If a person's name is Null then how would it break the database?
I have seen database interfaces (e.g.  framework libraries) that return 'null' as a string for null columns.  I believe there was a flag that would turn this on or off for debugging.  This flag allows developers to easily determine if the empty field was a result of a null value or an empty value.  This is a bad setting, especially in production, and would explain the issues explained in the article.  

The reverse processing of converting 'null' to a null value should generate an application error for a name field.  I would expect this to be rather quickly resolved.