Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 22:10:59 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

   The #MRZ (Machine Readable Zone) of a credit card sized identity card should be used more often in other contexts like access badges (for conferences). You get 3 lines that can be easily read by existing MRZ libraries, you can have up to 33 characters for entropy (9 chars doc number, 14 chars optional element 1, 10 chars optional element 2) where each character can be 0-9 or A-Z (uppercase only) and <, have check digits. Expiry date and name are standard elements. 1/2

   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 22:15:45 JST nadja

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer the problem is people want to put names there and it is *woefully* inadequate for containing names

   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 22:26:04 JST nadja

     @jwildeboer that'd be the smart move, yes. :P

   • Embed this notice
     Keanu 🏳️‍⚧️:progress_pride: (anghenfil@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 22:27:28 JST Keanu 🏳️‍⚧️:progress_pride:

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer But why bother doing text recognition if you can have a QR-Code with automatic error correction? I genuine curious.

   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 22:38:58 JST nadja

     @jwildeboer I put my name in, it broke

   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 22:40:54 JST nadja

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer oh also there's a bug: If a family name has spaces it encodes them incorrectly (it puts a << instead of a < in the MRZ)

   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 22:46:42 JST nadja

     @jwildeboer My name is valid Latin1 :)

   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 22:58:33 JST nadja

     @jwildeboer Having read the transliteration rules: ah right, so I should put my name in there but it doesn't fit (lenght-wise) anyway and I have to (lossly!) mangle it to be possible to put it in there to begin with ^^'
     Yeah the MRZ may be an international standard, but it's one of the ones we can just let die, don't you think? ^^
     Names are complicated and this standard is from the time where white europeans wrote "international" standards because it included the germans (&not even the french).

   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 23:12:21 JST nadja

     @jwildeboer I'm really not, but I'm confronted with the problem of my name breaking software like this very often. A MRZ not trying to contain the card holder's name is much more reasonable, but I have yet to see that. In fact, everywhere I see MRZ being mentioned as useful standard it states *the exact opposite*.

   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 23:34:24 JST nadja

     @jwildeboer That's fair. But standards set expectations, and I've been burned too many times by the well established tooling breaking because it didn't question the standard in the right places or (wrongly) assumed that some external system would do the proper sanitation of inputs. Maybe I'm just more jaded than is warranted :)

   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Jan-2025 01:08:52 JST nadja

     @jwildeboer I can imagine that most tools won't like a "primary identifier" to be the empty string (even if the spec does allow it), but yes this would work somewhat better ^^

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Jan-2025 03:18:39 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     Now to write a (long) blogpost on what the MRZ is, where it could be used outside of travel documents (with examples) and what open source tools exist to work with them. Also on the limitations and absurdities of this relic that I still find fascinating :) 4/5

   • Embed this notice
     Julius Schwartzenberg (jschwart@mas.to)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Jan-2025 03:21:06 JST Julius Schwartzenberg

     @jwildeboer are you sure it's handling long family names correctly? What I see on an actual card is that it's chopped off such that the initial letter of the given name can still fit.

     Now it seems to just put a partial family name till the end and no given name initial.

   • Embed this notice
     Julius Schwartzenberg (jschwart@mas.to)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Jan-2025 03:40:52 JST Julius Schwartzenberg

     @jwildeboer ah wow you are right. I just checked a visa issued by the same country and it chops off the name without any given name initial.

     So some countries are not even consistent in which approach they use...

   • Embed this notice
     Julius Schwartzenberg (jschwart@mas.to)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Jan-2025 03:47:25 JST Julius Schwartzenberg

     @jwildeboer it seems to struggle with multiple names though, when I put "DE PATERNOSTER EN NOGMEER NOGMEER" for the family name, a space ends up in the MRZ where there should be a <. It seems to stop replacing spaces with < after some family names.

   • Embed this notice
     Julius Schwartzenberg (jschwart@mas.to)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Jan-2025 03:55:37 JST Julius Schwartzenberg

     @jwildeboer indeed working now!

     I guess to get things really aligned you'd have to derive the used variation from the country and document type, but it will be hard to figure this out at a large scale. If you want more info on the documents I have, I could share this privately some time.