[returnzero]

Many years ago (ca. 2009?) at a previous employer we had an enterprise email scanner which included a content filtering feature which could block "pornographic images". We ended up turning it off as it had too many false positives since it was an insurance company that dealt with injuries so a lot of legitimate injury photos would get classed as porn and blocked. I think it was basically looking at how much of an image was skin tones.

The more interesting thing about that feature was that it A) only blocked nude images of white people, and B) would aggressively block photos of golden retrievers much to the annoyance of someone in the claims team who bred them and occasionally received photos to her work email.

[HeavenFox]

In China:

* During COVID, a medical school professor complains his class livestream would get cut off constantly without warning because he is teaching anatomy and showing pictures.

* Civics class online quiz. Multiple choice question. A: *; B: *; C: *; D: * - apparently all four choices are censored because they are names of Chinese leader.

* A police officer complains his files related to a rape case he is investigating was deleted by the cloud service provider

[suzzer99]

Google docs spell/grammar check shuts off if the word "anal" appears anywhere in a sentence. https://imgur.com/dTJmsTt

For some reason "anal" and the F-bomb are the only two words I can find where it does this.

The craziest part is if you type something like "analss gland" it figures out you're trying to type "anal gland" and shuts down spellcheck, even though anal gland (dogs) is a perfectly g-rated use of the word anal.

https://imgur.com/KjWcQJm

[Freak_NL]

Even the word fuck can be perfectly acceptable in plenty of contexts. Weird that someone went to the trouble of building in weird kill-switch exceptions in a spell checker.

“This feature remains severely disliked by users, with feedback such as ‘Fuck this moronic new button!’ being an example of the milder responses.”

[causi]

Sometimes I think there's a specific person at Google with some kind of vocabulary-related mental illness. Just try and get Google Voice Typing to type the word "o'clock". You can stand there saying it over and over, and Google won't stop listening indicating it's hearing and interpreting the word, but it just refuses to type it.

[benj111]

what happens if you miss spell a word though?

"my anal ysis shows..."

that doesnt get flagged as a spelling error?

why is it even a 'feature'? someone had to go in add a switch for the word anal to turn spell check off. it isnt like they just dont want to be involved with swear words. this is a feature that makes the app worse?!?

plus anal isnt even a swear word. how do you want me to describe the hole where the shit comes out? this is just wrong on so many levels.

[stevesimmons]

I used to work at a place that blocked a significant fraction of incoming Dutch emails. Eventually we figured out it rejected any message with "kunt" ("he/she can"), which is not exactly uncommon. Apparently they were flagged as deliberate attempts to circumvent the profanity filter.

[benj111]

Do you want to block attempts to skirt the profanity filter? How to you avoid reintroducing the Scunthorpe problem?

Jeez, darn are all mild forms of expletives, should they be blocked? What about bloody? That many anglophones would go to if you couldn't swear?

Surely if you can't use those, people are just going to say gosh instead, or Smeg or frel. Should they also be banned. Swear words exist for a reason, you can perhaps get rid of the harshest forms, you are never going to remove the need or desire for people to swear though.

[wink]

good ol' email filters with the *.stud.university.edu emails (stud as in student)...

[MerelyMortal]

"A)" reminds me of a certain Better Off Ted episode.

(If anyone here hasn't watched the series, do yourself a favor and do so.)

[papito]

Better Off Ted had a great premise, but it didn't survive past two seasons because it didn't "click". It was the right idea, but just like with successful shows, certain magic that not even the creators understand has to happen. And it didn't happen here, which is a shame.

That said, still a very entertaining show.

[dorkwood]

I once tried to post an image to Discord over and over, only to keep receiving one of those "there's been a problem" messages.

It turned out the untextured 3D pig's head in my image was tripping Discord's porno filter. I can only assume it was the shape of its snout.

[ramesh31]

There was an XKCD comic around that timeframe: https://xkcd.com/1425/

And it really sticks out as one of the few paradigm shifts we’ve had in the last 10 years. In 2009, it really was an impossible task to do that kind of image recognition. But by 2012, it was available in a library for anyone.

[nl]

Small correction - it wasn't until 2014 that it was widely available in libraries.

AlexNet was September 2012.

FlickR did their XKCD1425 bird detector in Oct 2014: https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o...

[HWR_14]

Wasn't it about 5 years between when the XKCD comic was published and it became a library. Powered by the work of numerous research teams.

[w-ll]

Even outside of image recognition, this is my most common referenced XKCD comic, with non tech managers trying to guess timelines of work.

[bogota]

> aggressively block photos of golden retrievers

That gave me a good laugh

[russdill]

In this case, they blur the image and allow the user to click to unblur.