quote:
Originally posted by .Lou
This makes sense, though I find it rather odd that the (for now anonymous) third-party company blocks out these kinds of domains without firstly investigating. Surely someone there knows that websites like googlepages.com, ebuddy.com, mediafire.com, and youtube.com are perfectly safe to use.
Dunno if it was "without investigation". But good point though. On the other hand, pages like googlepages.com could contain potential harmfull stuff. Then again, so can the entire internet....
As they say so themselfs, they block pages (or entire sites) based upon a lot of criteria. So, it might have been possible that there were viri spreading around which were located on some googlepages.com sites. And since legit links to googlepages weren't send/used that often in Messenger compared to the amount of malicious links being used, it might be logic in some way to block the entire range. Too bad for the few hundreds who used legit links to googlepages.com, compared to the thousands/millions who would otherwise would recieve viri... It's common sense... (if that is/was the case)...
If it is good practice to block domains or not, dunno. For both methods (blocking individual pages vs. blocking entire domains) something can be said. Is blocking needed at all? Personally I think it is, especially by default (but with an 'advanced' option to turn it off maybe). But this also means that they must walk on a very thin line as to what to block and what not.
But, I would be surprised if the only reason would be "competitors". That simply doesn't make much sense in a bussiness POV. Also because MS is getting very carefull when it comes down to competition and anti-trust, etc... especially in Europe (which has still the biggest market share for Messenger).
quote:
On another note, if they block out domains that are sent out too much, why is google not blocked? If they can avoid google's block, then they can avoid this kind of block as well.
This shows to me that this isn't about "competition", but all about security.
Like I said above, googlepages.com are websites from individuals which could contain malicious programs for people to download. Google.com is just a search engine and thus not as much a security threat...
As for why YouTube was blocked? Dunno, I don't see immediatly what that got todo with security either. But then again, so did Microsoft, and thus they fixed it....
Let us just hope that other (stupid) blocks will get lifted too. Maybe with the aid of enough people like you and me who report the blocks via the official feedback forms (which is the proper way to complain about them).... As that is what also happened with the YouTube issue
(which quite frankly didn't even lasted 1 day, so what's the big problem actually? -all of a sudden MS is the big devil on lots of blogs because of this- ): instead of people kind of ignoring it (like with the other blocks) and only complaining about it once in a while on their own forums were MS doens't see the -not that many- complaints, they started to complain to the proper official channels, MS saw it, and fixed it.... and even blogged about it themselfs...
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