I found an article about this on digg and frankly, I’m very surprised. It turns out that Microsoft censors all instant messages that go through their network.
This is done server-side and it doesn’t matter what IM client you use, whether it is MSN Messenger, Trillian, GAIM, Pidgin etc.
What’s being censored?
If your message meets any of the following criteria, the entire message will not be sent and you don’t even get a message telling you it’s been blocked. Try it out for yourself!
- If it contains “download.php”
If any part of your message contains the string “download.php”, the message will be blocked. This is probably because download.php pages can be attributed to automatic spyware and malware installation. This is stupid because the file can simply be renamed to something else, this “solution” probably creates more problems than it solves. - If it contains “gallery.php”
Similar to download.php rules but I can’t understand why they would block this. Galleries are bad? Who knows. - If it contains “.info”
If any part of your message contains the string “.info” whether or not it is part of a domain, it will be blocked. I’m guessing MSN is doing this due to the huge number of .info spam sites. Notorious as the cheapest top level domain you can buy (almost free), .info domains are very popular amongst spammers.
Concerns
This raises a couple concerns with the most obvious being privacy. This is not to say MSN is reading your messages since this is undoubtedly being done by a script (a bad one at that) but the fact that Microsoft has control over what you can and cannot write in your messages is just absurd.
The second concern is the number of false-positives this can lead to due to poor implementation on Microsoft’s part. If any part of your message contains .info the entire message will be blocked. If you try to send someone a news article from http://www.informationweek.com, it will be blocked. If you try to send someone to a legitimate .info site such as New York’s transit authority, it will be blocked. Hell, if you write “hey joe.inform jenny i’ll be late.thx”, it’ll be blocked.
Also, since they don’t tell you your message was blocked, I can just imagine the awkward scenarios that could arise.
Boss: Hey, can you send me that site with the report?
Jon: sure thing, it’s http://www.myreport.info
Boss: Hello? Are you there?
Jon: yeah
Boss: Can you send me the site already?
Jon: i just did, it’s myreport.info
Boss: Listen, if you can’t find it, just say so. Don’t ignore me.
Jon: screw this, i quit.inform human resources for me. see ya
Boss: Let’s go have lunch.
Workarounds
There are a couple workarounds. The first is to replace a single character in the offending URI with its URL encoded equivalent (i.e. down%6Coad.php instead of download.php). This is unbelievably inconvenient for the normal user and incredibly easy for potential spammers to implement.
The second is to completely encode your message, a feature supported by third-party IM clients like Pidgin and Trillian. However, this requires the receiving party to have support for encryption as well.
End Result
I don’t think this censorship will help Microsoft at all in gaining IM market share. In the United States, AIM is the most popular IM client but not by much. In the rest of the world, MSN actually holds the largest market share (60% as of 2006). Even if they remove this ineffective censorship, the fact that they can read and censor your messages is enough for me to consider switching IMs.
Popularity: 36% [?]
Tags: censorship, Microsoft, MSN, privacy, security
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Oh.. sounds like .info is not my choice anymore… Sigh… I already bought a few .info domains to use heavily on… it sounds a bad investment…
That’s crazy…i had no idea they did that. And people complain about Google invading privacy…
Wow … this might answer a few questions I’ve had over the last few months. I’ve used MSN Messenger quite a bit to keep in touch with family (since they won’t use IRC) and there have been times entire lines have been ignored.
I wonder if MSN’s servers flag everything with “terror related” key words, too
.info haha that a crazy post! i love learning behind the scenes stuff
Google’s not much better
unless you explicitly turned off search history, they most likely have a record of everything you’ve ever searched for!
Not exactly terror related but I heard that MSN Spaces (not MSN Messneger) will flag anything with the word “Aryan” in it. This includes phrases like “Mary and Paul” since it contains “ary an”.
It’s not necessarily a bad investment. I think MSN’s censorship is a pretty isolated case but of course, I’d get a .com/.net/.org when possible
[...] you know that MSN censors your instant messages? Read Jon Lee’s post for all the crazy [...]
Wow! I did not know this. That is quite interesting…
Blocking spam in such a manner is not only rude, but absolutely ineffective. Microsoft should know better. Spammers are always using new tricks and dumb blacklists like might work today, but won’t tomorrow.
Honestly. This filter so easy for hackers to circumvent yet quite difficult for the average user!
This is exactly what happened with the first e-mail spam filters. Words like viagra were soon turned to v1@gr4 to circumvent spam filters. Blacklists don’t work, because you just can’t come up with all the possibilities. Some sort of ‘intelligence’ is required if you want good results.
I dislike IMs. I always get confused. As I’m typing a sentence, the other person types another and thinks that I am answering a different question, or vise-versa. I think that if you are going to have any important information to relay to somebody, like that example you used of a conversation between an employee and employer, the phone is the best solution. Or at least, use VOIP. Otherwise, even without that one more annoying bug you mentioned, it’s often very easy to get the wrong impression using IMs.
Wow, thats interesting and still stupid on the part of Microsoft because those who want to spam and send viruses most probably will find ways around it. Glad I use aim (well not really, its not the best im service but its what most of my friends/family uses), I wonder if they have anything similar
Alright it’s high time for me to do redirect from my all my .info domains to international ones, isn’t it?
I would never use IMs for anything business related. I use it purely to communicate with friends and family, but you’re right it can be confusing sometimes. But it’s also very convenient to be talking to multiple people at once!
I haven’t heard of anything similar by AIM. If they know what’s good for them they wouldn’t do it!
I doubt other companies will follow suit once they realize how stupid this is. I reckon .info domains aren’t in trouble.. unless you’re an MSN user.
This sure is different than the type of censoring that comes to one’s mind in the first place, but it fits into the category of censorship for certain reasons that make sense to a company such as MSN.