<story><title>EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CWuestefeld</author><text>At the time I moved out of New Jersey 8 years ago, the state was still unable to represent my completely vanilla name on my driver&amp;#x27;s license. My first name is &amp;quot;Christopher&amp;quot;, but their computers can&amp;#x27;t&amp;#x2F;couldn&amp;#x27;t handle an 11-character name. It was always truncated on my driver&amp;#x27;s license.&lt;p&gt;This led to problems when they instituted their trusted ID compliance. When renewing the license we were required to provide some combination of documentation to corroborate our identity, and obviously that documentation needs to match the name shown on the driver&amp;#x27;s license - and of course mine did not.&lt;p&gt;There was one way out for Christophers like myself. A birth certificate was considered the ultimate truth, so as long as I had a notarized (with the raised seal) birth certificate to prove my identity, they would allow me to renew my license.&lt;p&gt;The State of New Jersey is very awful at IT. My wife, who works in healthcare finance, told me about problems she was having with the State because - get this - their field for what amounts to &amp;quot;Medicaid ID#&amp;quot; was too narrow, so they had to recycle ID#s for new recipients! And to make that worse, they discarded old backup data so when checking the data for a patient several years ago, it&amp;#x27;s only possible to find that of the latest owner of ID# 12345.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jjice</author><text>The absurdity of not being able to support a name as common as Christopher or anything as long or longer just screams &amp;quot;government work&amp;quot;. What the hell went through everyone&amp;#x27;s head when they built this system? Absolutely no testing or real data was used either, but that shouldn&amp;#x27;t matter, because having a max limit on someone&amp;#x27;s (very common) name is honestly impressive. The fact they developed this system without addressing this issue is a testament to the quality of government software development.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure there is good government software out there, but there are plenty of showcases of the opposite (especially since these are systems that NEED to work).</text></comment>
<story><title>EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CWuestefeld</author><text>At the time I moved out of New Jersey 8 years ago, the state was still unable to represent my completely vanilla name on my driver&amp;#x27;s license. My first name is &amp;quot;Christopher&amp;quot;, but their computers can&amp;#x27;t&amp;#x2F;couldn&amp;#x27;t handle an 11-character name. It was always truncated on my driver&amp;#x27;s license.&lt;p&gt;This led to problems when they instituted their trusted ID compliance. When renewing the license we were required to provide some combination of documentation to corroborate our identity, and obviously that documentation needs to match the name shown on the driver&amp;#x27;s license - and of course mine did not.&lt;p&gt;There was one way out for Christophers like myself. A birth certificate was considered the ultimate truth, so as long as I had a notarized (with the raised seal) birth certificate to prove my identity, they would allow me to renew my license.&lt;p&gt;The State of New Jersey is very awful at IT. My wife, who works in healthcare finance, told me about problems she was having with the State because - get this - their field for what amounts to &amp;quot;Medicaid ID#&amp;quot; was too narrow, so they had to recycle ID#s for new recipients! And to make that worse, they discarded old backup data so when checking the data for a patient several years ago, it&amp;#x27;s only possible to find that of the latest owner of ID# 12345.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pickledcods</author><text>I have the exact same problem with my European passport. maximum name length, that is total first+middle+surname must be less than 30 characters.&lt;p&gt;Officially I am not who I am.</text></comment>