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Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font
- unfunco 6y agoLightwater in Surrey is still censored.
- m4r35n357 6y agoThat one took me a few seconds . . . ;)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paddybyers 6y agoI lived there for 20 years and never noticed
- Already__Taken 6y agoit handled Scunthorpe though! only with a capital mind you.
- m4r35n357 6y agoHehe, who remembers Mary Whitehouse these days?
- parenthesis 6y agoI do, and the Mary Whitehouse Experience.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- LeoNatan25 6y agoThe author links to a Wikipedia article, which lists many common “censoring” mistakes, to show they have overcome one of those, but all others I’ve tried from the article are indeed incorrectly “censored”.
- IanCal 6y agoNo they are saying they have explicitly deal with one and only one special case, which is also the name of the problem and the name of the font.
- officemonkey 6y agoFor example, the word "balls" have many uses that should not be censored, yet it is always expurgated.
- curuinor 6y agoIt doesn't seem to censor the n-word. I would think it's pretty important to censor the n-word checked, failed to censor: n-word every word in this comic (nsfw for offensive words) https://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-offenders/ https://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-offenders/
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoIt's not really a swear....
- curuinor 6y agoI mean, if you pulled it out on a discussion not about swear words or something like that in civilized society, civility would go out the window (because you would've tossed it out the window), so it seems _more_ of a swear word to me in modern times than the ordinary fuck, shit, etc
- Beldin 6y agoIf we're arguing semantics: isn't it an insult instead of a swear word? I.e., is there a common use of the word not directed at a person? Like hitting your thumb with a hammer?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ComputerGuru 6y agoFunny story. We suspended a middle schooler earlier this year because he was heard using that word in close proximity to a black teacher. When approached, he swore he had stubbed his toe and cried out n*r in agony. The disciplinarian and I were discussing it and I was adamant that we could forgive his using any other verbiage, up to and including sob or the f-word in that context, but that I could never in a million years believe that anyone would use that particular slur after stubbing a toe or getting a paper cut.
- 6y ago
- arijun 6y agoThis is very cute! But I wonder why the creator decided to special case of Scunthorpe and not more common terms like peacock
- IanCal 6y agoIt's the name of the problem, name of the font and to me one of the first cases I heard about.
- UncleSlacky 6y agoProbably because the problem is named after it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- mahathu 6y ago"In February 2004 in Scotland, Craig Cockburn reported that he was unable to use his surname (pronounced "Coburn") with Hotmail. Separately he had problems with his workplace email because his job title, software specialist, contained the substring Cialis, an erectile dysfunction medication commonly included in spam e-mails." Now that's just bad luck. It could've happened to any of us!
- IanCal 6y agoI love this. I particularly like that arsenal is censored to a___nal.
- yummybear 6y agoass, however is not
- np_tedious 6y agoCan these ligatures be applied recursively?
- StavrosK 6y agoRecursively how?
- jadia 6y agoI can try putting this font in the comment section.
- tdons 6y agoInstant clbuttic.
- yuriko 6y agoShitake mushrooms
- StavrosK 6y agoIsn't that spelled "shiitake"?
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoIt's spelled 椎茸. There may also be a collection of Latin letters that are pronounced similarly.
- StavrosK 6y ago> https://www.stavros.io/posts/fastapi-with-django/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/fastapi-with-django/ Commonly referred to as "transliteration", and the transliteration is spelled "shiitake".
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoThere are at least 3 transliteration systems for Japanese. Writing foreign languages with 26 Latin letters usually loses some nuance and shows some bias towards the pronunciation of the authors' native language.
- Delk 6y agoIt has also become a loan word in English, so there's at least a de facto convention of how it is spelled with latin characters in English text. It's not written in kanji when used in English.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoA loan word with two different spellings!
- 6y ago
- EE84M3i 6y agoIt kind of sucks that in the source code of the page though they have to use asterisks instead of the literal swears, presumably in case the browser that's viewing the page doesn't load the font for some reason.
- glangdale 6y agoMishit is censored too... I like the number of HN commenters who tried out their favorite Scunthorpe variations. As somehow who designed an implementation of \b for an NFA-based regex matcher (https://github.com/intel/hyperscan https://github.com/intel/hyperscan) I always have an appreciation for the Scunthorpe problem; we did see quite a number of scam/spam/bad-word detection regex patterns that tried to avoid it with word boundary stuff.
- some1else 6y agoAnother example of redaction using OpenType features: http://projectseen.com/ http://projectseen.com/ > "Seen" is a typeface that is concerned with privacy and the interception of our communications by the NSA. It automatically strikes through spook words.
- MauranKilom 6y agoSomewhat ironic that this site uses a self-signed certificate...
- canofbars 6y agoWhy does the inspector and copy/paste only show * under the censored areas?
- londons_explore 6y agoMaybe so search engines don't blacklist the site for being adult content?
- nixass 6y agoI'm Richard and cannot even type my own nickname
- aeneasmackenzie 6y agoYeah these efforts always fall flat. Buttbuttination is my favorite example.
- Delk 6y agoIt flabbergasts me to find out that, by 2018 [1], people who are making decisions apparently still hadn't figured out that attempting to censor things (including people's names, of all things) using substring matching doesn't work and is a bad idea. I mean... I understand that when we were experimenting with things on the internet in 1996 that might have come as a surprise because, you know, you just don't think of everything. But 25 years later? [1] some of the examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem#Other_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem#Other_examp...
- lokedhs 6y agoYes, that's a clbuttic. http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake- http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-
- userbinator 6y agoThat was 12 years ago, and sadly the Google link to searching for the word now links to countless articles about the phenomenon, instead of actual examples (I gave up after the 5th page.) Several years ago I could still find them, I remember there being an entire mailing list that was censored in that way. I did manage to find one example that was saved by the Web Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20080725103641/http://www.bluegrassworld.com/music/Is-the-song-Dueling-Banjos-considered-blue-grbutt.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080725103641/http://www.bluegra...
- userbinator 6y agoAmusingly enough, the spelling of the original word became very easy to remember after seeing that, and the phrase that I made up to keep that was "two asses in a nation".
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoRIP Shitterton
- djsjejjdi324 6y agoon the other hand “fûck” is not censored
- dkaigorodov 6y agoOne more font idea: Add words like "_rump" and "_orona" to the block-list
- atrilumen 6y agoChimba.
- Endlessly 6y agoLol, like how when it loads you see the hidden text and then it disappears. Another option might be better to process the text, swap out each letter with for example X — or even better a ID-key, then render the font you made. If you used the ID-key, you could even encrypt each key, tag them by type (spoilers, swear words, personal info, etc) - though for obvious reasons that would require server-side code.
- londons_explore 6y agoYou only see the hidden text because your browser renders it with a different font first. Its the font itself doing the censoring, not some script, which IMO removes a good chunk of the 'neatness' of this solution.
- jpxw 6y ago“Fuⅽk” works (copy and paste in)
- celticninja 6y agoseems like bitch is acceptable language
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoMany many years ago I wrote a sign up form (an app now I suppose) for a UK ISP, and we, I cannot remember who wanted the feature, write a simple blacklist of words that users should not be allowed to put in their addresses, and of course we whitelisted Scunthorpe (as well as several other rude placenames in the UK post office address file) Just weird how the same things come round and round.
- fit2rule 6y agoI cut my teeth as a junior dev in the 80's writing soundex filters for the same purpose, which was repurposed to do auto correction of street names after I got it working on swear words... always amuses me to see so much effort put into such things even still today (as I struggle with autocorrect while typing one-handed due to a broken arm...)
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoIt is, I think, based around the need to understand the context to understand if it is a swear word, part of "reasonable" conversation or unwanted trolling. And we are still a long way from AI so a long way from a generic solution - as such everyone must roll their own for their specific needs and trade offs
- smitty1e 6y ago"I think this is [flowerbed]ing awesome," said a Babylon Bee podcast aficionado. They use an excellent voice-over actor, Dave DeAndrea to bleep out the errant F-bomb.
- selimthegrim 6y agoWait, edging is edgy now? Or that's just sticking another f-word in there?
- smitty1e 6y agoLatter.
- IgorPartola 6y agoAs a way to show off the capability of ligatures, more power to them. As an effort to censor, why in the ever loving fuck nuggets would you ever actually do that? I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this was a more correct way to put it, and instead of making a huge deal out of them we instead taught them what is and what isn’t appropriate. You’d think this would result in them using those potty words all the time. Nope. I mean mostly no. Currently one of them asked one of the family members to stop using the word fuck because it makes her uncomfortable. The other one and I were playing Minecraft and I tried to explain the Nether to her as hell and she was like “wait is that a word I can say?” which led to us discussing when it’s ok and not ok to use that word. My girlfriend explained what “boss bitch” means to the kids recently in terms of dog mushing. Some amusing stories: my oldest when she was in daycare made a pact with her classmates to go into the bathroom and say curse words because the teachers wouldn’t hear them in there. They even had someone on lookout when they did this. Words used were “poop” and “doodoo”. That same kid when she was 4-5 came up to mom and asked “I really want to say a curse word”. Mom sent her to her room to say it no more than five times and come back. She did and that was that. The other kid accidentally busted out with a periodic “what is this bullshit?” when she was much younger. She does not curse currently. Words are words and censoring “bad” words is silly. You can’t censor meaning. “Fk you” is just as powerful a statement as “fuck you”. Especially if it censors words like “associating” or “Cummings” or “arsenal”. This is just fodder for the unnecessary censorship memes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- searchableguy 6y agoWhile I am not for any kind of censorship, if someone doesn't know swear words, would they be able to use them? Is swearing orthogonal to human nature? I had known few kids who didn't know what swearing was and they never did anything similar to swearing. Is there value in swearing? If not, what's the argument for letting kids learn about it? It's an interesting thought. Would limiting the vocabulary lead to people expressing less. Is there any controlled experiment on similar? Can this affect complex thoughts or they can still be conveyed?
- thepete2 6y agoThere is a video [0] about this censoring-"problem" by Youtuber Tom Scott. He talks about how it's impossible to implement with all edge-cases, easy to circumvent and thus usually not a good idea. Fittingly, the video is filmed in Peniston. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE
- dubcanada 6y agoIf you play any video game that is multiplayer online you will know it's impossible. All these large companies Riot, Blizzard, Valve, etc implement censoring tools. People just swear over voice or add random characters to swear words or swear in different languages. It really doesn't matter what they do, people will still swear.
- conradludgate 6y agoI think Riot did ok actually, at least when I used to play LoL you can disable the filter. That means those who do swear can just use their normal vocabulary and not have to invent ways around the filter, and those that haven't disabled it get a still decent censored experience.
- jedimastert 6y agoIIRC, he actually mentions "Scunthorpe" in the video.
- Mindwipe 6y agoPresumably by someone from the UK given some of the references, but "bloody crap" is okay. Curious.
- globular-toast 6y agoIt's strange because the words written on the website are actually "f* * * ", "c* * * " etc. which are "censored" just like the actual swear words.
- flurdy 6y agoI once worked for an online game aimed at children. With some limited messaging and a forum, we needed to automatically filter swearing especially when it started to reach millions of users. The initial limited English only blacklists were useless. Kids are creative and terrible. So we replaced with big processes of failover with several external swearword filtering services. Costly... But kids are creative..., they write single letter messages that circumvent any automated filtering. Or rearranged their "room" with decoration that spelt out letters, or simply drew cock and balls, etc. This font might have reduced the need for filtering. But kids are creative... Thankfully it was not instant messaging. Direct near-instant messaging came in later products... Car-crash every time. Never write a messaging app for kids. There is always a mean-time-to-dickpick or worse.
- jstanley 6y agoAs soon as you start trying to automatically filter out messages you don't want, you enter an arms race that you're not going to win. Surely a better solution is to provide the players with a way to votekick abusive users, and leave it at that?
- infogulch 6y agoHumans are basically symbolic representation generating machines. Trying to stop such a being from communicating ideas by limiting their available vocabulary in a particular language is short-sighted and massively underestimates humans in general. Maybe that's a fancy way of saying that the only thing that scales with the community is the community.
- softwarejosh 6y agohave you never played video games? sure lets votekick someone from club penguin, im sure that wouldnt encourage cyber bullying and make matters worse
- jstanley 6y agoI've played a bit of https://skribbl.io/ https://skribbl.io/ recently and the votekick mechanism works very well for getting rid of people who just want to draw dicks and write swear words.
- rasengan 6y agoWhat happens if you copy paste?
- alpaca128 6y agoFont ligatures only affect how the text is displayed in that specific font. The underlying text is always the same.
- crustysock 6y agonigger is not censored either
- crustysock 6y agon*gger is not censored either
- jonesjohnson 6y agohttp://www.sansbullshitsans.com/ http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/
- martin-adams 6y agoThis is very clever. You could explore more fun with this technique, such as putting squiggly lines under common misspelling.
- buboard 6y agoPlease put a comments section in the page !
- lavp 6y agoIt does not censor the word "nigger"
- lisper 6y agoIt's a cute idea, but it took me all of 5 seconds to find a way to do an end-run around Scunthorpe Sans's fuckcked up censorship. I've never really understood why people think that misspelling "fuck" as "f*ck" suddenly makes is socially acceptable.
- parenthesis 6y agoI'm not expressing an opinion on the practice, but in case a child who doesn't know the word reads it? I can remember as a child reading a story in a UK tabloid newspaper that quoted (Neil Kinnock, I think) with some asterisks in some of the words, and not fully understanding.
- lisper 6y agoI don't think it would take very long for a child to learn that f_ck and f___ and "the F word" are all alternative spellings of "fuck". Hm, HN elides asterisks in in-line text. Maybe they still work in code blocks? f*ck f*** Yep. <irony> Whee, what a fun game. </irony>
- sneak 6y agoIt’s just an alternate spelling. It means the same thing, and children will still learn the word if it is written this way.
- askvictor 6y agoI'm a little impressed that it still works even if you add some zero-width spaces in the middle of a swear word. People will work around whatever restrictions you put in place; this is just for fun :)
- imdsm 6y agoThe word "parse" breaks it
- OliverJones 6y agoSomebody has extra time on their hands!
- syntheticnature 6y agoI find myself wondering whether a similar technique could be used to create a font that censors the vowels in God and related words for Jewish readers, due to their taboos regarding vowels in the name of God.
- Atlas48 6y agoclbuttic mistake ahoy!
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoThis might actually be a good way to make people self -censor. When a word suddenly blacks out they will wonder what they have triggered and maybe think twice before sending it because either they know they’ve crossed a line or it’s dubious the software will accept their text as written. Just like you showing people their ip addresses has proven a significant deterrent for attempting credit card fraud, masking out the undesired language might have the same effect. the beauty of doing it in. The font is its a mechanism nobody expects, someone is going to waste a lot of time figuring out how it works. I don’t see a GitHub project, I’m wondering if the list of words can be expanded to include non-English languages.
- shelsoloa 6y agoDoesn't censor "Karen" 0/10
- abafazi 6y agoDid not censor nigger
- lihaciudaniel 6y agoToo bad the 18th century adaptation of the Spanish negro isn't censored
- ressetera 6y agoDoesn't work with zero-width-space-like characters. Copy and paste the following: fuck nigger pussy
- donatj 6y agoI had this exact idea after they squirt gunned the gun emoji. I am surprised regime’s haven’t pushed something like this to block words like Tiananmen.
- xg15 6y agoSoo... the ligature trick is relatively old news - but I was somewhat surprised by the font not censoring "Scunthorpe". (And my suspicion is that this ability was what they were actually showing off) Any idea how they did this?
- bntyhntr 6y agoNo expert in ligatures but from a naive point of view I would assume it's another ligature that takes priority
- xg15 6y agoThat would make sense. I wasn't aware, overlapping ligatures were permitted. I wonder how well-defined this is though. I.e. will the ligature for the longest substring always "win", or if this is implementation-defined?
- lerpapoo 6y agoe for effor
- DmitryOlkhovoi 6y agothis shit doesn't work for сука блять
- Lio 6y agoIt’s pretty good. I tried it out with c%^*ge and that’s a proper filthy!
- GuB-42 6y agoInterestingly, none of the ethnic and religious slurs listed in Wikipedia are censored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_slurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_slurs Which is interesting because while few people are really offended by words like "shit" and "fuck", "nigger" is often treated much more seriously. Maybe that's the idea, that font is clearly intended as a joke and a tech demo, and racial slurs are just too f⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ serious. EDIT: And none of the bad words related to sexual orientation and disability are censored either, unless they overlap with clbuttic swearwords.
- gorgoiler 6y agoThis is shamelessly off topic but what’s the best tool right now for using open type features (like ligatures) for PDF typesetting from simple ascii text? I’m using asciidoc which has thankfully recently shipped hyphenation support, but I don’t think it supports ligatures. They feel like another must have for beautiful typesetting. I’m wary of TeX because I find it so hard to get the stylised results I want for our org (a school) but should I be less afraid? TeX based tools always felt content first, which is laudable, but presentation fanciness is a requirement when one works in pitching — in this case to school children.
- Doctor_Fegg 6y agoNever mind the ligature gag... the source font, Aileron, is lovely. Like a modern version of Rail Alphabet, the Helvetica-derived British Rail corporate font. http://dotcolon.net/font/aileron http://dotcolon.net/font/aileron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Alphabet
- retpirato 6y agohttps://www.glyphrstudio.com/online/ https://www.glyphrstudio.com/online/ is a free online font editor that lets you do this. You can either create a font from scratch or load an existing one (ttf, otf, or svg). It wouldn't censor a word like "associating".
- mrlonglong 6y agoNot going to read this, it's just sily.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mathieuh 6y agoI used to work on the MOT (roadworthiness test) system for GB, we had a blacklist and “screw” was in it. One day we got some feedback saying “what group of virgins wrote this software” because a tester was trying to type in “screw in tyre” as a fault. First time I’d encountered the Scunthorpe problem in real life, had a good laugh about it.
- racl101 6y agoIt still allows blowjob, handjob, rimjob and ZJ.
- gccxsse 6y agoIt also allows nigger
- BearOso 6y agoYoshitsuna. I see this false positive on other sites all the time. It needs to exclude censored words that are part of others by checking for white space on the sides. And that won’t work with ligatures at the very beginning of text. Then you need the censorship to be voluntary, so people aren’t tempted to circumvent it.