from Hacker News

EBCDIC Is Incompatible with GDPR (2021)

by fanf2 on 6/11/25, 8:42 AM with 33 comments

  • by Semaphor on 6/11/25, 10:04 AM

    Thought that sounded familiar. Needs (2021)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009963 2023, 467 comments

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986735 at the time in 2021, 267 comments

  • by thyristan on 6/11/25, 10:03 AM

    The article is from 2021, the original court decision it is writing about is from 2019. Old news.

    The machine-readable parts of government issued passports also do not adhere to that ruling, as do many government IT systems in Europe. The fallout from that ruling has been underwhelming so far.

  • by robertlagrant on 6/11/25, 10:44 AM

    > But, a decade after the seminal Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names essay - we shouldn't tolerate these sorts of flaws.

    It's nothing to do with that. It's the decades of work by the Unicode Consortium that makes this possible.

  • by oaiey on 6/11/25, 10:57 AM

    It is funny how my mind tricks me into search for privacy problems, but the reality here is a violation against the right to correct your data (which is a privacy problem, but not something you would think immediately of)
  • by SpaceL10n on 6/11/25, 11:29 AM

    For those who don't know...

    EBCDIC can be pronounced as ebb-sid-ick in conversation

  • by nuc1e0n on 6/11/25, 10:17 AM

    Yes, but not because EBCDIC is not ASCII based. All 8 bit character encodings are incompatible with GDPR, because they cannot represent everyone's names. There's an extended EBCDIC the supports the full Unicode range that is GDPR compliant. That said UTF-8 is still a better choice now.