• FIA (unregistered) in reply to Claxon
    Claxon:
    I once had a password that specified "The first digit of your password must be a number." - How much do you think that helped security.

    LOL, that's not uncommon. I particularly like the 'Your password must contain at least 1 number' type sites. Although one of them is my bank. :(

  • n9ds (unregistered) in reply to Spoe
    Spoe:
    And if your last name is O (an actual surname in France)?

    ...or Ng (Vietnamese)

  • (cs) in reply to Kederaji
    Kederaji:
    So I guess if my name actually is John Jacob Jingleheimer-Smith, I'm completely out of luck?

    Hey, that's my name too. I guess I'm also out of luck.

  • Fant (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know
    Someone You Know:
    If you think Sandy has it rough, imagine Chewbacca's predicament. He doesn't have a last name, so he fails the two-character minimum. Then he think to himself, "Well, maybe I can put in 'Chewbacca of Kashyyyk' instead." Oops...

    And what if your last name is Masdford?

    Just change it to "qwert" or "zxcv".. For some reason only obvious to the designer of that site those are perfectly valid. Maybe this is the chance for a anti-discrimination lawsuit for asdf people :-)

  • Tayrtahn (unregistered)

    I seem to recall a story a while back involving a similar form which rejected any name starting with "Don".

    At least this one makes a little bit of sense. A very little bit.

  • (cs)

    As for the gender confusion, I happen to work with Sandy, and I can say definitively that Sandy is a...

    WARNING WARNING Encrypted message from Federation Command, star date 20XX.6! Pirate activity detected! Sandy Barnabas, your mission is to infiltrate the pirate stronghold located in NAPSTAR and defeat the cybernetic monster TRACKER BRAIN... Along the way you may find blood sucking creatures known as MARKETROIDS from a base located off of State Road 388 which may hinder your progress! Good luck on your mission Sandy!

    Uh-oh, guess you'll never find out, unless you happen to know the secret JUSTIN_TIME_COMPILER cheat code! ;)

  • Bosshog (unregistered) in reply to Troy McClure
    Troy McClure:
    Rob:
    GettinSadda:
    "He tried again... Sandy took a quick peek at her passport ..."
    don't you mean her pbuttport?

    Well done sir. You win this round.

    Seconded! Outstanding!

  • (cs)

    var comment = eval('document.aspnetform.ctl00$MainContent$Body_Text.value'); document.write(comment);

    Output:

    I saw a site which had pictures protected by some company, meaning that they put in a javascript image swap to an image which said not to steal their images. I think they defaulted it to the deterrent image so you couldn't get to it just by turning off javascript. But it didn't prevent viewing the source and navigating directly to the image...
  • Stan (unregistered) in reply to Colin

    (Responding to Colin): If that is your choice then social services should probably choose to take away your child :)

    Reminds me of the story of Frank Zappa's son. Emergency delivery, mother ended up in a Catholic hospital. When the nuns asked for the baby's name, she replied "Dweezil". The nuns refused to put that on the birth certificate and substituted some other more common name. But the parents always referred to the child as Dweezil. So Dweezil grows up, gets his first job, and discovers the name on his birth certificate. He got VERY upset when he found out what happened, and went to court to get his name legally changed to Dweezil.

    Names are personal, and none of social services (or nuns) business. Of course, I realize you were joking.

  • Daphne O'Keefe (unregistered)

    Nobody here with punctuation marks in their last names? It is just so offensive to have these morons telling you that your legal last name isn't "valid".

  • (cs) in reply to n9ds
    n9ds:
    ...or Ng (Vietnamese)

    But that name would actually be valid with this script.

  • arduousardvark (unregistered) in reply to s.

    mY lAST nAME iS EZE

  • (cs) in reply to GettinSadda
    GettinSadda:
    "He tried again... Sandy took a quick peek at her passport ..."

    there's frequently gender confusion in these articles...i wonder what conclusions we can draw from that...

  • BadReferenceGuy (unregistered) in reply to Stan
    Stan:
    (Responding to Colin): If that is your choice then social services should probably choose to take away your child :)

    Reminds me of the story of Frank Zappa's son. Emergency delivery, mother ended up in a Catholic hospital. When the nuns asked for the baby's name, she replied "Dweezil". The nuns refused to put that on the birth certificate and substituted some other more common name. But the parents always referred to the child as Dweezil. So Dweezil grows up, gets his first job, and discovers the name on his birth certificate. He got VERY upset when he found out what happened, and went to court to get his name legally changed to Dweezil.

    Dweezil hardly unusual compared to Moon Unit, Ahmet Emuukha Rodin, and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen.

  • (cs) in reply to Mark
    Mark:
    What the heck?

    Some developers confuse me.

    What were they thinking?

    You can see how this evolved:

    version 1: check for not blank

    manager: they're just typing a space in the first name field! fix it now!

    v2: trim string, then check for not blank

    manager: that didn't work -- now they're just typing asdf! fix it now!

    v3: ignore trim, check for not blank, check for 'asdf'

    manager: some guy named 'alllo ooobetye' just registered a new account, and that last name sounds superfake. fix it now!

    v4: ignore trim, check for not blank, check for 'asdf', check for 3 letters being the same, add TODO comment "learn regular expressions, they might work here"

    manager: this still sucks, but i just got promoted so i dont have time to explain all the ways it sucks, but seriously -- fix it now.

  • houser2112 (unregistered) in reply to Colin

    My wife once was a caseworker, and encountered a child named "Shithead" (pronounced shi-THADE). She removed the child, but not for this reason.

  • JB (unregistered)

    Did Sandy suddenly get a sex change in the middle of checking for a Javascript bug? Is he a she or is she a he?

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Troy McClure
    Troy McClure:
    These stupid validations are always pet peeves of mine. The worst is the security question validation (yes I know we have talked about them to death).

    I got one the other day that asked the number of my street where I grew up. When I responded with 54 it told me it wasnt enough characters - there is a difference between trying to handle bogus data and just making it plain annoying.

    My fix is to use the site name in all my security questions - for instance, my first pet's name was discovercard.

  • JB (unregistered) in reply to savar

    One conclusion might be that some men in IT can't imagine that there are women who can interpret Javascript?

    Or maybe it was just a damned typo...

    Just sayin'....

    :-)

  • Péter (unregistered)

    Sandy could have just enter ..er... its name as Barnabás. Or sdfg. Or "; drop tables;

  • Teh Optermizar (unregistered) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    snoofle:
    Ola:
    Sandy should choose a valid gender.
    Done:

    enum Gender { MALE, FEMALE, GENDER_NOT_FOUND };

    Nah, it's still incomplete. Here: enum Gender { MALE, FEMALE, NONE, SHEMALE, OTHER, GENDER_NOT_FOUND };

    No, no, no... guys, that is just not forward-thinking enough... are you sure you are professional developers? :P

    This solution should allow for a nice broad spectrum of gender related surgery, hormone therapy, and mutation:

    float gender;

    #define FEMALE 0.0 #define MALE 1.0

  • Sandy (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that the mere possibility that I'm female has generated more discussion than the actual terrible javascript.

    On the other hand, who am I to shut down the ongoing awesome examples of gender enums?

  • streetpc (unregistered) in reply to elias
    elias:
    var comment = eval('document.aspnetform.ctl00$MainContent$Body_Text.value'); document.write(comment);

    Output:

    I saw a site which had pictures protected by some company, meaning that they put in a javascript image swap to an image which said not to steal their images. I think they defaulted it to the deterrent image so you couldn't get to it just by turning off javascript. But it didn't prevent viewing the source and navigating directly to the image...

    Web"masters" that haven't heard of viewing the source does not surprise me as much as ones who haven't heard of screen printing.

  • Walleye (unregistered) in reply to Spoe
    Spoe:
    And if your last name is O (an actual surname in France)?

    I think I remember reading a story about her...

  • Pete (unregistered)

    How about a combo box of the 300 most common last names? or just a checkbox labeled "Are you really real?".

  • (cs) in reply to Rob
    Rob:
    GettinSadda:
    "He tried again... Sandy took a quick peek at her passport ..."
    don't you mean her pbuttport?

    That sounds dirtier as 'pbuttport'.

  • MM (unregistered) in reply to Alex
    Alex:
    What is most frustrating about such sites is if you are like me and tend to use the context menu back item to navigate.
    At least there is an alternative available for "back". I use right-click and the context menu regularly to follow links that I want to open in a new tab.
    Dave:
    Opera handles matters rather more elgantly, by completely disregarding their little right-click scripting adventures.
    I think it varies in different versions of Opera, or maybe by some configuration setting that I haven't found the right setting for. At any rate, I've run accross this annoyance before while using Opera. (Hasn't happened lately, though. Not sure if that's because of the more recent Opera version, or if I've just gotten lucky in not running accross sites lately that do that.)
  • MM (unregistered) in reply to n9ds
    n9ds:
    Spoe:
    And if your last name is O (an actual surname in France)?

    ...or Ng (Vietnamese)

    I had a friend back when I was in High School whose last name was Uy. (Family background was south-east Asian, but I'm not sure which country.) I think there's a number of Chinese surnames with only two letters. (Xi, Xu, Yu, Wu, ...) Even if the site's validity check rules were implemented correctly, all of these would fail.

  • MM (unregistered) in reply to streetpc
    streetpc:
    Web"masters" that haven't heard of viewing the source does not surprise me as much as ones who haven't heard of screen printing.
    Apparently, they don't know about Print Screen, they don't know users can look at their source, and they don't know that in order for your browser to display a picture, that means it's already downloaded it to its cache folder.
  • MM (unregistered) in reply to MM
    MM:
    I had a friend back when I was in High School whose last name was Uy. (Family background was south-east Asian, but I'm not sure which country.) I think there's a number of Chinese surnames with only two letters. (Xi, Xu, Yu, Wu, ...) Even if the site's validity check rules were implemented correctly, all of these would fail.
    Never mind. I must have misread the article at first. I was thinking they required more than two characters. Requiring at least two will work for a lot more names. (That still doesn't help Mademoiselle O, though.)
  • Vioindi (unregistered) in reply to wing commander
    wing commander:
    I once dealt with a (Spanish) website that would not sell to anyone without a middle name. If you didn't have one you had to invent one.
    Bonus point for being Spanish, as middle name aren't needed (nor common) in Spain.
  • Rath (unregistered)

    Did anyone else notice that the last name is Cookson in the RSS feed, but changed to Barnabas in the full article?

  • Cian Duffy (unregistered) in reply to Jindra

    [quote=Jindra] I had to deal with almost every website once I lived in Ireland, where there are no ZIP codes (only Dublin has 1-9 as ZIP code) [/quote]

    1-24, excluding 21 and 23. And Cork has rarely used post codes too...

    I had some extreme fun trying to get Paypal to change an account I registered in the old days when it forced a postcode even here - as I couldn't remember if I'd used 'NA', 'N/A', '00000', '90210', 'feck off you imperialist twats', or so on.

  • michael (unregistered) in reply to Vioindi
    Vioindi:
    wing commander:
    I once dealt with a (Spanish) website that would not sell to anyone without a middle name. If you didn't have one you had to invent one.
    Bonus point for being Spanish, as middle name aren't needed (nor common) in Spain.

    More likely it was asking for both surnames. Having two surnames is fairly common.

    This of course gives a grand total of three names, one at the beginning, one at the end and one in the middle (I know it's not what most other people mean by "middle name" since it is generally used as the "main" surname but it is still in the middle).

  • (cs)

    Oh for crying out loud Sandy, just change your damned last name and stop your bitching!

    Sheesh, some people.

  • Galactic Imperial Overlord Vaun (unregistered)

    Wow, people actually enter valid information into websites like that?

  • Iago (unregistered) in reply to michael

    Just for clarification on Spanish names: My step-mother is from Castile in Spain. Her maiden name was Maria Anna Emma Lorca Granada. "Maria" was given to all girls. We called her "Anna". "Emma" was her middle name. "Lorca Granada" were the first two names in her surname. She stated that her fuller name included the surnames of all her ancesters, of which she could remember 16 of them.

    The australian passport office called her "the lady with the name"

    Also, how would Burmese people (like U Thant) register?

  • (cs) in reply to Rath
    Rath:
    Did anyone else notice that the last name is [something else] in the RSS feed, but changed to Barnabas in the full article?
    Yes, lgrave seems to have:
    lgrave:
    Alex, are you aware that your fisrt version is the one that is sent in RSS?...
    But unlike you, he did not tell what he's discovered, trying to protect the innocent, if that was her real name...
  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Hmm, it does give weak protection against SQL injection, a lastname of O'Connor (though O'brien passes)

  • (cs) in reply to Teh Optermizar
    Teh Optermizar:
    No, no, no... guys, that is just not forward-thinking enough... are you sure you are professional developers? :P

    This solution should allow for a nice broad spectrum of gender related surgery, hormone therapy, and mutation:

    float gender;

    #define FEMALE 0.0 #define MALE 1.0

    I think God would strike that down. "Go forth and multiply" doesn't really work, does it? Not after the second generation, at least.

    Of course, "Go forth and divide" would produce NaN, which might be an interesting comment on the TV series "The Prisoner."

  • (cs)

    I'd like to see how that person would write an email address validation routine.

    No, wait, I'd much rather be eaten alive by lions.

  • Autarchex (unregistered) in reply to Zecc

    Well, yes, 3 > 2.

  • Deiwos (unregistered)

    For a certain forum I'm a part of, the password has these requirements:

    Must be 12 characters long, at least. Must contain both letters AND numbers. Must contain at least one capital letter. Must contain at least one punctuation character.

  • Andy (unregistered) in reply to AT

    On a side note: If one is running Firefox with NoScript activated then the script doesn't work anyway so the images can be easily saved wtf?

  • Deiwos (unregistered) in reply to Andy

    Actually they said the pictures defaulted to the 'NO STEALING' image with scripts turned off, so that won't work.

    Captcha: What's a Parat?

  • Skriiik (unregistered)

    The real WTF is ofcourse that with JS disabled you can enter anything, including little Bobby Tables' name.

    @FredSaw: you forgot BOTH or HERMAFRODITE. And maybe a genetically mutilated human can change its gender at will, so maybe you could add ANY or WHATEVER_YOU_LIKE_BABY.

  • ölf (unregistered)

    Probably designed by the people who wrote the filters for spassasin, too, where five consecutive consonants are a no-no in your email adress.

  • phire (unregistered) in reply to Deiwos

    Apart from the fact that its all pointless and I hate it; I think the best form of anti right click image protection, is to simply stretch a transparent 1px gif over it (or even the entire page).

    That way if anyone tries to right click to get the image, they simply get the 1px gif.

    It doesn't require any client side JavaScript and doesn't interfere with any other operations. (as long as you haven't stretched it over the entire page.

  • Steevie (unregistered) in reply to wing commander
    wing commander:
    I once dealt with a (Spanish) website that would not sell to anyone without a middle name. If you didn't have one you had to invent one.
    When I lived in Spain, I had to open an online bank account, and I had to enter a "middle name", which I do not have. I was suggested to enter a space as middle name and it worked...
  • (cs) in reply to phire
    phire:
    Apart from the fact that its all pointless and I hate it; I think the best form of anti right click image protection, is to simply stretch a transparent 1px gif over it (or even the entire page).

    That way if anyone tries to right click to get the image, they simply get the 1px gif.

    It doesn't require any client side JavaScript and doesn't interfere with any other operations. (as long as you haven't stretched it over the entire page.

    1px image vs Firebug. Guess who survives.

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