Hillarious - guy with the vanity plate NULL has received $12,000 in tickets!

[thewayne]

A private company assigns license plates to violations, and guess what happens when they can't match the violation - it gets assigned to NULL!

This is a database bug. Null is the concept of absence of value. It is not zero, zero is a value. It is not an empty string. It is an absence of value. It means "this license plate field does not exist". And you cannot compare nulls to nulls - does not compute. Null does not equal Null.

Now, in the case of this guy, his license plate is a string of the letters "NULL". Perfectly valid word. In fact, at a previous job I found someone who had the name of Null! It was their actual family name!

So whoever designed the database is doing a string match where they're doing something like
IF LookupFails 'can't find a match for the plate in the MVD database
  IF [LicensePlate]="NULL" THEN 'we have a match!
    'send the fine to the owner of this license plate

not realizing that some joker might register the license plate NULL.

It's an illustration of bad programming technique that any first year programmer should have gotten an F on their assignment for.

He's gotten the fines dismissed, but continues to receive them.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/license_plate_n.html
The comments are amusing - if you're a programmer.

Comments

[silveradept]

I wonder what shoddy mechanism there is in that database that translates NULL, the concept, into the string "NULL" and then runs a match against it. It's probably something silent, too, meant to be helpful and render everything in the field into a string for easy comparison.

[thewayne]

It's just plain bad programming.  But also bad management supervision/code review/testing problem to allow that code to go into production!  So it's a multi-level problem.

[silveradept]

I suspect people get the systems they vote for.