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Yahoo! Bans "Allah" in Screen Names
szembek writes "According to The Register it seems that Yahoo! is banning the use of the string "Allah" in all screen names. The issue apparently became apparent when Linda Callahan attempted to use her surname in her screen name. The following link has an interesting list of terms that Yahoo does allow, and ones they don't."
...slashdot hasn't!
Is apparently allowed though.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I've run into problems with my last name ("Marcum") due to the last three characters.
It's still not as bad as Blizzard's, filtering out words like "basement".
Ignoring the whole political issue of it, if they are going to filter a string, they should at least allow common legit strings that it is a substring of.
Here we go again, Good thing Yahoo doesn't have embassies to torch. :)
Let's look at the article
I guess Yahoo is trying to avoid the trolls and hatemongers. You can't have a screenname "I<3Osama," but you can have a name with Jesus in it. I suppose that makes sense from a certain standpoint, Jesus is a popular hispanic name (but so is Osama and Usama as a male name in the Arabic world).
I could have iHeartJesus, but not iLoveAllah?
ConsultingFair.com
The whole point of writing articles like this is so people WILL stop using their services. If no one bitched, most people wouldn't know about it.
I read this article yesterday, and it's sad, really, that nazipedophilesodomyisgreat@yahoo.com is allowed, but nancycallahan@yahoo.com is not. It's an example of an idea that probably started as a noble concern. (I would imagine that someone tried to sign up for deathtoallah@yahoo.com in order to troll on a forum somewhere.) But in the processm you come up with something that is really unsolvable. The solution here seems to be that you ban the 7 naughty words (as determined by the FCC) throw in a couple obvious ones (administrator, security, etc.) and leave it at that. If you try to ban certain words, there is way too much grey area. Do you ban the word breast? How about the Yahoo ID breastcancerawareness or chickenbreast? There are just a few areas in life where a couple simple rules won't solve the problem. I am well aware that even banning the 7 naughty words isn't enough, (I could sign up for fuuckme@yahoo.com, and people would understand what I'm getting at.) but that's really as far as you can take it.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
This is NOT your personal war! Those people have rights!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Sad part of Yahoo! (got to remember the exclamation point!) buckling under like most of the western media over Mohammed cartoons is that it shows to terrorists and their lackeys is that terror as a political tools works. It's not kooky right wing christians that are the biggest threat to our freedom of speech. It's fundamentalist Islam that seeks to regulate western speech with threats of violence from the middle east.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I'm all against trials of writers and so-called revisionnists, because I don't believe in state imposed truth : a truth you can't debate is a myth in the full, dictionary, sense of the word. Those morons desserve to be laughed at, not sent to jail.
This said, your comparison is fallacious, because you're mixing two completely different things :
Therefore, by siding religious feelings and historical facts, you're fuelling the arguments or religious zealots willing to enforce their own myth as a state-held truth, and / or justifying racism toward those holding beliefs we don't share because they're holding a supposed "truth" we don't believe in. Both moves being equally dangerous.
My response to people who are too easily "offended" by funny pictures, disrespectful online names, etc.:
My very own Mohammed cartoon
Make one of your own. Share with your friend. C'mon, folks, the time is now to be juvenile!
Like the old saying goes: "The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it." Well, dammit, that might be true, but I'm tired of people damaging the Internet! Let's do what we can to make them unhappy.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"What's so dope about skeet? White people don't know what it means yet... When they figure it out, they're going to be like, 'My God, what have we done?!'"
Is there any doubt that we have lost the war on terror? should we even bother fighting it anymore? We repeatedly show these extremist nutcases that they can get whatever it is they want by terrorizing us. Every article about these ridiculous cartoons on CNN.com ends with a disclaimer: CNN has chosen not to reprint the cartoons out of repect for Islam when all I can read is CNN has chosen not to reprint the cartoons out of fear of getting firebombed proof that we have lost: Yeah, Osama may be on the run in remote areas of Pakistan & Afghanistan, but it takes me 40 mins to get through security at the airport, and I have to have my personal belongings searched to ride the subway.
Consider this. "Pen" is an ok word, "Island" is ok too. So I want to celebrate Pen Island with a domain name... penisland.com? Oops?
The classic real-world example of that being when the Italian company Powergen created a website with the perfectly obvious name of "PowergenItalia".
If you think there is a continuum then you do not understand the question. It is wrong to kill babies. It is wrong to deprive women of freedom of choice over their own bodies and subject them to a painful pregnancy for any reason but the welfare of others. Thus, taking the middle ground is to acknowledge that one or both of these injustices are happening.
There are people who are willing to stand by to see these injustices happen, but those are cynical, apathetic people who are of a lower moral character than abortion doctors and those who murder abortion doctors because both these groups are doing what is right in their own reasoning. Don't you see? abortion is the greatest debate in history because to a religious person, or a secular humanist or anyone else, life is sacred. You cannot say that there is part of a life in a woman's womb, you cannot redefine life though existential debate for that is denying your own existence and your own right to life.
To allow abortion in certain cases and deny it in others is to acknowledge abortion as the slaughter of the innocent and as a woman's right. Thus in the cases where it is denied, you are forcing a woman into having her life changed by an unwanted child for no reason but your bossy authoritarian and when abortion is granted you are killing a human that has done nothing to deserve it.
In the US today, abortion is legal, yet when you accidentally terminate a wanted pregnancy through negligent driving it is considered manslaughter. This inconsistency leads to only one conclusion: a fetus is human if and only if its mother wants it. If this is about the beginnings of humanity, how can we not extrapolate this nihilist world view into our own lives? Am I only human because my mother and others continue to love me?
There is no middle ground when talking about what is life, it didn't work for Plato, Descartes or Wittgenstein who are all people smarter than you that have tried to define humanity and it won't work for me. The abortion debate should be thought through by each one of us, because it goes beyond choice or killing babies, it cuts to the very core of each one of our existences. The politically correct middle ground might be the safest option, but most great questions, the middle ground between two extremes is the only one that can be conclusively proved to be wrong.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem