zlacker

[return to "The government ate my name"]
1. c0balt+G6[view] [source] 2025-10-09 19:39:38
>>notok+(OP)
Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII.

The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names.

http://archive.today/5h4v2

◧◩
2. 6SixTy+1F[view] [source] 2025-10-10 00:02:15
>>c0balt+G6
Don't completely rule out EBCDIC from the equation. It's generally an IBM-ism meant for punched cards with the same characters as ASCII. Despite the similarity, it means that it's a legacy system kept alive to now and switching to UTF-EBCDIC would likely incur disturbing 70+ year old layers of tech debt dust. Some of them don't even support lower case characters as it's using EBCDIC's predecessor, BCD.
◧◩◪
3. miki12+gI[view] [source] 2025-10-10 00:40:35
>>6SixTy+1F
And this is even the case in Europe.

There was a case of some German bank treating ü as "ue", its typical ASCII transliteration. A customer complained under GDPR and won.

[go to top]