These unlucky people have names that break computers

BBC.com ^ | Mach 25, 2016 | Chris Baraniuk

[Kaslin]

Jennifer Null’s husband had warned her before they got married that taking his name could lead to occasional frustrations in everyday life. She knew the sort of thing to expect – his family joked about it now and again, after all. And sure enough, right after the wedding, problems began.

“We moved almost immediately after we got married so it came up practically as soon as I changed my name, buying plane tickets,” she says. When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites. The site will say she has left the surname field blank and ask her to try again.

Instead, she has to call the airline company by phone to book a ticket – but that’s not the end of the process.

“I've been asked why I'm calling and when I try to explain the situation, I've been told, ‘there's no way that's true’,” she says.

[BenLurkin]

ping

[softwarecreator]

Wow. I never thought of that and I work in the field. Interesting.

[Vendome]

Ping uh ling...

[Billthedrill]

I love XKCD.

[ladyjane]

Have you thought about working indoors?

[disndat]

How do you fair with this?

What happens if you go with Null A. Void?

[softwarecreator]

=) okay, that was good.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The “NULL” value in a database and the string “Null” are two entirely different things.

Somebody is programming stupidly.

[softwarecreator]

What happens if you go with Null A. Void?
You don't want to know. =)

[Blue Jays]

We have also learned that United Breaks Guitars in other airline news.

[dhs12345]

Lol. That’s funny!

[HiTech RedNeck]

Sounds like an urban legend. Even with unsanitized input, ‘Null’ is not the same as NULL.

[grey_whiskers]

select credit_card_payment_date, credit_card_number from payment_table where name is not null ;

ROFLMAO!

[ifinnegan]

The “NULL” value in a database and the string “Null” are two entirely different things.

Somebody is programming stupidly.

—

Somebody’s making things up.

[SpaceBar]

agree with both comments.

[lefty-lie-spy]

That article is a real stretch, and nothing new. Its just a typical stupid British pop culture piece. I hate these articles. I work in computer in Japan too, and have similar experiences with my name, but it never bothered me or made me question any fault of the computer. We run into processing problems all the time from data entry, and it is not just names, it can be addresses, phone numbers, anything entered into a database. When that database (or program) gets enough data, it will eventually need to be tweaked to fix rare bugs that occur because the test case had never been considered.

[tinyowl]

Anyone familiar with little Bobby Tables:

Robert'); drop Table Students; --

[tinyowl]

Oops late to the game ...

[kvanbrunt2]

Wow. I never thought of that and I work in the field. Interesting.>>> didn’t exist in the old world of moving data around. now what do they call these databases 5th generation. can’t handle simple data.