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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!.
Does this story really belong in Politics? I think it more has to do with competition then politics.
Steve
Yahoo's been doing this for a while, with videos.google.com as well. My friend attempted to submit this MONTHS ago and it was rejected.
It would be more Yahoo's style if they just changed the URL to something else...
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medireview for the history)
Google video URLs are also blocked I guess. Isnt this antitrust?
Any thoughts that YIM is skimming the URLs you type for personal use ?
... )
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. They've got your nickname, IP, who you frequently talk to and what links they/you send receive from them.
Perhaps you could figure out what kind of information you're discussing ? With the YouTube tags you could assign "tags" to conversations that people talk about in IM. I sure hope I'm wrong though, the world gets scarier. With that idea though you could say the same for flickr and other tagging websites, delicious even ? Armed with that, the black helicopters are coming and the thought police have now, by association, got you nabbed.
Who's going to invest in this new idea first ? Too bad I don't work at an IM related company or we'd already have this implemented and tracking those freeloaders !
Sounds clever, and wouldn't be *that* tricky. A fun perl regexp would be able to yank it really fast. ( Who bets it's not Perl though
Later,
Anon.
I have recently noticed that many URLs sent in IM's will disappear without a trace. It seems that often the FIRST URL sent will not get through, but subsequent ones will. For example I will open an IM window, send a URL then say "did you get that?" after they don't reply, then the person will reply "did I get what?". The ones I can recall where links to Photobucket.
I think they are basically trying to stop the IM spam where URLs are randomly sent to users.
Yahoo filters out certain messages, and it has nothing to do with YouTube. Near as I can figure, the algorithm is like this:
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.
How is this overreacting? You're telling us everything in the article summary is correct, and even explaining why.
Developers: We can use your help.
Sending URLs of any sort as Yahoo! IMs has been unreliable for me and my friends for at least a year. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it; some URLs just don't go through. I've noticed it when both parties are using Yahoo! Messenger and also when one or both parties are using Adium, so unless the bug also exists within Adium, it may be a server-side issue.
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.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I'm not sure that you're correct to call them a "common carrier." That term has a specific meaning under both traditional common law, and as used in U.S. law, and to my knowledge, ISPs -- much less network operators -- have been considered "common carriers" by neither. At least, so far. I think that you could come up with a very good argument for doing so, but I'm not sure it's been done by a court.
However, as "Online Service Providers" (OSPs) computer communication networks are given certain 'Safe Harbor' provisions under the DMCA and the Communications Decency Act, which I believe Yahoo Messenger probably qualifies for. The requirements are spelled out in 512(c)(1)(A)(1) of the DMCA, aka the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act." Wikipedia has a nice summary here.
It would seem to me anyway, that Yahoo could be eliminating their OCILLA/Safe Harbor examption, by weaking their plausible case for not having knowledge of infringing activity. It certainly doesn't seem like it's good for them to have any knowledge of what's being transmitted; just pass the bits and be done with it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you try to write a message to someone a URL that contains gallery.php or download.php, the entire message will not be delivered at all.
If true that's almost creepier, since it suggests that in addition to just scanning the message for content and looking for some simple strings ("http://", "google", "youtube") that it's actually following the link and analyzing the content at the end of it.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
porn bot spam. I noticed yahoo started doing this with most urls and that i had to break them up for them to show up. I think this was in response to all the phishing and general scams via links posted. I dont know if youTube should feel special...it even blocks my website when I try and prove I have a job ;)
-those people who tell you not to take chances, they are all missing what lifes' all about-
I have found that an AIM chatroom will not accept certain URLs. It eats any message containing something it doesn't like. One notable example is anything from theonion.com. None of the URLs that trigger this behabior make any kind of sense to me. If you run any of the banned links through tinyurl, it is allowed through.
A direct IM of the problem link outside the chatroom will make it through just fine.
- "Well?" "Deep Subject."
AFAIK, Adium doesn't use HTML clickable links.
This in particular has to do with single line, URLs which is sent as the only text in the conversation. Thanks to this "news" article, now the spammers have got a clear analysis of what Y! blocks.
Either way, expect more grandmas getting phished.I have a Jabber ID that comes out to be the same place as my email address, and I flaunt both on every web forum I'm ever on. The email address gets 30-60 spams per day (nicely filtered by BogoFilter), the Jabber ID doesn't get a single one.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Too many secrets! (good movie!)
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 sending Photobucket links?
Also, in response to a previous poster who said something about how the technology to filter should never be developed or made known that it can be done on demand: You fail - The academic community frowns on your conclusion. The ability to do these things is often devloped concurrently with the rest of the software/hardware/etc., based on lessons learned from BBS'es and IRC and the first ISP's. The ability to filter and censor a network is critical to its operation in many ways and for many reasons (at least 65535 reasons), to prevent things like exploits and spam, or deal with hackers, etc. While I believe Internet Neutrality is important (I've writeen several papers on it recently), some argue that in many ways the Internet has never actually been truly neutral, some authors referring to a policy of "don't filter until/unless you have to" - implied is the ability to do so on demand when you absolutely have to. From a network engineering standpoint, it's not wise too have too many such rules running, lest you impact performance, so it isn't a good idea to allow Joe Schmoe in tech support or John Blow in the NOC to have the ability to implment these kinds of things just from a technical standpoint, other considerations (such as legal) aside. But seriously, don't fool yourself, pretty much any and every hosted service you use possesses the ability to eavesdrop on, filter, and/or censor you.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage