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Scunthorpe Problem
- davidddavidson 10y agoClbuttic
- colemannugent 10y agoTom Scott did a video on this: Why Web Filters Don't Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE It's well done, like the rest of his content.
- Zuider 10y agoOn a similar note, I wonder what web filters would make of the URLs for Pen Island stationers shop or the Mole Station creche websites.
- lochii 10y agosee wikipedia article "Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_Wikipedia"
- minimaxir 10y agoTVTropes as a good list of amusing examples as well: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScunthorpeProblem http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScunthorpeProblem
- TeMPOraL 10y agoObligatory warning: probably the single most addictive website in existence. Don't go there if you have something else to do today.
- zitterbewegung 10y agoI've run into this problem myself when parsing recipes for food allergies . Doughnuts has the word nuts in it but doesn't always contain nuts as an ingredient .
- lb1lf 10y agoBack in the late nineties, I attended the Norwegian University of Technology and Science. Someone in the IT department figured it was an excellent idea to host all student accounts on the stud.ntnu.no subdomain. We got a few odd bounces.
- MattConfluence 10y agoI'm currently attending, and we're still on username@stud.ntnu.no emails. I haven't had any experience with anything bouncing in my 5 years though.
- lb1lf 10y agoPresumably it has been white-listed just about anywhere as enough confused, angry or bemused students complained via other channels. Also, I remember how we initially didn't check the auto-generated user names (part of first and last name) for obscenities or other unfortunates. One of the highlights I still remember 20+ years later is a poor sod who was pervo@stud for a few hours; luckily we spotted it before he started using the account.
- mikeash 10y agoI once built a license code scheme that occasionally generated obscenities in the middle of the code. Once we realized the problem, we had a fun few hours building a blacklist with every obscenity we could think of.
- cvwright 10y agoThis is where I always chime in with a link to the List of Dirty, Nasty, or Otherwise Obscene Words on github. https://github.com/LDNOOBW/List-of-Dirty-Naughty-Obscene-and-Otherwise-Bad-Words https://github.com/LDNOOBW/List-of-Dirty-Naughty-Obscene-and... I originally found this list during a few frantic hours after I first created a password cracking homework for my security class. Naturally I'd used the Linux dictionary in /usr/dict/words as the source of the passwords. It only occurred to me much later to check what passwords my script had randomly chosen, and by then the hashes had been distributed to the students. Whoops!
- jgrahamc 10y agoImagine being called John Graham-Cumming. Long, long ago Google didn't understand that "Cumming" was a name. Google myself, get served ads for adult web sites. And Eudora's Mood Watch feature would flag every single email I sent as offensive.
- Toenex 10y agoAt least the wife will find that one plausible.
- jgrahamc 10y agoActually, she was the one that pointed this out to me long ago. It was frustrating and eventually I emailed Google and got them to fix it.
- jwdunne 10y agoInterestingly enough, there's also a doctor of a sexual health clinic that also provides online prescriptions for Viagra called Sean Cummings. Somehow delivery of order confirmation emails have never been an issue! Edit: eeek I don't order from there, I just work with the website's host!
- Declanomous 10y agoIt's okay, we won't judge you. Similar note, my surname is Fahey, which is Irish. For a few years after 9/11 my dad would get pulled aside for screening almost every time he flew alone. It was basically guaranteed if he was flying one-way. Our guess is that we were getting lumped in with some sort system that assigned higher risk to people with Arabic sounding names. Every Arabic surname I'm aware of begins with Fa[1]. Plus, if you look at it phonetically, both Fahey and the Arabic names ending with i have an ee sound at the end. I've always wondered if that was a coincidence. A computer might not even have been involved, since it never happened flying from Chicago, where most people recognize Fahey as Irish, it only happened flying to Chicago. Of course my dad tends to talk to himself when he is thinking, so who know, maybe he just looked really shifty. [1] Wikipedia list of Arabic surnames as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Arabic-language_surnames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Arabic-language_surna...
- HarryHirsch 10y agoTry keeping up with the journals as a chemist while on holiday behind an overeager webproxy. You are told that the subdiscipline of analytical chemistry is out of bounds. But that's a feature. The voting public sees that you are trying hard and failing, that's somehow considered better than shaking your head at the intractable problem.
- madcaptenor 10y agoIn my former life as a mathematician, I worked on analytic combinatorics. Mathematicians aren't quite as aggressive about abbreviating as chemists, so I never saw the abbreviation "anal. comb." in the wild, but I always expected to.
- Zuider 10y agoPhilosophers have to contend with Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. The title was particularly striking on the old Dynix Automated Library System. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software)
- mikeash 10y agoWhen I'm bored, googling for "buttbuttination" provides nearly unlimited entertainment.
- ewrong 10y agohttp://www.penisland.net http://www.penisland.net
- grkvlt 10y agoFrom their FAQ: > Q: Can I provide my own wood? A: In most cases we can handle your wood. I'm finding it hard to decide how intentional this is...?
- InclinedPlane 10y ago100% intentional in that case.
- js2 10y agoexpertsexchange.com was (is?) the most (in)famous of these.
- ben_w 10y agoI thought it was a dead heat between Pen Island, Powergen Italia, and Therapist Finder?
- amyjess 10y agoThere was also Mole Station Nursery.
- InitialLastName 10y agoThere's a store near me called Kids Exchange with a badly kerned sign. It's difficult to parse as intended.
- monksy 10y agoDoes this happen to be in NC? (If so I know where it is)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- erbo 10y agoThat's like the British joke about which three football teams have swear words in their names: Arsenal, Scunthorpe, and MANCHESTER FUCKING UNITED. :-D
- cwmma 10y agoJust had to update a conference web page because the sponsor logos had a css class of 'sponsor' which ublock and others were blocking.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoSame here for our Hackespace a year or so ago - our sponsor logos weren't showing; we had to change the CSS class to some arbitrary meaningless phrase.
- prezjordan 10y agoThis happened at Medium [0] because they hash paragraphs to a 4-digit hexadecimal string, and ad blockers would hide things like "#ad01", "#ad02", etc. [0]: https://medium.engineering/the-unluckiest-paragraphs-751dd36d2d30 https://medium.engineering/the-unluckiest-paragraphs-751dd36...
- jfoutz 10y agoMany amusing examples in the source page, but this one really stood out. > It also blocked e-mails sent in Welsh because it did not recognize the language. With my (very) limited exposure to Welsh, i kinda get that it would give spam filters fits.
- UncleSlacky 10y agoThis is still happening on some subreddits, /r/latestagecapitalism for example.
- cperciva 10y agoNote that the problem of words being misunderstood when lacking context is not limited to computers. My father - a chemistry professor - was at a conference a few years ago about Free Radicals when he was approached by a member of the public who wanted to know if he could participate...
- InitialLastName 10y agoMaybe he thought it was a Flaming Lips show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwlC0QWxj88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwlC0QWxj88
- jpindar 10y agoNot quite as funny, but I used to work for a company that had the word microwave in its name - we made radar components and such. We once were approached by someone who wanted us to repair their microwave oven. Our building had no obvious sign and didn't look like an appliance repair shop, so I don't know how they found us.
- kyle-rb 10y agoI'm not sure if it's still the case, but it used to not be possible to trade certain Pokémon over the global trade system with their default name due to a filter like this. I believe Nosepass and Cofagrigus were two of the affected.
- jap 10y agoCame across an instance of this recently, I think on the FT's website... It took me a while to figure out what was going on with "smar * * * * ches".
- rjeli 10y agookay, I give up. Is it two words?
- SomewhatLikely 10y agoThink tech.
- pvdebbe 10y agotwat
- BillBohan 10y agoWhen I worked for a company that made label printers we had a potential customer who wanted us to print labels with human readable and barcode fields with 4 random letters and 4 random digits but did not want the letters to spell any obscene words. We asked for a list of words to ban but they declined to provide such a list. We did not get the contract.
- joss82 10y agoThis problem could be solved by defining a logical rule (most probably through a regular expression) that would only filter the bad word when present as a single word. I'm amazed how rarely this simple system is used. Instead you end up with monstrosities such as the power stars chat that mangles most words into unreadable mess of . Could be a fun game though. Guess the words! ertion Weight and m