Why do you need to know my last name?
• 169 words • 1 min • updated
Some (annoying) websites and/or mobile apps will refuse to let you proceed past their registration / login screen unless you provide a last name. Isn’t my first name enough1?
There are a couple of ways to work around this:
- Provide a fake last name
- Provide a gibberish last name (aklsjslkja)
- Provide only the first or second letter of your real last name (e.g. “Thiago P”)
- Provide some non-latin-alphabetic character (e.g. “1”, “.”, “Э̇”)
Recently it occurred to me there’s an even cleverer idea: provide an empty (whitespace) character.
Some services have validation in place to prevent you from inserting a mere ASCII whitespace (’ ‘).
However, most will not bother to check “invisible” unicode whitespace:
There’s a single whitespace character above you can easily copy. vim displays
it as <200b> – zero-width space.
Another one (<200e> – left-to-right mark):
References:
-
Actually, why do you even need to know my first name in the first place? I am just some random database primary key ID. ↩︎