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EBCDIC Is Incompatible with GDPR (2021)
- thyristan 1y agoThe article is from 2021, the original court decision it is writing about is from 2019. Old news. The machine-readable parts of government issued passports also do not adhere to that ruling, as do many government IT systems in Europe. The fallout from that ruling has been underwhelming so far.
- cjs_ac 1y agoIt might be old news, but it's a good reminder that reality has a surprising degree of complexity, and that software engineers have a responsibility to properly represent and handle that complexity.
- JdeBP 1y agoAnd the clickbait title isn't actually the conclusion, as the page cited by this one as its source even explains.
- pepa65 1y agoMakes you wonder if that is one of the reason they like to spell people's names in all uppercase. (Under the rules of some languages, the accents etc. "fall away".)
- Semaphor 1y agoThought that sounded familiar. Needs (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009963 2023, 467 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986735 at the time in 2021, 267 comments
- nuc1e0n 1y agoYes, but not because EBCDIC is not ASCII based. All 8 bit character encodings are incompatible with GDPR, because they cannot represent everyone's names. There's an extended EBCDIC the supports the full Unicode range that is GDPR compliant. That said UTF-8 is still a better choice now.
- rlpb 1y agoHere in the UK, there is no "legal name" AIUI - just what I am known as that then ends up in my official government documents such as my passport and my driving licence. If I make up a symbol to represent myself, then where are we with GDPR compliance if I demand that symbol be on my official documents? It seems reasonable to limit compliance to some specific character set. Which character set should it be? Just one that can accurately encode all "official" languages in the region?
- nuc1e0n 1y agoWhat the 'reasonable' character set for names should be is more a philosophical question than a technical one. I think the unicode set of characters fully contains it. But would someone declaring their name is a unicode emoji be 'reasonable'? I think it would not be. Perhaps only certain script ranges within unicode?
- Piskvorrr 1y agoOnce you start taxatively naming "these are the Only Blessed Ranges," you'll be bitten by the usual brouhaha "email address ends with .[a-z]{2,3}". We all know how it went, and ".[a-z]{2,4}" didn't cut it, either, not even in 2000.
- nuc1e0n 1y agoTo add to the complexity, not all Chinese characters in use for names are representable in unicode. Perhaps at some point legal institutions must just define what the list of characters is that people can have as part of their name as listed on documentation. This reminds me of that 'what programmers believe about names' article from a while back.
- bmn__ 1y ago> not all Chinese characters in use for names are representable in unicode Why? How do you come to this conclusion?
- robertlagrant 1y ago> But, a decade after the seminal Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names essay - we shouldn't tolerate these sorts of flaws. It's nothing to do with that. It's the decades of work by the Unicode Consortium that makes this possible.
- oaiey 1y agoIt is funny how my mind tricks me into search for privacy problems, but the reality here is a violation against the right to correct your data (which is a privacy problem, but not something you would think immediately of)
- jwr 1y agoThe GDPR is often misunderstood and/or misrepresented — it's mostly about giving you agency over your personal data. Which (I happen to think) is a very good idea.
- SpaceL10n 1y agoFor those who don't know... EBCDIC can be pronounced as ebb-sid-ick in conversation
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