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Comment by Animus7 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the political forces behind this are, because I'd like to think that the engineers that implemented it understood that

a) it will do nothing to stop piracy, and b) it will reduce usage of Live Messenger

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To be fair, there is a lot of malware masquerading as The Lion King.torrent. They may not care about the piracy aspect; they may just want their users to have less malware on their computers, especially since Windows machines seem to be a prime target for botnets.

Censorship is never the right solution, though. That would be education.

I don't disagree, but how would you implement this?

Results trump ideals every time.

If this is really a serious problem, then they should send an informative email to every user, say once every week about spamming, phising, passwords, etc. Of course, it should be easy opt out.

Moreover, when I last used Windows (XP, 2008), executables could still masquerading as .doc files. This would be easy enough to solve for MS, I think.

> then they should send an informative email to every user, say once every week about spamming, phising, passwords, etc.

Which would be annoying. Users would either block it or ignore it.

> Of course, it should be easy opt out.

If it was easy enough, everyone would, rendering it useless.

If the e-mails are well-written, they will like it. You can't protect people from their own stupidity. Except maybe with censoring like this, but then we have another problem.

The comment section always have people informing if it is malware or not, besides; in that line of logic they would have to censor all file hosting services (those don't even have comment section)

Firsty, comment sections are usually full of noise and it's next to impossible to distill any valuable information out of it. Secondly, don't expect an average person to bother checking for potential malware.

Eh, the comment section very often contains people notifying everyone that a) the torrent contains malware, and b) the torrent does not contain malware. It's such a crapshoot. The uncertainty would put me off pirating as much if nothing else did.

The engineers probably just implemented a generic content-filtering system that could be used against images, or bad javascript, or whatever.

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