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Is Yahoo Blocking People From Sending Any Email That Mentions OccupyWallSt.org?
from the what-if-you-just-wrote-occupywallst-is-a-dumb-idea dept
Zacqary Adam Green points us to the rumor that Yahoo Mail, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that no one should be allowed to send any emails that merely mention the website http://OccupyWallSt.org. That's the website of the folks currently protesting in NY. Zacqary decided to test this out and produced a video showing Yahoo sending a bunch of lorem ipsum (gibberish) text without a problem -- and then refusing to send the same text once he added the URL at the bottom. We did some testing ourselves, and it appears that the message will go through if you just type OccupyWallSt.org. But if you do the full URL, with the http:... well, then you might just be a terrorist or something.
The message provided by Yahoo is that it refuses to send the email because "suspicious activity" was detected on the account and to "protect" the user, the message has not been sent. We also noted that once this happens, Yahoo starts asking you to input a captcha to send future emails. Because, um, linking to that one URL makes Yahoo claim you're a bot.
Seriously, Yahoo? First off, it's troubling enough that Yahoo has apparently decided that merely mentioning a URL can have your messages blocked from being sent entirely. But almost as bad is claiming that it's to "protect" the user. Yahoo has been struggling lately to retain users. Blocking outbound messages for no good reason isn't likely to win any converts. No wonder ex-CEO Carol Bartz was fired over the phone. Perhaps Yahoo's Chairman of the Board was prevented from emailing her for his own safety...
Update: Yahoo now claims that this was a mistake that's been fixed. They say it was a spam filter issue, but I can't see how that makes any sense.
Seriously, Yahoo? First off, it's troubling enough that Yahoo has apparently decided that merely mentioning a URL can have your messages blocked from being sent entirely. But almost as bad is claiming that it's to "protect" the user. Yahoo has been struggling lately to retain users. Blocking outbound messages for no good reason isn't likely to win any converts. No wonder ex-CEO Carol Bartz was fired over the phone. Perhaps Yahoo's Chairman of the Board was prevented from emailing her for his own safety...
Update: Yahoo now claims that this was a mistake that's been fixed. They say it was a spam filter issue, but I can't see how that makes any sense.
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Also...
It'd be kinda humorous if Yahoo! accidentally initiated the American Spring (unlikely)....
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Yahoo blocks some, not others
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This is what happens.....
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OccupyWallSt never happened , it is not happening.
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Crazy
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Yahoo's incompetence is well-documented
Anyone who knows how to use Teh Google to search the web, Usenet archives, and mailing lists could spend the rest of this year merely skimming the messages and postings about Yahoo's inability to run a mail service that meets even amateur standards, let alone professional ones. So my inclination -- until further evidence arrives -- is to eschew the conspiracy/blackout theory in favor of presuming it's just their latest bonehead move.
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Re: Abutment
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byebye
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Re:
Why not?
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Re: Yahoo blocks some, not others
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I can confirm this
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Re: byebye
....you are a tad bit late as it is not their first nor their most vulgar display of this nature. I would be more concerned with who gets blind carbon copies of the emails they decide are "suspicious".
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Re: Yahoo's incompetence is well-documented
Oh, I get it. This is just some kind of "mistake" by the dumb-as-rocks geeks in the back room without any purpose whatsoever behind it. Yahoo's enlightened management would never, ever dream of ordering such a thing, so please don't lay it at their feet, huh?
Bull.
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ymail
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Encript everything.
Once people start to see things they get ideas that they can control it, that it is ok to control it and they get upset if you refuse to be controlled, just like the MAFIAA.
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If it only blocks select URLs then they should be roughly reminded to keep their noses out of people's private communication.
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Re: Re:
Seriously, it's easier for law enforcement to get information about you than it is for YOU to find stuff about you. How much sense does that make?
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My emails are getting through
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yup
Some Theory here, just tested it in my german Yahoo-Account(s) sending various Mails to other Yahoo-Accounts and various other Mail-Accounts… everything including the URL got through. Everything.
My Guess is that it's the unaltered Chunk of Text that makes Yahoo think he's a Robot, which actually he is in that moment. ;D
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Re: Re: Yahoo's incompetence is well-documented
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Re: Re: Re: Yahoo's incompetence is well-documented
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Re:
However, if the government called them up, and said "hey, look for words on our list here and use your magic computer to block those packages being sent" then you'd have a First Amendment issue on your hands. This is all fantasy anyway as Fedex does not have a magic word-finding computer to scan its packages with.
I'm wondering if you meant USPS, which as a semi-federal agency has legal obligations above and beyond private businesses like Fedex.
I think phone companies are largely in the same scenario as described above they could censor phone calls even if it's a dumb idea business-wise; though as phone service is viewed mostly as vital infrastructure that everyone should have access to and the fact that they receive lots of government subsidies probably shifts it away from the realm of being a simple business decision and more toward illegal censorship.
There's no history that I can find of voice phone service being censored in the US. I imagine that it would take several legal battles to get a final answer on this.
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Re: This is what happens.....
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Re: Re: Re:
I think the voice phone service blurs the lines a bit as I said below, as there's lots of government money flowing into phone service providers and there's the whole concept of voice phone service being vital infrastructure that should be available to everyone.
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Re: Re: Re: 4th Amendment
> it's kind of been litigated away in favor of businesses
> being able to snoop for law enforcemnt.
The 4th Amendment was never intended to be a check on the activities of private businesses or individuals. It's sole purpose is to regulate the ability of the government to search and seize property and people.
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Re:
Or even better, encrypt it! ;-)
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Re:
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Re: Re:
If they violate these terms, they could lose their common carrier status. It's this that keeps them "honest" (I put quotes around that because as we all know, AT&T and other big carriers actually do widely snoop on phone and internet traffic), not fear of loss of business.
They have no fear of that because where would you take your business to? They all engage in the same behavior, so it's not like you have any realistic alternatives.
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Re: Re:
So? Encryption doesn't require that.
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Re: Re:
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Yahoo's incompetence is well-documented
"Never attribute to malice, what may be inspired by $$$."
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Re: Re:
If you want easier ways there are online encryptors that do the job for you but it is a third party thingy and there are extensions for all major web browsers and email managers.
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Re: Crazy
That's the only case I know of in which a major provider did anything quite this dumb.
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https://twitter.com/#!/YahooCare
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Re: Re:
The list consists of items that pose a very real safety hazard or they are required to by law. None of the reasons are arbitrary.
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Simple: Bayesian filtering. ("Given that an email contains this word, it is x% likely to be spam")
There are probably a lot of spambots/viruses that email a lot of things about 'wall st.', and I know there are a lot of spam emails that have the word 'occupy' in them. (an example from my spambox: "Occupy her warm hole today")
URLs are automatically suspect to moreorless every mailclient, and the more it looks like a URL, the easier it is to click through, the more suspicious the email will look.
If Yahoo uses predictive markov chains in their Bayesian filtering, I can easily see how this combination, of occupy, wall st., and as a URL, would trigger.
That it had to be manually corrected after a LOT of people noticed either reflects that their system encountered this problem manually, or that their system is very poor.
Or, if I think that Yahoo has more competent programmers & no ill intentions, this could also reflect that occupywallst.org was used as a spammer site before, or, given that this bug is guaranteed to happen for some terms at (given competent programmers), a very low percentage rate, this might also have been the only bug of this type for yahoo in a decade.
(But without such a system, then spambots could get through merely by minor typos or making different combinations of words; ie: XXXX YYYY ZZZZ might fail, and XXXXYYYY ZZZZ might get through, while still being human readable)
TL;DR: That this is a technical error is possible, but I wouldn't stop being suspicious and watching for similar events in the future. Or doing some research and looking into the past.
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Re: Also...
https://occupywallst.org/
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a new domain and suddenly this link to it goes from no one sending it to 1000s of ppl sending it, does sound like a bot net
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Re:
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Re:
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
Well, no, they really couldn't. There are privacy concerns there, already. It isn't a violation of the 4th Amm, but it certainly would be against the law.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
It's not snooping if they're processing it as suspected damage, then it's just part of the service...
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Re: Re:
I'm a purely a theoretical guy; put me out in the field and I'm F&%$ing useless! :p
Thanks, this makes it pretty clear to me that it was probably an actual mistake.
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Re:
Encript everything.
What if you want to send an email to someone who doesn't have a public/private key? What if someone who doesn't have a public/private key wants to send you an email?
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Re: Re:
OccupyWallSt.org doesn't have an A record (IP address), AAAA record (IPv6 adress) or CNAME record (pointer to a different site name). The correct web site address is www.OccupyWallSt.org, which has a valid A record.
Given that there was no valid way to resolve OccupyWallSt.org (without the "www."), the spam filter probably decided that this was a spam site that's since been taken down, and treated it as such.
Note that this doesn't need any human intervention, just an incorrect assumption on the part of the programmers of the spam filter.
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Re: Yahoo Censorship
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Spam filters only are for Incoming mail
This is logic fail in the extreme, a spam filter looks at INCOMING mail for certain signatures and hashes to stop spam from entering your inbox, though it still has to allow the mail to be received somewhere unless you actually state that any SPAM, including false positives, get deleted.
A SPAM filter does NOT search outgoing emails, to do that it means the provider of the email is searching through communication that was entered on their system before it is sent which equates to search and tampering, and probably falls under unauthorised access to private communications.
Yahoo is probably able to fall foul of the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" as well. In fact unauthorised access to private correspondence is one of the main reasons why "anti-hacking" laws are actually written in the first place.
The question now needing to be asked are:
* what else are they searching for?
* are the searches authorised under law?
* are the positive hits stored in a database for future analysis by either marketers, law enforcement, or other private orgs?
* Is this searching nefarious, intentional, politically and/or ideologically motivated?
* Is there tortuous behaviour, and has harm occurred?
* IS the striesand effect going to bite yahoo on the arse?
Other than the last question, which is a resounding yes, I have no idea, though I suspect Yahoo will be doing their utmost to stop them being answered now.
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Re:
Same "reasoning"?
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Filtering
I had previously been sending some folks I knew articles and information, with the SUBJECT: line of "OccupyWallStreet" and "OccupyWallStreet.org" on Saturday and there was no trouble.
Late late Saturday night and into Sunday, people seemed to have trouble with that as a Subject: line so I started to experiment. I sent several emails with Subject that I had sent previously and got the Yahoo "suspicious activity" warning (changing text around in the body)
I started changing the Subject line and writing text in the body with the URL and the #hasgtag from Twitter and that went through fine for awhile. A couple hours later and none of the variants - Subject line or body - would carry the URL for OccupyWallStreet or the #hashtag. Further testing showed that even "OccupyWallStreet" in the body of the message wouldn't go through. If you spaced it "Occupy Wall Street" it would.
This was being passed around on the Twitter channel for at least 12 hours; people started blogging it and some managed to get videos of it up on You Tube. Something similar was happening over at Facebook.
That is when Yahoo sent out an apology through the Yahoo Twitter channel and later in a news release and the problem cleared up somewhat...
So it's somewhat questionable that their "spam filter" explanation is the whole of it.
As of Tuesday night people were still reporting some email getting this message and some only being "delayed" for periods of time...
One of the Yahoo videos is here and the Facebook video is here.
I tested using several different email providers to send to and from Yahoo Mail. I had no problem with any of the other services, and Yahoo would let incoming mail through fine.
Miso Susanowa
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Re:
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Re: Crazy
Doubtful, see post above about T&C's.
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Re: Spam filters only are for Incoming mail
I think you're talking out your ass, my friend. ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_techniques#Outbound_spam_protection
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Re: Filtering
What about that behavior makes it unlikely to be a spam filter problem?
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Re: Filtering
First pass: Seems legit
Second pass: Yahoo mail has gotten a chance now to check out the link; what Rich and Jamie say above stops the email and marks it as spam because of the link.
Third pass: Terms associated with 'spam' have started to get blocked as well; The link is now marked as spam, erroneously, so things that people are tweeting with it, such as the phrase and hashtag begin to get blocked alongside it.
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horse hockey!
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You are fucked by capitalism
Capitalistic dictatorship!
Money rules, solidarity suffers!
//J
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Blocking my Emails
Robert Forst
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Blocking my Emails
Robert Forst
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Re: Blocking my Emails
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Can't access occupywallst.org through my AT&T/Yahoo DSL
The site is up and running: I saw it a few minutes ago through the adbusters domain (???).
Don't know what's going on, but I've got a creepy Kafka kind of feeling going on in my stomach.
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Reverse previous post: now I have access to occupywallst.org
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dropping yahoo?
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