censorship on MSN?

Posted by Nico Golde in
Sunday, August 12. 2007

Reading this and the AdiumX wiki it seems like MSN is censoring IM on the server-side.

However trying with ak who is actually using Adium X this seem to be bullshit^WFUD since our little .info test conversation worked flawlessly.

"According to communications director of MSN Sweden, Jessica Börjel, this is being done to protect users against exploits and worms spreading through the MSN Messenger service."

According to what I know about big companies they make official statements, not just some foobar in a private mail. So can someone please enlighten me?

Anyway, stop crying guys, there are better alternatives.

UPDATE: They really censor!
It seems to be no FUD, it seems to be true. But it's not just the .info keyword but the whole URL. So if you send http://test.info/download.php?foo=bar this will be blocked. At least you get an error message in AdiumX, in centericq/im you don't get one

Shame on Microsoft yet another time, especially for this lame approach of muddling security with obscurity, but as said there are better alternatives

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I can confirm that they blocked/dropped messages containing ".info" before. I was in contact with the MSN/Windows Live support regarding this two weeks ago, and after providing screenshots they confirmed it. Pidgin spots out a error message while the official MSN Messenger client just drops the message.

However, testing today reveals that only texts of the format http://*.info and www.*.info is blocked (and no longer is just ".info" enough to trigger the block), which is atleast somewhat better than before (having a domain in the .info tld myself....)

I agree that there are better alternatives out there!

#1 Niclas Andersson on 2007-08-12 23:15 (Reply)

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