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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."

10 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Along with anyone who lives in Essex by Neil_Brown · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or Sussex, or who is researching Wessex.

  2. Uh oh by Antipater · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Uh oh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Worse, this is for LoL. If the little MOBA tykes get worked up over things like this and step outside for the first time in their lives, we might have hordes of twitching kids shouting obscenities at anyone who doesn't twitch at the exact same frequency as they do, and also they'll smell bad.

  3. Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... by SuperTechnoNerd · · Score: 4, Funny

    You know your post will never make it through to the Brits, right?

  4. Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... by Cryacin · · Score: 3, Funny

    So the brits won't be able to access expertsexchange.com and pay to copy and paste code anymore?

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    Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
  5. Googlebomb Cameron by sir_eccles · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  6. Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Your comment is now cencored in the UK due to the word 'erect'.

  7. This is a clbuttic mistake by Minwee · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  8. Re:Is it really that sensitive? by monkeyhybrid · · Score: 4, Funny

    How sensitive is this filter really? How does it affect the residents of

    I think you forgot to complete the end of your sentence.

  9. Re:Great Firewall of China is bad enough ... by burnttoy · · Score: 4, Funny

    A good friend of mine got into a "conversation" about the Janet Jackson nip-slip incident.

    It went roughly like this:

    Antagonist: "But what if my children saw it"
    My Friend: "But nipples are for children..."

    Touche.

    --
    Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.