Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,alt.censorship From: aba@dcs.exeter.ac.uk (Adam Back) Subject: Re: naughty word replacements In-Reply-To: sayre@cs.sunysb.edu's message of 15 Jun 1995 05:30:54 GMT Message-ID: Sender: news@exeter.ac.uk (news admin) Cc: sayre@cs.sunysb.edu,aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk,cypherpunks@toad.com,patl@skyclad.lcs.mit.edu Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, U.K. References: <3rogie$5r3@newsserv.cs.sunysb.edu> Date: Sat, 17 Jun 1995 16:44:38 GMT Lines: 186 Johannes Sayre writes on talk.politics.crypto: > In case some flavor of net naughty words control does come into effect, > I propose that while the Conservative night falls temporarily over the > net, we define a commonly understood alternate vocabulary that cannot > be understood to violate the said offending legislation. For example, What an excellent idea! A technological solution to the comms decency bill. How cypherpunkish. How about we automate it so that you can say nice flowery polite looking things, which could not concievably be construed to be indecent, and have a small program sit on top of your newsreader translating that into plain english. Yeah got my interest up sufficiently to knock up this small piece of perl that did: --exxon------------------------------8<------------------------------------- #!/usr/local/bin/perl -s foreach(<>){chop;push(@d,"\L$_");} if ($u) {@d=reverse(@d);} %tran=@d; while(<>) { foreach (split(/\b/,$_)) { /^\w+$/ && push(@w,"\L$_"); } } while (@w) { $word=shift(@w); if ($phrase) {$phrase.=' ';} $phrase.=$word; push(@arr,$word); $t=$tran{$phrase}; if (defined($t)) { print "$t "; $phrase=''; @arr=(); } elsif ($#arr > 10 || !@w) { print shift(@arr),' ';unshift(@w,@arr); @arr=();$phrase=''; } } print $phrase; -------------------------------------8<------------------------------------- Cut out save as exxon, mark as executable with: % chmod 700 exxon Okay now we can do use different dictionaries depending on taste, heres one for the plain english (excuse language, but you dig): --plain------------------------------8<------------------------------------- fuck you may I express my annoyance exxon senator exxon slick willy president clinton government censorship communications decency assholes incompetents asswipe annoying person fucking way out of order highly inappropriate know squat have little knowledge prudish prick person who is overly sensitive to vulgar speech may you rot in hell this has lowered my opinion of you considerably jack booted thugs law enforcement officials gang crowd censor regulate fucking falling over themselves overly keen net information super highway illegal wiretaps much abused so called legitimate wiretap capabilities scared shitless understandably scared -------------------------------------8<------------------------------------- Using the plain english dictionary above you can translate a complaint against the comms decency bill from the original, into this Exxonized version (touched up to add punctuation & capitalization as the program doesn't cope with such niceties). % exxon plain < msg > post ###### exxonized complaint against comms decency bill ######### Senator Exxon may I express my annoyance you're a person who is overly sensitive to vulgar speech. This has lowered my opinion of you considerably for your work on the communications decency bill. President Clinton and his crowd of law enforcement officials seem to be overly keen in their attempts to regulate the information super highway. In my opinion they are just understandably scared of losing their much abused so called legitimate wiretap capabilities. It seems highly inappropriate that incompetents like you should be deciding matters about which you have little knowledge. ###################### by running (-u = unexxonize): % exxon -u plain < post you can get back the orinal plain text, much plainer more natural speech (again touched up with punctuation etc): ###### un-exxonized original ######## Exxon, fuck you you re a prudish prick. May you rot in hell for your work on the government censorship bill. Slick Willy and his gang of jack booted thugs seem to be fucking falling over themselves in their attempts to censor the net. In my opinion they are just scared shitless of losing their illegal wiretaps. It seems fucking way out of order that assholes like you should be deciding matters about which you know squat. ###################### (Excuse the language, I don't usually make a habit of using such speech, prefering sarcasm, but you know this whole comms decency bill thing encourages foul language, in a use it while you can way, as pretty soon it starting to look like it will be illegal to use it). Unfortuantely it looses the punctuation on the way, but that would be simple enough to fix. It's a rather primitive start, but it's enough to have fun with, you could come up with some quite nice dictionaries with government double speak translated into plain english, or into heavily sarcastic english or whatever. Ultimately you'd want more of a free form grammar, as that would allow for much more interesting effects. An emacs lisp mode would be beautiful, and allow for nice complex grammars as lisp is ideal for this kind of thing, unfortunately my lisp skills are near non-existant, any takers? (Pat as elisp guru if you ever get bored and have any spare time from developing the excellent mailcrypt.el, a suggestion for a fun project?) Then you can just add your: X-Authors-Preferred-Exxon-Dictionary: http://free-site.free.world/plain header, and away you go. Prudes can use which ever dictionary they like, the X-Authors comment is just for those who would like to see it in the light the author originally said it, a comment merely on the authors natural choice of language. So, my normal one would be say #sarcasm dictionary, where-as others may naturally speak in #plain dictionary, or their own custom dictionary. So fuck you Exxon, you asswipe (whoops forgot to exxonize that bit, read "So may I express my annoyance Senator Exxon, you annoying person"), Or "So hero most venerable Senator Exxon esq, you saviour of mankind." in #sarcasm. (The lack of a grammar is starting to show through at this point, textual substitution can only achieve so much). Adam -- [this message Exxonized with exxon(tm) dictionary #plain available from http://free-site.free.world/exxon_dictionaries/, or submit your own additions]