MSN Censors Your IM 287
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.
The genius that is Microsoft... (Score:5, Informative)
From an article that is linked to from this one:
Or for that matter, http: //tinyurl.com/z35a5.
Kind of reminds me of our software filter where I work. They blocked firefox.exe from running. My solution? I renamed the file to iexplore.exe. Worked like a charm.
It's also probably worth noting that the messages are blocked on the server, not the client. That means that it will block the message whether you're using the MSN client, Pidgin, or any other client to access MSN.
My advice: Get a frickin' Google mail account already and use Google Talk [google.com] instead.
Re:The genius that is Microsoft... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Misleading headline (Score:4, Informative)
No, the data which is being blocked from transmission is not blocked because it's going to a computer program which would be exploited by it. At least I haven't seen any allegations of that. It's being blocked because the human that would receive the data might use it in a way deemed inappropriate (by clicking on it, say).
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
At least they're doing something (Score:5, Informative)
At least their trying something (albeit a weak approach) to stop automated scripts from sending viruses all over their chat protocol.
When you work on 1000+ college student laptops, you learn a lot of things about software students use in general, and one of these things you learn is:
1) AIM is a Virus downloading service disguised as a chat protocol.
I know that AOL doesn't do this on purpose, but it is so easy to hack that it might as well be. it's great when a 12 year old downloads a virus that infects Aim thinking it was some game (probably from AIM i might add), it sends "Hey check this out!" to his sister at the college containing an infected link or program, and the next thing you know you're running Aimfix and cleaning Zlob off on 300 PC's.
If Aim would simply filter out the bad traffic (and they should be able to know if a client is spamming the servers like crazy by heuristics alone) it would stop a lot of scams dead in their tracks.
Re:Misleading headline (Score:2, Informative)
Old news! (Score:4, Informative)
All the more reason to use Jabber/XMPP (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Misleading headline (Score:1, Informative)
Four ways to hide the .php extension (Score:5, Informative)
Perl.
Still, the administrator of a server running PHP 5 can get scripts to run without having .php in the URL by using various forms of content negotiation [apache.org]:
Re:Four ways to hide the .php extension (Score:5, Informative)
1. Name the PHP file "download".
2. Use this option either in httpd.conf or
<Files
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
</Files>
3. Access it like:
http://localhost/download or accept arguments like http://localhost/download/file.odt
If you want to get what comes after the slash, this is all you need:
$thePath = explode("/",ereg_replace($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'],
file.odt would be located in $thePath[1].
Re:Four ways to hide the .php extension (Score:5, Informative)
Latest version introduced this - Use ZIP or RAR (Score:1, Informative)
Zipping is the way around this filter.