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NULL license plate not such a bright idea

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Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#201

Post by p1esk »

LanceH wrote: post #171
rebuilder wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also heard a similar story of a Finnish man who got a ticket in the UK, and on closer inspection found his name on the ticket listed as Mr. Ajokortti Körkort. Thats "driver's licence", first in Finnish, then Swedish, and is written at the top of the driver's license card. That said, I find these stories a little hard to credit, since you'd expect police officers in the EU to be fairly familiar with the standard…

I've been at some tournaments where a couple of the kids had the last name "Bye". They picked up a fair number of forfeits during the season.

Wow, that's an awesome last name for a tennis player :)

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#202

Post by impeachTheIdiot »

diatribattical wrote: post #183
rebuilder wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also heard a similar story of a Finnish man who got a ticket in the UK, and on closer inspection found his name on the ticket listed as Mr. Ajokortti Körkort. Thats "driver's licence", first in Finnish, then Swedish, and is written at the top of the driver's license card. That said, I find these stories a little hard to credit, since you'd expect police officers in the EU to be fairly familiar with the standard…

I once had a BevMo cashier in California ask me, “Massachusetts? Is that in Canada?” Very little faith left.

Yea, but it’s understandable an America sucks a geography (what do you expect with a shit education system). I expect better from the EU.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#203

Post by cezart »

gruez wrote: post #184
linker3000 wrote: post #132

A colleague used an app's "generate secure password" feature to change their ISP's web portal login - which then also became the WAN router's password - which they didn't realise. It was about a week before the router dropped its connection and needed to re-authenticate - and that's when I was called in to investigate the loss of connectivity - which Windows 10 very unhelpfully reported as the network cable disconnec…

>Avoid backticks in passwords. Is there even a reason to include special characters in passwords? They add 10% more security[1] but cause all sorts of issues with systems. Just use an alphanumeric password that's 10% longer, and if special characters are mandatory, use a safe character at the end like _ or -. [1] 6.55 bits per character (all printable ascii characters) rather than 5.95 (only alphanumeric)

Based on your numbers they add 10% entropy per character. Which compounds into an increase of 210% over a length of 12 characters. Thus you'd need the password to be at least 3 times longer with only alphanumeric characters to have the same entropy.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#204

Post by foobiekr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #90

Tangentially related somewhat-common bug: YAML files will interpret the literal 'no' as boolean false if it's not quoted, instead of as a string. Many developers have wondered why, when they stuck country-specific configurations in a YAML file, that things suddenly stopped working when they expanded support for Norway.

YAML has tons of warts like this.

https://yaml.org/type/bool.html

This should be used in schools as an example to illustrate how not to do things.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#205

Post by jrockway »

tsss wrote: post #13

Shout out to all the Python programmers from the other frontpage thread who are responsible for bugs like this with their crappy scripting languages.

I think if you want to blame scripting languages, you need a license plate that says "None" or "undefined".

What happened in this case was that people used the literal value "NULL" to mean "I don't know". They could have used the word "LOLCAT" and the effect would have been the same. Overuse of in-band signalling is a general design flaw not specific to any programming language. (Remember when people would whistle a 2600Hz tone to make free phone calls? Same thing as this.)

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#207

Post by netsharc »

toast0 wrote: post #92
vinay427 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any word on whether the plate without the preceding '&' is in circulation? I'd be curious if your records in the police systems would be merged with the records of the owner of that plate.

The rules for california are the special symbols (which don't include &) are non-significant. Everything but the plate itself ignores them. Washington doesn't have special symbols, but does have an optional dash, which is also not significant.

I guess it doesn't happen a lot, but they'd have a crazy time if they had to deal with Arabic license plates..

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#208

Post by tbyehl »

Causality1 wrote: post #2

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?

My state has legislation about denying / revoking vanity plates and 'It inconveniences our computers' is not a valid reason.

Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea

#210

Post by wcoenen »

jgtrosh wrote: post #56
the-dude wrote: post #46

I once had a product owner for a student/university web app who complained that for a particular user, their lastname was displayed as 'None'. This was a Python project and the product owner apparently already had learned 'None' equals NULL. I dug into the file which we used to import the users from and discovered the user's lastname actually was 'None'.

Maybe it could be added to the list of falsehoods programmers believe about names: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...

I think this example falls under falsehood 31, where None would be considered a "bad word" that can't appear in names.
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