Taking the Lord’s name in vain

Le Monde reports the strange case of Yahoo! users suffering repeated and inexplicable failures in registering certain email addresses and personal webpage names. Eventually the root cause is identified (by the users, not Yahoo!). It turns out that Yahoo! had some time past quietly implemented the automatic rejection or deletion of any names including “Allah” or even the substring “allah” appearing in other words. A fact that Yahoo! were curiously reluctant to ‘fess up to even when impacted users were contacting them for help.

Oddly enough, Irish surnames feature prominently – Callahan and Kallaher are both cited. Sea-divided Gaels like myself seem disproportionately affected. This is surely unfair. An Irish terrorist? Why, the very idea is ridiculous.

So, then: no allahs, to avoid abuse and consequent offence. So far so good. However, Le Monde goes on to supply a helpful list of words and phrases that Yahoo! has unaccountably omitted from its forbidden list:

Buddha
Jesus
Jehovah
Yahweh
killallmuslimsandarabs
thenazisaremybestfriends

…and my personal favourite

thejewskilledjesus

Roll up, roll up, while stocks last.

“fuck”, “asshole” and “cunt”, on the other hand, are also banned – an interesting equivalence alongside Allah, which might earn Yahoo! exactly the sort of attention it was hoping to avoid.

Meanwhile, l'Association française pour le nommage Internet en coopération (Afnic), which manages domains ending in .fr, claims to have a more balanced list, including Allah, Bouddha, Dieu, dieux, and diable. “lesnazissontmesmeilleursamis”, on the other hand, has already been reserved by the Parti Socialiste in perpetuity in memory of Francois “Mr Vichy” Mitterand.


Francois Mitterand, yesterday. Ah, sweet. Even after forty years, he was still helpless to resist the urge to cosy up to any nearby Germans…