
Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts' - rbanffy
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmp9v/life-on-the-internet-is-hard-when-your-last-name-is-butts
======
jackhack
Probably not as bad as if your last name is Null.
[https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/)

In the early 80s I worked with a guy who wanted an unlisted phone number (back
in the days of paper telephone directories). He was really miffed at the idea
that the phone company would charge him an extra $10 (or similar) per year for
this "service". ("Ten dollars to NOT do something?!? That's extortion!") He
couldn't believe this so he asked for a list of service charges which they
mailed to his home. Apparently changing your name was free. So, for several
years you could call "Kirk, James T., Capt." I guess he showed them. Bonus:
saved $10 per year. Extra bonus: frequent crank calls at all hours, for free.

Funny thing is I can't remember his real name.

~~~
maxerickson
Was it Leonard Nimoy?

~~~
qume
Wow that was downvoted. I guess these people aren't aware of Nimoys extensive
practical jokes with Shatner.

But even so, why would anyone downvote this?

~~~
driverdan
Because jokes are generally frowned upon.

~~~
davidw
Unoriginal or not funny ones; if they're unique and not some lame meme,
they'll often get upvoted

~~~
maxerickson
The mods discourage humor because it tends to metastasize into tedious
offtopic threads, which I guess is true enough.

Readers think they punish bad jokes and reward good ones, but the stupid Butts
pun is doing great while the absurdist gem about Leonard Nimoy secretly
wanting to be Kirk and living it out for a year in the white pages (and then
someone working with him forgetting his name!) was nuked from orbit.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
The humor just has to be dry enough to maintain plausible deniability. Kind of
like flirting in a corporate setting

~~~
excalibur
Or rubbing your eyes with sandpaper.

------
dx87
A similar problem happens when the name itself is only considered offensive in
certain cultures, but is completely benign in the culture of the person with
the name. I remember two gaming related incidents where people were blocked
from making accounts; one was a south american using "negro" as his username
being prevented from creating an account, even though english speakers with
the username "black" are fine; the other was a muslim with the first name
"Jihad" who couldn't create a playstation account. A muslim coworker told me
that "jihad" being synonymous with "holy war" is pretty much just a western
thing, it could also be referring to an internal struggle, so it's similar to
christians naming a child "Chastity".

~~~
JohnWilcox
I think the real problem that is totally overlooked is the whole authoritarian
nature of this paternalism of monitoring people as to their "offensiveness".
It's pure and unadulterated authoritarianism and controlling to declare
yourself as the moral arbiter of what is and isn't offensive and what should
and shouldn't be allowed. And no, it's not a matter of whether you CAN legally
do so, it's a matter of whether you SHOULD be an authoritarian dictator.

How about giving people a choice instead of playing Little Lord Fauntleroy and
controlling everyone's actions. How about just giving users the option to
block "offensive" or even just possibly "offensive" names and terms and words,
instead of going all paternalistic jerk.

It is something that has bothered me for a long while now, especially in
places like Reddit, where the whole fundamental concept of the site was
totally and utterly undermined by the authoritarian mod squad that makes the
whole community voting/self-regulation a facade when it's not being used by
the angry mob to metaphorically burn the witch that dared to say something
that wasn't their favorite thing to hear.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
There is also this idea in the US that typing somewhere fuck or shit is
unacceptable.

I am French and we have our dirty words which can be pit to good use or
misused. An adult using them judiciously may help their message going through.
It must not be overused, there is a specific balance to find.

Nobody will, however, type m....e because it means that the word should not
have been there in the first place.

Bleeping such words looks like fake puritanism to me. Either use them and face
the music or say _crotte_.

------
preinheimer
I'm pretty sure Caterina Fake[1] has talked about problems with signing up for
everything from Facebook to buying plane tickets.

These names need to be on those "things programmers believe about names that
are false" lists closer to the top[2].

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake)
[2] - [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

~~~
rectangletangle
I actually wrote a full-stack web service to handle people's names,
specifically to help avoid situations like this. My best advice: treat
people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field.
Don't assume anything without their confirmation, even if it seems obvious,
because somewhere out there someone's name will violate that assumption. My
research did conclude that nearly all names are below 500 characters, so
that's a reasonable upper bound, though I would at least double it to be safe.

[https://www.alphanym.com/demo](https://www.alphanym.com/demo)

~~~
crooked-v
[http://www.historyrundown.com/top-5-people-with-the-
longest-...](http://www.historyrundown.com/top-5-people-with-the-longest-
names/)

There's a couple of people for you with legal names well past 500 characters,
and that's just of Western European descent, where German-style compound words
are rare.

~~~
rectangletangle
Most certainly, percentile wise, they're the 99th. Nearly every case where I
encountered a name that long though, there was a shorter form. Generally
really long names are either patronymic/matronymic (listing ancestors) like
many Arabic names, or names following Hispanic conventions. Hawaiian names can
also sometimes be rather impressive.

For instance Pablo Picasso's full name is 103 characters (without whitespace):
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios
Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

~~~
pvaldes
Is a thing of the past. In Spain is currently illegal to register a baby with
more than two first names, except if she/he belongs to the royal family.

The last name's list on the other hand can be technically infinite but only
the first two (from both: father and mother) are used normally.

You can have also as many pseudonyms as you want of course, but they aren't
official names.

------
protomyth
Native Americans have the fun problem of taking a lot of grief (and some
Facebook deletions[3]) for last names like "Yellow Bird", "Good Iron",
"Walking Eagle", and "Has No Horses". In fact, I was a little disappointed
with a thread on this and some of the logic[1][2].

1)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364933)

2)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367657)

3)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9025246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9025246)

~~~
maxerickson
To me the weirdest part is how apparently important it is to some people that
the world fit into their expectations.

------
DanBC
The article mentions human moderators as a solution. Maybe, unless they're
part of a pathologically awful system like Wikipedia.

You have a username policy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy)

You have a notice board for blatant violations of policy (although it gets
used for a lot of other stuff):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_admini...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_administrator_attention)

You have a holding pen for usernames that have been reported but not yet
blocked, for further monitoring:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_admini...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_administrator_attention/Holding_pen)

Because the username policy isn't enough policy the UAA and UAA Holding pen
have their own instructions:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/User_names)

And because two different pages to report usernames to isn't enough there's
yet another for things that aren't as blatant as UAA:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/User_names)

It's actively hostile to people with names like those mentioned in the
article.

~~~
polanerAllFruit
Hmmm, I mean, on Wikipedia, does anyone want to see user names that aren’t
pseudonymous?

I think the policy is more likely to favor names that are not identifiable in
the real world.

So nonsense like “ _Snarf_Yorble_ ” is preferred to “ _Danny_DeVito_ ” even if
Danny DeVito himself is trying to help write an article about the TV show,
Taxi, by citing some good sources to fill in blanks and rectify some subtle
errors via the talk page.

Favoring handles and nicknames keeps attention focused on the content or data,
and not the authors, to retain a degree of objectivity. Merit badges are
there, not to promote credit, but credible accuracy and reliable behavior.

------
kstrauser
I worked at an ISP in the '90s, and our first paid customer was John Blank. On
several occasions, a well-meaning biller would delete his account because it
was "obvious a test".

~~~
mc32
Seems ‘Schmoe’ is a real, or at least adopted, last name. Linked in lists a
few Schmoes, including Joe and John. Must be hillarious.

~~~
crooked-v
The only safe thing to assume about the validity of family names is that
people may or may not have one, and that if they do, it is probably (but not
guaranteed to be) composed of a series of Unicode-space characters.

------
peterburkimsher
The name I was born with, Burkimsher, is always misspelled when people type
it.

I had a chance to choose my own Chinese name. I had friends with amusing
names: Yi-ting was eating, Wei-ting was waiting, and let's not mention Shi-
ting. Those are all quite normal names there! I laughed at first, but realised
that I remembered their names much better than other friends.

So I chose my name to be 台平, Tai-ping. Because I'm typing. This is now my
legal name on my ID card there!

~~~
tehlike
I would choose tri-ing or sli-ping for obvious reasons.

------
peterwwillis
As George Carlin pointed out[1], it's the context of the use of language that
determines whether it's good or bad. So machine learning just sucks at
determining context. Trying to get people to stop being offended by the
utterance of arbitrary sounds probably will never happen, but at least we can
make computers less stupid.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8)
(trigger warning: comedy)

~~~
Fezzik
This sparked a memory of sprinter Tyson Gay’s last name being automatically
edited[0] to be “less offensive”(?) by a religious org’s news website. Simply
searching for and replacing certain words is bound to fail.

[0]
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=294](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=294)

------
gambiting
It's only going to get worse - more and more systems are replaced with "AI"
which in return produces the worst case of "computer says no" \- with the
older systems, customer service could at least override the system, with the
newer ones it becomes increasingly difficult to do so. Even simpler
technologies like voice recognition are incredibly shit if you have an accent
or a surname that's not recognised by English "speaking" voice
recogniser(support lines where you have to say your surname to get connected
to someone are the worst).

~~~
MiddleEndian
On the topic of voice recognition systems, my old flip phone had a voice
recognition system where you had to first record yourself saying the name of
your contact before being able to call said contact.

Once you got past that initial step it was much much more reliable than
today's voice recognition systems on Android phones, especially for "foreign"
names.

------
sethev
Obligatory link to Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names:
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

~~~
protomyth
I wish that was a list like that could be added to because I would add:

41\. Full adjectives and adverbs can appear in names. Some folks didn't get
fancy and add prefixes and suffixes like the Europeans. You might even
encounter a family name that is a whole phrase.

~~~
philwelch
Puritan names actually followed this pattern, with names like “If-Christ-had-
not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst- been-damned”.

------
tokai
I have an ø in my name. It is especially annoying when entering payment
details and I have to input my name as it appears on my credit card. It is
surprisingly often that only ascii is accepted. I would guess the anglo-
internet is hell if you're from Asia.

~~~
ktpsns
In Germany, transliterations are widespread and officially accepted. Ö=OE,
Ä=AE, Ü=UE, ß=SS makes it fine to write Hübner as Huebner even in the passport
and other official documents. I wonder why other countries do not allow
transliterations as a legal way to deal with anglo-centric character sets?

~~~
wink
Not sure what the _official_ stance is, but people with Turkish names seem to
(often?) transliterate ü = u, ö => o, as seen for example at
[https://twitter.com/mesutozil1088](https://twitter.com/mesutozil1088) and
[https://twitter.com/ismail_kupeli](https://twitter.com/ismail_kupeli) \- not
sure about Swedes.

------
saudioger
Also: two letter surnames

You wouldn't think a lot of sites check for a minimum name length, but they
do.

~~~
userbinator
Those sites must not have a lot of exposure to Asians --- where transliterated
2-letter surnames are very common.

~~~
slyall
I use some software that requires 6 characters to be inputted before it'll
search for a name. At least that includes the comma and space.

A pain since I have a lot of people with short Asian surnames (and a "first"
name which isn't always the one they go by).

~~~
thedailymail
A 6-char limit excludes "Smith", "Brown", and "Jones". Perhaps that coding
decision should be revisited.

------
SOLAR_FIELDS
I have dealt with this specific problem before and it is a quite difficult
problem. I actually use it as an interview question often for prospective
programmers and it is a decent gauge of someone’s general problem solving
abilities. If you ask this problem of any programmer generally the people who
come up with the common “gotchas” and some suggested solutions quickly are the
kind of people that are likely to be able to quickly solve problems in a
pragmatic way generically.

The two most difficult parts of this problem are the _subset_ problem and the
_localization_ problem.

The subset problem is highlighted by Scunthorpe. When looking for bad words,
how do you whitelist the places like Scunthorpe where the subset can contain a
bad word? I.E. how can we allow Scunthorpe while also disallowing
.:)(B.adw0r3d ?

The localization problem is easily described in this thread as well. In
French, ass might mean a completely beningn word that’s completely different
from the meaning in English.

In the end the current solutions aren’t great and involve a shit ton of
heuristics with a lot of human intervention. I don’t see that changing in the
near future.

------
zbuttram
I haven't run into this problem yet, but I certainly expect to at some point.
Especially since my last name is even a bit more suggestive than simply
'butts' or 'weiner'.

------
jimbobimbo
I used to work on the project, where we had a filter like this on people's
names, to prevent abuse.

We quickly learned that showing message like "Name cannot contain profanity"
is a bad idea, because we'd show this due to names that happen to be
"questionable in some contexts". People get pissed off real quick, if you tell
them they have "profanity" in their name.

We changed it to something like "you're using a word we don't allow" (avoiding
mentioning of "profanity" altogether), PLUS, we added a way for users to
quickly contact support, if they're in this pickle.

------
mikeymz
Its entirely possible to be profane without the use of profane words. I am
surprised this didnt get a mention from Vice:

[http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-
of-t...](http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-
speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/)

TL;DR "We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct
sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of
grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."

"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old
boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:

I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.

------
x1798DE
I think it's interesting that the article mentions that they "haven't solved
the Scunthorpe problem". I always thought of the Scunthorpe problem less as
something to be solved and more as a cautionary tale about the folly of
attempting to implement censorship software.

It's like the DRM problem. It's incredibly difficult if not impossible, and
the goal itself is dubious.

~~~
tedmiston
Like validating email addresses with a regular expression. There’s an edge
case to break every assumption.

~~~
astura
They only proper way to validate an email address is to send an email to it.

------
drewg123
When I was in elementary school, the Vice Principal's name was Mr. Butts. That
was uproariously funny to my young self. Now I kind of feel bad for the guy,
being the brunt of an endless stream potty humor from "clever" pre-teens..

~~~
philwelch
If your surname is Butts and you chose a career path in elementary education,
you know what you're signing up for.

~~~
ravenstine
True although that doesn't mean they're getting what they deserve. If you want
to be an educator, or have any normal occupation, you shouldn't be forced to
change your identity.

------
irrational
I've known families with surnames like Weiner and Skanky (who had a bunch of
girls, I always felt sorry for them with a last name of Skanky). I imagine
they must have this same issue.

~~~
oasisbob
I was good friends with a daughterful Skanky family growing up - almost wonder
if it was the same one.

Much in the same way that the pronunciation of harassment over-corrected to
"hare-es-ment" for a while in the 90s (avoiding "her-ass-ment"), they led the
pronunciation of their name towards Skanchy, like Scrunchy, or Crunchy before
relenting.

------
brians
I had John Fread write in last year. His whole family had learned to be
careful picking usernames, and more careful as WAFs and such grew popular.

~~~
dmurray
I'm normally pretty good at this, but I don't get either part of this. What's
potentially offensive about a Mr or Mrs Fread? And what's WAF here?

~~~
evincarofautumn
I’m guessing fread looks like an attempt at code injection (fread() is a POSIX
C function to read from a file handle, but also present in e.g. PHP), and WAF
stands for Web Application Firewall.

------
malikolivier
I had the same issue with Facebook. I could not write by birth first name (in
a language other than English). It was considered "offensive" by the filters
in that specific language.

I ended up including some non-printable unicode characters in my first name,
and after a few tries, it worked :). At least my name is now shown properly,
even though the bits are not correct.

------
cdelsolar
The creator of the well-known board game Scrabble, which a significant portion
of my life revolves around, was named Alfred Butts.

------
spicymaki
I must admit this article brought forth my inner 5 year old. This reminds me
of James Mickens’ USENIX keynote about the hazards of security and AI. We are
deploying poorly reasoned and poorly tested technologies that are harming
individuals. When will we take a step back and think about the consequences of
the technology we are developing?

------
zaarn
It's really amazing how often I meet people today who think world filters are
in any way, shape or form effective against abuse and trolling.

And this isn't niche software either, this happens in AAA game releases, all
the time. I've encountered this in software that had been developed for
millions of dollars.

~~~
duxup
I always assumed it was just to filter usernames in an aesthetic sense...less
so about behavior.

Sadly most lists of unpleasant words are pretty aggressive.

~~~
zaarn
>Sadly most lists of unpleasant words are pretty aggressive.

Either that or they contain words that look like someone was sitting in front
of the screen and making a scrunched face trying to remember any more
offensive words.

They're also usually very US-centric and completely ignore other cultures,
languages or societies.

~~~
duxup
I think the it is more that they cross cultural boundaries. As someone looking
through a list I feel like I see a lot of odd...non US centeric words and
slang.

------
foxyv
An interesting project would be to consult with cultural anthropologists and
create a localization library for names. That way once a person selects the
appropriate country we can just consult the localization for name formatting
and cultural taboos then validate based on that.

------
yarrick
Related:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic)

------
jiveturkey
I used to know a guy whose name (really) was Michael Hunt.

~~~
dagenix
I had an actual comp sci textbook in college written by Harold Beaver.

~~~
Izkata
One of my college professors was Thor Hogan.

------
surds
Wonder if there is John Doe around facing these problems.

------
aidenn0
The name "Dick van Dyke" would often get censored by filters in online forums
in the 90s.

------
modells
A boy named Sue Drop Database Null. _Johnny Cash strums_

~~~
peterburkimsher
Or Little Bobby Tables from XKCD.

[https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

------
shawn
Relevant:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/9a0wuc/my_name_is_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/9a0wuc/my_name_is_ligma_and_this_is_my_story/)

------
TheRealDunkirk
First name Seymour?

------
dervaderv
I had a linear algebra professor named doctor buttcane.

------
some_account
Must be even harder on real life. :)

------
stormcode
As much of a chuckle as I got from this article... It's actually not hard.

~~~
stormcode
Ahhh, I'm being down voted for saying this isn't actually hard.

Maybe having the last name Butts on the internet IS hard after all.

(In case it's not clear, this is my last name)

The only trouble I have ever had was Facebook locking me out of my account in
2011 and making me send them a photo of my ID before being let back in. Took a
month.

The funny thing is I have a random Facebook account with a totally fake city
and name for a character in a game I play, and never had any trouble with
that!

Never had a registration problem on any site, though.

------
rootlocus
Vice is getting their articles from imgur now?

[https://imgur.com/gallery/MeMGmx4](https://imgur.com/gallery/MeMGmx4)

------
earenndil
> Take the case of Jennifer Null, for instance, whose name was frequently
> rejected in input fields because the program treated her last name as a form
> of code, rather than text

For all those who say javascript the language is fine: ^^

~~~
crooked-v
The value `null` and the value `"null"` are not the same thing in Javascript,
and `null == 'null'` is `false`.

~~~
cheeze
And if we set x=[0], then x==x is true and x!=x is also true...

And []+[] = "" And []+{} = [object Object] And {}+[] = 0 And {}+{} = NaN

------
samuelgoto
I'm a programmer named Sam Goto, and this is my story :)

[https://twitter.com/samuelgoto/status/1034898489447047168](https://twitter.com/samuelgoto/status/1034898489447047168)

------
MrEfficiency
I believe this is a dying problem. The next social media will be based around
a real life user.

First name, last name, photo, home address(or similar). Everything verified or
at least enough for people to feel like they are talking to real people.

Given how easily reddit is astroturfed by Aldi, Tmobile, Samsung, Tesla,
Donald Trump, and more, the next gen social media will revolve around real
people rather than usernames and corporate accounts.

~~~
nkantar
Even accepting your premise as as true (which I don't necessarily), social
media isn't the only space in which this problem appears.

The article itself mentions "members of British Parliament [being] blocked
from viewing the Sexual Offences Bill they had proposed by a government spam
filter"[0] and "the London Horniman museum’s emails [being] flagged because
systems thought they meant 'horny man'"[1].

[0]
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_politics/2723851.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_politics/2723851.stm)
[1]
[http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/533121.Name_of_museum_is_c...](http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/533121.Name_of_museum_is_confused_with_porn/)

