121–130 of 149 posts
I think it's interesting that the article mentions that they "haven't solved the Scunthorpe problem". I always thought of the Scunthorpe problem less as something to be solved and more as a cautionary tale about the folly of attempting to implement censorship software. It's like the DRM problem. It's incredibly difficult if not impossible, and the goal itself is dubious.
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I actually wrote a full-stack web service to handle people's names, specifically to help avoid situations like this. My best advice: treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field. Don't assume anything without their confirmation, even if it seems obvious, because somewhere out there someone's name will violate that assumption. My research did conclude that nearly all names are belo…
> treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field The problem is that you still need to deal with unicode attacks, sql attacks, js attacks, css attacks, regex attacks, etc. There's nothing 'arbitrary' about sanitizing any user-inputted text field, and it's especially difficult to do so a culturally sensitive way. It's a good problem you're solving though. It's a great job interview q…
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> treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field The problem is that you still need to deal with unicode attacks, sql attacks, js attacks, css attacks, regex attacks, etc. There's nothing 'arbitrary' about sanitizing any user-inputted text field, and it's especially difficult to do so a culturally sensitive way. It's a good problem you're solving though. It's a great job interview q…
If you have sanitize the name field because then you're doing everything wrong. Nothing should break no matter what characters a user puts in their name. Even if they use punctuation or null bytes or control characters.
If you don’t write software under the assumption that every other developer and all your users are at best wildly incompetent and at worst outright malicious then you’re doing everything wrong.
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I actually wrote a full-stack web service to handle people's names, specifically to help avoid situations like this. My best advice: treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field. Don't assume anything without their confirmation, even if it seems obvious, because somewhere out there someone's name will violate that assumption. My research did conclude that nearly all names are belo…
Even arbitrary text doesn't cut it -- not all names can be represented in Unicode.
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#2 and #3 on that list were clearly done as publicity stunts/"testing the limits" Bobby Tables-style than anything occurring naturally.
What does "naturally" even mean here? Everyone these days seems to be giving their kids unique names. Some people name their kid Obi-wan Kenobi. That's not really any different than these people, is it?
On the other hand, an ultra-long name that seems to be designed for testing overflows, in buffers mental or physical, is like a very different category to me.
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Even arbitrary text doesn't cut it -- not all names can be represented in Unicode.
Sounds interesting. Any examples?
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The biggest problem with this strategy is it isn't idiomatic to refer to someone by their full name in many contexts. However given its simplicity, and cultural neutrality, a single full name field should be the default choice IMO.
Full name: Nickname: and then refer to them by their nickname, which can be whatever they like to be called, in whatever land they come from and no programmer has to care about human naming conventions ever again
I had a linear algebra professor named doctor buttcane.
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Those sites must not have a lot of exposure to Asians --- where transliterated 2-letter surnames are very common.
I use some software that requires 6 characters to be inputted before it'll search for a name. At least that includes the comma and space. A pain since I have a lot of people with short Asian surnames (and a "first" name which isn't always the one they go by).