MSN Censors Your IM

Jamie ran across a story about censorship on MSN. Essentially, a number of suspicious strings result in silent failure of delivery. The strings are unsurprisingly things like .scr and .info. They've started maintaining a list if you're interested. Personally, I'd rather they fix the vulnerabilities that make those strings dangerous in the first place: it's not like IM is the only place a URL can get on your machine.

Comments

Re:Blocked firefox.exe

[lattyware]

An inept IT department?
OMFG!
Someone alert the world press!

Re:-gasp- Slashdot, too!

[KingSkippus]

Reminds me of games that try to filter out all 'bad' words

I play City of Heroes, and for some weird reason, it blocks the word "count." I think it was a typo when someone was entering words to block into the filter. It was just kind of funny, because I discovered it when I told someone, "Don't worry, you can count on me!" and it came out as "Don't worry, you can <bleep!> on me!" They had no idea what I was talking about, and it took a few entertaining minutes to hash out what was going on.

Re:-gasp- Slashdot, too!

[gbjbaanb]

Ah, the northern Uk town of Scunthorpe has been affected by this problem for some time now. I think a "Scun" must be a rude word in American English or something.

Re:The genius that is Microsoft...

[Wordsmith]

The day I start picking my friends based on their responses to IM security issues will be a sad, sad day.

"Mom, I met a great girl. She's not very nice, and she's not very pretty, but she started using Jabber after the latest MSN fiasco. You'll love her. I'll have her message you; oh, but you'll have to switch of of AIM first, mom."

Re:-gasp- Slashdot, too!

[glitch23]

Ah, the northern Uk town of Scunthorpe has been affected by this problem for some time now. I think a "Scun" must be a rude word in American English or something.

No, it's "Thor". We don't like Scandinavians.