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.'"
Re:monkey crotch? (Score:2, Interesting)
Bumfuckistan!
Banned: Juggalo (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of the banned words are amusing for various reasons. Some have fairly obvious explicit meanings, others do not. Some examples of messages that will be banned after this goes into effect:
"I am putting a new roof on my house and the stringer length is 18 feet."
"Did you see the new wuutang clan movie on netflix?"
"When using distance measuring equipment in aircraft, it measures the slant length between the VOR and the aircraft."
"When approaching to land, you should retard the throttle abeam the intended landing point."
"I want to go land at Bremerton Airport, IACO identifier PWT."
"When running long distances, you should be careful of joint pain in your knees."
"Calculus is often considered to be a harder class than algebra."
"Juggalo fatso got jesus" * (All words in this one are banned)
Wow. This is good stuff. I often wonder what is going on in these people's heads when they come up with lists like this. They are not sane as we know it.
Is this technically feasible? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking about this the other day as a technical challenge.
Assuming their SMS system handles tens of thousands of texts per second, each of which needs to be tested against this user-definable dictionary of 1600 words, is it even possible for the platform to keep up? Are there sophisticated search / pattern matching algorithms for testing a message against 1600 substrings? I can think of a very naive way to do this, but I'm sure it would not scale.
How would one implement this kind of high-speed pattern matching??
Language evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the most pointless thing with language bans and censorship of this kind is that it's exactly why we -have- so many double entendres and such. Every time a culture, religion, politician, parent, teacher, whomever, tells someone that saying something is offensive, the best they usually manage is the creation of some other way of stating the same thing. Even if that involves making up new words. Beyond that, the very children who everyone is usually trying to protect with language bans like this, are the absolute masters at creating new words to circumvent such things.
Only in English ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if they only will ban this list and words in English, how about the same words (meanings I mean) in their language ? are they banned too ?
Agreed, stop the hate, because this is a good move (Score:5, Interesting)
After all, don't people realize the horrible things that can happen when someone gets offended?
I found this documentary [youtube.com] about the terrible consequences of being offended. It recounts the gruesome details of people who have been offended, went to sleep, and woke up the next morning with leprosy.
It's good that Pakistan is stopping these atrocities before they get out of hand.
It's a well studied problem (Score:5, Interesting)
With a maximum character length of 140 characters, 1600 strings to match, and assuming 8 character long strings, it would take 140*8*1600=1,792,000 character matches per message if you do it naively. That is only a millisecond on modern GHz processors, but when processing large numbers of messages using embedded processors, that is probably a few more cycles than you want to spend on each message. You can do better by using Knuth-Morris-Pratt or Boyer-Moore. Since we can pre-process the strings to be matched, this means it takes only 140*1600*k=224,000*k (for some k determined by the algorithm). This is better, but not by much.
Notice that the dominant factor is the 1600 strings to be matched. If you really care about performance, then you want to get rid of that factor. Simplest way is to build a finite-state automaton. If it is encoded as an NFA, the performance won't be much better than before, but if you encode it as a DFA, then each message can be processed in only 140 table lookups. The downside of this is the size of the lookup tables. In the worse case, expect them to take terabytes of space depending on the particular 1600 strings being matched.
There are algorithms like Rabin-Karp and Aho-Corasick that might take less space while still taking only ~140 character operations. The practical answer, is to try DFA, RK, and AC to see which, if any, don't require too much preprocessing space, and then use one of those. The space requirements will depend on the particular text involved, but there are good odds that the tables for DFA will be small, and even better odds that the tables for RK and AC will be small.
Searching and sorting are two of the most well studied algorithmic problems in computer science. If you ever find yourself wondering how to do them efficiently, there is a good chance that very smart people have already figured out how to do it.
Re:Is this technically feasible? (Score:5, Interesting)
hardware accel.
its how routers do DPI these days.
any real firewall worth anything has hardware support for string finding, substrings, etc.
since routing is now 'boring' and its all worked out; the new hotness is to have 'apps' run on high speed router platforms and 'do things' at realtime speeds with your data.
now, aren't you sorry you asked?
Re:ROFL (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Looser? (Score:5, Interesting)
Animal lovers will appreciate the banning of the words "Cockfight," and "Pussy Cat." Rich people will get behind "Deposit," "Penthouse," and "Showtime." Reporters will love "Hostage," "Kill," "Murder," "Suicide," "Sniper," and presumably "Stupid." Construction workers seem to get the best with the banning of "Deeper," "Back Door," "Laid," "Banging," "Dome," "Harder," "Hole," "Joint," "Period," "Slant," "Screw," and "Budweiser." Everyone else will get behind the banning of such horrible words as "Creamy," "Jugs," and "K Mart." And pretty much all feminine hygiene is, by definition, unhygienic.
Strangely, they banned both root words and modifiers of root words... like calling out ass AND ass clown, ass banger, etc. It's like they don't know how filtering, or words, work. Also, they banned the phrases "XXX" which is, itself, a censor word to represent something else.