The Terrible Mistake of Choosing 'Null' as a License Plate 

inb4 everyone puts their name as "null" in the HAI suggestions form. But if you do, just make sure to include a quality topic suggestion along with that, because not only do these suggestions help fuel the channel, they also get you "the viewer" a free HAI t-shirt if we use your suggestion. Submit here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUdlvw6YgU44J8AnM2U_ZvRMyvh_CUM51LYSqF5nYJB9d1-w/viewform?usp=sf_link

You know ur database is bad when null (the value) is confused with "null" (the string).

If your system confuses `null` and `"null"` it's pretty trash to be honest

"You can't change your last name Mr. John Null." "Why not?" "I have to enter your current name before you can choose a new one." "But it's Null." "Sorry, my computer won't let me enter that. You can always try calling our central office. It's the one that puts you on hold for hours before randomly disconnecting."

My brother told me of a co worker at his store named J B Jones. Literally that was his entire legal name. He needed to get a name tag and somehow the computer terminal submission form kept rejecting the single letters as valid names so he wrote J (only) B (only) on there thinking someone would figure it out. Next week he received a name tag for Jonly Bonly Jones which he proudly wore. Somehow it messed up his payroll and he did not get paid for several weeks before they figured it all out. 😀

People with the surname "Null": *Exist* Computer databases: I'm gonna pretend I didn't see that.

"Coordinates 0,0" Ah yes in the oldest anarchy server on minecraft

I knew a man who had “NO TAG” as his plates some 30years age. At that time Virginia Police used that phrase for ANY vehicle not displaying a valid state license plate. He as well changed it after receiving thousands of parking tickets and fines.

As a programmer myself, I can't imagine how one can write an application in such a stupid way that it doesn't distinguish a TEXT STRING with the value "NULL" from an actual NULL value. While it is relatively easy to mistake an EMPTY text string (one that does not contain any character) with the NULL value, as under some circumstances they can be both evaluated as "nothing", I can't imagine how one can mistake the "NULL" string, which consists of four characters and certainly doesn't look like an empty string, with the NULL value which is actually nothing and NEVER converts to the text "NULL".

If your database can’t handle “null”, the string, you need to seriously reconsider your hiring choices. Like, sanitising inputs to prevent the string “null” from becoming null, is like, a must know for working on a database. Makes me laugh, thinking you could preform something like a SQL Injection, through something as silly as a license plate.

"The requested human does not exist" I want that line on my gravestone...

Why would a police database consider "null" the same thing as null...? Like, wtf?

null is not the same as "null" null is a value, "null" is a string

"there is no easy fix" the fix is called not being lazy and actually treating literal string "null" as a literal string. this is the stuff they teach within the first month of a cs program.

"I bless the rains down in [NULL ISLAND]"

Even better would a license plate saying '); DROP TABLE *;

There's a pretty big difference between writing "6E 75 6C 6C" in your database than to write "00" in your database

"There is no easy fix" Yeah there is. Everytime this issue shows up it is a mistake. QA should always test true null input (i.e. nothing) and string null (i.e. the string literal "null"). They should never be confused unless you have impressively stupid type coercion or you are using query strings instead of parameterized queries, which is bad practice, as without proper sanitization you have security issues far larger than this one.

To be fair, the string value "NULL" and the *_actual real true_* NULL are two very different things. A well-built database and software can handle "NULL" just as fine as things like "1 = 1" or " ';--" But that would imply competent programming and data management which is a fairy tale given the reality of software in the world. The silver lining is at least we get videos with terrible jokes thanks to them !

“They run the risk of breaking every modern database” No they don’t

I recall reading a news article some years ago about someone who had the one-digit vanity license plate "0" in Illinois, which law enforcement from around the state (not thinking it could be a real plate) had routinely used as a dummy plate when testing systems. As I recall, the actual owner lived in Chicago and found out about the problem when his car was booted for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid citations (which obviously weren't his).

Database programming 101: ALWAYS sanitize your inputs

The string "NULL" is distinct from the actual value "NULL" in any well-designed system. These are the consequence of poor design, not an innocent mistake.

Thanks Sam! This actually seriously helped. I nearly did it and couldve been cost thousands! I'll choose NaN now after my grand mother!

Interesting that you can’t put “Samsucks” but I’ve literally seen a “cops suck” plate, it was over 10 years ago, but I remember it strikingly because of how dumb of an idea for a plate it was

-programmer sees a "NULL" plate while driving -brains: *null.pointer.exception* -proceeds to crash into a tree

RU-vid: Here's why you can't have NULL as a licence number. Me who lives in a country where the plate format makes NULL impossible: Sure, why not.

There's an identical story to this where the plate was "No Tag" so every time there was a car parked with no plates the cop wrote no tag on the ticket

In another state (I forget which)some had '0000000' as their license plate number and that's their unknown plate default and this person also had tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

Requests for the “Null” license plate has increased dramatically.

As a software developer, I would apologise but this is testing 101 nowadays. Someone fucked up, and it made it's way from development to signoff without anyone checking.

I've worked on software that handles and issues license plates in Tennessee, so I have some insight into how this might happen. These days clerk's offices are using web apps on county and state intranets built to purpose. These use browsers, and the datatype of all inputs from a browser is a string. So what you have is a programmer who made a wrong assumption about people choosing the word "null" as a vanity plate name - or rather they likely didn't give it any thought until the bug came up. I had a similar snafu crop up where I was working where the original programming team assumed no 2 plates could ever have the same value. A reasonable assumption until someone let a vanity plate expire, then successfully appealed to the state to have the name opened back up for them for the second plate from 2 years ago. Our system wasn't having any part of it - until I backdoored the system and deleted the original expired plate because I didn't have the time to do a proper fix of altering the system to use a true primary key on auto-increment as it should have been doing in the first place. Besides, I was only altering the county's local copy of the record - the state official record still had the original expired plate's existence on file in the unlikely event anyone ever needs to know about it.

This is why it's very important to distinguish strings and senselessly labelled values such as true, false, null and undefined. In fact, as I was typing this, I just put quote marks around them to label them, and then I realised they were strings and removed them. Be careful out there, programmers

*Simple: differentiate “null” and null value.*

Last name: Null Computers: I have never met this man in my life

This happens to Ms. True where she can't access her apple account due to her last name.

Lol, my name's been breaking code since the 80's sometimes I'd have to enter a fake last name to register on banking websites. Before Irish people were established in the US they had to remove the Mc from names like McNull etc. I still deal issues with some government software to this day they have trouble with my accounts.

People now: Null is scary. People before: What are you gonna do? Hack my free minecraft acount?

Now, someone needs to put ' ' as their license plate.

0:46 "suggestions that you're a cop" I'm from New Zealand, but a friend of my parents has a license plate that is literally "IMACOP" (*His reason for the plate is because he drives a Holden Commodore which cops in our country use as cop cars*)

I had “OMYPUSE” as plates in Dallas TX for years until they caught on what it sounds like when pronounced.

People who didn't even pass basic programming 101 getting jobs to code entire police databases meanwhile I'm out working minimum wage as an intern doing mundane tasks with a college degree and years of crippling debt. Economic efficiency at its finest.

"no easy fix" NULL "NULL" Tadaaa.. Who is going to wire me millions of dollars now?

I'm making my license plate "your" because I think it would be funny.

In Germany there is house in the Reinhardswald forest called Tillyschanze. The problem is that this area does not belong to a municipality and has no ZIP code. For all administrative acts, like registration office, driving license office, electoral office and so on for the two residents, the responsible authority is the forest office of Münden, Lower Saxony.

Great, now I HAVE to try it out.

"There is no easy fix" As if database engineers haven't been sanitising inputs since injection was discovered

Ok so next we will try out undefined, false, true, and all the HTML tags

1:27 Love how in the background stock video our G-Man is dealing with a screen he mistakenly thinks is touch-enabled.

Some wannabe tough guy: "Don't mess with me, I'm pretty good in a fight" Some dude whose last name is Null: "oh yeah? My very existence destroys every database known to man."

"Ah, yes, we call him little Bobby Drop Tables."

I used to work for an organization that did a large amount of our business by US mail. We had clients that lived on Nonesuch Road in Abilene, Texas. It was almost impossible to get them stuff by mail. It would be returned as undeliverable even though the address is in the USPS database when you do an address search on the USPS Zip Code site and we used the Zip+4 zip code. There are multiple towns throughout the US with the name Nonesuch or None Such.

I heard about someone doing something similar with their license plate but theirs was “NO TAGS.”

_It might not be a vulnerability._ The dmv violation submitter might put the literal string "NULL" as a default plate# if the input is empty. Literally anything is possible, considering *the system let them submit empty license plates for traffic violations* in the first place… *Edit: When I say "submitter" I mean the machine that submits it to the database, sorry for any confusion on that.*

When you name your son "Robert'); Drop TABLE Students;--"

"I mean, it's *one* bag of Totino's Pizza Rolls, Michael, what could it cost? Twenty dollars?"

Prime example of a video where you could predict every single bit of it just by the title. 1. Someone wanted to do something semi-legal, because of course. 2. Databases read "null" as NULL, because of course. 3. The person got charged for everyone with a blank entry, because of course. Doesn't make the video superfluous, it just makes me a smug bastard.

HAI: NULL breaks everything All programmer and database admin: Badly managed DB or bad code.

Fun fact: Null is also a german word and means zero.

This sounds like a variant of a story I read a while back. A guy wanted a personalised plate and there were three options on the form; first choice, second choice and third choice (in descending order of priority, in case the first or second choice weren't available). He entered his first and second choices but instead of leaving the third choice blank, he filled it in with "NO PLATE" intending that he would get no plate if the first two choices weren't available. (He should have just left that part blank if he didn't want a third choice). As it turned out, his first two choices weren't available so he received number plates with NO PLATE on them. At first annoyed at the mistake, the man soon decided to roll with it and use the plates. He then started to receive fines from all over the country; from places he'd never visited, with vehicle descriptions which were nothing like his own vehicle. It turned out that when a ticket was issued to a vehicle without a number plate, the issuing officer would write "NO PLATE" on the ticket and that was what would be entered into the database to record the ticket. Since it matched this man's plate, the fine was automatically issued to him. I don't know what the result was, but I assume some arrangement was made so that he didn't have to pay the fines since the issuing of the fines to him was obviously an error and could never hold up in court. The point though, is that this is a case of bad programming caused by a lack of forethought. The correct way to design the system would have been to have a box to mark on the paper ticket for "vehicle does not have a number plate" and a corresponding check-box in the ticket database program to signal that the car didn't have a number plate and therefore not to even try to search for a match with any issued plate numbers. And here's a bonus Fun Fact for anyone who has read this far: The whole idea that entering the word "NULL" as input would somehow cause an error in a computer database is nonsense. Ordinary programming practices would ensure that this just doesn't happen. What programmers call NULL is represented inside the computer by an "out of range" value and not by the word itself. E.g.: The storage area is supposed to contain only letters or digits but instead contains spaces. A good programmer makes their program look for "out of range" values and has the program do something sensible with that value (such as not even attempting to match the non-existent plate number with any existing plate).

As for the people named Null, they also have first names, DOB and address, and the last name fields have long been updated to accommodate any string of characters because some people have apostrophes and other unsual characters in their (last) name(s), and the system just takes the string as it is and does not try to analyze it.

Me, a Computer Science student clicking on this video: *oh no*

Why the hell would null map to the string “null” and vis versa? This makes little to no sense and whoever programmed this wasn’t thinking straight.

It sounds like there's a simple solution: strings. If you store name and license plate inputs as strings, then inputting "null" would set the input term as 'null' (i.e., the string of text characters n-u-l-l), not 0.

the matpatify extension made the perfect text (who's the killer) with GTLIVE on the opposite side of the HAI logo

There goes my plans to change my name to null

I guess this explains how the character "Null" came to be in No Mans Sky.

Sam: “There is no easy fix.” literally everyone who knows one (1) thing about computers: “If you’re *_STUPID.”_*

I'm sure there isn't someone looking through every picture that was tagged at null island, but I like to envision a tiny, cramped cubicle at NSA with someone sifting through thousands of photos and comes across a selfie of a guy on a buoy and getting a little chuckle to themselves that someone is just as nerdy as they are.

So let’s say that someone called “Noah Body” punches you at school. Then when you have to tell who punched you, you say “Noah Body” but it sounds like “nobody”, so Noah Body gets off scott free for punching you. ^ the whole video in a nutshell

I like how the video shifted from a romantic gift to a bouy in the ocean.

There was a record once in Ireland of a person named "Prawo Jazdy" who committed over 50 different random traffic violations all over the country. It turned out "prawo jazdy" is just the Polish word for "Driver's license" and police were misreading it as a name.

Same thing happened in Denmark. A guy had the plate “Ukendt” (unknown in danish) He got tickets as well, but he won in court and the ticket company had to pay him for their mistake full tickets.

To be fair it's just laziness from the developpers. "NULL", "Null" or "null" as caracter chains (or strings) are not the same as the NULL marker of databases. Even the C from the late 70's knows how to manage strings and markers.

Fun fact: Illinois apparently doesn't ban Russian curse words on vanity plates. I used to have a neighbor who had "Blyat" as his plate and no one seemed to know what that word meant.

Thanks for the heads up on this, sounds like something i'd try too lol

I know a guy who has that as a last name. Very often when he fills out forms online, there is some kind of problem. He thinks about getting it changed.

“You should learn to sanitize your database inputs.” Read xkcd’s “Exploits of a Mom”.

My mom named me ";DROP TABLE Students" i've been having so much trouble getting a school to accept me into their program :(

piping straight into the query language leaves so many options for injection. Major security threat

The whole null island situation kinda reminds me of another like it. There is this site, MSPaint FanAdventures (MSPFA) that houses fancomic based on homestuck in varying degrees. When you reach a 404 error, the site redirects you to a fanadventure called "404quest" Although this time its more for the lolz than out f necessarity

Programmers be clicking on this like "oh no i know exactly what happened here"

But “Null” and dbnull.value are completely different things. Someone isn’t sanitizing their queries.

Imagine trying to break the system and getting mad when you break the system.

I’m glad you brought up Null Island! I first came across that island when I worked with data extraction at a government position I held.

I know how to configure my database to not confuse "null" the string with null the empty value in my freshman year in college for computer science :/

Wendover: Says "days" when it's really years Confirmed- Sam runs AliExpress shipping

This doesn't surprise me at all. A lot of people think I don't have a middle name because I put an X on forms that ask for a middle initial. I have to explain to them that X is the letter it starts with and not an indication that I don't have one.

"they run the risk of breaking nearly every modern database" - if you consider 30 years old Microsoft Access to be modern. Otherwise, every database nowadays does not care what strings you put in it.

The fines should not be his liability. Police officers should be diligent & note down the numberplate.

And that's why my license plate reads "ILUVHAX'); DROP TABLE tag;--"

Here in Germany we have a guy called "Max Mustermann". Max Mustermann happens to be a placeholder name for pretty much everything. If you see something like an example for a credit card or passport somewhere it probably says Max Mustermann on it, "Muster" literally meaning pattern or exemplary. So the poor bastard who was named Max Mustermann by his asshole parents basically can't do anything. Any application, like for contracts, accounts of any kind and so on, gets automatically rejected by any database because "Max Mustermann" automatically triggers fraud detection systems...

In Maine you can put anything on your license plate, I’ve found some good ones including the one on my profile picture

Ima call my son “Charlie DROP TABLE users;” and watch the havoc unfold.

I remember when “Null” used to be a Minecraft creepy-pasta. It was like Herobrine, because people did sighting videos about it.

This is a retelling of a story that dates back to the early 80'S. Before computers were doing the processing. Someone wanted a personalized license plate and the application form gave the person 3 choices. He picked 2, but for his 3rd choice he wrote NONE because he couldn't think of a 3rd choice. From here, the story goes on as in this video, but it wasn't in 2016. More like 1982.

null isnt the only keyword that can be parsed as “no value”, theres also “nil” from lua which is the exact same thing but typed differently

Good morning, yes, I'd like to request the droptables license plate. Why would I like that license plate? It was... Umm... My grandfather's nickname, yes, Bob Droptables...

You can't choose null as yours. Me, a bigbrain: uses i's instead of L's

Even if it was made today, a system which keels over when someone is named "Null" does not deserve to be called "modern". The system is using its database in a highly improper manner. For decades, databases have had tools to easily use them properly in just about any reasonable usage, and separate tools for using the database properly in those few-brain-cells-harder cases are readily available. It's common to use those separate tools anyway since they're a huge quality of life improvement and a huge benefit to development time. Gotta love how literal government systems are more delicate (which is a security issue unto itself and which indicates a likelihood of vulnerabilities for other security outcomes) than joe shmoe's thrown-together website.