• BBC News, Wednesday, October 29, 2008 11:45 AM

Anyone in the U.K. searching for music from Johnny Cash yesterday was in for a surprise. Ditto anyone looking for Jimi Hendrix's "Long Hot Summer Night," Queen's "Killer Queen" or any sing containing the word "lesbian," though none come to mind right now.

A glitch in the U.K.'s iTunes censorship software yesterday caused perfectly inoffensive song titles and artist names to be partially replaced by asterisks. Affected words include "hot," "Johnny," "Killer," and "lesbian." And while files from The Pussycat Dolls were unaffected, good luck finding "I Thought I Saw a Pussy Cat," by Danny Kaye.

An Apple spokesman was unable to explain the error, but said it would soon be fixed. ITunes regularly censors the names of explicit songs, and attaches "explicit" labels to those with adult content. But the spokesman assured BBC News that words like "hot" were never among those intended to be censored.

Read the whole story at BBC News »