Thomas Nybergh

Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger instant messaging network (formerly MSN Messenger) is currently blocking messages with urls that contain *.youtube.com. Tietokone, a Finnish IT publication reports that this applies to messages with links to *.mediafire.com, too.

WTF, how did the people running Windows Live even come up with such a lousy idea? I’m guessing the explanation, if one ever will be given, will be related to spam/trojans/phising or whatever the latest security scarecrow is. I’m not willing to speculate whether this is some conspiracy to undermine Google owned services, and this would certainly not be the best way to perform such an operation.

Luckily I don’t rely on Windows Live Mess-enger, I merely run BitlBee, a third party IM client in the form of an IRC proxy together with Irssi to be able to talk with a few non-IRC persons.

I also verified that this is true with BitlBee. The filtering appears to occur on the server side, not in the client.

[via: istartedsomething, Tietokone (in Finnish). Image borrowed from Wikipedia]