Yahoo Messenger Blocking youtube.com URLs? 231
wesleyye writes, "This morning I attempted to copy and paste a youtube.com URL to two of my friends via Yahoo IM. But they kept complaining they did not see anything. Actually they saw all the text message lines except the line with the youtube URL. Is YIM blocking the competitor out?" We verified in this office that a fully formed youtube.com URL could not be passed on YIM; changing the URL to read youtubex.com caused it to go through. Any other URL we tried worked. Update 10/10/2006 20:58 GMT by SM: Additional testing shows that there is something else going on for well formatted URLs. Even search results from search.yahoo.com had trouble when included with other text on the same line. Still awaiting comment from Yahoo!.
They seem to have fixed it (Score:2)
Can't imagine they'd want to. (Score:5, Insightful)
I just did some Googling and there doesn't seem to be anyone else talking about it, at least that I could find -- if Yahoo really was engaging in this, you'd think it would have created more of a hue and cry.
I'm starting to suspect hoax, unless someone besides the article submitter can come up with evidence that it happened.
I can't imagine that Yahoo would want to demonstrate that it has the capability of selectively filtering messages based on content. That just opens the door to lots of problematic demands -- e.g., why don't they block links to warez sites, or porn, or gambling, or (in other countries) various political websites. If you have that sort of capability, even if you don't want to use it for evil purposes, people are going to try and make you use it. So it's better just to never develop the capability in the first place, and if it is technically possible, never reveal that it can be done on demand, so that you can maintain your plausible deniability.
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I just tested it now, and youtube URLs no longer appear to be filtered. However, they were as recently as two weeks ago.
* In fact, I submitted this when I first n
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If what you say is true, than it can't have much to do with Google, eh? Maybe Yahoo want to work out some financial arrangement with YouTube, and YouTube doesn't want to play? I guess that's Yahoo's right. YouTube has "Jumped The Shark" anyway... ;)
Re:Can't imagine they'd want to. (Score:5, Funny)
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But seriously, is this a surprise? IIRC, wasn't Yahoo! quite complicit in filtering for The Great Firewall of China? I believe much more is being filtered, as I have had numerous messages to friends through YIM! simply disappear... I know, because the message not going thru caused me to either call, IRC, or yell across the apartment at the persons I was trying to message, and in all those cases, a URL was involved; thinking back on it, I wonder: has anyone else had a problem s
Re:Can't imagine they'd want to. (Score:5, Interesting)
If the first message you send to someone in a period of time contains only a URL (doesn't matter where it links to), it will be filtered out. I'm guessing this is to reduce spam.
Way to overreact, Slashdot.
Maybe worm-spread prevention? (Score:3)
There was a period of time a few years ago when I was getting 10-15 of these URL-messages a day. Didn't affect me any, because I used a Mac, but it might explain Yahoo's paranoia.
However, I would find such a limitation incredibly annoying, since I often use IM applications to send people links. For example, let's say you'
Overreact? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yahoo: Now even creepier! (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess the test would be to find a link that's blocked, and a link that's allowed; then put each one into a TinyURL and see if the same rules apply, or if they're both rejected or both accepted.
I agree with some other people though, based on other things that Yahoo has done, this seems like a provision that was probably originally implemented to stop the spread of spam and malware, not necessarily for any nefarious purpose. However, it's overly broad and IMO they'd be better without it, both for their own good and so as not to aggravate their users.
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I use all of the major IM clients (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Trillian) and to date, I have never received spam over IM. Not one. Ever. I do have my accounts setup so I can accept/deny friends but other than that, I have not done anything outside of the default setup.
I realize that my anecdote does not speak to the general trend so I have to
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Not one. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have two AIM accounts, two MSN accounts, a Jabber ID, a Google Talk account (as in, a Jabber ID @ gmail.com), and a Yahoo account.
I do occasionally pop into AIM chatrooms for a laugh, and those are completely dominated by spambots. But even there, the bots simply spam the channel in predictable ways, waiting for someone to IM them so they can reply with a URL, or tell you to look in their profile for a URL.
I also used to have some people as friends who were not too careful with their security, and were thus loaded with spyware. Their spyware sent me spam occasionally, I told them about it, they didn't care, so I blocked them.
Those are the only two places I've seen spam over IM. I mostly use Gaim on Linux and Adium on OS X, and I've also used Fire, iChat, and Yahoo natively on OS X. I only get unsolicited messages when I'm in chatrooms, or when I bother to try to make Qunu work. Neither of those are spam.
Frankly, I think either spammers haven't discovered IM networks, or a lot of effort has been made to make it hard to spam through them. The centralized approach probably helps a lot, too -- you can't exactly implement a CAPTCHA for Jabber, since anyone can set up their own server and register as many users as they want, but it's easy to implement a CAPTCHA for any of the other systems I'm on. Still, I'm never comfortable with any organization silently acting on my behalf, with no way to control that -- it smacks of ISPs putting VOIP traffic on high priority and ignoring SKYPE traffic. If you want to block messages to me, at least give me the option to unblock them, and default to off (prompt me when I sign up). Same with traffic shaping -- let me control how my own traffic is shaped, or at least let me turn off the shaping.
Re:Can't imagine they'd want to. (Score:4, Funny)
Editor 2: Quick, post it to the home page!
-Bill
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This filtering is truly an incredibly bad idea, destroying much of the value of the chat service. The advantage of chat - so I thought - over email was that you had confirmation that the other person got the information. Now it turns out that the information might silently disappear, and that the two people at the two ends of the conversation might have an inconsistent view of facts.
I am glad I stick to Google chat (out of laziness, since I have Gmail open anyway).
I'm glad I stick to Jabber (Score:2)
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True. But that's probably not what's happening here.
It was probably an overzealous formatting filter. Y'know, feed the thing ':)', get a smiley graphic, feed the thing &132/0000FF and get blue text, feed it some HTML and get something resembling the HTML. That stuff needs to be sanity checked, and dumped if it makes no sense.
They also probably don't want people embedding th
Alternately (Score:2)
Yahoo: It's there, it's broken, get used to something else.
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> either that or slashdot is seriously FOS
Welcome to Slashdot! So, how much did you pay on eBay for that four-digit ID? :)
Re:They seem to have fixed it (Score:4, Funny)
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Slashdot recently hit user ID 1 million right? Wow.
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Wait... people actually think a 4-digit ID has MONETARY value?
Uh, how much?
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Wow, Yahoo... (Score:2)
That's great for Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
Before everyone gets to feeling sorry for Google for this grave injustice against them, you should realize that Yahoo is well within their rights to block anything they want to from going through their IM service, and once people figure out that it's broken as a result, they'll start using an alternative.
...like, say, Google talk [google.com], maybe?
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Re:That's great for Google! (Score:5, Funny)
Have your friend start a blog, then post the "article" to slashdot anonymously. Seems to regularly work.
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BTW, I don't believe for a moment Yahoo did this on purpose to hurt the competition. They are smart enough to know that that would backfire 100 times worse than any competitive advantage they get.
Catbutt has a point. (Score:2)
"Within their rights" does not mean "reasonable". If my brother shows up at my door starving and shaking with cold, it is well within my rights to not do a thing for him, or maybe leave him outside and call an ambulence to prevent him from freezing. It would also be
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I can tell this is starting off well...
Even if I agreed with you, I didn't say that Yahoo should censor anything. There's a HUGE difference between being well within their rights to and should.
I would, but 1) I don't have any mod points, and 2) even if I did, you can't mod your own comments. I'm glad to see that someone else took the initiative to ping it with a +1 Insightful, though. ;-)
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Are you a Slashdot editor? This approach would do a lot to explain why everything related to Google gets posted here, down to how many sheets Eric and Sergey use to wipe...
Are you aware of Jabber? (Score:2)
But more importantly, if you're going to make people download software anyway, why not just have them use Jabber? Could Jabber be extended to do what you want?
here's what happened (Score:5, Funny)
Shit! *click* Whew.
Politics? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Politics? (Score:5, Insightful)
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What competitor? (Score:2)
All we have left is gtalk. It would be awesome if gtalk was a viable replacement, but it's not -- it doesn't have video chat, doesn't have voice on Linux or OSX (that I know of), and there aren't enough people using it to completely boycott the others. All the same things apply to Jabber (since Gtalk is just centrallized, Google-ized Jabber).
Regardless, no matter how
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Also I use AIM network (with the GAIM client, I wouldn't touch the official client with a 10 foot pole) and don't believe I have ever had a message filtered before.
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I think it's partially intended as a hint about what a future without network neutrality might be like.
--
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Your sig is very apt.
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True, in the same way that the GPL is about always distributing source when you distribute a binary. But the spirit of the GPL runs deeper, and so does the spirit of net neutrality.
No, that i
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Geez. Kind of harsh don't you think? I mean, the guy has only been here a month or two. No need to fire him over a simple mistake!
(I kid! I kid!)
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Shh! It's only CmdrTaco's basement... but every man's home is his castle...
Tin foil time (Score:2)
I know at work there were days that every URL except for fark.com would work and then it would come back. Some monkey having fun is all.
And
Block happening server side? (Score:2)
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It would also be harder as this would probably require a client update. As most people don't always run the most recent version...
More interesting is, if this is being run on the server side, then they are scanning every single message that goes through their servers. I wonder what else they are scanning for?
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> scanning every single message that goes through their servers.
> I wonder what else they are scanning for?
Unfortunately, we know that they are not scanning for viruses, spyware or phishing.
Newsflash (Score:2)
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woa, woa... don't get crazy now. AIM may not block your URL but as soon as you install it ALL your base are belong to them.
subscription benefits (Score:2, Funny)
Loss of communication can mean only one thing... (Score:2)
Re:Loss of communication can mean only one thing.. (Score:2)
Some men, you just can't reach?
Sorry.
Blocked by the client software (Score:5, Informative)
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Drawing a pretty fine line there... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait -- there's a difference?
Blocking? (Score:2, Interesting)
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medireview [wikipedia.org] for the history)
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They've done this before (Score:5, Informative)
Without free-softwares or freewares ... (Score:2)
This kind of story gives us a flavor of the degree of vendor-locking we would have without free softwares or freewares written by non-corporate programmers.
Video.google (Score:2, Interesting)
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Google video URLs are also blocked I guess. Isnt this antitrust?
Umm, what are you proposing Yahoo has a monopoly on?
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Antitrust laws cover a variety of anti-competitive business practices. This includes, but is not limited to, monopolistic practices.
antitrust (Score:2)
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Mine will. There is some Mountian Dew Code Red in the Coke machine here, which I'm sure is a violation of the vending company's licensing agreements with BOTH Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.
Skimming? (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe Youtube's links are being tracked as they are passed via YIM service ? Nothing says the messages are confidential. What's the likelyhood of this ? You could get customer data on the popularity of your viral (youtube) marketing , or make statistics as links traverse across these (IM) networks.
We all know IMs aren't secure, but the thought of catching links with statistics drawn up by links being shared is a scary proposition.
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I am saved (Score:2, Funny)
Not just YouTube... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they are basically trying to stop the IM spam where URLs are randomly sent to users.
YouTube links pass well in (Score:2, Insightful)
you could always try Tinyurl-ing [tinyurl.com] them and see what happens.
They are doing it with passwords too!!! AWESOME!! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:They are doing it with passwords too!!! AWESOME (Score:3, Funny)
WTF?! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is apparently an old, old bug. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've found that preceeding the URL with some random text (I end up typing "click here:" or something similar) addresses the issue. It's only when the IM line consists solely of a URL that it randomly goes into the bit bucket.
Yahoo has every right... (Score:2)
Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.. (Score:2, Funny)
Trillian (Score:2)
MSN Messenger guilty too! (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm calling bullshit unless ppl can reproduce it (Score:4, Informative)
We could both send Youtube links back and forth with no problem. We tried about 30 different times both with youtube.com as well as deep links directly to videos. No problems whatsoever.
Is anyone else able to reproduce this? Until so, I am calling bullshit.
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Re:I'm calling bullshit unless ppl can reproduce i (Score:2)
it's totally random when it will show up, i've sent two links to imageshack in a row and had one not work and one work. it's not even always the first one either.
as has been mentioned already, putting "link:" before the link or any other normal text fixes it 100% of the time.
3 words.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yahoo mail and groups have the same issues... (Score:2)
Basically, their system truncates the url when it line wraps the text. Nothing more...
no one said the CIA spying software was bug free.. (Score:2)
Interesting Addition (Score:3, Informative)
AIM blocks URLs too (Score:4, Interesting)
A direct IM of the problem link outside the chatroom will make it through just fine.
Slashdot also censors stuff (Score:2, Funny)
YIM? (Score:2)
Verified here...but only on Yahoo Windows IMclient (Score:2, Informative)
IETF standardized Internet IM already... (Score:2)
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Not "common carriers" but close. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, as "Online Service Providers" (OSPs) computer communication networks are given certain 'Safe Harbor'