Saturday 13 January 2018

An arrow once loosed...


John just pulled a post showing a picture of a crying child with one word underneath - 'Discuss'. The trouble is that once you put these posts up they are there forever in the sidebar, it is just that nobody can discuss them.

The other strange thing about putting up posts is the way that '&' turns into the word 'ampersand' in the title. I once wrote 'ampersand' into a title and it published as '&'. You have to find these things out for yourself unless you attend night-school classes in blog publication and code writing.

I heard recently that there is a code you can attach to emails and other things which makes them automatically self-destruct after they have been read. How useful that must be if you want to tell your area manager that he is a bastard and still keep your job. The added bonus would be that he could be diagnosed as a delusional paranoiac when he tries to show it to the general manager.

A few years ago I typed a message on H.I.'s employers' internal email system for her, and as it involved the employment of artist's models, it contained the word, 'nude'.

The email's security system has software which scans for obscenities, and it would seem that the word 'nude' was deemed obscene by the programmers, so it was immediately blocked and returned unsent along with a warning message about abusing the system by sending obscene messages.

I love the notion of a load of people in an office in, say, Slough, all hunched over their computers trying to remember every swearword they have known since childhood. They would have to turn a blind eye to words like 'bottom', or design an even more expensive program which considered words in context. I don't know how many people are called 'Fanny' these days, but I bet they would have a problem using H.I.'s system.

I imagine the scene in the software designers office to be something like this: A tired programmer has printed a huge list of obscenities over a period of days and nights, then he shows it to his proof-reader. His proof-reader spends half an hour trawling through it, occasionally asking what a particular slang word means, then says, "You missed out 'felching'.

The really creepy thing is that when I went back to remove the offending 'n' word from H.I.'s email, it vanished before my eyes. They had wormed their way into her personal emails and deleted it for her.

The technical experts said that was impossible, but I know it isn't.

13 comments:

  1. I wonder if the word 'trump' (fart) ever reached the censor's desk?

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  2. This rule is circumnavigated by those who know by muddling the letters up.

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  3. John has posted that picture before. I almost commented on it, but let it go. Apparently the mill can grind with the water that is past.

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  4. I didn't post the photo before , it was a new one of the Prof as a baby. I kind of liked it. But pulled it because of three particularly nasty troll comments

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    1. I noticed that some of your commenters are so hung up on Trump he was identified as a young Donald, even down to the hairstyle.

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    2. There was a lot worse than that

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    3. I'm happy I recognized the eyebrow. I am so sorry the evil tide rolled through. I am such an old lady/naif I don't expect it to get so revolting. I think I missed the worst of it, and simply say of what I read, "I'm glad John left this, so people can see trolls at work." That's not right; speaking up is, except, 1) it's your blog, 2) I'm a bigger proponent of drowning them in silence. And see, here I am using Tom's blog for a soap box. Anyway, I'm still patting my back for recognizing The Prof. Priceless picture.

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    4. Everyone is using my blog as a soap box at the moment. I have a few hecklers, but not trolls.

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  5. Using your criteria I imagine that very few of John's posts would ever get through.

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