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Comment by saulr | Hacker News Reader

This ultimately resulted in a new restriction in a bill making its way through Parliament that "a company must not be registered under this Act by a name that, in the opinion of the Secretary of State, consists of or includes computer code".

See page 16 of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill (https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/49554/documents/283...)

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Amazing. I would absolutely love to sit down with the Secretary of State and test their knowledge of what does of does not consist of of computer.

Assuming this means the Secretary of State for Business and Trade (the UK has 17 Secretaries of State), the current one has a degree in computer systems engineering and has worked as a software engineer [1], so she probably has a fairly good idea.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemi_Badenoch

I didn't know this, and have made the same snarky joke in dumb interviews about the company registration etc. - that's very cool and I will eat my words.

⇡ This is the founder of Drop Table

You’re sure it wasn’t just comment on the original thread? Looks like it was submitted by someone else?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13280494

He wrote a blogpost about it https://pizzey.me/posts/no-i-didnt-try-to-break-companies-ho...

She somehow got away with hacking into a rivals computer/server — she would contest the use of the word hacking but by the wording of the computer misuse act it's what she did.

Wait till they learn about Whitespace .. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua... )

So "SELECT TRAVELS LTD." is prohibited? How about "Class Moving Ltd.", or "Sarah's wedding functions", or "Goto Grocery"?

> in the opinion of the Secretary of State

The Secretary of State gets to decide whether it's "computer code." It's not an objective decision. This is how things are supposed to work.

That's kind of awesome!

Although it would be sad if this meant that, for example, one couldn't name a company after a programming language keyword (!?).

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

... I could go on.

That's why the Secretary of State (very important person) gets to make the call.

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