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MSN Search Blocking Results For XFree86?
Peacefire writes "Thomas Shaddack spotted this on http://www.root.cz/ (in Czech) -- if you go to http://search.msn.com/ and
search for 'XFree86', it tells you that you've 'entered a search term that is likely to return adult content', and directs you to the porn search engine NightSurf.com, which lists a bunch of porn sites that ostensibly match the term 'XFree86'. If you search for 'XFree86' on Google, however, it's clear that the top matching terms returned by a normal search, are XFree86 sites, are not a bunch of porn sites. MSN is apparently blocking the specific term 'XFree86' and not just filtering on something stupid like the 'X' or the 'Free', since you can search for 'XFree85' and 'XFree87' with no problem. And search terms like 'Linux', 'AOL' and 'Macintosh' are allowed, so at least MSN hasn't simply blacklisted all competitors' keywords as 'porn', but why would they be blocking 'XFree86'?"
Since it's about to get Slashdotted, here is the mirror list section from the xfree86.org site:
Web Mirrors
Our web site is very busy and often causes timed out connections. The following sites have been verified as being both accurate and reliable in their mirroring process, and so we recommend these for the best access:
Costa Rica
Copenhagen, Denmark
Paris, France
St. Denis, France
Berlin, Germany
Dortmund, Germany
Athens, Greece
Seoul, Korea
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Bucharest, Romania
London, United Kingdom
Not posting as AC 'cause the troll potential would be too high...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Something has gotta be wrong with that.
XFree85 seems to work
And so does XFree87
Here's a search for a possible culprit - just x86. Seems fine, although notice how the first 9 results are all AMD, with some impostor Intel claiming #10 spot (and it's not even Intel's site, it's Solaris on Intel document).
But back to searches for XFree86. So it wasn't the X86 part, how about
free86 - oh, look, XFree86.org is listed with Microsoft search engine after all. You just don't search it by name, search it by keyword that's reasonably close.
Perhaps they are blocking it because anything that uses the term "Windows" they consider to be a threat. Just look how "Lindows" Has had to change it's website to l---ws.com in several European countries
Not to beat the dead horse, but how many people using MSN as a search engine would know a thing about XFree86?
1. Linux with Xfree86
2. ???
3. porn
I mean come on, can't you see that?
404
Of course the fact that such mistakes can be made, and left undiscovered for so long, speaks against closed blicklists like MSN's.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Maybe they don't like the new license and are blocking it for our own good?
I continued to nightsurf and i found another side of XFree86!
Live Now: Free cams with 'xfree86':(Click to zoom)
Get 'xfree86' at the Websites of the Hottest & Naughtiest Webcam Starlets, Hunks, Couples & Groups in the World. Click any star to visit!
Looking for xfree86? I deliver, and I'm live right now.
It sure it convenient with a graphical user interface but this is TOO MUCH.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
MSFT is going to block all websites containing the letter "X", which will be all of their competition.
I.e. Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, hot XXX grits, etc.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Don't tell me I'm the only one who asks my wife if she wants to XFree86 tonight?
You know what?
"how many people using MSN as a search engine would know a thing about XFree86?"
Apparently none, given the MSN results.
Hotmail blocks my best friend's last name, which is Raper, because it's "offensive"...
MSN returns all sorts of hits, it does not say anything about likely to return adult content.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Perhaps they are doing soundex/metaphone type matching on the words to see if they are sex-related. Perhaps "xfree86" sounds like something you might find on a porn site.
Either than or it's X FREE 86 where 86 is some position that involves finding a woman with two heads.
John.
The point, I think, is that the only way people are going to know it is doing stuff like this (and thus, be able to make an educated decision) is if stuff like this is public.
I mean, if Google was blocking all search results for Linux-related sites, wouldn't you want to know? Especially if you already know the Linux sites, and thus don't search for their existence (if not content) on a regular basis.
Blocking web pages whose titles include a word starting with X would block the Super Bowl, which for the last few decades has used the letter "X" in the name of each event as part of the Roman serial number.
Little kid told me that an "XXX" movie means you have to be thirty years old to get in.
perhaps a better question to ask is: Who the hell is using search.msn.com instead of google?
Not that I believe that Google is really doing their service out of the goodness from their hearts - they're doing it to make money.
But people wonder why I don't want to see a Micorosft Internet Search built into Windows (oh, and made so you can't remove it without damaging the operating system, like you can't remove IE or Media Player or anything else Microsoft decides is essential).
Call me crazy, but MS seems to have this weird habit of shutting down things they don't like. Is this just a stupid mistake? It could be - I mean, block things starting with X to keep kids from porn, right?
Oops - but Xfree85 works, so that can't be it.
MS gives away IE to shut down Netscape. That wasn't the crime that I thought was terrible - it was going to their OEM partners and threatening them with extra high cost of Windows if they put on Netscape.
So if they should take over the search world, can we really trust it to reflect accurately? I'm all for giving something a fair shake, but if before the game really starts they're already blocking alternate product possibilities I think "trust" is something that won't apply to MSN search.
Of course, I could be wrong. Could just be a simple misunderstanding.
Sadly, even if it is, based on their past history, I don't think I could believe that's it.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Finally a viable competitor to Google. I have been looking for XFree86 adult content for quite some time. Google could just never bring up what I needed.
Thanks MSN!
MSN lists itself first, and google is fourth - higher in the rankings than it is on google itself.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Notice that a search for "X Free 86" returns xfree.org, the XFree86 website, as its first hit.
If you think about it, it's unlikely their adult filter is catches pornographic searches by the query text alone. I can think of any number of queries which would give porn but which it would be difficult to computationally distinguish from non-pornographic queries.
My guess is that MSN performs the search in any case, probes the first hits in their cache with some porn-detection algorithm, and redirects you if the algorithm thinks it might be porn.
This would suggest that, for whatever reason, the first few hits for XFree86 (as opposed to "X Free 86" or XFree85") pass the porno test.
On the other hand, the notice says "You have entered a search term that is likely to return adult content" which suggests strongly that only the query is being studied. So I don't know.
Anyway, I'd be more inclined to think it's a crappy test than to think they've explicitly coded this as some incredibly obscure means of spiting XFree86.
Let's break it down ... X, as in XXX (porn), free, as in beer, and 86, as in people who have been 86'ed. I certainly wouldn't want my children seeing that :-o
(Score:-1, Wrong)
I think we're overthinking this. This could be a subtle way for Microsoft to block information about OSS, but I think it's because their search engine kinda sucks. Isn't it more likely that we're so used to engines like 'google' and 'alltheweb' that we assume that Microsoft must be up to something. Now, I don't believe that this would be beyond their scruples, just that this seems like a screwup. Anyway, how many of us use msn.com anyway? Try hitting 'alt-home' and you'll get my point.
-
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
The simple, conspiracy-free answer to this riddle is that MSN just has a crappy search engine that DOES return porn sites when you search for XFree86.
And the irony is that their motto is "more useful everyday." I mean, that's obviously true if one day they're as useful as a stab wound in the kidney, and the next day they're as useful as a heat lamp to a burn victim, but wake up here, people. It's all an obvious attempt to associate porn and other "morally wrong" materials with the open source movement.
And while XFree86 gets blocked on MSN, let's see how a search for "SCO" fares on the two engines. (Top 11, "Because it's one more, you see".)
Hmmmm. Yep, no surprise there.
MSN Search Results "SCO" (Top 11):
1. SCO www.sco.com
2. California State Controller Kids Site www.kids.sco.ca.gov
3. Newsgroup: biz.sco news:biz.sco
4. Reuters - MyDoom Worm Aimed at SCO Web Site
5. DealTime - Sco Product www.dealtime.com/xGS-sco~NS-5320
6. InfoWorld - SCO: IBM Cannot Enforce GPL
7. Computer Business Consultants, SCO Unix Sales, Service & Support
8. Calibex.com - Simple Tech SCO-QUBE3/256 256MB for Sun
9. Bagpipe Marches & Music of Sco CD - Amazon.com
10. Northern New Jersey Council - Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco www.nobebosco.org
11. Northern New Jersey Council - Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco www.nnjbsa.org/camps/nobebosco
Google Search Results "SCO" (Top 11):
(Note: Includes the Google News "teaser" links just added.)
News:
1. SCO posts $2.3 million loss - InfoWorld - 2 hours ago
2. Perth firm files complaint against SCO - The Age - 9 hours ago
3. User group hits out at SCO - VNUNet - 11 hours ago
4. www.caldera.com
5. SCO | SCOsource www.caldera.com/scosource/
6. OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint
7. The SCO Group | SCO Grows Your Business sco.com/
8. the SCO v IBM info website
9. Analysis of SCO's Las Vegas Slide Show
10. California State Controller's Office www.sco.ca.gov/
11. GROKLAW www.groklaw.net/
Never assign to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity....
If you have reached a level of cluefulness where you need to find information on Xfree86 then you are using Google as well.
Not necessarily.
If you start out as an MS user and hear about this other operating system, what is the first thing you need to do to BECOME clueful? Look it up. Right?
So you look it up, using the tool you know. And the tool refuses, and tells you it's something pornographic.
So you decide somebody's playing a joke on you and forget about it.
And you never DO become cluefull enough to download it and try it out.
And thus you never wean yourself from MSware.
And you keep buying upgrades from MS.
Multiply by millions.
Multiply by hundreds of bucks each.
Sounds like a GREAT marketing ploy.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Paranoids,
Blocking XFree86 is not an indication of concious effort by Microsoft to divert traffic. Perhaps their blocking software has the following algorithm:
For terms that have been searched for more than 10,000 times, block the term if the first letter is X and the second letter is a consonant.
As you can see, this search doesn't consciously target XFree86. And XFree85 and XFree87 probably wouldn't meet the 10,000 criteria.
Wouldn't you think that anyone who knows what XFree86 is would not be detered by MSN anyway?
This is non-news. Hey everybody, the dots on acoustical tile above my cube spell out "Microsoft rules!" oh no!!!
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Perhaps they are doing soundex/metaphone type matching on the words to see if they are sex-related. Perhaps "xfree86" sounds like something you might find on a porn site.
Maybe it does, but "xfreee86" sounds the same, and returns real search results, and "xfree66" has more "six/sex" sounds in it and returns real search results. They're not filtering by sound.
Goto http://search.msn.com select "Advanced Search" put in XFree86 then click on search.
You'll get a page with a box that has "Sponsored Sites" at the top and a link to NightSurf.com
Now click on the link below that box that says "Go Back to MSN Search"
OMG.... it's the results of the search for XFree86.. perhapse their "BETA" search engine is having problems with the basic search and sponsored links code. Overall the original article is BS since they rushed to slam Microsoft and didn't double check everything.
Yes the Eye Of Bill is watching. I can sense it's Evil gaze.
We talked about doing the full investigation, and suing, etc. and even called the district attorney since this seemed to be criminal behaviour to us. We decided we were too small and too poor to pursue the matter as a civil case, and I don't know what happened w/ the DA.
I thought it was pretty foul play, it was one of a number of incidents that helped turn me into a bitter Microsoft-hater.
I did a search for "teen shemales fisting watersports anal toys"[msn.com], and got www.xfree86.org as a result...
Catholic Schoolgirls
Hot teen sluts
upskirt shots
pictures of women licking my balls
sexy XFree86 girls
So, even if XFree86 was unintentional, what content do they think they're protecting us from?
Where would they get that idea?
I'm a fairly competent internet programmer, so here's my analysis: follow the money. First thing to examine is the url that MS presents. I've split it into multiple lines for readability. Notice that it contains two other urls as parameters.
r ch.dll6 R .gif
_ TR.gif
e al code=msn&src=1&key=xfree86
o m
http://search.msn.com/adpassthru.aspx
?ADTARGET=http://ads.msn.com/ads/adredir.asp
%3F&TARGET=http://apps.NightSurf.com/~wsapi/nssea
%3Fdealcode%3Dmsn%26src%3D1%26key%3D&QUERY=xfree8
&IMG=http://ads.msn.com/ads/IMGWB3/004400170001_T
This url takes you back to the msn search site so that it can record your click. The search site responds with a code 302 (Document moved) and redirects you to ads.msn.com. Here is the url for that. Notice the similarity.
http://ads.msn.com/ads/adredir.asp
?url=http%3a%2f%2fapps.NightSurf.com
%2f%7ewsapi%2fnssearch.dll
%3fdealcode%3dmsn%26src%3d1%26key%3dxfree86
&image=http://ads.msn.com/ads/IMGWB3/004400170001
This ad site responds with another redirect that finally takes you to nightsurf. Here is the url for that.
http://apps.NightSurf.com/~wsapi/nssearch.dll?d
Now here's where it really gets interesting. Notice the dealcode and key parameters in particular. They would seem to imply that MSN has some kind of deal with NightSurf.
I have to conclude that NightSurf paid MSN to feature it's ad (that's what it is, not a search result) when users type in 'XFree86'. I had difficulty understanding why a porn search site would want to do something like that, so I started investigating. First stop, betterwhois.com. Here's what they have to say about NightSurf.com.
Registrant:
WebPower Inc.
ATTN: NIGHTSURF.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA. 20172-0447
Domain Name: NIGHTSURF.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Inc., WP av4xg8hq3ck@networksolutionsprivateregistration.c
ATTN: NIGHTSURF.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA 20172-0447
570-708-8780
It seems that this is a private listing from Network Solutions and any further investigation will have to include sending an email to the listed address.
So the question remains, why is NightSurf.com (A.K.A. Web Power, Inc.) paying Microsoft for the XFree86 keyword? Did Microsoft knowingly accept that or was it more automated? Do I or do I not have a hole in my hat?
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
I got the adult content warning and tried:
xfree86 bullshit its adult content...
for a laugh, which for some reason bought back a bucketload of Slashdot stuff (!?). Conspiracy against xfree86? No, it's just a really bad search engine.
This is nitpicking but interestingly if you search for Y Windows Y MSN Gives you this and Google Gives you this. Google finds it without problems.
I've tried a few other terms like Microsoft loses lawsuit and they don't seem to be filtering results. Interestingly searching for Microsoft Warez IS being manipulated pointing to microsoft.com/piracy. Don't blame them. Just interesting to compare the results with other search engines.
While I can possibly see this as some form of censorship, especially when searching for Xfee86, what I'd like to know is what other terms they have manipulated which might be interpreted as a conflict of interest. What would happen if the US government had a Goolge like search engine - what kind of censorship would occur on their site? At what point will NBC (of MSNBC) become involved - if ever - to filter out searches whose results are not in their favor. Does CNN, the BBC the CBC and other media do the same thing on Internet searches on their websites?
Ah. But if you search for XFree86 MS idiots!!! you bypass their pr0n warning and get a slew of links to Slashdot.
How not-so-strange...
Here's what you need - Lesbian Linux.
Provides the porn-get package manager to provide all your porn needs.
X FREE 86 also returns the correct Xfree86 homepage, and XXX free 86 doesn't generate a warning.
Never confuse volume with power.
You know what's fun? Search for "GNU" or "GPL" on MSN, and compare that with Google. The GNU website is the first hit on Google, but doesn't even appear on the first page of MSN. The first MSN result is an African safari thing... The first MSN hit for "GPL" is: "InfoWorld - SCO: IBM Cannot Enforce GPL". Insane.
Next week MS will put another easter egg in their search engine to keep Slashdotters busy for hours while MS programmers hammer out Longhorn and Sheephorn and Horned-owl and take over the WORLD!!!
I tried to submit similar article on Jan 22 but it was not accepted. Evidently Microsoft responded to the complain and Apache is not blacklisted anymore. Below is my original one month old post. Sorry URL show proper results now and I did not saved the original search results.
A few days ago I noticed that every time I use Internet Explorer (i.e. MSN search) to look for apache related projects I never got a reference to apache.org websites.
Examples: jelly script , maven apache , cocoon framework .
*.apache.org sites never came up. I am not even talking about listing it as "featured web site". It never came up as the link at all!!! The best you would get is a reference to XML.com website discussing the technology but not to technology itself.
Even search for "apache web" got the reference www.apache.com as the featured site instead of www.apache.org Only "apache" got "apache.org" as the featured site at the second place after oil related Apache corporation. Yahoo and Google as you would expect did proper job.
Searching for Xfree86 porn works, too! Strangely enough ...
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Wow! What a horrible search engine! Xfree86 porn doesn't bring up the warning because it's not the EXACT term which they have in their database. I suspect that they compiled a list of terms likely to bring up adult content, but they fail to check if somebody used a combination of those words.
Seach for porn, and you'll get the nightsurf thing. Search for nude, and you'll also get the nightsurf warning. But- if you search for porn nude then you'll get no warning at all!!! This is stupid even for microsoft standards.
While I hate Microsoft for all the same reasons most of you do, I think in this case there's a non-malicious explanation. That redirection is probably triggered by the following conditions:
(1) The search term contains certain things that tend to find X-rated content. The algorithm might look for dictionary terms and try to form seperate words out of the serch phrase (so if you looked for hothornybabes it would notice that it contains the words "hot" and "horny" and "babes".) So, "Xfree86" probably gets flagged because it's "X" followed by "free" and some irrelevant number. But, wait, you say 'Xfree87" and "Xfree85" don't trigger, so that can't be it, right? Well, it still could be because of the next point:
2) It probably *also* only triggers the redirection if the search result returns a lot of hits.
So 'Xfree86' triggers a lot of hits, and contains red-flagged terms, while 'Xfree87' has the same flagged terms, but triggers few hits, and so isn't assumed to be porn.
Anyway, that's one possible explanation. I'd attribute this to stupidity on the part of the algorithm before attributing it to maliciousness.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The MSN search isn't biased against Linux at all!
For proof, just go here and read what it says in the title.
For the lazy: "MSN Seach: linux -- More Useful Everyday"
i believe the best demonstration is saerching for 'porn' and then 'porn porn'
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Obviously the MS programmer(s/oids) is(are/are) ANDing the evil bit flags instead of ORing them. They did check the for evil bit, didn't they?!
Why do I get the feeling that if you manually overrode the "maxlength=150" and set them a nice custom GET with "bork" 17000 times on the MSN search line, somewhere in Redmond a server will go down?
--