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Facebook Messenger blocks messages containing “di.wang”

127 points| elbajo | 4 years ago |twitter.com

46 comments

order

elbajo|4 years ago

Would be curious to hear how something like this happens.

My first guess was that the domain was part of a FB deny list but I don't see why it would. It's still up for grabs https://www.whois.com/whois/di.wang and I can't find any history on https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://di.wang/\\*.

Context is that this is part of an email address and my friend can't send their email anymore.

pryce|4 years ago

My guess is that facebook engineer named 'di wang' of which at least one exists[1] was attempting to ensure the blocklist functionality worked in production.

Then again, the employee I found is an engineer in the ads department, so blocklist functionality seems unlikely for him to be working on.

[1] see linkedin. I have removed the link to an employees profile who may or may not be relevant and is not a public figure.

2OEH8eoCRo0|4 years ago

I served with a guy named Hung Wang. He complained that Microsoft thought it was an obscene name and couldn't make it his Xbox Live gamertag.

pyuser583|4 years ago

In all fairness, that’s probably what the other folks on XBox would think.

zozbot234|4 years ago

Profanity filter running amok? See the old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

fullstop|4 years ago

Ages ago, I remember some corporate mail server (Corel?) blocking some emails which were discussing Microsoft Exchange. They were blocking "sexchange" and "msexchange" matched.

macilacilove|4 years ago

Does fb messenger have a profanity filter?

varispeed|4 years ago

Not sure why it is suprising? If the state wants something to be censored, corporations have very little room to wiggle out. It's funny how Overton window is moving. I remember in the 90s, the mere suggestion that the west could experience Soviet level of censorship was considered deluded conspiracy thinking. Now the population is very much okay with censorship as long as content they don't like is censored. But propaganda machine works well at shaping what general public like and don't like, so they can implant the idea of what people should dislike and then censor it - people will applaud.

shadowgovt|4 years ago

It's not even guaranteed it's for state censorship.

FB has a business interest in tagging and blocking "Hey, check out my new hot pics on scamsite.stealyourdata.haxx"-type messages because they harm their users.

Ambolia|4 years ago

Not just censorship. A lot of people think the media, the government AND the opposition, are actively malicious towards them. Not just in America, in many western countries.

I think in the 90s a lot of people thought the goverment was misguided, or stealing, or even had some shady branches. But not actively malicious and harmful as a whole.

mrslave|4 years ago

Censorship is cool when cool new tech companies are doing it.

boredumb|4 years ago

Surely it doesn't end poorly. It's not like the federal government itself is asking private entities to take a more proactive approach to censorship.

JaimeThompson|4 years ago

One thing I have noticed is that a lot of those speaking out against censorship themselves have no problem censoring polite comments in their own comment sections.

Wonder why that is?

shadowgovt|4 years ago

The market (in both the "stock" and "free people choosing their service providers" senses) seems to think so.

tut-urut-utut|4 years ago

Is this some kind of a plot to motivate people to install Facebook Messenger just to try to reproduce a bug?

Sorry guys, still not gonna try it ;)

v0idzer0|4 years ago

This is the most compelled I’ve ever felt to use Messenger.

Still not compelled enough though.

kevincox|4 years ago

This was one of the triggering reasons why I moved away from FB Messenger as my main chat app. I knew that Facebook was pretty awful for a long time but Messenger was a very good messenger. It is fast, reliable and has a solid set of features. Of course most importantly just about everyone I knew was on it. So for the longest time I didn't have enough motivation to start moving people.

But then it started blocking links fairly frequently. Maybe one or two a week. This is in a chat with someone that I had known for months and we talked daily. It clearly wasn't spam and very unlikely that I was trying to scam. The sites seemed basically random, like they were blocking with a bloom filter without actually verifying the "maybe positives". I distinctly remember trying to send a link to a Monty Python script and it getting blocked. That was the final straw for me and I moved that chat to something end-to-end encrypted.

nathell|4 years ago

Seems to work now. Or it might be geographically constrained (I’m in Poland).

elbajo|4 years ago

Still broken when trying to send to the same contact. Also tried with a German VPN and same result.

What's super interesting though is that from what I can see it sends fine to my EU contacts but not to US contacts. I don't want to spam all my friends so I can't collect too many data points.

TowerTall|4 years ago

Not working for me either (Thailand)

pyuser583|4 years ago

Not working for me (America).

epgui|4 years ago

It is also being filtered in Canada.

bspammer|4 years ago

Works for me in the UK

cm2187|4 years ago

I am getting a "this page is down" twitter error on the link (from the UK), which is also unusual.

hunter321|4 years ago

Not surprised. I work at a different FANG and we literally have the Scunthorpe problem.

Farfromthehood|4 years ago

Isn't messenger supposed to be encrypted??

sillysaurusx|4 years ago

No. Moxie equated FB messenger with Telegram. Neither offer the encryption guarantees of Signal.

aaron695|4 years ago

wi.wang.com is blocked

a-di.wang works

Wang roughly translates to the character 网, meaning “website” in Chinese.

The warning -

(#368) The Action Attempted Has Been Deemed Abusive Or Is Otherwise Disallowed

Enjoy the CTF, I'm stumped

dannyw|4 years ago

Wang is also a very common surname.

progx|4 years ago

That is the main problem? Really? Not that facebook reads your messages, processes them, do what they want with them?

Use a secure messenger, but not facebook.

stavros|4 years ago

> Use a secure messenger, but not facebook.

Nit, this sentence implies that Facebook is a secure messenger, which it isn't. "Use a secure messenger, not Facebook."