You’ve heard of full names but let me introduce you to even fuller names.

In Iain M. Banks‘s Culture novels, names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up [ref]. This got me thinking about the roles of names in the age of The Internet. There is a lot of pressure on parents (well some parents) to give their children unique names these days. Mostly this results in some questionable name choices. Add to that the push for a unique personal brand, chosen handles, nicknames, deadnames, and all the other naming stuff. This left me wondering if Mr Banks might not have had a good idea we can use.

For fun, I thought I would see if I could work out a structure for a naming system that could be a unique route/reference to a single person. That got me thinking of other fiction that does interesting or cool things with names and titles.

I’m going to start with a list of name things that could be used:

• Given name (or new name) [Legal Name]
• Family name (surname) [Family]
• Nickname and/or handle(s) [Handle]
• Title(s) (Mr, Mrs, Mx, Ms, Lord, HRH etc.) [Title]
• Chosen name [Known As]
• Location [Address Parts]
• Birthplace [Birthplace]
• Career or profession [Profession]
• Parents [Father] [Mother]
• Employer [Employer]
• Pronouns
• Notable activities [Activities]
• DNS/Profile [Lookup Request Service]
• Letters after name [LAN]
• Esquire (perhaps)

The basics

The first few should be relatively obvious, For example, you might refer to me as Mr Matthew David “Lord Matt” Brown. That’s the first four – all common name and title things.

Then we get to known as. I tend to go by Matt.

Address parts

Address parts are the section of naming inspired by Iain M. Banks. I suppose that the address section could have many parts the use of which could be optional because not all of us want to doxx ourselves. In this imaginary world, the full address part of the name is used for official stuff (like opening a line of credit, utility billing, voter registration, etc.

Culture names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up. Let’s take an example; Balveda, from Consider Phlebas. Her full name is Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T’seif. The first part tells you she was born/brought up on Rabaroan Plate, in the Juboal stellar system (where there is only one Orbital in a system, the first part of a name will often be the name of the Orbital rather than the star); Perosteck is her given name (almost invariably the choice of one’s mother), Alseyn is her chosen name (people usually choose their names in their teens, and sometimes have a succession through their lives; an alseyn is a graceful but fierce avian raptor common to many Orbitals in the region which includes the Juboal system); Balveda is her family name (usually one’s mother’s family name) and T’seif is the house/estate she was raised within. The ‘sa’ affix on the first part of her name would translate into ‘er’ in English (we might all start our names with ‘Sun-Earther’, in English, if we were to adopt the same nomenclature), and the ‘dam’ part is similar to the German ‘von’. Of course, not everyone follows this naming-system, but most do, and the Culture tries to ensure that star and Orbital names are unique, to avoid confusion.

Names, A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Iain M Banks

Using Banks’s system we would all acquire Sun-Earther as part of our location name or Sol-3 perhaps. I took inspiration from history for birthplace and differed from Banks slightly. See Birthplace for more of my ideas there. I justify differing in that (1) there is no reason not to riff on the idea and (2) “not everyone follows this naming-system” so we are still canonical if we too differ.

One fun idea might be to play with postcodes. Most countries have them. Many that have postcodes (zip codes in the US) have letters in them. For those with letters, one could substitute words for each letter.

For example, my postcode area is CT9. So I could choose to render that at Character Transcriber as a reference to both TTRPGs and my writing.

For brevity (acknowledging the irony here), it would probably be traditional to include the minimum needed lines to find you. On top of that, it might be optional just how much you include.

For example, you live at 237 Madeup Street, Somecounty, Smalltown, AB1 2CD. You might choose to render that as Madeup Smalltown A Brilliant (1/2) Cool Dude. Or you may choose to forego the address most of the time.

Birthplace

This one is a nod back to the invention of surnames. My reference here is Leonardo da Vinci whose name means Leonardo from Venice. Thus, part of your name could be “de [Birthplace]”.

Career or profession

This is another nod back to the invention of surnames. Many surnames trace their origin to professions. Names like Smith, Brown, Baker, Tailor, etc..

As a bonus this part of your fuller name answers the two most common questions, “Who are you?” and “What do you do?”.

Parents

Another early surname thing but also something nerdy and sci-fi. #

Surnames such as Johnson, Matthewson, Babson, and so forth first came about to define a person by who a parent was.

No for the sci-fi bit. In Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, we meet the Nietzscheans who carry the names of their parents. This takes the form of [Name] from [Father] out of [Mother]. You can add that to your fuller name.

I guess you could also add professions for your parents too.

That would make mine by John the artist out of Rosemary the teacher

Employer

For Employer as part of your name, we look to Max Barry’s book Jennifer Government. In Barry’s setting people take their employer as their surname. Guess who Jennifer works for…

As we are not a dystopia, perhaps a fuller name might hyphenate the employer with the family name. For me, that would be Brown-Self (as I do not work for a company).

Esquire

Esquire is sometimes used as a general courtesy title for any man in a formal setting, with no precise significance, usually as a suffix to his name, and commonly with initials only. Chuck an “Esq.” in if you want. After your location name part seems to feel about right to me.

Pronouns

This is where I got a bit creative. Rather than list the pronouns, we can demonstrate them.

Take both [Profession] and [Kown As] (chosen name) we can make:

[she|he|they|…] [are|is|…] the [Profession] call [her|him|them|…] [Known As]

For me, this would be “he is an Author call him Matt”

Activities

This is a section where you can bulk out your name with things you do that are integral to your identity. I might choose “gamer, geek, coder, writer, chair of Thanet Creative”

DNS: Lookup Request Service

DNS stands for Domain Name Service it is what helps your computer turn authorbuzz.co.uk into a unique network address so the page can load. Perhaps you don’t want to give out your address and phone number but you might want to enable people to request those details. Your Lookup Request Service is where people can go for more information. Like, for example, your online profile. Like my about me address https://me.lordmatt.co.uk/.

Letters after name

We already have a system of letters after names like BSc, PhD, MD, DLitt etc.. They are called Post-Nominal Letters if you were wondering. They still go at the end.

The Oxford University Calendar style guide lists diplomas and certificates after degrees so I’m claiming HNDip [ref].

Putting the fuller name all together.

We are left with a pattern for fuller names that looks like this:

[Title] [Legal Name] [Handle[ AKA [Handle]…]] [Family]-[Employer] da [Birthplace] by [Father] out of [Mother]; [|she|he|they|…] [|are|is|…] the [Profession] [called|call [her|him|them|…]] [Known As] the [Activities] in [Address Parts] referencing [Lookup Request Service] [LAN]

For me, I am unfussed about my pronouns which can easily be inferred so I skipped some of the pronoun formations for better “flow”. For the same reason, I added a semi-colon after parents to disambiguate transitions.

I am the one and only Mr. Matthew David “Lord Matt” Brown-Self da Ramsgate Esq. by John the Artist out of Rosemary the Teacher; the Author called Matt the gamer, geek, coder, writer, and chair of Thanet Creative in Sol-3 Kent Character Transcriber 9 referencing me.lordmatt.co.uk HNDip

What’s your fuller name?

I’ve been sketching ideas of late. Mostly to learn how to get the best out of my new brush-tip pens but also to shake off the rust from my (limited) art skills.

This is a before and after of the digital clean-up of a mobile snap I took of one such sketch.

Before

After

I tweaked colour temperature, contrast, and brightness and then did a little digital clean-up of the unwanted white specks. As you can see, the pencil marks are gone, with only the slightest bit of airbrushing needed.

This is less about skill and more about how good the tool I used is. (GIMP).

If I use this in a game, I’ll probably do a contact scan and clean up again so that the end result more closely resembles the drawing.

What should we call this little fellow?

WITNESS is a theoretical system that logs number plates in an encrypted database that can later give you a WITNESS statement if it saw a target car or bike at a given time. I could make it for real but I am mostly exploring the idea for fiction.

I had an idea looking for a story: WITNESS.

WITNESS records when and where it has seen a number plate on a car. The result is a huge database that can be queried to answer the question, “did anyone see this car in that area at this given time?” By “anyone” we mean, a WITNESS (number plate recording) box.

Due to the way it is set up, you must specify a day and an area. For each search, the customer is charged thus discouraging fishing expeditions.

If the answer is yes, you get a WITNESS statement – a certificate that affirms the car in question was in the area.

I imagine that private investigators might use it as they close in on their person. Cops might use it to place a car near the scene of a crime, and the accused might use it to place their car far from said crime.

I’ve worked out exactly how this would work. I’ll get to the technical part at the moment. WITNESS sounds like it could be dystopian or a lifesaver for the wrongly accused. I would very much like to hear your opinion on it. If this were real would you feel it was dystopia or a good idea for law and justice?

For the TL;DR: crowd – it is very hard to tamper with the database and harder (and more expensive) to go fishing for information as the search has to be done once for every hour in every box for every day. That’s 24 searches for just one box and one car.

The technical stuff

There are two main technical actors in this model. The central database and the witness boxes.

The WITNESS box

The box itself would be a sealed unit connected to a power supply with a camera sensor capable of identifying number plates.

Inside the WITNESS box, is a simple computer with a restricted storage capacity. This is so it cannot buffer too many number plate images. The exact capacity is relative to how busy the road is that the box watches.

The box also maintains a record of its location. It uses GPS, nearby WiFi hotspots, and nearby cellular towers to confirm that it is where it is supposed to be. A further check is carried out by examining the network route to the central database (traceroute). Some of these techniques are used by Pokemon Go to detect cheating.

The WITNESS process

Once WITNESS snaps a number plate (triggered by a detection) it caches the relevant part of the image to storage. A secondary process steadily works through the images converting them into text.

If WITNESS cannot read the image with confidence it adds the image to a compressed file along with other data needed to add this image back to the central database. This is then encrypted with the central office encryption public key. This way only the central office can decrypt the image. There humans will identify the number plate. After that, the central office server converts the text into a database record in a single packet signed with the identification team’s secret key (more on that in a bit).

At random intervals, WITNESS will send identified images to the central office so its work can be verified. The people who do the work do not know if this is a verify or identify.

If a WITNESS box runs low on space in its image buffer, it can send a signed and encrypted compressed file to a nearby WITNESS box or central office for processing.

Now that WITNESS has a text numberplate, it deletes the image. The text is combined with the WITNESS box’s Unique ID and that day’s secret salt and turned into a one-way hash. Say, SHA3-512. The number plate is now a string of characters that cannot be reversed and can only be created again with all three pieces of information. This is added to the local store along with the date and time the number plate was taken.

Every hour, the records in the local store are put into a data packet which is signed by the WITNESS box’s private key. This is then sent to the central database which can use the WITNESS box’s public key to verify the data packet was not tampered with. This is done using an encrypted connection like the one your bank might use for your Internet banking app.

Key pair cryptography is a real thing. Here’s the overview. And here is the technical/mathematical stuff.

The Central Database

The central database stores the WITNESS data packets by location group and day.

Each incoming packet is verified using the WITNESS box’s public key. If the packet fails the test, the database sends a repeated request to the WITNESS box and notes a possible attack. This attack potential is then monitored by the security team. If enough fails are detected, the packets are placed in the isolation database along with all future packets until the WITNESS box integrity is secured.

The search

To search the database and create a WITNESS statement, the location, day, and number plate must all be entered. For each day, for each number plate, for each WITNESS box, the one-way hash must be created. Then all 24 hourly records must be searched for the hash. This must be repeated for every WITNESS box in the area.

As a result, confirming a car in a location is relatively inexpensive in terms of computing resources but searching broadly becomes quickly prohibitive. That deliberate time-complexity cost is how WITNESS defends against unreasonable surveillance and fishing attempts. Asking, “Was my car near Wilson Road on Thursday” generates a quick yes or no. Asking “Which cars were in Wilson Road on Thursday” means checking every possible number plate. In other words, confirming location is easy but search is nearly impossible.

This is why WITNESS charges per search. The authorities can get all the court orders they want, a broad search is technologically impossible.

BOLO mode

If a Be On the Look Out (BOLO) is issued for a given car (number plate), WITNESS boxes in the area can be given a limited number of numberplates to look out for. The box can check for the given number plates before one-way encryption. They add a flag for the BOLO target to that hour’s packet which can then be verified with a single search of that packet. Once verified, the location can be sent to the police. The report would be an hour or two after the sighting.

Another way to do BOLO would be to have the database perform a search for the number plate each hour after the update. Expensive for the police (each one is a paid search) but I am sure some sort of discount can be worked out.

What could WITNESS stand for?

Let’s take a few shots at this:

• Wide Interconnected Test of Number (plate) Existence Secondary to Sighting
• Wired Internet Tagging of Number (plates) Every Second Street
• Will Itomise Tracking Numbers Entered Securely and Systematically

What do you think?

I am confident that with a significant loan, a grant and/or the right legislation I could make WITNESS right now. None of this is technology that does not exist. There’s nothing stopping its creation. You could save time and money by adding traffic cameras and other car surveillance that already exist. I have my doubts about its viability as a business but as a private/public partnership deal, this is almost too easy to make.

What do you think of WITNESS? Would you like a government to implement it or is it capitalist dystopia?

This is a snippet of dialouge from my upcoming Visual Novel (The Spell Collector) between the titular Wizard (W) and their assistant Brian (B). It appears after chapter zero.

W: Tell me something Brian.

B: What do you want to know teacher?

W: I truly appreciate the assistance you have given but there is one thing I don’t quite understand.

B: There’s something that you don’t understand?

W: The end of this trip will mark the start of the fifth year with you as my assistant. Most novices serve for a year or two before leaving to pursue their own studies.

B: That’s true.

W: You’ve been with me for over three years already. Four by the end of this journey.

W: Do you plan to leave when we arrive somewhere more exciting?

B: No, teacher. Not at all.

W: Strange. Most young mages would do just that. It is not as if you owe me anything.

B: I’m not ready to go it alone. I feel like I have so much more to learn from you.

W: That’s kind of you to say. I doubt there is any more for me to show you. At least not anything new that you cannot work out for yourself with a little practice.

B: I’m confident this journey will teach us both all sorts of new things.

W: That is why I am taking this sabbatical after all.

B: I’m looking forward to it.

W: Me too. It’s been far too long since I left that stuffy old castle.

This is in reply to: Writers, tell us about your WIP

Yesterday I started writing a story. I called it “Cube”. It is about a person who one day discovered they have the ability to summon a large extra-dimensional space.

My plan is to write each episode, take it to one or two writer’s groups for feedback, and then share it on this blog. Episode one should be up in the coming week. Before then, I need to replace some tell with more show as I kinda wrote the whole thing far too fast.