[HN Gopher] Your last name contains invalid characters (2010)
___________________________________________________________________
Your last name contains invalid characters (2010)
Author : redbell
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-01-09 13:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
| mo_42 wrote:
| We just have too many assumptions about names.
|
| There should only be one input field that asks for a name. Even
| systems that require a legal name should be like that as there
| are people whose legal name cannot be written in two forms.
| Tor3 wrote:
| Another one is where they have a limit on how short a name can
| be. I even remember a discussion on the Linux kernel mailing
| list about that. Linus himself wouldn't accept names shorter
| than (IIRC) three letters. But I was in high school with a guy
| from another country, his name consisted of a single letter. He
| didn't even have a first or last name, only that letter. And it
| was official - when the loans and stipends arrived it was all
| printed on the common wall on 132-char folding paper, from the
| governmental student loan bank. His name (one letter) was
| there.
|
| (p.s. I did present what I wrote above on said mailing list
| back then, but as far as I remember people simply decided to
| ignore it as too rare to care about, in addition to those who
| for some reason taught I just made it up (why should I?))
| seszett wrote:
| A former French secretary of state for the digital sector was
| Cedric O. I think it's a Korean name originally.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| Even your name can be written into two fields. Assume order of
| first name and last name is also problematic. There are
| languages that put the Last name on the front. It looks kinda
| annoying (or even solecism in some condition) when someone
| speaks your name in reverse.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I once had a distant co-worker whose entire legal name was
| "Steel". It was a government job, so I can only imagine what
| sort of nightmares he went through for payroll.
| piva00 wrote:
| Hacker News user patio11's list of falsehoods programmers believe
| about names[1] is always fun to be thrown into these discussions.
| Follow-up from this John Graham-Cumming article around the same
| time.
|
| [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
| programmers-...
| lostlogin wrote:
| "People have exactly one full name which they go by."
|
| My case was actually this.
|
| I took a call from a person with a name that was one word. Not
| first name, not last name, just one word.
|
| I never found them in the system as the name wasn't in the
| database as far as I could tell. They were quite irritated.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| That's a different problem. I've word as the full name.
|
| People can have multiple full names.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Are these any rules with names? Having nothing at all might
| be something that doesn't happen.
|
| Edit: Nope, rule 40.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| Do you mean they had a mononym?
|
| Famous examples but for stage names are Madonna or Cher.
|
| I knew someone who had one that has a mononym and would
| regularly run into issues.
|
| I believe they did get their passport issued with their
| mononym, but it caused all sorts of problems with
| international travel. Some airlines would require duplicating
| their name for first and last, then cause issues during check
| in, security or immigration, because of the mismatch between
| passport and ticket/visa/etc.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Do you mean they had a mononym?
|
| I do.
|
| The idea of a plane ticket for 'Cher Cher' is quite funny,
| though presumably wasn't for her.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If someone has a mononym and a system needs two names,
| the accepted convention should be to use "The" as their
| first name.
| lostlogin wrote:
| This would be good as a 'title' option. We get a fleet of
| military ranks, honorific crap and religious stuff. I'd
| like to see some options like 'The.
| eesmith wrote:
| https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
| gives examples.
|
| One counter-example for "People have, at this point in time,
| one full name which they go by." I learned from the 2020
| election concerned the Georgia voter fraud claim that someone
| used the name "James Blalock" to vote, years after he died in
| January 2006.
|
| Thing is, it was his 96-year-old widow, "Mrs. James Blalock
| Jr.", who voted. That was the name she registered as, back when
| using "Mrs. <Husband>" was a common custom.
| _glass wrote:
| My last name contains the character ss. This silently fails
| often, that's why I put in ss almost everywhere, because a lot of
| important mail had then encoding errors. Also difficult is the
| transition between different countries, that don't have this
| letter. In Germany for official communication it has to be ss,
| but in the other country it has to be ss. That's why we need
| proper unicode support everywhere.
| aftoprokrustes wrote:
| This is I think a much bigger issue, and pretty much impossible
| to understand for most users: the fact that the frontend
| happily accepted your name/e-mail/whatever is _not_ an proof
| that it can handle it. I tried to use gmail's feature that you
| own all addresses of the form my.name+whatever@gmail.com when
| registering to services, but it silently failed so often that I
| do not even bother trying anymore.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| A mere email... I had a situation with a bank when their
| website accepted new password but the backend implicitly and
| without feedback trimmed the new password to 10 characters.
| happymellon wrote:
| HSBC had this problem. Not sure if it still does, but it's
| a big enough institution that I feel it deserves being
| called out.
| jp191919 wrote:
| I had this problem with Transunion (a credit reporting
| agency in the US). They shortened my password to 15
| characters, didn't tell me or anything, I had to figure it
| out myself when trying to login.
| bonton89 wrote:
| Paypal did this with 20 characters. I can't even remember
| how I figured it out so I could login.
|
| I don't know if it truncated it automatically or it just
| stopped accepting input after 20 characters and I of course
| did not notice since the password entry fields were masked.
| yukkuri wrote:
| Same, on multiple sites. It is obnoxious as heck
| emptyfile wrote:
| At least ss is an acceptable and widley understood replacement
| for ss.
|
| My last name end on "ic" so every time, even on many EU shops
| and websites, I get to choose if I want to write my name wrong
| with "ic" and definitley get the package(cause the post
| understands) or write my name properly and get my package in
| 90% of cases.
|
| Its just plain weird that a Spanish/French/UK online shop will
| support their weird characters but not full Unicode.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > I get to choose if I want to write my name wrong ... and
| definitley get the package ... or write my name properly and
| get my package in 90% of cases.
|
| every time i walk into a coffee shop i have to judge how much
| trouble spelling my name 'correctly' will be and will switch
| to "Y" in those cases
|
| like, I thought Joachim was supposed to blaze the trail for
| the rest of us soft J's :(
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > Its just plain weird that a Spanish/French/UK online shop
| will support their weird characters but not full Unicode.
|
| Between plain 7-bit ASCII and full Unicode there were a few
| decades of make-do with several 8 bit encodings.
| gwd wrote:
| > That's why we need proper unicode support everywhere.
|
| A couple of years ago when I wrote a little webapp to do some
| scheduling stuff for our community's yearly conference, I just
| used plain unicode strings for usernames, including spaces. I
| didn't really see why not: The database (SQLite) handles
| unicode, the backend (golang) handles unicode, the frontend
| handles unicode, nothing ever gets passed into a shell program
| or put into CSV or anything, all queries are parameterized; why
| bother making pointless restrictions?
| bschwindHN wrote:
| This still happens regularly in Japan (and elsewhere I'm sure).
|
| "Enter your name" -Okay here's my name
|
| "No, you need to enter your name in kanji. Of course, everyone
| has a kanji name, right?"
|
| That, along with refusing half-width roman characters, requiring
| them to be full-width and all that kinda shit. Basically stating
| up front on their own website that they suck at programming.
| Tor3 wrote:
| Wife (Japanese) couldn't enter her name into a web form for a
| Japanese hotel (had to go directly to the hotel because of some
| booking.com problems at the time). It had to do with half-width
| vs full-width, but we couldn't figure it out even though she's
| Japanese and her PC is Japanese. In the end we had to do a
| long-distance phone call. But Japanese banks at least has a
| system which mostly solves at least those problems - everyone's
| name is written in Katakana.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Japanese hotel websites are probably the worst offenders. I
| refuse to use them anymore and only book through hotel
| aggregators. They are straight up horrible.
|
| > But Japanese banks at least has a system which mostly
| solves at least those problems - everyone's name is written
| in Katakana.
|
| That's workable, though I still remember seeing banks with
| comically short character limits for names.
| vsnf wrote:
| You should see the password requirements. Shinsei Bank
| hardcaps your password at 10 characters.
| criddell wrote:
| Which probably means they are storing your password
| rather than a hash of the password.
|
| I complained about this to my bank when I found out they
| stored passwords and their response was "don't worry
| about it - you aren't responsible for fraud".
| vkou wrote:
| > I complained about this to my bank when I found out
| they stored passwords and their response was "don't worry
| about it - you aren't responsible for fraud".
|
| I'd much rather live in a world where banks are idiots
| with passwords and I'm not responsible for fraud, than a
| world where I'm expected to be not an idiot with my
| passwords, and I _were_ responsible for fraud.
|
| Every day, I count my lucky stars.
| Arrath wrote:
| Reminds me of when one of my subordinates applied for an
| apartment and as part of the process the property
| management people reached out to me to verify his
| employment.
|
| How? By forwarding me his unredacted application chock
| full of PII. When I pointed out that most people probably
| wouldn't appreciate their SSN and more being shot around
| in emails by the management company, I was simply told it
| was "standard practice" for them. Following insinuations
| that their "standard practices" might just be "fucked"
| were summarily ignored.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >"No, you need to enter your name in kanji. Of course, everyone
| has a kanji name, right?"
|
| Do they actually block hiragana and katakana? If they do that's
| probably grounds to sue.
|
| >refusing half-width roman characters
|
| With _maybe_ the exception of arabic numerals, Japanese is
| nearly always written in full /monospace width. This is not
| unlike how English is nearly always written in
| half/proportional width.
|
| When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| > Do they actually block hiragana and katakana? If they do
| that's probably grounds to sue.
|
| I don't have evidence at the ready, but I remember
| interacting with websites which complained about receiving
| katakana for both the name and kana field for your name.
|
| > With maybe the exception of arabic numerals, Japanese is
| nearly always written in full/monospace width. This is not
| unlike how English is nearly always written in
| half/proportional width
|
| Yes, I'm fine with them using it. But they could put in a
| _little_ bit of work for me and convert my half-width
| characters to full-width, as the good websites here do.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The kana field is for indicating how the name is read
| (remember, kanji can be read in many ways), and
| consequently how the name should be indexed and sorted
| inside databases and other data stores.
|
| If the field wanted only either hiragana or katakana
| (remember, it wants a simple reading guide) and complained,
| I'm not necessarily surprised.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| I'm specifically talking about the kanji field, not the
| kana field. If your name doesn't have kanji (which mine
| doesn't), you can really only enter katakana. And I've
| encountered forms which refuse katakana for that field,
| and which also refuses half-width or full-width roman
| characters.
|
| What do you do at that point?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I would just enter hiragana and move on with my day, and
| if _that_ doesn 't work I would just pick arbitrary kanji
| using standard readings to roughly spell out my name
| (this practice is known as Dang teZi , ateji).
|
| It's not my problem they have to deal with malformed data
| if that's all they will accept.
| ytch wrote:
| > Do they actually block hiragana and katakana? If they do
| that's probably grounds to sue.
|
| many websites in Japan has two name field: one is kanji,
| another is katakana.
|
| https://shinkabukiza.pia.jp/membmng/RegisterNormalAction.do
|
| Take this for example, the field in first row is full-width
| kanji, second one is full-width katakana.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The oMing Qian (onamae) field is for your name as written
| in Japanese normally, and it should take any of kanji,
| hiragana, or katakana as appropriate so long as it is Quan
| Jiao (full width) and the programmer didn't screw up.
|
| The hurigana (furigana) field is to indicate how the name
| given above is read, because kanji can have many readings
| including completely arbitrary ones. This also serves to
| indicate how computers should index and sort the names when
| storing and processing them, so it's still applicable even
| if the name is all hiragana or katakana and immediately
| obvious.
|
| Furigana is also used to indicate how to read kanji in
| ordinary text, oftentimes when dealing with rare kanji or
| special readings, when the text _must_ be comprehensible by
| everyone (eg: emergency bulletins), or when the text is
| written for people learning Japanese (eg: school
| textbooks).
|
| Furigana is usually written using hiragana, so the reason
| Quan Jiao katakana (full width katakana) is specified
| instead of just full width is to inform the form's filer
| that he shouldn't write hiragana like he otherwise probably
| would.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Does a lot of that come from the fact that names can use
| kanji outside of the common 2000+ Joyo kanji?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji
|
| Is it common to come across names using kanji outside
| that range?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiy%C5%8D_kanji
| grose wrote:
| I live in Japan and this happens to me all the time. My name is
| too long to fit in most forms so I have to drop the middle name
| (which isn't really a thing here, they consider it as part of
| my first name), and then they get mad at me because it doesn't
| match my ID exactly. I've had to redo forms because I didn't
| write my name in all caps like the resident card. I've had
| medical ID cards from hospitals that chop my name halfway off
| and the staff wrote the rest with a marker. It's a mess.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Some people just can't fathom it when the name doesn't
| exactly match, no critical thinking is allowed in those
| cases.
|
| "Hmmm, your ID card says 'Christian Joseph Anderson' but our
| records show 'Anderson Joseph Chri', are you trying to pull a
| fast one on us???"
| xnzakg wrote:
| > Some people just can't fathom it when the name doesn't
| exactly match, no critical thinking is allowed in those
| cases.
|
| In my experience computers are the bigger issue. A human
| can think outside the box in a way a `strcmp` can't.
| aristus wrote:
| You might be surprised. I spent a long time carefully and
| politely explaining to an immigration case officer that
| "Firstname NMN Lastname" meant, in fact, that there was
| No Middle Name and not that there was a middle name
| cryptically encoded as NMN.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >A human can think outside the box in a way a `strcmp`
| can't.
|
| Computer says no
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n_Ty_72Qds
|
| ---
|
| A human can do many things, but never underestimate the
| power of the system (Hello Moloch) to remove said
| creative abilities from humans. Also never underestimate
| how creatively stupid humans can be.
| Tor3 wrote:
| There's one thing I at least haven't had any problems with. I
| have a middle name. I never use it. I always order my flight
| tickets without the middle name. However, my passport
| includes the middle name. I've never had a problem with that,
| in Japanese airports (or elsewhere, for that matter).
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Same here, my passport includes my middle name but I always
| book my air tickets without my middle name. Have had no
| issues in about 15+ countries with this approach.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I would have used the only Kanji I know: :). I guess I might
| end up with a fair few name siblings huh.
| fusslo wrote:
| I wonder if a kanji name is a legally recognized name. Like, I
| don't know kanji, could I just pick random characters that end
| up being nonsense? or will I get in trouble
|
| interesting anecdote
| adelie wrote:
| you can't really have a 'nonsense' name - there's a list of
| around 3000 characters you're allowed to use in names, but in
| theory, you can put together whatever you want. you'll just
| get side-eyed for having a weird name, that's all.
|
| that being said, i think most of these websites that ask for
| a kanji name will require you to show ID with that name when
| you show up in person, so you might run into trouble if you
| just pick random characters.
| brunoTbear wrote:
| I was concerned that the author might have been running into the
| Scunthorpe Problem
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem).
|
| My last name contains a naughty substring. I feel for the author
| and their hyphen!
| ant6n wrote:
| ,,ear"? ,,ar"?
| labster wrote:
| I'm starting to think Bruno has been lying to us about being
| a bear all this time
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I used to have that problem but it has not been an issue since
| the early 2000s.
| zamalek wrote:
| I ran into it about a year ago with Verizon. No Dickinsons
| allowed! Sadly the only FTTH around, so I had to have support
| give me permission to have my name.
|
| I can vaguely imagine how someone would _think_ its a good
| idea (it's not, to be clear) on a website where users might
| see other users' names, something like CRM SaaS. I can't
| understand how anyone would think that validating users' real
| names on a purely customer-facing website is a good idea.
| Maybe frustrated customers (can't imagine why) have names
| like FuckVerizon on their account?
| dessimus wrote:
| Or similarly a clbuttic mistake
| (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic).
| brian_cunnie wrote:
| I couldn't make changes to my USPS (United States Postal
| Service) account for years because it kept flagging my last
| name, "Cunnie", as an obscenity.
| willmacdonald wrote:
| My last name is Macdonald, however most banks in the UK change it
| to MacDonald, which is incorrect.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| Clearly the easiest solution is the alls caps last name
| convention: MACDONALD which wold be correct for both
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| That annoys me on lots of US-based websites. a, o, u etc. seem to
| be well supported, but my name contains a rarer character/accent
| combination(still not that rare and very common in lots of
| places) and I frequently have the issue that american websites
| tell me that my name is invalid.
|
| European websites never bother me about it, of course :)
|
| Doesn't bother me that much but I've had moments where a service
| told me that "Your name MUST match the name on your ID", only to
| then complain that I can't use a certain character. Which is
| present on my ID. Well.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Fortunately it's only my address, but "Kobenhavn O" fails even
| on websites in Europe sometimes.
|
| The postman understands "Kbenhavn", "K~#benhavn >&" and so on.
|
| Very occasionally some address verification thing can't match
| my address, as one side or the other within their system is
| corrupting it.
| vidarh wrote:
| Norway has a village that's just named "A"...
| euroderf wrote:
| > I've had moments where a service told me that "Your name MUST
| match the name on your ID", only to then complain that I can't
| use a certain character. Which is present on my ID. Well.
|
| In a just world, the website would be taken offline at once,
| and kept off until fixed.
| undebuggable wrote:
| Even for an European in another European country one has to have
| prepared ASCII-alised name(s), surname, and address in home
| country. ASCII characters and digits only. The variety of
| systems, encodings, and input methods is legendary, complaining
| is pointless. BTW JGC says his surname contains a hyphen but
| _technically_ he is using the minus character.
| Symbiote wrote:
| He is using the Unicode "Hyphen-Minus" character.
|
| This is the hyphen-minus, U+002D: - (and ASCII too)
|
| This is a hyphen, U+2010: -
|
| This is a minus, U+2212: -
| bux93 wrote:
| I don't know if complaining is pointless in your situation.
| Some Belgian citizen did, and they got a ruling that the bank
| needs to upgrade their EBCDIC system to support diacritics to
| spell their last name correctly.
| https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with...
| I don't know if the bank ended up fixing it, though.
| undebuggable wrote:
| There always exists that one institution which will not
| accept your diacritics and usually it's a bank, city hall,
| tax office, or an airline.
| ytch wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37332126
|
| > Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style "Family name first" when
| designing interfaces?
|
| the discuss shows it's so hard to handle name of people from any
| countries.
| spuz wrote:
| I'd like to think that we've made progress in web development in
| the last 14 years. I wonder if people like JGC still experiences
| this kind of issue on certain websites?
| mmis1000 wrote:
| I think emoji may push the adoption of utf8. A system is not
| going to accept emoji correctly unless it have proper utf8
| support.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I do. In fact, it literally happened to me yesterday.
| rustybolt wrote:
| An employee of a major US airline had the audacity to declare my
| last name invalid, and literally made me pick a different name
| that "the system" would accept. My last name literally only uses
| ASCII characters, not even dashes or accents.
|
| I did pick another name at that time because I had been waiting
| for an hour, so practical concerns trumped principles, but it's
| ten years later and I still feel offended when I think about
| this.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| How does that work when they check your ID at security?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Then you have to rely on the common sense of the person
| checking you.
| deathanatos wrote:
| My tickets rarely, if ever, have my name correctly on them.
| It is nearly always truncated.
|
| It has literally never been an issue, and I suspect the
| agents are just used to this.
| delecti wrote:
| Lucky. The one time I flew when my ID didn't match my
| ticket (using an airline account that I forgot to update
| with my married name first) and it was a pretty big
| headache. I had to stand in the security line for about 15
| extra minutes for them to verify that yes First Maidenlast
| was the same person as First Marriedlast. I made sure to
| get the situation fixed before my return flight.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| I was likely some COBOL system with UI displayed by some
| miracle on a modern PC with windows. The employee probably
| didn't even know what encoding is, they didn't intent to
| question your identity.
| rustybolt wrote:
| > they didn't intent to question your identity.
|
| Of course, but, to give you a sense why I felt so annoyed,
| the conversation went something like this:
|
| > What is your last name sir?
|
| "de Bakker"
|
| > That name is invalid. What is your name?
|
| My last name is "de Bakker".
|
| > That name is invalid. You need to give a valid name.
|
| "de Bakker" is my last name. It's on my passport.
|
| > Sir, if you don't cooperate I'm gonna hang up and proceed
| with the next customer. What's your name?
|
| So it was very clear that I was the one at fault here.
| yukkuri wrote:
| That's not even an unusual name...
| happytoexplain wrote:
| If your stack supports Unicode (where utf8mb3 doesn't count), is
| there any practical reason to even validate name fields beyond
| silently removing anything in categories Zl, Zp, and C?
| jerf wrote:
| The possible need to integrate with other systems that don't.
| If you tell me your name is (real Unicode Chinese here) but I
| _have_ to integrate that with a system that requires English
| letters only, I may be stuck.
|
| There are cases where that happens for real and not just due to
| other computers not supporting Unicode properly; for example it
| is completely unreasonable for every postal system in the world
| to have to support every language in the world for addresses.
| partdavid wrote:
| The only real way to handle it, even though it's not a fully
| general solution, is to ask the user if it needs to be
| different than what you've said is their canonical name. For
| example, just ask "How should your name appear in a address?"
| (only if different from your name) or "How may your name
| appear in government records?" (for when you need to look
| these up, like for known traveler info). That's not fully
| general but it at least accommodates many of these use cases
| and doesn't run afoul of the "automated rudeness" problem the
| blogger is talking about.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Surely every alphabet/character in the world is a much
| smaller set than every language though? Say, roughly Unicode
| sized?
| jerf wrote:
| The scale of "all the postal mail in the world" is about as
| large as it comes, so to a first approximation, every
| little potential issue you can imagine, as well as every
| one you can't, will actually happen. Is that "fragile" in
| Russian or "urgent" in Mongolian? Is that bit of text the
| oblast or the road?
|
| But even beyond that, even expecting every postal system in
| the world to have to understand every script is itself not
| feasible. I don't mean this to offend, but Arabic is just a
| scribble to me. I know from reading articles about the
| difficulty of typography that Arabic letters are generally
| strongly affected by their preceding and/or following
| characters, but that only from HN, not from my normal day-
| to-day experience. I couldn't even parse it into letters
| correctly or safely. The ideographic languages have no
| spaces, so I can't break them into words safely. (After
| some non-trivial study of Japanese, I could _mostly_ do it,
| but still only _mostly_.) It 's not a reasonable
| expectation to put on every postal system in the world.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I agree that potential integration with non-Unicode
| systems is a real concern I hadn't thought of. However,
| your examples of complexity in the service of
| demonstrating _why_ a system might not support Unicode
| don 't seem to affect or be affected by the allowance of
| all printable Unicode characters in digital
| representations of proper nouns, unless I'm
| misunderstanding.
|
| I.e. I don't understand why these problems mean that a
| postal system might elect to not support all scripts _in
| storage_ (I get why it means the OCR software for a
| postal office might not support scripts outside their own
| country 's scripts).
| jerf wrote:
| Because having the script in storage is not enough to
| derive the other possible representations that may be
| needed. partdavid's answer is correct, you may have to
| ask for other representations to be provided to you.
|
| This is much like the naming scenario, where I may need
| both your legal name for legal reasons, which may have
| local restrictions on it, and I may also have a field
| that is basically "What do you want me to call you?"
| which may have arbitrary unbounded Unicode for all I
| care, I don't care if my system calls you the Lord and
| Master of Zalgo Text. But there's no programmatic way to
| get from the latter to the former, or indeed, even a
| human way.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Last name contains invalid characters [2010]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769788 - July 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _Your last name contains invalid characters_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438355 - June 2010 (73
| comments)
| borski wrote:
| Required reading:
| https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
| paulddraper wrote:
| > PS Would accepting the hyphen actually destroy your database?
|
| IDK but every time I programmatically create an AWS resource, I
| have to go crawling through masses of disorganized documentation
| to see what character substitutions to make.
|
| Hyphens do destroy AWS's database. :shrug:
| Alex3917 wrote:
| RDS databases only allow alphanumic names -- no hyphens,
| underscores, spaces, etc. Even though it's a small thing, it's
| an absurdly bad user experience to have to enter the exact same
| name two or three times spelled differently just to set up some
| basic AWS infra.
| sjrd wrote:
| My first name (Sebastien) fits in latin1 (ISO-8859-1) and I still
| can't trust airlines websites to deal with it correctly, so I
| remove the (mandatory in French) diacritic. I don't know how
| people with names outside of that range navigate online. It's
| pretty appalling that we haven't fixed this yet.
| mort96 wrote:
| My favourite is when they stress the importance of typing the
| name exactly as it appears on the passport or on a debit card,
| then doesn't accept my name.
|
| This is why I don't use Namecheap anymore fwiw. They used to
| accept 'o', they redesigned their interface, I had to add a new
| debit card to my account, their new system didn't accept 'o'
| yet told me to write the name "exactly as it is on the card".
| Customer service just told me to write a name that's not mine
| in the billing info; I moved to a different registrar instead.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's not quite the same, but every time I put my apartment
| number in the second address field (which is more or less
| exactly for apartment/duplex numbers etc), it thinks for a
| second and says "USPS has a suggested more accurate address"
| which simply appends it to the street address.
|
| Why do we even have that field anymore?
| emilecantin wrote:
| I've been called A~(tm)mile or similar a few too many times
| before discovering my name is actually spelled Emile on my
| birth certificate. I stopped even trying for Emile at that
| point.
|
| Also, to the original article's point, it looks like these
| websites would exclude like half of Quebec's population; dual
| last names are very common here (women keep their names after
| marriage, making the "mother's maiden name" security question
| pretty stupid).
| yukkuri wrote:
| "Security questions" are as a class pretty stupid.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ... before discovering my name is actually spelled Emile on
| my birth certificate. I stopped even trying for Emile at that
| point.
|
| Diactrics on uppercase letters weren't that common before:
| they were _officially_ supposed to be there on uppercase
| characters but:
|
| - old french typewriters didn't have them (they had the
| lowercase e, e, a etc. though)
|
| - people using early computers had no idea how to encode them
| at all (but e, e, a etc. were on the keyboard) [1]
|
| But "ATTENTION MARCHE" and "ATTENTION MARCHE" are two very
| different things. It's simply wrong to use the first one if
| you meant the second and vice versa.
|
| Now I know a friend who lives in the US and who simply
| dropped the diacritic from its family name: so now he and his
| kids have a "different" family name than his family in
| Europe.
|
| He found it easier that way.
|
| [1] People using Word in the early nineties had to type 'e'
| and then select that character and go to a menu to transform
| it to uppercase, because "shift+e" would enter the digit '2'.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| french airlines?
| aodonnell2536 wrote:
| I've been dropping the apostrophe in my last name my entire life
| just to prevent from dealing with the headache it could
| potentially cause. Quite irritating, it feels as if my last name
| is being slowly changed by shoddy software
| nevir wrote:
| Also consider that in some cultures, people have no last name, or
| multiple last names.
|
| Have one input: "What should we call you?"
|
| and, if you really need it: "your full name"
| kjetijor wrote:
| I'll add another airline story. SAS, the Scandinavian flag
| carrier - which you'd think would have Scandinavian characters
| down. I've had an account with them since, well, they got a web
| presence. My last name contains an o - for which; technically at
| least Norway accepts both o and oe as valid transliterations.
|
| Order a ticket online, they pick the transliteration for o as o,
| passports transliterate o to oe - the less ambiguous choice. This
| generally isn't a problem until you want to travel to one of the
| APIS countries - USA or UK, which won't let you check in if the
| name on your passport doesn't match the name on the ticket.
|
| I have tormented many check-in counter staff with this,
| especially at regional airports that don't see a lot of
| international travel.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| transliteration of documents most likely is covered by a
| national standard
|
| it should be possible to file a complaint to you country's
| standardization agency and they will pressure the airline with
| fines
| emilecantin wrote:
| My mom's last name is Saint-Pierre, but it's actually written
| as St-Pierre on her passport. She almost couldn't get on the
| plane in Atlanta last year because of that. You'd think such a
| simple abbreviation would be accepted, but apparently not.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > won't let you check in if the name on your passport doesn't
| match the name on the ticket.
|
| This is always a paranoid worry of mine. Even worse, some
| airlines tend to include the academic title in there too,
| meaning I've had tickets reading "MRDRWRONG, PROBABLY".
|
| Not only does it not match my passport, but it also makes it
| look as if I'm a murderer.
| eckesicle wrote:
| Hi. I wrote part of this flow for SAS on the original mobile
| app years ago. I am so sorry.
|
| We had to do it because the underlying backend is Spanish and
| the APIs are insane. Behind our JSON-wrapper is an adapter to
| translates it into teletype friendly format ... spaces, new
| lines and tabs makes it look like a ticket you'd get from a
| travel agency in the 1970s.
|
| This format is also the reason why your name is truncated on
| your ticket (or so I was told). IT in the airline industry is
| insane and many systems are many decades old at this point.
|
| A bit surprised you have trouble with APIS though.
| widforss wrote:
| This is why I am on HN :)
| Tomte wrote:
| I have an umlaut in my last name.
|
| Once, checking in to a flight within China security didn't want
| to let me through.
|
| Because ,,Muller" (as an example) on the passport is not
| identical to ,,Mueller" on the ticket.
|
| I eventually made it through when I pointed out that the machine-
| readable code on the bottom of the passport contains the string
| ,,MUELLER".
|
| Names outside US-ASCII are always problematic.
| netsharc wrote:
| https://geeksta.net/img/large/schei-encoding-white.jpg
|
| I googled "Chinese passport" to have a look, and conveniently
| for them, they have the ASCII version of the owner's name under
| the Chinese name.
| p1mrx wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_passport_(2012_ve.
| ..
| dctoedt wrote:
| Obligatory XKCD reference: Little Bobby Tables --
| https://xkcd.com/327/
| soneil wrote:
| Since we're sharing war stories .. I have an O'Name. My employer
| game me an email address, first.o'name@corp. This, while being
| technically valid, broke many things as you can imagine. I asked
| repeatedly to have it changed, but to no avail. I got used to
| reciting my ID number on the phone because that@corp worked too.
|
| One day, I got a call from IT, almost apologetically asking if
| they could change my email address because it was causing them
| issues. I pointed out I'd requested such approximately every 3
| years since I started.
|
| It turns out they'd never received those requests. I'll give you
| two guesses ..
| layer8 wrote:
| A long time ago, I used "/" as a separator in email address
| localparts under my domain (as in "foo/bar@example.com"),
| because that's a valid email address syntax and I filtered my
| email into corresponding folders. As it turned out, some MTAs
| mapped localparts to local file system paths, with my email
| addresses wreaking havoc...
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, back in IE3 or IE4 days the temporary internet files
| directory would commonly save files temp files with the
| domain they came from without an extension. So if you visited
| microsoft.com it could save some asset in temp internet files
| as 'microsoft.com', which a com file is a valid executable
| extension. Of course this would trigger many anti-virus
| programs to scan it and now freak out that random content is
| ending up in executables.
|
| It took a bit of time between Microsoft making the temp
| internet a 'special directory' and AV working properly in the
| directory, and the browser not saving attacker controlled
| literals to the filesystem to get past these. Also fun in
| NTFS because it could cause bluescreens was the AUX, CON,
| PRNT filenames.
|
| Your post just reminded me of that kind of issue.
| nneonneo wrote:
| When I was quite young, I remember visiting a website on a
| public library machine (probably running Windows 98 at the
| time) which mistakenly downloaded a .com file instead of
| showing a page. I opened the .com (expecting it to be the
| file I wanted to read), and instead got a console window
| that showed some gibberish _and then started up the
| printer_.
|
| Surprisingly, the random text in the program was
| interpreted as valid program code. I was too young to
| understand exactly what had happened at the time, but now I
| understand it's because one of the valid forms of .com
| programs is a headerless chunk of x86 code for DOS, and I
| guess that website's output just happened to (a) not
| immediately crash and (b) invoke the DOS service for
| printing.
| Aaron2222 wrote:
| Reminds me of a similar story from my childhood. I was
| also quite young at the time, accessing the public
| library OPAC from my home computer, and noticed the URL
| for the page ended in (I think) `.exe`. I know now that
| the OPAC was likely using CGI[0], but at the time I was
| curious, and somehow was able to download this `.exe`,
| Given it was a`.exe` and that it actually ran, I can't
| have just saved the webpage. I have a vague feeling I
| might have stripped the query parameters off the end of
| the URL, and that caused the web server to serve up the
| underlying `.exe` file. But whatever happened, when I ran
| the file, all it did was cause my printer (a parallel
| port one, not USB) to start printing blank pages.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface
| miki123211 wrote:
| Hafas (the system of record for train scheduling
| information for Deutsche Bahn and the national Polish
| railways) does the same thing. An example URL is[1].
|
| Both have better consumer frontends now (although I
| remember Deutsche Bahn still recommending this system
| around 2019), but those systems ultimately get all their
| data from this one, as far as I'm aware.
|
| [1] http://old.rozklad-pkp.pl/bin/query.exe/pn?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Is there any format for a .com that isn't just a
| headerless chunk of x86 code??
|
| (Which also means it's extremely difficult to determine
| if a .com file really is an executable--there's no
| signature. It either decodes or it doesn't--and most
| bytes decode correctly because you want to pack the
| commands in as densely as possible. Things which will not
| decode are packing inefficiencies.)
|
| (And back from the Z80 days I remember very carefully
| crafting assembly code that could be embedded in a BASIC
| program without causing it to puke. Some commands were
| unavailable and some values were not permitted--amongst
| them, zero.)
| nneonneo wrote:
| Ah, time to use `foo/../../../etc/bar@example.com`!
|
| (Replace bar with passwd - I was blocked from submitting my
| original comment by Cloudflare's WAF...)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > It turns out they'd never received those requests. I'll give
| you two guesses ..
|
| I thought me having a hyphen on my last name was bad. I'm glad
| no place I work at has tried to add them. This is a great
| ending to this story btw, and maybe a reason to try and contact
| them via phone if you never hear back at all.
| nitnelave wrote:
| My wife's last name is only 2 letters long. Some websites don't
| accept that as it's too short (take that, Xi Jinping!)
|
| Conversely, I've had to fill forms in Korea that included space
| for only 4 letters, including both first and last name. Needless
| to say, my 3 first names plus last name didn't fit.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I knew someone with a one letter first name "J". Most times he
| would have to put "Jay" as his first name.
|
| This caused big problems whenever he booked airlines tickets as
| the name on the ticket didn't match his ID.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| When my father was born, his parents gave him a normal given
| name, but endowed his middle initial as only a single letter.
| They said, when he grew up he could choose whatever name fit
| that initial.
|
| The initial happened to match his father's given name, and
| when he was old enough, he reliably chose to take that name
| as his middle name. It is certainly an endearing story of
| filial devotion, and a distinct lack of finicky SQL databases
| or web input validation in the 1950s.
| bpye wrote:
| My first and middle names are both relatively long - this
| caused me issues when getting a US SSN. On a UK passport they
| are both in the "Given Names" field - and both ended up on my
| I-94. This was too long when the person at the social security
| office tried to enter my details. They had to send it by mail
| to be processed which took something like 6 weeks...
| Monotoko wrote:
| Same in China, the amount of issues I've had at banks, airports
| etcwith 4 names is unbelievable
| plasticbugs wrote:
| I can pile on to this. I had to rename my employer's Microsoft
| Teams app because it doesn't autocomplete the app's name after an
| apostrophe is typed in the Microsoft Teams app (both native and
| web).
|
| For example, typing "@O'Shaughnessy Demo App" into Teams to fire
| off a command to our bot would automatically stop populating the
| autocompletes after the apostrophe is typed. So users would be
| forced to scroll through the entire list of usernames that begin
| with O to get to our app name to type a command into our bot.
|
| Our workaround was to rename the application to "Demo App by
| O'Shaughnessy". Microsoft is aware of the bug after we posted in
| their dev forums, but has not fixed it yet.
|
| You'd think that typing the full "@O'Shaughnessy Demo App do
| thing" into the app without relying on autocomplete would work,
| but it does not.
| cerved wrote:
| I don't expect anything to work in Teams
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| It makes me miss Skype for Business. Teams is down there with
| Sharepoint in terms of craptaculence.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I still miss MSN. It just worked for non-work stuff. I met
| my wife during the peak MSN years.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ah, little Bobby Tables must be this guys son.
| deathanatos wrote:
| My given name includes a generational suffix (a roman numeral);
| my home state, upon issuing a drivers license, wrote that out as
| an arabic ordinal numeral. E.g., instead of "III" for "the
| third", I got "3RD". _On an official government ID._
|
| I eventually moved, and every state after that wasn't quite that
| dumb.
|
| Needless to say, this matches nothing at all, like airline
| tickets, or my birth certificate or passport. Shockingly, this
| was never a problem.
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe Unicode should specify an equivalent of UAX #31 [0] for
| person names. ;)
|
| [0] https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/
| dpedu wrote:
| I didn't notice the date of the article until I got down to the
| screenshots of the old Mac OS X "aqua" UI controls. And wow, I
| forgot how good they looked. The drop-downs just scream "interact
| with me, you can click on me" unlike this flat and low contrast
| stuff we have today. I miss it.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| In some systems it may say your last name contained a "sexually
| explicit" term.
| gumby wrote:
| Author didn't mention the other problem which is that sometimes
| the hyphen is replaced with a space rather than being dropped
| (while other sites, or sometimes other parts of the same system)
| won't accept a space either.
|
| Plenty of people _do_ have spaces in their surnames (like Conan
| Doyle) and shouldn 't the system be able to distinguish between
| "Conan Doyle" and "Conan-Doyle"?)
| zqna wrote:
| 90% of Lithuanian girls/women last names end with e. Which is
| mandated by the government, so as long as parents hold Lithuanian
| passports then you will be stuck with your e. So, good luck
| opening a bank account abroad for your baby daughter.
| medo-bear wrote:
| > 90% of Lithuanian girls/women last names end with e. Which is
| mandated by the government
|
| Why is this mandated by the government?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Cultural war it seems.
|
| "VLKK Chairperson Violeta Meiliunaite claims that legalising
| such a spelling would "violate the Lithuanian name system and
| have a negative impact on the country's linguistic and
| cultural identity and distinctiveness"."
|
| https://media.efhr.eu/2023/09/27/vlkk-legalisation-of-
| female...
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| There is a legal requirement to adjust names to conform to
| Lithuanian morphology. This includes foreign names.
| robocat wrote:
| Children's names are restricted in many countries (including
| my own, New Zealand):
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law
|
| Hopefully someone will add the reason for Lithuania.
|
| Iceland: Parents are limited to choosing
| children's names from the Personal Names Register, which as
| of 2013 approved 1800 names for each gender. Since 2019 given
| names are no longer restricted by gender. The Icelandic
| Naming Committee maintains the list and hears requests for
| exceptions.
|
| New Zealand: Below is a list of banned names in New Zealand:*
| [Asterisk], 4Real, 89, Anal, Bishop, Constable, H-Q, II, III,
| Justice, Justus, Knight, Lucifer, Mafia No Fear, Minister,
| Mr, Queen Victoria, Royale, Saint, Sex Fruit, Talula Does The
| Hula From Hawaii. Note I suspect * is special because I think
| it is a is placeholder in the Dept. Internal Affairs for none
| (I had an acquaintance that changed their name to a single
| word and the asterisk appeared in their surname field
| officially - also see http://wookware.org/name.html )
|
| And hilariously Australia had this girl called
| Methamphetamine Rules recently:
| https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
| news/2023/sep/19/can-y...
| turminal wrote:
| Did I read this correctly, there is a mandatory suffix to names
| of all female Lithuanians, required by law?
| a-priori wrote:
| Mandatory naming systems are pretty common around the world.
| Many countries, for example, have a list of permitted given
| names, and requirements around what family name can be used
| (e.g father's name, if father is known).
| chrisdhoover wrote:
| No moon unit for you
| zqna wrote:
| Yes. A bit more (somewhat funny, but also sad) context:
| https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/7/4/88
| miki123211 wrote:
| In many languages, last names are Gendered.
|
| Polish does this for some local last names, mostly the ones
| ending with "ski" (they end with "ska" for a female)[1]. This
| makes grammatical sense, Polish adjectives change their form
| depending on the gender of the noun they apply to, and those
| names are kind of sort of adjective like.
|
| Czech goes even further and applies grammatical rules to all
| names, even foreign ones. Czech news broadcasters will
| literally say "Melania Trumpova" or "Michelle Obamova".
|
| Incidentally, those gendered forms are a pain in the ass to
| deal with in user interfaces, particularly if you don't have
| gender information for your users and/or want to support
| nonbinary, something slavic languages are really not designed
| to do.
|
| [1] The US doesn't enforce this rule of course, and therefore
| it's not unusual to meet a female American with Polish roots
| with the surname "Kaminski" (or sometimes even "Cumminskey").
| widforss wrote:
| My name is Aron Gunnar Mauritz Widforss (chill out, I'm Swedish,
| so everything about me is public anyway). In Sweden this does not
| cause me any problem because every person and system understands
| to refer to me as Aron Widforss.
|
| Well, I don't live in Sweden ... so right now every system is
| presenting me as Aron Gunnar Mauritz, making every person
| interacting with those system refering to me as Aron Gunnar
| Mauritz. Which is madness to me.
|
| Naming customs are subtle and hard for other cultures to grasp.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > I'm Swedish, so everything about me is public anyway
|
| I'm confused, Isn't EU much more privacy focused and with GDPR
| etc it's easier to reduce your internet footprint?
| widforss wrote:
| Yes, unless your data is part of a public database. The
| principle of public access to official records [1] combined
| with the Swedish freedom of the press act [2] makes my full
| name, our version of the SSN, an estimate of my salary as
| well as my address just a google search away. Which is not a
| problem for me.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_
| to_...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Freedom_of_the_Pres
| s_A...
|
| EDIT: There are even search engines to find out who in an
| area have been convicted of various crimes.
| xlii wrote:
| I had my share of problems, so I didn't use non-latin chars in my
| name as much as possible, but there was an instance that really
| surprised me.
|
| It was around 2010 and I joined (as a contract) company which
| used Google's Cloud Platform for their products. It was initial
| phase, but stuff was ramping up quite quickly.
|
| So, since I was contractor, and it was supposed to be short gig,
| access was given to my Google account, which was one of not that
| many places that had my full name visible (mostly for visibility
| and official matters).
|
| Week or two later I was to do something with CDN, or Cloud Files,
| don't remember the product, but it was managed through Python
| script. As soon as I logged in and tried to do something I got
| familiar error about unsupported encoding.
|
| That was weird, but as that was Python script I quickly figured
| out that the reason was that Google was pulling my name from
| their account and their script couldn't handle it. Oh well,
| happens, I mailed support (what a time to be alive back then!)
| and went toward my way not really expecting much.
|
| I received response shortly after, that in this case it wasn't
| possible to fix the access script. After few back and forth where
| I pushed against using latin chars in every Google product
| possibly support finished with something along the lines "well,
| you can just change your name in that case".
|
| Funnily enough, for company that was hiring me it was the last
| straw and they took their business elsewhere. I, personally, was
| annoyed for a long time, but today it only makes for a good
| anecdote. I never used any GCP products though.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I avoid all of this by just using my father's last name instead
| of using the hyphens. If it's not something purely official like
| a job application, banking, etc, I don't care enough to put my
| full last name. I guess I've been doing it so long, I never
| realized how broken some sites are for people. Even when I get
| employed, I just register as "Giancarlos Toro" everywhere.
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