Pakistan Bans 1600 Words and Phrases For Texting 356
Hugh Pickens writes "In a move reminiscent of George Carlin's Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has handed down a ban on about 1,600 terms and phrases it has deemed obscene and told carriers they have seven days to block the words on their networks, or face legal action. 'The filtering is not good for the system and may degrade the quality of network services — plus it would be a great inconvenience to our subscribers if their SMS was not delivered due to the wrong choice of words,' says an official at a one of the telecoms. The list includes such words and phrases as 'idiot,' 'monkey crotch,' 'athlete's foot,' 'damn,' 'deeper,' 'four twenty,' 'fornicate,' 'looser,' and 'go to hell,' among others. There are also various double entendres included in the ban such as 'beat your meat' or 'flogging the dolphin.' Mohammad Younis, a spokesman for the PTA, says the ban is 'the result of numerous meetings and consultations with stakeholders' after consumers complained of receiving offensive text messages. 'Nobody would like this happening to their young boy or girl.'"
At least they have a public list. (Score:5, Informative)
More list forensics (Score:5, Informative)
- A lot of superstrings seem to be banned; I guess they expect the operators to censor the longest possible match.
- I guess no one's allowed to do research on HSV in Pakistan, since "herpes" is banned.
- How long before someone turns the blocking of "lesbian" and "gay" into a human rights issue? Especially "gay pride"?
- Some of these bans are actually dangerous to public safety: "sniper", "hostage", and "stroke" are all being banned.
Re:Woefully ineffective (Score:4, Informative)
228. Creamy.
No it won't. On the other hand neither will positive comments about icecream.
Re:Is this technically feasible? (Score:5, Informative)
What, you think they're going to do this on a Commodore 64?
I looked it up, and folks in the US send 80 billion SMSes per month. That works out to about 30k SMSes/sec on average across the entire United States. Now, I realize that certain times of day are more likely to have SMSes than others, so let's say, to a first order, the peak rate of SMSes is 100k/sec. Now divide that among all the cell towers, understanding that some will be busier than others.
Let's say a given cell tower has to process 100 SMSes a second, each at the full 160 character limit. That's 16kB/s. Let's say each word take 1000 cycles to test for, which should be on the high side since it assumes you can't use, say, a trie to take advantage of common word roots, or use pattern matching accelerators (which are quite common in this space [google.com]). 16kB/s * 1000 * 1600 = 25.6Gcyc/sec. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't.
A single board in one of these cellular base stations has literally dozens of processor chips, most with multiple cores, running in the GHz range. And that's just one board. My employer sells a chip in this space which crunches away 10Gcyc/sec across all of its 8 processors, and our customers put dozens of these on each board.
On GSM networks, SMSes are control channel messages. They go via a low bandwidth side channel that is nowhere near as compute-intensive as the main voice channel. If you're provisioned to handle a certain number of phone calls, you're more than adequately provisioned to handle SMSes and the corresponding filtering, as long as you do the filtering at the base station.
Re:Easy to get around and disrupted (Score:5, Informative)
for(p=text,p2=buffer;*p;p++) { if (!isspace(*p)) *p2++ = LEETMAP(*p); }
for(i=0;i<1600;i++) {
result = pcre_exec(badpatterns[i].regex, 0, buffer, strlen(buffer), 0, 0, optvec, sizeof(optvec)/sizeof(optvec[0]));
if ( result >= 0) {
national_database[ subscriber_id ].strikes ++;
(* badpatterns[i].punitive_action) ( national_database[ subscriber_id ].strikes, &gps_position[ subscriber_id], buffer, DISPATCH_POLICE);
return MSG_BLOCKED;
}
}
Re:Banned: Juggalo (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ROFL (Score:4, Informative)
In India, showing your bare feet to someone is extremely offensive. There are similar traditions in Pakistan so it probably is part of an insult of some sort. Just a guess though.
Re:Hey now everybody chill (Score:5, Informative)
All of those things happen in Pakistan, but each one is illegal except for one*.
- Age of consent for marriage is 18 for males & 16 for females under Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961. Underage marriages are illegal.
- Throwing acid in a person's face was explicitly criminalized in May of this year and can get you life in prison. Under older Muslim law, the victim had the right to return the favor and have acid dribbled in the eyes of her attacker.
- Burqa wearing is optional and largely AFAIK common mostly in areas that border Afghanistan. Stoning a woman to death for not wearing a burqa is murder.
* The one legal bit you implied was forcing your wife to have sex. Pakistani law requires that the victim not be legally married to the perpetrator in its definition of rape, just like in many US states up until North Carolina was the last to close the loophole in 1993. Many states still don't protect a woman if she's incapacitated and unable to refuse her husband.
Re:Hey now everybody chill (Score:5, Informative)
That's nice. But the AOC isn't enforced outside of major cities. Pakistan is quickly sliding into a imperialist islamist shithole. Meaning that sharia is the law of the day, and a wife or women who isn't subservient is disrespectful of their man, and in turn god. And where the whole sharia law thing has kicked into full gear, there's no such thing as rape. Unless you can find 8 male witnesses. And of course you can't rape your wife, she has to submit.
The Burqa is also becoming a 'norm' throughout the country as the government tries to appease the hardliners. Keep up with the times AC.
Re:Looser? (Score:5, Informative)
If only we used English Curses in the First place! (Score:4, Informative)
The weird thing is, we don't text in English! We "txt" a bizarre 1337 Roman Urdu, with lavish sprinkling of punjabi curse words.
Awesome language, that Punjabi, it has both, some of the very best poetry *and* curses.
So yeah, our dear president, we will still continue to crude messages about you, good luck stopping us. (I could swear one in ten messages is something disparaging about the president, given my inbox)
This is, of course, if the list *is* real. First of all, it's unlikely PTA would have revealed it, and secondly, I don't think they would dare censor something like Jesus Christ. All the churches would be in uproar, and the Supreme court would rip them a new one.
(*BTW*, just to give an idea, Pakistan has one the highest rates for text messaging in the world. We have six companies offering extremely competitive sms packages, and we don't have incoming charges bullshit that you have there, so good luck filtering those tens of millions of messages sent every day.)
Re:More list forensics (Score:3, Informative)
Why you assume that this theocracy is special only because it's a Muslim theocracy? We all know what was happening in a Christianity theocracy, and it's not better.