I love when people double down out of principle, when the only person getting hurt is themselves. He refuses to change it because he did nothing wrong...sure, but you are also the only one being hurt by it. Is this really the hill to die on?
Die on?
But how - he can challenge the fines in a court of law. Since it's a vanity plate, adding an extra notoriety won't hurt.
If I recall correctly, this comes up a lot with null.com too with respect to emails, etc. I think there was even an HN post about all the null@null.com emails collected by someone.
This reminds me of the bit that mentions that St. Peter has a list of questions he asks people at the Pearly gates. Among them he asks, “Did you have a vanity plate?”
There are ways to properly sanitize inputs these days so NULL becomes "NULL" (string), BUT also tons of systems moved into JSON format assuming its safe. It is not. JSON is not binary safe and there are tons of unicode chars that will break JSON. I was once overseeing system that people would bring down all the time by registering usernames that the app could not properly sanitize and they in return were breaking JSON format to the halt of the whole system. I should not admit but using same chars I myself broke few youtube channels when comments and votes were working in JSON format themselves without properly removing unsafe char codes. Good times.
The interesting question this article poses is whether there's a system in place for the government to revoke vanity plates it's already approved. Can they force him to change the plate?
They just wouldn't let him renew his vehicle registration unless he changes his vanity plate or goes back to the a random number.
Shout out to all the Python programmers from the other frontpage thread who are responsible for bugs like this with their crappy scripting languages.
If you want to throw darts at someone, I think database systems with three-valued logic would be a better target. This criticism (not for these reasons) has been leveled...