The word, used by computer scientists to mean ‘no value,’ has created long-running challenges
When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works
No, when people DON’T PROPERLY SANITIZE THEIR USER INPUT, nothing works!!!
Looks like little Bobby Tables has some extended family.
Who the hell writes
if 'null'? If it’s a thing, what language would interpret a string like that?
I’d bet it’s less simple input sanitizing and more 2 mistakes made separately because they don’t know any better.
- The input field converting everything to a string indiscriminately
- Because they did 1, converting everything back to the assumed type
If the front end Dev makes the first mistake, null would be sent in the body as “null”. Then on the backend, somebody might even be binding the variables correctly, but before hand realizing they have to deal with the market and rather than just have a conversation undoes it in their own code.
It’s fine in PHP, so that catches most server backends.
Ruby as well, it even raises a warning about the string where a bool should be!
Python handles it just fine, as well.
Rust doesn’t allow it, depending on the backend framework and server software this might give issues.
So depending on how this is handled a C# or Rust backend might cause the name not to be stored, but then I’d expect nothing to be stored… :/
This topic pops up in random news sites like every 5 years, and usually the conclusion is people with these names have less and less problems, as systems evolve.
Nowadays names which looks like some vulgar words cause more problems, it’s called the Scunthorpe problem from the city of Scunthorpe. As this is a shitty article, this actual problem is not even mentioned, classic.
Lol one of the characters in my D&D group is named Farthard (pronounced Far-thard) and his steed is named Shithead (pronounced Sha-theed)
Anyone got a non-paywall link? I’m changing my name soon and this is highly relevant to my interests.
little bobby null
https://archive.ph/2gDhN also works
This seems to be old news, and paywalled.
Edit: gee, thanks MSN. The article i’d read was about the license plate.
Morgan Null, in black, with her parents and brother, all Nulls. lol
Not that rare of a name apparently…
Taking the issue at face value, I wonder what Johnny Null’s workaround would be for his (or their) name?
N’ull? Nul-l? \Null? Null? JohnnyN ull?
Definitely not N’ull, that would trigger a SQL error when it can’t interpret the ull after the string delimiter.
If they’re not sanitizing that, they deserve to have their system broken lol
--Null