FC: Excerpts from RISKS Digest: Y2K, Windows censoring cuss words

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 13:07:36 +0100
From: Debora Weber-Wulff <weberwu () tfh-berlin de>
Subject: Power-out in Y2K test

The Berlin newspaper "tageszeitung" from Dec. 11, 1999 reports on a Y2K test
conducted at the federal Department of Justice. The workers had been asked
to not use their computers from 14.00 on Friday. Good thing, since the tests
managed to shut down the power in the building. No one wants to make an
official statement on the subject, since the official German policy is that
"Everything is going to be all right".

http://www.taz.de/tpl/1999/12/11/a0131.fr/text?re=ba for those who read
German "Millennium-Bug im Justizministerium"

Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, Technische Fachhochschule Berlin
weberwu () tfh-berlin de, http://www.tfh-berlin.de/~weberwu/

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Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 23:41:25 -0000
From: "Martyn Thomas" <mct () hollylaw demon co uk>
Subject: Go to jail - go directly to jail ...

A recent Spam e-mail called "free world site" gave me a shock. In Outlook
98, simply selecting the message (to delete it) executed the HTML it
contained, which used the OpenWindow function to connect to a remote Web
site.

The risk? In the UK, according to the BBC radio news, several people have
recently been arrested "in co-ordinated raids across the country" for
downloading child pornography from the Internet. They were apparently found
by monitoring Net traffic, and part of the evidence against them is the
record of web-sites visited "automatically stored on their computer's hard
disk".

Then again, there's all the other things you can do with HTML.

Martyn Thomas, Holly Lawn, Prospect Place, Bath BA2 4QP UK  01225 335649

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Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 11:40:36 -0500
From: "EricWagoner" <ewagoner () partnersoft com>
Subject: Windows98 censoring word processing apps

A friend of mine recently bought a new Gateway computer for his family. He's
a playwright and an English professor, and so does plenty of writing. The
computer came pre-installed with Microsoft Word 97, which he was beginning
to get comfortable with. He told me the other day that he was having a
problem he needed help with -- he was writing a script that contained a
character with a mild potty mouth, but every time he wrote the "S-word", it
got instantly replaced with XXXX. What's worse, in another script, a period
piece with archaic English, MS Word would replace those four letters with
XXXX even if they were parts of two different words, such as "'Tis hit!".
These four letters show up surprisingly often in English of a few hundred
years ago, and this was driving him crazy.

I thought it was a simple matter of setting the auto-correct feature in MS
Word, that maybe cuss words were now censored by default. I told him how to
disable the feature, or at least how to remove those letter combinations
from the lists. He told me a few days later that it didn't help, that even
with auto-correct completely shut off he was still plagued with XXXXs in his
scripts. I told him I'd gladly come over and take a look.

When I did, I found he was correct, that I had told him wrong. I scoured
Word for some kind of "child protection" feature, but could find nothing
anywhere. Out of curiosity more than anything, I opened WordPad and tried to
type the word, and it was instantly replaced with XXXX. I opened NotePad,
and again XXXX. I realized then that it was a global Windows 98 setting and
had nothing at all to do with Word. In the control panel, I looked in Users,
Accessibility Options, and anywhere else I could think to look for child
protection features, and came up blank. Finally, I noticed that in the Start
menu was the item "Log Off DEFAULT". It struck me that in all the many times
he and his family had booted up the computer since he bought it, no one had
logged into Windows under their own name, that everyone was using the
DEFAULT user.

I restarted Windows and logged in as "eric". All of the XXXXing was gone,
and I was free to type what I wished. I logged on again as DEFAULT, and
censoring began anew. I gave him the solution, and he was happy.

I've now scoured the web for some mention of this "feature" but have found
nothing. I tried logging on as DEFAULT on my own computer, and when Windows
started I got an error (advpack not started -- missing dll -- something like
that), so it seems that this may be something built in by Microsoft for some
reason. The only thing I can guess is maybe it's for store floor models so
some kid can't go leaving dirty graffiti on the screens. Of course, Gateway
sells direct by mail-order, so that's not an issue here.

Anyone ever heard of this before? Certainly, real professional work was
being prevented by this seemingly undocumented feature. Interestingly, very
few words were censored in this way. I could be plenty raunchy with nary an
interference, but say the "S-word" or what CAP calls the "most foul of foul"
words, and I was silenced.

Eric Wagoner <ewagoner () partnersoft com> http://www.partnersoft.com
Partner Software;  Kestrel's Nest Weblog   http://www.athens.net/~ewagoner

  [And all that XXXXing is likely to get THIS issue censored!  PGN]

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