• Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Dick McBeef
    Dick McBeef:
    I ran into a similar problem a couple of years ago. A content filter wouldn't let me use the phrase "one group" because the last 2 letters of the first word and the first 3 letters of the next word combine to spell "negro".

    I not sure which is worse. Using a stupid content filter or being the person who decided that "negro" is somehow offensive.

    So, people won't be able to switch to Spanish when being "controlled" by that filter? "Negro" simply means "black" in Spanish.

    BTW, how would people in that company talk about business in Montenegro?

  • ASS (unregistered)

    This story reminds me of my childhood playing Street Fighter 2.

    My initials are ASS, which doesn't mean anything in particular in my country, so I used them in the high score table whenever a kicked major butts at a video game. For years, I wondered why Street Fighter 2 would always change my name to 'CAP'.

  • Lars Westergren (unregistered)

    It's always fun when you get people speaking different languages together. I love the Honda Fitta example... That one is true, unlike the old Chevy Nova urban legend.

    When I was working half time as a teacher, I tried sending out a mail to a group of students essentially saying "Bra gjort!" ("well done!"). Filter sent back a warning - "potentially offensive word 'bra'!" Man, English speakers are easily offended. ;)

    Or when playing World of Warcraft (I'm off the addiction now) and chatting with fellow Swedes, lots of words suddenly was censored. It was fun trying to figure out what the offensive stuff was. The very common word "fick" for instance ("got"/"recieved"). I realised it probably be because I was playing on EU servers, and the German word "ficken" is filtered.

    My favourite example ever though was last year when Swedish housing company Locum (http://www.locum.se/) had big billboards everywhere with a lower case "L" and the "o" in their name changed to a heart. It looked like "I heart cum". A lot of Swedes know what that word means. But appearently not the people who made the ad. :D

  • (cs)

    The name of the Bash shell sounds like a certain Romanian word. Suffice to say, that piece of software can't be mentioned in a spoken conversation around here. Luckily, the written form is OK...

  • Jno (unregistered) in reply to Steve-o

    My kids went to a school run by a guy who signed his letters

    A. Dick, Head Teacher.

    Funny names are an endless source of amusement, except to those bearing the names, I guess.

    I blame the parents.

  • (cs)

    It is always locale dependent, there being much hilarity in the UK about the alternate meaning of the US name Randy. Searching for 'Randy Bender' should find an onion article with lots of explanation. I also worked with someone named Randy Winkel which was similarly hilarious.

    Lastly I knew a Polish man whose name was pronounced as Mr Wankovski, which is funny in the UK but fine in Poland. He was far too proud of being Polish to consider changing it - and quite right too.

  • George Nacht (unregistered) in reply to Rich
    Rich:
    My last name is Homolka. Fairly common in Czech republic where my great grandparents were from, though here the only famous Homolka's are a bit actor (Oscar) and a serial killer from Canada (Karla Teale, nee Homolka).

    So besides all the homo jokes when i was a kid (yes, my porn name is Dick Homo and i didn't even need to try hard) i've been kicked out a few things, including using rhomolka as my login for DSL.

    Congrats to your great grandparents for leaving this country in time. To me, this is luckily the history as well, but during the communist times, all mail (I´m talking old fashioned, paper mail here) has been censored by some stupid machine, that dumped all letters to and from abroad with certain text strings. Do not remember, honestly, which strings it were, but one of them was ,,anti" as in anticommunist, antiproletarian, antirevolutionary, you name it and also anything that resembled bomb, missile, mine etc. So, as result, all drivers of minivans had hard times, and I can not even begin the misery, when you was collector of antiquities...

  • (cs) in reply to seejay
    seejay:
    And the IT department basically refused to remove the filter on their email addresses and said "check the filters to make sure nothing important got caught". Certainly doesn't make sense when the bulk of your emails wind up getting flagged for offensive content when they're directly related to your job. :/

    Seejay

    To be fair to the IT dept, having worked in one myself (at a university), I can understand the attitude somewhat. While we never (while I worked there) had complaints about us filtering peoples names, we did pretty much block out all of Italy, which some people really need to communicate with.

    Our standard answer was live with it, get them to fix it or live without our spamfilter. Ok, we did try and find solutions, but it is next to impossible to get rid of all spam without getting rid of legit mail. We did offer the possibility of viewing the filtered out messages.

    In some cases you have to be more lenient. There are researchers doing research into sex. In fact, the cs dept does that as well...in relation to genetic algorithms. Unfortunately most IT depts learn to be intractable because if they aren't then they get walked all over.

  • PeriSoft (unregistered)

    The classic NASCAR 2003 racing sim had a fairly draconian word filter. Not only would 'Scunthorpe' turn to '@#$(!@(#!' (I once watched a British simmer desperately trying to say where he was from) but the filter would ignore punctuation or spaces, to prevent people saying "s.c.u.n.t.h.o.r.p.e" and getting away with it.

    This resulted in a lot of nice translations:

    "He'll never qualify driving like that" -> "@#$!@# never qualify driving like that"

    "He's hit the wall!" -> "@#$!@#@$% the wall!"

    Good times.

  • (cs) in reply to Tom Melly
    Tom Melly:
    valerion:
    And can someone explain the Rover 214 thing? I'm not getting that one at all, and I'm not normally totally stupid.
    You're not, but Outlook is/was - "(R)over 21(4)"

    Thank you - I blame it on my lack of caffeine at the time of reading.

  • Cliff (unregistered) in reply to Rob Gough

    You who lived there may not have noticed but the phrase "If Typhoo put the tea in Britain, who put the cunt in Scunthorp?" certainly already existed from when I was at school in the 1960's

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Hmm, slightly tangential to the original article but as we're discussing funny names ...

    A chap in Oxford, England named his daughter Robyn. His surname? Banks. Apparently he thought this was hilarious, but then you do meet some strange people in that town.

  • RandomGuy (unregistered)

    It's pretty funny how something that's a normal word in one country can be something really offensive in another. I once downloaded a freeware program called Debuggy, written by someone named Vanja Fuckar. Of course, it put "Debuggy by Vanja Fuckar" everywhere - the start menu, the shortcut, the title bar, etc. I can understand the guy being proud of his work, but I had to change the name of the menu entry to prevent long explanations to the rest of my family.

  • (cs)

    A couple of years ago I worked with a guy with a last name of McCallit and a 1st name of Whatcha. I say his name in a company database when I first got there and thought it was test data made up by some programmer instead of someone who's parents had a really weird sense of humor.

  • Loren Pechtel (unregistered)

    All this craaazy (the captcha) filtering makes no sense since we have a Dick and a Bush in the White House!

    The filter-writers should be embar***ed!

    At least our time clock no longer lists people as working in the Final Ass department. (A screen display limited to 9 characters to make things fit.)

  • igitur (unregistered)

    Funny... I've never had that problem here in South Africa ;)

  • (cs) in reply to TheJasper
    TheJasper:
    seejay:
    And the IT department basically refused to remove the filter on their email addresses and said "check the filters to make sure nothing important got caught". Certainly doesn't make sense when the bulk of your emails wind up getting flagged for offensive content when they're directly related to your job. :/

    Seejay

    To be fair to the IT dept, having worked in one myself (at a university), I can understand the attitude somewhat. While we never (while I worked there) had complaints about us filtering peoples names, we did pretty much block out all of Italy, which some people really need to communicate with.

    Our standard answer was live with it, get them to fix it or live without our spamfilter. Ok, we did try and find solutions, but it is next to impossible to get rid of all spam without getting rid of legit mail. We did offer the possibility of viewing the filtered out messages.

    In some cases you have to be more lenient. There are researchers doing research into sex. In fact, the cs dept does that as well...in relation to genetic algorithms. Unfortunately most IT depts learn to be intractable because if they aren't then they get walked all over.

    Oh believe me, I understand the concept of doing your job and trying to manage it as best as possible even with "exceptions" to rules... but from what I've seen/heard, the IT department at my old university was still on par with how it was when I went there... pretty sucky overall. They had the ability to tweak the spam filter or even disable it individually... they just flat out refused to do it for anyone and gave a canned answer that everyone got the same treatment regardless of how much it inconvenienced them.

    Nothing like finding out legal evidence essential to a case got caught in the spam filter and was missed for several days because of it. :/ I know my spam filter isn't perfect and I try to check it on a regular basis, but sometimes it's just not something you remember to look at, especially when you assume it's not going to trip. The TA that asked for my presentation didn't even think about it getting caught until I mentioned that there were definitely "naughty" words in there, including "child pornography".

    I feel for IT departments... I've heard horror stories about the lusers some have to put up with. But then when I hear about ones that barely do their job and forget that they're supposed to be maintaining systems for other people's usage, it really burns my buns.

    Seejay

  • Yaron (unregistered)

    Am I the only one noticing that the report from the filter explicitly states:

    Context: '[Message Body]'
    This should mean that, as stupid as triggering on the name Gookin may be, it triggered on it being in the message BODY, not the TO address.

    So all Chad had to do was not start the message with a "hello Mr. Gookin", or not leave a quoted "From: **** Gookin" if this was a reply, and he wouldn't have had a problem with the filter.

    No?

  • Gunde (unregistered)

    There is a similar example of this in EA's Command & Conquer 3, where a very common Swedish word is censored, "alla", which means "everyone". So when trying to suggest a free for all in swedish it comes out as "**** mot ****".

  • V. Agra Pornington (unregistered)

    I sympathize. I run into this all the time, myself.

  • Sin Tax (unregistered) in reply to Belcat
    Belcat:
    Negro is the term slavers used for black men. Do you really want to make even the slightest implication of that, when saying "black men" is just as good?

    What do you have against people of east european origin - Slavs? Just because slavs were the first to find themselves in a position where they were owned and abused by other people, doesn't give us the right to continue to use their cultural name when referring to such despicable practises, don't you agree?

    Oh, and the aforementioned "slavers", as you racist pig[1] seem to like to call them, were probably speaking spanish, "negro" meaning "black" - which you for some reason don't find as offensive, and thereafter the word was simply loaned into english. That's a very natural way for a language to evolve, and there is absolutely nothing inherently racist in that. So I must conclude that you have something against spanish, eh?

    I am amazed how people will mention someone's race in their stories even though it is totally irrelevant (ie, this black guy was waiting in line at the supermarket and... why did they mention black? it was not relevant).

    Why did they mention it was a man? That's sexist!

    CAPTCHA: dreadlocks! Hey, I am offended by that!

    -Sin Tax

    [1] Apologies to our fourlegged fellows, but I will not let anyone set limits to how I use well-known and easily recognized phrases.

  • Sin Tax (unregistered) in reply to sol
    sol:
    What is wrong in being black, asian etc.?

    Being ashamed of your own race seem rather racist.

    Unless you are of pale European descent, in which case you are actually supposed to be ashamed in some places.

    -Sin Tax

  • SiD3WiNDR (unregistered) in reply to Old Wolf
    Old Wolf:
    That needs a 'NSFW' tag ! The page links to that of Penistone, where I learned: Penistone is twinned with the Icelandic town of Grindavik.

    That reminds me of the Pen Island people at penisland.com :P

  • Frank W. Zammetti (unregistered)

    The real WTF here is this:

    'Racism and Bigotry (English) > Severity - High'

    Apparently, this system considers some forms of racism and bigotry to be worse than others. I'm glad we finally worked out the algorithm to figure that out... wonder what it'd say abotu Don Imus?

  • (cs) in reply to RandomGuy
    RandomGuy:
    I once downloaded a freeware program called Debuggy, written by someone named Vanja Fuckar.

    Which reminds me. The movie Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning features a Russian character called Fukov. Seeing how many other character names in that movie were English wordplays, I don't think it was a coincidence...

    Especially considering the scene where an enraged Emperor Pirk yells "Fukooooov!!!!!"

    I laughed my *** off.

    Felix

  • whicker (unregistered)

    Is it a true statement that filters for offensive words should assume a *****space, err I mean, a "non-alphanumeric" character before and after a suspect word?

    And another thing, why would anyone author a filter that's completely a true or false kind of thing. Where one instance of a word found within other alphanumeric characters gets automatically flagged as offensive... Seriously, do these people even test their software or actually attempt to use it in the "real world" or with real data?

    /rant

  • AdT (unregistered)

    MSN Search used to block web pages and queries containing the German word Staatsexamen (state examination).

    As for funny names: The Mitsubishi "Pajero" is called Montero in Spanish-speaking countries because Pajero means wanker.

    A German TV moderator's surname is Deppendorf ("idiot village"). Then there are non-famous people with names like "Rosa Schwein" (pink pig), "Rosa Schlüpfer" (pink slip), "Axel Schweiß" (armpit sweat) or "Adolf Führer" and the dentists Doctor Gewalt (violence) and Doctor Schmerz (pain).

  • (cs)

    What is the big deal ?

    Mr. Gookin should immediately submit a written report to his supervisor/line manager stating the incidents and the fact that due to this he is unable to perform his work and that he is awaiting directions/guidance from supervisor/line manager on how to proceed. When submitting the report he should retain a printed copy of the report with his supervisor's/line manager's dated signature on it as proof. Further, as for any directions/guidance Mr. Gookin receives on the issue he should insist that it be given to him in written form.

    Also, Mr. Gookin is discriminated against because of his last name. The machanism on how this is handled differs from state to state but Mr. Gookin should file a complaint with the responsible agency/person within his state's government. If that no possible then a citizen's petition to the state's legislature should be considered an option by Mr. Gookin.

  • Cheetin' cheetah (unregistered) in reply to Rich
    Rich:
    My last name is Homolka. Fairly common in Czech republic where my great grandparents were from, though here the only famous Homolka's are a bit actor (Oscar) and a serial killer from Canada (Karla Teale, nee Homolka).

    So besides all the homo jokes when i was a kid (yes, my porn name is Dick Homo and i didn't even need to try hard) i've been kicked out a few things, including using rhomolka as my login for DSL.

    Well, in Thailand, we have names such as Pradinamporn, Chulalongkorn

    The latter would probably be blocked by some funky kiddy web filter as some unproductive website to visit in a company.

    ====

    CAPTCHA Test (Required For Anonymous Users) Prove that you're not a robot. Type in the word you see in the image.

    cognac

    I don't mind having cognac. I do mind if a robot was preprogrammed to whisk that bottle away from me and into the bin...

  • Robbert (unregistered)

    Several years ago, the company I worked for had a policy of 8 letter email addresses. This was fine for the first and second Peter Williams in the company, but when the third guy with that name came in, if was my dubious honour to tell him that his email alias was petwilli. He was delighted. :)

  • Robin Lionheart (unregistered)

    In situations like this, we must remember our First Amendment rights:

    Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to **emble, and to pe**ion the government for a redress of grievances.

  • Hacker Supreme (unregistered)

    Actually, I think I'm gonna let Mr. Gookin know about this...

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Robin Lionheart
    Robin Lionheart:
    In situations like this, we must remember our First Amendment rights:

    Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to **emble, and to pe**ion the government for a redress of grievances.

    Mod parent up! :-)

  • (cs) in reply to MET
    MET:
    It is always locale dependent, there being much hilarity in the UK about the alternate meaning of the US name Randy. Searching for 'Randy Bender' should find an onion article with lots of explanation. I also worked with someone named Randy Winkel which was similarly hilarious.

    I actually worked with a guy named Randy Bender! I'm in Canada, so most people didn't get the joke (including me), but there were a few people who were able to explain it to us.

    For those who don't know, Randy is slang for horny, and Bender is slang for homosexual.

  • Jonathan (unregistered) in reply to Robbert
    Robbert:
    Several years ago, the company I worked for had a policy of 8 letter email addresses. This was fine for the first and second Peter Williams in the company, but when the third guy with that name came in, if was my dubious honour to tell him that his email alias was petwilli. He was delighted. :)
    Not quite up to the level of most of these responses, but I do recall one employee who got the company to modify their normal email address policy.

    The policy at the time was the fairly common First letter of first name + last name.

    The employees name was Katherine Eggers.

    She pointed out that an email of keggers@<company.com> might create a wrong impression about the company.

  • Hognoxious (unregistered) in reply to lrb
    lrb:
    Latin, Spanish and other names describing something black are right out.
    Not to mention a small Balkan country.
  • Hognoxious (unregistered) in reply to Stefanie
    Stefanie:
    My mom says they didn't call them STDs back then.
    Your mom is correct - I'm sure the girl at my school called Victoria Dawson would confirm that.
  • Hognoxious (unregistered) in reply to lrb

    [ "gook" is a derogatory slang word used to refer to asians. ]That puts a different slant on things...

  • Hognoxious (unregistered) in reply to Tom Melly
    Tom Melly:
    You're not, but Outlook is/was - "(R)over 21(4)"
    I don't see the significance of the age 21. Doesn't one become an adult at 18?
  • Icelight (unregistered)

    Ah, this reminds me of the good ol' days of Phantasy Star Online and its absolutely absurd censor. You think a game rated 'T' would allow words that it censored...but no.

    Saturday? Sorry, you might be trying to make a reference to feces hidden within a day of the week! Coke? Sorry, you're obviously talking about drugs! Pig? HEY! Stop insulting police officers!

    Hell, it would even censor some obscure, old english words that no-one would even KNOW about...and Spanish words too, of course.

  • Yaron (unregistered) in reply to Hognoxious

    In the US (And I suppose some other countries?) the legal age for drinking alcohol is 21. So you have to be "over 21" to buy alcohol. But they are actually allowed to vote at age 18. Gives you perspective on what is more important...

  • Gookin (for real) (unregistered)

    This is just an example of an idiot with too much control and an abusive big head behind a keyboard thinking he will control what everyone does.

    I worked in gov't for 12 years. We had an IT director who reduced efficiency by about 15%. First you have to log in to a workstation using complexity having caps, lower case, numbers and wild cards (like an asterisk, percent sign, etc.). Then once logged in at the main screen you have to log in every time to every application. Passwords may not be repeated on any two applications (I ran 10-15 applications at once) and all passwords have to be changed every 45 days. This guy is a total asshole. The cost to acquire the software, set it up, manage it and pay 1,000 employees to remember, write down, and recall and retype this crap over and over is tremendous. The IT director obviously abuses his wife and children and is probably an alcoholic too. There are problems with it all the time keeping people from getting work done. Requests for services, hardware and software are unfulfilled and ridiculed. Absolutely every keystroke is counted and monitored. This guy is a complete ass.

    Then in our sister jurisdiction next door (county gov't) they have nothing in place. You approach your computer and bump the mouse and you're connected. No usernames and no passwords and 100% efficiency at zero cost. They have never had a problem in 20 years of computers there.

    So we have choices. We can employ persons and processes that control and monitor our every keystroke at great cost and severe inefficiency, or we can employ logical, nice people who provide us the tools to get our job done at peak efficiency.

    If you're the person making the choices, choose well.

  • Darwin (unregistered)

    This has actually happened to me where I work, but in each case it was with a long email with a lot of cut-n-pasted text in it, and I was never able to figure out exactly what triggered it (the bounce message didn't specify).

    The most recent time, a colleague emailed me a SQL script that was giving an error. It had a number of queries UNIONed together, but they weren't quite parallel. I think one of them had accidentally gotten an additional column, or two columns had gotten transposed. I fixed it and sent an email back with the broken script, a comment on what had to be changed, and the fixed script.

    It bounced back, saying, "Your mail has been rejected due to violation of the offensive language policy".

    Actually, I just went back over it, and I find that at one point the person writing to me had quoted a requirement about the:

    dspsl_prc_per_ton_xxx_amt

    Which was actually referring to three different columns, with different substitutions for "xxx". Most probably it was these three x's that set it off. Heh.

    The email is dated 2006-04-18. Funny that I should only just figure it out now, when commenting on the Daily WTF.

  • usy4life (unregistered)

    this is the worst bullshit i ever read

  • homofag (unregistered) in reply to luke727
    luke727:
    Are there any laws about names? What is there to stop me (aside from ridicule) from changing my name to "Homofag Cuntly McNiggerton" (or "H.C. McNig" for short)? Is that the most awesome name you have ever heard or what? On the other hand, it would be somewhat awkward to hand that form to a homosexual black woman...
  • Mark (unregistered) in reply to felix

    [quote user="felix"][quote user="RandomGuy"] I laughed my *** off.

    Felix [/quote] Laugh some more with a blooper from Star Wreck http://bloopers.lcors.eu/en/Blooper-Movies/Science-Fiction/Star-Wreck-in-the-pirkinning.html

  • Dave in Pittsburgh (unregistered) in reply to Veinor

    Somebody might feel they were getting gypped.

  • Isikyus (unregistered) in reply to Gordonjcp

    You are right; statements such as "Gordonjcp is a ***** ****") are not capable of causing harm. But not all language is factual statements.

    Consider these:

    • "I do"
    • "I hereby sentence you to death by hanging"
    • "I accept the Terms and Conditions"
    • "The right of the People to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed"
    • "Good morning"
    • "Sorry"

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