I'm not seeing what TypeScript brings to the party here? Looks like regular old JavaScript plus a vanilla dashboard.

Very similar to this post from a few months ago - https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker

In CO, there isn't an online search. When you apply, you have to list your top options and hope one is available. I'm also not a normal person. I'm an engineer and this was not good enough for me.

I emailed government employees until I figured out who was responsible for license plate records. I submitted a CORA (Colorado Open Records Request) for the entirety of their dataset. I had hoped to get the data on some regular cadence to build a simple online service for others. Unfortunately, they flat out refused and wouldn't discuss options.

When I told my family what license plate I wanted, they laughed at me and said "No one has that, just go get it". And so I did and it worked. I now have what I consider to be the best possible license plate in Colorado: "LCNZPLT"

Occasionally I'll see someone walk by my car, see the plate, think for a few seconds and then start laughing. Mission accomplished!

>EVENTVALIDATION is (was?) a novel security measure implemented in 2006 by the ASP.NET team to "prevents unauthorized requests sent by potentially malicious users from the client [..] to ensure that each and every postback and callback event originates from the expected user interface elements, the page adds an extra layer of validation on events".

The attack it prevents is called XSRF, and this security measure wasn't novel in 2006.

It's a fun story of course, but it also seems that people like OP who abuse public APIs are why we can't have nice things, and why so many web pages these days are bogged down by Cloudflare and Anubis interstitials that waste human time.

I did something similar to get OnlineOrNot's twitter handle - I realised that unclaimed names would 404 and so I set up a check to get an alert when that happened.

What character set does it use? For example, can "O" and "0" considered different characters or same character, and are some letters/numbers not used? If so, then how many they say are possible is not quite that simple, since some might match (so they cannot simply be added together) and some might not be possible.

I did something similar with CA a few months back - https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ca-plate-checker

Next steps would be to make it LLM assisted and to generate common number/letter replacement combos

I got my vanity phone number this way too. However key point is to have a registrar with an insecure lookup endpoint like in the article.

Most endpoints now only give you a list pre generated numbers to choose from, AND that endpoint is rate limited to the tits with reCaptcha. No more script kiddies.

Hey, would you please consider adding an RSS feed to your blog? I remember liking your post about Waffle house and now also this one, so I tried to add it to my RSS reader. But unfortunately no feed is available.