Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?"
Has something that wasn't a terrible plan ever been implemented by people who use the phrase "consultations with stakeholders" with a straight face?
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.
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?"
- "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!
g o t o h e l l
You had to say it, didn't you? You had to say that one little four-letter word. You couldn't just say "call hell" or "eval hell" or "do hell while true" or even "gosub hell". No, you had to put yourself right there beyond the bounds of civilised discourse and say The Word.
Consider yourself harmful indeed, sir!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
... 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.
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.
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.
g o t o h e l l
You had to say it, didn't you? You had to say that one little four-letter word. You couldn't just say "call hell" or "eval hell" or "do hell while true" or even "gosub hell".
The implication is that there is no return. Gosub hell indeed.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!