colemannugenton Hacker News • Recommends
On “Scunthorpe Problem”
Tom Scott did a video on this: Why Web Filters Don't Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem - link to this video It's well done, like the rest of his content.
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#scunthorpeproblem#contentfiltering#webfilters
Why Web Filters Don't Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem
Tom Scott
6.7M subscribers • 29 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2020.
- Presented by Tom Scott
- May be out of date. Uploaded 10 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
3.6M views10 years ago2 recommendations
Web developmentSoftware designHTTP, REST and GraphQLAlgorithmsWeb and application security
Tom Scott explains the Scunthorpe problem and why naive keyword-based web filters fail to handle context and edge cases.
In a small town with an unfortunate name, let's talk about filtering and innuendo. And use it as an excuse for as many visual jokes as possible. I'm at tomscott.com on Twitter at twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at facebook.com/tomscott and on Instagram as @tomscottgo (Thanks to James Paulsen for prompting me to do this video!)Why it's here
2 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as a clear and entertaining explanation of the Scunthorpe problem and the difficulties of automated content moderation.
thepete2on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font”
There is a video 0 about this censoring-"problem" by Youtuber Tom Scott. He talks about how it's impossible to implement with all edge-cases, easy to circumvent and thus usually not a good idea. Fittingly, the video is filmed in Peniston. 0 link to this video
Crosseye_Jackon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account”
Penistone and Scunthorpe and now Memphis. link to this video As much as I dislike Twitter (I only really use it for work reasons) they are in a no win situation. They either moderate what people post with a flawed system that will never be 100% or be hounded by the "Why won't anyone think of the children" group.
varun_chon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns”
With Tom Scott in particular, there’s a number of his videos that are kinda eerie to watch now with today’s LLM context eg. link to this video
u/BryalTin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions
On “Abbreviation or full name for source file extension?”
Yeah, Tom Scott made a good video on something very similar to this. link to this video
The thought from the top-level comment I find most pertinent is that "it's hard not to offend anyone, but considerably easier not to offend everyone". Whatever you say, someone will always be offended, but it's not that hard to be just a little thoughtful and take at least one extra step to ensure you won't cause needless abrasion.