Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters? Friday is upon us so take a moment from glumly hitting refresh on your government website of choice and join us for a story of abbreviations and adult filters in today's edition of On Call. "Kate" (for that is not her name) contributed today's tale, which concerns the time, five years ago, when she was tasked with staffing a …
One of the funniest support calls I overheard was when my colleague had to explain to a local elderly councillor, at her insistence and despite his repeated warnings, exactly what some of the words in her spam email meant (yes, including "c*m")
She was perfectly fine about it, and my poor colleague managed to keep it professional, but he was visibly squirming and very red faced.
When I worked at our local authority as the person who looked after email had to deal with a number of "Elected Members" who could not spell and kept having emails rejected. "C*M was one probably the most common and a pain to deal with. Unfortunately many of these people firmly believed that they were right and we were there to do what they told us. How many of these councillors ever got to where they were was a complete mystery but having seen how the behave, it does not surprise me when we hear of local and county councils having issues.
In any such situation, we always need to remember. Councillors are nominated by their friends in the party and elected by a public who know very little of them beyond their label. Some of these, in turn will rise up the party ranks and be nominated for parliamentary elections.
So once idiocy gets in the rot can spread far and wide. And like any kind of rot, it's easier to get it in than to eliminate it.
Old birds like that are either so highly-strung the slightest vibration causes them to snap, or they've run out of fucks to give so long ago that they find it funny as all hell, and are the dirtiest birds imaginable.
Ribald joke my grandmother liked to share: You should always look to, ahem, 'service' older women, because they don't yell, they don't swell, they don't tell, and they're grateful as hell.
So she was probably, if anything, trying to stop herself from slapping the table laughing.
And I'm sure many of us have in the past looked for the answer to a question on expertsexchange.com. These days they use the slightly different URL experts-exchange.com.
(Until they started locking the answers behind registration and I imagine their traffic dropped off a cliff. Of course, I'm sure the exec that came up with the idea got a nice bonus anyway.)
Used to have a list of domain that people should really have thought about a bit longer before using them, but can't find it now. A couple of them still spring to mind though. Expertsexchange.com now have a hyphen in their domain and the original is parked. Therapist.com also now seems to be owned by a domain parking service as well, so don't know where all the therapists go now.
Mining and earthworks tend to use BCM for 'bench cubic metre' and LCM for loose cubic metre, or just 'cubes'. Not much use for quantities smaller than that - although the linear dimensions used to achieve such cubes can be very finicky if you are pursuing a seam of gold, or doing final trim on some piece of construction.
"It's probably used in construction, mining, forestry, freight or something similar"
Freight, definitely. Coincidently I just saw an unrelated TV documentary where the camera happened to linger on the doors of a standard shipping container. It had all it's vital statistics stencilled on the doors including, at the bottom of the list, the volume of the container in CUM and CUFT.
Fleabay has a fine example of just such a shipping container:
Instrumentation & flow measurement engineer here. I have never used CUM or anything like it for cubic meters. I don't need to use superscripts either, as superscript 3 is readily available as ASCII 179. On number pad, Alt 0179 gives ³, which I use in m³, m³/s, etc.
Surprised here as well. I read the entire article wondering how in heck could m3 trigger any filter whatsoever. Then I noticed the link on "well known abbreviation" and followed it.
CUM ?
Never heard of that as an abbreviation for cubic meter.
I do, however, fully understand how that could trigger a filter.
Thinking about this, about a million years ago I was involved round the edge some project or other where the engineer sometimes wrote CuM for cubic metres ( of soil to be shifted). But they were transcribing a conversation we'd had, not writing a technical document. (Something along the lines of "We informed the client that we would need to move 300CuM of earth").
I would do m^3 if I wasn’t able to use m³. It is actually only fairly recently that you could rely on computers to display Unicode correctly, and playing around with fonts to give the correct appearance can cause other problems.
I’m guessing he used the capital letters in “CUbic Metres”.
This is where punctuation becomes useful, as cu. as an abbreviation of cubic would be fine, so cu.m would be cubic metres. I have seen plenty of cu. yds, but no cuyds.
But it shows the problems with simple pattern matching filters - taking context into account would allow things like summa cum laude, end everything would be oojah-cum-spiff.
I wonder what Plum would have made of his novels not making it through spam filters.
But it shows the problems with simple pattern matching filters - taking context into account would allow things like summa cum laude, end everything would be oojah-cum-spiff.
You should see some of the weird pattern matching on Fanfiction.net's discussion forums. You can call someone "Richard", but not by his 4-lettered short name (at least they merely blank out the "offensive" bits with asterisks, and not outright reject the messages).
... the weird pattern matching on Fanfiction.net...
That must make life difficult for Dick Tracy fans.
Given the way fanfic seems to lean, judging from the few times I've been persuaded, against my better judgement, to dip my toe in the slightly-murky waters (and usually regretted it), I'm amazed that there's enough left after it's been filtered.
Reminds me of something a garden-bird-enthusiast friend told me about - he and a group of like-minded people once tried to set up an online discussion group but got fed up trying to find ways of discussing the mixed flocks of tits that regularly descended on their feeders without having their messages rejected for profanity.
Given the way fanfic seems to lean, judging from the few times I've been persuaded, against my better judgement, to dip my toe in the slightly-murky waters (and usually regretted it), I'm amazed that there's enough left after it's been filtered.
It's still possible for it to be cleaner. My own work tends towards the "Shojo-ai" end of yuri, and no "lemons".
1 cm^3 is, for all intensive porpoises, equivalent to 1 millilit(er|re). It's 1e-6 m^3. So, not the same.
The one that gets me is the medical usage mcg. Every time I see it I ask myself "wtf is a milli-centigram, again?" I think that they intend it to differentiate milligrams from micrograms. I wonder why they don't use ug like us engineers do.
When I started out, capacitors were sized in mfd and mmfd; that's uF and pF now, kids. And frequencies honored the great German inventor, Heinrich Cycles.
Get off my lawn, you kids!
Except it is MICROgrams and U is used for UNITS as in IU (international units)
mu-g is too close to mg - and a 1000x overdose or other confusion.
It is standard in healthcare. I have prescribed in all the above scales. And still occasionally do so.
Should we consider
1k5, 1.5k and 1500 ohms
Circuit diagrams with the former are much easier to be certain.
And isn't a cubic meter a measure of volume not length so technically 1000 L or 1 kL (ducks, runs and hides)
A colleague had sent a social commentary / study on a country where he worked to several of interested parties. He referred to the socialist tendances and the filter did see beyond cialis making him unable to deliver his report much to the annoyance of all involved.
one place I worked had a long running project called Common Finance Initiative. It needed its own helpdesk. But management didn't want it to be called a 'helpdesk'. They wanted something more cuddly. They went with the 'care team'. until they realised the helpdesk team would answer the phone by saying "hello, CFI Care"
I heard (perhaps apocryphal) that the US computer company Wang originally decided to launch a service package called Wang Care. They later changed it to Wang Guard, which wasn't all that much better.
A quick web search confirms that Pen Island, maker of branded business gifts, still has their original domain name online.
"zooming right by the American censors"
What censors were those, pray tell? Try as I might, I can't seem to find hide nor hair of any censors that would have had any affect on any Bond movies distributed in the US.
It may surprise and offend you lot across the pond, but over here on this side there is no Federal Government censorship board for the Entertainment Industry. Never has been, either. It would seem that Adults in the US are allowed to view what they like, with no Government applied nanny state rules to say otherwise (unless it is criminalized elsewhere, child porn for example).
Yes, the Motion Picture Production Code was self-imposed censorship, but that ended in 1968 with the MPAA rating system ... neither of which mattered, because the Bond films weren't made by Hollywood until 1983's Octopussy, at which point arguably they were no longer Bond films anyway.
Oh come on, the USA TV scene is one of the most prudist around.
Remember "funsters" dubbed in?
The biggest problems with over-censored movies on UK TV were caused by the TV station acquiring the version meant for American TV, rather than the cinema release.
Oh, and show me a US TV (free, over the air) that would broadcast a woman singing hymns whilst men waved their penises (in full view) in tune. (https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/reality-tv/a28852964/naked-attraction-contestants-penis-church-hymn/)
Even the YouTube clip had to be censored, because... America.
A country where a nipple is exposed on TV and there's more outcry then when there are school shootings.
You seem to be operating in a state of confusion, First of all, so-called "broadcast TV" isn't a part of the Entertainment Industry. Rather, it's part of the Advertising Industry (with a few exceptions, which I'll get to below), As such, they operate under the guidelines set by the advertisers, and codified by the advertisers bitch, the FCC..
Fortunately, we also have cable and satellite broadcasters. These folks are not quite as tied to advertising as broadcast TV, and as such they can pretty much broadcast what they like. And they do. There were a few shows similar to your Naked Attraction back in the late 80s or early 90s, but they faded away as interest went away. Seems nobody cared after the initial titillation. Every now and again someone comes up with a new version of pretty much the same thing, but the public collectively yawns at it.
Note that one exception to the Broadcast TV being run by the advertising industry is PBS. They are free to broadcast pretty much what they like over the air. I've see stuff essentially similar to your penis church hymn on more than one PBS station, supposedly in the name of "art", not as a game show, although again, that was years ago and the novelty seems to have worn off, so nobody bothers anymore.
YouTube doesn't censor because the Federal Government says so, rather YouTube censors because their advertisers say so. And please note that I can find a copy of that clip anyway, because it's not banned by the government, so it's hardly censored.
The nipple "outcry" was three or four namby-pamby curtain-twitching hand-wringers who do not speak for the general population, although they think they do. And unfortunately, some of them have access to a platform that allows them to voice their supposed "outrage" where more than their own family can hear it. Don't judge us all based on a handful of prudes ... unless you want us all to judge all of you by the antics of the likes of Mary Whitehouse.
Have a nice weekend, this round's on me.
There are two things wrong with this. The first is that you seem to think there's Government censorship of entertainment media in the UK. There isn't. There are regulators established by parliament but they're independent and are concerned with taste and decency as well as, for the film industry, deciding the rating.
Your second, bigger, mistake is in your definition of the word censorship. You in the US have it, whether it's imposed by advertisers, public opinion or politicians, and you have more of it than we do. Yes, you can produce just about what you like, but try getting it in front of a sizable audience.
You say you've had shows like Naked Attraction in the US. I bet they were niche and subscription only. This show is put out in prime time by a free to air public service broadcaster. It is completely mainstream. It's a dating show where almost the very first part of six people we get to see is their genitals. That's both men and women, straight and gay (to a small extent). And not just shot from a distance.
And it's funded by advertisers. The 'advertising partner' is Dominos, others buying time for an online episode I've just looked at are Western Union, Asda (a Walmart subsidiary) and Which!, our equivalent of Consumer Reports.
Try putting that out on NBC and attracting that type of advertising.
This is the UK. Our attitudes are staid compared with some other European countries and places such as Australia, but so far from yours. You remind me of the UK in the 1950s.
And that's just media censorship. There are many places in your country where standing up and saying you were atheist would be career, social and especially political suicide, so people keep quiet. Similarly on issues such as abortion and gun control. They are, in a very real way, censored, as saying the wrong thing will lead to repercussions.
No, you not in any meaningful way free of censorship.
There's a general prudishness that's taken hold of the USA in recent years. From what my younger colleagues say, most gentlemen don't shower in locker rooms unless there are private stalls. The 'towel dance' (look it up; it's actually a thing) is employed lest anyone find out that the dancer has the same equipment as everyone else in the room. The list goes on...
No, nor were Master Bates or Roger the Cabin Boy part of the crew of the Black Pig either. These were student gags from the 70s and 80's, rehashed by Victor Lewis Smith in the Guardian, for which the Graun had to pay damages to the creator.
Yea. I read about that after posting mine. I think I suffer from the Mandella Effect. I still swear I heard the names when I watched it as a child... I also remember my mothers incredulous look, which she never explained why.
Paris, because she possibly did things people want to forget. ---->
I remember once watching Naked Gun on TV in the USA.
It's the scene where Priscilla Presley in a short skirt climbs a step ladder, and Leslie Neilsen looks up. He is dubbed to say "Nice One!" Then she climbs back down the ladder - carrying a stuffed beaver.
With the dubbing it makes no sense at all!
Not just American companies. None other than the great Jack Vance, perhaps one of the finest wordsmiths then alive, wrote a book titled _Servants of the Wankh_, silent h and all. Admittedly, he wanted the book's title to be different, but the Wankh *were* a pivotal species in the book and he definitely didn't see anything wrong with their name. Many years later he renamed them to the 'Wannek' after being told what 'wank' meant in Britain.
If Vance didn't know... it's safe to say that next to nobody in the US did other than immigrants from countries speaking British English variants, at least not a few decades back.
Same in California, which I've pointed out a time or three, but saying so is a waste of breath. For some reason the British think they know more about what happens in the US than the people who actually live here ... despite the fact that most of them have never traveled as far as Hull.
Dr. Wang told a roomful of Silly Con Valley luminaries and hangers-on that he got over the locker-room derived humo(u)r of his name during his first year at Harvard, but we should feel free to snicker at it if we liked. In his opinion, it said more about the person doing the snickering than the owner of the name. He further said this applied to any name.
Yep many years ago (before I was in IT actually) I /cough/ came across Wang Care. It was related to some computer equipment on an early very high end synthesiser (Synclavier, since you ask). The staff at the distributors apprised me of it straight way, to much nudge nudging.
A quick web search confirms that Pen Island, maker of branded business gifts, still has their original domain name online.
It is very important, in a work context, to note that www.penisland.net is the domain name for Pen Island. Do not confound it with www.penisland.com.
This has been a public service announcement.
We have an office in Shanghai, they have an IT team and often have an intern join them. For some reason, they decided to not setup the interns with a full new account each time they get a new intern, and instead use the same account for all of them.
This means that anything the intern works on gets recorded in SVN as shitintern, which I thought was a bit on point - at least when you're looking at the history and saying "Who the fuck wrote this old bollocks... aah, the shit intern"
Very early on in my career, I worked for a small subsidiary of Serco called "Project Engineering" who started to find themselves doing quite a nice little sideline in network installs for other companies and wanted to spin this off into a separate business.
The manager concerned called for suggestions for a name, and we came so close to getting him to agree to "Project Engineering Network Integration Services" before he finally twigged.
When PCs were first being rolled out in the Aerospace factory I worked at, slowly replacing DEC's All-in-One offering on a Vax cluster, they had a tedious habit of locking-up/not booting/disconnecting from the network (Pathworks over Decnet - there goes all the old 386 protected(?) ram. One bright spark I workd with suggested a Fast Action Response Team to dash around the facory to sort things out. He would have got away with it too, until he suggested we leave calling cards in case the user was away at lunch -"You've been FARTed". You know who you are, Frank!
Remedy. Ah yes, I recall being asked to pull some data out of it.
The obfuscation of the schema was infuriating. It's not like it stopped anyone from writing their own queries/reports, just meant wasting a lot of time working out how to map the table/column names to something real.
Drugs probably would've helped, as it was I settled for copious amount of beer.
"Certainly not worthy of a whole On Call column. The abbreviation for my employer's name ends in SH and we are the IT department, we laugh about it in the office, never heard anyone outside the office catch it..."
There's a tanker firm here in Scotland who's domain name is wemovesh.it, domain redirects to their actual company name.
When I was working for a tyre company, we used to write the name of the truck company on the removed tyres before storing them, so that their fleet manager could inspect them and decide whether to scrap them or send them for retreading. One of our regular customers was a brewery named Whitbread, whose most popular product was Whitbread Tankard. One of my colleagues (not me, I hasten to add) always wrote their name on the tyre as Titbread Wankard, and left it in plain sight from the road. Mr. Plod used to come around occasionally to have a quick gander at the assembled stack of discarded tyres. Another of our customers was a coach firm who had several contracts to supply school busses. One day we had a coach in for four new tyres on the back axle, one of the old tyres was not only down to the canvas, but through the steel cords as well, and had two fringes of rusty wires around the shoulders of the carcase. Mr. Plod was _very_ interested in that one!
I'm sure I've told this one before, but in a previous century our company had a department which existed quite happily for a long time as "Organisation and Methods" (O&M).
A new and rather dubious Chief Exec then joined the company, and for no obvious or logical reason decided to change this department's name to "Systems and Methods".
After this rename, the members of the department delighted in answering the telephone with "S&M, how can I help you?"!
I had a friend of Breton origin who insisted that his name, beginning with Ker, was spelled K' since it was the proper way to write it down, triggering some failures at the time in all IT system it was entered into...
Thank you for he opportunity to link to one of my favourite informative web-pages:
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
Obviously, old systems had to deal with quite limiting constraints, so blaming an old system for being limited to say, ASCII, would be unfair. On the other hand, there are some brain-dead assumptions being made, even today.
NN
Names are chicken feed to what many UK web-programmers think addresses should look like, or what constitutes a "legal" phone number.
Why yes, I have done business with small manufacturers and local govt in the UK in the recent past. How did you guess?
One site I was just required to use first insisted that a legal phone number only have a certain number of digits (and naturally, the pattern was only legal for UK phone numbers despite the site being for the use of foreigners as well as Those Now Standing Alone Together). I complained about that, and it was fixed, but then the address accepted "USA" as a valid country but converted it to UK when the document was finalized.
Then there's the sites that insist I fill out the address, then tell me they have a better suggestion (usually involving the zip+4) and when I accept that the site generates an address format error.
Other sites trying to sell me stuff have address fields with regex guardians that don't believe anywhere outside the UK exist. I honestly think they'd be better off just dumping it all in a textbox feeding a CDATA parameter, and letting a human sort it out.
Then there are the idiots telling me they don't like my browser and want me to use umbongo, chrime or gooseygoosey (download here). That one usually garners a "LOST SALE" email to every email address I can find on the site on account of I have no nostalgia for 1997.
This reminds me of the story of Mr O, who had many attempts to apply to study at a British University. He filled in the form, left the first name blank, and put 'O' as his name. The form was rejected, as you had to write your full name, not just initials. But O was his full and only name. Mr O wrote a covering letter to that effect, and resubmitted the form. Another rejection, addressed to Mr Only Gonly. So he put that name on the form, and was accepted.
One on my colleagues at Bradford University was Mr Fok. I think the jokes ceased to be funny some time during fresher's week.
Shiny new change control system was implemented where I work. Part of what was required was that every single stage had to have the initials of the person who would do it, whether in the business or IT, entered in the relevant column. First one I submitted was rejected with a snotty 'generic use of IT for whoever will do a piece of work in a change control document is not allowed'.
I politely replied that if the sender cared to look at my full name at the top of the submitted form s/he would see that my initials were, in fact, IT, and that I had conformed to the data entry format specified in the documentation provided for the shiny new change control system. That change request went through.
This issue popped up again though as the change control team staff changed. I'd send the same answer, rinse and repeat. Eventually the change control manager emailed to ask did I have a middle initial and could I use that as well? Technically against the documentation, but who was I to argue. I replied saying that I was happy to do so, but as my middle name is Christopher it probably wouldn't help.
Working in local goverment was involved in developing an application to handle the ordering, despatch, invoicing etc for the sort of large bins you'll see behind many small to medium sized businesses. Application developed, tested and accepted. Then came the vitally important question, what is it to be called? We pushed for Commercial Refuse Application, CRApp. I was surprised how far that got before someone in senior management said no.
I had a fun afternoon once years ago testing out a spam filter. A mate working in another company had sent me an email from his work address about the christening of his offspring. I replied and I received a reply that my email was rejected owing to the "use of language" in it. I called him up and he said he had no idea what was going on. Eventually we narrowed it down to my saying I thought the choice of venue was "bad ass". We tried bad arse which also was rejected, as was arsed, pissed etc. I then spent what remained of that Friday afternoon with him and me sending emails finding out what words triggered their filter. I don't remember if we got round to cum but I doubt it.
I got pretty fed up one evening when talking to the support centre for a Unix variant, when mails out to them containing the output of what I was doing did not arrive.
Apparently, the mail system applied a filter on both incoming and outgoing mail of the company, a large UK bank, which took exception to fsck and blackholed the mail, and me cutting and pasting in the actual text from my screen into the mails triggered the exception.
It took a while to work out what was happening as well, because the messages back to me about inappropriate use of language were sent overnight, not immediately. The following morning, I was deluged by these messages. I phoned the help desk of the company I was working for, and had a thankless talk while they tried to explain that it was a common euphemism for a banned word, and I tried to explain it was a real command that would be used in real technical conversations, and eventually ended up scanning about 10MB from my own personal junk spam log (this is before HTML mail) to prove that it really wasn't common at all.
Didn't do any good, so I explained to the rest of the team that they had to avoid using the real command name when using mail.
I want to have an experiment sometime to see how many common words I can make into euphemisms by using them in dodgy contexts.
"I want to have an experiment sometime to see how many common words I can make into euphemisms by using them in dodgy contexts."
One would think all of them. English is wonderfully flexible that way. Anyone who doubts this should read an annotated version of Shakespeare sometime.
Kind of makes the current bickering over blacklist/whitelist and master/slave in technical documentation seem exceedingly pointless and more than a trifle puerile, no?
Pedantic mode
Stère is actually only used in forestry. At least in France. It depicts a 1mX1mX1m of *piled* heat wood. Cut and piled in normally 1m long bits.
For other forestry than heat, m3 is used because you normally measure the trunk so this is an accurate measure, without all the holes of piling them up.
What we here in West Pondia call "cordwood", a cord being a stack of firewood 4 ft high x 4 ft wide x 8 ft long, or 128 ft^3. When I lived in Maryland it was illegal to quote firewood prices in units other than "per cord" (or, presumably, per fractional cord) -- no "$xx per truckload".
I'm old enough to remember when Middlesex and Essex were blocked by spam filters. Made a mess of my fantasy cricket. Hmmm, a quick G, sees it's still an issue: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2767791/spam-filters-blocking-ontario-county-with-a-racy-name.html
It seems we have both much and little to fear from AI...
"I'm old enough to remember when Middlesex and Essex were blocked by spam filters"
I wonder how anyone living here copes with those filters:
The Manhood Peninsula is a large peninsula of land to the south of Chichester. The name is thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon maene-wudu meaning ‘common wood’ or 'common land'.
https://peninsulapartnership.org.uk/where-is-the-manhood/
>>An American colleague likes to "collect" silly British placenames.
He may or may not have Shaggs (Near Wool in Dorset) and Shitterton (next to Bere Regis also in Dorset) in his collection, or perhaps he still needs Wilsford-Cum-Lake (Near Salisbury, Wiltshire), where Sting used to live, to complete his collection?
Glad to be of service!
Geographic pedantry:
Foggy Bottom is not a suburb, it's just a 15-minute walk to the White House. It is the neighborhood where the State Department, the World Bank and IMF, and a university are located. It is on the Potomac River, not the Delaware River or Delaware Bay. (There are no suburbs of Washington on the Delaware River, as that is ~100 miles away. You may be thinking of Philadelphia.)
In the southern states, "bottom" is a common word for low-lying land, often a flood plain. In many towns it's the poor people and minorities who live in the bottoms.
In MILFord, Ohio there is Round Bottom Road. I tell my wife that it brings a smile to my face every time I see that street sign, as it reminds me of her :)
There are some amusing place names in Pennsylvania Dutch country -- Intercourse, Bird-In-Hand, and Blue Ball are located near each other.
There's Boring, Maryland.
As you take the A2 east bound from the Dartford Tunnel, you will see a sign for
CHALK
THONG
I was always amused at that one.
Near where I used to live (in Thanet) a particular sign was forever being stolen so it was eventually made into two separate markers.
It pointed to
HAM SANDWICH
It's gone now, at least the sign is.
We used to have a church camp by the lake. It was run by a Methodist Church and they called it the Methodist Camp. But the road signs refereed to lots different camps so it was abbreviated as "Meth Camp". So the signs were a popular photo op for some people.
Two local towns are named Fertile and Manly. Not too funny by themselves but the local paper couldn't resist putting up the headline when a "Manly man marries a Fertile woman".
I used to drive a delivery lorry around Dorset, and often went through the villages in the valley of the river Piddle, such as Piddle Trenthide, Piddlehinton, Puddletown, Tolpuddle, Affpuddle, and Tincleton. I also used to travel up and down the A5 when I was at Uni, and went through such delightful places as Paulerspury, Potterspury, and Potter's Bottom.
"An American colleague likes to "collect" silly British placenames. He was particularly pleased to discover Shingay cum Wendy in Cambridgeshire."
He'll love this, then
In the days before the victorians changed names to be more palatable there were plenty of such names.
Shitlington (Over, Middle and Nether) were near here. The three villages became Overton, Middlestown and Netherton and the whole parish lost its H to become Sitlington. All of which were only a few miles from Shat.
Ramsbottom in Lancashire used to be Ramsarse.
More recent bowdlerizations have including the changing of Butt Hole Road to Archer's Way (I seem to remember El Reg reported on that one)
still trips over plagiarism filters used at a college and a university i used to work at
Didnt object to Shingay-cum-Wendy, little soddbury end, titford, wortley bottom and many more
still bypassable by regex injection either prefix line with a # or double backslash
Or just save as a pdf....
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Back in the day I had an early monitoring system. Relative greybeards will remember Big Brother. Well, the site for getting extensions was deadcat.net and this fell foul of the Council Net Nanny which decided that this was a necrophilia site and not suitable for the delicate eyes of housing officers and other LG officers. I had a lot of work to persuade the powers that it was a genuine site for geeks such as me. I think Big Brother worried them as well for that matter.
A clubuttic issue, for sure.
Of the web filters I've worked with (Websense, Cisco/Ironport WSA, Umbrella, and good ol' squid with some customizations to the configuration file), Websense and squid were the only ones that I could have done that with. We didn't use the word filters, because there were other, better solutions, and TBH, we use d it more as a security appliance and a means of enforcing productivity by blocking things like failbook etc. than an actual corporate censor.)
The best system I saw was one where the first time a system/user tried to access potentially NSFW content was to inform that the user that they are welcome to proceed but that all such accesses are logged and reviewed and inappropriate access will be dealt with.
It was a sensible, pragmatic approach.
In a former life I was asked to place an IT related advert in a well known weekly computer trade newspaper. I sent an email to them with a query about placing the advert but it kept bouncing back as undeliverable with a message that the email had been rejected because it contained inappropriate content. I sent an email to their advertising team querying them about the problem but that too bounced back with the same message. As far as I could tell there wasn't anything remotely offensive or inappropriate in either email, so we placed the advert elsewhere. It must have been some sort of over vigilant email filter kicking in.
At a previous employer the in house discussion system also took it upon itself to censor.
I wrote in a message that "a particular criticism was rather hard on a company" -- only to have it changed to "a particular criticism was rather ***** a company" and a warning that my manager would be informed if I triggered the system again. Raising this with the help line also highlighted differences between English and American (they don't use that phrase much apparently). I was not alone - the help message board quickly became full of similar messages.
Two work-arounds arose - one was that 'difficult' words started gaining extra spaces in them and the other was the use of deliberately wordy circumlocutions such as when writing instructions -- e.g. "To remove the plate, press down h a r d o n the cover and turn the cylindrical metallic attachment device fitted with a helical slope anticlockwise". Descriptions of connections of male and female plugs/sockets were very entertaining.
The other option, of everybody acting like grown-ups and not sniggering or taking exaggerated offence at unintentional double-entendres was seen as too difficult.
I use the term 'double-entendre' as 'innuendo' may be mistaken for Italian pornography :-)
There's a track by Bloodhound Gang titled "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo".
More than enough innuendo in there.
The music video is also rather interesting...
Then there's the Bob & Tom rewording of The Beach Boys classic track Kokomo.
Or a certain track that is named "La la la la..." from the show Drawn Together.
I'll see myself out, and leave you to explain to IT why the filter was tripped.
You want uncomfortable situations?
I was working with a young, married, and rather attractive female engineer (I might add, she was very good at her job), who confided to me that she could never remember which was the male connector and which was the female.
Visions of difficult conversations with HR flashed through my mind, as I attempted to come up with a safe answer.
My answer is lost in the cobwebs of my memory, but apparently it was innocuous enough that she continued to work with me. She was a very bright woman, and a natural engineer. Last I heard, she had moved on to a Sales position.
When I was an apprentice to an engineering firm, we all had to undergo basic Fitting training. One of my intake was a very young and not exactly worldly wise fellow, who asked the instructor why male and female threads were so named. The instructor ("Knocker" White) put his arm around the boy's shoulders in a fatherly way and said "I think you should go and talk to Sister Amos about that".. Sister Amos was the nurse in charge of the Accident Room, and guardian of our moral health.
While ³ is technically a superscript 3, I think that OP was getting at the point that you can either type a regular 3 and then superscript it in a way supported by the application you're using, or you can type Alt-0179 which inserts a unicode ³ without additional formatting.
The keyboards I use most often have ², ³ etc. mapped as <Alt-Gr>2, <Alt-Gr>3 etc. I was about to point this out as a much simpler and easier to remember alternative to <Alt>-0179 when I realised it doesn't work on this Windows 10 machine either in "United Kingdom Extended English" layout or "Cymraeg", which is the one I use most often as it includes modifiers for accented characters which aren't present on the UKE keyboard.
Hmmm...
M.
I was trying to sell a car on a certain website for Trading Autos, unfortunately just after listing it the car decided to bork itself. Rather than spend £300+ fixing an £800 car, I altered the advert to say the car was 'stuck in limp mode'. Advert was blocked and flagged for moderation... Turns out they didn't bother to do anything about it for 10 days.
This takes me back to circa 1995 and the early days of firewalls and content scanning for inappropriate words - We had a bank that cranked the very new firewall content scanning all the way up to 11. They were initially very pleased but soon reported that a significant portion of e-mails was not getting through. I looked at the firewall logs and soon discovered that the content scanning was looking for all traces of words that could be considered offensive, so for instance the word "digital" was triggering the rules as it detected the word "git" in digital. Hence a lot of e-mails getting blocked ....
Once rules were modified to be less aggressive the issue was resolved.
Only a year ago, I was trying to write a nice review about a tradesman who had come out on a Saturday to sort out a problem. It kept getting blocked. No useful message, it just said that it was inappropriate language. I finally realised that Sa-turd-ay was causing the issue, and changed it say he'd come out at the weekend.
I worked for a place many years ago now, that had a system called the Tactical International Tracking Service.
For about two years, while this 'tactical' system was still in use, my boss desperately tried to get any new system we built to fit the acronym A.S.S. He actually managed to get it to fit a couple of times, but always had his suggestions shot down by whoever was going to 'own' the new system. Just no sense of humour with some people!
Icon, because it's Friday!
Until recently, the HK government was fond of using "cum" in it's meaning of "combined with". Who wouldn't want to use a litter cum recyclables collection bin?
However, I declined the invitation to a "Networking cum drinking party".
"All of a sudden we had e-mails intercepted by the ISP's porn filter whenever we received proposals for the erection of the structural steelwork."
I think a council got taken to court because they never replied to e-mails from somebody who wrote to them complaining about an erection on an adjacent property.
Working at a marketing company I once had a junior engineer come to me in a fluster, and asked to speak to me about a delicate matter in private.
He had been working on a directors laptop and and found hundreds of files referring to a sexual act. We had a look at the machine, I creased up. Knowing the Director quite well I gave him a call and suggested he find a new naming structure for his very harmless "analysis by sex" reports.
Sort of apropos of this.
When, many years back I was on Jury service, the case was delayed while the defendant's statement was sent electronically ( they could have printed it and and brought it along quicker, but that's another issue). The reason being, it turned out after 'is Honour rather testily asked why here was such a delay, being that the electronic system for sending the statements wouldn't transmit the swear words so they'd had to get it rewritten taking out the words that wouldn't go through.
Many moons ago I worked for a corp whose server naming conventions were based upon a historic name plus a device description; it always made me giggle whenever we needed to reference the on site mail server.
It's first part name was 'Hermes', after the Greek messenger of the gods... Apt.
It's second part name was 'Exchange', for that was the MS mail system it ran. Also apt.
Concatenating the two gave it's full name: Hermesexchange.
Sadly it was only me who ever saw the irony of a Her-me-sex-change.
Oh, happy days.
Reminds me of translation of resource files for display messages and manuals. Once had a complaint from a Finnish company about a technical support document describing an ISA 'expansion slot'. Apparently our translator did not have sufficient colloquial knowledge of the language.
It was Jimmy Carter. IIRC the translator was better-versed in classical Polish literature than in current word usage, so the President's saying that he understands "the desires of the Polish people" was heard by modern speakers as "the lusts of the Polish people".
Goes to show that we can't have archaic, and eat it too.
Many systems have blacklists of words when they send out those handy "enter this code" form entries. We had fun generating the list, only for an apoplectic director to come in and complain that the system, in a demo, had provided the code "UTWAT" for him to enter. Apparently this would end civilisation as we know it, destroy our reputation etc etc.
Rather than make the code generator really slow I just removed all the vowels. Still in production I think.
I once worked with someone who was the son of a wealthy Nigerian prince, and whose father died - in Nigeria. The Nigerian probate solicitors dealing with the will basically couldn't email him at all, his bank blocked payments to them - try persuading a bank's antifraud team you really do need to send money to someone in Nigeria in order to get your inheritance - and so on. Fortunately he saw the funny side, at what was obviously not an easy time for him.
had one hell of a time 20 years ago, they were trying to arrange some sort of joint venture/tie up with https://www.otisspunkmeyer.com/ in the US.
Icon, because I'm a child and the name still makes me laugh, although probably more to do with the apocryphal public schoolboy game involving biscuits & m^3 -->
Very useful web site (Bruce McKinny) - As HM Customs and Excise were using VB in 2000 as dll's to power their internal intranet I tried to consult the online version - got a visit from their security. Explained what had happened and red faces all around. Then one of my colleagues asked:
"So what about emails?"
"We check them too and block the bad ones"
"And what happens when you are contacted by aggregate suppliers?"
"What?"
"You know - hardcore as in concrete "
"Oh shit!"
I suspect that animal fertiliser suppliers would have been excluded as well.
There was a case ~10 years or so ago where someone made an objection to a planning application and sent in his objection via email to the relevant council email address referring to the issues he had with his neighbour's "proposed erection". The application was approved and the complainant tried to find out why no account had been taken of his concerns only to find the council said they had received no objections so the application had been approved without any discussion. Turned out his email had been silently blocked due to "erection" being considered to be a "rude word". I think the case went to court over whether the council had a right to block emails, especially as "erection" was a perfectly standard word in architecture/planning context but I seem to recall he lost as it was deemed to be the same situation as the post office misdelivering/losing a letter and that he could have takne steps to check
About 15 years ago I was supporting a software product and interacting with a customer in a large US corporation. One email I sent kept being rejected for "security and/or content reasons". After warning my customer, I sent a series of chopped down versions of the email until I established that the presence of two specific words would cause it to be rejected. The words were "model" and "replicate".
This made it hard to talk about a problem in creating replicated nodes on a diagram representing a software model.
I can remember when during the short life of ST-Ericsson we seemed to have a continual process of "tweaks" to the company structure every few months resulting in all the "business units" getting new and invariably three-letter acronyms (anyone with business cards was forever crossing out the printed unit name and writing in the new one!) and at one point the group I was in ended up being the "Wireless Multimedia Division" .... or WMD - as this was close to the time of the Iraq war inevitably many people (including some senior management) started to refer to us as the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" division ... until a memo came out to announce that as the name WMD was "causing issues" we were being redesignated as WMMD.
I remember a company where we were based in UK and US and at one time trying to check flight availabilty on Virgin Atlantic was not possible as virginatlantic.com was deemed to be a sex site by the web filter. I think it was the same filter that also deemed a local scout group's Ten Tors training website, which my son was doing, was blocked for being a gambling site.
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Military loves acronyms, US Navy even more so. The brass decided to take the first four Ohio class ballistic missile submarines and replace the ICBMs with cruise missiles. So, the Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Georgia submarines got 154 cruise missiles each. I'm told that watching a sub refit for OMFG do a deck launch is indeed awe inspiring.
Many years ago I did a Disaster Recovery exercise at a customer site in Scotland. To provide for some entertainment for the several hours worth of tape restore to sit through, the customer decided to restore the email spam/pron/profanity folders first. A manual review of the many, many attachments found there proved to be somewhat educational to say the least!
Corona did accelerate online tools for our schools.
But the states of our country try to use the itslearning platform. So all the state educational ministers decided that the abbrevation and link for this would be the 2 letter short form of the respective state and then .istlearning
Our state minister must have been asleep at the helm. Schleswig-Holstein shortens to sh .
The mirth of all students in the schools is still not lessening. sh.itslearning is quite unfortunate ...
The press had their field day.
I was trying to look up train times for a trip to a meeting at another site. The company firewall blocked the train timetable web site for some reason. So I used a VPN to get onto a customer's network and accessed the site from there with no problem.
It turns out a lot of trains had been cancelled that day and the departure times were all showing as 'XXXX'.
The PDP-11 debugger was called the "Terminal Interactive Testing System", with the obvious abbreviation. I still remember when a programmer came bursting into our room to report that Chris had been talking to our (rather well endowed) female boss and innocently said "I learnt all I know about TITS from you".
That was my first job (40 years ago), and about a third of the programmers were women. I think they hadn't had the opportunity to learn that "computers were for boys" at school.
Was the tool I was about to program in 1994 - in good old Germany. Have been told some years later the company mothership heavyweights came from the US and went speechless after they have been told about our great CUM tool.
Which was in fact a user and host admin tool for good old yp/NIS..... and ran on a SUN IPX - called "Die CUM"
Working for an oil company meant a constant battle with the spam filters which,for some unknown reason, didn't like terms like "twelve inch pipe" (especially when combined with "drill"). Most were solved, but I could never get the filter to accept the term "hole expanders" which I was assured was perfectly legal, decent, honest and truthful in the industry.
Another story involves a manager in India who managed to send a set of (mindbleach still needed) VERY hairy images to the whole organisation list, not his intended recipient!
I once had this problem when a supplier I was dealing with finished an email with "if you have any questions cum comments...": a perfectly legitimate word in this context. After repeatedly chasing the supplier via email for the information I was waiting for I called my contact only to be told that he'd been responding to each chase by resending. We both spoke to our helpdesks to track down the problem and found that my end was binning the email without telling either the sender or recipient of what it was doing. Not helpful. I can understand not telling the recipient, thus avoiding annoying someone who is being spammed, but tell the sender, and if it is spam: who cares if we spam them back?
Bouncing suspect spam email back to the sender doesn't work. Spammers routinely forge addresses. Far better to drop it on the floor, or the bouncer runs the risk of spamming an innocent.
Remember, there is absolutely nothing that guarantees the delivery of email. Any business that has a business model that requires email as part of it's foundation is fooling itself (or it's investors).
We have a product that works with medical dictionaries which are uploaded by a regulatory body in XML format. One day nothing worked, so spent some time looking through the XML downloaded and quickly found the cause. The XML was incomplete, it had the first few hundred KB complete then had something like "This content is blocked because potentially offensive words were detected. The offensive word is 'penis'" as the last bit of text in the file. Looks like IT's shiny new web filter was a bit too overzealous. Still, I enjoyed writing the "pretty much everything we do is to do with the body, it's particularly important that we have the definitions for vital reproductive organs intact" support ticket for the poor bod responsible for fixing the issue.
For the last few years we've used G-Suite which allows the use of organisational word filters for email. Some genius in senior management decided that this would be a good idea and paid for a 3rd party supplied 'block list' to ensure bad words wouldn't be allowed. Brilliant. I work supporting social services case management systems in local government. Blocking an email that contains the phrase 'he said he wanted me to suck his <male chicken> in an attachment to an email titled 'Urgent, required for court proceedings tomorrow morning' regarding a potential child sexual exploitation situation is really not a good idea.
My better half fell foul of over-zealous new filter blocking all messages to the exam syndicate referencing one of the books on that year's syllabus. Can't remember which now. But it did cause a bit of a stooshie in their manglement when they had a team of irate external examiners who believed all their emails had been ignored.
I remember screwing up an online forum by embedding terminating HTML codes halfway in censored words and expressions ("first post" was always replaced by "boobies"). As the censored word or expression was replaced, the embedded HTML code was removed, so the start had no corresponding terminator. The results were sometimes spectacular.
My OH is a big fan of camping and caravanning but at our age prefers to book sites where children aren’t allowed. It’s quite normal; these sites tend to use the phrase Adults Only to identify themselves as child-free. She's a teacher, it took a couple of visits to the school IT gurus to explain why her evening web searches kept triggering their alerts.
no reasonable expectation to use employers IT access for personal use - potentially actionable and lucky not to be sacked yet, especially after hours as you imply.
You do have your own internet access...
If I was council IT/HR it would be written warning and access restricted to defined working hours and monitored (as usual) - breaking the whole IT structure to allow "adults only" searches could be actionable and very expensive for the school/authority if my little johnny/janet saw something they REALLY shouldn't as a consequence.
Anon as I await the haters
Thanks to the US aversion to having anything to do with S E X, an email that I sent while working in the USA fell foul of their filters because of the address I'd quoted in the email had the words Cuckfield, Sussex mistyped as "Cuckfield, Sus sex".
Bloody puritans. I was hauled up by my boss on my return and given a warning. That lasted all of one minute until I showed him a printout of the offending email.
Even today, US TV bleeps the word 'ass'.
"the US aversion to having anything to do with S E X"
I guess I'm not here, then, amd neither is my daughter. (We won't discuss you lot's "Indecent Displays Act" of 1981, because that would just be cruel.)
"US TV bleeps the word 'ass'."
No, it does not. Certain idiots might choose to bleep it in certain places for reasons which escape me, but there is no US-wide blanket bleepage of the word ass on TV.
Stop it with the lies already, you're just making yourself look silly. Or you would, if you weren't a cowardly nameless, faceless blob of grey goo. Shirley if your own censorship laws are so benign you can post under your El Reg handle instead of hiding behind "AC".
When I was courting a young American girl (I was 15 at the time) the discussion turned to sex, and whether or not we should indulge. She said that her big siter allowed her BF to "Ride her Ass". As an Englishman in the US, I was highly amused to imagine the Big Sis sitting astride a donkey while her BF mounted it from behind. I shared this mental picture with my GF, and it took quite a lot of explaining that to us, an ass was a donkey and not an arse. (We didn't, by the way).
Many years ago when the office I worked in transformed from remote keying in of all the paper stuff from the office, to actual mainframe terminals on user desks, the project was called Front End Keying, or FEK for short. It made all the subsequent meeting much less tiresome!
("Have you been FEKd yet", etc).
For 6 months work became pretty much a Carry On film.
I needed to purchase a "low boy" long haul trailer. After considerable review of quotes I selected an Eager Beaver product.
Went to show the purchasing lady the trailer I picked out, and we discovered there are fundamental differences between going straight to eagerbeavertrailers.com and doing a google search for Eager Beaver...
Send to you from a town fairly close to Bumpass, Virginia.
Have two like this!
The first features a lovely young lady from another country, now English wasn't her first langauge but she usually managed pretty well with most words. One day she takes a call into the support line where there were some S.M.A.R.T. error messages appearing on a client's computer, so she dutifully logs the call and passed it down to the relevant team to handle.
Within minutes the Hardware Manager is on the phone to her and asks her to open the ticket and re-read what she'd put
"Client has a hard d*ck failure" she'd typed in error
As she does so, the Hardware manager quips "well love you'd be better off handling that one than me" (he was a dirty old bastard too!)
-----------------
The second one is tamer, having to talk a developer out of their chosen abbreviation for Cumulative Totals was well, a rather more lengthy discussion than I'd anticipated. He swore up and down that no one would read it that way and my arguement was that as part of the customer facing team, who had to train the user on the feature there was no way I was reading out Cum budget and Cum totals on an open call!
Eventually they relented!
A national retailer here in West Pondia had an initiative called "Door To Floor", apparently aimed at improving efficiency by moving received goods directly from the receiving dock to the sales floor, bypassing the stockroom. They must have been doing some training at one store where I was dispatched to fix something IT-related. Hanging in the stockroom was a humongous banner that read "DTF University". After picking my chin up off the floor, I asked the manager if she was aware that the kids use "DTF" in txt-speak to mean "down to f*ck". She told me that she had not been aware of that usage, and thanked me.
The banner was gone at my next visit.
About 10 years ago, we were using a third-party (European) mail filter service ... a friend in Guatemala tried to send me a one line email, something like:
stan, see this statue of liberty replica in Colmar, France: <some url>
...and it got rejected.
We traced it down and found that the mail filter service rejected it because of the word 'replica' ... they'd been seeing tens of thousands of spam emails trying to sell "replica rolex" and other "replica" watches ... and they went way, way overboard.
We dropped them and started managing our own mail after that!
I find most censorship rather childish. This entire long thread of comments proving censorship as such. Most of us are not in school anymore. Many for several decades. I'm long past gray, mine beard's white.
Censoring medical terms? Court records? Engineering common terms? Common words in every day use? But then again common sense is in short supply in many places. Authoritarians in manglement positions keep making sure of that.
Odd, I thought Cu. M. was a reasonable abbreviation. But M^3 works.
Reminds me of the swimming pool construction project at my college. The idiot architect didn't know the difference between a yard and a metre, so he made us a 25-yard pool. Then he wondered why we couldn't get it certified for swim meets. When the problem was discovered, he famously said "yard, metre, what's the difference?"
The head of the construction crew said "3.3701 inches each".
When we later discovered that electrical conduit after electrical conduit did not match up to one another, requiring dogleg bends, we weren't all that surprised. The idiot couldn't frakking MEASURE.
Some years ago I worked in support for a company which sold digital services to the radio industry. We had a product that allowed radio stations to manage their DLS text, the scrolling updates that appear on digital radios. To avoid abuse, given it allowed the presenters to put up their own messages, it had a profanity filter, the configuration of which had to be tweaked when the system mysteriously declined to acknowledge the playing of Saltwater by Chicane.
And just as a postscript to all of this. I am, as I type this, in the middle of trying to forward the government's green voucher confirmation to an approved contractor so they can start the work. But this government email is being bounced by the contractor's Spam filter.
It is literally nothing more than a genuine and expected email from a government department being sent to a company who's job it is to receive and act on said email..
<bounce>
The major US-based systems and services supplier I worked for 20 years ago had for a while a filter that correctly blocked emails containing profanities and strong language. The fun part was that it helpfully appended to the bounced email a list of words that could have caused the block, hence the sender was helpfully presented with that same list of the worst (best? hardest? strongest... yh) words that weren't allowed. Yes - c**t was in there, in full.
S'funny that, I worked for an IT company that provided IT support to a major national brand of gas supplier (no more clues). I used to pull the early shift (I preferred it) but I was NOT on the Desk that provided that support as I was a techie at a different level. However, a young lady off that desk came to me in a panic because she had been wrestling with an email problem being experienced, exactly as reported.
With no one else (yet) in the office, I asked to see the offending email/headers despite the fact that I was operating systems and hardware (Groupware - who provided email systems support - were not in yet).
Yes, the offending (and offensive, to some) abbreviation for cubic metres was peppered throughout the email.
This story is either my dealing with this matter, or another IT help desk experienced the exact same incident independently. In IT, I suppose anything is possible, so I guess it is just a case of someone else experiencing the same thing and not someone changing gender and assuming the story...
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