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Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

vole.wtf

21–30 of 310 posts

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#22
post #8

This is very cute! But I wonder why the creator decided to special case of Scunthorpe and not more common terms like peacock

I live not too far from Scunthorpe and heard a story that Scunthorpe county council rolled out a new spam filter on the own email servers and no one in the council could sent any emails that day as they all got blocked. This was a few decades ago and I can’t find a source but there are references to the origin here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because the problem is named after it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

"In February 2004 in Scotland, Craig Cockburn reported that he was unable to use his surname (pronounced "Coburn") with Hotmail. Separately he had problems with his workplace email because his job title, software specialist, contained the substring Cialis, an erectile dysfunction medication commonly included in spam e-mails." Now that's just bad luck. It could've happened to any of us!

[deleted]

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#27
Mishit is censored too... I like the number of HN commenters who tried out their favorite Scunthorpe variations.

As somehow who designed an implementation of \b for an NFA-based regex matcher (https://github.com/intel/hyperscan) I always have an appreciation for the Scunthorpe problem; we did see quite a number of scam/spam/bad-word detection regex patterns that tried to avoid it with word boundary stuff.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#29
post #9

I love this. I particularly like that arsenal is censored to a___nal.

Inspired by you, I grepped my system words file in search of words containing fuck. What I didn't expect is Apple's /usr/share/dict/words comes pre-censored.

  > grep fuck /usr/share/dict/words
  > grep '^shit$' /usr/share/dict/words
  > grep '^dick$' /usr/share/dict/words
  dick
  > grep '^cunt$' /usr/share/dict/words
  > grep '^bitch$' /usr/share/dict/words
  bitch
Wow.

(This comment doesn't reflect well on me. Fortunately, this is a pseudonymous account.)

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