The Scunthorpe Problem

It's interesting how complex engineered systems can seem to develop a personality without any conscious design intent. Sometimes automated obscenity filters develop an adorable combination of prudishness and boneheadedness, blocking perfectly normal (though sometimes awkward) proper nouns that contain letter strings that would be obscene on their own. You can read more about that here:
The Scunthorpe Problem

The phenomenon is named for the town of Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, England. In 1996 AOL blocked Scunthorpe residents (Scunthorpians?) from registering accounts due to a certain four-letter string toward the beginning of their town's name. Take a good long look at the word and see if you can find what I'm talking about.

Years later the same problem arose, and was eventually corrected, in Google's language filter. The problem is by no means limited to eastern England, of course, and individual users like Craig Cockburn (Wikipedia helpfully suggests this is pronounced "coburn") and Herman Libshitz (no such help this time, alas) ran into trouble registering accounts with various email services due to a lack of specificity in the obscenity filters' scrutiny.

The must puzzling case is that of Linda Callahan, who was unable to register an account with Yahoo! for some time due to the presence of "allah" in her family name. I'm not quite sure what the world is coming to when the Arabic word for the God of Abraham and Isaac is considered obscene. Oh, well, at least Ms. Callahan was eventually able to check her email in peace.