Generic wishful suggestion for courts, regarding any sort of computer-processed data which is a basis for legal action: Coin some fancy-sounding Latin phrase meaning "obvious computer failure", and make liberal use of that phrase in curtly dismissing legal actions (with prejudice) where some key piece of the assertion is clearly a product of "garbage in, garbage out".<p>That might at least give some incentive to those running GIGO-excreting computer systems to clean up their sh*t.
For those who like podcasts, Radiolab also had this story recently, along with a few other cases of bad programming (“Are you suggesting I change my name to “quote N-U-L-L quote”, to match the databases you’re working with?”)<p><a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/null" rel="nofollow">https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/null</a>
I'm surprised that NULLs weren't filtered out with what ever stored procedure is running on the database that sent the workload for mail ticket dispersal.<p>Although I suppose it is an edge case because NULL is supposed to not ever get joined with an address or UID.
Great story from 2019. <a href="https://dev.to/michaelpaulkunz/what-we-can-learn-from-sir-charles-antony-richard-hoare-7fg" rel="nofollow">https://dev.to/michaelpaulkunz/what-we-can-learn-from-sir-ch...</a> relates the same story back to Sir Tony Hoare.