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Names That Break Computers

Megalith

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,000
Holy crap, how does Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele even remember to spell her last name?

For Null, a full-time mum who lives in southern Virginia in the US, frustrations don’t end with booking plane tickets. She’s also had trouble entering her details into a government tax website, for instance. And when she and her husband tried to get settled in a new city, there were difficulties getting a utility bill set up, too. Generally, the more important the website or service, the stricter controls will be on what name she enters – but that means that problems chiefly occur on systems where it really matters.
 
Pretty sure such a name would not have been accommodated in most places once typewriters became the norm or even before
 
If my last name was Null, I would have already changed it to Nulls, and been done with it. At the very least, I would have wrote Nulls on my kids birth certificates so that they would not have issues with such an obviously unfortunate name when it came to computing.
 
exploits_of_a_mom.png
 
Gorankar said:
If my last name was Null, I would have already changed it to Nulls, and been done with it. At the very least, I would have wrote Nulls on my kids birth certificates so that they would not have issues with such an obviously unfortunate name when it came to computing.
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When I worked for a government agency, one of our head administrators had the last name of Null, and there were politically-connected people with apostrophes, spaces and hyphens in their names. Needless to say, the development team made sure that stuff worked 100%.
 
I wanted to change my name to ALT+F4 but it turns out it doesn't do shit when you actually type it out.
 
Neither Mana, Orix, GeImp nor Panda, my name is Abalamahalamatandra.....and that's the end of the matter.
 
My legal last name is ';delete * from users; and I've always had problems accessing websites for years. I completely sympathize with Ms. Null.
 
Twisted Kidney said:
I wanted to change my name to ALT+F4 but it turns out it doesn't do shit when you actually type it out.
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GaryJohnson said:
Kind of what I was thinking about Null... why would that cause problems when the string "Null" is not NULL?
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Pretty much it 'Null' != NULL , no user should ever be able to input NULL value , lazy programming is at fault here .
 
I have a double barrel name (with a hyphen). The damn airport thing is damn annoying...

Goto the airport and enter your name into the kiosks and it won't find it.
Scan your passport it won't find it
Enter booking reference FOUND IT
Confirm name by typing...doesn't find it
Confirm by passport doesn't' find it...

My corporate profile now has it without the hyphen and I have to remember to enter the name without the hyphen. If I need to goto a checking desk for any reason ... things can get funky....
 
My name on the internet is my father's. No place seems to accept that the addition of ", Jr." is acceptable. Not even this site.
 
It's also possible to have a name that's too short. A person with the name of A O trips a lot of flags meant to prevent the use of initials instead of full names.
 
If I ever meet a person named Null, I'm going to pretend to be confused.

"Hi, I'm Kevin Null."
"So, no last name then?"
"No, my last name is Null."
"Ah, so just Kevin then. No last name. Got it."

*Kevin gets frustrated and walks away muttering something to himself.*

Interestingly enough, some names like Hu confuse humans as well... like in the well-known "Who's on first" joke.
 
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Gorankar said:
If my last name was Null, I would have already changed it to Nulls, and been done with it. At the very least, I would have wrote Nulls on my kids birth certificates so that they would not have issues with such an obviously unfortunate name when it came to computing.
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If I were to go through the hassle of changing my name, I would at least try to get something really cool. My all time favorite is when a couple tried to name their baby "4real," but I can see how that would be problematic too...
 
Man, that's some lazy coding, no system I've ever designed has that flaw. A string value of "Null" shouldn't ever be treated the same of an actual value of Null. that's unbelievably incompetent. And I suspect that any system with this flaw is very likely wide open to SQL injection. Although if it were me, I'd have changed my name to "Nul" by now.

Funny story though, I used to work on an old system designed years before and it had worked fine for years. That is until someone complained that they were unable to enter their customer's surname correctly. What was it? O'Neil, but the input validation didn't allow entering a comma. So, one of my co-workers just turned the validation off. Later on the same customer called back to tell us they couldn't view or enter any new customers. Guess what? The whole system didn't properly escape ' characters. Yeah...

P.S.

We also allow names (first or last) as long as 50 characters so Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele can sleep soundly there. Man it must be annoying to spell that out over the phone. In person I assume she just hands out cards with her name printed on them.
 
Quix said:
Man, that's some lazy coding, no system I've ever designed has that flaw. A string value of "Null" shouldn't ever be treated the same of an actual value of Null. that's unbelievably incompetent. And I suspect that any system with this flaw is very likely wide open to SQL injection.
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Agreed! In a weakly typed language, I can almost see an incompetent or novice coder making this mistake. However in a strongly typed language, I find it almost impossible to imagine that someone could circumvent the error without realizing the problem they were creating.
 
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