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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I recently tried to send a file to a small group of friends on Facebook. After uploading, it rejected the file because it was a video with a copyrighted song playing in the background.

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Messenger = MSN Messenger in this context, sorry if it was misleading.

Australians Remember

Censorship in action.

Next time I'll zip it :)

you probably need to add a password to the zip file or it will be scanned too.

"This file cannot be sent, since its content cannot be confirmed to be safe and virus-free". Maybe not today, but it's not an inconceivable next step...

Oh no, I've encountered this many times already. Sometimes, double-wrapping the archive satisfies a system that isn't recursively extracting archives. :/

Shall we try stenography next?

*steganography

Today I learned a new word from spellcheck. Stenography refers to taking notes or writing in shorthand form, not crypto.

Happened to me some years back during an interview :-/

You're kidding, but this is Google Mail today. I've pretty much given up on sending executables.

If you zip it and change the file extension, gmail will let it through. My friends and I occasionally send each other .googlesdumb files.

We send .renametozip files.

It will now also not allow sending .js files. Or zip files containing .js.

So much for emailing a draft of a web application to a colleague.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6590?hl=en

To protect you against potential viruses and harmful software, Gmail doesn't allow you to attach certain types of files, including:

> Certain file types (listed below), including their compressed form (like .gz or .bz2 files) or when found within archives (like .zip or .tgz files)

> Documents with malicious macros

> Archives whose listed file content is password protected

> Password protected archives whose content is an archive

File types you can't include as attachments:

.ADE, .ADP, .BAT, .CHM, .CMD, .COM, .CPL, .EXE, .HTA, .INS, .ISP, .JAR, .JS (NEW), .JSE, .LIB, .LNK, .MDE, .MSC, .MSI, .MSP, .MST, .NSH .PIF, .SCR, .SCT, .SHB, .SYS, .VB, .VBE, .VBS, .VXD, .WSC, .WSF, .WSH

I wouldn't blame them because there is so much "easy" bad things people do except that all the ad networks apparently allow an advertiser to run whatever JavaScript they want in a third party website. I would be in their side if they disallowed JavaScript in ads.

Why are you emailing source code around in 2017 anyway?

I tried to send a zipped archive of some code on Google the other week (old project), it rejected it, so I zipped it again with a password, it still rejected it.

In the end I had to throw it up on the web with a strong password.

Not sure if they the prior attempt unpassworded set a flat for the subsequent attempt but Google though is almost superhuman when it comes to blocking malicious stuff I do wonder what the false positive rate is like.

Perhaps because ZIP password do not encrypt header (file list?)

Format like 7z works well for this purpose as it has an option to encrypt header info.

You can also just rename a x.zip to x.piz (or any nonsense extension) and most services won't try to parse it as a zip.

It's a shit workaround but I have been adding the extension .txt onto the end then telling them to remove that

I usually upload to Stack and send a link to the file there.

Does that really work? I thought files on slack where only visible to the team members.

Not Slack, Stack. It's a Dutch cloud storage platform by TransIP, one of the bigger hosting providers. 1TB for free.

You guys are acting like it's such a big deal to steno it into a word document by base26-ing it into sentences as initialisms using markov chains. Facebook sends my 14 megabyte word files no problem (to transfer a 700 kb wav file). I mean sure it was easier on me or my recipients when I could just dump the base64 in there. And when it started rejecting that, adding the markov chains as initialisms was no walk in the park, you have to let your recipient know how to get it back out again (basically a perl one-liner). But at least there's lots of Gutenberg ebooks to train on and really it's just not that big of a deal. Anyone can do it in an hour or two in pretty much any language, just follow tutorials. Then just tell your recipients what to do and they'll jump through whatever hoops you want. I mean how else am I going to send a 700 kilobyte wav file? FedEx a custom-pressed CD under my own label?

So really Facebook is pretty reasonable.

Why word documents instead of powerpoint slides?

I'd suggest finding a service that doesn't examine and judge you at all times, but to each their own.

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