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Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

vole.wtf

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Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#241
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around middle school, I decided that I would stop using swear words, because it seemed like getting myself in trouble by letting one slip out at an inappropriate time was more of a bother than just avoiding them and coming up with more inventive ways to express myself. Refraining from curse words has been part of my character ever since, and just about everybody who knows me knows that I don't swear. And you know wha…

ESL here. At school one teacher told us using swear words only show your lack of knowledge for better words. I took that to heart and the very few times I've used them, I really had no other option. However I've noticed swear words come more easily to me in English and don't feel as harsh as when I hear them in Spanish. I wonder if it's my lack of vocabulary.

I've always wholeheartedly agreed with Stephen Fry's view on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_osQvkeNRM

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#242
post #83

As a way to show off the capability of ligatures, more power to them. As an effort to censor, why in the ever loving fuck nuggets would you ever actually do that? I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this wa…

Around middle school, I decided that I would stop using swear words, because it seemed like getting myself in trouble by letting one slip out at an inappropriate time was more of a bother than just avoiding them and coming up with more inventive ways to express myself. Refraining from curse words has been part of my character ever since, and just about everybody who knows me knows that I don't swear. And you know wha…

I love and appreciate swear words. They're incredibly important as an act of protest and defiance against the prudes and the cultural censors.

The eventual normalization of swear words will show that we have won the battle.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#243
post #9

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

Call of Duty has censored all input with a regex like this for as long as I can remember. I can't even name one of my classes "Assault" which isn't even viewable publicly. You would think it would be easy to add a whitelist for such a common word.

I had occasion to write a chat server for a small gaming service once. The way I came up with to do the profanity filter ended up working a lot better than I expected it to, and avoided the problem you describe.

It worked like this.

1. Make a copy of the text to be filtered, modified as follows.

-- change upper case letters to lower case

-- change 0 to o, 1 to i, 3 to e, 5 to s, and vowels with various accent marks to the corresponding unaccented lower case vowel

-- discard anything else

For example, if the input was "Start the assault. let's f-u-c-k them" it would become "starttheassaultletsfuckthem".

2. Scan this for any substrings that are on the bad word list. In this case it would find "ass" and "fuck" [1].

3. If no bad words are found, the original string is returned and we are done.

4. For each word in the original string, look it up in the dictionary (I believe I used /usr/dict/words). Note the ranges of character positions in the original string of the words that are spelled correctly.

5. For each bad word found in the filtered string, if all of its characters came from positions in the original string that were part of correctly spelled words, leave it alone. Otherwise, asterisk out its characters in the original string.

In the above example, "ass" would be left alone because all of its characters came from "assualt" which is recognized as a correctly spelled word. None of "fuck" came from correctly spelled words, so it would get zapped. The final result would be

  start the assault. let's *-*-*-* them.
[1] Well...actually not. I just checked my archives and found the chat server bad word list. It did not include "ass".

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#244
post #9

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

Call of Duty has censored all input with a regex like this for as long as I can remember. I can't even name one of my classes "Assault" which isn't even viewable publicly. You would think it would be easy to add a whitelist for such a common word.

I had occasion to write a chat server for a small gaming service once. The way I came up with to do the profanity filter ended up working a lot better than I expected it to, and avoided the problem you describe.

It worked like this.

1. Make a copy of the text to be filtered, modified as follows.

-- change upper case letters to lower case

-- change 0 to o, 1 to i, 3 to e, 5 to s, and vowels with various accent marks to the corresponding unaccented lower case vowel

-- discard anything else

For example, if the input was

  start the assault. let's f-u-c-k them
it would become

  starttheassaultletsfuckthem 
2. Scan this for any substrings that are on the bad word list. In this case it would find "ass" and "fuck" [1].

3. If no bad words are found, the original string is returned and we are done.

4. For each word in the original string, look it up in the dictionary (I believe I used /usr/dict/words). Note the ranges of character positions in the original string of the words that are spelled correctly.

5. For each bad word found in the filtered string, if all of its characters came from positions in the original string that were part of correctly spelled words, leave it alone. Otherwise, asterisk out its characters in the original string.

In the above example, "ass" would be left alone because all of its characters came from "assualt" which is recognized as a correctly spelled word. None of "fuck" came from correctly spelled words, so it would get zapped. The final result would be

  start the assault. let's *-*-*-* them
[1] Well...actually not. I just checked my archives and found the chat server bad word list. It did not include "ass".

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#245

Another example of redaction using OpenType features: http://projectseen.com/ > "Seen" is a typeface that is concerned with privacy and the interception of our communications by the NSA. It automatically strikes through spook words.

Somewhat ironic that this site uses a self-signed certificate...

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#246
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around middle school, I decided that I would stop using swear words, because it seemed like getting myself in trouble by letting one slip out at an inappropriate time was more of a bother than just avoiding them and coming up with more inventive ways to express myself. Refraining from curse words has been part of my character ever since, and just about everybody who knows me knows that I don't swear. And you know wha…

ESL here. At school one teacher told us using swear words only show your lack of knowledge for better words. I took that to heart and the very few times I've used them, I really had no other option. However I've noticed swear words come more easily to me in English and don't feel as harsh as when I hear them in Spanish. I wonder if it's my lack of vocabulary.

[deleted]

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can these ligatures be applied recursively?

Recursively how?

Pretty sure the answer is "no" but I'll explain more what I was wondering.

Assume "arse" and "anal" are both on the bad and that underscores are treated like irrelevant whitespace.

Arsenal

A___nal

A______

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recursively how?

Pretty sure the answer is "no" but I'll explain more what I was wondering. Assume "arse" and "anal" are both on the bad and that underscores are treated like irrelevant whitespace. Arsenal A___nal A______

You mean "arse" and "enal"? So basically overlaps? That's a good question, I'm not sure what happens there, I think the first ligature "wins".

Yeah, if you type "cuntits" it only censors "unt".

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#250
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think vulgar goes along with basic, the four letter, Germanic versions of fornicate and defecate have a whole range of varied, nuanced, often contradictory meanings that capture the irreducible complexity of lived experience. The Latin derived versions just make everything so bloodless, so focused on one particular aspect of the concept. They really are the simple words, even if they have more letters.

What many people consider the strongest English vulgarity is derived from the Latin cunnus.

I'm amazed at British TV shows even whimsical gameshows where everyone swears like a sailor. But when someone dares to say the "c word" it's bleeped and everyone gasps.
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