth data for 50 percent of the potential targets and that inquiries with the correct first seven of nine digits are sufficient for a credit reporting agency to answer a positive match in half of the cases, an attacker could potentially harvest credentials at rates as high as 47 per minute, obtaining 4,000 credentials within two hours before the IP addresses used in the botnet were blacklisted, the article said.

WICHITA — As I stood in line to get a new driver’s license today, it occurred to me that if the Department of Motor Vehicles were a business, it would never make it.

No credit cards are accepted. No debit cards. No checks over $300.

There are no cell phones at any time.

No chairs to sit on while waiting.

And no discernable air conditioning to enjoy while standing there desperately searching for cash in one’s purse or wallet.

A few other handy things to know: You should occasionally look at your driver’s license because apparently you generally aren’t notified you have an expired one until a police officer three blocks from your house pulls you over and alerts you (for a small fee of $86).

You can’t go to just any DMV office for a new license. Admittedly, I probably should have checked on this one before waiting in the first line at 21st and Maize before then heading to 21st and Amidon.

You have to show up with proof of your current address. And not just any proof will do.

Not to completely cast blame, though.

There were some quite nice DMV employees willing to helpfully explain each step I was doing wrong.

And I further admit, the red ink I got on my new white linen shirt while attempting to write this blog while in line was completely my own fault.

what choices do drivers have to consider when choosing which agency they wish to monitor their driving/licensing.

why is it that the dmv for california in this instance, is like a monopoly.

I want to know.

I don’t know if this has been written about, but yesterday on the PBS News Hour John Boehner said something that I think deserves a lot more attention because it reveals how Republicans just don’t like middle and low income people. I actually think it’s borderline racist, but at the least it’s the height of hypocrisy for a Government official to dis essential Government agencies like the DMV and the U.S. Post Office.

“I’m opposed to a government option, period. Listen, if you like going to the DMV, and you think they do a great job, or if you like going to the post office and think it’s the most efficient thing you have run into, then you will love the government-run health care system that they’re proposing, because that’s basically what you’re going to have.” - U.S. Representative John Boehner, R-Ohio