• AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Once I was tasked with doing QA testing for an app which was planned to initially go live in the states of Georgia and Tenessee. One of the required fields was the user’s legal name. I therefore looked up the laws on baby names in those two states.

    Georgia has simple rules where a child’s forename must be a sequence of the 26 regular Latin letters.

    Tenessee seemed to only require that a child’s name was writable under stone writing system, which would imply any unicode code point is permissible.

    At the time, I logged a bug that a hypothetical user born in Tenessee with a name consisting of a single emoji couldn’t enter their legal name. I reckon it would also be legal to call a Tenessee baby 'John '.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      1 hour ago

      Sounds like you did a thorough job as a QA tester. As a software engineer, I love to see it.

  • takeheart@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Na, names are about pronunciation (how you call someone). Written letters are an approximation of that. You can’t pronounce a newline, so there’s that.

  • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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    6 hours ago

    A line break is a non-printable character. So it would only work in the scope of electronic storage. The minute it hits other media, the line break character is subject to how that media handles it’s presence, and then it is lost permanently from that step forward.

    Plus, many input forms make use of validation that will just trim anything that isn’t a character or number, removing the line break character.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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      1 hour ago

      As someone with a very mildly unusual name, I can tell you that it doesn’t matter whether a system could or could not meaningfully represent the name. Often the people or systems just refuse to acknowledge any deviation from what’s expected. Sometimes databases are written to enforce arbitrary grammatical rules that make my name impossible to write, or the people using the systems will just “correct” the “error” without telling me. I don’t mind that much but our normative systems just love to homogenise us.

      • ruk_n_rul@monyet.cc
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        42 minutes ago

        Because sadly we live in a society, and normal names are required for the functioning of society.

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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          8 minutes ago

          No they’re not. They’re required for us to be catalogued and managed by a state, to our detriment and the enrichment of the ruling class.

          “Normality” is a fucking scam that keeps your imagination in check, so you never look outside your assigned box and realise you don’t have to belong to anyone.

          You have no idea how much genocidal violence has been done to condition our society to accept a dystopic phrase like “normal names are required for the functioning of society”.

          Your mind has been caged.

    • piecat@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      A line break doesnt have to be electronic only. You just… start a new line on the paper.

      If it were somehow legally allowed, the sanitization would be incorrect.

  • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
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    7 hours ago

    Not legal in Sweden. Our “IRS” must also accept the name and deem it legal.

    I for one like this. As it stops some very stupid people to name their children some very stupid names. Such as “Adolf Hitler”.

    And yes. Someone did try to name their child this and they were appropriately stoped from doing it.

  • Bookmeat@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Not legal in Canada. Your legal name must use Latin characters only. This is a sore point for indigenous people.

  • socsa@piefed.social
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    10 hours ago

    If elected president my first order of business will be to make all birth certificates fully unicode compatible.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    6 hours ago

    Good luck with that.

    Most computer nayetems will trim the crap out of that name, the white spaces like space, tab, \r and \n will be gone by the time it’s in the database

  • trustnoone@lemmy.sdf.org
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    12 hours ago

    I have an apostrophe and it’s super annoying as some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

    So I’ve received ID with Mc%20dole or they add a space in it. Or I’ll get a work email with an apostrophe but I cant use it anywhere because sites have it disabled. And I’ve missed my flight because I changed my ticket once to add the apostrophe and the system just broke at the gate.

    Worse yet many flight companies have “you will not be able to board if your ID doesn’t exactly reflect your details” but their form doesn’t allow it. Even most forms for card payments don’t allow it even though it’s the name on my card.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Spent lots of effort to get names for my kids that avoid this. Swedish/French. It’s harder than it sounds.

    • agilob@programming.dev
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      7 hours ago

      I have an apostrophe and it’s super annoying as some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

      My surname contains a character that’s only present in the Polish alphabet. Writing my full name as is broke lots of systems, encoding, printed paperwork and even British naturalisation application on Home Office website. My surname was part of my username back at uni, and everytime I tried to login on Windows, it would crash underlying LDAP server, logging everyone in the classroom out and forcing ICT to restart the server.

    • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      I have an apostrophe

      Scottish/Irish?

      some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

      Which kind of apostrophe?

      A straight apostrophe, fine - that can and does get used in valid SQL injection attacks. I would be disgusted at any input form that didn’t sanitize that.

      But a curly apostrophe? Nothing should be filtering a curly apostrophe, as it has no function or use within SQL. So if you learn how to bring that up in alt codes (Windows, specifically), Key combos (Mac) or dead keys (Linux), as well as direct Unicode codes for most any Win/Mac/*Nix platform, you should be golden.

      Unless the developer of that input form was a complete moron and made extra-tight validation.

      Plus, knowing the inputs for a lot of extended UTF-8 characters not found on a normal keyboard is also a wee bit of a typing superpower.

    • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      you will not be able to board if your ID doesn’t exactly reflect your details"

      Do they care about an apostrophe though? I can see any punctuation being a problem for systems.

      • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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        10 hours ago

        I had to convince people to let me on board a plane because my name contain a swedish letter (å). Their computer system translated it into “aa”, which then didn’t match my passport.

          • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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            5 hours ago

            No, my passport has my real name of course, with “å”. In the airport system and on the boarding pass my name was spelled with “aa”.

            • ryedaft@sh.itjust.works
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              4 hours ago

              I’m amazed that none of your family members have run into the same problem. If I were you I would compare passports with my family.

        • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          That one I can actually see, having an extra letter that doesn’t match. Dropped punctuation or symbols (whatever the flair is called) though personally I wouldn’t care.

          • wieson@feddit.org
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            7 hours ago

            That’s the wrong way of looking at an å.

            It’s not just an a with decoration. It actually has different pronunciation and is typically replaced with aa if no å is available. (I’m neither Swedish nor Norwegian, so not 100% sure, but it’s what happened to Erling Haaland).

            Similarly, you would replace a German ä with ae. So if my name was Bäcker, it would be wrong to spell it Backer on a ticket. Baecker would be the way.

            • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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              7 hours ago

              Yes I’m aware it’s not an a with decoration jfc. I’m saying for computer entries that garble things, I wouldn’t care about matching it up so perfectly (with dropped whatever those things are called) as to not allow someone to board a plane.

    • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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      12 hours ago

      … why are you putting an apostrophe in McDole? The O-apostrophe in Irish names is an anglicisation of Ó, eg. Ó Briain becomes O’Brien. Mac Dól would become MacDole/McDole.

      • hypnotoad@lemmy.ml
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        12 hours ago

        Yeah fuck this guy for spelling his name the way it was given to him what an asshole

        • Affidavit@lemm.ee
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          11 hours ago

          Probably some bureaucrat decades ago making an incorrect assumption that passed down through generations. Happened to my family. No Irish roots whatsoever, yet somehow we ended up with the annoying form-breaking apostrophe in our ‘legal’ name just because it begins with the letter ‘o’.

          “Oscar??? Surely, you’re mistaken. I hereby decree your name to be O’Scar!” ~Arsehole circa 1937

          • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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            10 hours ago

            Yep also happened to my family. There is a y in my family name, but that’s very uncommon in the Netherlands, my last name is of French origin. So some bureaucrat changed it to a Dutch y which is an ij and there was no time to correct it since my grandparents had to catch the boat to flee the former Dutch colony. Now my last name is constantly pronounced wrong. I’m probably going to change it in the future but in the Netherlands you are not allowed to change your name except for a few exceptions. And applying for a name change cost a lot of money and you won’t get it back if they reject it. So I probably have to get a lawyer to do it.

            • Affidavit@lemm.ee
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              9 hours ago

              Yeah, I’ve considered a name change myself. Decided not to bother as it would mean every time I need to prove my identity to a government organisation I’d need to provide additional change of name documentation.

              Government is hard enough to deal with as it is without adding an extra thing that needs to be assessed.

        • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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          7 hours ago

          Hey Militant Left, just because every question directed at you assumes you are an asshole, doesn’t mean the same applies to questions to other people