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When your last name is Null, nothing works

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Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#211

Post by rollulus »

b3lvedere wrote: post #207

It's amazing to watch systems do things as humans initially have intended, then see those system fail in the most spectacular ways, because the humans didn't think of every possible failure scenario. I've had great fun with my surname, which contains of two words and just a space in between. Lots of systems thought my "maiden name" was the first word and adressed me as Mrs. My wife has three first names, adopted my s…

A tax office algo discriminating you because it believes you could have foreign roots, sounds like you’re a tax payer in the Netherlands!

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#212

Post by stevoski »

Us computer scientists (or developers or coders or whatever we are called at the moment) typically think we are really smart. We can be unbearable know-it-alls, really.

And yet we screw up, collectively and individually, over and over again on the fundamentals of making good software that serves people, by making not-very-well-thought-out decisions.

Your surname is a word we decided should mean nothing/empty/unknown? Oh, we didn’t think about that. Um, can you just change it?

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#213

Post by EvanAnderson »

tommica wrote: post #191
EvanAnderson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anticipated twins with The school directory sync system I made for a small District (sub-5000 enrollment). I appended a random two digit number to first initial, last name (EAnderson96). So far none of the parents who have "weaponized"(1) the naming of their children have managed to break it since we brought it up in '99. (1) Hypothetical John Smith and his siblings Jane Smith, James Smith, Janet Smith, Jack Smith,…

I wonder if developers have a different naming convention for their children... Even on a subconscious level

I joked with my wife about using numbers in our daughter's name (k-rad 31337 style, with the first "letter" being a 3). I thought it would probably shake-out crappy software. In the end I knew it would be a mean thing to saddle the child with. It sounded like fun, though.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#214

Post by EvanAnderson »

Loic wrote: post #199
doubled112 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love seeing what the apostrophe in my last name breaks when I sign up for services. Converting it to an HTML character entity is not really expected behaviour, but it was among the most amusing I’ve seen. O'Brien was it? Bonus points if you edit the profile and those are expanded too. Hello Mr. O'Brien.

I have an apostrophe too and it broke many websites. It was also a natural source of SQL injection detection. About 20 years ago, I was able to see a bit more than what I supposed to from the Ikea website. Nowadays, I see mostly encoding issues, especially in notification pop-ups.

Apostrophe names were always my go-to for plausibly deniable checks for SQL injection.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#215

Post by nilram »

b3lvedere wrote: post #207

It's amazing to watch systems do things as humans initially have intended, then see those system fail in the most spectacular ways, because the humans didn't think of every possible failure scenario. I've had great fun with my surname, which contains of two words and just a space in between. Lots of systems thought my "maiden name" was the first word and adressed me as Mrs. My wife has three first names, adopted my s…

Have you come into the scenario where a doctor's office is trying to find your medical records? Or a hospital? Or an emergency room, trying to fetch them from an office in another town or country? Better to have a good attitude than not, but the phrase "it's all fun and games till someone loses an eye" comes to mind.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#216

Post by globular-toast »

bustling-noose wrote: post #140

humans should come with a big UUID that is generated at a central database to keep out duplicate and then just a name without any last name for social connections. this would also solve discrimination on many levels. would be a nightmare for privacy and tracking but we are all being tracked anyway.

Interesting idea, but the point of uuid is to not be centralised, otherwise you'd just use a serial number.

So if we assume everyone is born in a room with an address everyone could have a uuid like xxxx-yyyy-zzzz where xxxx is the postcode/zip code of the address, yyyy is the room number (only needs to be unique at the address) and zzzz is the time (only needs to be unique in the room, so local time is fine). This is similar to the uuid v1 scheme.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#217

Post by ProllyInfamous »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #70

This is hilarious: Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it,…

>his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn’t been involved in.

I had this problem a few years ago when I got a similar license plate — every time somebody wrote NOPLATE in the license field, I received their citation.

My state eventually "fixed" this by blocking all citations written NOPLATE... which means I don't even get legitimate [i.e. my vehicle illegally parked] fines anymore =P

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#218

Post by ProllyInfamous »

b3lvedere wrote: post #209
James_K wrote: post #85

It's rather fun that computers have these magic words in them.

Back then i was so amazed i could "destroy" MS-DOS just by typing CTTY CLOCK$. Or Window 98 just by executing /CON/CON

Are these the MSFT equivalent of `rm -R` [delete everything on your linux box]?

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#220

Post by oneshtein »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #182
detourdog wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I set-up a directory system for a small school. The students logins were a combination or initials and date of birth. When I created the scheme I knew that a set of twins would break the system. Somewhere between 3 and 5 years we finally got a set of twins that needed to modify the system. I called them to my office and found out which one came out first and appended 1 their usernames and 2.

I’m a twin and my parents never told us who was ‘first’.

They not told it to you.
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