Topics: Security & Insecurity, , Languages, Interesting Tech Insights, Privacy & Liberties, Networked World, Virtual Worlds, Communications, Censorship, Psychology, Censorware, Human Factors, "Hacks", creativity

Schneier on Security blog has an entry on the "Ubiquity of Communication", a pointer to an essay by Randy Farmer. (Farmer is a pioneer of virtual worlds.)

Randy Farmer's essay, "The Untold History of Toontown's SpeedChat (or BlockChat™ from Disney finally arrives)" looks at ways people have found to get past "child safe" communications filters in one online world. Farmer give examples of ways creative users have gotten around similar filters in other online worlds. Among the ways is using moveable objects in the online world to form letters, numbers, and other symbols that other users can see.

One of the most humorous examples was with a user interface that restricted communications to a whitelist of "safe, clean" words. During the testing of the UI, a 14 year old boy quickly found a way to make a sexually suggestive statement with the limited vocabulary. (Gives a rather different perspective on words such as "giraffe" and "bunny". Read the essay's account of the test.)

J.D. Abolins