from Hacker News

Microsoft Censors Pirate Bay Links in Windows Live Messenger

by zotz on 3/24/12, 4:02 PM with 175 comments

• by jacquesm on 3/24/12, 4:36 PM

  We'll be seeing a lot more of this in the next couple of years. The RIAA and the MPAA will get more and more desperate and will call in more favors with industry buddies as they get closer to the recognition that they are losing the war in spite of winning a couple of battles.

  In the Netherlands 'Brein', one of the rights organizations has done more to promote the pirate bay than the pirate bay ever could have hoped to achieve by themselves.

  This is the biggest case of disruption that I've witnessed in my life so far and even though the outcome seems all but certain it remains to be seen how much damage the wounded bear will be able to inflict before finally keeling over.

  edit:

  This prompted me to post a thing I wrote a while ago but didn't publish: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry

• by trotsky on 3/24/12, 4:52 PM

  While I'd be willing to bet this is due to some malware flag (as that pretty much always ends up being the case with IM provider X is censoring Y), I am baffled as to why people would consider it scandalous that a multi-billion dollar company who makes pretty much all of its revenue from selling intellectual property licenses might drop links conveyed using its free service to a site that is unabashedly one of the world's foremost facilitators of intellectual property rights violations.

• by Animus7 on 3/24/12, 4:26 PM

  I wonder what the political forces behind this are, because I'd like to think that the engineers that implemented it understood that

  a) it will do nothing to stop piracy, and b) it will reduce usage of Live Messenger

• by udp on 3/24/12, 4:19 PM

  So, what's the most convenient way to IM with end-to-end encryption? I don't like the idea of it being possible for an intermediate to scan through my private messages.

• by citricsquid on 3/24/12, 4:22 PM

  I'm a regular WLM user and this has been happening for years, I've seen innocuous links to small websites blocked too. It's rare that links are blocked but I wouldn't be so quick to suggest this is intentional on the part of Microsoft. The frequency at which a new URL is being shared could have triggered some sort of automatic blocking system because it's assumed to be a worm?

  > Apparently, the company is actively monitoring people’s communications to prevent them from linking to sites they deem to be a threat.

  Everything passes through their servers, it's not P2P and never has been, doesn't everyone know this about WLM? It's how they're able to support offline messaging.

• by nextparadigms on 3/24/12, 5:32 PM

  If this was actually done by mistake by their software, then we can expect TPB links to start working again in Windows Live Messenger any minute now, right?

  I don't need Microsoft to "protect" me by not allowing me to see something. At most what they should do is warn me that it might contain malware, which is something they used to do with file transfers, too. But today I believe they just outright block most of them - even .rar files, unless they are scanned with some special MSN software of theirs that you need to download.

  No thanks, Microsoft.

• by spdy on 3/24/12, 4:49 PM

  As more and more of this surface in critical times of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA etc. we will see an "outer net" emerging soon based on a p2p solution and highly encrypted. I know there is TOR but it`s not cutting it yet.

  Maybe one of the big players (Google?) will join this battle for free speech and an open internet. Most of us do not want to be censored in any way.

  The Unstoppable Force vs The Immovable Object.

• by jstepien on 3/24/12, 4:17 PM

  I wonder whether they block magnet links as well. In either case, URL shorteners seem to be a sufficient solution.

• by res0nat0r on 3/24/12, 5:57 PM

  HN is slowly turning into Reddit.

  TPB is probably being censored by the software because some automated process to ingest and aggregate threating sites flagged that site as hosting malware. This is just like Google stopping you from clicking thru to sites which they know host virii / trojans. Calm down.

• by rbanffy on 3/24/12, 8:34 PM

  If Microsoft is able to police conversations carried over Live Messenger, shouldn't it be unable to invoke the dumb pipe defense and be held responsible for any piracy its service allows to happen because its negligence in blocking the evil activity happening on its own network. They even profit from those activities! And not only copyright infringement - bank robberies, terrorist attacks, child molestation, heresy - it's all their fault for not blocking it in the first place.

  I would love to see this idea in court.

  OTOH, who can be sure they do not store IP and login (or other personal information associated with the Live profile) and hand it to anyone with the proper court order?

• by NiekvdMaas on 3/24/12, 5:08 PM

  MSN/Live Messenger is blocking all URLs ending in .torrent for years already. But blocking a FQDN like thepiratebay.org is even stranger... who makes/maintains these censoring block lists, and why is this not explained to users?

• by slug on 3/25/12, 1:53 AM

  That's why people should move to open and decentralized instant messages networks.

  xmpp/jabber for example are easy to setup, federation is supported by some major parties (google talk for example) and use OTR (or PGP if you can convince your friends) encryption whenever possible.

  Pidgin, Adium and others support it out of the box or through easily installable plugins and even your [mom] can use it since the key generation and handshake can be automatic, requiring only optional authentication if you are paranoid.

• by pearkes on 3/24/12, 4:30 PM

  Facebook does this as well. (Or at least, they did until The Pirate Bay changed it's TLD to `.se`)

  You could argue that it's for the user's security. Torrent sites do have a lot of sketchy cruft.

• by b0rsuk on 3/24/12, 5:54 PM

  Is there anything stopping them from doing the same in Internet Explorer ? And they're not stranger to issuing automatic updates that mess with Firefox, so..

• by sdfjkl on 3/24/12, 10:53 PM

  Just one more example of why you shouldn't use private communication without end-to-end encryption.

• by _gd3l on 3/24/12, 10:12 PM

  This doesn't bother me. Or, I should say, I'm not inherently opposed to it.

  Microsoft is a private company acting on their own will. This censorship is one I might not agree with, but it could just make the case for another uncensored client to become popular.

  As long as this type of behavior isn't forced by a government, I actually like it in the long run. I think companies should take a stance on things, and seeing Microsoft act this way just makes me more happy with companies who take the opposite stance. If that favorability change happens with enough people, theoretically Microsoft could hurt financially. This would then make it more profitable to be open and uncensored.

  So, in a nutshell, I've seen comments elsewhere about this that were SUPER negative and hateful. I understand them, but at the same time, I think this is just another signal to instead focus on and promote those platforms that focus on and promote freedom. And a big signal, to boot.

• by beagle3 on 3/24/12, 11:51 PM

  It's an unregulated private service, they can. It's just that they can no longer claim "commOn carrier" status. If they don't do that for everyone, they are assisting piracy. Let the lawsuits begin.

• by jrockway on 3/24/12, 11:25 PM

  The text looks like it thinks TPB is malware. TPB is certainly not a site I'd visit on a Windows box, the ads bring new meaning to the word "shady".

  (Google's safe browsing database disagrees with me here, though.)

• by kogir on 3/24/12, 7:06 PM

  I think this is totally fine. Live Messenger is a private service, and Microsoft can run it however they want. Users will simply switch to competing services that don't suck. Let the market decide.

  Also, as behavior like this increases in frequency, we'll finally be forced to address the current usability issues with point-to-point cryptography and adopt it more broadly. Microsoft shouldn't be able to read anything you write unless you choose to share it with them.

  A world where all communication is encrypted requires more software development effort, but ends up better for everyone in the long run. Calls, emails, text messages - none of them should be intelligible to anyone other than the parties explicitly involved.

• by jhaile on 3/24/12, 8:12 PM

  Any censorship or modification of your "private" communication is a very scary precedent to set. Will they start modifying hotmail emails or bing search results next?

• by tluyben2 on 3/24/12, 6:45 PM

  wow I thought everyone knew this. I ran the 110mb.com infra and that domain and subdomains were blocked in messenger. years ago that was.

• by dpn on 3/25/12, 1:43 AM

  So what does this mean for companies that conduct legitimate business over TPB. Does this allow for some kind of action against MS?

• by gigantor on 3/24/12, 4:48 PM

  Solution from the comments: tinyurl.com (or similar). This should be instinct for many twitter users by now

• by wisty on 3/24/12, 6:20 PM

  Microsoft knows very well that people will just write "thep!!!!!ratebay.se/slug".

• by nyellin on 3/24/12, 5:47 PM

  I feel sick to my stomach. Companies shouldn't censor personal chats like this.

• by jsilence on 3/24/12, 9:50 PM

  Thank you, Microsoft for promoting endpoint to endpoint encryption.

• by sek on 3/24/12, 6:02 PM

  The Gmail Man seems to be working for Microsoft now.

• by judgej2 on 3/25/12, 4:36 AM

  "Actively" by having software do it for them.

• by victorantos on 3/24/12, 4:17 PM

  this is clearly not a solution

• by billpatrianakos on 3/25/12, 12:56 AM

  Oh give me a break! I hate when they pull the censorship card like that. It cheapens all other real threats to free speech.

  If you like propaganda that justifies pirating, keep reading the Torrent freak blog with their red herrings like censorship and their "battle for free speech".

  Microsoft is exercising their rights just like we get to exercise ours. It's a private company offering you free software (as in no money exchanged) and they don't want to let you share torrent files and for good damn reason. I'd do that too if I were Microsoft!

  Anyone who claims the Pirate Bay is a place to share cool new media that's released for free is just kidding themselves. Look at their most popular downloads. It's primarily all copyrighted music, movies, and software that are being shared without the owner's consent. Sure, there are a decent number of artists sharing their work via TPB and the Pirate Bay do a lot of promoting of that stuff. But make no mistake, the majority of people are just downloading a bunch of free, copyrighted work.

  It would be censorship if Live Messenger were the only or one of few viable options for IM but that's far from being the case. I sincerely doubt Microsoft cares about you downloading albums for free. They just don't want you sharing Windows 8 over their app (when it finally ships, that is) that's all.

  Is that not a legitimate concern? To try to stop people from getting your product without paying you? That's reasonable. They put a ton of time and money into developing software and they don't do it for their health. Just because it's digital and takes zero effort to copy doesn't mean that after the first copy is sold everything else should be up for grabs.

  Whenever the torrent people start yammering about censorship and free speech and try to sound all hip, smart, and progressive, it's just a distraction. It's really about continuing to operate while ignoring IP laws. Whether you think copyright is okay or not is irrelevant because the laws are on the books and enforced. If all you do in protest of those laws is pirate music and movies you're really just creating more problems for yourself. Piracy alone as a protest only creates more censorship and restrictions of free speech as Torrent Freak would call it. If you really believe in all those nice sounding ideals you have to get up from behind your monitor and write a letter, make a phone call, or actually show up somewhere and do something.

  This article was downright laughable. This is just a PR war and damn easy one to win too. It's easy to hate "big evil corporations" and to love getting shit free with little to no effort needed.

• by jxi on 3/25/12, 9:14 AM

  Now we know why Microsoft/MSN doesn't have a true "off the record" feature. They want to be able to monitor your conversations and censor you like this.

• by Craiggybear on 3/24/12, 6:28 PM

  The world has gone mad.