6 ms·

I guess the Scunthorpe problem is still a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

015a 6y ago
Reminiscent to me of Call of Duty Warzone; it has loadouts which you can give custom names (that only you see!) which are protected with a profanity filter. Comically, some of the literal names of the guns are banned as being profane, like "MP5".
- tschwimmer 6y ago
  See also Dark Souls multiplayer, in which you can see many “K***hts” running around.
  - hatsunearu 6y ago
    Oh my god that's fucking hilarious.
- mikestew 6y ago
  My CoD group of friends still occasionally calls the assault rifle "analsault". Stupid, huh? Not as stupid as an earlier version of CoD (Black Ops 1, IIRC) that wouldn't let you name a load out "assault $WHATEVER", 'cuz you know, "ass". But "anal" is so much better so that was allowed. They fixed it in later versions, but I still have a "penetration" class because I'm immature that way.
- vaduz 6y ago
  Isn't it just to double-plus-ensure that no one "accidentally" uses a name that ActivisionBlizzard did not license from the appropriate gun manufacturer? I.e. It has little to do with profanity but a lot to prevent someone from making screnshot of a loadout with a gun that looks like MP5, is named by them as "MP5 whatever" and behaves like an MP5 in some type of legal action?
  - sli 6y ago
    I cannot imagine horror of the precedent it would be set if H&K successfully sued AB over copyright infringement for names that are visible only to the player who entered them. Those names are not shown publicly.
    - vaduz 6y ago
      Whilst I agree - and fervently hope we won't have to live in such a world - I thought the same about the API copyrightability and that one is not exactly going the reasonable way at the moment. H&K has an US trademark consisting of just "MP5" in relation to a ton of things (though not video games!) so they could at least try make a case out of it not being purely nominative use and tie AB in court, if they wished. It would be PR suicide, but still, not the most stupid thing they have done.
  - ufmace 6y ago
    It feels like it would be pretty bizarre if a court somewhere actually ruled in favor of a gun manufacturer for lost revenue in a trademark suit because somebody was genuinely confused between a weapon in a video game and ordering an actual physical weapon, that can only be legally ordered by licensed firearm dealers and government organizations.
  - 015a 6y ago
    Unclear. They do absolutely refer to their gun as, say, the "MP5" in-game. Though, interestingly, in Modern Warfare (2019), many guns have two names; for example, the MP5 is also called SMG Charlie (as in, NATO phonetic alphabet for C). I kind of got the impression that it was laying groundwork for a long-term goal of removing the actual names of the guns; possibly due to licensing fees, or maybe to divorce the ugly reality of killing with video game killing, I don't know.
- wheybags 6y ago
  Maybe I'm being dense here, but what possible profane meaning is there in MP5?
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    The RIAA is trying to get ahead of various up-and-coming formats that will be used to pirate their content.
  - 015a 6y ago
    You're not being dense. Its inexplicable. The only thing I can come up with is that "5" looks like "S", so maybe its banning "MPS", but even that is nearly meaningless; urbandictionary has some explicit things it stands for, though they're not well-upvoted.
- floatboth 6y ago
  Need for Speed Heat doesn't allow you to put "69" or "420" on your car. But "6 9" and "4 2 0" are fine :D Best filter ever, completely defeated by just spaces
ubermonkey 6y ago
I'm just agog that people are still doing dumb pattern matching for profanity filters. I just assumed that YEARS AGO people realized how dumb it is, but apparently: No.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  A great many places do this and automatically refuse content based on arbitrary “bad words” regardless the context. I remember being denied to post a forum post containing the phrase “tardive dyskinesia”, as it appears that it rejected anything with the string “tard” in it. I'm not sure as to whom they think to be helping with that, but it's entirely possible that their advertisement revenue will actually suffer, if the string “tard” be found on their pages.
- Majromax 6y ago
  This is Google. It's probably very smart pattern matching for profanity. The neural network may have taken millions of core-hours to learn to be as dumb (here) as a blind keyword search.
  - ttt0 6y ago
    We had to give up our privacy to create a highly sophisticated technology that doesn't even work half of the time. I love the future, it was totally worth it.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    Well, obviously. If it were a dumb profanity filter then it would be possible to fix it!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  Not super relevant or anything but I just can't help but share my favorite profanity filter story, so here you go. I worked at a place that had a profanity filter in two parts. The first part was in C, several pages of if (!strcmp(x, a)) return 0; After all that, it then invokes popen() to ssh to another machine and run a shell script there, which contains several more pages of string comparisons, this time in shell.
tyingq 6y ago
My particular favorite is this one: "In October 2020 a profanity filter banned the word bone at a paleontology conference." https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyzamj/a-profanity-filter-banned-the-word-bone-at-a-paleontology-conference https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyzamj/a-profanity-filter-ba...
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Why are we letting tech companies treat us like children? Once I confirm to them I'm an adult, I should be able to choose to see everything.
int_19h 6y ago
A long time ago, I saw a guy unable to post on a corporate blog of his own team. Turned out that his name was flagged by a filter. What made this particularly egregious is that the name in question: "Hui" - wasn't even a swear word in either his own native language - Chinese - nor in English. But it closely resembles a Russian profanity. Turned out that the filter was "multilingual", and applied rules for all languages to all posts...
- grishka 6y ago
  Why the hell would it even apply Russian filters to something that isn't written in Cyrillic? And this isn't the best English transliteration of that word either... That's really some dedication.
  - emayljames 6y ago
    Yeah, they would have to do literal translation based on phonetics. That is just insane.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > they would have to do literal translation based on phonetics. That seems pretty unlikely to have happened here; I don't know the Russian word in question, but the Chinese "hui" rhymes with English "clay". (It also rhymes with the more sensibly spelled Chinese "wei"; the 'e' is only omitted when the syllable begins with a consonant. Compare "feng shui".) I'd be surprised if that were a possible reading of any Russian that might be transliterated "hui".
      - int_19h 6y ago
        A native Russian speaker who is familiar with how Russian is usually transliterated, but unfamiliar with Chinese, would read it very similar to the Russian word in question ("khoo-y"). As to why the filter was applied to Latin characters - I'm not sure, but I'm assuming that's to prevent people from using translit to sneak in profanities. Of course, this ends up being a pointless game of whack-a-mole - there's so many possible ways to spell something like that with Unicode...
ourcat 6y ago
And the Arsenal pocketwatch.
emayljames 6y ago
The example where the AFA filtered a news article about Tyson Gay, to replace any instance of his surname to 'homosexual' is an hilarious example of why you need context.

015a 6y ago

Reminiscent to me of Call of Duty Warzone; it has loadouts which you can give custom names (that only you see!) which are protected with a profanity filter. Comically, some of the literal names of the guns are banned as being profane, like "MP5".

tschwimmer 6y ago
See also Dark Souls multiplayer, in which you can see many “K***hts” running around.
- hatsunearu 6y ago
  Oh my god that's fucking hilarious.
mikestew 6y ago
My CoD group of friends still occasionally calls the assault rifle "analsault". Stupid, huh? Not as stupid as an earlier version of CoD (Black Ops 1, IIRC) that wouldn't let you name a load out "assault $WHATEVER", 'cuz you know, "ass". But "anal" is so much better so that was allowed. They fixed it in later versions, but I still have a "penetration" class because I'm immature that way.
vaduz 6y ago
Isn't it just to double-plus-ensure that no one "accidentally" uses a name that ActivisionBlizzard did not license from the appropriate gun manufacturer? I.e. It has little to do with profanity but a lot to prevent someone from making screnshot of a loadout with a gun that looks like MP5, is named by them as "MP5 whatever" and behaves like an MP5 in some type of legal action?
- sli 6y ago
  I cannot imagine horror of the precedent it would be set if H&K successfully sued AB over copyright infringement for names that are visible only to the player who entered them. Those names are not shown publicly.
  - vaduz 6y ago
    Whilst I agree - and fervently hope we won't have to live in such a world - I thought the same about the API copyrightability and that one is not exactly going the reasonable way at the moment. H&K has an US trademark consisting of just "MP5" in relation to a ton of things (though not video games!) so they could at least try make a case out of it not being purely nominative use and tie AB in court, if they wished. It would be PR suicide, but still, not the most stupid thing they have done.
- ufmace 6y ago
  It feels like it would be pretty bizarre if a court somewhere actually ruled in favor of a gun manufacturer for lost revenue in a trademark suit because somebody was genuinely confused between a weapon in a video game and ordering an actual physical weapon, that can only be legally ordered by licensed firearm dealers and government organizations.
- 015a 6y ago
  Unclear. They do absolutely refer to their gun as, say, the "MP5" in-game. Though, interestingly, in Modern Warfare (2019), many guns have two names; for example, the MP5 is also called SMG Charlie (as in, NATO phonetic alphabet for C). I kind of got the impression that it was laying groundwork for a long-term goal of removing the actual names of the guns; possibly due to licensing fees, or maybe to divorce the ugly reality of killing with video game killing, I don't know.
wheybags 6y ago
Maybe I'm being dense here, but what possible profane meaning is there in MP5?
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  The RIAA is trying to get ahead of various up-and-coming formats that will be used to pirate their content.
- 015a 6y ago
  You're not being dense. Its inexplicable. The only thing I can come up with is that "5" looks like "S", so maybe its banning "MPS", but even that is nearly meaningless; urbandictionary has some explicit things it stands for, though they're not well-upvoted.
floatboth 6y ago
Need for Speed Heat doesn't allow you to put "69" or "420" on your car. But "6 9" and "4 2 0" are fine :D Best filter ever, completely defeated by just spaces

ubermonkey 6y ago

I'm just agog that people are still doing dumb pattern matching for profanity filters. I just assumed that YEARS AGO people realized how dumb it is, but apparently: No.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
A great many places do this and automatically refuse content based on arbitrary “bad words” regardless the context. I remember being denied to post a forum post containing the phrase “tardive dyskinesia”, as it appears that it rejected anything with the string “tard” in it. I'm not sure as to whom they think to be helping with that, but it's entirely possible that their advertisement revenue will actually suffer, if the string “tard” be found on their pages.
Majromax 6y ago
This is Google. It's probably very smart pattern matching for profanity. The neural network may have taken millions of core-hours to learn to be as dumb (here) as a blind keyword search.
- ttt0 6y ago
  We had to give up our privacy to create a highly sophisticated technology that doesn't even work half of the time. I love the future, it was totally worth it.
- smichel17 6y ago
  Well, obviously. If it were a dumb profanity filter then it would be possible to fix it!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
boring_twenties 6y ago
Not super relevant or anything but I just can't help but share my favorite profanity filter story, so here you go. I worked at a place that had a profanity filter in two parts. The first part was in C, several pages of if (!strcmp(x, a)) return 0; After all that, it then invokes popen() to ssh to another machine and run a shell script there, which contains several more pages of string comparisons, this time in shell.

tyingq 6y ago

My particular favorite is this one: "In October 2020 a profanity filter banned the word bone at a paleontology conference." https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyzamj/a-profanity-filter-banned-the-word-bone-at-a-paleontology-conference https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyzamj/a-profanity-filter-ba...

koheripbal 6y ago
Why are we letting tech companies treat us like children? Once I confirm to them I'm an adult, I should be able to choose to see everything.

int_19h 6y ago

A long time ago, I saw a guy unable to post on a corporate blog of his own team. Turned out that his name was flagged by a filter. What made this particularly egregious is that the name in question: "Hui" - wasn't even a swear word in either his own native language - Chinese - nor in English. But it closely resembles a Russian profanity. Turned out that the filter was "multilingual", and applied rules for all languages to all posts...

grishka 6y ago
Why the hell would it even apply Russian filters to something that isn't written in Cyrillic? And this isn't the best English transliteration of that word either... That's really some dedication.
- emayljames 6y ago
  Yeah, they would have to do literal translation based on phonetics. That is just insane.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > they would have to do literal translation based on phonetics. That seems pretty unlikely to have happened here; I don't know the Russian word in question, but the Chinese "hui" rhymes with English "clay". (It also rhymes with the more sensibly spelled Chinese "wei"; the 'e' is only omitted when the syllable begins with a consonant. Compare "feng shui".) I'd be surprised if that were a possible reading of any Russian that might be transliterated "hui".
    - int_19h 6y ago
      A native Russian speaker who is familiar with how Russian is usually transliterated, but unfamiliar with Chinese, would read it very similar to the Russian word in question ("khoo-y"). As to why the filter was applied to Latin characters - I'm not sure, but I'm assuming that's to prevent people from using translit to sneak in profanities. Of course, this ends up being a pointless game of whack-a-mole - there's so many possible ways to spell something like that with Unicode...

ourcat 6y ago

And the Arsenal pocketwatch.

emayljames 6y ago

The example where the AFA filtered a news article about Tyson Gay, to replace any instance of his surname to 'homosexual' is an hilarious example of why you need context.