This seems dumb on the part of the bank. Unless terrorists are really, really stupid, classifying the first name "Isis" as "terrorist" is bound to have a 100% false positive rate.
It's cause the banks keep getting sued by the US govt and the US govt keeps siding with the US govt that the banks violated sanctions.
So banks then do ridiculous things like checking your timezone and checking your name and the memo fields so they get to have a stronger defense in court.
I recently used paypal to send a dollar to a coworker with the description of “tardigrade”, after reading a story on HN about how they were blocking transactions containing that string.
Sure enough, the transaction was blocked, my account was disabled, and I had to send paypal an email saying that I wasn’t an arms dealer.
Dunno why this is being downvoted - i once jokingly added a note mentioning “meth” paying someone for dinner (in reference to our conversation at said dinner) and google suspended my account temporarily and cancelled the transaction
It was (probably) capitalized in the original submission. But Hacker News's title autoformatting screwed it up, again. It's known to capitalize individual words but removing all-caps acronyms.
It's the annoying part. The anti-all-caps-clickbait system knows some common abbreviations, but not others. For example, on multiple occasions, "MIT" was not unaffected but "CSAIL" was turned into "Csail", see [0].
There is definitely some find-and-replace code. After you click the submission button, the title is immediately "corrected" (submitters can manually edit the title back later), with good intention - anti-clickbait. It basically does three things: remove superfluous words, remove superfluous caps, and properly capitalize the title. Most of the time it works well, but annoying when there's a false-positive.
Examples I've seen so far (note that it's not always triggered, there must be some "if" conditions here. It's not always reproducible).
* All lower-case titles are capitalized.
Generally good, but not always enforced, it's strange.
* Unnecessary caps are removed.
Many false positives. "MIT CSAIL" becomes "MIT Csail", DARPA becomes "Drapa", etc.
* "%d Ways To Do X" and "How To Do X" becomes "Do X", per Guideline.
It misfired when I tried to submit "20 °C – A Short History of the Standard Temperature for Dimensional Measurements" by NIST. The "20" was removed and I had to edit it back!
A submission of "How we threat model" by GitHub became "We threat model", makes the already-short title unreadable.
* Clickbait words are removed.
Generally good. But false positives exist. For example, "Massive Parallel" is a legitimate concepts in computing, but the word "massive" will be removed. I just tried "Massive MIMO", which is similarly a legitimate concept in communication, got removed as well.
Try submitting this paper "Pilot Optimization and Channel Estimation for Multiuser Massive MIMO Systems" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.0045), you'll see that the word "massive" is deleted immediately after submission (but as I said, the reformatter is not always triggered and not always reproducible, perhaps your high karma will stop the filter from doing it).
* "Your Statement is 100% correct" becomes "Statement is 100% correct".
This is a good one, the unnecessary personal element is removed.
Thanks for the detailed examples. Maybe it's karma threshold, maybe a bug, or maybe I never wrote a title that would trigger the autoformatter, but I never noticed it.
Plenty of style guides [0] recommend lower case or title case for acronyms or initialisms pronounced as words (e.g. Nasa, Opec, scuba, radar in increasing order of how likely you are to actually see them written that way). It's silly to insist that HN follow your preferred style.