Facebook Messenger blocks messages containing “di.wang” | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Messenger blocks messages containing “di.wang”

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127 pointselbajo46 comments

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 and I can't find any history on 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.

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.

Or maybe somebody in FB blocklist dev carried out a vendetta against such engineer…

> 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.

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-su...

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.

In all fairness, that’s probably what the other folks on XBox would think.

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

Ages ago, I remember some corporate mail server (Corel?) blocking some emails which were discussing Microsoft Exchange. They were blocking "sexchange" and "msexchange" matched.

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.

Does fb messenger have a profanity filter?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not just censorship. A lot of people think the media, the government AND the opposition, are actively malicious towards them. Not just in America, in many western countries.

I think in the 90s a lot of people thought the goverment was misguided, or stealing, or even had some shady branches. But not actively malicious and harmful as a whole.

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

The market (in both the "stock" and "free people choosing their service providers" senses) seems to think so.

Imo this is more like the case where the market/money reflects the opinion of the 1%.

Facebook's 2.9 billion monthly actives aren't the 1% in any meaningful definition of the numbers.

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.

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?

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.

Because censorship that most people fear is the power of the state stymying information flow and not private actors acting freely of their own accord. It’s when the states monopoly on violence gets leveraged to censor, that you see things like genocides, tyrannical acts, with no rival powers to combat them. If you don’t like Facebook, go use another site or build your own, we are blessed with that freedom. Facebook has the right to curate content for its users.

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 ;)

This is the most compelled I’ve ever felt to use Messenger.

Still not compelled enough though.

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.

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

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.

Not working for me (America).

It is also being filtered in Canada.

Works for me in the UK

Not working for me either (Thailand)

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

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

Not working for me (Turkey)

Isn't messenger supposed to be encrypted??

No, never was.

Not by default?

No. Moxie equated FB messenger with Telegram. Neither offer the encryption guarantees of Signal.

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

Wang is also a very common surname.

This is bizarre.

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.

> 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."

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