the story of a tech arms race

back in the before times

when the Nintendo DS was big

there was a little thing called Pictochat

I think. This might be about a later thing related to Miiverse now that I say it

but a way that users of nintendo handhelds could draw and upload images to a nintendo Place

I forget what it was called

and the director behind the app talked about it in an interview

and about the technology they tried really hard to implement

with the goal of

don't let people post penises

write code that will identify when a drawing is a penis, then block it from uploading

they put a LOT of time into this

but the end result was

Yeah it was Pictochat

whenever you make a dick-proof chat service

humanity invents a more ingenious dick

Since news orgs tried to make a big deal about it when the DS first came out

the human will to draw penises was so immense that no amount of dev time could make this possible

I never knew it was supposed to be penis proof.

Mine came through just fine (I never sent that at anyone it’s just one of those tech curiosities of “will it let me do this stupid thing they should have thought about”)

Apparently they did think about it, it just didn’t work

Advanced Penis Detection Algorithms

(An old XBox 360-era meme when the camera was introduced for it - well before Kinect)

lmfao incredible

i actually used it to send doodles back and forth with my friends but i'm not the type of person to draw dicks on things so it never even occurred to me to try