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Comment by alokm | Hacker News Reader

These lists can be very locale insensitive. A few years back my friend was trying to get a Gmail id with his name. To his surprise he wasnt able to get any id, no matter how long and obscure suffix he tried. Then it hit me that it was because of his name Kshitij. Systems should take terms from other languages and locales as white lists in these cases.

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This is known as "The Scunthorpe problem". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

(The substring part of it, not the locale-sensitive part.)

The world filter on the PS3 chat is my favourite example of this. It was almost impossible to chat with friends during gaming session when for example "Akuma" (A Street Fighter character and a perfectly safe word in Japanese as well) gets censored into "a---a", and Several Finnish words like "pelata" (to play. "pela" is something offensive I guess?) "mutta" ('but'... apparently it considers "mutt" a bad word.) and anything containing "ass" (ssa is the inessive suffix and Finnish has vowel harmony. Fun.) and lots of others get completely mutilated.

A clbuttic problem of naive sub-word filtering.

>These lists can be very locale insensitive.

Perhaps because english is all it matters to them. Who in Europe, for example, even cares if a forum or chat has some swear words in his language?

We might be even more pissed off that we can't swear and leave the service, rather than complain about it.

Analogous to that, in Germany don't beep out any swearwords on television, which is why American celebrities appearing on TV here swear vedammt oft. For example this eminem interview

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x98y4u_eminem-interview-on-...

It's at 2:30 where he talks about it. And swears a "little".

That brightened my day considerably.

When I watch Misfits (UK show) they say some things that I never hear on American shows. It only happens on shows that are after the watershed[1] though. Before then I don't know which parts are censored.

It always amuses me a little how Americans seem to be more strict than the Europeans for media censoring.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watershed_(television)

Yes. And nobody flinched much when this happened in France, and a few decades ago at that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uxAofXJCh8

Until someone mentions Nazis, that is.

Since this has been downvoted, allow me to explain. The parent to my previous comment implies that Europeans are more tolerant of swearing than Americans, but they (or at least their governments) verge on paranoia when it comes to any mention of Hitler or the Third Reich.

No, there's nothing against mentioning Hitler or the Third Reich. As it's well known in the Web, full movies about Hitler and the Third Reich have been made even in Germany, and they weren't banned or its producers arrested.

The town of Cumming GA is subject to some interesting objections. Entering the address, one system refused with the comment "My, what colorful language you have."

Bring to mind the classic Fark example of "a bit chilly". Fark's swear filter removes spaces to hunt for disallowed words...

And the service is named fark??

Microsoft uses a tool called Policheck that maintains different wordlists for different locales

There's a blog post on it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/12/04/10100294....

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