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Pakistan Bans 1600 Words and Phrases For Texting
Hugh Pickens writes "In a move reminiscent of George Carlin's Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has handed down a ban on about 1,600 terms and phrases it has deemed obscene and told carriers they have seven days to block the words on their networks, or face legal action. 'The filtering is not good for the system and may degrade the quality of network services — plus it would be a great inconvenience to our subscribers if their SMS was not delivered due to the wrong choice of words,' says an official at a one of the telecoms. The list includes such words and phrases as 'idiot,' 'monkey crotch,' 'athlete's foot,' 'damn,' 'deeper,' 'four twenty,' 'fornicate,' 'looser,' and 'go to hell,' among others. There are also various double entendres included in the ban such as 'beat your meat' or 'flogging the dolphin.' Mohammad Younis, a spokesman for the PTA, says the ban is 'the result of numerous meetings and consultations with stakeholders' after consumers complained of receiving offensive text messages. 'Nobody would like this happening to their young boy or girl.'"
That's going to make giving instructions difficult. I hope no-one's working with an IPL over IM over there.
well, all I can say to that is:
newsletter. immediately.
(wonders what I have been missing all these years)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
After all we know how ppl using txt spel pfectly an don abbrev any wrds.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pakistani users will have 1600 new euphemisms by the end of the week.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_crab_(Internet_slang)
After all: It's for the children! Right?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
to Pakistan government on this one is
g o t o h e l l a n d f o r n i c a t e you l o o s e r i d i o t s
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
But what do they really think this is going to accomplish, other than invention of a new vocabulary?
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?"
That's how the French say 80.
On the list: "harder". I can understand a**f****r, but "harder"? WTF? (also, they have IDIOT and ID1OT and IDOIT... but not 1D10T. Noobs.)
Also on the list: lotion and period. Scientists with dry hands are gonna have some difficulties.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
And Abe Lincoln.
Something tells me, though, it refers to reefer in this context.
Program Intellivision!
Has something that wasn't a terrible plan ever been implemented by people who use the phrase "consultations with stakeholders" with a straight face?
Kids and adults alike will just find new ways to say "beat your meat" "go to hell" or whatever in 3..2..1
The censors cannot possibly hope to keep up.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
And yet "Aw yeah, shoot your hot creamy load all over my face" would get through just fine.
Some of the banned words are amusing for various reasons. Some have fairly obvious explicit meanings, others do not. Some examples of messages that will be banned after this goes into effect:
"I am putting a new roof on my house and the stringer length is 18 feet."
"Did you see the new wuutang clan movie on netflix?"
"When using distance measuring equipment in aircraft, it measures the slant length between the VOR and the aircraft."
"When approaching to land, you should retard the throttle abeam the intended landing point."
"I want to go land at Bremerton Airport, IACO identifier PWT."
"When running long distances, you should be careful of joint pain in your knees."
"Calculus is often considered to be a harder class than algebra."
"Juggalo fatso got jesus" * (All words in this one are banned)
Wow. This is good stuff. I often wonder what is going on in these people's heads when they come up with lists like this. They are not sane as we know it.
In my original attempt to post I wrote "It's for the children!." in all caps in order to communicate the absurdity to those on Slashdot who don't always think things through and might actually take me seriously. I received the following error: Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Come on Slashdot, isn't that what we have moderation for?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
This is going to seriously dent the Pakistani vocabulary!
Just last month I sent a text to my boss that read...
"Hey, monkey crotch! How's your atheletes foot? Any looser? Damn! Quit beating your meat and call idiot!"
And to my wife...
"Tired of flogging the dolphin? Let's fornicate!"
And she replied
"Go to hell!"
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I was thinking about this the other day as a technical challenge.
Assuming their SMS system handles tens of thousands of texts per second, each of which needs to be tested against this user-definable dictionary of 1600 words, is it even possible for the platform to keep up? Are there sophisticated search / pattern matching algorithms for testing a message against 1600 substrings? I can think of a very naive way to do this, but I'm sure it would not scale.
How would one implement this kind of high-speed pattern matching??
Here in Iran messages are censored but nobody knows for which words. It's not even consistent: when there's going to be a protest event or news the filtering increases. Normally it filters less words. People guess these words. The worst happens for advertisers and advertising companies that send bulk SMS and later find out that nothing has delivered!
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing."
is a bunch of middle aged bureaucratic dudes sitting around a table saying "What do you think about "Monkey dick".. should we ban that?"
I learned a few new swear words today. On a side note, why are 1072, 1073, and 1074 redacted? Are they too obscene?
- "Beastiality" is banned, but not "bestiality". Coitus with animals is acceptable as long as you can spell it properly.
- A lot of superstrings seem to be banned; I guess they expect the operators to censor the longest possible match.
- I guess no one's allowed to do research on HSV in Pakistan, since "herpes" is banned.
- How long before someone turns the blocking of "lesbian" and "gay" into a human rights issue? Especially "gay pride"?
- Some of these bans are actually dangerous to public safety: "sniper", "hostage", and "stroke" are all being banned.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
who are there because they tweeted some small phrase or something.
Bad words are bad because I said so. I don't like them, and so they should be banned.
Think of all the children that are being saved!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
hahahaha awesome
The US needs to get a set of BALLS and Liberate Pakistan.
This has gone to far, we need to bring freedom back to the world. Only way to do this is for the US to get a set of BALLS and Liberate countries like Pakistan and Canada.
Weird that Jesus Christ is on the list, after Mohammed he is Islam's second most important prophet. :)
Difficult when you are a plumber and need to order 1/2" NPT nipples...
A Pakistani Big Bitch must be huge, she's 2x on the list
Now Pakistan is a country of many languages so I wonder if there are, besides this English one, comparable lists for the others?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Umm i suppose that means something different over there than it does in the states?
Or are they really that idiotic? ( oh wait, i guess this post will be banned too... )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe they think you might be able to get it from locker rooms while flogging the dolphin?
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Most of them. But in some regions, as well as in Switzerland, they're sensible enough to use septante/huitante/nonante instead of that vigesimal crap.
Circumcision is child abuse.
STUPID
NIGER (the country??)
KOTEX
SEX
VAGINA
TONGUE
SUCK
HOSTAGE
UTERUS
SNIPER
SNOT
SIX SIX SIX (yeah cuz someone is gonna spell out numbers?? why not ban 666 then)
SCREW
SHOWTIME
ROBBER
RETARDED
CRAP
CREAMY
DIKE
DEVIL
DRUNK
GAY
HARDER
JOINT
PEE
PERIOD
OUI
NAKED
NIG
OU812
POOP
PREMATURE
PUSSY CAT
REAR END
SLAVE
STROKE
TROJAN
TWO ON ONE
WUUTANG (???)
WHITE TRASH (is this a problem over there??)
But the main thing I think, as I peruse this list, is Fuck Pakistan. They seriously banned the word "dome". It's probably because such structures stand up too well to suicide bombing and thus more modern architecture is necessary to better enforce the will of Allah. They also spelled incest wrong. Ope, can't say "period". Can't say "premature".. Can't say "red light".. can't say "showtime".. they misspelled "wasted".. and you can't say "Got Jesus"... just how many Germans do they have over there? All in all, pakistani texting is now useless. The impending surge in encryption will give plausible deniability to terrorists the nation over, so the next time there's unrest, the government will collapse.
... for doing everything they can to ensure that the range of Pakistani euphemisms and double-entendres expands to ever newer and more creative territory. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
There is no freedom in any country...only the illusion of it. In the US, our founders where aware of this and several of them were supporters of complete government dismantlement at various intervals.
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
for(p=text,p2=buffer;*p;p++) { if (!isspace(*p)) *p2++ = LEETMAP(*p); }
for(i=0;i<1600;i++) {
result = pcre_exec(badpatterns[i].regex, 0, buffer, strlen(buffer), 0, 0, optvec, sizeof(optvec)/sizeof(optvec[0]));
if ( result >= 0) {
national_database[ subscriber_id ].strikes ++;
(* badpatterns[i].punitive_action) ( national_database[ subscriber_id ].strikes, &gps_position[ subscriber_id], buffer, DISPATCH_POLICE);
return MSG_BLOCKED;
}
}
I too would like to pretend that the XFL never existed, but ban people from texting "HEHATEME"? Is Rod Smart THAT controversial in Pakistan?
Easier than encryption, and likely to scramble a text enough to avoid all filters. There's probably an app for it.
I usually dislike it when Hitler gets used to compare things but I'm going to do it anyway. Hitler did it in the name of the Children as well, he said so himself. You can do great evil and get away with it as long as you're doing it "to protect the innocent young".
In Capitalist US, the commerce controls the Government.
What you do is to give people a lot of freedom somewhere while you take it away in other places.
And when people aren't good behaving citizens then you pepper spray them.
Freedom is what you think you have, reality is that you may be free to express what you think in the western world but as soon as you act upon your opinions to get others to listen then you are a danger to the order.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Of course the most pointless thing with language bans and censorship of this kind is that it's exactly why we -have- so many double entendres and such. Every time a culture, religion, politician, parent, teacher, whomever, tells someone that saying something is offensive, the best they usually manage is the creation of some other way of stating the same thing. Even if that involves making up new words. Beyond that, the very children who everyone is usually trying to protect with language bans like this, are the absolute masters at creating new words to circumvent such things.
2. find the people who initiate changes in vocabulary by tracking messages from source 3. Subvert or kill them 4.???
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I wonder if they only will ban this list and words in English, how about the same words (meanings I mean) in their language ? are they banned too ?
Your circle of friends has much higher standards for texting content than mine.
From the list: Ass Pirate
No Ass Ninja.
B33t yur m33t.
See? It still gets through.
After all, don't people realize the horrible things that can happen when someone gets offended?
I found this documentary about the terrible consequences of being offended. It recounts the gruesome details of people who have been offended, went to sleep, and woke up the next morning with leprosy.
It's good that Pakistan is stopping these atrocities before they get out of hand.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
A French guy once told me they abolished "septante" in France in shame after their defeat to Germany in World War 0 in 1870.
Now we'll have annoyingly illiterate Pakistani youth.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
With a maximum character length of 140 characters, 1600 strings to match, and assuming 8 character long strings, it would take 140*8*1600=1,792,000 character matches per message if you do it naively. That is only a millisecond on modern GHz processors, but when processing large numbers of messages using embedded processors, that is probably a few more cycles than you want to spend on each message. You can do better by using Knuth-Morris-Pratt or Boyer-Moore. Since we can pre-process the strings to be matched, this means it takes only 140*1600*k=224,000*k (for some k determined by the algorithm). This is better, but not by much.
Notice that the dominant factor is the 1600 strings to be matched. If you really care about performance, then you want to get rid of that factor. Simplest way is to build a finite-state automaton. If it is encoded as an NFA, the performance won't be much better than before, but if you encode it as a DFA, then each message can be processed in only 140 table lookups. The downside of this is the size of the lookup tables. In the worse case, expect them to take terabytes of space depending on the particular 1600 strings being matched.
There are algorithms like Rabin-Karp and Aho-Corasick that might take less space while still taking only ~140 character operations. The practical answer, is to try DFA, RK, and AC to see which, if any, don't require too much preprocessing space, and then use one of those. The space requirements will depend on the particular text involved, but there are good odds that the tables for DFA will be small, and even better odds that the tables for RK and AC will be small.
Searching and sorting are two of the most well studied algorithmic problems in computer science. If you ever find yourself wondering how to do them efficiently, there is a good chance that very smart people have already figured out how to do it.
They have a very inflated view of themselves, which is reflected in their country's name - Pakistan means Land of the Pure.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
They're always out trying to censor everything. Screw them!
Imagine Kansas with nuclear weapons,
truly, a point of know return.
(been waiting *decades* to use that joke. NOW, what do I do?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
#494 on the list, He Hate Me. Who knew the Pakistani government had so many XFL fans?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
"Hostage"? There are going to be a lot of pissed off Al Qaeda in Pakistan. "We have been waiting two weeks for the ransom on this journalist, why won't they reply to our texts!"
After reading the list, there are some good and bad parts:
Good: #575 - Juggalo. ICP fans should be banned, everywhere.
Bad: #657 - Master Blaster. Now how will Pakistanis know who rules Bartertown?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
3) Why are combinations of two words on the list, where one of the two is also on the list already? The combination would already be banned due to that single word.
4) Why is "dome" on the list? You can't even describe a building with a dome?
When the countries split, most things were split - wealth, population, what have you. But the amount of stupidity was duplicated.
In India, showing your bare feet to someone is extremely offensive. There are similar traditions in Pakistan so it probably is part of an insult of some sort. Just a guess though.
I could find some uses for this list.
I'm sure they anticipated that... that's why the 1600 word/phase list is probably 1600 variants of the phrase "F**** the PTA" or "The Pakistan Telecom authority sucks"
One would hope the lawmakers used regex to define the forbidden terms.
On second thought, perhaps it's better not to let lawyers know about the power of regex.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ask the Americans in US prisons because they tweeted or texted some small phrase or something.
Things like "I am going to assassinate the president, come help me rednecks".
Nice moral equivalency asshole.
Real people are getting arrested, tortured and killed in China for saying far less than that.
Meanwhile in the U.S. you just said you were going to assassinate the president, which you threw around because you know nothing would happen.
If you repeatedly posted it to twitter for months on end, you MIGHT get a visit from the secret service. MIGHT.
Stop pretending two drastically different situations are the same as you shame the whole western world with your cavalier dismissal of dissidents as being the same as some random U.S. crackpot. They are fighting for a real cause and you are curb-stomping them, however inadvertently...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
im not talking about a fantasy of where we might be in 10 years. im talking about actual, real people sitting in jail in china, right now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheng_Jianping
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_dissidents
Seems no matter where you go and no matter how ludicrous the subject, "IT'S FOR THE CHIIIILLLLDREN!" always wins. :\
Regards;
Shamelessly stolen from the NFL "naughtyword" list?
http://outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm
Two lists with "Purina Princess" can't be that common, now can it?
Testing the dongle?
athletes foot, backdoor, backseat, blackout, deeper, devil, dome, fairy, finger food, glazed donut, hole, hostage, k mart, lotion, lube job, penthouse, period, quickie, rear end, ribbed, roach, robber, screw, slant, slime
Heaven forbid if your name is Mary Jane.
ass is illegal, gay is illegal... but just to be sure "gay ass" is also illegal
fourtwenty is a nono, but I guess it is ok to use 420.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
'Nobody would like this happening to their young boy or girl.'
Quite frankly, I would not be at all phased if somebody simply texted the phrase "athlete's foot" to my daughter.
/* No Comment */
I once had an email bounced (by the recipient's UK ISP) because the contents were "obscene". The contents? Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach. Content of that link NSFW, it seems. At least according to that ISP.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I was going to put every word on the list in a poem, but words #1072 to 1074 are impossible to rhyme.
still not on the list
dikidydick dickidydick dickidydick
They totally ignored cuss words in their native language, Its more likely to hear "gand-du" for "fag" than the word "fag".
Or for that matter "run-dy" for "whore"
or "lund" for penis
Yet another instance of Belgian superiority.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Is the english list translated from the URDU list? Perhaps the URDU list doesn't have words with such dual meanings as 'screw' and 'period'.
Personally, I have no problem with "Honey, can you pick up some tampons for me?", but some guys hate this. Now they can claim that darn censorship, they blocked it out, so I assumed you were asking me to pick up some beer.
ESPECIALLY if you have a foot fungal growth!
Are we sure this isn't fake? I mean, is "beat your meat" really a phrase that also exists in Urdu? Or is English just that popular there?
Tom Lehreh got it right in Who's Next, with Alabama.
Have gnu, will travel.
A memo was leaked a few days ago. ("memogate") The Pakistan civilian government already unpopular for alignment with the west. asked the U.S. to do something about the Pakistan military gaining more power.
SOPA is in U.S. congress/senate.
Was network censorship in a country with many more pressing needs part of an agreement for our help?
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
As someone I know once said, never project your cultural views on another nation. Meaning, they will never view or treat you the same way in which you do. Pakistan had better be careful whom they piss off. India is mainly Hindu. They wouldn't have the compunction to force an entire nation to take another spin at the wheel of life. Of all the nations on Earth, a conflict between those two could easily go Nuclear in a hurry.
Life is not for the lazy.
"Let the Bhudda guide you to enlightenment." Is fine on the list. Infact if you look at the list, it's only Christian religious stuff that is banned (and a tiny bit of Jewish in using the same terminology for God).
Not really. Regardless of how stupid they are, Pakistanis don't really want to die. India could wipe out Pakistan in a nuclear war significantly faster than they can take us out. What is worrying though is that China is giving them a hand with their military arsenal. Without their help, I wouldn't be surprised if Pakistan blows itself up with its weapons. It is what they're usually good at, no? :-D
But all speculation apart, I really hope it doesn't come down to a nuclear (or any) war.
And Abe Lincoln.
Something tells me, though, it refers to reefer in this context.
A Gettysburg Address joke? Why not, we are nerds here.
I am not a crackpot.
No, it's not. People often confuse India as some sort of homogenous territory as far as culture is concerned. Traditions can vary greatly between different areas of the country. Personally, I have yet to meet someone here who is offended by my feet. o_0
I've been India all my life and never heard that. In fact in most places of worship(temples etc.) you are required to remove your foot wear and go bare feet, thus exposing them.
It occurred to me that 1600 unique words would be close to 10% of man people's working, day-to-day vocabulary.
(Cue: jokes about being 60% or more of some people's vocabulary)
On the plus side, the vocabulary list repeats a lot. On the minus side, entire messages (may?) get lost if a forbidden word gets used.
And another thing, that I find quite interesting: The list is English. I had not known that English is one of two "official languages" of Pakistan.
Perhaps they are trying to encourage the makers of Urdu porn?
Is forbidden, even without f inbetween. There's just no freedom in muslim countries.
This is to stop discussuins of christianity, which they see as offensive.
The weird thing is, we don't text in English! We "txt" a bizarre 1337 Roman Urdu, with lavish sprinkling of punjabi curse words.
Awesome language, that Punjabi, it has both, some of the very best poetry *and* curses.
So yeah, our dear president, we will still continue to crude messages about you, good luck stopping us. (I could swear one in ten messages is something disparaging about the president, given my inbox)
This is, of course, if the list *is* real. First of all, it's unlikely PTA would have revealed it, and secondly, I don't think they would dare censor something like Jesus Christ. All the churches would be in uproar, and the Supreme court would rip them a new one.
(*BTW*, just to give an idea, Pakistan has one the highest rates for text messaging in the world. We have six companies offering extremely competitive sms packages, and we don't have incoming charges bullshit that you have there, so good luck filtering those tens of millions of messages sent every day.)
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom was an MMO with a word filter, restricting dialogue to a set number of clean phrases. Didn't take long for someone to come up with the phrase "I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny". Is Pakistan going to block those words too?
yes.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Pacsoc doubleplus good, texting clean unwords delete leads to goodthought and unthoughtcrime.
While most of it is stuff you would expect, but here are some really dumb ones (deeper, idiot, drunk, deposit) and some funny ones (Dahmer(?), mother love bone(?!))
Can you imagine if you tried this-
I have to go *deposit* more money to make the *hole* *deeper* in the back yard that the *drunk* *idiot* messed up.
I see where the phrases "back door" & "banging" can have a sexual connotation, but there are also a few other ways to use them, too. I must be too old to understand the controversy behind "cocky" and "cocktail."
I'm also confused by TFA's explanation of how Pakistan has a free speech clause in it's constitution but somehow this is "not unrestricted?" I can understand China trying to stamp out political speech, but Pakistan looks like it's on a morality crusade that makes the extreme Bible-bangers in the US look tame. I do admit I have slim knowledge about Pakistan.
(I really have to figure out a way to use "mother love bone" in a proper conversation with someone.)
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Yeah! How dare they plagarise the Torah like that!
Is that banned?
Look pakistan, if you really want to control your people, do what RA did in Stargate (orig movie) and just ban all writing and make your country all slaves.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Well how dare you send emails about naked shingles? You wanna know what I think? I think you're some kind of deviated prevert.
No left turn unstoned.
'flogging the dolphin.'
I would like to express my gratitude to the Pakistani government for helping me extend and enrich my English vocabulari.
It looks remarkably similar (down to the capitalization of words) to a list circulating since at least 2005 of words banned from NFL jerseys.
See
http://www.outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm
'Course, perhaps Pakistan just borrowed this list.
Jeremy Butler
www.ScreenSite.org
www.TVCrit.com
I just hope they banned "LOL".
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Pity you didn't bold the "offensive" words. I can't identify most of them.
If it is, just take it as a shorthand version, you know, to save you text letters. I mean, there's nothing wrong with texting "Prez is a #1224", is there? :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is actually much older : the Académie française (founded in 1634) never accepted the "septante" form. It fact it is a strange mashup of a base-10 and a base-20 system.
Big Brother ungood.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
In case you didn't notice, my post was constructed entirely out of banned in Pakistan words, of which "looser" was a prominently featured example, whereas "loser" was not. I'm perfectly aware of the difference between "looser" use of language in artistic license, and "loser" posts by speling polis posers.
It saddens me that you also probably missed how my post **simply incredibly cleverly and deviously** spaced out the letters in the banned words to avoid filters. :-(
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Hah, it's not on the list. I win.