Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

People with names that break computers

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 288 posts

Re: People with names that break computers

#11

Post by Freak_NL »

msielski wrote: post #8

I had a strange experience where my cable company's mobile app, which streams most channels, was missing audio on a few channels. After escalating the issue to an engineer, he finally got back to us and told us that if a username contained "ts" like mine did this issue would happen. After making a second username without that combination, all worked fine. I'd still like to know what logic in their application would g…

Imagine the cowboy code responsible for such an abomination of a bug.

Re: People with names that break computers

#13

Post by mariodiana »

I realize that the issue of names is complicated when you consider different practices the world over, but is there not some kind of RFC or other specification that people are supposed to follow? How can that be in 2016?

The first job I took in IT, after graduating with a liberal arts degree, was in software testing for a company that made point-of-sale systems. Only a month or two out of training I was given the task to test a name and address form. Knowing that quotes were special characters in databases, I tried entering something like O'Connell as a last name. Sure enough, the system broke. I remember filing a snarky bug report about how Irish and Arab people ought to be able to use the form.

My point is that testing for quotes and "Null" as a surname isn't some kind of esoteric science. What's wrong with people!

Re: People with names that break computers

#14

Post by JorgeGT »

msielski wrote: post #8

I had a strange experience where my cable company's mobile app, which streams most channels, was missing audio on a few channels. After escalating the issue to an engineer, he finally got back to us and told us that if a username contained "ts" like mine did this issue would happen. After making a second username without that combination, all worked fine. I'd still like to know what logic in their application would g…

In the context of acoustics, "ts" almost always means time-step (inverse of frequency). But I don't have the faintest idea of how it would collide with the username string :|

Re: People with names that break computers

#16

Post by tyleo »

If these services are evaluating the string in the text field such that it results in the value Null rather than the string "Null" it is concerning. The usibility my be compromised for users with these surnames but I wonder if the security is also compromised via code injection through these fields.

Re: People with names that break computers

#17

Post by anon4 »

mariodiana wrote: post #13

I realize that the issue of names is complicated when you consider different practices the world over, but is there not some kind of RFC or other specification that people are supposed to follow? How can that be in 2016? The first job I took in IT, after graduating with a liberal arts degree, was in software testing for a company that made point-of-sale systems. Only a month or two out of training I was given the tas…

It's a way to mitigate sql injection attacks when you don't want to pay for a rewrite of the data layer to not communicate with the database by blindly mashing strings together.

And don't get me started if your name can't be written in US-ASCII, i.e. if it has weird squiggles above or below the characters or if it's written in gasp cyrillic.

Re: People with names that break computers

#20

Post by ams6110 »

Freak_NL wrote: post #9

In addition to the obligatory little Bobby Tables, this blog post describing the falsehoods programmers believe about names is informative and a must-read for anyone dealing with names in software: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

It's linked in the story, too.
Post reply on HN