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Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

Back in the late nineties, I attended the Norwegian University of Technology and Science.

Someone in the IT department figured it was an excellent idea to host all student accounts on the stud.ntnu.no subdomain.

We got a few odd bounces.

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I was sure you were going for a NUTS reference with that first sentence. Alas, a missed opportunity for stud.nuts.edu. ;)

I had a professor once tell the class that Minix was created with the Free University Compiler Kit.

He realized his mistake a few seconds later when we all started laughing.

Matter of fact, nuts.edu is (or, at least, was - doing a whois on my phone is a pain) registered to a computer club at the NUST (which, incidentally, is the official abbreviation even though the direct translation would be NUTS...)

I'm currently attending, and we're still on username@stud.ntnu.no emails. I haven't had any experience with anything bouncing in my 5 years though.

Presumably it has been white-listed just about anywhere as enough confused, angry or bemused students complained via other channels.

Also, I remember how we initially didn't check the auto-generated user names (part of first and last name) for obscenities or other unfortunates.

One of the highlights I still remember 20+ years later is a poor sod who was pervo@stud for a few hours; luckily we spotted it before he started using the account.

I once built a license code scheme that occasionally generated obscenities in the middle of the code. Once we realized the problem, we had a fun few hours building a blacklist with every obscenity we could think of.

This is where I always chime in with a link to the List of Dirty, Nasty, or Otherwise Obscene Words on github.

https://github.com/LDNOOBW/List-of-Dirty-Naughty-Obscene-and...

I originally found this list during a few frantic hours after I first created a password cracking homework for my security class. Naturally I'd used the Linux dictionary in /usr/dict/words as the source of the passwords. It only occurred to me much later to check what passwords my script had randomly chosen, and by then the hashes had been distributed to the students. Whoops!

> Added "shitblimp"

I'm already in love.

I built a similar system for marketing codes recently, but I wanted to encode a combination of the user ID and some of the details of the mailing so the relevant information could be determined without having to check a database. I just removed letters that could create certain four-letter forms of profanity, and then broke up the code into four-letter blocks using hyphens so I didn't have to worry about obscenities longer than that.

I don't doubt you could still find an obscenity if you were really looking, but I feel comfortable with that level of obscenity prevention. If someone honestly finds a way to be offended by whatever obscenity possibilities are left over, then they could probably find a reason to be offended by almost anything.

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