I dumped Apple’s word list

Retr0id | 8 hours ago

I'd appreciate if someone could dump the iOS "adult websites" list (which are blocked by default in the UK unless you submit government ID etc.)

ilumanty | 8 hours ago

Wait, are you saying iOS UK Edition blocks adult websites on the OS level?

Retr0id | 8 hours ago

Yup! Any webkit web view, and iOS doesn't allow any non-webkit web views (in this jurisdiction at least)

matthewmacleod | 7 hours ago

This is just a straight-up lie.

Retr0id | 6 hours ago

Well if it works some other way, please dump it anyway and let us all know how it works?

Edit: I'm reliably informed that it's enforced at the domain level via a bloom filter stored in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WebContentRestrictions.framework/WCRFilter-2025-09-29.plist

matthewmacleod | 5 hours ago

This is an opt-in feature that implements content restrictions (for e.g. parental control).

Retr0id | 5 hours ago

It's not opt-in in the UK. It's enabled by default and cannot be disabled without age verification.

It's darkly funny that the UK is so far gone these days that people literally do not believe it.

cuttysnark | 5 hours ago

But how does it work in practice? Say someone put a new adult site online right now that’s some random .com - how quickly and by what mechanism is this block list updated? Seems like mainstream sites that are established and/or big enough to care about being taken down would be compliant and easy to block.

And this is just DNS I assumed unless also keep a record of which ip addresses they actually resolve to.

To be clear I’m interested from the technology perspective and not advocating our UK friends evade government pr0n censors as a form of political protest…

mrheosuper | 2 hours ago

It just has to be good enough, like blocking 80% of adult website is better than nothing, I guess that's their view.

flanz_10 | 8 hours ago

It's not a list, it's a series of ML classifications. Basically, you've got "child mode" locked on. The solution is to not use a UK apple id.

Retr0id | 8 hours ago

An ML classifier running against the DNS name? Really?

flanz_10 | 7 hours ago

Not really DNS. They're actually checking the entire URL. They also check page content and other metadata.

If you're having distinct dns blocking errors, that's not Apple or it's a profile that's been set on your device.

Retr0id | 6 hours ago

The error screen I get says "Website not allowed" "'$domain' is a restricted website." - and it's coming from iOS/webkit itself, my network is unfiltered.

flanz_10 | 6 hours ago

That doesn't mean it's DNS, it just means that the presentation is saying domain only.

swid | 8 hours ago

This is interesting… does anyone have data in theirs? It also feels like something they could have put on an intern and it didn’t really gain any traction. Each app would need to “tell” the OS who the receiver is, and the article indicates there is no API to do that. Maybe it just knows, but how could that be?

_false | 8 hours ago

if autocorrect is disabled this will be empty

hmokiguess | 8 hours ago

ah that explains it

verytrivial | 8 hours ago

I have a MacBook that was meant to replace my aging Windows and Linux laptops. This article is a microcosm of why I have just stopped using it. An endless stream of mollycoddling, obfuscation and "It's for your own good, child" trash. I can't even bring myself to sell it because I'm ashamed of it.

lrvick | 8 hours ago

Install Linux on it and carve a big X over the apple logo

awesome_dude | 8 hours ago

I have Asahi on my mac book mini - it turns a nice piece of hardware into a wonderful computer to use :)

watwut | 8 hours ago

But ... the point of that vulgar words list is to STOP autocorrecting them when it detects intentional use.

mahboi | 8 hours ago

Also you can disable autocorrect. I don't even have this list.

mahboi | 5 hours ago

Oh and to be clear, this isn't one of those Windows things like "oh just disable this in some hacky unsupported regedit way, how did you not know this," or the default browser setting that flips itself back, or other settings that it'll nag you to change back every day. I mean MacOS has a properly supported setting for this and I haven't seen an autocorrection in years.

yborg | 8 hours ago

The parent post is a microcosm of why he's actually not using the Macbook - he doesn't understand how it works.

ajjenkins | 8 hours ago

Why would “trump” be considered an offensive term? My understanding of the database is to prevent you from accidentally typing offensive or words being autocorrected to something offensive. Like if I misspell “helper” I don’t want that to be autocorrected to “hitler”.

It’s surprising to me that “trump” would get the same classification. Given that he’s the current president of the US, I’m sure people intentionally type his name all the time. I don’t want my keyboard to steer me away from writing out “trump”. And typos autocorrecting to Trump don’t seem like a big deal either. Would anyone be offended by the text “don’t forget to bring your Trump to band practice”?

monster_truck | 8 hours ago

They're really passionate about Euchre (in a negative way) over in Cupertino

ixtli | 8 hours ago

just read the article and trump (unless its the word for fart as in the uk) is marked as sensitive.

n2d4 | 8 hours ago

Trump is marked as sensitive, not offensive; along with words like "God", "Jews", and "gun"

edf13 | 8 hours ago

Here in the UK it means fart

Larrikin | 8 hours ago

A reasonable explanation is proposed in the article

freehorse | 7 hours ago

> Would anyone be offended by the text “don’t forget to bring your Trump to band practice”?

Trump could be offended. It is obviously there to avoid offending Trump.

And it is not considered "offensive" but "sensitive".

anonymous908213 | 8 hours ago

Somebody please kill Claude I'm so fucking tired of reading this grating writing. Technology was a mistake

hugodan | 8 hours ago

If you find something funnier than Oedipus, I want to hear about it.

smcin | 7 hours ago

'Bacchus', 'Hooters' are also in the lists. 'Pornhub' but not 'OnlyFans'/'OF'.

I'm reminded of how Cartman on South Park used to sneak in terms like 'catamite'. Steganographized archaic terms.

ixtli | 7 hours ago

I feel the same way.

lioeters | 7 hours ago

That's the funniest comment I read today. Honestly, I feel the same.

The cultural burnout and second-hand AI overdose many of us are suffering. It's a form of mental pollution, and it's getting harder to breathe.

CalChris | 8 hours ago

Right on Trump and wrong on Putin.

ixtli | 8 hours ago

Incredible that 'conservatards' is in there but not 'libtard'. I thought the right was always being censored!

CodeWriter23 | 8 hours ago

It's the exception that proves the rule

warkdarrior | 8 hours ago

The author must have bought MAGA edition of the MBP. The AOC edition has 'libtard' in it, surely.

MBCook | 8 hours ago

That is odd. Hadn’t occurred to me.

nonethewiser | 7 hours ago

libtard and conservatard are both there on when I tested on my Mac 26.2

nancyminusone | 7 hours ago

I don't think I have ever seen 'conservatards' before today

freehorse | 7 hours ago

First time I heard that word too. Which proves the point /s

People are reading too much into this.

ixtli | 7 hours ago

I commented this here for this precise reason. `Libtard` is definitely a word people on the internet use but the other one ive literally never seen before. Someone went out of their way to add one and not the other. I agree though that, ehem, rightoids are supremely sensitive tho.

freehorse | 3 hours ago

> Someone went out of their way to add one and not the other.

And it worked! It has been so much censored that neither of us even knew that word.

bluebarbet | 7 hours ago

Just in time for America's ongoing discovery that "liberal" and "conservative" are in fact quite similar ideologies. New insults are called for. I propose "progtard" and "reactard".

what | 7 hours ago

Progcels be seething over reactchads.

DeluluDon | 7 hours ago

IRC is that way ->

bluebarbet | 6 hours ago

In fairness, this discussion is about offensive vocabulary.

ixtli | 7 hours ago

I think downvoters may not have realized i was being sarcastic with my second sentence.

nonethewiser | 8 hours ago

Apple's built-in dictionary flags on my Mac: 26.2, which is newer than the article's 15.6. Apple has changed several things since:

  ┌───────────────┬────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │               │ Article (15.6) │             My Mac   (26.2)              │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Total entries │ 199,019        │ 199,940                                  │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Vulgar        │ 1,050          │ 850                                      │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Offensive     │ 663            │ 727                                      │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Sensitive     │ 2,558          │ 2,748                                    │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Oedipus       │ vulgar         │ sensitive (sex topic)                    │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ cooties       │ vulgar         │ clean                                    │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Biden         │ clean          │ now tagged politics topic, still no tier │
  └───────────────┴────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────┘

  These are unchanged:
  - Trump is still sensitive with the politics topic. The lowercase card-game word "trump" is still
    clean.
  - Obama, Putin, Vance and Harris have no tier. Musk still isn't in the dictionary.
  - Tom and Mick are still offensive, and pee, poo, niggle, underling, blacklist and Isis are still
    sensitive.
  - idiot is still sensitive, and now also has the catch-all "sensitive context" topic.

  Words in the capitalized sensitive list that the article doesn't mention include Saddam, Grindr,
  Oedipus/Oedipal, TERF and Viagra. Trump is still the only living politician among them.

rdtsc | 8 hours ago

    Putin clean
    Stalin clean

Somehow Mao is there. But Pol Pot isn't. I would have guessed they'd go by the number of victims. But I guess "Uncle Joe" is clean and uncontroversial, so someone was confused about history. But yeah, this has that "Cupertino interns typed this list" feel to it.

baggachipz | 8 hours ago

> Every other real person on that list is dead, and nearly all of them are Nazi officials, dictators or terrorists. Then there's Trump

If the shoe fits....

Y_Y | 8 hours ago

you must acquit

walthamstow | 7 hours ago

Surely the first HN user to be named after a Brummie drag queen

deprave | 8 hours ago

Why does Apple need to keep these in a separate database? I thought they removed filtering, maybe subject to user age or parental controls, not added a whole mechanism to manage it.

jmbwell | 8 hours ago

This is about autocorrect learning words you like to use that it should consider potentially intentional use of words it might otherwise think you typed accidentally

It’s adaptive non-censorship

thinkingemote | 8 hours ago

Would it be possible to get versions of the files to see when certain words got added and I imagine certain words got removed? Could be interesting to correlate certain events, personalities, trends, memes, controversies etc with the changes.

It was added in 23 so there's potentially 3 years of updates.

Edits: This comment shows differences between 15.6 and 26.2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50358223

whycome | 8 hours ago

Does this play a role in why the keyboard on iOS is so fucking enraging? It used to be amazing.

MBCook | 7 hours ago

No. That is a separate INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS issue.

Can’t believe they don’t fix it year after year.

busymom0 | 7 hours ago

When the first iOS 27 beta came out, it was actually really good for me. But later betas and now the public release ruined it once again. It's unbelievable how bad it is.

MBCook | 5 hours ago

I had a similar experience. It got worse through the betas for me too.

FireBeyond | 6 hours ago

There are literal slow motion videos on YouTube showing people pressing the correct intended next character and iOS "correcting" it to something else because it predicted(?) that they actually meant something else.

whycome | 5 hours ago

It actually seems like it could be related because of a change in the prediction model that places emphasis on this type of "learning"

rappatic | 8 hours ago

> I dumped Apple's word list

Claude dumped Apple's word list, and obviously wrote the article too.

kulahan | 7 hours ago

The calculator did the math!

alex43578 | 7 hours ago

You didn't write this comment, your keyboard did.

breznev | 7 hours ago

Yup. Something about this sentence reeks of Opus 5.5: "The one exception is the n-word: it is in the list in English and several other languages, and I'm not writing it out."

netsharc | 4 hours ago

Yeah, what is it with the fucking 4-word sentences (subject, verb, object) which AI use that aggravate me. Always so short and "punchy". Maybe it's the aggression and breatheless haste...

I can't focus and read this shit. The other article on the frontpage https://blog.nns.ee/2026/11/02/renault-hack/ also used LLM for the work, but I think a human wrote it (or he's using an LLM that's managed to sound human). It's so readable!

Edit: a snippet from the slop:

> There is no public API

> I looked. NSSpellChecker, UITextChecker, NaturalLanguage and UILexicon don't expose vulgarity.

I think the fucking problem is, each sentence is supposed to convey information. Here "I looked." is prominent, but is it information? No, it's fucking useless. Remove it and it doesn't even change the information. Meanwhile readers' brains are trying to process why the author included this sentence, it must have value?

GaryBluto | 4 hours ago

There is something very funny to me about how that word (I’d write it directly if I knew I could without getting auto-dead) has somehow been deemed the most offensive word of all time. What makes it different from any other slur based upon identity?

iknowstuff | 3 hours ago

Using that word means that centuries of enslavement and subhuman treatment are not abhorrent to you. Because a person who finds it abhorrent would never use it. In essence it shows you still put yourself above other people in that incredibly vile way

Teever | 2 hours ago

In a document discussing taboo words and how a tech company chooses to categorize them it seems foolish to block that one word but not all the others.

Is there any context in which you feel it is acceptable to use that word?

zahrevsky | 6 hours ago

But if it gets rogue and hacks some websites then it's suddenly again you, not Claude.

nonethewiser | 8 hours ago

There is a lot more interesting stuff to mine from this.

The phrase blocklist for the Chinese lanaguge is a lot larger (surprise, surprise). It about 281 KB for Simplified Chinese, 325 KB for Traditional and 160 KB for Cantonese, against 28 KB for English.

apparently there are `shouldShowTaiwanFlagEmoji()` and `deviceIsChinese()` functions as well but that doesn't have anything to do with this database.

jooize | 8 hours ago

giving fixing ducking

How do I make iOS let me swipe “fucking” everywhere? fucking

fucking fucking fucking!! After typing it manually two or three times it then swipe completes in this particular text field in this app. I've heard about adding a contact with the words, but that is ridiculous, so I have held out hoping Apple will eventually come to their senses, like a fool.

This doesn't make “fuck” swipeable either… unless I type it once, and keep it in the text field!

Oarch | 6 hours ago

Add autocorrect in the settings/keyboard/text replacement to change duck and ducking etc back to their original beauty

jkahrs595 | 5 hours ago

Settings->General->Keyboard->Text Replacement

add fucking as a replacement for fucking (yes, both the same)

Stupid, but it works.

swiftcoder | 8 hours ago

The vulgar db doesn't exist at all (nor the ~/Library/Keyboards directory) on my Tahoe install. Weird

dr_pardee | 7 hours ago

It didn't for me either but macOS was trying to write to it and failed so I had Claude fix it: https://gist.github.com/ericpardee/4ca8d9d46d03d3d92b1887f47...