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Comment by trotsky | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The would consider it scandalous because:

1) they consider their communications private

2) they think that what they type into an IM client will pop out on the other end unchanged

3) they believe that their relationship with the facilitator of their communications media should not be subject to relationships that provider has with other commercial parties.

Where does it end? Being unable to share the link of your favourite restaurant because it hurts the interests of your communications provider?

The amount of modification of any messages by two parties that trust each other enough to engage in one-on-one communications should be set to '0' by default, unless they request otherwise.

That gives me an idea for the most evil chat system ever: modify links to hotels, restaurants etc based on the size of kickbacks from competing establishments.

More seriously, chat should work so that the client signs and encrypts each message, hiding it from the provider and anyone other than the intended recipient.

Or you could just create a chat client that modifies links to amazon and other retailers to automatically include your affiliate link. Profit!

You've released your chat media out into the world. As far as I can tell that makes them fair game for everyone to look at and download and alter and remix as they desire.

And indeed they do and I'm fine with that.

Because now they have taken a role of pro-active censorship/moderation of private communication. Will Hotmail allow such links for long? How about Bing? Can I paste these links in an Excel/Word file on Office365? What about non-free services like MS Lync, Exchange, and Outlook?

Forget the need for deep-packet inspection. If major web services stop users from linking to TPB and other sites, MPAA etc. will have accomplished their goals of restricting legitimate users' activities. Who else is going to follow their lead now?

Microsoft has done stuff like this with MSN messenger for as long as I can remember. At least five years. The specific sites that are blocked frequently includes entirely harmless ones.

Between blocking messages "for users' own good" and other technical issues (80% of message I send to certain users are dropped silently), MSNM is by far the least reliable messaging system out there. Nobody should be using that piece of shit in the first place.

Because people consider what they send in their email to be theirs, not something a faceless corporation has graciously allowed them to utter. People are also beginning to correlate these mega-companies with government-type power, especially over information (hense the use of the word "censor"). Combine these, and you get the outrage.

But IM providers censor malware links and other scams all the time, and your email provider censors or outright blocks spammers for probably up to 50% or more of your mail volume. Clearly people do actually expect certain classes of communication to be actively intercepted.

People expect something that was not intentionally sent by their friends to be actively intercepted. While making the technical distinction may sometimes be tricky, the emotional distinction is fairly straight forward.

You're right, it's an emotional distinction. Let me illustrate. A man operates a gay rights message board that includes private messages. He tolerates alternate viewpoints, but after a particularly bad flamefest he uses a plugin to ban linking to a hate speech site that is especially contrary to the aims of the forum that he pays for out of his own pocket. It extends to PMs. He explains that if you want to trade such links you're welcome to go elsewhere.

Reasonable?

But the aim of Microsoft's messenger is not to prevent intellectual property theft.. especially when the users are under the impression that it is to facilitate private communications..

> He tolerates alternate viewpoints, but after a particularly bad flamefest he uses a plugin to ban linking to a hate speech

So he doesn't actually tolerate alternate viewpoints, the problem is in the framing. If the discussion board was supposed to facilitate discussion of opposing viewpoints (like IM network is supposed to facilitate private messaging) then it's not reasonable to ban one side's resources.

I wouldn't be so sure. When Microsoft tries to do something like the following, their intentions become very suspicious:

http://www.conceivablytech.com/8108/products/microsoft-may-a...

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