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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

#231

Post by callc »

dehrmann wrote: post #107

One place I worked, customers (usually merchants) sent product data through an API my team managed. I was working on a data validation project and ran across an item that was getting rejected. One of the fields customers can set is tags. The item was a t-shirt with a joke about null pointer exceptions, so someone set tags to include ["null", "pointer", "exception"]. Our parser coerced it to null, then returned an err…

Ah yes, automatic type coercion. A literal “WTF were you thinking” feature of JavaScript. So much pain for so little gain.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#232

Post by zigman1 »

rco8786 wrote: post #104

My last name is a popular Irish name with an apostrophe in it. I have tons of issues with my name in forms. I'm basically a walking SQL injection detector. But also I've started to drop the apostrophe in most of my online profiles and things. So I think we're starting to see the end of apostrophes in people's names, thanks to some fun oddities of the internet and common database technologies.

Slightly related thought, but I have a popular Slovene name with letter Ž (pronounced as g in mirage) in it. Since I started living abroad, I use the letter Z, even when introducing myself. It often throws people off guard completely and it is much easier to use just Z.

So I guess some cultural aspect of names will also disappear, I know I want I children to have a bit more "international" names.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#233

Post by tsm »

elorm wrote: post #133

Ha I'm surprised no one mentioned one of the most common name maltreatment complaints. The Gaelic patronymic prefix Mc/Mac. When treating Mc/Mac names, the first letter after the prefix is always capitalised.. e.g McDonald's, McCarthy, McCain, McCoy, McConnell etc but you're more likely to see mcdonalds, mccoy, mcconnell. Orthographic case preservation reports were like the biggest complaints that no one was interest…

My surname is Macdonald—some ancestor generations ago decided to use the lowercase d. When I lived in the US it took considerable coaching to get humans not to write McDonald, and some just couldn't get it.

I then moved to Scotland, where exactly zero people have defaulted to Mc instead of Mac. However, the computer systems of both the NHS and the University of Edinburgh apparently don't store the case of strings and reconstruct the capitalization after the fact. Both systems list me as MacDonald and there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm relatively okay with this—before computers McDonald, MacDonald, Macdonald, and M'Donald were all functionally equivalent. But now I do worry about the implications of having official documents with variant spellings

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#234

Post by thih9 »

jwr wrote: post #223

This is terrifying, because it implies that so many computer systems interpret user-supplied data as what should be out-of-band values. No computer system should ever interpret what is in the "last name" field, it should be a sequence of characters only. Every attempt at interpretation is an exploit waiting to happen.

You are right. At the same time this is a very common issue and an attack vector[1][2][3]. E.g.: an existing book called "alert("!Mediengruppe Bitnik");" is still not shown correctly by some websites[4].

[1]: SQL injection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection

[2]: Cross-site scripting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting

[3]: Exploits of a Mom (Bobby Tables) XKCD: https://xkcd.com/327/

[4]: https://www.tomlinsons-online.com/p-16381221-scriptalertmedi...

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#235

Post by bloak »

In case anyone else was wondering, the name Null seems to come from Ulster; the "ul" in "Null" seems to come from the "Ul" in "Ulster": https://www.houseofnames.com/uk/null-family-crest

(However, online information about the history of names is unreliable: there's a lot of spam and slop in that area.)

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#237

Post by walrus01 »

zenethian wrote: post #22

The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.

There's a number of websites and forms that reject entire domain names for email that have a hyphen in it, despite a hyphen being perfectly valid in modern DNS usage and domain names in every ICANN TLD.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#238

Post by marcyb5st »

Definitely not as bad, but I had problems with my name (Marcello) as well because it contains the name of a musical instrument. So I can only imagine what they are going through.

The latest was Swiss airlines website which was kind of shocking since it is a proper Italian name and one of the official languages of the confederation. Most annoying instance was with the ESTA online application many years ago (fixed last time I tried) that forced me to go to the a US embassy/consulate in person.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#239

Post by fxtentacle »

lmz wrote: post #198
wodenokoto wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's annoying that airlines writes "as spelled in passport", when what they really need is an upper case alpha-only version of your name. But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name. We've had Airlines for way over half a century, and visas for about as long as we have had passports and people still walk around with international…

> But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name. They do in the machine readable area. Maybe not "clearly".

The passport machine area replaces Ö with O but most German airlines replace Ö with OE.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#240

Post by ericpruitt »

Asooka wrote: post #73
gxonatano wrote: post #61

My name, Ĝonatano, contains a ĝ, which is an uncommon letter outside of my language, Esperanto. But when I go to set my username to "ĝonatano," I'm often told that usernames "may only contain letters or underscores," as if ĝ weren't a letter. (You can see that I've approximated it in my HN username, but I don't need to do that on web services that correctly understand that letters exist outside of ASCII and Latin-1.)

You also can't put in Cyrillic or CJK characters. It's a user name, not a human name, you should be fine just using the 26 ASCII letters for it. Basically anything that is a computer-centric string should be only ASCII and nothing else, because supporting all of human writing is a never-ending task.

It's also a dangerous one. For example, are a number of variants of "a" that are different characters in Unicode but are often indistinguishable in most fonts and/or at small font sizes: https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp?a=abcde....
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