Hot, or H*t? If you were on the UK iTunes site at the right time last week, you’d have wondered what was so bad about the word hot that it needed to be censored. Or what poor old Johnny Cash had done to become J****y Cash.
An Apple spokesman told the BBC there had been a “database glitch,” which happened when iTunes check for explicit references, and that he had no idea why the software had picked on innocent words, but there was nothing intentional in the “censorship.”
Johnny Cash found his first name subject to the asterisk, as did Queens’s Killer Queen (now K****r Queen) – although murder seemed to escape the software – and Danny Kaye’s I Thought I Saw A Pussy Cat (I Thought I Saw A P***y Cat).
The glitch, though embarrassing and amusing, was resolved.