from Hacker News

A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019)

by danielyaa5 on 4/19/22, 12:38 PM with 11 comments

• by bell-cot on 4/19/22, 3:58 PM

  Generic wishful suggestion for courts, regarding any sort of computer-processed data which is a basis for legal action: Coin some fancy-sounding Latin phrase meaning "obvious computer failure", and make liberal use of that phrase in curtly dismissing legal actions (with prejudice) where some key piece of the assertion is clearly a product of "garbage in, garbage out".

  That might at least give some incentive to those running GIGO-excreting computer systems to clean up their sh*t.

• by openasocket on 4/19/22, 3:03 PM

  There's definite grounds to sue the Citation Processing Center, at least to get them to stop assigning these tickets to him.

• by tpoindex on 4/19/22, 3:29 PM

  For those who like podcasts, Radiolab also had this story recently, along with a few other cases of bad programming (“Are you suggesting I change my name to “quote N-U-L-L quote”, to match the databases you’re working with?”)

  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/null

• by gunshai on 4/19/22, 4:27 PM

  I'm surprised that NULLs weren't filtered out with what ever stored procedure is running on the database that sent the workload for mail ticket dispersal.

  Although I suppose it is an edge case because NULL is supposed to not ever get joined with an address or UID.

• by grenran on 4/19/22, 2:44 PM

  On the other hand, this could allow him to easily contest any future parking ticket.

• by cestith on 4/19/22, 2:35 PM

  Great story from 2019. https://dev.to/michaelpaulkunz/what-we-can-learn-from-sir-ch... relates the same story back to Sir Tony Hoare.