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

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2. comrad+3b[view] [source] 2025-10-09 20:05:37
>>c0balt+G6
The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u'

Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii. How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?

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3. Mister+Xr[view] [source] 2025-10-09 21:48:11
>>comrad+3b
> Is their database a 7-bit database?

Ascii is 7 bits. What people think of as 8-bit ASCII is actually code page 437, the alternate characters added to the PC BIOS in the original IBM PC. Like UTF-8 it uses the most significant bit in a 1 byte ASCII char to determine if it should use a character from ASCII if 0 or the extended 437 characters which includes ü if 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

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4. umanwi+6K[view] [source] 2025-10-10 01:04:55
>>Mister+Xr
Do people think of this as 8-bit ASCII ? I've never heard of it referred to ASCII until now. In fact, I've never heard of it at all (by the time I was old enough to know what a character encoding was, Latin-1 and Windows-1252 were totally dominant IIRC).
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