Someone from a Discord I moderate alerted me that the phrase "on 1994" was triggering the censor bot.
I figured it was just a precaution against people leaking birth dates or something. So I went to try and whitelist the phrase.
I typed "on 1994" into the box, and it autocorrected it to this.
I tried three times and it insisted on changing 1994 to "igga". And I thought, fine, I guess people are using Leet Speak to say THAT word now. But in trying to narrow down the flag, people were able to say "1994" by itself no problem. So why couldn't they say "on" or "in 1994"?
So that post about the word 'bone' being censored at a paleontology conference had me looking down the 'scunthorpe problem' rabbit hole and I was on the wiki page and
Although Twitter does not publish the contents of the word filter list, users can check whether a particular term is blocked from trending by searching for it. By default, the site blocks all photo and video results from search terms it believes may contain sensitive content, meaning a media search for “porn” or “Cummings” will, unless the search filters are turned off, return zero results.
Anti-porn filters stop Dominic Cummings trending on Twitter | Politics | The Guardian
“It’s generally known as the ‘Scunthorpe problem’, but I figured it was better to film this in Penistone because, first, the joke is so much less rude, and second there’s really no reason for anyone ever to go to Scunthorpe.”
Tom Scott: “Why Web Filters Don’t Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem”
The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of online content by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.
The problem arises since computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, but interpreting words of this kind requires considerable ability to interpret a wide range of contexts, possibly across many cultures, which is an extremely difficult task. As a result, broad blocking rules may result in false positives affecting many innocent phrases.
I like to think I am smart. It's. A lie. But anyway, I had some classmates who weren't quite as smart as me. And thus I have memories of that.
Anyway, here's some tech horror stories courtesy of my time in school!
The Monitor
In my grade 9 business class I sat at a computer that had no power button on its monitor. The way to turn it on and off, as recommended by even my tech-savvy old business teacher, was to stab a pencil in the hole where the button should have been and manually hit the thingy inside that the button normally would've.
The Clean Wipe
The library at my school had a small computer lab. Like maybe 24 computers, max. I remember sitting in one row, looking over at a computer and seeing it with a single line of white text:
Someone managed to delete the operating system?????
Sure it could be IT trying to fix it but they a) wouldn't leave it blank without an installation disc for that long, and b) school has the computers all on one network so if one computer caught something ALL of them did, and the antivirus was pretty good so it had to have been new and/or bad.
The Censorship
Our school had a really bad system for censorship where basically anything you said that was bad would get you blocked from the Internet for a while and you probably had to go down to the office and ask the principal or something to unblock you and probably stand your ground I don't know I wouldn't know I never had to do it except for that 1 time I almost did.
I was trying to look something up for a science project in grade 12 chemistry class, and I don't remember what exactly it was, but I was looking up Antoine Lavoisier, so it's probably alchemy related. Let's say it was "dephlogisticated" as an example.
I had absolutely no clue how on Earth you said that, so naturally, I decided to look up "dephlogisticated pronunciation". Thing is the system didn't care if you were partway through typing a word. So when it saw that I was typing "dephlogisticated pron" it freaked out and went
"Pron"? That means porn! Porn is Banned! Get blocked, idiot!
- Or that's what it would've done if I hadn't freaked out at the sight of this sudden new tab popping up on my screen and closed it in time before it could actually block me.
I didn't know what would've happened until I looked back and realised "Oh yeah that's kind of how their blocking system works. Welp." I should just be glad that I didn't have to go down and explain to the principal how "dephlogisticated porn" is not something I would want to look up.
Anywho
That's all for this. Just remember guys, computers are finicky creatures! If you don't know what something does or what to do about a problem, don't go doing stupid things on the computer. That folder you deleted might just be the metaphorical cocunut-in-TF2 of the operating system.
Note: I actually find these incidents to be really funny in hindsight, and I don't mean to attack anyone who thought similar things. Everyone does it! Never feel bad about learning things, because without learning things, how would we know that dephlogisticated porn isn't a thing? We wouldn't.
Good luck with that thing you've gotta do everyone!
