3mo ago

Asking the real questions

216 comments

"We call her Carrie, because of the carriage return."
You can also try to give the child NULL as middle name for additional fun.
- someone tried that with their license plate, it turned out well: https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/
  edit: archive link
  
  I just realized that the shitty software on the other side of the divide is casting null to ”null", which absolutely explains that issue. What a cluster
  
  He is being too nice. He needs to get a lawyer and sue that shitty company for harassment and whatever else.
  ETA: The US isn't overly litigious. We are under litigious if anything.
  
  they should have just used rust smh
  
  Oh no, it gets worse:
  Prank or not, Tartaro was playing with fire by going with NULL in the first place. “He had it coming,” says Christopher Null, a journalist who has written previously for WIRED about the challenges his last name presents. “All you ever get is errors and crashes and headaches.”
  Archive link: https://archive.ph/o/Foe1r/https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
  
  Yeah, this is his daughter
- undefined
  
  Ca\r\rie
- Hey "java.lang.NullPointerException" can I borrow your pen?

asking questions like this is how i found out that one of the allowed characters in names in my country is ÿ, which is fine in Latin-1 but in 7-bit ASCII is DEL.
- This sounds like it would create a whole list of fun and irritating edge conditions for some poor bugger to debug. Love it.
  
  If someone else has to debug the problems caused by a parent naming their child with a special character, does that make the parent the bugger? 🤔
- that's amazing! Aren't codecs fun

I have an apostrophe and it's super annoying as some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.
So I've received ID with Mc%20dole or they add a space in it. Or I'll get a work email with an apostrophe but I cant use it anywhere because sites have it disabled. And I've missed my flight because I changed my ticket once to add the apostrophe and the system just broke at the gate.
Worse yet many flight companies have "you will not be able to board if your ID doesn't exactly reflect your details" but their form doesn't allow it. Even most forms for card payments don't allow it even though it's the name on my card.
- I have an apostrophe and it’s super annoying as some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.
  My surname contains a character that's only present in the Polish alphabet. Writing my full name as is broke lots of systems, encoding, printed paperwork and even British naturalisation application from on Home Office website. My surname was part of my username back at uni, and everytime I tried to login on Windows, it would crash underlying LDAP server, logging everyone in the classroom out and forcing ICT to restart the server.
  
  everytime I tried to login on Windows, it would crash underlying LDAP server, logging everyone in the classroom out and forcing ICT to restart the server.
  Now that's the way to do it! Make it everybody's problem, not just yours.
- %20 is encoded space if I remember right, so even then they were already incorrect
  
  It sounds like maybe they sanitized the apostrophe to a space and then encoded it
  
  Yep, the apostrophe would be %27
  So Mc%27dole
- Always worth posting this classic.
  
  There's also the version with examples if you want to know exactly what and why it breaks.
  And the git that collects all of these in one place, if you want to really nerd out.
  
  This is going to be bobby tables isn't it?
  
  Also relevant: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
  
  Been there, seen that, had to deal with it. Now add the problem that there are people who don't know their birth date or not even the f-ing year they were born in. And I'm not talking about someone from a lost tribe at the Amazonas.
- you will not be able to board if your ID doesn't exactly reflect your details"
  Do they care about an apostrophe though? I can see any punctuation being a problem.
  
  I had to convince people to let me on board a plane because my name contain a swedish letter (å). Their computer system translated it into "aa", which then didn't match my passport.
- Same shit with American custom forms. On the one hand, they threaten you with Armageddon if you fill out the form incorrectly, on the other hand, they only allow plain letters, numbers, and a handful of special characters. Nobody there has the capacity of the mind that maybe a name cannot be correctly represented with that tiny subset of characters. So it is simply impossible to fill out that form without breaking the law. And it is a customs form, so they should know that people filling it out are most likely foreigners.
- I have an apostrophe
  Scottish/Irish?
  some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.
  Which kind of apostrophe?
  A straight apostrophe, fine - that can and does get used in valid SQL injection attacks. I would be disgusted at any input form that didn’t sanitize that.
  But a curly apostrophe? Nothing should be filtering a curly apostrophe, as it has no function or use within SQL. So if you learn how to bring that up in alt codes (Windows, specifically), Key combos (Mac) or dead keys (Linux), as well as direct Unicode codes for most any Win/Mac/*Nix platform, you should be golden.
  Unless the developer of that input form was a complete moron and made extra-tight validation.
  Plus, knowing the inputs for a lot of extended UTF-8 characters not found on a normal keyboard is also a wee bit of a typing superpower.
- Spent lots of effort to get names for my kids that avoid this. Swedish/French. It's harder than it sounds.
- ... why are you putting an apostrophe in McDole? The O-apostrophe in Irish names is an anglicisation of Ó, eg. Ó Briain becomes O'Brien. Mac Dól would become MacDole/McDole.
  
  Yeah fuck this guy for spelling his name the way it was given to him what an asshole
  
  Mc'Dole is what they said, not McDo'le.

That's easy, just call it Jhon\nDoe
- John\0Doe will fuck with all C (and C based derivatives) software that touches it.
  
  Nah, it will end up simply as "John" in the database. You need "John%sDoe" to crash C software with unsafe printf() calls, and even then it's better to use several "%s"
  
  C and C derivatives will be fine unless they're fucking up encoding.
  
  With an address in 's-Hertogenbosch to help people who are lazy about escaping.

Once I was tasked with doing QA testing for an app which was planned to initially go live in the states of Georgia and Tenessee. One of the required fields was the user's legal name. I therefore looked up the laws on baby names in those two states.
Georgia has simple rules where a child's forename must be a sequence of the 26 regular Latin letters.
Tenessee seemed to only require that a child's name was writable under some writing system, which would imply any unicode code point is permissible.
At the time, I logged a bug that a hypothetical user born in Tenessee with a name consisting of a single emoji couldn't enter their legal name. I reckon it would also be legal to call a Tenessee baby 'John '.
- Sounds like you did a thorough job as a QA tester. As a software engineer, I love to see it.
  
  By the time the app was due to go live, we'd only reported bugs with the signup and login flows. This was misinterpreted as there only being issues with the signup and login flows, and the app launched on time. In reality, it was impossible to get past the login screen.
- im sure the devs tasked at fixing that bug loved u ;-)

Ask Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; 's mum how it went.
- Ah, little Bobby Tables we call him

There are a frightening number of systems that don't allow "-", which isn't even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, "I paid for money for my name; I'm not letting it go." (Note: I wasn't pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It's not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.
- It boggles my mind how so many websites and platforms incorrectly say my e-mail address is 'invalid' because it has an apostrophe in it.
  No. It is NOT invalid. I have been receiving e-mails for years. You just have a shitty developer.
  
  worst thing is, the regex to check email has been available for decades and it's fine with apostrophies
  
  Yes! Hyphens and "+" are also legal, and while most will accept a dash, many don't allow '+'. But it's explicitly allowed in the spec!
  
  Ugh and that happens a lot if your email domain has an even slightly unusual TLD too.
- And you'd think a simple solution is just leave out the hyphen when you put you name in, but that can also lead to problems when the system is looking for a 100% perfect match.
  And good luck of they need to scan the barcode on your ID.
  
  Then the first part is interpreted (in the US, anyway) as a middle name, not as part of the last name. I did run into a recently married woman who did that: dropped her middle name, moved her last to the middle, and used her spouse's last name.
  More commonly, places that don't take hyphens tend to just run the two names together: Axel-Smith becomes AxelSmith.
  Programmers can be really dumb.
- I have come across a shockingly large amount of people who not only have a hyphenated last name but also have a hypenated first name! Dealing with every new computer system is like a new adventure
  
  You'd think by now Jean-Luc Picard would be a well known example and systems are able to deal with it.
- There are also fringe externalities from this too. I have my mom's last name for my middle name and my dad's for my last name. But back in the 90s, my state would erroneously handle that scenario as having no middle name and both names hyphenated for a last name. I didn't find this out until I turned 18 and tried to get a retail job and they wouldn't hire me until it got fixed.
  First I had to go to the Dept of Health and get a new birth certificate, then I had to do the same at the social security administration for a new social security card. Hours and hours over multiple days just so I could earn minimum wage folding and selling used clothing. Ironically, the name mixup never was a problem when I did taxes previously.

What's the answer? I need the link
Edit: I found it

Sibling of Bobby Drop Tables
- Y'all need to learn how to sanitize your inputs!

Just seen that the listing for ; DROP TABLE "COMPANIES"; -- LTD has been redacted by the government website‽
- Is it missing an apostrophe and a dash? Or they registered the wrong name?
  Anyway, the use of quotes seem to have backfired. I blame Excel.
  
  Apparently they didn't include the single quote at the beginning because they wanted to hint at the exploit without actually triggering it.
  (and Lemmy seems to combine two dashes into one)

No, cause "John\nDoe" messes up my regex. Sorry, out of the question. I'm not good with regex.
- no one is "good" with regex.
  
  Then who's coming up with all the bits that I copy/paste off the internet? The regex dragon?

Frontend devs hates this guy.
- Still better than Jennifer Null I guess

Can I kill someone who wants to do this? How do I legally get away with it?
- Plead permanent sanity. If I was the judge I would let you go.
  
  Plead permanent sanity.
  temporary sanity is the best I can manage these days.
  
  Of myself of the now dead purpetrator?
  
  Thanks bro

Not legal in Canada. Your legal name must use Latin characters only. This is a sore point for indigenous people.
- Hello my name is JohnDoe. My name only contains Latin characters, no spaces allowed.
  
  Ah, but you see, "John" and "Doe" are two names - first and last - and when you say "My name is", you're really listing out your names, with spaces inbetween!
  But then there's hyphenated names, and I have no idea how those are treated.
  
  Romans also had spaces in between words
- Did the Romans not use line breaks?
  
  Blank spaces arent characters by definition as they're the space that allows the letters to exist
  
  No, they didn't even use the space to separate words. Take a look at any Roman inscription in Italy, there are no spaces between the words (just like there are no silent pauses between spoken words).
- Which is both entirely understandable, and also tragic because Canada's indigenous written characters are so cool. :D
  But also, it's gotta be neat having a name among your people, that "the state" has nothing to do with...

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/exploits_of_a_mom.png
- Little Bobby Tables

Not legal in Sweden. Our "IRS" must also accept the name and deem it legal.
I for one like this. As it stops some very stupid people to name their children some very stupid names. Such as "Adolf Hitler".
And yes. Someone did try to name their child this and they were appropriately stoped from doing it.
- If only Sweden invaded the rest of the world instead of Russia... le sigh
  
  Eh, if they went imperial they would be subject to imperial needs leading to all the usual imperial problems.
  
  I accept our new Scandinavian overlords. But I would rather have it be Finland.
- Should have went with Adolf Olivernipples
- ugh literally 1984

C programmers would ask whether a null-terminated name would be acceptable

I'd rather include a bell character '\a'
- And that's why you're not safe for work.
- Bing Crosby

It's impossible to represent that on paper. It could be misrepresented as a specific number of spaces. Depending on the position on the paper, it may also be hard to tell if the carriage return comes with the line feed. Unless you want the document to be in ASCII or EBCDIC hex, it's like writing an ambiguous math problem where the answer is different depending on how you were taught about the order of operations. Don't do this to your kid, Abcde.

It's time to log off and get a vasectomy

If elected president my first order of business will be to make all birth certificates fully unicode compatible.
- How is your son X Æ A-12?
  
  Screw everything about Elon musk
  
  "It sounds like a password"
- Y̴̥͉͕͌̀ǫ̴̗̅̕u̵̱̾̋͐̚ ̷̡͕͈͛̇h̴̳̱̘̆ä̶̼́̕ṽ̷̬͕è̷͓̰̔̌ ̸̪͋m̷͍͎͙̂́̔ͅy̷̰̘̎́̉ͅ ̷̳͒v̷̭̕o̷̢͚̟͇͒̃͐̕t̴̪̙͗̐͆́ë̶̦͗ ̵̗͌̅p̶̰̫͛̑r̷̨͛̏̈́͝e̷͇͍̋̚͜s̸̳͙̒͘î̶̞̍̍̋͜ͅd̴̰̭͚̞͗ě̶̯̖n̶̩̿̕t̶͎͉̂ ̵̦͂̍̀Z̵̧̲̦̹̾͋a̴̒̑ͅl̷͇̘̝̬͒̊͝ǵ̴̹̣͖'̷͂͜o̴̢͔̱̔ò̷̧͛!̷̦̎͑͆͘ ̵̺̼̜̃̑
- Howdy friend, I'm ▒⟪♶⳽Ⰶ⮫☲Ⰱ∓✑ⲍ␝ⅼⓑ⊯⛝≋ⱚⵯ⿳➡⸷⋘⎋⛏⍫⣺⨼⛜⧄ⅈ⎥⦶⋣⩥⮯⨏⼧⁹⟤.
  
  Oh, poor thing. It must be terrible to be one of insufferable Elon Musk's progeny
- (ノ-_-)ノ~┻━┻ Miller
- I govenment site I visited recenly made a point of how it accepts emojis in passwords!

Na, names are about pronunciation (how you call someone). Written letters are an approximation of that. You can't pronounce a newline, so there's that.
- John
  (long pause)
  Doe
- Just pronounce \n as a glottal stop.
  
  Hawai
  i
- But differently spelled names are legally distinct.
  
  i think they mean that pronounciation matters for determing validity, not for the actual record or distinguishing between names
- But something has to be written on the birth certificate and social security card, and that's what everything else will expect you to use. I think just due to technical limitations (e.g. of the printer/template for those things) it wouldn't be allowed, but I dunno about legally
- How do you pronounce the hyphen in double barrelled names?
  
  The hyphen can provide indicators on how to parse the letters on either side. "Pen-Island" would be pronounced differently from "Penisland."
- Try telling that to
  .
- Just crouch down to simulate moving to a lower line.
  John
  <crouch>
  Doe

NaN,
Not a Number, and now Not a Name
- NaN: „Hey Nanna, can you call the nanny?“
- Arguably any name is not a number.
  Except for Jennifer 8 Lee.

This sounds like the start of another sovcit "loophole"

Anyone remember when Chrome had that issue with validating nested URL-encoded characters? Anyone for John%%80%80 Doe?

why settle for \n when you can go for the stylish carriage return
- so John\r Doe ? depending on the software, when it gets printed, the carriage return will move the cursor to the start of the line without moving a line down, becoming \x20Doe.
  
  This is the ideal rendition, I would say. On a related note, I just love it when there are backspaces in my filenames
- ¿Porqué no los dos? A nice \r\n, Windows style.
  
  Gotta band it Windows tho, it just feels right, I want to enjoy my fake typewriter

Easy, John\nDoe
- Probably have to escape it so it will work properly: John/nDoe
  
  \n already is an escape sequence, consisting of \, the escape character, and n, the code that is responsible for the new line. Together they form an escape sequence.

A line break is a non-printable character. So it would only work in the scope of electronic storage. The minute it hits other media, the line break character is subject to how that media handles its presence, and then it is lost permanently from that step forward.
Plus, many input forms make use of validation that will just trim anything that isn’t a character or number, removing the line break character.
- As someone with a very mildly unusual name, I can tell you that it doesn't matter whether a system could or could not meaningfully represent the name. Often the people or systems just refuse to acknowledge any deviation from what's expected. Sometimes databases are written to enforce arbitrary grammatical rules that make my name impossible to write, or the people using the systems will just "correct" the "error" without telling me. I don't mind that much but our normative systems just love to homogenise us.
- A line break doesnt have to be electronic only. You just... start a new line on the paper.
  If it were somehow legally allowed, the sanitization would be incorrect.

Always sanitize your Data inputs.

I want the char 8 that makes a beep.
- "John $(tput bel) Doe"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant

Apparently no-one did it yet, so I'll name my child +++ATH0

I'm not american and I'm glad I'm not but intended if someone could enter a bunch of zero width spaces

"ethics aside" truly a starter for a qa

What about an open bracket? (
- ) Found Satan
  
  ( it will be fine with enough upvotes
  
  Teehee )

John
Doe, related to Derrick Nippl-e perhaps? (Fry and Laurie)

Good luck with that.
Most computer nayetems will trim the crap out of that name, the white spaces like space, tab, \r and \n will be gone by the time it's in the database

Be funny as fuck if Canada started extradition procedures when he landed

Am I allowed to include sql command words such as drop table in my child's name?
- Simmer down, Bobby
- https://xkcd.com/327/

Unix or dos format?
Anyway, you probably need to put a backslash before it to indicate line continuation.
But wouldn't it be better to use something more traditional, such as
<br>
?
- HTML is more traditional than \n?
  
  True, poor choice of phrase.
  But I was thnking of something like
  undefined
  
  #define my_macro does not fit\ on one line

I really can't even begin to properly explain this because it's just so many layers of intuition. No, you absolutely cannot have a line break in your name. That's not a letter. That said, I'm fully prepared for someone to give me an example of some writing system that uses line breaks for unique purposes apart from spaces.
- Chaotic neutral response: A line break is just white space.
  Most languages use white spaces

216 comments