Did you know? Scunthorpe has a computer problem named after it. Yes, that one

Did you know? There is a real computing term called "the Scunthorpe problem". It's named after us.

Of course it is. It means a computer filter blocking something innocent because it contains a rude word hidden inside it. We'll let you work out which four letters in "Scunthorpe" caused the trouble.

Don't say it out loud. It started in April 1996, when AOL's profanity filter stopped people in Scunthorpe from creating AOL accounts. A whole town, banned from the internet for its spelling.

In the early 2000s, Google's SafeSearch made the same mistake, hiding local services and businesses with the town's name in them. Experts say it's hard to fix, because computers find it difficult to understand words in context. So somewhere, right now, a website is probably blocking someone from Scunthorpe.