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Names That Break Computers (bbc.com)
Reader Thelasko writes: The BBC has a story about people with names that break computer databases. "When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites. The site will say she has left the surname field blank and ask her to try again."
Thelasko compares it to the XKCD comic about Bobby Tables, though it's a real problem that's also been experienced by a Hawaiian woman named Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele, whose last name exceeds the 36-character limit on state ID cards. And in 2010, programmer John Graham-Cumming complained about web sites (including Yahoo) which refused to accept hyphenated last names.
Programmer Patrick McKenzie pointed the BBC to a 2011 W3C post highlighting the key issues with names, along with his own list of common mistaken assumptions. "They don't necessarily test for the edge cases," McKenzie says, noting that even when filing his own income taxes in Japan, his last name exceeds the number of characters allowed.
Users with unacceptably deviant names will be assigned GUIDs for standardized interaction with all systems. Thank you for your compliance with this exciting and mandatory efficiency initiative.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/...
Nothing to say, read it.
There is similar stuff about Dates, Time, Time Zones etc. on the internet. I should make a collection of it.
But I can't figure how to write into my /. journal nor how to use the old /. bookmark feature.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I was working the help desk at Intuit when a beautiful Indian woman employee required assistance with her laptop. Her last name was 26 characters long and ended with the word "porn". No one could pronounce her last name beyond the first few syllables. My coworkers and I referred to her as "Miss Porn" while repairing her laptop. Behind her back, of course.
Just pick one already.
Just move to Scunthorpe.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Her name in a (web) form would be put into a database field as a string ... the word NULL is a keyword, not a string "NULL". I am not saying that this did not happen, I just find it hard to see how a string and a database keyword could possibly be confused ?
It would be: INSERT INTO Customer (Surname) VALUES ("NULL")
not:: INSERT INTO Customer (Surname) VALUES (NULL)
An asian co-worker of mine who's family name is Teh has found that his name is almost impossible to type in tools like microsoft word, which auto correct Teh to The.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Hope the registration of your plane isn't FPL because thats part of the syntax of an ICAO flight plan creation message.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
My uncle experienced this problem with our last name: Blank. When filling out a form it returned with an error: Last name cannot be left blank. This is still a running joke in our family. Never experienced it myself.
I've had issues a few times with filters on names rejecting mine for supposedly referring to a body part...
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I could never create his account (last name as ID). It took me some time to realize the parser was picking up on the keyword long. It was decades ago, so I expected things like that were fixed.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
I don't think a byte has always been 8 bits, so there's definitely some wiggle room there as long as the bits are contiguous.
Nullius in verba
It is high time the government refuses to register any name that is not Unicode compliant, within so many bytes with some reserved names that are not allowed. No more onefortymandaktwosixtwojamuna to you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Data cannot break computers. Data whose contents differ from the possible preconception of application programmers can cause errors in poorly designed, written, or tested applications.
Try typing Björn into a lot of web site name fields. I'm not sure that slashdot should be too vocal on this, I don't think the umlauts would have shown up until recently.
Nullius in verba
Most programmers can not even figure out how to validate a f--ing email address, let alone a persons name.
How about they fix the email problem first and stop rejecting my email address ^_^@mydomain
Yes, you can put that on my domain listed below and email me, and yes it is a valid email address as per the RFC.
Story sounds suspicious. Null as a string is not a reserved word or a name that should cause problems unless they are doing some really weird shit. You might check a string for being NULL but you would never check a string to see if it was equal to "Null" (unless you are employing retard programmers).
All the names people gave themselves when we database programmers were weak is no longer enforceable once we became strong. Now we enter the name of the baby at birth in the hospital. If the name could not be entered, tough luck, pick a new name proud parents! Not born in a hospital? Hospital does not have computer? tough luck, no social security number to your baby, no way to do anything in US of A. We are the dbase programmers, we rule the world.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
From my experience many companies do things on the cheap and then keep it around forever. Fortunately any robust ORM should make any name work with relatively little effort as long as the length is less than 255. Unfortunately many developers still write code like it's 1999.
My last name tripps up decency filters on websites. My wife tried to create an account on some website and it wouldnt accept our last name in the registration field saying foul language wasn't allowed.
My last name.. Dike
Stop signs are only Suggestions
It happened to me in Spain. Foreigners get IDs that start with an X, while natives' IDs start with a 0. There was this system to get the payroll ant it wouldn't accept an ID if it didn't start with a 0. The IT zombies tried to convince me once and again that I was inserting my password incorrectly as the illiterate "sudaka" I obviously was. It wasn't till I used technical jargon and told them to log on using the VNC that they took me seriously and fixed it.
Sorry, but if a last name of "Null" breaks your code, you're a shit coder.
The same for name fields- a 50 character limit should be the minimum. Database space is cheap, what exactly do people think they're saving by restricting a name field to 20 characters or so?
It pisses me off when a site insists that your last name HAS to be more than 2 characters, or that your first name can't be a single letter. Believe it or not, some people DO have names like that. If he was still alive someone like e. e. cummings wouldn't be able to sign up for jack shit these days because most sites insist that a period simply cannot be a part of your name, and a one-letter name is somehow illegal.
It makes sense to restrict some fields to some maximum value when the upper limit is known (i.e. phone numbers, zip codes, US state names, etc) but for any arbitrary data it makes no sense to enforce an unrealistic maximum. Yes, most last names are less than 30 characters, but not all are. Why would you put in some stupid hard max limit like 30 characters?
Seriously, what the fuck does it cost you to define a column as 100 chars wide instead of 30? What benefit are you supposedly gaining by restricting it to 30 chars? Are you being charged by the letter or something? Sure, a 100 character limit seems unduly generous, but the moment a customer can't create an account because of your mindless stinginess, you're the one that loses a sale, not them.
I've been coding for decades and it's both gratifying and disheartening to see so many large, well-funded companies making these idiot-level mistakes that I don't make. I have a hard time believing that I'm smarter than all the coders at some of these large companies, but the evidence seems to show I am, at least in some areas.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It's unreasonable to expect the Japanese to change their systems because of a problem that only occurs for badly integrated foreigners.
Doesn't Japan actually require immigrants to adopt a Japanese name?
#DeleteChrome
Your name could be Cherry Chevapravatdumrong. She's one of the producers on Family Guy.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm221...
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
And I thought the difficulties I encountered with my "REGISTER_GLOBALS" username would last for all time, but luckily that problem is now 'solved'.
The fancy-pants name for this is the semipredicate problem
I don't recall how I stumbled upon that article; but it's one of my favorite "look at me, I can use a long word for it" things now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Try Dildo, NL. Or Swastika, ON.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The article neglects to mention perhaps the most famous case of all, Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff, Senior. And that's just an abbreviation -- his actual surname (or so he claimed) was 666 letters long.
In the Dutch province of Friesland there's this town called Sexbierum. :)
A few years ago these people regularly had trouble signing on to certain US based services.
Quite surprising for a place where they shit in the restroom
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Byte size have varied a lot in the past and could conceivably vary in the future too (but it's unlikely). Even the definition of byte as a concept have varied, most have byte as the smallest addressable element while some systems had it as the character size etc. Word addressed machines very seldom used byte to describe the addressable element size but some had word-sized characters... It's a mess.
A more correct name is octet which by definition consists of 8 binary digits.
No Intercourse, PA?
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
As long as your last name isn't a single letter. That catches my psuedonym fairly regularly.
Back when I worked in medical data, I encountered real people with single-character names. It happens for real names, too. For programmers, the rule is simple: Don't use names for anything except your application's convenience, and don't have any restrictions on them. Don't even require their existence.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I run two e-commerce stores based on osCommerce and had this exact issue with a customer whose last name was Null. There is a common function in osCommerce (tep_not_null) trying to see if the argument is empty. One of the things it looks for is the string "null". When I discovered this, I removed that part of the test (which never made sense to me.)
That's the anglicised version.
The gaelic original uses Ã".
What keeps the Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele's of the world from not dreaming up even longer last names?
Table-ized A.I.
"Now and again, system administrators have to try and fix the problem for people who are actually named “Null” – but the issue is rare and sometimes surprisingly difficult to solve."
Not really difficult at all, as “Null” is a text string and NULL is a datatype usually encoded as Ø, that is the numeric value of zero and not "0". Any database that read a string and converts it to a datatype isn't worth the bits it's written in.
The name Mackenzie would be normally rendered in Japanese as three sounds, Ma Ken Ji. Normally these would be phonetic kana characters, and I have never heard of a Jaoanese database (I used to implement these) which didn't support kana. But if you rule out kana names, a foreigner can still choose kanji, or Chinese, characters to represent his name.
I tried registering a product on-line, but their software would delete any words found in HTML, including e-mail addresses. My address became something like "user@-word.com" because it had the word "table" in it. Both prompts for it were so filtered. It was also to be my login at the site. I couldn't receive the confirmation e-mail because they'd borked it. I got them on the phone and they made the correction in their database (their system was unfiltered) resulting in me still being locked out because the login prompt also stripped out "table"!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
They get custom license plate of Lost Tag and are surprised by the result.
When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites.
Most websites? Really? That's a lot of badly written websites. I mean, wouldn't you have to almost go out of your way to make it crap enough to fall over when giving the string "Null"?
This is because the word “null” is often inserted into database fields to indicate that there is no data there.
If you're literally entering the word "null" to indicate no data then you're a really shitty database programmer.
I can't help wondering if Ms Null had this happen to her once - maybe twice - and enjoyed the attention her little story got her so much that she's started embellishing it each time she tells it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Says the person named "Anonymous Coward".
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Doesn't Japan actually require immigrants to adopt a Japanese name?
Even if they would, what about visitors/tourists/international customers?
Harry S Truman
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Lost two low 4 digits accounts, because one had a "$" in it, and the other a "?".
One was mine and one was "given" to me by a friend who walked away in disgust from all things IT.
No fucking shit. I'm trying to imagine how a text field isn't either quoted or escaped, or better paramerized, but realizing that's what has happened here, I'm also wondering just how vulnerable these systems must be to injection attacks.
First order of business, fire your developer with extreme prejudice.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Easy answer: the Japonese should speak English and write with Latin characters like civilized people have done since time immemorial.
My retarded younger-self put my name on my license plate - while living in fairly rural environs. Yes, yes it was stupid and it meant that every time I did something stupid it would come to light quite quickly. I've not had a vanity plate since.
It might be interesting to find out the internal codes used for license plate readers and then see if they're properly sanitizing their inputs. Does "stolen" flag anything? Does DBR-323 flag as wanted for questioning? Sure, many of us assume that they're properly dealing with inputs but I'm not willing to operate under any such assumptions. I've *seen* too many examples of bad code.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
So a name like Yakamoto would be too long in Japan?
I would have thought the problem would be something else, not the fact that it was hypenated.
I was stumped working on a website on a shared ColdFusion server, where the webhost decided to install a SQL injection filter. Random form posts and URLs that used various SQL reserved words like, well, LIKE, or SELECT, or whatever started failing. That wasn't fun.
Says the person named "Anonymous Coward".
Noel's son, presumably. Posting incognito.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
My New Jersey driver's license still has me named CHRISTOPHE because back in 1993 or so when I got my license -- go ahead, count the number of characters. Ten. The idiot programmers who put together New Jersey's database allocated TEN CHARACTERS for the first name. Fucking morons. First of all, it's standard procedure, when inventing a completely arbitrary length limit in a computer program, to make it a power of 2, just so it looks like you did it for some computer-related reason. A limit of 10 is obviously bullshit because no computer in the world has a limit of 10 for anything. Only humans use 10 as a round number. Second, if you're programming a database of names and you need to set limits on length, the least you should do is check the most common names and make sure the limit is larger than the largest one. And CHRISTOPHER has been in the top twenty of American male first names for a long, long time. Citation: http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...
Cher is not allowed to fly, her tight skin may not withstand high altitude air pressure.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Certainly not. Foreigner names may be "translated" into the katakana alphabet, which doesn't change much the number of characters (since full width katakana take each 2 bytes). Some foreigners get themselves a name in "kanji" (ideograms), but that name (unless it's the spouse name) has not official value.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Like most cultures/countries - the Japanese are deeply attached to their cultural roots and want to preserve their language/alphabets/kanji.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Not mentioning most sites which design is so f-up that they cannot recognize a number entered while in "hiragana mode" - and force users to switch between modes all te time...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The reality is that a lot of systems access databases formatted when that wasn't the case, so are incapable of dealing with larger field sizes because they were set up decades ago. So if the underlying COBOL system won't allow more than 30 characters, it would be foolish to allow a front end that did...
I read once about an Indian guy who changed his name to the equivalent of "John Smith (deceased)". Evidently this was in protest to some threats by a local official along the lines of " if you don't sell me your land you're dead ". The computers were fine with it, but an operator at his bank read the name and flagged the account as deceased, freezing all his money.
Having a Jr suffix on my name... breaks most web sites. Amtrak being the worst. On one page, it is required, but the on the next page it breaks. Its now impossible with their most recent update for me to purchase tickets using my account. Without the suffix, it says my name doesn't match, but with the suffix, it says there are invalid characters.
Yes, I learned machine language on computers that literally only had 256 bytes.
I wrote a new course to teach students on a machine with only 64 bytes of RAM (1k word ROM and 128 bytes EEPROM) . In 2008 or so. Such machines still exist in staggeringly huge numbers. See, for example the PIC12F675. Their bottom end model (the 10F200) has a staggering 16 bytes of RAM and 256 words of flash.
So I'm guessing you're either an ancient greybeard or did a machine language course on a very small microcontroller.
I did like the super low-end microcontrollers for teaching. One thing I found appealing was it was the first bit of the engineering course (and it happened early) when the students can step outside of the slightly artificial uni environment and into the real world. I mean sure there are all sorts of strange restrictions on a PIC, but importantly, they're all there for a reason and that reason is never to make it simpler for teaching. And most of the answers to "why does it do this weird thing" were "well, that saves a couple of transistors which lowers the cost", but it was nice to work with a solid product which was engineered to some very strict criteria.
And the devices are simple enough that you can give the students the 400 page databook and the answers will be in there somewhere.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Or you could have just contacted /. And ask for a name change like I did when my "^" was no longer a valid character.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
B.S. It's not names that break computers, it's idiot coders who couldn't care less. I mean seriously, a "Null" as a name to break a name input? Maybe they should write an article about the most idiotic programmers who somehow got to work on real life systems for real money and got away with it.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Or move to the Danish city of Middelfart.
Eat the rich.
Have 2 high school friends that have terrible problems with names: one pronounces his surname "Azz We Pay," but spells it "Asswipe." Other named Harry Fagina.
Neither do I, it's tiny and surrounded by the worlds largest refineries :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
The Autocorrect options are very adjustable.
But how will the adjustments follow the person from one computer to another, even if the person doesn't have a user account on each computer on which he uses Word? Does it support storing a user's roaming settings in a Microsoft account or something? If not, one reason to stick with the defaults and argue for better defaults is to make it easier to use someone else's computer.
I've been dealing with this issue for ... quite a long time, and incompetent programmers have perpetrated code that does some of the weirdest things with my name. Most recently, The Phone Company put my name into Caller-ID as "Pelt Van".
My last name is two words. Worse, my cousins have a name which has a punctuation mark (D'Hondt). Either totally screw up a lot of computers.
Have some pity on Belgians this week, will you? Bedankt.
Of Ulm?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Ragged Ass Road.
germans and austrians are my main gripe. half of them put Dipl. Ing. into the 'first name' field. i get it, you're proud you finished school, but it is stil NOT your first name!
Yeah. I get the same feeling from websites that will mail me my current password if I forget it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Ulysses S Grant
It's not just the maxima. I have a one-letter (like x@yyy.zzz) email address that quite a few sites refuse to accept just because it's only one letter long.
A dismaying preponderance of software can't handle an apostrophe in a name, because nobody has ever heard of, eg. Europe. So one sees: o An airline FFM system that accepts it, but a reservation system that doesn't, preventing linkage o Snail mail with ' interpolated into one's name o Web forms that won't submit
...or Fucking, Austria?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.