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Comment by delinka

6 years ago

The code doesn't rely on a magic value, the humans have decided that an empty value will be typed, by hand, into their terminals as the characters "NULL".

The problem is that the employees with access to the system are required to enter a 'valid' value. But in some cases there is no value. So the 'valid' value they've come up with is the string "NULL" - they can't use "~~NULL~~" because ~ isn't allowed on a license plate. So because A) anyone can request a valid value on a plate, and B) nonce values must also be "valid" within the system, the tax payer is capable of ordering a nonce value on a plate.

>the humans have decided that an empty value will be typed, by hand, into their terminals as the characters "NULL"

Almost certainly because of software constraints, like the form not allowing the plate number field to be blank.