muleociation (cont.)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

over in soc.motss i told the "muleociation" story and wondered aloud
about content checkers.  and got this amazing but true story:

[me]
 >>are there bad-word checkers that flag words with "ass" in them, or
 >>words that begin with "ass" (associate, assist, assemble, assign, etc.
 >>-- a fair collection of really useful words)?  i could just barely
 >>manage to imagine such a silly thing, but i really have trouble
 >>imagining software that went so far as to suggest "mule" as a
 >>substitute for "ass".

[alex elliott]
 >Quite some years ago I went to an internet cafe that had an extremely
 >stupid and extremely over-zealous objectionable content filter.  It was
 >apparently set to screen out "hate speech" as well as sexual stuff,
but it
 >didn't bother to check whether the filtered words were part of larger,
 >non-objectionable words or not (filtered words were just deleted, not
 >substituted with synonyms or anything).

 >I was trying to read my email, but it was very difficult since the
sender
 >was renamed to "Mne" (that's "Maryanne" without the "aryan") and the
first
 >word of her note was "Wver" (that's "Whatever" without the "hate").  It
 >was equally incomprehensible the whole way through.

 >I'm still annoyed that I didn't ask for my money back for the time I
paid
 >for.  The stupid filter made the computer essentially useless.

arnold