It took me a minute to find this--remembering it from when it made the
rounds a few years ago. "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names". It's
a useful reality check for anyone who thinks they can find and record
someone's "real name".

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Perhaps PS4 should consider using VIAF. :)

- Tom

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 10:36 AM, MJ Ray <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Michael Schofield <[log in to unmask]>
> > [...] This split topic I'd like to see maybe in another thread is
> > about giving full legal names to web services. If anyone watched the
> > PS4 reveal last night, you might have noticed that PS4 is giving up
> > gamertags (read: aliases) for full names to easily integrate with
> > other social platforms. [...]
>
> Anyone know how they're going to handle namespace collisions, and the
> various sexual and racial harrassment that will happen in some games
> once you can make assumptions about people from their full names?
>
> Hopefully, they only need be names and not legal full names.
>
> This might amuse some of you: I'm not even the first (or in the first
> ten) calling themselves "MJ Ray" on one popular web service - the ones
> before me are a diverse bunch, too; and I namespace-collided with
> myself at least twice while I was both staff for different departments
> and a student at an expanding university - the user database required
> full names and required them to be unique... oops!  I don't think
> that's the case any longer... ;-)
>
> Regards,
> --
> MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
> http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
> In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
> Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/
>