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posted by martyb on Friday August 31 2018, @01:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the or-Douglass-or-Medick-or-Aycock-or... dept.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmp9v/life-on-the-internet-is-hard-when-your-last-name-is-butts

[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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:21AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:21AM (#728661)

    What if it's your name that suddenly gets a new, obscene meaning, what do you do?

    1. Have a few drinks.
    2. Come up with some memes.
    3. ???
    4. Profit!

  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday August 31 2018, @08:32AM (2 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Friday August 31 2018, @08:32AM (#728665) Journal

    Also, if you don't register the same username in all popular social sites, somebody in a side of the sexopolitical spectrum you don't like might register with the same username, and your carefully crafted image is compromised.

    --
    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday August 31 2018, @06:01PM (1 child)

      by Osamabobama (5842) on Friday August 31 2018, @06:01PM (#728868)

      'Tis true. Bots are much maligned on much of the internet; this user speaks the truth.

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      Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:30AM

        by Bot (3902) on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:30AM (#730649) Journal

        > Bots are much maligned on much of the internet
        well that was always me in fact

        --
        Account abandoned.