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Comment by jks | Hacker News Reader

Likewise. My last name contains a non-ascii character. In ~2009 I started at a company whose admin conveniently set up an account for me on their Ubuntu server... on which no-one could then log in locally because the login manager crashed when trying to display the list of users. I logged in via ssh and changed my name to the nearest ASCII equivalent.

I always feel slightly worried on sites that demand that I give my full legal name (such as the US ESTA form), and then refuse to handle it because it includes "illegal" characters.

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Full legal name as appears on machine readable zone in your own passport. Allowed characters are A-Z only, see MRZ specifications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-readable_passport

What's a legal name? It presumes it's somehow different from other ... illegal names. But in which way? Which law has a say?

"Legal name" is a catch-all term that usually means "approved for use on government issued ID". Are there instances when that's not always the case and some forms of ID (not just, say, an ID card, but also in tax filings, for example) actually have different rules? Amazingly, sometimes yes. But usually that's what it means.

I get what it could mean but it's jurisdiction bound and doesnt resolve unambigyously, doesnt match mrz and isnt always ascii.

The name the legal system uses to refer to you.

Legal system as in court of law? They tend to use more letters than I have in my actual passport (definitely more than fits into mrz) and depending on which court we talk about they also use different alphabets. They also assume certain structure in those nsmes, which differs from one court to another.

Are you using courts that insist on different alphabets? Then you have multiple legal names.

And some operations are based on exactly what's on your passport.

It's more than court, taxes are an important and relevant set of laws.

Yes, I had a pleasure do deal with two courts that use two different alphabets this year. They one of the two referenced the other. The name written in neither of two matches whats actually written in my passport. It isn't a complicated name by any reasonable metric.

Taxes are easier -- they just ids and names are display only kind of stuff, sourced from the base registry.

This has happened to me with passwords containing foreign characters. The system would accept it, but further logons would be impossible. Now I always strip diacritics to be safe.

A friend mentioned using control characters in passwords... like ^F and ^B, but not ^C because that's the interrupt character. Feels vaguely risky to me (does ^U empty the line? does ^W delete the last word? does your terminal emulator do some weird encoding like it does for cursor keys?) but if it works, why not?

I remember in school learning that technically speaking on Unix you could have the backspace character as part of your password too

But for the same reason with ^W and ^U I have no idea how you'd implement that in an interactive prompt without escaping

I suspect I have run into a couple bugs because of password generators putting characters that some backend system cannot process in the password. Halfwish they just did DKWhhjwqjkwqjmHSJKHAIUHQwdmlsadkl instead.

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