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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?
(yahoo guy in the back browsing slashdot at work)
Shit! *click* Whew.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
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.
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.
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 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.
Maybe due to malware, rather than Yahoo?
Wait -- there's a difference?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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."
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."