Ahouxs.122 net.misc utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!floyd!vax135!houxi!houxv!houxs!hansen Tue Apr 20 10:14:24 1982 Re: Stanford Jokes Crackdown The Peninsula Times Tribune, Saturday, March 27, 1982, contained an article entitled "RAUNCHY, RACIST JOKES PURGED FROM STANFORD COMPUTERS" by Richard Hanner. Here's the scoop: The SPIRES computer system (used mostly by adminstrators for general computing and maintained by the Center for Information Technology) contained a file of jokes split into four categories: clean, dirty, filthy, and sick. The sick category contained many racist jokes. New employees were required to access the file as one of their exercises in learning to use the computer system. One of the new employees in January (of non-white ethnic origin) saw the file and was rather upset. She told her supervisor, and the file was eventually removed a month later. The file had open write permissions, so anyone could add jokes to it. It had existed on the system for three years. When it was removed, there were over a thousand entries in it. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.