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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.
"Fix the vulnerabilities first"?
WTF you talkin bout. Out of that list used as an example, 5 were PHP security problems (who has PHP installed on the local PC?) one was an odd but normal TLD. One was an executable file.
I'd like to know, how "just fix the software" works in a world where 60% of users don't know about updates, don't update when they do know, or use pirated software the vendor actively blocks from updates.
There are certain strings that have no legit business in MSN chat, that's true. In my opinion, that list doesn't have any of them, AND poses a threat to other stuff aside from the local computer.
God Damn I hate bloggers.
You're a fucking tool, he didn't ask how do I get rid of Windows because of their numerous retarded practices he asked how to turn off a single feature in MSN. To install Ubuntu doesn't help him at all if you were to tell him to install other MSN protocol IM clients such as Pidgin, Trillian or something else then you could have moved them slowly towards open sourced software and made the switch go easier, not that I really would recommend Trillian and I haven't played with Pidgin yet. The best course of action however would have been to not click the reply button because your answer had absolutely no relevance to the question he was asking.