All of these decisions are made by filter lists. To be expected that a good amount of false positives will occur. They will improve over time. And anyway, our machine overlords don't really care about the soft fleshy meatbags that resent the new world order.
Isis crisis: Facebook makes Bristol lass an unperson
Not so long ago you could barely move on Facebook for all the exquisitely crafted beheading videos. Now you can’t even watch a cute cat video – if your first name is Isis, anyway. Spare a thought for Isis Thomas, a 27 year-old from Bristol, who found this out when she was locked out of her Facebook account. Isis has fired off …
COMMENTS
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Friday 1st July 2016 14:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
In the 90s I briefly worked on "protecting the children" - helping out an internet provider that served several schools. It had an internet filter that was in effect a list of all the rude words that the administrators could think of.
We (like many others) "discovered" the scunthorpe problem and tried in vain to work around it.
If it's still happening 20 years later I don't see how it will ever get any better - you'll always have someone saying "but if I just tweak that regular expression, we'll be sorted".
Anyway, the problem is not the stuff that labels itself as offensive material - some people might find pictures of women's breasts "offensive", but it's not the stuff that you really need to block.
The real problem is the server with an innocuous name, containing files with innocuous names, with contents that you cannot unsee.
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Friday 1st July 2016 15:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Isis IS another stupid label
Just imagine if the abbreviation for Islamic State was the first choice (I believe it IS for some) then trying to filter that out IS simply not going to work.
Why do we have this apparently benign label for them, just because that's what they say they aspire to? I think we should call them for what they are: murderous bastards.
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Saturday 2nd July 2016 22:13 GMT J.G.Harston
Re: Isis IS another stupid label
"most arab countries call them Daesh"
Well, duh, of course they do, because they speak Arabic, and Daesh (al-Dawlah al-Islamīyah fī al-ʻIrāq wa-al-Shām) is the Arabic for ISIS, just as Russian-speakers when speaking Russian spoke about the CCCP, and German speakers when speaking German speak about Deutchland. Only poncy tw*ts sprinkle their conversation des jours with foreign bon mots.
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Monday 4th July 2016 15:19 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: Isis IS another stupid label
I find use of "Daesh" preferable *especially* when someone's speaking English.
Reason being that whether or not it actually pisses them off in reality (and there's some scepticism about that claim)- it at least doesn't do them the favour of (a) directly parroting their name of choice and thus (b) also repeating their own self-justifying propaganda of being an "Islamic state" in the native language of the listening audience. Even with the regulatory "so-called" disclaimer or similar boilerplate attached, you know some people are going to make the mental association regardless.
With "Daesh", non-Arabic speakers have to find out what it means and in doing are likely to be made aware of its derogatory connotations, meaning any association with its repetition is less likely to be positive.
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Saturday 2nd July 2016 19:18 GMT Vic
Re: Isis IS another stupid label
I think we should call them for what they are: murderous bastards.
The Combined United Northern Territories of Syria.
Vic.
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Monday 4th July 2016 11:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Work the system for your own benefit.
Couldn't agree more, it's mostly full of bellends but it's tool, quite a useful one. As an amateur photographer it put me contact with some very interesting people and I'm now writing a photography book, selling my photos to a wider audience and I've got to meet a lot of very nice people in person who are also as serious about photography as me.
So whenever I see posts like yours, I appreciate that my experience may be the rare exception, but some of us use it purely as a tool to improve our real world lives for the better rather than becomg just another tool ourselves.
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Friday 1st July 2016 13:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Isis
"Isis was worshipped as the ideal mother and wife as well as the patroness of nature and magic. She was the friend of slaves, sinners, artisans and the downtrodden, but she also listened to the prayers of the wealthy, maidens, aristocrats and rulers."
A bit like what the Conservatives claim to be.
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Friday 1st July 2016 14:21 GMT Tim Jenkins
Re: Isis
Or her parents were Dylan fans.
There's a cracking clip of him performing 'Isis' during the 1975 Rolling Thunder Review (presumably filmed for 'Renaldo and Clara') that does the rounds on various video sites. One suspects that facepaint might not have been the only white powder backstage...
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Friday 1st July 2016 15:38 GMT Kubla Cant
Re: Isis
I've never heard of Isis Academy, but Oxford has had a magazine called Isis since 1892, and an eponymous river (aka Thames) for rather longer.
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Friday 1st July 2016 13:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Like-block
Pretty sure 99% of commentards have the 'like buttons' blocked. Although maybe not, because I swear people made more of a fuss about web bugs when they were invisible (ie tracking pixels).
Anyway, people have short memories. Facebook was never just a normal start-up. Remember how hard the controlled media pushed Facebook at the beginning. Something like this doesn't get off the ground without the right backing.
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Friday 1st July 2016 15:48 GMT Mike 16
Re: Like-block
If I actually had a Facebook, Twitter, etc. account I'd be more concerned. Even without such accounts, I do appreciate websites like www.schneier.com that block social network tracking by default, using
http://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/
If the "like" and "share" buttons exist, and aren't greyed out, well, that tells you something about the website you are on.
(Note, in case I was insufficiently clear, a site with a "like" button is tracking you whether you have a Facebook account or not. Yes, you can block it, but wouldn't it be nice for the site owner not to throw you to the wolves for a pittance?)
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Friday 1st July 2016 20:21 GMT Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Re: Like-block
Dear Facebook. We have to inform you that our internet usage policy requires us to permanently block offensive webpages like faceboot.com and fecesbook.com. As your domain name is confusingly similar to these sites, and your site often carries improper content, we do not see a possibility to make a policy exception for you. Consider changing your name to something less offensive.
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Friday 1st July 2016 13:54 GMT M7S
Perhaps FB are taking a leaf out of the Icelanic Law Books?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/iceland-parents-told-children-cannot-be-called-harriet-or-duncan-because-they-are-not-on-a-list-of-9567483.html
To be fair to our new footballing overlords I read only the other day that the situation has since been improved and in fact the committee relating to such names will be abolished along with these restrictions, however for a while the two children (now 10 and 12 or thereabouts) had passports listing them as "Boy Cardew" and "Girl Cardew".
Of course if lots of people went down this route as a form of "civil obedience" then the authorities and also people like FB would rapidly find their abilities to manage (and monetise) records went to pot and change their tune.
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Monday 4th July 2016 11:12 GMT Dan 55
Re: Perhaps FB are taking a leaf out of the Icelanic Law Books?
Not that Britain is free from that nonsense. The passport office says it must take the name from the foreign birth certificate even though the naming rule used wouldn't make much sense if the child had been born Britain. If a child can have two nationalities then two names should also be allowed given that naming rules and nationality go hand in hand.
There is a list of exceptions, but you always come across the rule that proves the exception and it seems the passport office is not fully aware of the exceptions allowed by the general register office. If I didn't have the Brexit deadline I'd have probably made more enquires but as it is I just wanted the citizenship officially recognised and passport for my kid before an arbitrary date that could be used against him in the future.
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Friday 1st July 2016 14:33 GMT sawatts
Banjo Problem
Reminds me of the Banjo Problem - in the 90s a (UK) school introduced a naughty-word-filter inherited from the US, which was discovered to ban the word "banjo", presumably not for musical reasons. This probably introduced a generation of school kids to a new meaning to the word.
The real problem is that the meaning of words are fluid - especially in slang or vulgar - and meaning is in the context. Virtually any word, if used correctly, can be a euphemism for John Thomas. On one forum I currently visit the banned words list include "Wang" - the 3rd most common surname in the world!
For the Scunthorpe Problem, I can only presume that the people who devise the filters haven't yet discovered word boundary tokens ('\<' and '\>').
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Friday 1st July 2016 23:27 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Banjo Problem
"For the Scunthorpe Problem, I can only presume that the people who devise the filters haven't yet discovered word boundary tokens ('\<' and '\>')."
And it's takes kids 5 seconds to write "stupidcuntface" to get around the word boundaries. Unless the filter is going to spell check everything and hold enormous whitelists.
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Friday 1st July 2016 14:35 GMT Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese
Facebook filtering
The automated filtering on Facebook seems somewhat primitive, especially in comparison to some of the other pretty whizzy stuff they do elsewhere.
I use FB quite a bit for promoting one of my sideline activities, and really struggled to get them to accept an ad for a promoted post because there was something in there which was falling foul of their filters. I was stumped as to what the problem was, and it took quite a few rounds against some automated services before I could actually get a human to review and OK the ad.
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Friday 1st July 2016 17:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Dear Facebook user
please forward scans, copies of some of the most important and sought after documents in your possession, passport, driving license, etc to prove to a faceless entity that couldn't give a shit about your privacy that you are who you say you are, because that's so fucking important in weeding out nutters.
Dear Facebook, GFY.