Scunthorpe, AOL and NLP

Dafydd Gibbon, U Bielefeld


Grade your sensitivity to NLP and ethics:

Which of these questions does the following excerpt suggest to you?
  1. A wide open job market for specialists on morphological analysis?
  2. The need for theses on NLP and ethics?
  3. The failure of semsnticists to educate the world?
  4. The conviction of commercial online providers that the significance of their activities can be reduced to string-matching?
  5. The universality of verbal totalitarianism?
  6. The limitlessness of human folly?
Communicated by Peter Ladkin:
>From the latest RISKS:
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 15:28:52 +0100 (BST)
From: Clive Feather 
Subject: AOL censors British town's name!
  [Clive forwarded to RISKS an long item from the Computer underground Digest,
  Thu Apr 11, 1996, Volume 8 : Issue 29, ISSN 1004-042X, from Doug Blackie
   that relates an experience Doug had in trying to
  register with AOL.  He entered his name "Blackie" and his home town
  "Scunthorpe", and found that AOL's (indecency-filtering) registration
  program would not accept that combination.  After various discussions with
  the AOL folks in Dublin, he discovered that he could register properly if
  he entered the town as "Sconthorpe".  As a result of this curious situation,
  AOL has announced that the name of the town will henceforth be known as
  "Sconthorpe".  The entire saga is documented in the Scunthorpe Evening
  Telegraph (final edition) of Tuesday, 9 Apr 1996, issue number 30111,
  printed and published by Grimsby and Scunthorpe Newspapers Ltd., Telegraph
  House, Doncaster Road, Scunthorpe, DN15 7RE, UK.  The article was provided
  on-line by David G. Bell , and was included as 
  a part of Doug Blackie's message.  PGN Abstracting.]
Does AOL also disallow `parsers', or possess a French filter to ban dangerous words like `conversation'?

Please feel free to comment.


Dafydd Gibbon, 25 April 1996