Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Messenger Blocking youtube.com URLs?
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!.
Just tested this with a friend - the URLs get through fine when sent with Adium. So they're being blocked by the client software - not the network itself.
Since they've done this before, and now done it again, I assume they'll keep doing it until discovered with it in the act. In which case they'll call it a temporary glitch or something. They're skilled in this work internationally too, and are building quite a reputation with all this.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I don't know how I could "prove" it, but I can verify that this has indeed been happening for at least 4+ months*. Any message with youtube.com in it was silently discarded, but outube.com, utube.com, etc. all went through fine. I suppose I could post chat logs from my two machines, but obviously I could have altered them to suit my own purposes...
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 noticed it, but my story was rejected. C'est la vie.
--- Remove all references to mud-dwelling quadrupeds to email me.
Yahoo Mail blocks gmail invites as well.4 5-20040621AreHotmailandYahooBlockingGmailInvites.h tml
http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-
Yahoo blocking YouTube URLS on their IM service has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. Even if Net Neutrality was passed it wouldn't preven them from doing this.
I just tried this with a friend. I use Trillian. He uses Yahoo.
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.
I can personally attest to this as well. It is a known filed bug in GAIM but they can't fix it since it's server side.
Get a chat client that adds an MD5 signature. It could tell you if the message was altered, unless they recompute the MD5 as well.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I remember the grand old days of no user IDs on Slashdot (yes kids, no joke!). That was fun, being able to impersonate whoever you wanted... Flame wars would erupt between Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds. It eventually got out of hand, and then everyone became a number...
Slashdot recently hit user ID 1 million right? Wow.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
My co-worker and I can reproduce this claim. Not sure it is intentional though. I am using GAIM on Linux and he is using the Yahoo IM client on windows and any message that contains http://www.youtube.com/ either directions is not going through...Tried it with my brother who is using GAIM on Linux as well (after disabling off the record messaging) and the message went through fine both directions. Weirdness...
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."