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from the or-Douglass-or-Medick-or-Aycock-or... dept.
[A writer for SB Nation, Natalie] Weiner's Twitter thread is a who's who of people with birth names that throw algorithmic obscenity filters through a loop, but the problem is hardly new. These sorts of false positives have been an issue for spam filters pretty much since the beginning of the internet and were so widespread that computer scientists have even christened the issue. They call it the "Scunthrope problem."
[...] According to coverage in RISKS Digest, rather than fixing the problem, AOL "announced that the town will henceforth be known as Sconthorpe" in its systems. As Rob Kling, then a member of the Association of Computing Machinery's committee on computers and public policy, noted in the RISKS forum, "I can imagine there might even be some people with the last name of Scunthorpe. The willingness of AOL to excise identities in the name of 'decency' raises big issues of genuine decency in my view."
In retrospect, Kling's critique was remarkably prescient.
Here is the twitter thread.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday August 31 2018, @01:20AM (6 children)
Have you tried filling a form when your last name is "Rakotoarison Ratzimbazaf" (friend from school), includes an accented character, a dash "-" ?
Now, add the fun of having to disable the autocorrect on your phone ...
The people allergic to curse words are only one part of the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:04AM (3 children)
Yikes! I'm guessing they would use a keyboard shortcut (something like "!me") rather than write that scrabble goldmine every time.
(Score: 3, Touché) by hendrikboom on Friday August 31 2018, @02:21PM (2 children)
Not a Scrabble gold mine at all. It's a proper noun.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @05:03PM
Did you look at that name? There's nothing proper about it.
(Score: 2) by Urlax on Tuesday September 04 2018, @10:58AM
Well, android adds all contacts to your autocorrect dictionary, so I don't see a problen there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:36AM
Not necessarily programmers. I once had a requirement that names/surnames must be only whatever the client specified as allowed (local alphabet letters and that's it). Of course it didn't contain dashes, or whatever else you might find in there because they clearly knew better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Friday August 31 2018, @11:04AM
My given name have an acute accent in it. It has gotten to the point where I routinely lie when I have to give my name due to it not translating well across systems (utf8 everywhere has improved the situation, but still it pops up now and then - luckily I rarely use my given name).
I'm luckily enough amused by it, and also by the fact that people rarely bother to read the name properly (my name is an uncommon form of a name that has two more common forms - so I often end up being called or adressed as a completly different name by people that insist on that calling someone by their given name builds a sense of familiarity).
The problem is also found when you use a most-latin alphabet. For instance a french program I use at work has no issues whatsoever with "ö" (ouml) or "å" (aring) but it chokes badly on "ä" (auml) - which cracks me up since that programs' biggest market is germany (which has "ä" (auml) but not "å" (aring))