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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

The part I came to love about France in general is that while all of these are broken, the people dealing with it will completely agree it's broken and amply sympathize, but just accept your name is printed as G�nter.

Same for names that don't fit field lengths, addresses that require street numbers etc. It's a real pain to deal with all of it and each system will fail in its own way to make your life a mess, but people will embrace the mess and won't blink an eye when you bring paper that just don't match.

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Under GDPR people have the right to have their personal data to be accurate, there was a legal case exactly about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009963

That's a pretty unexpected twist, and I'm frilled with it.

I don't see every institution come up with a fix anytime soon, but having it clear that they're breaking the law is such a huge step. That will also have a huge impact on bank system development, and I wonder how they'll do it (extend the current system to have the customer facing bits rewritten, or just redo it all from top to bottom)

There is the tale of Mizuho bank [0], botching their system upgrade project so hard they were still seeing widespread failures after a decade into it.

[0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/02/11/business/mizuho...

> I don't see every institution come up with a fix anytime soon, but having it clear that they're breaking the law is such a huge step.

It's excellent, but also sad that it takes legislation to motivate companies to fix their crappy legacy systems, and they will likely fight tooth and nail rather than comply.

> Does it mean Z̸̰̈́̓a̸͖̰͗́l̸̻͊g̸͙͂͝ǒ̷̬́̐ can finally have a bank account?

I wonder if this also means one can require a European bank have a name on file in Kanju, Thai script or some other not-so-well-known in Europe alphabet.

A bank can specially request it to be the name on a passport or domestic ID card. That's one way to make sure that the name falls within some parameters, though that can be tough on the customer in some conditions.

I guess every country has a technical document on what's allowed in names, but then say EU banks have to cater for full superset of EU rules.

As far as the passports go, ICAO 9303-3 allows for latin characters, additional latin characters, such as Þ and ß, and "diacritics", so something not too crazy, i.e. Z̷̪͘a̵͈͘l̷̹̃g̷̣̈́ő̶͍ would still be plausible.

Since work on central ID in Europe moves slowly banks will only need to bother with local name rules atm since only local names are valid. I am guessing we will have normalization rules in the end and that looks completely unplausible.

They might get the name to fit in that field but what are you going to do about date of birth??

So it's time to finally ditch the POSIX string libc, and adopt u8 as universal string type. Which can finally find normalized.

All the coreutils still can not find strings, just buffers. Zero terminated buffers are NOT strings, strings are unicode.

https://perl11.github.io/blog/foldcase.html

This is not just convenience, it also has spoofing security implications for all names. C and C++11 are insecure since C11. https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident/blob/master/doc/c11.md Most other programming languages and OS kernels also.

Or ve kan fainali hav orxogrefkl riform!

Ahah, I can relate to that. My driving license doesn't spell my name correctly, and somehow nobody cares. I somehow like this "nah, who cares" attitude

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