Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

staticassertion

I've stopped using my real name. My last name has an apostraphe, and at this point I'm just sick of websites rejecting it and then forcing me to refill in all of my information.

So, now I drop the apostraphe.

In high school my school ID was completely broken. It printed <first half of last name> <first letter of last name> <middle name> <first name>.

They ended up putting a quotation mark instead of the apostraphe - somehow the machine handled that fine. That was the workaround.

Hotel wifi systems tend to break if they ask for a last name to connect. Again, training me to reserve the hotel under a 'fake' last name.

I actually notice it every time I write my last name. I'm like "is this a system that will break" and now I'm inclined to just never use the "real" spelling because then I'll get a mismatch later on.

This is something I've really noticed over the last decade. The older I get, and the more systems become a part of my life, the more systems I have to give a fake name. Paper records will show my true name, but I wonder if at this point, given digital records, what it would appear to be.

I was at Xerox when they were inventing i18N in the mid 1980s. They were so excited when I started because my real name is Mairé and not Maire. They wanted my login name to include the acute accent.

Over time all of the i18N people left for Apple. My login broke and I removed the accent. When I went to Apple I never bothered to add the accent again even though I was friends with the Unicode gang. I never added it back.

Username relevant :(

Ouch, that one hits close to home

Man that's depressing

Well, my name cannot be accurately represented in Latin characters. Most people in Taiwan adopt an English name because the Mandarin one is hard on computers and communicating with English-speaking businesses.

My favorite instance of this was Mailgun, who html encoded the apostrophe, and then html encoded the resulting text.

O'Bryant -> O'Bryant -> O&#39;Bryant (screenshot: https://twitter.com/obryant666/status/1163638029212250112/ph...)

Apostrophed person here. This happens SO often.

Deep sigh: ' is not a special character in email addresses or headers so it can support names like yours without special effort.

I think a lot of those writing software just escape [^a-zA-Z0-9-_\.] or similar just to be overly cautious. I've definitely been guilty of this myself when I'm in a rush.

I'm also the person who gets irrationally annoyed at web forms that barf at my username+tag@example.com email address usage (+ signs being valid in the username part), so I can certainly relate to the ire, too.

It's a special character in HTML, which is the context in which the name is being shown. The fact that it's escaped before being concatenated into the HTML document is fine; the fact that it's triple-escaped is the problem.

>Hotel wifi systems tend to break if they ask for a last name to connect

DDWRT WPA2 had issues with apostrophe in passwords. I wonder whether OEM firmwares have such issues, ironical considering special character does improve password strength.

Some of these systems which broke were almost certainly SQL injectable.

The number of systems failing the "L'Oréal test" is staggering. (This one tests multiple assumptions: nonalphabetic names, nonascii names, capitalization. We have encountered a particularly unexpected name+address a long time ago, and the name kinda stuck ;))

And as someone with an accent on a letter of my name, what I find amazing of your example is that the apostrophe and é are part of ascii.

No technical limitation on the computer if it supports ascii. It’s bad programming and assumptions.

é is not in ASCII. No accented leters are. You might be thinking of ISO-8859-1, or Windows-1252, which Windows misnames as "ANSI". But not all legacy/broken systems use these, they might be thinking in a different legacy encoding, which lacks an é.

Kwpolska, your account is shadowbanned, most posts from you are not displayed, although they are overwhelmingly useful/factually correct. I am unable to directly reply to your post, so need to go up one level and hope you see this post.

(HN readers, if you don't understand what's going on, then enable "showdead" in your profiles.)

Apostrophe is within ASCII, but breaks sites that a) are prone to SQL injection and/or b) are prone to XSS, generally anything where it can be a control character.

"é" is not in ASCII, you're thinking of some "extended ASCII" variant, such as Latin-n (where n goes from 1 to 12). Those are insidious, as your "of course é is in ASCII" becomes "of course ř is in ASCII", or something similar. Finding the original encoding then requires out-of-band signalling, or guessing (heuristics ;)).

The technical limitations checked here are in bespoke code, not in the OS.

Yep, I too have stopped using my real name. I have an internet nickname which is "close" to my real name that i use for most sites because I am tired of having problems with my real name.

This is really annoying because whenever I call about an account somewhere they will ask my name and I will say it is "AAAA ZZZZZZZ" and they will say, "oh it looks like I don't have an account for you". So then I will have to say, "oh wait, try 'BBBBB ZZZZZZ' or 'AAA BBB ZZZZZ', because that is probably me." This happens all the time when I book hotel rooms or reservations. I will come in and say I have a reservation under one name, they will say they can't find me, then i list several potential names. It causes all sorts of confusion and remarks of suspicion.

(those aren't my real names, just examples for illustrative purposes)

To make matters worse, my first name is broken into two words, plus then my family name. All three words can individually be perceived as "first names" or "last names". So the initial confusion, will frequently lead to mis-collecting of my name and mixing up the order of my name.

It is so bad, that I have had to register an alias now with the credit bureaus because it causes so many problems (yes you can do this if you call them) when authenticating me under various names.

Another fun/annoying recent story is that I am in the process of selling my house. My realitor told me that there was a problem because the county doesn't have me as the registered homeowner. My mortgage was signed using my real legal name. But apparently the county's computer system can't handle someone with punctuation in their legal name that is not part of a "title". So my name got dicombobulated in their system and is reported as a single letter with no punctuation. So the county records for my house do not show me as the homeowner, because their system made too many assumptions about naming conventions and my name got "broken" in the process. So now I have to correct it manually before I can sell my house.

Long story short... you should make no assumptions about names when creating a name field in a system architecture. It should literally allow for the absolute highest amount of flexibility possible. Especially if you are designing a system for say... the county government's title and deed records.

I find this terrifying because I have worked with county-level government organizations in the past, and have seen some truly horrendous and ancient systems. But they have such a high level of control over important things in one's life, such as ability to sell property! To fall victim to this because of something as simple as a name that doesn't fit a legacy system's assumptions is really painful and discouraging I imagine.

After reading #28, I have to assume that your name is T'Kuvma

Why not something common like O'Reilly, O'Neal or O'Riordon?

Which is the real problem - an apostrophe in a surname is a long, long way from unusual.

Or "L'Oréal"

How many systems truly need to identify you uniquely, and not just uniquely amongst their customers?

My identity is private. I use placeholder names for virtually everything I do.

Financial services?

Edit to be more substantive:

There are a lot of places where Know Your Customer rules apply. Further, there are places where identity really does matter, such as insurance. The approach you outlined sounds like a headache when it comes to those things. Not sure who the headache is for... :)

Why do you think identity matters for insurance?

Mostly because of the concept of “insurable interest”. Insurance pricing doesn’t hold up unless the buyer has a reason to avoid the outcome being insured against. The simplest example is life insurance.

Why do you question whether identity would matter?

I would say that NONE need to identify you uniquely. If any engineer is using names as a unique identifier then they need to find a different career.

I can't just call up and say "My name is John Snow, I want to withdraw $100 from my account." Even a small system will quickly run into duplicates. Names are far from unique. Systems might use name for reference purposes, but beyond that, some other unique identifier needs to be used.

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