Radiolab - NULL

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

A one-word magical spell. Several years back, that’s exactly what Joseph Tartaro thought he’d discovered. It was a spell that, if used properly, promised to make one’s problems disappear. And so he crossed his fingers, uttered the word and cast the enchantment on himself. The result, however, was anything but magical. Unbeknownst to Joseph, by unleashing this spell, he’d earned a lifetime membership into a cursed community. A clan made up of folks who, through no fault of their own, had become nameless and invisible. Today, the story of these unfortunate souls, the dark digital arts that took so much from them and the wizardry needed to give them new life. Special thanks to Sarah Chasins, Tony Hoare, Brian Kernighan and to Patrick McKenzie for writing that wonderful list of assumptions programmers believe about names. And also to all the folks who spoke to us and emailed us with stories of their own ‘problematic’ names. DOWNLOAD BRAILLE READY FILE HERE Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.     Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe!

Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC.

See? Yeah. You hit it. You start. You start. You start. Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. I'm Lulu Miller.

This is Radiolab. And today we have a story about how emptiness can fill your life with trouble. Could you be making more money as a bad guy, but you've decided to use your powers for good? Yes. Okay. It comes to us from the very troublesome producer, Simon Adler. Yeah, so let me introduce you here to Joseph. Joseph Tartaro. I'm an

offensive security consultant. Essentially a professional hacker for hire. Hired by companies to, you know, break into things and find flaws and vulnerabilities and then show them how we found those. And hey, Joseph, this is Sarah. I'm also on the line too. Okay, awesome. And producer Sarah Kari and I called him up because a couple years back now, he found a flaw that almost broke him. I guess a little bit, yeah. And it all started with? What was behind your decision to get a vanity plate? A license plate.

I was just bored. And obviously people like to customize their vehicles. You know, people get vanity plates related to a hobby of theirs or their work or any sort of interest. So one day he surfs over to the California DMV's website. And I start picking out hacker-related funny stuff. You know, to see if it's available. Stuff like...

Syscall. What's that? Like a system call for programming. Or... Knopsled. It would probably be involved to explain. This is going to go over your heads. Yeah, yeah. It might confuse you. Another

was RTFM. You know, read the effing manual. Aha. You know, stuff like that. Anyhow. As I was going through ideas, one of them was null. Null. N-U-L-L. Which, to a computer, isn't really a word at all. It's like a character or a symbol. Correct. It means that the field or value or data is just

empty. Like in a spreadsheet, if a cell has nothing in it, not even a zero, the computer stores that emptiness as, well, as null. So this license plate would effectively say blank. Yeah, yes. Okay. So I just went, oh, that's kind of cute. You know, and then I thought this might lead to a funny scenario. Because being a hacker and all, Joseph knew that if some programmer had done a sloppy job, the DMV's computers might mistake the word null for the symbol null.

And if they did, he wondered, Can I get a ticket? With this license plate, some bad code, and a bit of luck, he'd effectively be invisible. So he ordered the plate, bolted it to his car, and discovered that he was right. That yes, the DMV's computers were poorly programmed, just not in the way that he had hoped. So one morning, you know, I went out to get the mail, opened up his mailbox and peered inside. I had a wad of envelopes. It was like 15 envelopes,

you know, with my name and my address and everything. I was just like, what the hell? Because I don't really get mail. Okay. But then I opened the first one up and it's like, I got a parking ticket. And not just any parking ticket. It said, you have a ticket for, you know, parking in a handicapped stall that's written for like a Mercedes. And so I'm like, huh? Because that's not his car. No. What type of car do you have?

Or did you have? Just an old beater. Okay. And then I open up the next one that's like for a Toyota in Corona, California. Not his car, not his city. Okay. And as he opens up the next one. Fresno County.

And the next one. Rancho Cucamonga. And the next one. Cypress College. Each of them is a parking ticket or a traffic ticket for a different car, a different violation in a different part of the state that it says he's responsible for paying.

Just didn't make sense. So he jumps on his computer, surfs over to the site of the collection company listed on all of these tickets, trying to see if they've made a mistake or something. But what he saw there was that those tickets in his mailbox were just the tip of the iceberg.

There were hundreds and hundreds of tickets. It was like $10,000 or something worth. Oh my God. What it appeared was happening was that instead of his null license plate being stored as blank, every blank license plate was being stored as null. And so every ticket written without a plate number, maybe because the car didn't have one or the cop forgot to fill it in, was being sent to Joseph. That is my theory.

Yes. And so what's your reaction to that well i thought it was hilarious oh okay because it's clearly not me i don't have 30 cars i haven't lived all up and down the the coast of california and so who in their right mind would think that any of these were mine. Okay. I thought it would be a funny phone call and then it getting taken care of, but... Okay, I'm recording. Looks like it's got a good level. I was wrong. Because unbeknownst to Joseph, when he chose that license plate, he became an unofficially

adopted son of a certain family. Could you just say your name and what you do? Yeah, it's Christopher... That was a joke. Oh, you got me. It's Christopher Null, N-U-L-L. The Null family. I'm a technology and business journalist.

And Chris says his problems began with the internet and a rejection. At some point along the way in the early 2000s, you know, I tried to register for an online service. Like AOL or something. Put in my name and then I would get an error that would pop up and say, you know, this field cannot be blank. And he was not alone. I'm like, no, damn it.

My name is right there. The whole screen would go gray and then freeze. It said not a legal name. Now I'm a lawyer. So it's kind of curious to not have a legal name. That's Wes, Susie and Bill. Last name. N-U-L-L? No, null. So what what is coming up? What is going wrong, actually? Yeah. So like behind the computer screen. Yeah. So it could be any number of things, but likely the programmer accidentally put in some quotation marks. So it says like, it should say, if null then. But instead what they put is, if quotation marks null then. And the thing is, well, that sounds like it should be an

easy problem to solve. It's not like this happens just one place in the code, because once it gets inserted into the code, then as these programmers are working, oftentimes they're copying and pasting chunks of it from one place into another. So this error is just running ripshod over the entire software. It's like a low stakes Y2K. Well, for one family, like targeted on one family. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's much easier to just not let people use their name rather than spend millions of dollars on fixing it

for the dozen people that it's impacting. But, boy, does it impact them. I have to have it corrected. Bill here says he sometimes gets letters from the IRS or Medicare. Stuff from the government written out to William, no last name. Or Verizon sends me bills regularly that say, you know, dear Dr. Undefined. At first, I couldn't even see the end of it, but it's just an avalanche. Adam Null here woke up one morning in college to find all of the university's

undeliverable emails in his inbox. I think the sum total was about 30,000. The most difficult thing was with State Farm. And Susie Null was once trying to process an insurance claim and discovered that her name had been replaced by a punctuation mark. As in, it would say Susie comma instead of Susie Null? No, it didn't have a name at all. It just had a comma. Okay.

And I'm like, oh, the null glitch strikes again. And resolving these null glitches. We all love calling customer service, right? It's just about as hellish as you would imagine. Thank you for calling. Please be assured that your call will be answered as quickly as possible. Oh my god. Like when Joseph called the DMV to deal with his null license plate. They said, wow, you have a lot of tickets, you owe a lot of money, but we have nothing to do with citations.

You've got to call this other number. So he does that, tries to explain that these aren't his tickets. All of this is from the word null, but they don't care. They just say, what's your ticket number? And he's like, no, you don't understand. And they're just like, ticket number, ticket number, ticket number.

And we just got into like this back and forth. Okay, dumbass, we're done here. I will say the common thread in all these stories that I'm hearing, which is the null glitches seem to manifest in situations that are already frustrating. That's true, actually. Like dealing with your insurance company is already frustrating. Yeah. And then just dollop an extra serving of frustration on top of it. Yeah. And when the nulls finally get through to someone who at least understands the problem,

the solution that's often offered is. Well, you could change your name. And I said, are you suggesting I change my name to quote, N-U-L-L quote, to match the databases you're working with? This, by the way, is Sarah Null. And they go, well, that's one thing that would work. And I said, well, clearly that's not an option, right? Clearly I'm not going to change my name where it's not even letters anymore. Wow. So, so yeah, it was, it was a pretty absurd suggestion.

It's also... I was going to say something else. It was going to be really great, but I forgot it. Again, Chris Null. Oh, no, I remember. It's not just people with the name Null, right? This story plays out for millions of people. And we're going to get to that

after a quick break. My name is Lauren from Huntsville, Alabama. As a member of Radiolab's exclusive membership program, The Lab, I provide a steady source of funding so Radiolab can continue to bring us stories, not to mention exclusive perks. Join at Radiolab.org slash join. Lulu? Latif? RadioLab.org slash join. Lulu. Latif. RadioLab.

So before the break, Simon, you were telling us stories of migraine-inducing computer problems targeted to specific people with a specific last name of Null. But it's not just about those specific people. No, not in the least. In fact, the sort of problems we're talking about with these null folks exist for all sorts of different people. And they seem, looking at this story or sort of digging into this, it seems that they exist because of this fundamental difference between the way we humans process information and the way computers process information.

Here we go. Hold on, hold on. There's too many wires out. And so if we're not very careful about translating between the two, we can make digital life difficult for a lot of people. What's going on? The business school flooded with sewage last week. And we were like, yes, America's premier business school.

This, by the way, is our former intern, Tanya Chabla. I am an undeclared sophomore at the University of California at Berkeley. She's taken a bunch of computer science courses where they've talked about this translating. And in one of those classes, she says last year... Okay, it's not that interesting of a story, but I took a class called The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

And I didn't go to lecture, but the few times I did go to lecture, one of the times the professor was like, when you create webpages and you ask for names, there are things that you should think about. And so, because we're like the future of technology and programming, on the lecture slide, our professor included this list. The list was titled, quote, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. And it was these 40 bullet points with a preamble that read, all of these assumptions are wrong. And now, as a public service, Tanya will read us some highlights from that list. People have exactly one full name. That's an assumption. People have exactly one

full name, which they go by. People have exactly N names for any value of N. It's such a CS thing to say using the variable N, but it's a thing. Okay, anyways. People don't have first names that are over 20 letters, and people don't have last names that are less than two letters. I and my family for one, but you know. Wrong and wrong. I'm Vivian Yu. Single letter, Yu. The list goes on. People's names do not contain numbers. Wrong.

People's names are not written in all caps. Wrong. People's names are not written in all lowercase letters. Wrong. Wrong. Thank you. But come on in all lowercase letters. Wrong. Wrong. Thank you. But come on. My name is Lorraine Passion. At least we can all agree first names don't have spaces in them. Actually, there is a space in between the la and rain of my name.

Well, hyphens. There are no hyphens in first names. I am Eden Perlove, spelled E-H hyphen D-E-N. Wrong as well. But we're not done yet. People's first names and last names are by necessity different. My name is Yang Yang. Wrong. And yes, we do exist. People have

family names shared by their relatives. Wrong in Iceland. And on and on. No million people share the same name. Mohamed Wang. No, no. It's estimated that 150 million people have the first name Mohamed

and 92 million use the last name Wang. That's a huge number. And on. And then 40. This is my favorite one. People have names. So, yeah, it's not just me because I have an unusual last name. One more time, Christopher Null.

So, do I feel personally attacked? No, I just feel, you know, I feel sadness that this issue can't be easily resolved. And we can all live in name harmony. So to wrap this thing up, our man from the top, Joseph Tartaro, over the course of a year or so, he was told countless times to just change his license plate,

that that would resolve his issue. But being a man of principle... I never did because that's not a solution, and it doesn't actually fix the issue. So he fought this thing, made hundreds of phone calls, spent untold hours on hold, even went to his local sheriff's office

to try to get this resolved. And today, his plate still reads null, his record has been cleared by the DMV, and more than that... If you try to look up my information on the website, it doesn't let you search the word

null anymore. So, I don't know. Wait, what on earth could that be? I don't know if they just put a block in or they stopped taking tickets or what. So now it's started a whole new conversation of, well, now you really can't get tickets. Well, right. Have you arrived at the promised land here after four years in darkness? Potentially.

This story was reported by Simon Adler with help from Sara Khari and Tanya Chawla. It was also produced by Simon with music and sound design also by Simon. We'd like to give special thanks to Sarah Chasins, Tony Hoare, Brian Kernaghan, and all the folks who emailed us with stories of their own, quote-unquote, problematic names. Just to let you know, this episode is sort of an appetizer. We're cooking up an entire hour about names. It's coming down the feed very soon. Keep an ear out for that.

I'm Latif Nasser. I'm Lulu Miller. Thanks for listening. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhujana Sambindam, Matt Kielty, Nanny McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Ana Roskwet Paz, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Carolyn McCusker

and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibbo. Hi, I'm Ram from India. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.