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> The Scunthorpe problem, AOL didn't let users set their hometown to Scunthorpe because of the "cunt" substring. This is a classic.

Clbuttic!

These heavy-handed restrictions on speech are positively medireview!

Confused Google

"medireview. Erroneous, computer-generated form of medieval."

Enlightened facepalm

In that vein, there's also dawizard, wizardnta, the amDanielan dream (in a book whose author changed the name of a character named Eric to Daniel), and a company that is now in the african-american.

> * Some games displaying the nickname "Nasser" as "N*er", suggesting that it is the n word.

This actually looks like it removes "ass" and not related to n-word? Nevertheless, rather assumptious!

Edit: Oh I misread the post. The new name is even worse... That is rather hilarious and sad at the same time :/

My read of it is that's exactly what they were saying. The software replaced "ass" with "*", which made it even worse because now it read like the software was correcting the n-word (and in turn suggesting the person was using the n word).

I think the suggestion is that to the uninformed, "n*er" or "n***er would appear to be a censored n-word.

It was supposed to be three stars actually, but the other two vanished due to HN formatting.

This reminds me of middle school while I was temporarily in a country with heavily censored internet, where, I couldn't even search for info about sexual reproduction in plants for an assignment without a VPN because they filtered on "sex".

So while I couldn't find info on actually innocent topics, it had been trivial to play around with search terms to find porn that the filter couldn't catch.

> temporarily in a country with heavily censored internet

So, the USA huh?

For "children" (read: under 18), schools are some of the most despotic, censorious, and anti-democratic institution we have, and we send young humans from 6-18 through this meatgrinder.

During health class, our teacher was unable to see anything about "breast cancer", even though various cancers were in the discussion topic. Didn't matter. "Breast" is a evil horrible sexualized word that we must never allow anybody ever see... Even though you're legal to consent to sex at 16 in most states, and 17 in the rest.

Even the community college had the same blocks on it as the local high school. By definition, people who attend are 18+ , and yet treated like 3rd graders.

It may not be as censored on your own connection (cell, cable, fiber, etc), but this country absolutely does heavily censor, and they censor humans when most vulnerable and under state compulsion to attend.

They all have smartphones. Almost everyone single one will have a smartphone.

Before smartphones, I’ve seen someone masterbating while watching porn in the middle of a massive row of computers in the college library. People probably did worse and it’s the reason they block it.

And? You go up to them and tell them to quit or you'll call the cops for indecent exposure.

We already have a pretty sane law on this. We do not need shitty blocking tools that way overreach their bounds.

And yes, anything that blocks "sexual content" or otherwise also blocks VPNs and Tor and I2P as well. Those "bypass tools" are default enabled on ALL blocking systems.

It was Iran, at home. The school was not that great so the only material accessible there would have at most been an old encyclopedia in the library.

I still remember when Google, in a fit of one of the many moral panics, decided to ban everything related to guns from their shopping site. Which, of course, lead to banning of all the Burgundy wines, because they have a "gun" inside! Poor fellas were so hasty to implement it they couldn't even do the filter right.

People named Guido not being able to create an account because apparently my name is also a racial slur in some part of the world where I do not live.

I cannot register with my nickname in a LOT of online services/games. Sony even sent me a scary letter with intention to suspend account.

Also I utterly hate all those online services that require at least 6 letters in nickname...

Richard?

I think that's why an online card game I play won't let me name my tarot-themed deck "Tarot", it changes it to "*ot". Not sure what it means but I guess their censoring mechanism taught me a new slur?

Pretty sure I ran into this problem trying to use my American credit card to pay a bill from the University of Sussex in the UK. (Note the substring of "sex".) No matter how many humans we got involved, every attempt would immediately lock down our credit card beyond the usual fraud alert locks that I can personally revoke by responding to a text message, and would require a manual unlocking by bank support staff. Finally we just tried the PayPal option and it worked fine.

Searching for Kinky Kids, a Japanese boy band since 2000s, would trigger a warning about sexualization of children.

To be fair, the band is KinKi Kids, with an "I".

If you insist on searching for "kinky kids" (using quotes) you will find stuff that is closer to what the filter warns you about, still SFW though.

Incidentally, the name comes from a region in Japan. A university named after the same region changed its English name to "Kindai University" to avoid this issue:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/21/kinki-univ...

I just tried again.

Turn out it is the correct spell that triggers the warning

In other "we can absolutely totally build ai, no really guys, this shit works" news: A friend is losing some weight via diet and exercise changes. We have a messages convo wherein I congratulated him and we discuss both our exercise routines.

One of Google's autosuggested response emojis was a kiss. This has happened repeatedly over the 6 months-long conversation.

Do a screenshot, send it, and ask if the "ai suggestion of a kiss is a good case of semantic understanding of our conversation, when viewed by an AI?"

But it may very well be correctly understanding that people like to end sentences with an emoji, combined with that being the most likely emoji used in conversations like this. That becomes plausible when combined with most such conversations using little to no emojis (more professional and dry) but those that do (more emotive) tend to be between partners. Texting a partner about these topics might be more common than texting others, or at least more commonly emoji-heavy, which would be below the noise floor until also mixing in the probabilities of sentences being followed by emoji versus being followed by any particular word. These particular conversations would tend to express passionate love more than happiness, sadness, sarcasm, taking orders, or various other emotions. Suddenly a signal emerges from the noise, which is both interesting and statistically most useful.

This would all be solved if the predictive text engine knew the context beyond what was recently typed. I don't think this is typically true (yet?) -- it would be interesting if all predictions were at least binned by partner vs slang1 friend vs slang2 friend vs business acquaintance et al. with structured data coming to it from the app. Bit of a privacy question I suppose.

maybe it wants you to be more than just friends (i.e. is 'shipping' you two) :)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/medicine-hat-basketba...

Guy Carbagiale Fuck wasn't allowed to have his name on his jersey.

In the early 2000s I couldn't download Winamp 3 at school because the URL contained the string 'mp3'. I'm sure the school did not care about the distinction.

If you couldn't download MP3s, what good would Winamp be? :P

Surely he only wanted WinAmp to listen to mp3s recorded by his school band.

He wanted to whip the llamas ass.

The earnest answer is I wanted to play my ripped mp3s and recordings off the radio on my computer at home. We had slow dial-up and 4 kids fighting over it, but I had my own non-internet-connected computer and an early flash drive, and the school had fast internet.

I wonder if spelling the MP3 part of the path name with URL encoded characters might not have defeated the check yet still resolved on the server end.

E.g. instead of /mp3/ you write /%6dp3/.

Filed under Idle Questions About Past Events Next To Impossible To Answer Today (IQ APENTITAT?)

If I knew then what I know about /g?urls/ today, ...

Ha, I worked at a place that blocked ebay. Not because it was ebay, but because for some weird reason they used .dll in their extensions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

There's a lot of shitakemushrooms going on.

Dark Souls 2 turned "Knight" into "K***ht". In a medieval fantasy setting.

There have also been problems with Plymouth Hoe, Clitheroe, and Penistone.