August 10, 2011
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Four-letter words in unexpected places
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3652 hit(s)
I've noted before that we have tools to help us find geopolitical issues in our docs. This includes profanity. Not that this comes up a lot, of course. But the point is both to guard against unintentional uses, like maybe a writer who's in a hurry and copies something out of an email thread that includes some dubious language. Or to guard against profanity in places where people (editors, say) might not think to look.
And indeed, I personally ran across a couple of such instances in the last few weeks, much to my amazement. (Actually, amusement, and you'll see why.)
The story involves GUIDs, or "globally unique identifiers." A GUID is a 16-byte/128-bit number; that's 3.4 × 1038. You use GUIDs to identify things because, given this huge pool of numbers, and the fact that GUIDs are generated randomly (for practical purposes), the chance of two GUIDs ever colliding is infinitesimal.
So? Well, for humans, GUIDs are normally represented like this:
936DA01F-9ABD-4d9d-80C7-02AF85C822A8
That's a 128-bit number in hexadecimal (base 16, useful for computers), which uses the digits 0–9 and the letters A–F to represent numbers. You can see from the example that a GUID will often have consecutive letters.[1] And any time you can put letters together, you can, advertently or otherwise, form words. And when you can form words, ...
The massive internal database we use to store our work uses GUIDs as IDs for everything — documents, pieces of art, code snippets, everything. So for example, while we're authoring, if we want to create a link from one topic to another topic, we specify the GUID of the target topic. (Of course, the tools do all this for us; we don't have to actually know GUIDs or anything.)
As I say, twice in the last week or so I've run our geopolitical check tool and it objected, vehemently, to what it fingered as profanity in the docs. This was the first one:
CCEE44F2-86E3-CACA-9E53-8CA5F25F8F62
Namely, a GUID (probably in a link) that included the string "CACA". This amused me, because apparently you can take the boy out of the 2nd grade, but you can't take the 2nd grade out of the boy.
The second hit was a little more mysterious. Again the tool had tripped over a GUID; this time it was this:
4D07A497-37F7-4454-BBCD-732EA5CDD059
The sequence of letters that had raised the alarm was "BBCD". Uh ... what? But the tool said it was profanity, so I went looking. And sure enough: BBCD is a derogatory term in Britain (I guess). Wow, interesting catch.
Of course, there's nothing for us to do here. First, the character strings are in GUIDs, which we can't change. And anyway, customers never see these; they're used internally for identifying "assets," as they're called, but are converted to other types of identifiers (comparatively tame stuff like http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fddycb06.aspx, for example) during the publishing process.
This whole business got me to thinking about how many offensive terms we could construct out of the combination of letters A–F (repeats allowed) with 8 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 12 places to play with. Not so many, probably. (Lots of words, but not so many offensive words.) Which was why I found it all the more interesting to have come across two examples in just a few days.
More reading
Online GUID generator
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