Bah, humbug! Virgin Media censors Charles D**kens Some Virgin Media telly customers attempting to tune in to various programmes over the weekend were greeted with ludicrous censoring of well-known names, such as Charles D**kens and Jarvis C**ker. The cockup was reported by The Media Blog, which posted various screenshots sent in by bemused viewers using Virgin Media TV's on- …
It started as and still exists as, I think, a radio programme (that funny thing where the pictures are in your head), called, "Any Questions". Damned good too, much less photogenic preening and self-importance. It had or has (I live abroad now and am out of touch) a follow up when listeners could write in, something like, "Amy Answers".
Ah children, think you invented it all.
Yeah, these spam filters are a pain in the ****[1], as a magna ***[2] laude software spe******st[3] graduate whoever designed these filters should be ******inated[4] and their body thrown in a c****[5] I want to watch the cookery program about pan fried ****ake[6] mushrooms in ****burn's[7] Port.
Added to which I can’t find out how to repair the ****el[8] engine in my bike.
[1] arse
[1] Cum
[3] cialis
[4] ass x2
[5] anal
[6] shit
[7] Cock
[8] Wank
Paris, see 8 & 7 above
That place is deliberately blackholed by my machines for being utterly useless and cluttering up my Google searches. "Pay for a result that probably won't be useful anyway". Nope. I'm not going to pay for support from a company I've no service agreement with.
It does look like PigeonRank agrees with me, as it didn't turn up last time I searched on a non-sanitised machine.
I could sort of understand someone wanting to put, say, live subtitles through an automated censorship device, but if you trust the output of (notoriously unreliable) censorship software over the judgement of your own staff then I think it is time to find a new line of business.
As a broadcaster or publisher you get the data direct from the channels in question.
You can then ask for clips of specific programmes to do the mag writeups.
That said, you're absolutely right that TV guide info should never go through a censorship application. If there's objectionable material in there then that's the lookout of the channel - it's ITV that gets bollocked when the X-Factor offends, not Virgin/Sky/Freeview/Freesat.
Once Virgin re-write any of the TV guide data then they're opening themselves up to a bollocking from OFCOM, as it then becomes easy for the channel to claim they didn't put the objectionable content there, must have been Virgin - especially if nobody on other broadcasters objects!
Has automatic censoring ever worked well for anyone, ever? Genuinely curious here.
Seems like the whole thing is so fragile it would make more sense to have a real human doing the job instead.
(insert rant about the pointlessness of aste***king out letters in the hope they make things less rude despite the word meaning being patently obvious)
Brings back happy memories of the /Earth & Beyond/ MMORPG. That censor didn't even pay attention to white space so "Gosh it's here!" would appear as ""Go%! *&'s here!"" leading to hours of fun from everyone trying to work out what the word was. They even added words from other languages which taught people how to swear in Swedish, French and German amongst other languages.
The thing that makes me suspicious, though, is this: the EPG is hardly random untrusted data, it's not like they get it from user-generated content. So if they don't want any swearing in it, why use a filter when they create all the content in the first place? Just tell their employees who write it not to use any swears. Your publicity stunt theory is at least credible.
I had a problem in trying to book into a London hotel from my US HQ. The confirmation kept being dumped by the smut filter. It was so bad that it went straight in the bin without notifying me that it had been filtered.
This happened when I sent the confirmation from my personal system to the company system. In the end we captured the very dirty message and indeed it was just a hotel booking confirmation. It turned out that the designer of the WEB site had named all the image files used to render the pictures of the hotel TIT001.jpg and by the time the smut filter got to TIT003.jpg it was just too many T*Ts for it to take.
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