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databases security debugging

Names that break software: NULL, True and little Bobby Tables

16 questions · by Quizbun

A man picks the licence plate NULL and ends up with $12,049 in strangers' parking fines. A woman named Null can't book a flight online. An actor named True gets locked out of iCloud for six months. A whole English town can't sign up for AOL. Each Question starts with a real person or place, asks what the software got wrong, and ends with the fix.

Questions

Not answered. In late 2016, a security researcher registered this California vanity plate as a programmer's joke. What did it bring him?
Not answered. At the peak, how much in other people's fines was charged to the NULL plate, in US dollars?
Not answered. For more than a year, the plate caused no trouble. What set off the flood of tickets?
Not answered. Which changes to the ticket system would stop tickets with no plate from reaching the NULL driver?
Not answered. Jennifer Null from Virginia tries to book a flight online. What happens on most airline websites?
Not answered. In March 2021, actor and author Rachel True said she'd been locked out of her iCloud account. How long had it been going on?
Not answered. Rachel True's error message read: Type error: cannot set value 'true' to property 'lastName'. What does it suggest went wrong?
Not answered. A YAML config file lists country codes. A YAML 1.1 parser such as PyYAML loads the list below. What does Norway's NO become?
Not answered. In 1996, people in Scunthorpe, an English town in North Lincolnshire, couldn't sign up for AOL. Why?
Not answered. AOL's first response didn't fix the filter. What did it tell Scunthorpe residents to do?
Not answered. A developer switches the profanity filter from substring matching to whole-word matching, like \bword\b. Which problems remain?
Not answered. In xkcd's "Exploits of a Mom", a school loses its whole student table because of one pupil's name. Which changes would stop this from happening again?
Not answered. In June 2010, Patrick McKenzie published "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names". How many falsehoods are on the list?
Not answered. McKenzie's post opens by pointing to another programmer's complaint from the same day. What happened to John Graham-Cumming?
Not answered. Janice "Lokelani" Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele's surname is 36 characters long. In 2013, Hawaii's ID system allowed 35. What did her driver's licence show?
Not answered. Final boss: which of these assumptions about names are false?