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I'm reminded of being unable to schedule Genius Bar appointments because my last name was a banned name. Given my Cantonese romanization, Jason Hung was apparently denied AppleCare support from geniuses.

(I do understand why'd they regex for bad names since at one point Apple publicly showed who was enqueued for support, but not very helpful to tell someone their last name isn't good when they already need help! Not trying to be sensational, but they could have just flagged it for human review to see if the name was an obvious joke, or better yet, not display names publicly)

Edit: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1491462



"Hung" is a pretty common name. You'd think it wouldn't be on the list for that reason alone.


>regex for bad names

This is why you don't use something as simplistic as regex to do your automated moderation. Automated moderation is a pretty tricky area and requires something at least as sophisticated as naive Bayes.


I used to have a problem with a Google contact form because of part of my surname ("Cocks"). I posted a screenshot here and a couple of people very politely offered to help and it is, I think, fixed now.

I have no idea how often my name causes communication to be silently dropped.


Gah. Apple has a database of their own customers. I'm surprised they don't use that as a whitelist of known good (recognized) names.




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