My name is my UPP

[Anonymous]

This came up in a chat recently, as I think it’s trending on fediverse or Reddit or something.

It got me thinking how much Traveller uses rigid codes in universe and not just in rules, and it lead me thinking how confusing it would be, and how many low-wage clerks or robots you would confuse, if you named something a random string of numbers.

My name is Amr Eladawy. Whenever I get a ticket through an agent and they put my first name as Amr, it lands as A only in the Airlines system. That happened with many airlines and different agents ... It seems that there is a smart rule that considers the suffix MR as Mister and drops it ... Recently, another smart developer decided to prevent people with first name less than 2 characters from checking-in [assuming the name to be invalid data]

Ship name? KA-4B66061A. Not the usp, the name. I think the database is broken, it’s confusing the name with the usp. Let me call my supervisor.

Every smuggler ever: Traffic control just went offline. I can’t believe that worked.

There’s other examples relating to implementation which I feel might not be relevant to Traveller (for example the surname “Null” which breaks databases) but I like to believe they’ve fixed this by TL 9+. The code-for-name, however, seems a very human error and will likely still work on people.

 

[AndrewW]

There’s other examples relating to implementation which I feel might not be relevant to Traveller (for example the surname “Null” which breaks databases) but I like to believe they’ve fixed this by TL 9+. The code-for-name, however, seems a very human error and will likely still work on people.

Just make it zero and try and divide. (Ask the US Navy about that one)

 

[Anonymous]

There’s other examples relating to implementation which I feel might not be relevant to Traveller (for example the surname “Null” which breaks databases) but I like to believe they’ve fixed this by TL 9+. The code-for-name, however, seems a very human error and will likely still work on people.

Just make it zero and try and divide. (Ask the US Navy about that one)

My ship name is “=4+1” but it probably reads “5” in your spreadsheet. I’d expect the imperium, if they still use keyboards, to have a special formula key that isn’t valid in sophont languages instead of =. Otherwise this is still broken.

 

[Condottiere]

Joseph Tartaro never meant to cause this much trouble. Especially for himself.

In late 2016, Tartaro decided to get a vanity license plate. A security researcher by trade, he ticked down possibilities that related to his work: SEGFAULT, maybe, or something to do with vulnerabilities. Sifting through his options, he started typing “null pointer,” but caught himself after the first word: NULL. Funny. “The idea was I’d get VOID for my wife’s car, so our driveway would be NULL and VOID,” Tartaro says.

The joke had layers, though. As Tartaro well knew, and as he explained in a recent talk at the Defcon hacker conference, “null” is also a text string that in many programming languages signifies a value that is empty or undefined. To many computers, null is the void.

That setup also has a brutal punch line—one that left Tartaro at one point facing $12,049 of traffic fines wrongly sent his way. He’s still not sure if he’ll be able to renew his auto registration this year without paying someone else's tickets. And thanks to the Kafkaesque loop he’s caught in, it’s not clear if the citations will ever stop coming.

https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/

 

[Anonymous]

Yea we know how to fix this null issue but it’s just expensive to re-engineer all the systems. Note that it doesn’t break a properly implemented modern system. It comes from the previous generation storing and transmitting binary values as text. I do not blame them though. No-one knew any better at the time because everything mins still so new. Some of the founders of the computer age are still alive today. It’s one of those unusual industries where you talk about x’s Law and can actually still meet X.