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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!.
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, maybe?
Very strange.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
> 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?
Unfortunately, we know that they are not scanning for viruses, spyware or phishing.
Google video URLs are also blocked I guess. Isnt this antitrust?
Umm, what are you proposing Yahoo has a monopoly on?
IRC. We pass links back and forth like that all day.
you could always try Tinyurl-ing them and see what happens.
Why the hell aren't you using a free software chat client (so yahoo can't block anything client side), with encryption (so they can't block anything server side)? The are many benefits to free software and encryption beyond this particular situation. A proprietary chat client using a cleartext protocol just seams like idiocy from a security standpoint, especially in the age of Criminal/Corporate/ISP/NSA snooping.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I've been facing this problem since so long..
its not just the URLs but anything that is pasted..
it sometimes doesnt get thru..
I used YM for sending code snippet to friends but it simply doesnt work sometimes..
I was thinin that there is some problem with my Yahoo Msgr and I need to install it again..
but then i had msn..
i dont think this has to do with content filtering or something..
it may be some bug in the software..