EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR

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's license. My first name is "Christopher", but their computers can't/couldn't handle an 11-character name. It was always truncated on my driver's license. 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…

And good thing, IMO. You try and have a weird name in a foreign country. If you're not careful, everyone will spell it differently, and then you'll spend ages going "No, I'm sure I'm in your system. Try this other spelling". At least back in the 90s when I often had to deal with that, you were usually talking to a real life person, sitting on the other side of the desk. You could show them your documentation. Today since…

Thought that sounded familiar. Needs (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009963 2023, 467 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986735 at the time in 2021, 267 comments