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Comment by markedathome | Hacker News Reader

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markedathome

The company doesn't exist as it was dissolved last year. [1]

What is interesting is that at the bottom of that page is the following

[NAME AVAILABLE ON REQUEST FROM COMPANIES HOUSE] 16 Oct 2020 - 27 Oct 2020

where usually it would state the prior company name instead of the [name ... ]

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

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The funniest thing about this (they also did this to my company) is that the name masking applies absolutely everywhere. So, for example, if they send you important mail about needing to take some regulatory action, the mail arrives addressed to 'NAME AVAILABLE ON REQUEST FROM COMPANIES HOUSE]' on the outside of the envelope, and inside it has a letter with a bunch of warnings about whatever is going to happen to the company, except it doesn't tell you the name of the company.

In what cases do they do this? What was your company called?

That's kinda concerning... does the site have XSS/sanitization problems?

It's possible, for example, that they are instead concerned about anyone consuming the data in some automated way, and are trying to protect downstream consumers who fail to sanitise the data correctly conveyed from Companies House to them. This is such an extremely rare type of company name that it might genuinely be reasonable to "throw an exception" when asked for it, even if you are perfectly capable of giving it, when you don't have much trust that your consumer will be capable of receiving it.

(The article does suggest there were problems with Companies House originally, but even after fixing them, this kind of consideration may prevail.)

Right, I'm going to name my next company "NAME AVAILABLE ON REQUEST FROM COMPANIES HOUSE"

Don’t forget the square brackets

Chaotic neutral.

It’s not the site, which is fine and written by the great GDS.

It’s the data is available to other users and those idiots don’t parse it properly.

I see some potentially very confusing options for a future company name.

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