Trends on Twitter can Make You Look a T#t

In a recent flurry of fairly pointless "news", Microsoft was under the spotlight for including some slightly odd constants in their open-source code. The hex values, at least one of which, #B16B00B5 could be considered on the wrong side of sexist, were at the very best a little puerile.

Developers have been spelling things in hex for as long as we've been building software.  As hexadecimal numbers can contain the numeric digits 0-9 as well as letters A-F, the propensity for silliness is so much more than with decimal. One example you won't have to travel far to stumble across is #DEADBEEF, perhaps offensive to vegetarians?  FACE:B00C formed part of the address a popular social networking site used on world IPv6 day, and Microsoft have previous form, using 000FF1CE at the end of their product codes in MS Office.

In any case, it is probably sensible not to include anything likely to cause offence in your source code, though some of the comments in the Linux kernel sources range from the hilarious to the downright vulgar with some crossover in between - indeed the "F-word" was (is? I haven't checked) used as a placeholder to search for in one bit of source. I guess the largest software companies aren't used to having their work looked at in so much detail.

This story did have a useful point to it, however. The widespread reporting caused #bigboobs to trend on twitter, and whilst a good section of the tweets were having a sly dig at Microsoft, some were, well, what you'd normally expect from a reference on the Internet to boobs.

Twitter does have a control to prevent you opening adult content - however, as it seems to rely on users self-tagging tweets, it ranges in efficacy from chocolate teapot through fishes on bicycles. I've  had a look, and reckon the only reasonable way to keep twitter clean is to filter at search-term level, indeed going after the #bigboobs hashtag from behind guardian gets you no tweets. It's not perfect, but it will remind users to be careful what they click, and provide another backstop against liability and e-safety issues.