Wednesday, March 08, 2006

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…

10 comments:

Desargues said...

Are the two in the picture laying a wreath at the monument of all the German soldiers who died of hardened arteries gorging on foie gras in Paris, waiting to be attacked? That may explain my British head of department's fondness for such jokes as: "Advertisement on eBay: French gun for sale, in excellent condition; never used, dropped once."

I wonder if Yahoo will prevent me from registering 'Lronhubbardisacunt'.

Foot Eater said...

I don't know if Mitterand was partial to foie gras but whatever he ate, he's looking in damn good shape for a corpse.

Gorilla Bananas said...

Here's the tourist website of an Indian city with an interesting name.

Gorilla Bananas said...

Try again.

Ivan the Terrible said...

Hi Des - go for it. We could certainly do with a site like that. Especially if there's a "celebrity retard" section for Tom and John...

Footie - that's a little rich coming from someone about whom is the cold fluorescence of the morgue.

GB - plenty of anagram fun there, potentially. Shame I'm too nice to go for it :)

And Doc, I'm afraid "No harm no foul" won't fly. No forgiveness without repentance is the rule. Just ask Kyle Broflovski...

Ivan the Terrible said...

Yup - that's exactly what I was thinking of too. "Oh my God! They killed Jesus!" "You bastards!" etc. We can't get 'em for the Jew Scouts tho', at least until Baden-Powell is thoroughly horse-whipped first. It's only fair.

BTW, did you know that it's only the year 5766 in the Jewish calendar because of the action of compound interest? 'S a fact, that is. It was in Der Sturmer.

The Aunt said...

I wonder if you can register Doubleyouestungrandtasdemerde.

Ivan the Terrible said...

Sans doute! It's not like they understand French over here, after all...

Sam, Problem-Child-Bride said...

My friend is a purveyor of fine custom (usually tartan) soccer balls. On a drunken whim, not long ago, and after a chat about current world events and the players who are ballsing them up so royally, he went home and registered bushballs.com and dicksballs.com (Cheney). He now is a purveyor of fine leather Bush balls as well, each resplendant with stuff Bush has said.

Anyway, whatever, your political alliegances I'm sure there's been a time in the past 5 years we've all wanted to kick him in the head a bit.

Should anyone be interested at all , his site is balls@tartanballs.net His name is Nigel, he's a Brit in America and I think you just request a bushball or something.

Don't mean to shamelessly peddle but his site just seemed apropos of the irreverant domain name discussion today. Sorry if it's out of order.

Ivan the Terrible said...

No problem, Sam - sounds interesting. After all, those BushBalls will be collectors' items after the Secret Service go round and shoot him in the head.

What about OsamaBalls, tho'. Obviously they'd be smaller and hairier, so tennis balls would seem to be in order. And looking ahead to 2008 he could do HillaryBalls with their patented "sudden swerve to the right" action...