How spam filters dictated Canadian magazine’s fate

by Jude Sheerin, BBC News

After 90 years, one of Canada’s oldest magazines, The Beaver, is changing its name.  Its publishers say it was only natural that a Canadian history journal should have been named in honour of the industrious dam-building creature which is the country’s national emblem.

But in recent times the magazine’s attempts to reach a new online audience kept falling foul of spam filters – particularly in schools – because beaver is also a slang term for female genitalia. ….

In 1996, residents in the British town of Scunthorpe were initially banned from registering with internet service provider AOL because the town’s name contained an obscenity. This became known as the Scunthorpe problem.

Elsewhere in England, residents of the South Yorkshire town of Penistone and Lightwater in Surrey had the same trouble. …..

The problem, technology experts say, is that with a worldwide web awash with filth, broad blocking rules often result in a false positive, meaning innocent content is binned just to be on the safe side.  Furthermore, distinguishing the e-mail sheep from the goats can be a tricky business, especially given the intensity of the so-called “arms race” between the filters and the spammers. ….

In 2008, a news website run by the American Family Association censored an Associated Press article on the sprinter Tyson Gay. A filter decided that “gay” was an offensive word, which should be replaced with “homosexual”. The resulting article began with the memorable headline: “Homosexual eases into 100m final at Olympic trials”. ….

…. Henry Stern, Cisco Systems’ senior security researcher, says without the blockers, a tsunami of between 250bn and 400bn spam messages a day would deluge our inboxes, crashing computer networks around the world. Report

DCL: trust the BBC to know what’s going on!