* The Scunthorpe problem, AOL didn't let users set their hometown to Scunthorpe because of the "cunt" substring. This is a classic.
* Amazon banning sales of Guns N' Roses merch (because guns).
* People named Miranda having issues with bank transfers (because of the substring "Iran").
* Some games displaying the nickname "Nasser" as "N*er", suggesting that it is the n word.
Alexa not being able to say "pussycat" properly, which is an issue to this day.
* Parental control software that filtered on "anal" in URLs, which also affected "analysis".
* Another parental control software that removed any file with "sex" in the name. This also included "sysext". I know of a school whose entire computer room got bricked because of that bug, the IT person decided it would be a good idea to update all the computers to Windows 10 at once, without checking for software incompatibilities first.
* The British politician Dominic Cummings not being able to set up a Twitter account.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
* The Scunthorpe problem, AOL didn't let users set their hometown to Scunthorpe because of the "cunt" substring. This is a classic.
* Amazon banning sales of Guns N' Roses merch (because guns).
* People named Miranda having issues with bank transfers (because of the substring "Iran").
* Some games displaying the nickname "Nasser" as "N*er", suggesting that it is the n word.
Alexa not being able to say "pussycat" properly, which is an issue to this day.
* Parental control software that filtered on "anal" in URLs, which also affected "analysis".
* Another parental control software that removed any file with "sex" in the name. This also included "sysext". I know of a school whose entire computer room got bricked because of that bug, the IT person decided it would be a good idea to update all the computers to Windows 10 at once, without checking for software incompatibilities first.
* The British politician Dominic Cummings not being able to set up a Twitter account.