There’s a arms race on in the automatic traffic camera world. As better and better camera technology is developed for the police, industrious inventors crank out products to defeat them. Ethical problems? Maybe for some, but you know what they say: “Find a need and fill it.†Wired has more:
Traffic-light tickets have ticked off a gazillion drivers, some of whom have had to [fork over $500][3] for running a light. Now there’s a way for you to throw a monkey wrench into that money-making machine.
Jonathan Dandrow has developed [noPhoto][4], which renders the pix snapped by those revenue-generating robo-cams useless. The technology behind noPhoto is fairly simple. At the top of the gadget, which doubles as a license plate frame, there’s an optical flash trigger that detects the flash of the traffic-light camera. That trigger sets off one or both xenon flashes in the sides of the noPhoto, so when the traffic-light camera opens its shutter, there’s too much light and the picture of your license plate is overexposed. Big Brother can’t read your plate.