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MSN Censors Your IM

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the its-for-your-own-good dept.

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.

1 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. MSN does some weiiiiiird things... by jez9999 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's one it started doing since the recent MS security drive. Any file that could possibly exploit a hole in any piece of software seems to be treated with serious suspicion. Somehow, this seems to include GIF files. So, when someone tried to send me a GIF file, I get this warning. I download it anyway, and it's sitting on my hard drive. I can copy it somewhere else, open it, etc.

    However - and this is the kicker - when I click on the blue link to the file in the MSN chat window, I get this dialog. Yeah, it actually DELETED the file I just downloaded. After I copied it using Explorer. And I have full access to it. Dunno who implemented that piece of genius.

    --
    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.