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Great Firewall of UK Blocks Game Patch Because of Substring Matches
Sockatume writes "Remember the fun of spurious substring matches, AKA the Scunthorpe problem? The UK's advanced 'intelligent' internet filters do. Supposedly the country's great new filtering regime has been blocking a patch for League of Legends because some of the filenames within it include the substring 'sex.' Add one to the list of embarrassing failures for the nation's new mosaic of opt-out censorship systems, which have proven themselves incapable of distinguishing between abusive sites and sites for abuse victims, or sites for pornography versus sites for sexual and gender minorities."
I do not understand. I just can not understand.
China is a communist country, a country in which the regime is NOT elected.
They have their "Great Firewall" in place in order to protect their totalitarian regime.
Why in the world the UK, with a supposedly "ELECTED" and "DEMOCRATIC" government, want to follow China in erecting their "Great Firewall" ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Or Sussex, or who is researching Wessex.
Getting caught playing LoL? Their faces must be red.
How sensitive is this filter really? How does it affect the residents of Sussex
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Across the UK, kids are running to their parents crying "the porn filter won't let me play my video game!" This might actually increase support for the firewall...
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Seeing "sex" in a url, what a horrible experience.
wearing google glasses? this is crazy? no wonder us hobbyist whiners seem innocuous
This reminds me of the story I read in a /. comment about an overzealous filter that wouldn't let people at his office visit any URL with "sex" in it. There was a problem because they were using expertsexchange.com
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
is now not much better than China and our Chinese cousins what with their bloody great firewall. Who would have thought it would come to this?
There will be thousands ringing up their ISPs when they cannot check the local games at MiddleSEX, SEXton, or, even better, Titty-Ho. Those people will shortly be removed from official maps so as to not offend their neighbours.
Wankers.
all the worst pictures and content you see isn't stuff you seek out on porn sites, its the random crap someone links you while playing any online game.
Really, "Great Firewall of UK" is clumsy and doesn't doesn't make much sense in context. Perhaps we should call it "Hadrian's Firewall"?
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Ah, reminds me when the slashdot had a "bolt" icon for the hardware posts and were blocked by a filter... because any internet image with "hard" in it was obviously porn.
Reminds me of a time when I went to access expertsexchange.com on the job, to get a quick solution to a coding issue I was having, back around 2000... the web filter classified it as "sexually oriented" and it took me a minute to realize how the name had parsed out.
You can now get to the site via experts-exchange.com, though it is far less useful these days.
When I went to register my username/email address for new Verizon FiOS service, I wasn't allowed to use my own legal name, solely because my last name contains the substring "noc". When they first told me, I jokingly said... "You have a lot of customers running a network operation center out of their home?", to which the sales tech answered, "Whew! I'm glad you understand what that is, because I wasn't sure how I was going to explain it."
As I understand it, the porn filtering is opt-out, but the censorship system isn't, as all packets are still routed through the same routers, inspected and possibly manipulated. Or are they?
Also is porn surfing over https possible? I'm no UK citizen, so I'm unable to look myself.
wtf are "gender minorities"?
Maybe people should just launch an attack against the greak UK firewall, and be done with it.
Does anybody know where the filtering takes place? Building?
When ever you have people making decisions for the "greater good", they end up making those decisions for their own greater good. So it doesn't matter in the long run what they are censoring, the act of Law in doing so is the objective. The fact that it is not doing what was intended doesn't matter, it just means the censorship must be "refined", and the filters need to be "fixed".
Liberty would mean removal of the filters and government intervention from an act of free will, i.e. looking at sexual content on line for example, and an act of responsibility from people, i.e. monitoring their children's internet access. This will never do for Big Government tyrants, because this would imply that people actually have their own freedoms that are not "given" to them by the government, and their free will and responsibility is more important than the governments ability to intervene.
might be a bit upset about dumb filters like this.
...would have to be Nintendo/GameFreak's profanity filtering for online submission of Pokemon battles.
The filter prevents battles from being submitted where one of the monsters' nicknames contains a profanity. Makes sense, probably wise. But it also prevents battles from being submitted containing a certain non-nicknamed monster (give it a nickname, and it'll go on straight through). I mean, how do you not have a whitelist for something like that?
Sorry, but we found the word 'sex' on this webpage, so we're going to have to block it.
Again, dreadfully sorry about all that.
Sincerely.
Her Majesty's Nanny-State
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Only the most mediocre of engineers is interested in this type of work, this is why it seems to be authored by morons who introduce brain-dead heuristics that a child could anticipate problems with and avoid.
It's a good thing that there's no way to advertise a porn site with obvious keywords like Porn or Sex. In Britain, users should only be able to see safe sites featuring things like tasty Cream Pies and beautiful Pearl Necklaces and innocent Rimming sites to teach kids how to enjoy decorative rims. It's easy to filter out the bad stuff by looking for the obvious bad words.
There's really no evidence that this is the case. Just speculation. PC Pro actually did some journalism and found that the actual ISPs had received no complaints
So the Guardian is doing the Daily Mail thing of nabbing articles from reddit, and accepting them at face value without any actual research. No wonder traditional newspapers are dying.
wants to lynch him.
Maybe slightly off-topic, but the bit I could never quite understand in the States (and I accept you're a lovely bunch of people with differing views), was how the demographic allegiances are flipped related to pretty much the rest of the world.
Usual (for the rest of us) seems to be that the more affluent you become, the more right-wing your views - "I want to keep my money, not redistribute it to the proles"
The coasts of your country contribute the majority of tax-base to the country, and in return get the centre hoovering up the money whilst whining about 'big government'
Still, I can see the appeal of subsidized living and playing with an assault rifle in your 10-acre back-yard.
So no more history of navigation classes, I would suppose.
Gender minority? Since there's 2 genders and the minority is very slightly men (49/51-ish) that would be minority not minorities. Also nobody considers it one.
Anyway, do they have an inline word-destroying filter like some awful 90's filter instead of a point system with an all or nothing blocker? What cheap ass software suite are they even running?
Although, uncompressed and unencrypted plain text in patch file that contain vulgar words is a bit dumb on the developers' part. They shouldn't have allowed something like that to go out because it damn sure wasn't on accident.
Associate it with something "naughty" (ala Santorum) and demand it be added to the filter for the sake of the children and voila slowly but surely Cameron will be filtered out of UK life.
Anyone who is not male or female.
They want their mushrooms back.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It happens when you buttume that doing a mbutt replacement of strings consbreastutes a good plan, when it's really just a reRichardulous buttbuttination of words.
It's somewhere between buttstounding and buttinine.
Pity the poor guy named A. D. Mindell who wants to use his real name on a Dell-oriented forum, but they don't allow spaces or punctuation.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There, I've always wanted to make a valuable contribution to a porn filtering debate!
And Blue Tits in the cold........ (Ever seen pictures of the little things pecking the tops of milk bottles?)
Oooohhh!!! Missus!!!!
Yes, in the days of the AOL NannyFilter, ornithologists used to have problems too. Nothing changes!
At probably less than 1% of the population, people with chromosomes other than XY or XX are the real gender minorities.
Them and people whose reproductive biology is neither clearly male nor clearly female and people whose biology is clearly one gender but their chromosomes are the other gender.
These are the real gender minorities.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
ExpertSexChange requires a paid membership anyway.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
“Sadly there is no silver bullet when it comes to internet safety and we have always been clear that no solution can ever be 100 per cent. It requires all of us to play our part,” said TalkTalk spokesperson to PinkNews.
Mistakes were made.... but not by us. It's your fault we had to censor you!
I always considered names like Essex, Sussex, Middlesex (really!) ridiculous. It's great that this kind of nonsense will get wiped off the Internet. And it's entirely satisfactory that Analysis will revert to be counted among the forbidden arts.
Every time there is some kind of false positive in a censorship system which happens to be in a so-called 'Western democracy', news stories start flying around as if this is the turning point at which our unaccountable overlords decide this totalitarianism thing is just too much hassle to be worth it. What actually happens (as has happened countless times now) is that 'they' shrug their shoulders, add an exception (maybe) and get back to the heroic task of building tomorrow's glorious dystopia.
Remember when quite a few schools on the West Coast were blocking that site and/or punishing students for using it because the school administrators used the domain name as an excuse to lie and claim that the popular tech site was actually about sex change operations? Also, when I was intern at Microsoft a couple of people got suspended for using that web site. It isn't an accident that the people in charge lie about domain and file names. They know damn well there isn't a problem, but they just want to exercise the only power they have. It's the only thing they have that they enjoy doing.
Either that or cut the submarine cables that connect the UK to the rest of the civilized world.
Must be really hard to do anything in SUSSEX, ENGLAND.
Can Brittainers in Essex read this post?
For enthusiasts of English beverages.
And Manchester (gender discrimination and trigger word).
I mean really. A queergender imaginary-chinese eye-lazy trans-turtle non-person might get triggered. Triggered !
well thank *** I've not go** ***wing carrots in the S****horpe ***tant factory!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The highly affluent ...blah blah... the bible belt ...blah blah mass delusions.
Another ongoing delusion ...blah blah... republican base ...blah blah ...
After the NSA saga, after all the information Edward Snowden has shared with us, you still want to play this asinine partisanship game ??
When will you wake up to the fact that you, an "enlightened liberal" (since you used the word "delusion" to describe your opponents), is as much a victim of the so-called, in your own words, "mass delusion" as those "deluded nemesis" of yours, the "Bible belt Republicans" ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
No more so than the rest of the world wants the idiotic USA morals and ideas infecting their societies.
Worked for one of the big four Australian banks and would regularly get complaints from customers who couldn't provide their name in the Sender field on funds transfers due to dodgy substring checking.
Upon looking into the issue further, we found that the word list being filtered for had been taken many years earlier from a crappy email filtering list and also included "warez", "teens" and some bizarre racist terms that I'd never come across in my life.
Despite regularly causing complaints, the high cost associated with any development (along with the fact that the bank ran their Internet Banking as a cost centre at the time) went unfixed for years. When it finally came time to fixing it I got the lucky job of working on the requirements, and got a chuckle from many of the executives that I needed to signoff from.
What is that?
Both are terrible, but the police state version the US is setting up is worse. Firewalls can be circumvented. FBI vans showing up because you searched for 'backpack' and 'rice cooker' are a bit harder to ignore.
I like how you target others but not the US, for years they tried to ban/taboo sex, and still do to a large extent. The even called/targeted people 'communists' because they enjoy a good titty, oral sex or even masturbation.
Watch the move The People vs. Larry Flynt, laughable how people reacted to seeing a women's entire body [her 'who haa' "taco"] the government at the national and state level claimed it was over selling it in corner stores, and exposing it to children, but they had laws in place banning you from showing a women's [who--- forget it I'll just say] pussy.
You have the same thing again because "children' can be exposed to sex far easier on the internet. It isn't about censorship, to protect children, it is still taboo to watch "freaky" sex acts or to see a hardon or pussy. And there is far worse, women getting paid and willingly being beaten and "fake raped", PBS had a special on how the porn industry has gotten to a point where anything goes, even things you could not imagine.
I owe my apologies to a certain game development company for not understanding this particular reason.
Now I feel much more better than their testers, while my nickname would be banned for releasing a new patch, and they wanted me to beat them all.
A nice idea, but what could possibly be worse than "Conservative politician"?
Somebody needs to make a very popular game that includes game data in .sex files - all of a sudden there will be massive public outcry.
In fighting gym, an individual gets a good exposure to make his fitness, improves his physical activeness, and reduces fat from his body, increases his stamina, strength, martial arts and gym instructors provides you a friendly and supportive environment.
I spent days researching a sub-string problem like this six years ago:
http://irolo.net/mambo_and_sex
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
I had a similar situation: I was failing to get emails from one person. It turned out that this person had in their SIG their job title which included the word "specialist". Unfortunately, the Outlook spam filter was seeing "cialis" inside "specialist" and putting the messages into the trash.
Because of they have the power to. Prove how dangerous it is to give them any power at all. When you have the chance at new constitutions dont do it.
Think more carefully how they abuse it. Perhaps we can strip them of it one by one.
It appears the only way
Democracy's have no votes on this stuff so are no different than dictators. Fake elections that have the same people in power over and over might fool most of the people but when it ends the fall out is going to be biblical. The same computers they use against us will soon be turned against them.
You think the UK have a supposedly "ELECTED" and "DEMOCRATIC" government?
The Rothschild are based in the UK.
They are part of the Zionist Illuminati Jew World Order.
The UK is about to become a new fascist state where Big Brother sees it all.
Many have demented that the book "1984" is only fiction - but I say they are too blind to make the connection between fictional futurism (back when the book was written) and today when the fiction have started to become reality.