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The Single Vigilante Behind Facebook's 'Real Name' Crackdown
Molly McHugh sends this story from Daily Dot:
When Facebook issued an apology this week for suspending user accounts that had what it alleged to be fake names, it pinned the whole debacle on one person. This "individual," Facebook reasoned, sewed confusion into its flawed reporting system—intended to protect against bullying and online abuse. Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox explains that Facebook was caught “off guard” by a lone actor who reported “several hundred” accounts as fake. According to our source, who claims to have spent "hours and hours" systematically reporting Facebook users from the drag community and beyond, thousands of accounts were suspended—and they've been at it for weeks. ... Given the timing and the accounts suspended, they believe that they are in fact the mystery "individual" who threw a wrench into Facebook's system, noted in Facebook's explanation of the events. "Considering the hours and hours I spent reporting accounts over the course of the past month, it is likely that I am."
OK, I stopped reading at the ad hominem, the rest of the drivel you posted is a complete fucking waste of time.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Facebook applied the same rule to everybody. People in the LGBT community objected. Facebook backed down and apologized. It is a familiar pattern in society in the continuing accommodation of the demands of the LGBT community. What are the limits to that accommodation?
I'll be happy once the world learns to build systems that don't break on the apostrophe in my last name.
You would, then, love using any software I write. I absolutely promise it won't break on an apostrophe. It won't break on a semicolon. It won't even break on foreign vowels or unicode...
Because I strips all that crap out, only allowing Latin1 [a-zA-Z]. I do, however, preserve any random-case names you insist on using, because while unbearably pretentious, they at least don't break anything.
And yeah, call me an asshole (though you have to put Australia ahead of me, they've outright banned diacritics in names by law) - But little Bobby Tables won't break my code. To hell with input validation, people constantly come up with new ways to enter complete garbage (and on forms they want to fill out, not talking about fake email addresses here). Just sanitize it all and call it good; and if you end up named Jrmy Obrian, blame your parents, not me.
/ BTW, all those O-apostrophe names in Irish? You've already accepted a corruption of your name, so lose the purist BS. That actually comes from Anglicized Gaelic o- or O-acute, with the diacritic shifted slightly to the right. The former means "from" the latter means "grandson"