From: "Carl F. Peters III" Ain't it nice to know we are being protected? Subject: Sailor Mode -- Now that's what I call a feature! Date: Tuesday, June 23 1998 ========= -Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649 [ The dirtiest minds of all belong to the censors. -- Peter Langston ] KIDS' SOFTWARE IS CURSED BY A BUG An educational software program has exhibited an unusual glitch -- under certain circumstances it can spew forth language that would make a sailor blush. "Secret Writer's Society," a product of Matsushita's Panasonic Interactive Media, is a writing program for children that, among other things, recites their compositions back to them in a computer-generated voice. The problem is, there's a bug in the filter that's supposed to prevent the text-to-speech function from reciting foul language, and instead of suppressing those words, it delves into the archives of prohibited words to string together streams of obscenities that go "way beyond George Carlin's seven banned words," as one parent who tested the program says. A Matsushita marketing manager says she has heard of only two instances of the problem, both using a Macintosh and both times, when a lot of memory was in use. But the editor-in-chief of SuperKids, which reviews educational software on the Web, says that he was able to activate the glitch simply by writing a passage longer than just a few sentences and double-clicking the mouse instead of single-clicking. "It's got a very expressive vocabulary," he notes. (Wall Street Journal 17 Jun 98)