7 ms·

Facebook Messenger blocks messages containing “di.wang”

127 points by elbajo 5y ago

kevincox 5y 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.
emrahsamdan 5y ago
Not working for me (Turkey)
cm2187 5y ago
I am getting a "this page is down" twitter error on the link (from the UK), which is also unusual.
elbajo 5y 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 https://www.whois.com/whois/di.wang and I can't find any history on https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://di.wang/\\ 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 5y 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.
  - toyg 5y ago
    Or maybe somebody in FB blocklist dev carried out a vendetta against such engineer…
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    > Then again, the employee I found is an engineer in the ads department, so blocklist functionality seems unlikely for him to be working on ... Unless there's also a blocklist for ads, and someone misconfigured the messenger list to pull that one in also. I've seen similar errors in other companies.
- NobodyNada 5y ago
  Could it be some sort of doxxing filter gone wrong, like when Twitter banned the word "Memphis"? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/03/14/twitter-suspends-accounts-users-tweet-word-memphis/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/03/14/twitter-su...
nathell 5y ago
Seems to work now. Or it might be geographically constrained (I’m in Poland).
- elbajo 5y 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.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  Not working for me (America).
- epgui 5y ago
  It is also being filtered in Canada.
- bspammer 5y ago
  Works for me in the UK
- TowerTall 5y ago
  Not working for me either (Thailand)
pyuser583 5y ago
This is bizarre.
progx 5y 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 5y 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."
mrslave 5y ago
Censorship is cool when cool new tech companies are doing it.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The market (in both the "stock" and "free people choosing their service providers" senses) seems to think so.
  - a_imho 5y ago
    Imo this is more like the case where the market/money reflects the opinion of the 1%.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Facebook's 2.9 billion monthly actives aren't the 1% in any meaningful definition of the numbers.
- boredumb 5y 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 5y 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?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jevoten 5y ago
    I wonder if there are any meaningful differences between an individual's comment section (even if on a public-facing service such as Twitter), where that individual chooses what to censor, versus a corporate behemoth like Facebook choosing to impose censorship on all users of its Messenger - where the mediator of communication decides what to censor, regardless of what the participants want.
tut-urut-utut 5y 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 5y ago
  This is the most compelled I’ve ever felt to use Messenger. Still not compelled enough though.
varispeed 5y 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 5y 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.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    FB has been doing political censorship for over a decade. First they started with torrent links, then anarchist propaganda. Since they introduced shadow-banning i haven't really followed the latest developments, but they definitely have been collaborating with other entities on what to censor.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Torrent links are a viral vector and I'd expect them to be censored for the same reason the "hot pics" site would be censored... Potential compromise of user machines. I'd be interested in what anarchist propaganda has been censored. Anecdotally, I see a ton of it on FB (a side-effect of being friends with anarchists), but I wouldn't be surprised if some things get dropped. I've gotten smacked for sharing nudity (including, hilariously, reshares of my own Facebook posts from the past) and after January 6th, the service got very skittish about talk of violence and government (for I think obvious reasons... One of the few things that could end the party for Zuckerberg would be landing in prison for the very ambiguous charge "aiding sedition"). I have no doubt they engage in politically-related censorship... But we have no evidence that's what happened here, because (like any large public-facing messaging service that doesn't have a "user beware" attitude) they have those systems anyway for dealing with scammers and trolls.
joelbondurant1 5y ago
aaron695 5y 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 5y ago
  Wang is also a very common surname.
zozbot234 5y ago
Profanity filter running amok? See the old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- fullstop 5y 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.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    A very smart and senior engineer, whom I greatly respect, was researching DNS owners via whois and told me: “the guy who registered “therapist dot com” is the same guy who registered “the rapist dot com.” We never stopped teasing him about that.
- macilacilove 5y ago
  Does fb messenger have a profanity filter?
T3RMINATED 5y ago
chrisacky 5y ago
Maybe it's related to enforcement of the 764.3(a)(2) of the EAR "Denial" (or equivalent). Here's a list of denied entities: https://bis.doc.gov/dpl/dpl.txt https://bis.doc.gov/dpl/dpl.txt
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y 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 5y ago
  In all fairness, that’s probably what the other folks on XBox would think.
Farfromthehood 5y ago
Isn't messenger supposed to be encrypted??
- silvercove 5y ago
- sgjohnson 5y ago
  No, never was.
- djohnston 5y ago
  Not by default?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  No. Moxie equated FB messenger with Telegram. Neither offer the encryption guarantees of Signal.
hunter321 5y ago
Not surprised. I work at a different FANG and we literally have the Scunthorpe problem.

127 points by elbajo 5y 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.

emrahsamdan 5y ago

Not working for me (Turkey)

cm2187 5y ago

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

elbajo 5y 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 https://www.whois.com/whois/di.wang and I can't find any history on https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://di.wang/\\ 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 5y 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.
- toyg 5y ago
  Or maybe somebody in FB blocklist dev carried out a vendetta against such engineer…
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > Then again, the employee I found is an engineer in the ads department, so blocklist functionality seems unlikely for him to be working on ... Unless there's also a blocklist for ads, and someone misconfigured the messenger list to pull that one in also. I've seen similar errors in other companies.
NobodyNada 5y ago
Could it be some sort of doxxing filter gone wrong, like when Twitter banned the word "Memphis"? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/03/14/twitter-suspends-accounts-users-tweet-word-memphis/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/03/14/twitter-su...

nathell 5y ago

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

elbajo 5y 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.
pyuser583 5y ago
Not working for me (America).
epgui 5y ago
It is also being filtered in Canada.
bspammer 5y ago
Works for me in the UK
TowerTall 5y ago
Not working for me either (Thailand)

pyuser583 5y ago

This is bizarre.

progx 5y 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 5y 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."

mrslave 5y ago

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

shadowgovt 5y ago
The market (in both the "stock" and "free people choosing their service providers" senses) seems to think so.
- a_imho 5y ago
  Imo this is more like the case where the market/money reflects the opinion of the 1%.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Facebook's 2.9 billion monthly actives aren't the 1% in any meaningful definition of the numbers.
boredumb 5y 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 5y 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?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jevoten 5y ago
  I wonder if there are any meaningful differences between an individual's comment section (even if on a public-facing service such as Twitter), where that individual chooses what to censor, versus a corporate behemoth like Facebook choosing to impose censorship on all users of its Messenger - where the mediator of communication decides what to censor, regardless of what the participants want.

tut-urut-utut 5y 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 5y ago
This is the most compelled I’ve ever felt to use Messenger. Still not compelled enough though.

varispeed 5y 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 5y 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.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  FB has been doing political censorship for over a decade. First they started with torrent links, then anarchist propaganda. Since they introduced shadow-banning i haven't really followed the latest developments, but they definitely have been collaborating with other entities on what to censor.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Torrent links are a viral vector and I'd expect them to be censored for the same reason the "hot pics" site would be censored... Potential compromise of user machines. I'd be interested in what anarchist propaganda has been censored. Anecdotally, I see a ton of it on FB (a side-effect of being friends with anarchists), but I wouldn't be surprised if some things get dropped. I've gotten smacked for sharing nudity (including, hilariously, reshares of my own Facebook posts from the past) and after January 6th, the service got very skittish about talk of violence and government (for I think obvious reasons... One of the few things that could end the party for Zuckerberg would be landing in prison for the very ambiguous charge "aiding sedition"). I have no doubt they engage in politically-related censorship... But we have no evidence that's what happened here, because (like any large public-facing messaging service that doesn't have a "user beware" attitude) they have those systems anyway for dealing with scammers and trolls.

joelbondurant1 5y ago

aaron695 5y 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 5y ago
Wang is also a very common surname.

zozbot234 5y ago

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

fullstop 5y 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.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  A very smart and senior engineer, whom I greatly respect, was researching DNS owners via whois and told me: “the guy who registered “therapist dot com” is the same guy who registered “the rapist dot com.” We never stopped teasing him about that.
macilacilove 5y ago
Does fb messenger have a profanity filter?

T3RMINATED 5y ago

chrisacky 5y ago

Maybe it's related to enforcement of the 764.3(a)(2) of the EAR "Denial" (or equivalent). Here's a list of denied entities: https://bis.doc.gov/dpl/dpl.txt https://bis.doc.gov/dpl/dpl.txt

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y 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 5y ago
In all fairness, that’s probably what the other folks on XBox would think.

Farfromthehood 5y ago

Isn't messenger supposed to be encrypted??

silvercove 5y ago
sgjohnson 5y ago
No, never was.
djohnston 5y ago
Not by default?
sillysaurusx 5y ago
No. Moxie equated FB messenger with Telegram. Neither offer the encryption guarantees of Signal.

hunter321 5y ago

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