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Admin
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I think I need to poo again
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A while back I worked for a company with a very active forum. I was in charge of adding newly mandated "dirty words" to the forum's profanity filter. My favorite that was deemed too vile to be displayed on-screen was the phrase "chocolate cha-cha".
Really? chocolate cha-cha? Has anybody, anywhere ever actually said that?
Just goes to prove that profanity filters will never be 100% idiot-proof, because idiots are so inventive.
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poorly implemented filters are a prickly subject with me when you end up with messages like:
Please click the help button if you require assistance
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Now don't forget to get your gift, an entirely-free Irony Detector, on your way out
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Now solve this puzzle:
N*GGERS : clue - people you hate
GO **** YOURSELF *** : clue - phrases
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Congratulations on quoting a South Park episode.
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We certainly can't have any profanity on "The Daily What The Fuck," can we?
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Hmmm... tough one...
The first one's quite easy: naggers. I really hate people that nag.
The second is a bit tougher, but I'm guessing "go tuck yourself in!". Am I close?
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Damn. I only just watched the movie of the n*ggers one. I'm not really original am I? Dunno about the other one though :P
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Are we talking about the very flat country, with all the EEC and the fog?
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wtf? Bash.org is up again. And I've been wasting time at work working? Damn
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Most natives don't even know what it means.
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I used to work for WatchGuard Technology, who made the first appliance firewall (and still, to my knowledge) produces internet security systems.
My bit of the product was the application proxies -- email, web, etc. We were adding content filtering to the web proxy, and had licensed a third-party database of categorized URLs. My job, then, was to make all outgoing web access first go through this database to make sure the given URL was allowed or denied.
While I was developing the content-filtering module, I had to do a lot of testing, both for "bad" sites (eg, listed in the database) and "good" (not listed), as well as various permutations of the URLs to make sure the kiddies weren't going to be exposed to the shocking world of the wide-open Internet. (So, weirdly, porn sites were safe for my work at that moment.)
Once I got the code mostly working, I tried to access my own website... and was denied. Hmm, that's strange. I knew what was there, and knew that I didn't have any the attributes of sex/drugs/gambling/tobacco/etc. that was in the database. Given that my personal website was used an old-style tilde (~) notation, I spent a long time tracking down some weird parsing bug,
Finally, I realized the truth: looking more closely at the database, I saw that my website was being blocked: for a good variety of attributes -- in fact, more than most "bad" sites got.
Why?
At the time, I published the e-zine-list, a very early web resource of about 4000 electronic zines. Apparently the editors of the blocked-sites database had decided that some of those zines were so bad, even the description of the zines on my site didn't pass their "good" filter.
Of course, once I realized I was on the "other" side of the content-filtering chasm, I tested the system assuming my site would be blocked.
Admin
You can surely think of a better way than typing them all in... can't you?
As for matching words inside other words; "clbuttic" and "S****horpe" are wonderful cases of programmers thinking they understand how to write a regex. And failing. Take one profanity list and one dictionary. For each swear, show dumb regex matches in dictionary.
Without even thinking hard, I get 6135 matches. Like this:
It's interesting to note that "ass" alone makes over half those hits. I'll leave it up to someone else to pipe that lot through sort. And no temp files, please.Admin
Sigh. Not the trigger-happy U.S. model that goes off when it detects sarcasm, ennui, cynicism, slapstick comedy, bizzareness, satire, parody, and jadedness?
In fact, is the commonly-found one that works for all the above, and not irony?
No wonder they're free...
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Not to beat a long-dead horse, but The Daily WTF should be well versed in content filtering after its troubled period as Worse Than Failure.... My goodness, what WILL the grandmother think?
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I used to use NSFW language in comments/commit-logs, until I found out that the regulators actually read this stuff...
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F...ing was f...ed out by the f...ing f...
It never was floccinaucinihilipilificating.
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That thread cracks me up, and also illustrates why I don't like the Debian community. Fixing that "bug" would have been far easier than all the BS involved in arguing about it. WTF.
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What if the comment invites some other person to make love elsewhere? Will that be 'cleaned up'?
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What really annoys me is how my mobile phone censors my text messages for me. In what world would I use "dual", "duck", "eval", and "dubl" more frequently than "fuck"? So childish. Cue Armstrong and Miller sketch...
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My email address quite innocently has the word sperm in it. I'm quite glad that half my mail doesn't get through. Arseholes.
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The previous clbuttic story inspired this blog post: Universal Internet filter plans detailed - I'm sure someone in the British government actually thinks this is a good idea.
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I recently wrote a profanity filter for my company's web application. My class comment was:
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BTW: There should be some more obvious feedback when you try to post without filling out "Your Name"... Couldn't figure why nothing happened a couple of minutes there.... ;)
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Anyone heard Chuck Berrys version of J****y B. Goode? iTunes have a copy, I'veh eard it's a lot like Johnny B. Goode, but censored for the sake of the kids wtf
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Maybe you've never spent any time with Jamaicans... "Rass" is one of the commonest swear words they use. It is used in much the same way as "f...ing" (without the dots, of course), as in "shut your rass mouth!"
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That's not what I *ed out. I wrote the word just as one overly-aggressive profanity-filter on comments did to me.
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Personally, I am getting sick and tired of filtering. I even getting more fed up with idiots that think they can tell me I should not see. I am quite capable of deciding for myself than you very much.
Jiff www.Privacy-center.net
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That's easy. NIGGERS are people I hate.
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At an old job the computer would generate "product codes" with one of those schemes where the first letter is "D" for deoderant and "F" for fragrance and so on, the second letter meant something else that I forget, etc. One day the computer generated a code that was a vulgarity. Somebody caught it before they printed it on thousands of labels, so they added a vulgarity-checker to the code generation. And one of our people was assigned the task of making a list of all the vulgar and obscene words that he could think of. What a job! He got paid to write down obscene words! How do you put that on your resume?
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On the serious side: While of course my life will not be destroyed if I hear or read an obscene word, personally, I'd rather not subject myself to it. I won't die from stepping in dog excrement or having someone throw up on my shirt or watching a reality program, either, but these things are unpleasant and I avoid them. I've never understood why someone people get such pleasure from using words that they know offend or annoy others.
Admin
On the serious side: While of course my life will not be destroyed if I hear or read an obscene word, personally, I'd rather not subject myself to it. I won't die from stepping in dog excrement or having someone throw up on my shirt or watching a reality program, either, but these things are unpleasant and I avoid them. I've never understood why someone people get such pleasure from using words that they know offend or annoy others.
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I think of it like this: say I post here saying how dumb I think Flat Earth Society people are. If one of them reads my post, they will likely be offended, ne? Should I worry about that? Surely almost nobody would argue that I should, because their position is just so damn ridiculous. Well, I find the idea that certain words can be "bad" just by their mere nature to be equally inane, so I don't really see a reason to curb their usage just because someone might be offended.
That being said, I do avoid cussing around children, etc... IRL.
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Classic! <-- people rally against Censorship, start here!
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I hope all your mail doesn't get through Arseholes - the smell alone would be quite nasty...
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There is a serious point here. Anything that removes swearwords has to contain a list of swearwords. I was bitten by the same thing in the early 80s when I worked on a Sinclair Spectrum game called Valhalla. I naively put the list of swearwords in an array in the interpreted BASIC part of the game (this was a long time ago, remember) and a user, or in fact I think a user's mother, found it and wrote to complain. I suppose I should have used some weak encryption on the list, like XORing.
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At least it is explicit. Very readable.
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i used to play the game Runescape, and the filters on it's forum pages used to block the word "sextant"...and yes, that word was used in-game, you needed one to find buried treasures.