I realized in the edit that the Guardian is actually muting audio the instant a bad word is detected - the audio gets muted slightly _before_ the caption block appears on-screen, so it's not waiting until the databurst is complete. I'm sure that's to help mitigate bad timing errors, but it also means it can cut off sentences before it shou
My wife had one of these growing up. Their family gave up on it once they tried to watch Toy Story with it on and it decided to censor "Woody" and her parents didn't want to explain why that would be censored...
My college used to aggressively block the most obscure words, one of them was "virgin", which downsized the USA by two states, blocked an airline, and most Catholic websites. I asked why, I was told to prevent pornography. I tried pointing out that not many virgins work in that particular industry, but to no avail.
My mom bought one of these when I was a teenager. We had years long running jokes about turning f-bombs into wow, sex into hugs, and the Finding Nemo line that went from "he touched the butt" to "he touched the tail." This device did more to push me toward being fine with swearing than anything else in my life.
I REMEMBER "HE TOUCHED THE TAIL" 😂 I watched so many movies with this thing but the songs in Bambi were being muted constantly because the birds kept using the word "gay" lol
Ohh jeez, THIS thing. Totally had one in our household and friend's households in the late 90s/early aughts 😄 It had the unintended side effect of putting increased emphasis on language, so my buddies and I constantly found ourselves more focused on deciphering what was actually being said anytime it muted. We learned all KINDS of colorful new language as a result that otherwise may have passed by without much thought. Thanks TV Guardian, _you piece of ' crud. Wow._
Hahaha, yeeaahhh... that has also always been my feeeling with song lyrics being censored. If it hadn't been censored, I probably never would've picked up on a lot of them, haha
What about if you're watching TV and someone on the TV is speaking German or some other non English language? What if they swear, does it only understand English?
There was an article I read in the 90s about a kids word learning program that had a typing section to allow kids to type their own sentences and have the computer read the sentence back to the child via the sound card. The code for this would censor bad words from being typed in or read aloud by the computer. Apparently the company that produced software didn't QA very well because if kids typed too many normal words into the note pad program it would over load the programs buffered memory and instead of stopping phrases from being spoken it read the list of bad words in its memory out loud for all to hear. One woman described it as the George Carlin's list of bad words you are not allowed to say on TV. Apparently this thing would angrily read all the naughty words on the list very quickly.
i just had the funniest idea ever: i'm gonna get a vhs copy of south park: bigger, longer, and uncut and a tv guardian and i'm gonna watch the entire movie with it turned on and see what happens
1:49 Little correction there: the labelling says it's 100 Megaamps. So the power of the device is close to a Gigawatt. Strong language protection requires huge power!
I absolutely had one of these in my household in the '90s! But as others have stated, it had the opposite effect as intended. Instead of guarding me from hearing profanity it made me focus on what words were removed. After a while I learned which words it used to replace the bad words. My brain would then automatically and conveniently translate them back to their profane version. It wasn't perfect though. To this day I still think the main cowboy character in Toy Story is named "excited".
We had one growing up. Parents got it for typical Fundie Christian reasons. Now I'm Atheist. Maybe I should start blaming this thing when people ask why I'm not religious anymore.
@@nasonguy That must have sucked. England is a secular country, by and large, so we never had to deal with this sort of brainwashing. Even though my mum went to a convent school she made up her mind to never pass any beliefs she may have had to her kids. Wish more people were like that.
A friend of mine had one of these. As mentioned elsewhere, replacing sex with hugs was pretty bad, but the worst example of it he saw was, he was watching Sesame Street with his toddler one morning, scene change, a muppet rooster walks across the screen, stops, turns to the camera, the audio mutes, and the captioning reads “clown-a-doodle-doo!” I still laugh thinking about it.
@@ElliLavender I never really thought about it but it's insane for people who are deaf/hard of hearing or whatever to just rip away information like that as if /everyone/ is a child
Despite the total absurdity of the device, I have to take my hat off to the engineers assigned to build it and write that manual. They did (I think) the best possible job within the technical limitations, were aware of the many failings, and mentioned them in detail in the manual. You don’t always get to choose what you work on, but it’s always great to see a difficult and unrewarding job done well regardless.
My mother bought one of these from QVC as a depressed impulse buy when I was a kid. I didn't like the idea of it, and I was the only one with the know-how to set it up. Instead of using it to censor, I set it up for a much better function: to add closed captioning to an old TV that didn't have it. It got quite a lot of use as a closed-captioning upgrade!
@@wishunter9000 my mom was born in the 70's, was a nurse and only now she got used to doing computer stuff because she's studying. Meanwhile my dad was born in the 60's and made circuit boards, made T-shirts for our city's Worker's Party and now just hangs around modifying whatever electronics he finds. Some people just don't care about technology and ask others to deal with it lol
@@wishunter9000 i know people who can hardly figure out how to plug in a HDMI cable and power cable. Something even simpler than the old three cables from back then
My parents absolutely had one of these on our TV when I was a kid and I had almost completely forgotten about it until this moment. What a weird nostalgic feeling! One thing I specifically remember is that on ours the word "sex" was replaced with "hugs" regardless of context. So people would routinely ask pregnant people if they knew the hugs of the baby.
My psychology teacher in highschool (inner city Catholic, class of 07) used this to show us relevant movies with "objectionable language" (things like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or A Beautiful Mind). We knew what was being said. He knew we knew. We knew he knew we knew. The administration knew he..... But, it served it's true purpose as: to be a fig leaf/plausible deniability and allow us to get a better, more contextualized, more empathetic education. I think that alone justifies this things creation and existence.
That reminds me, high schools in Kansas are required to teach creationism along with evolution theory. On the second day of AP honors Biology II, my very droll teacher explained this and stated something like "Creation theory posits that God created the world exactly as it is today. Do we all feel like we're familiar with creation theory?" We all rolled our eyes and said "yeah." Teech said "Good, now we can get on to science."
UA-cam closed captioning also censors. I find that extremely irritating. I have an auditory processing disorder. I usually hear ok, but always keep the CC on. There should be an adult selection because if I was completely deaf, blanking out swear words often changes the meaning of the sentence which seems like it should be against the ADA.
@@L-sillybrained I've complained but never got a response. If there were some deaf people that got the ACLU involved we could maybe get actual accurate text translations but until then, I'm not holding my f---ing breath lol
UA-cam should professionally create CC by hand for all videos above a certain amount of views (250k views?) and then let the viewer decide how they want to censor the text.
I actually learn all my bad words from my parents arguing in the kitchen instead of TV, music, or video games. Just be aware that your child will learn to swear regardless. If your child starts swearing, teach them to have filter.
@@Vykk_Draygo Doing so around the children . . like oh my 🤬why would you. Seriously though it WAS not *NORMAL to swear in front of your young children. If you mention "what shit did you buy" it isn't quite as bad as the following: "what the F is wrong with you." Or . . . "you b-witch" . . . "wh_re " . . . "being a jack🐎" and so on I don't even want to spell them. Married couples should not be using cuss words to describe each other.
glad you mentioned censoring captions being bad practice, youtube's autocaptions do it sometimes and it's absolutely infuriating. If it's not censored for those who don't need captions, it shouldn't be censored for those who do!
Here’s a bit of context on UA-cam caption censoring: it’s a way for creators to get their content through over eager UA-cam filters. At least this was the thinking at some point (algorithms may have updated since). If the creator over-rode the auto-generated captions, they could get the occasional word through. So, kinda like the TV Guardian, UA-cam is/was relying on captions for filtering.
I remember seeing a vídeo about the old series code lyoko, its a french animated kids show, and one of the characters is named sissy. It was censored everytime it was said and the show is rated E
I'm so happy you mentioned that censoring captions is very bad accessibility practice. This is one of my favorite channels! ps you just reminded me of teletext. that was so cool
I love how "No effort November" first turned into "Nearly no effort November" and now into "Look, OK, I may say there's no effort involved, but... November". Excellent video. Thank you.
Given the cheapness of the device, I'd bet that the bad words are stored in plain text. Send it to Adrian's Digital Basement and ask him to dump the ROMs. :D
I showed this to my wife who grew up in a very strict Christian household and what do you know, her mom heard about one of these in church and got one for them! She absolutely hated it and remembers in A Walk to Remember a girl was wearing a dress and a guy said "She's going to get a lot of hugs in that dress" Amazing.
@@matthewrease2376 You're kidding, right? I didn't even get within six feet of my grandmother (who lives across town from me and i see once or twice a month to help when she needs something done around the house) until she'd gotten the vaccine, and we were both completely fine with that, because if i gave my grandmother a virus that killed her, i'd lose my mind.
I used to play Puzzle Pirates (a puzzle-based MMO) back during its alpha and beta phases before release, and I'm reminded of an incident with the game's profanity filters. Similar to how this device works, the chat had a filter that would replace common swear words with piratey-sounding substitutes. Unfortunately in one release somehow the two dictionaries had gotten mixed up, so suddenly people who were playing "in character" in the game found that they were, well, swearing like sailors. Hilarity ensued.
I played a lot of puzzle pirates back in the day. I don't normally care for auto censors and generally turn them off, but I always left PP's "Pirate-ify" setting on because it made me smile.
And this reminds me of Neopets infamous Day of SIn. Where, after the NeoPets site had begun to fall apart, something went wrong, and basically the filters stopped working one day in 2015.
Hold up you didn't even mention the most absurd censor in the whole thing! I grew up watching TV exclusively with one of these, to the point we'd have to switch devices manually by unplugging & plugging them into the back of it. If it ever detected someone saying "have sex" or "sex" at all, it would replace it with "hugs". "Have sex" turned into "have hugs" sometimes. It was truly, absolutely the most hilarious thing about it to me lmao
Presumably the AIDS awareness campaigns were advising you to have safe hugs, too. That is one of the dangerous effects of prudish censorship. And, on a more frivolous note: did it also use "hugual intercourse" or "hug intercourse" as a euphemism?!
Usefulness aside, someone did some very impressive programming to fit this functionality into the onboard PIC microcontroller, which has only 2K of program memory. Around the time this came out I was writing sentence parsing firmware (totally unrelated to CC) using similar PICs, and whoever was able to do all this with 2K - I take my hat off to you. BTW, if you're really interested, the curse words of interest are stored in clear text on the 16K serial EEPROM on the board.
What amazes me more is how stupid and clumsy modern programmers are. Mouse driver 1991 - 30KB. Mouse driver 2022 - 130MB. That's over FOUR THOUSAND times bigger for.... the same functions.
4:51 “Some do, for silly reasons (which makes using them as a computer monitor _very_ annoying until you find the “just scan” setting buried in the menus)[…].” You have no idea how much time that joke just saved me. Thank you.
I've always wondered how he distinguishes between No Effort and Regular, for that very reason! Now that I'm working on my own channel, with deep dives into queer history instead of technology, I think I get it. The throw-away comment at the end here, about how he'd look into it more but it's No Effort November, makes it all make sense to me now. I start researching a topic, and end up needing to do a good ten videos on associated topics, expand the video I had started, and.... go finish something else that's a little closer to done. (And then YouCut eats it, and then I have to redo all the editing while resolving never again to use YouCut... but at least I thought of several UA-cam shorts to create along the way. On... a... nearly completely unrelated topic.)
I live in Brazil, and we had our own sorta "version" of the TV Guardian: dubbing. By law, all programs and films aired on public access television *must* be dubbed. This by itself isn't a terrible problem, since Brazil does have some of the best dubbing studios and artists in the world. But, as an "added bonus", the translators also heavily censored and softened the script of any movies they did. As a result, we grew up watching stuff like The Goodfellas with the actors saying pretty much the "TV Guardian" version of the script. An odd side effect of this is that most of us grew up thinking that American movies were all very clean and sanitised. But, since local Brazilian films didn't need dubbing, they'd always get aired with full profanity on, and this led to think that Brazilian films were the worst in the world in terms of profanity, in comparison to the "clean" and "polite" American movies such as Scarface.
Good one : D In poland there is a voicover but they make it with a slight delay to original actor voice so you can hear english right before polish translation. As in your example translation was heavily censored and modified but since we could still hear the original, the difference between the two was often quite funny.
Very interesting. In Germany, which has no law mandating dubbing, but it's done anyway with virtually everything, because the German-speaking market is large and profitable, there was a period from the 1960s to the late '80s when serious foreign movies were turned into comedies by creating more "humorous" scripts and then use those for the dubbing. They had free reign and changed the nature of many films, especially Westerns, completely. Audiences absolutely loved it and many still do to this day, but much of this humor is very infantile and dated. The people behind the originals were also usually not asked and often shocked and surprised when they learned what their films had been turned into. Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill buddy movies were the most affected by this. The duo is extremely popular in Germany, mainly because these dubbed versions (which nobody knew were different from the Italian and English language originals) precisely hit the pop culture zeitgeist of their time. Both did however also make more serious movies, like Terrence Hill in the stunning Western "My Name is Nobody" by Sergio Leone (and with one of the best soundtracks of all times by Ennio Morricone). In the original, Nobody is a tight-lipped anti-hero, barely uttering a word in most scenes. This is still a comedy in its original dub, but it's comparatively subdued. In the German dub on the other hand, they used every opportunity to turn him into a witty comedian, constantly uttering little jokes and remarks. They often have him speak when he has his back turned to the camera and was silent in the original. One scene from this movie I vividly remember from a time when I watched movies first in German, then in English with German subtitles, then in English with English subtitles and finally without subtitles in order to increase my English vocabulary (which worked brilliantly, except with these movies) was a scene where he's arrested and walked towards a building clearly labelled "Jail". Since this word doesn't exist in the German language (it would be "Gefängnis"), they had him ask if he was led to the building where "Jail" lived (pronounced like a German would, so "yail"). This joke only works if you understand English enough to know what it actually means, making this one of those rare bilingual puns. As for cussing, there's much less of a hysteria about protecting children from it (it's usually not a factor with age ratings) and the German language isn't very colorful in this regard. Dubs try their best to somewhat emulate the severity and style of the originals, but there are cases of films, TV shows and games turning it down, for marketing reasons. It often doesn't work and the finer aspects of language, especially word plays, are routinely misunderstood and butchered, to the point that I think most people writing translated scripts aren't very well versed in the English language. A friend of mine, who kind of infected me with the idea of watching originals instead of dubbed versions, alerted me to this and I haven't stopped noticing it since. Luckily, this was right at the time when the DVD began to take off, which usually had at least two audio tracks, the original and the dubbed version, so I could easily switch to the original audio track. Except of course with movies that omitted them for space or cost-cutting reasons. Lots of films also retained on-screen translations in the form of subtitles for e.g. signs and text on screen, which is an issue that still exists on modern streaming services even if I switched everything to English.
My buddy across the street grew up in a catholic household. His dad worked for IBM, and his mom loved being catholic. She insisted on having this thing. His dad hated it so he made up a set of fake wires that went to the unit and the t.v. then the cable just went straight to the t.v. every time she heard a swear word he would bang on the box and claim its malfunctioning.
My friend did something similar with his central heating, put a wireless controller inside an old dial type control box and every time his girlfriend complains about the cold he lets her "turn the heating up" knowing full well it does nothing.
I had a friend in Elementary School who had one of these, but I never saw it in action. Always blew my mind that it could censor live TV. The actual explanation blows my mind even more.
You have reached a level of professionalism that even the "no efford novemer" series is hardly inferior to your other episodes. Greeting from Germany :)
I knew a girl in high school from a conservative family who had one of these things. I’d never heard of such a thing before. I saw it in action while watching ‘Finding Nemo’ of all things where I believe it cut out the word “butt” and replaced it with “tail”.
When we were kids, my brother actually asked for one of these for his birthday, he didn't like swearing at the time. My favorite weird substitution was the Siren scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail where all the maidens are excitedly asking for "oral hugs"
The Teletext was extremely strong among the deaf people in Sweden. It was even sold as an aid-device. I grew up with a deaf father and still remember what page the weather forecast was on and where the TV-guide was. Very neat and helpful. And to many extent even far quicker than cell phone usage of today. And leaving the sound of the TV on you could fast and easy watch the weather and keep the dialogue in your ears and then go back to the program. Loved it very much.
My family had one of these growing up! The side effect being that we would forget that not all of our neighbors had these and we would take our not family friendly films to neighbors houses to watch which would make for very awkward movie viewing experiences when the foul language wasn't filtered out. It also had some hilarious effects such as changing this sentence from "Great jumpin' horny toads" to "Great jumpin' excited toads". Watching looney toons with this thing on was great.
We had a TV guardian growing up and the results were often hilarious. My mom showed us the movie Cliffhanger with the guardian on and in one scene it muted everything EXCEPT several naughty words. So the sound would briefly cut in just long enough to hear someone yell a 4 letter word 😂😂
One of my high school teachers had this, and was apparently watching CSI with his wife and daughter. Evidently it replaced "sex offender" with "hug offender," which then became a bit of a local meme.
My parents totally had this while I was growing up! It was so annoying, and it would mute "sex" and replace it with "hugs", regardless of the context 😂
The blob of paint on the 2K eeprom U6B suggests to me that maybe this has been preprogrammed with the database, and should be easy to read out as these chips aren't code protected.
Holy crap, Teletext was a thing outside of where I live too?! Out Teletexts actually still exist! Granted, only, like, 4 channels actually have it, and it's been... largely abandoned (heck, quite a bit of stuff doesn't work anymore), but you can still access them! It's wild to see a relic of the past still *sorta* working even to this day!
My mom kept one of these on every TV in the house until I was 15 or 16. She was so strict about language that she didn't think the TV guardian was strict enough. We had to watch Disney movies with this thing turned on because she hated terms like "balls" or "stupid" and "shut up" was forbidden in the house. I remember being told not to watch tv or movies at friends houses because they didn't have this. The side effect was me asking her all the time why a word was bad and her having to explain it.
True story: Back in the mid 1980's, I went to the first Comdex convention in Las Vegas where i saw a prototype of a similar device. We typed in several explicit sentences and it caught all of them. I thought about it for a few minutes and did the F-bomb, only I changed it to the Ph-bomb as F and Ph produce the same sound. The developer was there and asked me to stick around for a few minutes. He worked on a program and asked me to try it again. The Ph-bomb no longer worked.
As someone in the UK who did grow up with Teletext, I would LOVE to see you collaborate with someone who can provide thoughts, ideas, media, and feedback for you to present. Your enthusiasm for Teletext already is enough for the video to be great I'm sure. If I can help at all I would love to.
As a developer, I couldn't help but envision a bunch of people sitting in a meeting room going over on a whiteboard how they're going to censor phrases.
I worked on a project once where we wanted to detect incitement to violence or other harmful stuff in text for book publishers. We had to gather so much material to train the models that we always joked that any day now, the authorities had to knock on our doors.
@@andreibaciu7518 I've been that guy. It was called the "Carlin List" on our project. The real problem comes with phrases. "Porch" and "Monkey" are both innocuous words, and are used in appropriate conversations in children's programming. But put them together ...
I remember we had something like this at the Highschool I went to. For all I know, it could have been the exact same system considering how much it also used the work "jerk". One time it changed a sentence to "He pulled out his jerk" and the whole class just erupted in laughter. It had most of the same exact issues this thing has such as bad timing, not working on certain DVDs, sometimes it would miss words and leave them uncensored. Most of the teachers hated it, it was more distracting than anything. They would get excited when a DVD wouldn't work with it.
My grandfather had one like this. He called it the Cuss Free TV. He didn't have it for kids or anything. He just didn't like hearing the words himself. Instead of just muting it would substitute a voice saying a different word. Like I remember watching The Matrix with him and hearing "kiss my toe."
This thing is an automated version of the hilarious "clean" versions of action movies that used to air with dubbed audio over cuss words- I remember Bruce Willis running around calling people "Mellon Farmers" before shooting them in uncensored fashion.
As a Polish, I could say a lot about teletext uses, but the most intriguing aspect I learned recently is that... it's still used! It turns out that teletext is one of the few info channels, which are available in prison all the time. So not only they use it to read news, sport scores etc. - people outside of prison can buy an ad in teletext (with SMS or online), so they use it to send messages to their relatives in prison
@@andrzej_autko haven't seen video, but i read about it on some Polish portal (but it's mentioned also in English sites) Since, you're Polish, check page 471 on tvp1 (it's also online). At the moment there is an ad with "we wish you that the time will pass quickly" part ;)
Hmmm, Polish AND Prison? Why explicitly mentioning Polish? Is this some effin stereotypes, transported by those for example German idiots[1]?: "The Polish & Theft go hand in hand". Anyway, greetings from Germany, fellow neighbor!:) Teletext is just an established service, a data service embedded and specified by the DVB standards. Teletext goes back to German Videotext, which was presented for the first time with a 400-page offer by ARD and ZDF during the 1977 radio exhibition in Berlin. In 2017, according to ARD (public broadcaster) Trend, Videotext still had more than 15 million daily visitors, 12 million of them on ARD and ZDF alone[2]. News, sports and the program pages are particularly popular, but also the accompaniment of live events (e.g. ESC Song Contest) and specific offers such as the Tatort magazine. In the German Wikipedia on the subject, which is well worth reading, there is unfortunately nothing about your interesting story. Thank you for sharing, qj0n:) [1] joking, I am none of them, you are welcome friend!:) [2] So this is anything but obsolete and forgotten. My father, who is over 85, is a heavy user of sports news via Teletext himself:)
@@dieSpinnt Sad to say we no longer have teletext in the UK: for the BBC (publicly funded), Ceefax turned into "Red Button" with the switch to digital, but they offered a little more than they could deliver when they called it "interactive TV" and it withered on the vine. Plans to shut it down altogether were put on hold in 2020 thanks to protests and petitioning by the deaf, blind and visually impaired communities. The commercial stations, however, contracted their teletext out to a company called Teletext, who mostly shut down services in 2010. So this wouldn't be possible here :(
@@dieSpinnt pretty sure it's just cause he is polish and thus the example is specifically polish prisons because, you know, he's polish. Like how I'd mention you can still send telegrams to American prisons. Because I'm American and that's what I happen to know. I know y'all have some... Uh. History with Poland but not everything has to be in that context
Teletext is still pretty popular here in the Netherlands. Not just for closed captioning - always at page 888 - but also for news and sports results. Given the lack of bandwidth compared to the modern alternatives, there are no ads, autoplaying videos, or SEO-optimized padded nonsense. Just a few paragraphs at most. Which is a remarkably blissful experience.
I mainly used to use it for "what's playing now and what's next" (page 333 I think) and a full program guide (starting at 303 I believe?). And there definitely was plenty of ads, mostly for certain phone numbers, just on their own pages somewhere 😂
888 seems to have been a sort of standard for subtitles, UK Children's BBC and ITV used to sign "888" before programmes that had subtitles for deaf people. The commercial telly version, Teletext, (the BBC had Ceefax) was also one of the major sellers of cheap, drunken holidays to the flesh-pots of the Med.
My mom got one of those when I was a kid, dad got so fed up with it that he threw it out in the back yard and destroyed it with a hammer. Our TV was never censored again.
We live in a very strange time where I could easily imagine a team of engineering undergrads recreating this entire project for a weekend hackathon...and could also easily imagine another team using speach-to-text to get around the need for captions....and another team using deep learning to literally listen to the audio swears and replace them with other generated phrases in real time.
It's a mystery to me why this company which still exists hasn't gone that route. It would be very easy. Many existing repositories for transcription of spoken word exist. Plug in your word database and pass through the video feed with enough delay to process it all and it would work near perfectly.
And I could also totally imagine projects being developed to do the reverse - to take bleeps and "vege swears" like heck and frick, and recreate a swear to match. Deepfaked audio could even be used if you have enough cpu grunt.
this thing just unlocked a memory! it's what introduced my entire 7th grade class in Christian school to the term "puss" as profanity--watching Shrek 2 when Puss in Boots' appears and says his name...it got censored. not many of us would've known about that otherwise so we asked our teacher what it meant 😭 classic.
I'm Dutch, non of the profanities are beeped out. Especially with music, the radio version is just so lame compared to how a track was meant to be. From adding beeps or, in Gravel Pit by Wu Tang for instance, animal sounds and the like. Some whole lines are just inaudible. It's not that our youth swears more or less than in other countries that DO bleep out. Plus, most child targeted stuff on tv/radio doesn't have profanity in it anyway.
@@nlx78 I believe radio is censored throughout Europe, at least within the countries I've driven in. It's stupid, especially because the profanities are often in English (there's not as much cussing in songs of other languages) so children wouldn't understand the words, and the radio station could just... avoid broadcasting particularly egregious songs. We still get a song called " 'Nigerian gas' in Paris" to this day on radio, and it's a half-mute fest.
Oh hey I had one of these. It was terrible at so many things and honestly made me *more* aware of potentially sensitive language. It censored “Puss” in the Shrek movies and replaced it with “Wimps” which was hilarious.
15:48 The irony of this is that UA-cam captions are censored. At least the auto-captioning is because they apparently don't care that an adult would be choosing to watch other adults swear in a video. Superchats are also routinely censored. Comments are also increasingly get scanned for swears and can result in suspensions/bans.
I remember as an intern I got the task of writing a profanity/spam filter for a corporate messaging system we were working on. The code review was hilarious since it fed off of a text file of every profanity I could think of or find. Of course I started the file with George Carlin's slightly redundant list.
I can imagine it being useful to families with infants or toddlers, who are either just learning their first words or in the repeating everything phase. This would allow adults to watch whatever they liked while supervising kids who can't see the screen or aren't paying attention. No help for kids actually watching TV, but it would certainly prevent a 2 year old from screaming curse words repeatedly for fun.
A child only repeats what it either hears often or what gets the most amazing reaction when it first repeats it. If a kid repeats "car", everone is, "Jep, thats a car". If it repeats "fuck", everyone is like noooooo u shouldnt say that. The 2 year old might not know what they mean, but it knows how adults react to them saying it. Its so funny to hear other people think about this. Its just not something people bother where I'm from (german part of Europe), well they do, but that has nothing to do whether a kid could hear it. Its just that u don't want a stranger to hear u cuss, bc they might think ur uneducated, but because of the kids? Fuck no... 😬
My family had one of these when I was growing up. We loved it because the censorship was often just "off" enough to make phrases funny, and it would pick up on wacky things that you wouldn't expect to be objectionable. My favorite thing is that it replaced a rooster's "cock-a-doodle-doo" with "jerk-a-doodle-doo"!
20:23 I used to love Teletext. It was basically like pre-internet. Weather reports. Lottery results. News, comic strips and the best one for me? Game reviews. I would have never have heard of Golden Sun without it.
Back in the 90s I had a video capture card in my PC, and it decode all 4 channels of closed captioning and 4 channels of teletext, if present. While flipping through the cable channels in Canada with TT turned, the only time I ever saw text was a crude up-coming programming guide in the CBC French channel. Years ago, my parents elderly friend needed help with their TV: "It has a big black square in the middle of the picture" . I knew right away that they have accidentally activated TeleText display, without any text to show. Just keep pressing the "CC" button on the remote, until it cycles through the multiple closed captioning and teletext modes back into the "off" setting, and everything will be fine.
Teletext brings back memories of me and my grandpa typing down the numbers for the pages we wanted to see. Sports results, weather and tv programming were used the most. Some tv channels even included horoscopes and news. It was fun to browse, in some ways it was like a proto internet browsing experience. They even made pixel art to go along with each category.
A poor signal would mean random missing or corrupted text. I'd so love to go back in time and introduce a mobile phone or something. Then realise there was no 4G or any internet or.... damn.
There were even basic chat rooms in teletext (I think you entered your text via phone) and some channels even had pixel art porn if you knew where to find it. Also the information on the current program was pretty good. You'd get the plot of a movie, the actors names and more.
@@ForboJack TV2 in Norway had a bunch of sex-phone numbers on it, with art on the pages. TV2 has shut down their teletext, but NRK still has it's available. There's even a webpage to look at it online.
@@SuperFranzs advertising for sex-hotlines is the only thing I can remember seeing on teletext. Maybe there was other stuff but that probably wasn't interesting enough for me as a kid 😅
My parents' solution to keeping us from repeating bad words on screen was to have us shout out "bad word!" whenever we heard it as a game, activating the power of pedantry with the amusing side effect that we would also call out adults for swearing irl.
this reminds me…when I was in 4th grade, I went to a conservative private school in the heart of georgia. As expected, swearing was incredibly taboo, not just for kids my age either. My teenage sister said she was the basically only person who regularly swore in her grade. One day, my music teacher puts on a video for our class, I believe 4 chords by the Axis of Awesome. He was showing basically how many songs have this chord structure, especially popular ones. We were all really enjoying it, then suddenly the singers said “I’m a bird, I’m a plane, I’m a motherfuckin’ birdplane,” and honestly everyone was silenced into shock. The video ended not long after and he never addressed it, and neither did we. As an adult, I’m like, who gives a fuck if some 9 years olds hear a swear word every once in a while. But man, it was so life shattering back then.
Probs did watch it, but it's a really cool example of how much use you can get out of four chords as well as being a legitimately amazing music medley performance so they decided a single swear was worth the learning/viewing experience.
I think the best way to truly and blamelessly extricate yourself from the teletext dilemma is not to rip the band-aid off, but to look out for a glorious collaboration with an equally glorious fellow youtuber. Preferably one who _is_ emotionally invested in the subject.
I find that an incredible application for closed captioning data. I don't care how silly it seems, the fact that they could screen both text and audio even mostly successfully with an add-in box is a beautiful concept.
@@lambertovitali3152 Capitalism doesn't do "useful" - thats just side effect that is not at all guaranteed to happen. Capitalism does "what will sell".
Oh my god am i really seeing Mr. D, the man who claimed that Rax restaurants was a place you can eat, on your shirt?!?! I’ve just found your channel and I’m in love
In my personal experience, almost every kid I knew who was brought up with this level of strictness around foul language has gone on to curse as much, if not more, than most other people once they hit middle school. It's almost like telling children that something is forbidden makes them even more curious about it!
Yeah I was going to use a TED talk about country flag design for a class where we were designing some thing and talking about designs. I was going to have the library to myself with my group but that didn't end up being the case so I mentioned to the other group that in case I miss muting the words (which I almost wasn't going to do). that sometimes you hear words that aren't meant to be repeated and I know all these kids knew all the words anyway. Like one of the other teachers said to me a couple of kids looked up classic art and their eyes just about came out of their head when they realized they were nearly looking at po.. (naturally shaped individuals) on the school computers, it was something along the lines of they're gonna find it anyway I have it in a controlled environment and they will also realize the standards have changed throughout the years of what was deemed acceptable and what wasn't. I wish I could remember exactly what she said to me as she leaned over when this happened in the library.
Absolutely. I’ve gotten myself in a lot of trouble in my friends groups over sexual related stuff, coming off teenage years of: you guessed it, speeches about no sex before marriage
Even if we had a million of those installed in the living room tv , it wouldn't help at fucking all. I got in so much trouble for swearing but not in the "hey fuck you" insulting way, more like "shit i forgot the book in my fucking locker" but even when threatened to be expelled, i just continued as it just felt more natural and better to express my thoughts more effectively and so i did
Many live captions are now done by voice to text programs instead of stenography, although stenography is still used. There is still a captioner, they listen to the audio feed coming in from the station a few seconds ahead of the actual broadcast. They repeat along whatever is being said while pushing buttons to indicate who is speaking when there are multiple speakers. They also have to say nonsense words that act as macros for punctuation, dashes to indicate mistakes, those phrases in square brackets like [music playing]. A couple examples are "kak" for a comma, "doesh" for a dash, etc. They also create custom macro phrases for commonly said phrases or difficult names and words that the text to speech program regularly get wrong. This approach is a relatively recent development and is more accessible to train folks on than the whole other language that is stenography.
that seems like it would only work well for stuff without an in-person audience, otherwise people would probably get annoyed by all the weird kak doesh stuff, and fixate more on that, than what's being said
That's why I hate live captioning. I *live* for accuracy. So many stations/networks don't employ the new methods, and it's very obvious whatever system they're using is not adequate.
I had some friends who grew up in a strict, Pentecostal household, and their parents had one of these on their television. I remember a line in the show _7th Heaven_ that was censored to say, "We need to talk to Simon about hugs."
That reminds me of the episode "stop me before I hug again" in the show Limitless. His mind censors all the "bad words people say for the episode as a bit of a gag
About Teletext: we still have it (here in The Netherlands) and it's been turned into an app, as well. I installed it when I deleted my Twitter app a few months ago. While it's obviously quite limited (there are usually only about 20 articles at a time and an article is just one page of teletext) I like getting my daily news in bite-size chunks, and it's a lot nicer to read than those attention-grabbing articles with loads of meaningless text and advertisements.
Yeah, I was a bit bothered how he talked about it in the past tense, haha. Like mentioned above, it's still very much alive in Finland. It was the best thing in the 90s and I never stopped using it. Even with a smartphone it's just so convenient for example checking for all our domestic sports live scores in one place.
He was talking about American-style closed captions, which are a LOT LESS advanced than teletext - they're literally ONLY subtitles. Usually the only thing they are used for nowadays is live TV. DVD's, blurays, and Netflix don't use closed captions in the way he talks about.
@@odkres Via an app it's just a regular app though, right? You aren't having to wait 30 seconds for the right page number to appear, and TV is generally digital these days (in the UK we switched analogue TV off in 2012 to make room for 4G) so also doesn't use teletext to send the info system, it uses whatever the format your receiver understands (though usually still with the red, yellow, blue, green buttons, at least in the UK - the BBC popularised the "Press Red" as the option for opening the BBC Red Button service, but until only a few years ago, "TEXT" was also a button on all TV remotes for activating digital services)
@5:00 I cannot believe you have just told me what's wrong with my TV after a year of googling and arguing with my friends that it's not a dead pixel. Oh my god
Growing up in a very Christian environment, so many of my family’s friends had these they didn’t seem abnormal at all to me. It was always a spicy treat as a kid when the timing was off and it muted a whole line of important dialogue and then unmuted just in time for a loud F-bomb for the whole prayer group to gasp at.
Ah yes, taking hopeless efforts to avoid reality and overreacting when it slips trough seems to be quite accurate depiction of living in Christian environment.
I'm so glad I finally found out why that blinky bar was on top of some of the stuff I watched. I love the "a-ha" moment of solving a decades old mystery in particular.
I saw something like this more recently, as a Raspberry Pi project. It was explained, not as a profanity filter though it could be used for that, but to mute thing that you're just sick of hearing about. The example given was of the latest celebrity scandal. Naturally, the user supplies (and updates) his own set of words.
I had an LDS missionary neighbor who described having one of these growing up. Never once heard him swear, but I imagine that was more his upbringing than the TV Guardian. Anyway, he was also a combat veteran in Iraq. Even then, being in an active warzone, he never swore. The idea of taking incoming fire and saying “gosh darn!” has the same vibe as watching Goodfellas but with fewer swear words. I hope he’s doing well, he was actually a really nice guy. 😂
Oh, if you are speaking about the military ... My ancestors in Germany had an even better solution to stop those "bad bad things" from spreading, polluting the race and the ideas of "healthy" citizens: They simply burned that down! Art, Books, Drawings, Science .... oh and later the minds (including their hosts, the people), too. Please excuse my cynical comment (We Germans have good education in that disgusting matter of the past ... that is what happened, related to the topic, in my words), but that is the ultima ratio, the road where ALL censorship will lead you towards. But I don't have to say anything. Let's just cite "One man's profanity is another man's lyric". (= the public saying. better read: As Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in his majority opinion, “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” reinforcing the idea that even unpopular speech is protected by the First Amendment. You can read the entire article from The First Amendment Center, search for "40 Years On, One Man’s Vulgarity Is Still Another’s Lyric") I hope your friend is doing well, too:) P.S.: And let's be clear: Not the words made him a good friend, but his actions, his personality and his character. Remember, in contrast, the worst people in history didn't need swear-words in their inciting public speeches that lead to indescribable sorrow. It was the content, the message, the context that broke loose the manifestation of hell on earth. These "specialists" in their field are at their most frightening when they talk so softly and usually about the unspeakably evil of their actions or threats. Who would know? Maybe in a decade or two our conversation will be deleted or censored ... because you or I used a word, that is not tolerable any more. Including all history with their lessons following generations could be learn from. Well, sad, but in that case, they are doomed to repeat our mistakes. Which is a horrible prospect of the future ... but also deserved, if they choose that path. Sorry for being that negative. Forget that rabbit-poo and have a nice day, K P:)
@@KP-ty9yl Since when are historical facts = assumptions? (WTF???) Or didn't you distinguish between the general and the personal part of my comment? Or did you misunderstand my black humor at the beginning ... well, then I am sorry? Not telling what you actually mean doesn't help. Because, and that is very funny: What assumptions? Should I make assumptions now, about what you mean?:P
@@dieSpinnt I think it’s a bit of a reach to compare the TV Guardian to governmental censorship, is what I’m getting at. And I’m not in favor of government censorship. In fact, I think people should be able to deny that Covid even exists, say that Donald Trump is a Nazi, and call Muslims rapists. I disagree with all of them, but people should be allowed to say them or post them online without legal consequence. But what people restrict in their own home isn’t governmental censorship. And I do see an interesting pattern where those who will openly criticize Christians censoring content for their children are less prone to criticizing Muslims or Jews when they do the similar things with their children :o
You know what's fascinating to me? The fact that I just learned that UA-cam is ALSO censoring expletive's and this video was the first thing that came to mind. There's no way for the user to stop it, we're all just stuck behind a TV Guardian, and must suffer.
@@sandy-lo UA-cam doesn't explicitly censor expletives but it can demonetize the video or get it suppressed in the algorithm so far less people see it, and depending on the subject matter also get it age restricted. This of course has the effect of video creators avoiding them if they want the videos to do well. So not outright censored but still heavily suppressed, which is just another form of censorship.
@@OrbObserver no, youtube does outright censor profanity in the youtube comments. try calling someone a few bad words and you will quickly find that your comment quickly disappears after about 17-30s. how much profanity you can use depends on how much profanity you have used in your past (kind of a "trust system"; negative feedback loop; the more profane you are, the less profane you can be), and sometimes it reaches absurd levels. in fact you cannot even post links to well known sites such as imgur or pastebin or whatever else. for as far as im concerned, the only links allowed are the ones that remain within youtube. your comments also get removed if you post too many of them or they are """suspicious""" in other ways. heres the problem: you dont get notified of this. the comments get deleted silently and you have no idea of knowing other than to refresh the page after about 30s passed since you posted your comment. worse yet, sometimes it may appear as though the comment is still there, but if you look at it when youre not logged in (ie from an incognito window), its not there. you may look this up on youtube, a tech youtuber by the name bisquit made a video about this. fun fact: bots bypass this system and post comments with malicious intent and these comments stay up for months or years at a time. bonus fun fact: google censors many sites from its search results. it is a very trigger-happy company when it comes to censoring content.
One thing thing missing from yours is the locking cover that went over the cables in the back to prevent obvious bypassing the device. I think it had one of those cylindrical keys. Plenty of kids like myself could have figured out how to bypass. I remember having it growing up for the movies that would have just a couple bad words thrown in. Parents would still have to tell the kids to shut their eyes for offensive visuals. The captions always had the effect of me trying to figure out what they actually said since by that age I already knew most of the bad words.
I love how 'gay' is just casually labeled as a cuss word. My family had one of these growing up. Imagine my shock hearing my childhood movies uncensored for the first time. Oh my!
I think I remember those at garage sales and such. Honestly I want to see it try to play "George Carlin's 7 words you can't say on TV". I just want to read a how it tries to sensor him. It would probably be just as hilarious as the uncensored bit.
I'll one-up that... run it with South Park: Bigger, Long & Uncut -- it'll be interesting to see how it handles the song from the Terrance & Phillip Movie.
@@TStodden Also from that movie, not an exact quote I'm sure but it's close: Horrific deplorable violence is OK, as long as they don't say any naughty words.
@@TStoddenWould *maybe* work, Just because the voices are so flippin high-pitched then becomes so painful it might even go to the point it misses some swears.
FYI: Ben Eater just uploaded a video on the TV Guardian adressing the contents of the naughty word dictionary that is (probably; I'm not entirely through it yet but I have great trust in the quality of Bens videos) worth watching. Edit: My trust was indeed not misplaced, Bens video is excellent. :)
Came here from Bens video to leave a comment about the same topic you covered, but as you already did that the best I can do is upvote your comment so it gets some attention
Hi! I was extremely intrigued by this video, and particularly the part at 5:35 where you were sad to find that the manual didn't list the dictionary. I ordered one of my own, and took it apart. I removed the EEPROM chip, and dumped all its contents. I was successful in pulling out the dictionary of swears! The replacements are also in there (such as "crud"). Unfortunately, it's not immediately obvious what the replacements are in the file. All I have is the dictionary, but not the actual logic connected to swapping out words. However, the info might be in there somewhere, need to keep digging. In any case, all the data is on a 2-kilobyte chip, specifically U6B, which is in the top-center of the shot at 2:45. I dumped the chip to a 2-kilobyte .bin file, which holds all the data on there. I don't think UA-cam will let me link the file directly, but you can find it on my Twitter account, which is JoeyMurphySpace. Hope this is helpful! Edit: Oh! And I forgot to share my favorite part! In addition to its dictionary of words to censor, it also has a list of words to NOT censor, my favorite of which is "Dick Van Dyke", which, were it not for the exception, it would censor twice. That must have been a hilarious edge case for them to find during testing.
Lol, I imagine he caused one or two all nighters in the 80s and 90s. "Can we make it recognise names?" "I was trying to figure that out last week for Pussy Galore, just add an exception"
As youtube doesn't let me edit the preceding comment: Maybe someone finds out what FLAG1/FLAG2 is supposed to mean. "merge" means that the merged word is censored when it preceeds a "bad word".
@@joeymurphy2464 Oh, I see. UA-cam removed the comment as spam where I linked to my GitHub repository. My username is karcherm and the repository is named TvGuardian. That's why I couldn't edit the comment: It was already in the process of being removed.
So, at first, I wanted to call this device The Bowdlerizer, but then I decided that, in honor of the era it comes from, it should be dubbed the PearlClutcher 2000. (The modern HD version is, of course, the Pearlclutcher _5000,_ because camelcase is no longer "in", and for some reason marketers skipped right past the 4th and 5th millennia after "2000" ceased to be futuristic.) My favorite bit of TV censoring from that era has to be from the network broadcast edit of _On Golden Pond,_ in which Jane Fonda's character's declaration that "my father is a goddamned poop" has the "god" muted out, but not the "damned". It's doubly funny because "poop" is in the original line, not a redub!
I don't think there's much merit in the idea, but I do think it was most effective in dealing with language in the era of channel surfing. Parents could reasonably assume that little to no nudity etc. was on the airwaves during the day but it might include a few of the lesser words that TV Guardian would filter out. That being said it was often overzealous and would filter out words like "ball" from programs like Clifford the Big Red Dog. Definitely it's main weakness was being unable to discern context.
I realized in the edit that the Guardian is actually muting audio the instant a bad word is detected - the audio gets muted slightly _before_ the caption block appears on-screen, so it's not waiting until the databurst is complete. I'm sure that's to help mitigate bad timing errors, but it also means it can cut off sentences before it shou
Now we all want to know what profanity was supposed to end this comment before the Guardian protected our delicate ears (uh I mean eyes)
Classic comedy
That sentence surely ended in "should fucking do it". Works as intended!!
"Edit". That sounds like effort.
I see what you did here 🤣
My wife had one of these growing up. Their family gave up on it once they tried to watch Toy Story with it on and it decided to censor "Woody" and her parents didn't want to explain why that would be censored...
I love irony...
The poor thing would have melted if you watched the first 3 minutes of Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Lol that's great that they gave up on it rather than just shut it off for the movie
Lol
Sometimes people get what they deserve. This seems appropriate.
My college used to aggressively block the most obscure words, one of them was "virgin", which downsized the USA by two states, blocked an airline, and most Catholic websites. I asked why, I was told to prevent pornography. I tried pointing out that not many virgins work in that particular industry, but to no avail.
nice
Well, "virgin" ironically IS a common p*rn category.
Good old Scunthorpe Problem.
haha that was hilarious
Aren't colleges meant to be where adults find their feet? If you don't get exposed to the world, how else do you learn to navigate it?
My mom bought one of these when I was a teenager. We had years long running jokes about turning f-bombs into wow, sex into hugs, and the Finding Nemo line that went from "he touched the butt" to "he touched the tail." This device did more to push me toward being fine with swearing than anything else in my life.
I REMEMBER "HE TOUCHED THE TAIL" 😂
I watched so many movies with this thing but the songs in Bambi were being muted constantly because the birds kept using the word "gay" lol
Such palpable irony
callsic americano style *chef kiss*
That only happens in cartoons.
Y'know whats ironic? Your existance@@flamingdog9207
Ohh jeez, THIS thing. Totally had one in our household and friend's households in the late 90s/early aughts 😄 It had the unintended side effect of putting increased emphasis on language, so my buddies and I constantly found ourselves more focused on deciphering what was actually being said anytime it muted. We learned all KINDS of colorful new language as a result that otherwise may have passed by without much thought. Thanks TV Guardian, _you piece of ' crud. Wow._
Hahaha, yeeaahhh... that has also always been my feeeling with song lyrics being censored. If it hadn't been censored, I probably never would've picked up on a lot of them, haha
ye ol' Streisand effect
It warms my heart to know that LGR watches Technology Connections
I find this thing and idea it typically American 😅
You also had to decipher some non-curse words. For example, the word "pass" became "ptush."
So if you reverse input with output, does it start adding more profanity?
No, it just starts muting everything that _isn't_ a profanity.
@@michaldvorak1 the cuss cut
You damn right.
No, it enhances the profanity
What about if you're watching TV and someone on the TV is speaking German or some other non English language? What if they swear, does it only understand English?
There was an article I read in the 90s about a kids word learning program that had a typing section to allow kids to type their own sentences and have the computer read the sentence back to the child via the sound card. The code for this would censor bad words from being typed in or read aloud by the computer. Apparently the company that produced software didn't QA very well because if kids typed too many normal words into the note pad program it would over load the programs buffered memory and instead of stopping phrases from being spoken it read the list of bad words in its memory out loud for all to hear. One woman described it as the George Carlin's list of bad words you are not allowed to say on TV. Apparently this thing would angrily read all the naughty words on the list very quickly.
Now that's ... one hell of a buffer overflow!
Do you know what program it was? I tried to Google it but came up with nothing.
And that, kids, is why you always use memory allocation.
This is the funniest thing I read in a while
I have heard about this somewhere before but I can't recall the game. Anyone know?
i just had the funniest idea ever: i'm gonna get a vhs copy of south park: bigger, longer, and uncut and a tv guardian and i'm gonna watch the entire movie with it turned on and see what happens
How'd it go
Humanity wont like another nuclear catastrophe turn it off
so you will just watch a silent movie? XD I would love to see its captions for the songs though lol
Be better to watch a George Carlin routine
@@Blackjack701AD that will turn him into an angry mime occasionally angrily yelling some animalic noise.
1:49 Little correction there: the labelling says it's 100 Megaamps. So the power of the device is close to a Gigawatt. Strong language protection requires huge power!
Great Scott!
Aw dammit you beat me.
Connect 88 of those in series and you can time travel, of course without any vulgarity.
This is heavy
@@kfin45 Is there a problem with the gravitational pull in the future?
I absolutely had one of these in my household in the '90s! But as others have stated, it had the opposite effect as intended. Instead of guarding me from hearing profanity it made me focus on what words were removed. After a while I learned which words it used to replace the bad words. My brain would then automatically and conveniently translate them back to their profane version. It wasn't perfect though. To this day I still think the main cowboy character in Toy Story is named "excited".
We had one growing up. Parents got it for typical Fundie Christian reasons. Now I'm Atheist. Maybe I should start blaming this thing when people ask why I'm not religious anymore.
Fantastic!
@@nasonguy That must have sucked. England is a secular country, by and large, so we never had to deal with this sort of brainwashing. Even though my mum went to a convent school she made up her mind to never pass any beliefs she may have had to her kids. Wish more people were like that.
@@Blitterbug and thus, she passed her beliefs to you. Lmao
@@glovepro1256 what?
A friend of mine had one of these. As mentioned elsewhere, replacing sex with hugs was pretty bad, but the worst example of it he saw was, he was watching Sesame Street with his toddler one morning, scene change, a muppet rooster walks across the screen, stops, turns to the camera, the audio mutes, and the captioning reads “clown-a-doodle-doo!” I still laugh thinking about it.
why would it replace "cock" with "clown" lol
Lmao 🐥
That's hilarious
Some silent movie Charlie Chaplin level stuff
The Scunthorpe problem.
Fun fact: youtube now has their own version of CCensoring, replacing closed captions of swears with a big fat [___]
They censor words networks didn't even give Norman Lear a headache over.
sometimes excludes dam-
Yes and I hate it so much. Why can't youtube make a system where if the user is over 18, it doesn't censor swear words? So stupid.
@@ElliLavender I never really thought about it but it's insane for people who are deaf/hard of hearing or whatever to just rip away information like that as if /everyone/ is a child
@@trashcant"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." Definitely a quote still fitting current days.
Despite the total absurdity of the device, I have to take my hat off to the engineers assigned to build it and write that manual. They did (I think) the best possible job within the technical limitations, were aware of the many failings, and mentioned them in detail in the manual.
You don’t always get to choose what you work on, but it’s always great to see a difficult and unrewarding job done well regardless.
Yeah, considering what they had to work with, they did a remarkable job.
I wonder if Oppenheimer would agree 🤔
@@classicDropwig Oppenheimer is a fraud. There's no such thing as a nuclear bomb.
What's the basis for assuming the engineers had some apprehension towards working on this product?
@@yukiminsan as stated above.. IMHO it’s an “absurd concept”, that could never work properly at that time
My mother bought one of these from QVC as a depressed impulse buy when I was a kid. I didn't like the idea of it, and I was the only one with the know-how to set it up. Instead of using it to censor, I set it up for a much better function: to add closed captioning to an old TV that didn't have it. It got quite a lot of use as a closed-captioning upgrade!
@@wishunter9000 you can hardly make a general rule from his parents. People are different.
@@wishunter9000 my mom was born in the 70's, was a nurse and only now she got used to doing computer stuff because she's studying. Meanwhile my dad was born in the 60's and made circuit boards, made T-shirts for our city's Worker's Party and now just hangs around modifying whatever electronics he finds.
Some people just don't care about technology and ask others to deal with it lol
@@wishunter9000 Funny, right? I mean since it was Boomers and older who invented the high tech industry, PC's and the internet.
@@artdonovandesign Not to mention the amazing TV Guardian itself.
@@wishunter9000 i know people who can hardly figure out how to plug in a HDMI cable and power cable. Something even simpler than the old three cables from back then
My parents absolutely had one of these on our TV when I was a kid and I had almost completely forgotten about it until this moment. What a weird nostalgic feeling!
One thing I specifically remember is that on ours the word "sex" was replaced with "hugs" regardless of context. So people would routinely ask pregnant people if they knew the hugs of the baby.
"We'll take the 10AM train to Sushugs"
@@twiceineverymoment "Eshugs is an alright county I guess"
@@twiceineverymoment I'd love to know how it dealt with Scunthorpe
@@binky_bun Or the "buttbuttination" of JFK
@@binky_bun Penistone
My psychology teacher in highschool (inner city Catholic, class of 07) used this to show us relevant movies with "objectionable language" (things like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or A Beautiful Mind). We knew what was being said. He knew we knew. We knew he knew we knew. The administration knew he..... But, it served it's true purpose as: to be a fig leaf/plausible deniability and allow us to get a better, more contextualized, more empathetic education.
I think that alone justifies this things creation and existence.
I think this is the first time I've heard of a genuine use for this waste of plastic and silicon
That reminds me, high schools in Kansas are required to teach creationism along with evolution theory. On the second day of AP honors Biology II, my very droll teacher explained this and stated something like "Creation theory posits that God created the world exactly as it is today. Do we all feel like we're familiar with creation theory?" We all rolled our eyes and said "yeah." Teech said "Good, now we can get on to science."
@@Whammytap in Louisiana, as well, and my science teacher said almost the exact same thing!😂
UA-cam closed captioning also censors. I find that extremely irritating. I have an auditory processing disorder. I usually hear ok, but always keep the CC on. There should be an adult selection because if I was completely deaf, blanking out swear words often changes the meaning of the sentence which seems like it should be against the ADA.
I’m right there with you. Headphones help me hear a bit better but it really bothers me that they can just do that.
@@L-sillybrained I've complained but never got a response. If there were some deaf people that got the ACLU involved we could maybe get actual accurate text translations but until then, I'm not holding my f---ing breath lol
UA-cam should professionally create CC by hand for all videos above a certain amount of views (250k views?) and then let the viewer decide how they want to censor the text.
@Lime Which option is that when you upload a video?
I remember this being a baked in feature for their speech detection API so I had to resort to
recognize_google(audio).replace("f***", "fuck")
I actually learn all my bad words from my parents arguing in the kitchen instead of TV, music, or video games. Just be aware that your child will learn to swear regardless. If your child starts swearing, teach them to have filter.
Same for me that's a secret
Sounds like there are more issues there than learning to cuss. I couldn't imagine yelling at my wife, let alone cursing at her (or vice versa).
@@Vykk_Draygo Doing so around the children . . like oh my 🤬why would you.
Seriously though it WAS not *NORMAL to swear in front of your young children.
If you mention "what shit did you buy" it isn't quite as bad as the following:
"what the F is wrong with you." Or . . . "you b-witch" . . . "wh_re " . . . "being a jack🐎" and so on I don't even want to spell them.
Married couples should not be using cuss words to describe each other.
This
@@NPC-bs3pm this
glad you mentioned censoring captions being bad practice, youtube's autocaptions do it sometimes and it's absolutely infuriating. If it's not censored for those who don't need captions, it shouldn't be censored for those who do!
[ __ ]
Uncensored captions can also indicate the tone of the person who spoken, you can most likely tell on captions if someone is pissed
Sometimes auto captions systems remove bad words not to censor the content but as a fail safe from adding bad words where there are non by mistake.
Here’s a bit of context on UA-cam caption censoring: it’s a way for creators to get their content through over eager UA-cam filters. At least this was the thinking at some point (algorithms may have updated since). If the creator over-rode the auto-generated captions, they could get the occasional word through. So, kinda like the TV Guardian, UA-cam is/was relying on captions for filtering.
I remember seeing a vídeo about the old series code lyoko, its a french animated kids show, and one of the characters is named sissy. It was censored everytime it was said and the show is rated E
I'm so happy you mentioned that censoring captions is very bad accessibility practice. This is one of my favorite channels!
ps you just reminded me of teletext. that was so cool
Yes. Shame on UA-cam for doing it with auto-captions.
I do transcription work and they really hammered this in during training, I’m glad he mentioned it
I love how "No effort November" first turned into "Nearly no effort November" and now into "Look, OK, I may say there's no effort involved, but... November". Excellent video. Thank you.
It must be a perfect month for that long delayed Teletext video.
"Not Exactly 'No Effort' November"
Hasn't been since he hand painted Christmas lights
Given the cheapness of the device, I'd bet that the bad words are stored in plain text. Send it to Adrian's Digital Basement and ask him to dump the ROMs. :D
Came here to say this! I'd love to see that list.
Why would they not be ascii text
just a set of lines that all, continuously like an ourobouros, censor one another for their foulness
@@JussiPeltola these are pretty much synonyms in this case. like a plaintext file would be ASCII
@@JussiPeltola so that other manufacturers can't easily steal your word list and all your substitutions.
I showed this to my wife who grew up in a very strict Christian household and what do you know, her mom heard about one of these in church and got one for them! She absolutely hated it and remembers in A Walk to Remember a girl was wearing a dress and a guy said "She's going to get a lot of hugs in that dress" Amazing.
Nothing wrong with a good Christian side hug. Unless there's a pandemic.
Jurassic park was the one that made me laugh
@@CTimmerman that's a terrible reason not to hug a loved one
@@matthewrease2376 You're kidding, right? I didn't even get within six feet of my grandmother (who lives across town from me and i see once or twice a month to help when she needs something done around the house) until she'd gotten the vaccine, and we were both completely fine with that, because if i gave my grandmother a virus that killed her, i'd lose my mind.
@@ShuRugal Yeah, but I don't think you would have been hugging your granny anyway ;)
We had a different gadget in my house. My parents would just say "No, you're not watching that."
I used to play Puzzle Pirates (a puzzle-based MMO) back during its alpha and beta phases before release, and I'm reminded of an incident with the game's profanity filters. Similar to how this device works, the chat had a filter that would replace common swear words with piratey-sounding substitutes. Unfortunately in one release somehow the two dictionaries had gotten mixed up, so suddenly people who were playing "in character" in the game found that they were, well, swearing like sailors. Hilarity ensued.
I played a lot of puzzle pirates back in the day. I don't normally care for auto censors and generally turn them off, but I always left PP's "Pirate-ify" setting on because it made me smile.
cabbage you cabbage you are cabbage cabbage your cabbage. RSfilterr did that one time whee all swear AND NON-swear words wer e"cabbage"
@@nightmarerex2035 🥦🥬
And this reminds me of Neopets infamous Day of SIn. Where, after the NeoPets site had begun to fall apart, something went wrong, and basically the filters stopped working one day in 2015.
BLISTERING BARNACLES!
Hold up you didn't even mention the most absurd censor in the whole thing! I grew up watching TV exclusively with one of these, to the point we'd have to switch devices manually by unplugging & plugging them into the back of it.
If it ever detected someone saying "have sex" or "sex" at all, it would replace it with "hugs". "Have sex" turned into "have hugs" sometimes. It was truly, absolutely the most hilarious thing about it to me lmao
Presumably the AIDS awareness campaigns were advising you to have safe hugs, too. That is one of the dangerous effects of prudish censorship.
And, on a more frivolous note: did it also use "hugual intercourse" or "hug intercourse" as a euphemism?!
Ah yes, the dream product of the puritan america who doesnt realize how inneffective puritanism actually is.
legendary gymnast mary lou retton
endorsed it.
yes that mary lou retton.
That's outrageous! Everyone knows the proper replacement phrase is "special cuddles". =:oO / =;o]
Veterinary receptionist: And what hugs is your dog?
Usefulness aside, someone did some very impressive programming to fit this functionality into the onboard PIC microcontroller, which has only 2K of program memory. Around the time this came out I was writing sentence parsing firmware (totally unrelated to CC) using similar PICs, and whoever was able to do all this with 2K - I take my hat off to you. BTW, if you're really interested, the curse words of interest are stored in clear text on the 16K serial EEPROM on the board.
Someone needs to do a data dump of that eeprom that would be really interesting to see!
What amazes me more is how stupid and clumsy modern programmers are. Mouse driver 1991 - 30KB. Mouse driver 2022 - 130MB. That's over FOUR THOUSAND times bigger for.... the same functions.
@@lambertovitali3152 nah, now you need that in Dotnet that runs a browser that runs your application in Javascript. 😏
5:35 that sounds like a job for @foone
@@BastetFurry May as well be writing BASIC and passing it through the interpreter built into a TRS-80 BIOS chipset...
4:51 “Some do, for silly reasons (which makes using them as a computer monitor _very_ annoying until you find the “just scan” setting buried in the menus)[…].” You have no idea how much time that joke just saved me. Thank you.
My favorite part of No Effort November is that the videos are still extremely informative, interesting, and well put together
And most of the time take more effort than his regular videos.
When I read that I thought you'd censored the word _nut_ 😁
@@AnotherDuck Well, he never said he'd go to any special effort to go to no special effort.
@@Meshamu I hate how that makes sense.
I've always wondered how he distinguishes between No Effort and Regular, for that very reason! Now that I'm working on my own channel, with deep dives into queer history instead of technology, I think I get it.
The throw-away comment at the end here, about how he'd look into it more but it's No Effort November, makes it all make sense to me now.
I start researching a topic, and end up needing to do a good ten videos on associated topics, expand the video I had started, and.... go finish something else that's a little closer to done.
(And then YouCut eats it, and then I have to redo all the editing while resolving never again to use YouCut... but at least I thought of several UA-cam shorts to create along the way. On... a... nearly completely unrelated topic.)
I live in Brazil, and we had our own sorta "version" of the TV Guardian: dubbing.
By law, all programs and films aired on public access television *must* be dubbed. This by itself isn't a terrible problem, since Brazil does have some of the best dubbing studios and artists in the world. But, as an "added bonus", the translators also heavily censored and softened the script of any movies they did. As a result, we grew up watching stuff like The Goodfellas with the actors saying pretty much the "TV Guardian" version of the script.
An odd side effect of this is that most of us grew up thinking that American movies were all very clean and sanitised. But, since local Brazilian films didn't need dubbing, they'd always get aired with full profanity on, and this led to think that Brazilian films were the worst in the world in terms of profanity, in comparison to the "clean" and "polite" American movies such as Scarface.
Good one : D
In poland there is a voicover but they make it with a slight delay to original actor voice so you can hear english right before polish translation. As in your example translation was heavily censored and modified but since we could still hear the original, the difference between the two was often quite funny.
Caraca! Os tiras estão chegando
@@driveslow48 calhorda!
lol
Very interesting.
In Germany, which has no law mandating dubbing, but it's done anyway with virtually everything, because the German-speaking market is large and profitable, there was a period from the 1960s to the late '80s when serious foreign movies were turned into comedies by creating more "humorous" scripts and then use those for the dubbing. They had free reign and changed the nature of many films, especially Westerns, completely. Audiences absolutely loved it and many still do to this day, but much of this humor is very infantile and dated. The people behind the originals were also usually not asked and often shocked and surprised when they learned what their films had been turned into.
Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill buddy movies were the most affected by this. The duo is extremely popular in Germany, mainly because these dubbed versions (which nobody knew were different from the Italian and English language originals) precisely hit the pop culture zeitgeist of their time. Both did however also make more serious movies, like Terrence Hill in the stunning Western "My Name is Nobody" by Sergio Leone (and with one of the best soundtracks of all times by Ennio Morricone). In the original, Nobody is a tight-lipped anti-hero, barely uttering a word in most scenes. This is still a comedy in its original dub, but it's comparatively subdued. In the German dub on the other hand, they used every opportunity to turn him into a witty comedian, constantly uttering little jokes and remarks. They often have him speak when he has his back turned to the camera and was silent in the original.
One scene from this movie I vividly remember from a time when I watched movies first in German, then in English with German subtitles, then in English with English subtitles and finally without subtitles in order to increase my English vocabulary (which worked brilliantly, except with these movies) was a scene where he's arrested and walked towards a building clearly labelled "Jail". Since this word doesn't exist in the German language (it would be "Gefängnis"), they had him ask if he was led to the building where "Jail" lived (pronounced like a German would, so "yail"). This joke only works if you understand English enough to know what it actually means, making this one of those rare bilingual puns.
As for cussing, there's much less of a hysteria about protecting children from it (it's usually not a factor with age ratings) and the German language isn't very colorful in this regard. Dubs try their best to somewhat emulate the severity and style of the originals, but there are cases of films, TV shows and games turning it down, for marketing reasons. It often doesn't work and the finer aspects of language, especially word plays, are routinely misunderstood and butchered, to the point that I think most people writing translated scripts aren't very well versed in the English language. A friend of mine, who kind of infected me with the idea of watching originals instead of dubbed versions, alerted me to this and I haven't stopped noticing it since. Luckily, this was right at the time when the DVD began to take off, which usually had at least two audio tracks, the original and the dubbed version, so I could easily switch to the original audio track. Except of course with movies that omitted them for space or cost-cutting reasons. Lots of films also retained on-screen translations in the form of subtitles for e.g. signs and text on screen, which is an issue that still exists on modern streaming services even if I switched everything to English.
My buddy across the street grew up in a catholic household. His dad worked for IBM, and his mom loved being catholic. She insisted on having this thing. His dad hated it so he made up a set of fake wires that went to the unit and the t.v. then the cable just went straight to the t.v. every time she heard a swear word he would bang on the box and claim its malfunctioning.
bahaha
That's great😂
Great story of fiction 💀🤣🤣
My friend did something similar with his central heating, put a wireless controller inside an old dial type control box and every time his girlfriend complains about the cold he lets her "turn the heating up" knowing full well it does nothing.
That could only go on for so long until she'd ask for a new box.
I had a friend in Elementary School who had one of these, but I never saw it in action. Always blew my mind that it could censor live TV. The actual explanation blows my mind even more.
You have reached a level of professionalism that even the "no efford novemer" series is hardly inferior to your other episodes.
Greeting from Germany :)
I guess no effort means no magic of buying two of them :(
That’s kind of a running joke with his no effort November videos.
All he needs to do is drop the contrived attempt to be “funny”, as he was better like that (when he first started) and all will be well.
@@unlokia Nah
I knew a girl in high school from a conservative family who had one of these things. I’d never heard of such a thing before. I saw it in action while watching ‘Finding Nemo’ of all things where I believe it cut out the word “butt” and replaced it with “tail”.
*“He touched the tail”*
German version would censor the ''tail'' :D
@@lkrnpk I'm German, for the life of me I can't figure out what you mean, help me please!
@@simonro9168 i see your schwartz is as big as mine
@@simonro9168 "Schwanz" would get censored
When we were kids, my brother actually asked for one of these for his birthday, he didn't like swearing at the time.
My favorite weird substitution was the Siren scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail where all the maidens are excitedly asking for "oral hugs"
Oral hugs lol
Yes!!! I still think about instances of that one!!
The Mahito Mouth hugs lmaoooo
What a unique request
The Teletext was extremely strong among the deaf people in Sweden. It was even sold as an aid-device. I grew up with a deaf father and still remember what page the weather forecast was on and where the TV-guide was. Very neat and helpful. And to many extent even far quicker than cell phone usage of today. And leaving the sound of the TV on you could fast and easy watch the weather and keep the dialogue in your ears and then go back to the program. Loved it very much.
Teletext was i ternet before internet wad a thing.
My family had one of these growing up! The side effect being that we would forget that not all of our neighbors had these and we would take our not family friendly films to neighbors houses to watch which would make for very awkward movie viewing experiences when the foul language wasn't filtered out. It also had some hilarious effects such as changing this sentence from "Great jumpin' horny toads" to "Great jumpin' excited toads". Watching looney toons with this thing on was great.
My friend with one of these had fond memories of watching “Jerk Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” every year
tell me some of the stuff from the looney toons censorship's the box spat out
I’m actually impressed by how comprehensively this thing does the text replacements (especially given the crude exterior).
We had a TV guardian growing up and the results were often hilarious. My mom showed us the movie Cliffhanger with the guardian on and in one scene it muted everything EXCEPT several naughty words. So the sound would briefly cut in just long enough to hear someone yell a 4 letter word 😂😂
lol
Good movie. Hope you rewatched it properly later on.
One of my high school teachers had this, and was apparently watching CSI with his wife and daughter. Evidently it replaced "sex offender" with "hug offender," which then became a bit of a local meme.
My parents totally had this while I was growing up! It was so annoying, and it would mute "sex" and replace it with "hugs", regardless of the context 😂
I love having gay [hugs]!
@@youngwang97 I love [driving] thick [cars]
"Hugs, Lies, and Videotape"
They had no consideration for the opposite hugs….
Leaving you wondering why your mother and father would want you to "sex" your cousins goodbye when leaving the family Christmas party.
The blob of paint on the 2K eeprom U6B suggests to me that maybe this has been preprogrammed with the database, and should be easy to read out as these chips aren't code protected.
Teletext was an insane concept. Internet without internet. News, sport scores, chatrooms, games all kinda stuff on your tv for free
Holy crap, Teletext was a thing outside of where I live too?! Out Teletexts actually still exist! Granted, only, like, 4 channels actually have it, and it's been... largely abandoned (heck, quite a bit of stuff doesn't work anymore), but you can still access them! It's wild to see a relic of the past still *sorta* working even to this day!
My mom kept one of these on every TV in the house until I was 15 or 16. She was so strict about language that she didn't think the TV guardian was strict enough. We had to watch Disney movies with this thing turned on because she hated terms like "balls" or "stupid" and "shut up" was forbidden in the house. I remember being told not to watch tv or movies at friends houses because they didn't have this. The side effect was me asking her all the time why a word was bad and her having to explain it.
I feel really sorry you had to live through that bullshit
Damn she was unnecessarily strict. Ig she was extremely religious too because prudes seem to usually be in that category
so are you an ordained saint by the catholic church yet?
@@akiraigarashi2874 please don't say the beaver word it is a bad influence
@@kazooduck 😂😂😂😂😂
True story: Back in the mid 1980's, I went to the first Comdex convention in Las Vegas where i saw a prototype of a similar device. We typed in several explicit sentences and it caught all of them. I thought about it for a few minutes and did the F-bomb, only I changed it to the Ph-bomb as F and Ph produce the same sound. The developer was there and asked me to stick around for a few minutes. He worked on a program and asked me to try it again. The Ph-bomb no longer worked.
He patched up your exploit.
yey
That's clever for the developer to be present while the public tries to circumvent the product's intended use!
LMAO he literally went:
Ain no way im lettin this slide
live QA, lol
As someone in the UK who did grow up with Teletext, I would LOVE to see you collaborate with someone who can provide thoughts, ideas, media, and feedback for you to present. Your enthusiasm for Teletext already is enough for the video to be great I'm sure. If I can help at all I would love to.
Someone like Techmoan or Tom Scott. Possibly 8Bit Guy but being US based probably has little first-hand experience as already explained.
@@dcarbs2979 If Techmoan was up for a collab, that'd be an amazing duo!
In addition to the channels already mentioned I'd also recommend Nostalgia Nerd. But yeah...Techmoan Connections is a match made in heaven!
@@dcarbs2979 i'm goping to fight tom scxott on top[ of a train but we'll be friends after because it was just fo sillies :-)
@@dcarbs2979 I was totally thinking of Tom Scott. From what I know about him, he would love the topic of Teletext.
How to catch your house on fire:
1. Turn this machine on
2. Play Rap music
As a developer, I couldn't help but envision a bunch of people sitting in a meeting room going over on a whiteboard how they're going to censor phrases.
I worked on a project once where we wanted to detect incitement to violence or other harmful stuff in text for book publishers. We had to gather so much material to train the models that we always joked that any day now, the authorities had to knock on our doors.
Imagine being the guy told to compile every word in the English dictionary known to be profane.
@@andreibaciu7518 I've been that guy. It was called the "Carlin List" on our project.
The real problem comes with phrases. "Porch" and "Monkey" are both innocuous words, and are used in appropriate conversations in children's programming. But put them together ...
I'm loving the mental image of a company spreadsheet with one column being an exhaustive list of naughty words.
I mean that's basically what happens now
I remember we had something like this at the Highschool I went to. For all I know, it could have been the exact same system considering how much it also used the work "jerk". One time it changed a sentence to "He pulled out his jerk" and the whole class just erupted in laughter. It had most of the same exact issues this thing has such as bad timing, not working on certain DVDs, sometimes it would miss words and leave them uncensored. Most of the teachers hated it, it was more distracting than anything. They would get excited when a DVD wouldn't work with it.
🤣
"He pulled out his jerk" is just beautiful.
"overscan" was code for "the boss is paying attention" at the tv station where I used to work. It means, "look like you care".
My grandfather had one like this. He called it the Cuss Free TV. He didn't have it for kids or anything. He just didn't like hearing the words himself.
Instead of just muting it would substitute a voice saying a different word. Like I remember watching The Matrix with him and hearing "kiss my toe."
This thing is an automated version of the hilarious "clean" versions of action movies that used to air with dubbed audio over cuss words- I remember Bruce Willis running around calling people "Mellon Farmers" before shooting them in uncensored fashion.
No clue but a 7yo could 'pick' the rear cable box lock with a pair of fingernail clippers.
Do you see what happens? You see what happens Larry? This is what happens. You see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?
yippie kai yay mr falcon
Funnily enough avgn just released a video talking about all of those censors
"Yippy-ki-yi-yay, my friend!"
As a Polish, I could say a lot about teletext uses, but the most intriguing aspect I learned recently is that... it's still used!
It turns out that teletext is one of the few info channels, which are available in prison all the time. So not only they use it to read news, sport scores etc. - people outside of prison can buy an ad in teletext (with SMS or online), so they use it to send messages to their relatives in prison
Let me know if there's a video on tuat
@@andrzej_autko haven't seen video, but i read about it on some Polish portal (but it's mentioned also in English sites)
Since, you're Polish, check page 471 on tvp1 (it's also online). At the moment there is an ad with "we wish you that the time will pass quickly" part ;)
Hmmm, Polish AND Prison? Why explicitly mentioning Polish? Is this some effin stereotypes, transported by those for example German idiots[1]?: "The Polish & Theft go hand in hand".
Anyway, greetings from Germany, fellow neighbor!:) Teletext is just an established service, a data service embedded and specified by the DVB standards. Teletext goes back to German Videotext, which was presented for the first time with a 400-page offer by ARD and ZDF during the 1977 radio exhibition in Berlin. In 2017, according to ARD (public broadcaster) Trend, Videotext still had more than 15 million daily visitors, 12 million of them on ARD and ZDF alone[2]. News, sports and the program pages are particularly popular, but also the accompaniment of live events (e.g. ESC Song Contest) and specific offers such as the Tatort magazine.
In the German Wikipedia on the subject, which is well worth reading, there is unfortunately nothing about your interesting story. Thank you for sharing, qj0n:)
[1] joking, I am none of them, you are welcome friend!:)
[2] So this is anything but obsolete and forgotten. My father, who is over 85, is a heavy user of sports news via Teletext himself:)
@@dieSpinnt Sad to say we no longer have teletext in the UK: for the BBC (publicly funded), Ceefax turned into "Red Button" with the switch to digital, but they offered a little more than they could deliver when they called it "interactive TV" and it withered on the vine. Plans to shut it down altogether were put on hold in 2020 thanks to protests and petitioning by the deaf, blind and visually impaired communities. The commercial stations, however, contracted their teletext out to a company called Teletext, who mostly shut down services in 2010. So this wouldn't be possible here :(
@@dieSpinnt pretty sure it's just cause he is polish and thus the example is specifically polish prisons because, you know, he's polish. Like how I'd mention you can still send telegrams to American prisons. Because I'm American and that's what I happen to know. I know y'all have some... Uh. History with Poland but not everything has to be in that context
Teletext is still pretty popular here in the Netherlands. Not just for closed captioning - always at page 888 - but also for news and sports results. Given the lack of bandwidth compared to the modern alternatives, there are no ads, autoplaying videos, or SEO-optimized padded nonsense. Just a few paragraphs at most. Which is a remarkably blissful experience.
I mainly used to use it for "what's playing now and what's next" (page 333 I think) and a full program guide (starting at 303 I believe?). And there definitely was plenty of ads, mostly for certain phone numbers, just on their own pages somewhere 😂
Is was like a one-way BBS that only state-of-the art 80's and 90s TV had here in Australia :P
Sweden calls it Text-TV and uses page 199 for subtitles, but popularity is the same.
888 seems to have been a sort of standard for subtitles, UK Children's BBC and ITV used to sign "888" before programmes that had subtitles for deaf people.
The commercial telly version, Teletext, (the BBC had Ceefax) was also one of the major sellers of cheap, drunken holidays to the flesh-pots of the Med.
We had 888 as the subtitles page in Belgium too. I remember often looking up the weather report.
2:41 -> _Oh no, I voided my warranty…_
The warranty probably expired 25 years ago.
Yeah.
My mom got one of those when I was a kid, dad got so fed up with it that he threw it out in the back yard and destroyed it with a hammer.
Our TV was never censored again.
Hahaha 🤣👍
Based.
You have a good father.
😂😂
sounds like an oldschool guy my dad is the same 😂👍
We live in a very strange time where I could easily imagine a team of engineering undergrads recreating this entire project for a weekend hackathon...and could also easily imagine another team using speach-to-text to get around the need for captions....and another team using deep learning to literally listen to the audio swears and replace them with other generated phrases in real time.
Could even have the device passthrough at a second or two delay so it has time to process input and correct as needed.
@@GambitsEnd Heck you could make the delay way longer, minutes if needed.
It's a mystery to me why this company which still exists hasn't gone that route. It would be very easy. Many existing repositories for transcription of spoken word exist. Plug in your word database and pass through the video feed with enough delay to process it all and it would work near perfectly.
And I could also totally imagine projects being developed to do the reverse - to take bleeps and "vege swears" like heck and frick, and recreate a swear to match. Deepfaked audio could even be used if you have enough cpu grunt.
@@Mrcaffinebean That wouldn't be terribly user friendly though, with that much of a delay.
this thing just unlocked a memory! it's what introduced my entire 7th grade class in Christian school to the term "puss" as profanity--watching Shrek 2 when Puss in Boots' appears and says his name...it got censored. not many of us would've known about that otherwise so we asked our teacher what it meant 😭 classic.
I'm Dutch, non of the profanities are beeped out. Especially with music, the radio version is just so lame compared to how a track was meant to be. From adding beeps or, in Gravel Pit by Wu Tang for instance, animal sounds and the like. Some whole lines are just inaudible. It's not that our youth swears more or less than in other countries that DO bleep out. Plus, most child targeted stuff on tv/radio doesn't have profanity in it anyway.
What was the answer?
@@nlx78 I believe radio is censored throughout Europe, at least within the countries I've driven in. It's stupid, especially because the profanities are often in English (there's not as much cussing in songs of other languages) so children wouldn't understand the words, and the radio station could just... avoid broadcasting particularly egregious songs. We still get a song called " 'Nigerian gas' in Paris" to this day on radio, and it's a half-mute fest.
@@leonrois it actually called nigerian gas in paris or is it still called niggas in paris?
@leonro I hate that song tbh it's so annoying
Where have you been all my life ? 😉 love your channel! 😊
Man, this actually brought back repressed memories of my childhood of watching movies created for kids being wrongly censored by this strange box.
Yeah - except that today basically all UA-camrs are forced to "voluntarily" censor themselves exactly the same way.
How much the US has progressed!
I'm [WILLY], The new sheriff in town!
@@OGuiBlindaorichard for the new cowboy
Oh hey I had one of these. It was terrible at so many things and honestly made me *more* aware of potentially sensitive language. It censored “Puss” in the Shrek movies and replaced it with “Wimps” which was hilarious.
Wimps in boots….
"WOW HER RIGHT IN THE WIMPSY!"
Pray for mercy from... WIMPS! In Boots.
It would certainly make a porno film very interesting to watch...
So we had weakly interacting massive particles in boots?
My father was involved in the early development of teletext. Thanks for giving people the overview, even if you can't do a full length video on it :)
Cool beans
As a kid teletext was like magic to me.
@@ForboJack Loved messing about on Teletext on the BBC channels (all 2 of them) and it was Oracle on ITV right?
@@Shanghaimartin I thought Teletext was ITV and Ceefax was BBC? Or was that just the user interface names but the technology names were as you say?
Cool
15:48 The irony of this is that UA-cam captions are censored. At least the auto-captioning is because they apparently don't care that an adult would be choosing to watch other adults swear in a video. Superchats are also routinely censored. Comments are also increasingly get scanned for swears and can result in suspensions/bans.
I remember as an intern I got the task of writing a profanity/spam filter for a corporate messaging system we were working on. The code review was hilarious since it fed off of a text file of every profanity I could think of or find. Of course I started the file with George Carlin's slightly redundant list.
Legend
I'm a member of a discussion board where Eric's dad is replaced with "nope" by the profanity filter.
But did your solution solve the clbuttic svulvahorpe problem?
for um science reasons do you still have that file?
@@michealpersicko9531 Unfortunately no, this was like 15 years ago.
I can imagine it being useful to families with infants or toddlers, who are either just learning their first words or in the repeating everything phase. This would allow adults to watch whatever they liked while supervising kids who can't see the screen or aren't paying attention. No help for kids actually watching TV, but it would certainly prevent a 2 year old from screaming curse words repeatedly for fun.
Nothing funnier than a two year old dropping F-bombs left and right.
A child only repeats what it either hears often or what gets the most amazing reaction when it first repeats it. If a kid repeats "car", everone is, "Jep, thats a car". If it repeats "fuck", everyone is like noooooo u shouldnt say that. The 2 year old might not know what they mean, but it knows how adults react to them saying it.
Its so funny to hear other people think about this. Its just not something people bother where I'm from (german part of Europe), well they do, but that has nothing to do whether a kid could hear it. Its just that u don't want a stranger to hear u cuss, bc they might think ur uneducated, but because of the kids? Fuck no... 😬
My family had one of these when I was growing up. We loved it because the censorship was often just "off" enough to make phrases funny, and it would pick up on wacky things that you wouldn't expect to be objectionable. My favorite thing is that it replaced a rooster's "cock-a-doodle-doo" with "jerk-a-doodle-doo"!
20:23 I used to love Teletext. It was basically like pre-internet. Weather reports. Lottery results. News, comic strips and the best one for me? Game reviews. I would have never have heard of Golden Sun without it.
I rarely used Teletext, but it was almost like having a web browser on your TV. There was a lot going on in it.
Still exists in some countries. Norway is one example.
Yeah, I were too young to have any use of it. But my parents used to to check the weather, news and the lotto on it.
Back in the 90s I had a video capture card in my PC, and it decode all 4 channels of closed captioning and 4 channels of teletext, if present. While flipping through the cable channels in Canada with TT turned, the only time I ever saw text was a crude up-coming programming guide in the CBC French channel.
Years ago, my parents elderly friend needed help with their TV: "It has a big black square in the middle of the picture" . I knew right away that they have accidentally activated TeleText display, without any text to show. Just keep pressing the "CC" button on the remote, until it cycles through the multiple closed captioning and teletext modes back into the "off" setting, and everything will be fine.
@@jonathancombe9991 same here in the Netherlands.
I grew up with it in the UK - there were games and joke pages for kids - happy memories :)
It'd be fun to reverse engineer and pull out the list of words and/or rules. If I could find one I might give it a whirl.
It's been done.
@@Kaczynski66 funny, that's the video that's about to autoplay next
That video brought me here.
Yep
Change innocent words into swear words!
Teletext brings back memories of me and my grandpa typing down the numbers for the pages we wanted to see. Sports results, weather and tv programming were used the most. Some tv channels even included horoscopes and news.
It was fun to browse, in some ways it was like a proto internet browsing experience. They even made pixel art to go along with each category.
A poor signal would mean random missing or corrupted text. I'd so love to go back in time and introduce a mobile phone or something. Then realise there was no 4G or any internet or.... damn.
There were even basic chat rooms in teletext (I think you entered your text via phone) and some channels even had pixel art porn if you knew where to find it.
Also the information on the current program was pretty good. You'd get the plot of a movie, the actors names and more.
@@ForboJack TV2 in Norway had a bunch of sex-phone numbers on it, with art on the pages.
TV2 has shut down their teletext, but NRK still has it's available. There's even a webpage to look at it online.
@@SuperFranzs In the NL too, some very naughty pixel art!
@@SuperFranzs advertising for sex-hotlines is the only thing I can remember seeing on teletext.
Maybe there was other stuff but that probably wasn't interesting enough for me as a kid 😅
My parents' solution to keeping us from repeating bad words on screen was to have us shout out "bad word!" whenever we heard it as a game, activating the power of pedantry with the amusing side effect that we would also call out adults for swearing irl.
this reminds me…when I was in 4th grade, I went to a conservative private school in the heart of georgia. As expected, swearing was incredibly taboo, not just for kids my age either. My teenage sister said she was the basically only person who regularly swore in her grade.
One day, my music teacher puts on a video for our class, I believe 4 chords by the Axis of Awesome. He was showing basically how many songs have this chord structure, especially popular ones. We were all really enjoying it, then suddenly the singers said “I’m a bird, I’m a plane, I’m a motherfuckin’ birdplane,” and honestly everyone was silenced into shock. The video ended not long after and he never addressed it, and neither did we.
As an adult, I’m like, who gives a fuck if some 9 years olds hear a swear word every once in a while. But man, it was so life shattering back then.
What, did the teacher not watch the video first? 😆
Probs did watch it, but it's a really cool example of how much use you can get out of four chords as well as being a legitimately amazing music medley performance so they decided a single swear was worth the learning/viewing experience.
I think the best way to truly and blamelessly extricate yourself from the teletext dilemma is not to rip the band-aid off, but to look out for a glorious collaboration with an equally glorious fellow youtuber. Preferably one who _is_ emotionally invested in the subject.
Who do you have in mind?
@@blabik LGR comes to mind.
I think a collab with Techmoan would be awesome.
@@dbclass4075 Not British enough.
Tom Scott Plus ... Alec Watson. (-:
I find that an incredible application for closed captioning data. I don't care how silly it seems, the fact that they could screen both text and audio even mostly successfully with an add-in box is a beautiful concept.
It didn't do any screening on the audio, just relied on the CC.
Just imagine what could have been achieved if those minds had built something useful.
"Silly" isn't the word i'd use for it. I'd call it a sing of mental issues.
@@lambertovitali3152 Capitalism doesn't do "useful" - thats just side effect that is not at all guaranteed to happen. Capitalism does "what will sell".
@@madcio Useful things sell to everybody. The above gadget only sells to a minority of backward up tight folk.
Oh my god am i really seeing Mr. D, the man who claimed that Rax restaurants was a place you can eat, on your shirt?!?! I’ve just found your channel and I’m in love
That voided warranty, my man... I should have sent you a few tamper evident attack tools so that you can lift those stickers without any damage. 😁👍
@DeviantOllam in the comments of a Technology Connections video? Just when I thought my UA-cam subs were in two totally different worlds...
Honestly I'm not that surprised to see you here, this is one of the finest obscure tech channels to geek out to.
I feel like that is a joke because warranty void stickers were found to be illegal by the FTC.
How do you not have a check mark by now?
holy shit it's DeviantOllam
My parents had one back in the day and it really wowed with my speech style for a while. I learned to speak fluent cursive on my own
In my personal experience, almost every kid I knew who was brought up with this level of strictness around foul language has gone on to curse as much, if not more, than most other people once they hit middle school. It's almost like telling children that something is forbidden makes them even more curious about it!
Yeah I was going to use a TED talk about country flag design for a class where we were designing some thing and talking about designs. I was going to have the library to myself with my group but that didn't end up being the case so I mentioned to the other group that in case I miss muting the words (which I almost wasn't going to do). that sometimes you hear words that aren't meant to be repeated and I know all these kids knew all the words anyway.
Like one of the other teachers said to me a couple of kids looked up classic art and their eyes just about came out of their head when they realized they were nearly looking at po.. (naturally shaped individuals) on the school computers, it was something along the lines of they're gonna find it anyway I have it in a controlled environment and they will also realize the standards have changed throughout the years of what was deemed acceptable and what wasn't. I wish I could remember exactly what she said to me as she leaned over when this happened in the library.
Absolutely. I’ve gotten myself in a lot of trouble in my friends groups over sexual related stuff, coming off teenage years of: you guessed it, speeches about no sex before marriage
Even if we had a million of those installed in the living room tv , it wouldn't help at fucking all. I got in so much trouble for swearing but not in the "hey fuck you" insulting way, more like "shit i forgot the book in my fucking locker" but even when threatened to be expelled, i just continued as it just felt more natural and better to express my thoughts more effectively and so i did
Yes that is exactly how that works.
While probably true, it doesn't make it any less immoral.
This channel is actually perfect. It’s a whole bunch of random knowledge I will never need to use, but it itches the brain real good.
Thx
Many live captions are now done by voice to text programs instead of stenography, although stenography is still used. There is still a captioner, they listen to the audio feed coming in from the station a few seconds ahead of the actual broadcast. They repeat along whatever is being said while pushing buttons to indicate who is speaking when there are multiple speakers. They also have to say nonsense words that act as macros for punctuation, dashes to indicate mistakes, those phrases in square brackets like [music playing]. A couple examples are "kak" for a comma, "doesh" for a dash, etc. They also create custom macro phrases for commonly said phrases or difficult names and words that the text to speech program regularly get wrong. This approach is a relatively recent development and is more accessible to train folks on than the whole other language that is stenography.
that seems like it would only work well for stuff without an in-person audience, otherwise people would probably get annoyed by all the weird kak doesh stuff, and fixate more on that, than what's being said
That's why I hate live captioning.
I *live* for accuracy. So many stations/networks don't employ the new methods, and it's very obvious whatever system they're using is not adequate.
How do they deal with when someone says Kack-Handed ?
I had some friends who grew up in a strict, Pentecostal household, and their parents had one of these on their television. I remember a line in the show _7th Heaven_ that was censored to say, "We need to talk to Simon about hugs."
That reminds me of the episode "stop me before I hug again" in the show Limitless. His mind censors all the "bad words people say for the episode as a bit of a gag
hugs not drugs
That was the least of the problems with that show in hindsight.
About Teletext: we still have it (here in The Netherlands) and it's been turned into an app, as well. I installed it when I deleted my Twitter app a few months ago.
While it's obviously quite limited (there are usually only about 20 articles at a time and an article is just one page of teletext) I like getting my daily news in bite-size chunks, and it's a lot nicer to read than those attention-grabbing articles with loads of meaningless text and advertisements.
Same for Finland! People still use it and it works fine. Also it looks like there are multiple apps for browsing it, didn't know that before. 😄
I remember there was something like that involving MSN sending something over the air.
Yeah, I was a bit bothered how he talked about it in the past tense, haha. Like mentioned above, it's still very much alive in Finland. It was the best thing in the 90s and I never stopped using it. Even with a smartphone it's just so convenient for example checking for all our domestic sports live scores in one place.
He was talking about American-style closed captions, which are a LOT LESS advanced than teletext - they're literally ONLY subtitles. Usually the only thing they are used for nowadays is live TV. DVD's, blurays, and Netflix don't use closed captions in the way he talks about.
@@odkres Via an app it's just a regular app though, right? You aren't having to wait 30 seconds for the right page number to appear, and TV is generally digital these days (in the UK we switched analogue TV off in 2012 to make room for 4G) so also doesn't use teletext to send the info system, it uses whatever the format your receiver understands (though usually still with the red, yellow, blue, green buttons, at least in the UK - the BBC popularised the "Press Red" as the option for opening the BBC Red Button service, but until only a few years ago, "TEXT" was also a button on all TV remotes for activating digital services)
@5:00 I cannot believe you have just told me what's wrong with my TV after a year of googling and arguing with my friends that it's not a dead pixel. Oh my god
Growing up in a very Christian environment, so many of my family’s friends had these they didn’t seem abnormal at all to me.
It was always a spicy treat as a kid when the timing was off and it muted a whole line of important dialogue and then unmuted just in time for a loud F-bomb for the whole prayer group to gasp at.
Ah yes, taking hopeless efforts to avoid reality and overreacting when it slips trough seems to be quite accurate depiction of living in Christian environment.
Jesus loves you
John 3:16
Romans 8:35-39
That's hilarious lol
@@virenor Christian censored environments are more toxic than normal ones where you won't go to hell already for just saying f*ck once.
@@scrubbingdoubles8585 And I will keep sinning, or jesus died for nothing.
It's absolutely bewildering how many people in the comments recognize this. I thought something like this would have been extremely rare.
I was thinking the same
Right?!
not in Murica
I love how this guy's delivery makes him seem not quite unhinged, but maybe just dangling precariously from the last screw on the last hinge lmao😄
The snark is strong in him!
As a straight man, I can't stand guys who talk like this...
@@joeblow229, is "eloquent" the word you're looking for?
@@joeblow229 you really won't shut up about this LMAOO
@@joeblow229 You prefer the company of men who speak in other ways?
I'm so glad I finally found out why that blinky bar was on top of some of the stuff I watched. I love the "a-ha" moment of solving a decades old mystery in particular.
I saw something like this more recently, as a Raspberry Pi project.
It was explained, not as a profanity filter though it could be used for that, but to mute thing that you're just sick of hearing about. The example given was of the latest celebrity scandal.
Naturally, the user supplies (and updates) his own set of words.
Maybe Covid/ Corona? I order 2 pls 😂😂😂
could you post a link to the project (or its name)? i was thinking of doing something similar
I'd buy one if it detected and muted commercials
what's the name?
can we get one with a list of senators and former presidents?? all of whom I AM TIRED OF HEARING
I had an LDS missionary neighbor who described having one of these growing up. Never once heard him swear, but I imagine that was more his upbringing than the TV Guardian.
Anyway, he was also a combat veteran in Iraq. Even then, being in an active warzone, he never swore.
The idea of taking incoming fire and saying “gosh darn!” has the same vibe as watching Goodfellas but with fewer swear words.
I hope he’s doing well, he was actually a really nice guy. 😂
Killing people is okay, as long as you don't say a bad word. The hypocrisy is astounding.
Oh, if you are speaking about the military ...
My ancestors in Germany had an even better solution to stop those "bad bad things" from spreading, polluting the race and the ideas of "healthy" citizens: They simply burned that down! Art, Books, Drawings, Science .... oh and later the minds (including their hosts, the people), too.
Please excuse my cynical comment (We Germans have good education in that disgusting matter of the past ... that is what happened, related to the topic, in my words), but that is the ultima ratio, the road where ALL censorship will lead you towards. But I don't have to say anything. Let's just cite "One man's profanity is another man's lyric". (= the public saying. better read: As Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in his majority opinion, “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” reinforcing the idea that even unpopular speech is protected by the First Amendment. You can read the entire article from The First Amendment Center, search for "40 Years On, One Man’s Vulgarity Is Still Another’s Lyric")
I hope your friend is doing well, too:)
P.S.: And let's be clear: Not the words made him a good friend, but his actions, his personality and his character. Remember, in contrast, the worst people in history didn't need swear-words in their inciting public speeches that lead to indescribable sorrow. It was the content, the message, the context that broke loose the manifestation of hell on earth. These "specialists" in their field are at their most frightening when they talk so softly and usually about the unspeakably evil of their actions or threats.
Who would know? Maybe in a decade or two our conversation will be deleted or censored ... because you or I used a word, that is not tolerable any more. Including all history with their lessons following generations could be learn from. Well, sad, but in that case, they are doomed to repeat our mistakes. Which is a horrible prospect of the future ... but also deserved, if they choose that path.
Sorry for being that negative. Forget that rabbit-poo and have a nice day, K P:)
@@dieSpinnt you made a lot of assumptions to go from my comment to that
@@KP-ty9yl Since when are historical facts = assumptions? (WTF???) Or didn't you distinguish between the general and the personal part of my comment? Or did you misunderstand my black humor at the beginning ... well, then I am sorry?
Not telling what you actually mean doesn't help. Because, and that is very funny: What assumptions? Should I make assumptions now, about what you mean?:P
@@dieSpinnt I think it’s a bit of a reach to compare the TV Guardian to governmental censorship, is what I’m getting at. And I’m not in favor of government censorship. In fact, I think people should be able to deny that Covid even exists, say that Donald Trump is a Nazi, and call Muslims rapists. I disagree with all of them, but people should be allowed to say them or post them online without legal consequence.
But what people restrict in their own home isn’t governmental censorship. And I do see an interesting pattern where those who will openly criticize Christians censoring content for their children are less prone to criticizing Muslims or Jews when they do the similar things with their children :o
You know what's fascinating to me? The fact that I just learned that UA-cam is ALSO censoring expletive's and this video was the first thing that came to mind. There's no way for the user to stop it, we're all just stuck behind a TV Guardian, and must suffer.
What do you mean?
@@sandy-lo UA-cam doesn't explicitly censor expletives but it can demonetize the video or get it suppressed in the algorithm so far less people see it, and depending on the subject matter also get it age restricted. This of course has the effect of video creators avoiding them if they want the videos to do well. So not outright censored but still heavily suppressed, which is just another form of censorship.
@@OrbObserversandy still doesn’t understand.
@@OrbObserver no, youtube does outright censor profanity in the youtube comments. try calling someone a few bad words and you will quickly find that your comment quickly disappears after about 17-30s.
how much profanity you can use depends on how much profanity you have used in your past (kind of a "trust system"; negative feedback loop; the more profane you are, the less profane you can be), and sometimes it reaches absurd levels. in fact you cannot even post links to well known sites such as imgur or pastebin or whatever else. for as far as im concerned, the only links allowed are the ones that remain within youtube. your comments also get removed if you post too many of them or they are """suspicious""" in other ways.
heres the problem: you dont get notified of this. the comments get deleted silently and you have no idea of knowing other than to refresh the page after about 30s passed since you posted your comment. worse yet, sometimes it may appear as though the comment is still there, but if you look at it when youre not logged in (ie from an incognito window), its not there. you may look this up on youtube, a tech youtuber by the name bisquit made a video about this.
fun fact: bots bypass this system and post comments with malicious intent and these comments stay up for months or years at a time.
bonus fun fact: google censors many sites from its search results. it is a very trigger-happy company when it comes to censoring content.
@@c0smo709 Well I did specifically talk about censorship in videos.
I remember seeing this at the store as a kid and wondered how it worked. Now, 20+ years later, I finally find out!
One thing thing missing from yours is the locking cover that went over the cables in the back to prevent obvious bypassing the device. I think it had one of those cylindrical keys. Plenty of kids like myself could have figured out how to bypass. I remember having it growing up for the movies that would have just a couple bad words thrown in. Parents would still have to tell the kids to shut their eyes for offensive visuals. The captions always had the effect of me trying to figure out what they actually said since by that age I already knew most of the bad words.
Every time I use my dish washer I think of you. No exaggeration. Thanks for your great content and unique style.
Or when I buy dish washer detergent. Funny how that works. Glad I'm not the only one.
My wife still thinks I'm crazy, LOL.
Those rock suckers really know how to wow up a good time.
I love how 'gay' is just casually labeled as a cuss word. My family had one of these growing up. Imagine my shock hearing my childhood movies uncensored for the first time. Oh my!
So much for *The Flintstones* or *The Three Caballeros.*
I think I remember those at garage sales and such.
Honestly I want to see it try to play "George Carlin's 7 words you can't say on TV". I just want to read a how it tries to sensor him. It would probably be just as hilarious as the uncensored bit.
That would be very meta.
I'll one-up that... run it with South Park: Bigger, Long & Uncut -- it'll be interesting to see how it handles the song from the Terrance & Phillip Movie.
@@TStodden Also from that movie, not an exact quote I'm sure but it's close: Horrific deplorable violence is OK, as long as they don't say any naughty words.
@@TStoddenWould *maybe* work, Just because the voices are so flippin high-pitched then becomes so painful it might even go to the point it misses some swears.
FYI: Ben Eater just uploaded a video on the TV Guardian adressing the contents of the naughty word dictionary that is (probably; I'm not entirely through it yet but I have great trust in the quality of Bens videos) worth watching.
Edit: My trust was indeed not misplaced, Bens video is excellent. :)
Came here from Bens video to leave a comment about the same topic you covered, but as you already did that the best I can do is upvote your comment so it gets some attention
@@kellerkind6169 Same! lol
Me three
It was awesome to watch. @TechnologyConnections
Here! Upvote becuz I came here to do the same. Cheers.
Hi! I was extremely intrigued by this video, and particularly the part at 5:35 where you were sad to find that the manual didn't list the dictionary. I ordered one of my own, and took it apart. I removed the EEPROM chip, and dumped all its contents. I was successful in pulling out the dictionary of swears! The replacements are also in there (such as "crud"). Unfortunately, it's not immediately obvious what the replacements are in the file. All I have is the dictionary, but not the actual logic connected to swapping out words. However, the info might be in there somewhere, need to keep digging. In any case, all the data is on a 2-kilobyte chip, specifically U6B, which is in the top-center of the shot at 2:45. I dumped the chip to a 2-kilobyte .bin file, which holds all the data on there. I don't think UA-cam will let me link the file directly, but you can find it on my Twitter account, which is JoeyMurphySpace. Hope this is helpful!
Edit: Oh! And I forgot to share my favorite part! In addition to its dictionary of words to censor, it also has a list of words to NOT censor, my favorite of which is "Dick Van Dyke", which, were it not for the exception, it would censor twice. That must have been a hilarious edge case for them to find during testing.
Lol, I imagine he caused one or two all nighters in the 80s and 90s.
"Can we make it recognise names?"
"I was trying to figure that out last week for Pussy Galore, just add an exception"
As youtube doesn't let me edit the preceding comment: Maybe someone finds out what FLAG1/FLAG2 is supposed to mean. "merge" means that the merged word is censored when it preceeds a "bad word".
@@tw11tube Where are you seeing "FLAG1", "FLAG2", and "merge"? I also don't see the preceding comment you're referring to.
@@joeymurphy2464 Oh, I see. UA-cam removed the comment as spam where I linked to my GitHub repository. My username is karcherm and the repository is named TvGuardian. That's why I couldn't edit the comment: It was already in the process of being removed.
Convert the file to hexadecimal and paste the result into your comment
So, at first, I wanted to call this device The Bowdlerizer, but then I decided that, in honor of the era it comes from, it should be dubbed the PearlClutcher 2000. (The modern HD version is, of course, the Pearlclutcher _5000,_ because camelcase is no longer "in", and for some reason marketers skipped right past the 4th and 5th millennia after "2000" ceased to be futuristic.)
My favorite bit of TV censoring from that era has to be from the network broadcast edit of _On Golden Pond,_ in which Jane Fonda's character's declaration that "my father is a goddamned poop" has the "god" muted out, but not the "damned". It's doubly funny because "poop" is in the original line, not a redub!
The modern version would be the PC5K or maybe Perli because everything needs a cutesy SEO name now
Wasn't there a knock-off version of the PearlClutcher called the Gasp-O-Tron?
I don't think there's much merit in the idea, but I do think it was most effective in dealing with language in the era of channel surfing. Parents could reasonably assume that little to no nudity etc. was on the airwaves during the day but it might include a few of the lesser words that TV Guardian would filter out.
That being said it was often overzealous and would filter out words like "ball" from programs like Clifford the Big Red Dog. Definitely it's main weakness was being unable to discern context.