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The Clbuttic Mistake

This week the Daily Telegraph brings us an article about the potentially disastrous results of over-eager language filtration software. The newspaper pointed to one particular phrase to highlight the problems of substituting supposedly inoffensive words for obscenities:

“President Abraham Lincoln was buttbuttinated by an armed buttailant after a life devoted to the reform of the US consbreastution.“

The error is caused by poorly programmed anti-obscenity filters - similar to spell checkers - that automatically replace words considered rude or offensive with more acceptable variants. “Butt” replaces “ass”, “breast” is substituted for “tit”, and so on.

Less well-developed versions of this software do not just replace the ‘naughty’ words, but also alter longer words which contain banned letter combinations, so “assassination” becomes “buttbuttination” and “entitlement” becomes “enbreastlement”.

The whole thing reminds us at bdaily of AOL’s Scunthorpe Problem in the 90s.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .