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A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019)

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Re: A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019)

#11
post #9

Generic wishful suggestion for courts, regarding any sort of computer-processed data which is a basis for legal action: Coin some fancy-sounding Latin phrase meaning "obvious computer failure", and make liberal use of that phrase in curtly dismissing legal actions (with prejudice) where some key piece of the assertion is clearly a product of "garbage in, garbage out". That might at least give some incentive to those…

Exactly.

> “null” is also a text string that in many programming languages signifies a value that is empty or undefined.

I can't think of a single language that does this. A null interpolated into a string or concatenated with an empty one could produce such a string. If that string value is then used to signify an empty/undefined value is misuse of the language.

Re: A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019)

#12
post #9

Generic wishful suggestion for courts, regarding any sort of computer-processed data which is a basis for legal action: Coin some fancy-sounding Latin phrase meaning "obvious computer failure", and make liberal use of that phrase in curtly dismissing legal actions (with prejudice) where some key piece of the assertion is clearly a product of "garbage in, garbage out". That might at least give some incentive to those…

Exactly. > “null” is also a text string that in many programming languages signifies a value that is empty or undefined. I can't think of a single language that does this. A null interpolated into a string or concatenated with an empty one could produce such a string. If that string value is then used to signify an empty/undefined value is misuse of the language.

SQL is more of a data language, but things like T-SQL or P-SQL I guess count. Lots of programming languages interacting with SQL databases mistreat NULL values. This guy's plate should never be "IS NULL" but should be a string that "plate = 'NULL'".

Re: A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019)

#13
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. > “null” is also a text string that in many programming languages signifies a value that is empty or undefined. I can't think of a single language that does this. A null interpolated into a string or concatenated with an empty one could produce such a string. If that string value is then used to signify an empty/undefined value is misuse of the language.

SQL is more of a data language, but things like T-SQL or P-SQL I guess count. Lots of programming languages interacting with SQL databases mistreat NULL values. This guy's plate should never be "IS NULL" but should be a string that "plate = 'NULL'".

I think it would be more the case that specific programs (or stored procedures) mistreat NULL values, rather than a language or library not providing a way to properly handle them.
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