How a 'NULL' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell

How a 'NULL' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell

Joseph Tartaro never meant to cause this much trouble. Especially for himself.


In late 2016, Tartaro decided to get a vanity license plate. A security researcher by trade, he ticked down possibilities that related to his work: SEGFAULT, maybe, or something to do with vulnerabilities. Sifting through his options, he started typing “null pointer,” but caught himself after the first word. NULL. Funny. “The idea was I’d get VOID for my wife’s car, so our driveway would be NULL and VOID,” Tartaro says.


The joke had layers, though. As Tartaro well knew, and as he explained in a recent talk at the Defcon hacker conference, “null” is also a text string that in many programming languages signifies a value that is empty or undefined. To many computers, null is the void.


That set-up also has a brutal punchline—one that left Tartaro at one point facing $12,049 of traffic fines wrongly sent his way. He’s still not sure if he’ll be able to reregister his car this year without paying someone else's tickets. And thanks to the Kafkaesque loop he’s caught in, it’s not clear if the citations will ever stop coming.

Null Set


In his Defcon talk, Tartaro played up the idea that he had initially hoped a NULL plate might get him out of tickets—that, once fed into the database of offenders, the violation quite literally would not compute. But he says now that pranks weren’t actually his initial focus. If anything, he was surprised that the California DMV website let him register NULL in the first place.



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