The Scunthorpe problem occurs when a spam filter or search
engine blocks e-mails or search results because their text
contains a string of letters that are shared with an obscene
word. While computers can easily identify strings of text within
a document, broad blocking rules may result in false positives,
causing innocent phrases to be blocked. Origin and history  The
problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL's
dirty-word filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe,
North Lincolnshire, England from creating accounts with AOL,
because the town's name contains the substring cunt. Years
later, Google's filters apparently made the same mistake,
preventing residents from searching for local businesses that
included Scunthorpe in their names. Other examples  Mistaken
decisions by obscenity filters include: Refused web domain names
and email addresses  - In April 1998, Jeff Gold attempted to
register the domain name shitakemushrooms.com, but he was
blocked by an InterNIC filter prohibiting t