A Name that Can Kill Skynet – The Weird Side of the Internet

A Name that Can Kill Skynet – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Do you have a weird last name? I don’t really, but the spelling of my ‘Sweeny’ is not the typical spelling, which is ‘Sweeney,’ and so I’ve had my share of not pulling up on someone’s system and having to check their spelling. But that’s just a mild annoyance. Some people have names nearly impossible to pronounce in English, and some people have names you can easily pronounce, like ‘Weiner,’ that too many people are eager to pronounce. But there is one surname that has a particular power in our cyber enhanced system:

Null.

It’s a simple name, and there are enough people who have it, but “Null” means “empty value” to a computer. So in many areas of our lives, just typing in the last name “Null” on an online form will crash the system.

Nontra Yantraprasert became a null through marriage and came very close to missing a friend’s wedding in India because the Indian consulate kept crashing their system trying to process her form, resulting in them hand-proccessing it. Jan Null, a 75 year-old weatherman, had no much trouble booking online hotel reservations for his job that he started putting “J.Null” in the last name space, looking like he doesn’t know how to fill out a form.

Just the use of “Null” to be a jackass by making that your vanity plate, in the hopes that processing your plate would crash a police computer and get you out of a speeding ticket, might end up giving you hundreds of tickets from all over your state.

What’s the moral of this story? I guess if you want to frustrate yourself, change your last name to “Null.” Or if your last name already is “Null,” my condolences. I have to sometimes let it go when people spell my name ‘Sweeney,’ and I thought that was a pain, but hats off to you, truly. Rest with the knowledge that your very name could bring Skynet to its knees.

More from Liam Sweeny…