AOL renames Scunthorpe

The following is an excerpt from the RISKS digest, issue 18.07. As it was posted to comp.risks, there should be no problem with my reposting it here.

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.]

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 11:10:22 -0700
From: kling@ics.uci.edu (Rob Kling)
Subject: Re: AOL censors town's name!

  [The previous item contributed by Clive Feather touches on some further
  serious issues relating to the effectiveness, propriety, and risks
  involved in filters that attempt to censor on the basis of linguistic
  strings; as other examples, side-effects of filtering "couples"
  (RISKS-17.79) and "xxx" (SurfWatch, RISKS-17.81) have been noted in recent
  RISKS postings.

  Rob Kling is a member of the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy,
  the umbrella organization in ACM for RISKS.  He had the following comments
  upon seeing the above message; his comments address just a few of the RISKS
  issues raised.  PGN]

There is a lot of info regarding Scunthorpe obtainable via Alta Vista.
This is a real city and its integrity deserves respect, even if it is
not exactly a place well-known to people in the US.  [For example, see
http://www.computerprint.co.uk/scunthorpe/travel.html and
http://www.computerprint.co.uk/scunthorpe/history.html .]

I can imagine that there might even be some people with the last name of
Scunthorpe.  The willingness of AOL (or other services) to excise identities
in the name of "decency" raises big issues of genuine decency in my view.

Rob Kling

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