Yahoo Messenger Blocking youtube.com URLs?

wesleyye writes, "This morning I attempted to copy and paste a youtube.com URL to two of my friends via Yahoo IM. But they kept complaining they did not see anything. Actually they saw all the text message lines except the line with the youtube URL. Is YIM blocking the competitor out?" We verified in this office that a fully formed youtube.com URL could not be passed on YIM; changing the URL to read youtubex.com caused it to go through. Any other URL we tried worked. Update 10/10/2006 20:58 GMT by SM: Additional testing shows that there is something else going on for well formatted URLs. Even search results from search.yahoo.com had trouble when included with other text on the same line. Still awaiting comment from Yahoo!.

Can't imagine they'd want to.

Very strange.

I just did some Googling and there doesn't seem to be anyone else talking about it, at least that I could find -- if Yahoo really was engaging in this, you'd think it would have created more of a hue and cry.

I'm starting to suspect hoax, unless someone besides the article submitter can come up with evidence that it happened.

I can't imagine that Yahoo would want to demonstrate that it has the capability of selectively filtering messages based on content. That just opens the door to lots of problematic demands -- e.g., why don't they block links to warez sites, or porn, or gambling, or (in other countries) various political websites. If you have that sort of capability, even if you don't want to use it for evil purposes, people are going to try and make you use it. So it's better just to never develop the capability in the first place, and if it is technically possible, never reveal that it can be done on demand, so that you can maintain your plausible deniability.

Re:Can't imagine they'd want to.

You could always post a screenshot of the logs, since that seems to be admissable in court nowadays.

Re:Can't imagine they'd want to.

Yahoo filters out certain messages, and it has nothing to do with YouTube. Near as I can figure, the algorithm is like this:

If the first message you send to someone in a period of time contains only a URL (doesn't matter where it links to), it will be filtered out. I'm guessing this is to reduce spam.

Way to overreact, Slashdot.

Yahoo: Now even creepier!

If true that's almost creepier, since it suggests that in addition to just scanning the message for content and looking for some simple strings ("http://", "google", "youtube") that it's actually following the link and analyzing the content at the end of it.

I guess the test would be to find a link that's blocked, and a link that's allowed; then put each one into a TinyURL and see if the same rules apply, or if they're both rejected or both accepted.

I agree with some other people though, based on other things that Yahoo has done, this seems like a provision that was probably originally implemented to stop the spread of spam and malware, not necessarily for any nefarious purpose. However, it's overly broad and IMO they'd be better without it, both for their own good and so as not to aggravate their users.

Not one.

I have a Jabber ID that comes out to be the same place as my email address, and I flaunt both on every web forum I'm ever on. The email address gets 30-60 spams per day (nicely filtered by BogoFilter), the Jabber ID doesn't get a single one.

I have two AIM accounts, two MSN accounts, a Jabber ID, a Google Talk account (as in, a Jabber ID @ gmail.com), and a Yahoo account.

I do occasionally pop into AIM chatrooms for a laugh, and those are completely dominated by spambots. But even there, the bots simply spam the channel in predictable ways, waiting for someone to IM them so they can reply with a URL, or tell you to look in their profile for a URL.

I also used to have some people as friends who were not too careful with their security, and were thus loaded with spyware. Their spyware sent me spam occasionally, I told them about it, they didn't care, so I blocked them.

Those are the only two places I've seen spam over IM. I mostly use Gaim on Linux and Adium on OS X, and I've also used Fire, iChat, and Yahoo natively on OS X. I only get unsolicited messages when I'm in chatrooms, or when I bother to try to make Qunu work. Neither of those are spam.

Frankly, I think either spammers haven't discovered IM networks, or a lot of effort has been made to make it hard to spam through them. The centralized approach probably helps a lot, too -- you can't exactly implement a CAPTCHA for Jabber, since anyone can set up their own server and register as many users as they want, but it's easy to implement a CAPTCHA for any of the other systems I'm on. Still, I'm never comfortable with any organization silently acting on my behalf, with no way to control that -- it smacks of ISPs putting VOIP traffic on high priority and ignoring SKYPE traffic. If you want to block messages to me, at least give me the option to unblock them, and default to off (prompt me when I sign up). Same with traffic shaping -- let me control how my own traffic is shaped, or at least let me turn off the shaping.

Re:Can't imagine they'd want to.

Editor 1: I'm having basic tech support problems!!!
Editor 2: Quick, post it to the home page!

-Bill

Re:They seem to have fixed it

I then wonder what my 3 digit id would fetch. ;)

That's great for Google!

Before everyone gets to feeling sorry for Google for this grave injustice against them, you should realize that Yahoo is well within their rights to block anything they want to from going through their IM service, and once people figure out that it's broken as a result, they'll start using an alternative.

...like, say, Google talk [google.com], maybe?

Re:That's great for Google!

My friend attempted to submit this MONTHS ago and it was rejected.

Have your friend start a blog, then post the "article" to slashdot anonymously. Seems to regularly work.

here's what happened

(yahoo guy in the back browsing slashdot at work)

Shit! *click* Whew.

Re:Politics?

I think it's partially intended as a hint about what a future without network neutrality might be like.

Blocked by the client software

Just tested this with a friend - the URLs get through fine when sent with Adium. So they're being blocked by the client software - not the network itself.

Drawing a pretty fine line there...

Maybe due to malware, rather than Yahoo?

Wait -- there's a difference?

They've done this before

Since they've done this before [quickwired.com], and now done it again, I assume they'll keep doing it until discovered with it in the act. In which case they'll call it a temporary glitch or something. They're skilled [wired.com] in this work internationally too, and are building quite a reputation with all this.

Not just YouTube...

I have recently noticed that many URLs sent in IM's will disappear without a trace. It seems that often the FIRST URL sent will not get through, but subsequent ones will. For example I will open an IM window, send a URL then say "did you get that?" after they don't reply, then the person will reply "did I get what?". The ones I can recall where links to Photobucket.

I think they are basically trying to stop the IM spam where URLs are randomly sent to users.

WTF?!

Why the hell aren't you using a free software chat client (so yahoo can't block anything client side), with encryption (so they can't block anything server side)? The are many benefits to free software and encryption beyond this particular situation. A proprietary chat client using a cleartext protocol just seams like idiocy from a security standpoint, especially in the age of Criminal/Corporate/ISP/NSA snooping.

This is apparently an old, old bug.

Sending URLs of any sort as Yahoo! IMs has been unreliable for me and my friends for at least a year. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it; some URLs just don't go through. I've noticed it when both parties are using Yahoo! Messenger and also when one or both parties are using Adium, so unless the bug also exists within Adium, it may be a server-side issue.

I've found that preceeding the URL with some random text (I end up typing "click here:" or something similar) addresses the issue. It's only when the IM line consists solely of a URL that it randomly goes into the bit bucket.

MSN Messenger guilty too!

If you try to write a message to someone a URL that contains gallery.php or download.php, the entire message will not be delivered at all.

I'm calling bullshit unless ppl can reproduce it

I just tried this with a friend. I use Trillian. He uses Yahoo.

We could both send Youtube links back and forth with no problem. We tried about 30 different times both with youtube.com as well as deep links directly to videos. No problems whatsoever.

Is anyone else able to reproduce this? Until so, I am calling bullshit.

3 words....

porn bot spam. I noticed yahoo started doing this with most urls and that i had to break them up for them to show up. I think this was in response to all the phishing and general scams via links posted. I dont know if youTube should feel special...it even blocks my website when I try and prove I have a job ;)

Interesting Addition

Get a chat client that adds an MD5 signature. It could tell you if the message was altered, unless they recompute the MD5 as well.

AIM blocks URLs too

I have found that an AIM chatroom will not accept certain URLs. It eats any message containing something it doesn't like. One notable example is anything from theonion.com. None of the URLs that trigger this behabior make any kind of sense to me. If you run any of the banned links through tinyurl, it is allowed through.

A direct IM of the problem link outside the chatroom will make it through just fine.