Yahoo! Messenger: You Can Share Stuff, But Not FilesTube Links
Seems like there’s no love lost between Yahoo! Messenger, the Yahoo! developed instant messaging application, and FilesTube, the web search engine that specializes in searching for files in various file sharing and uploading sites.
Yahoo! Messenger is a handy way of staying in touch with your friends and share your thoughts with them. It’s not so useful if what your want to share with your friends are FilesTube links. TorrentFreak, site that specializes in everything torrent related, has found that if you send someone in your Yahoo! Messenger friends list a link to FilesTube, your friend will not get the link.
When I first read TorrentFreak’s report I said to myself “nah, this can’t be right.” So I decided to give it a try. Fired up Yahoo! Messenger and contacted Bob from accounting. Here’s how the conversation went:
George: Hey Bob, check out this link on FilesTube. It’s the link to the third episode of Pioneer One, a sci-fi TV show offered free of charge by its makers exclusively on torrent sites.
George: This is where the link was, but it didn’t show up in Bob’s conversation window.
Bob: What link?
George: Probably didn’t go through or something. I’ll send it again.
George: Nope, it didn’t show up this time either.
Bob: Still nothing.
George: okay Bob, let me try something else.
I then tried to put the link as my status. Pasted the link and I was presented with this message: “Abuse content found. Please modify your status update and share it again.”
“TorrentFreak contacted Yahoo! to try and shed some light on the issue, but since we haven’t heard back yet all we can do at this point is speculate,” said Ernesto, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of TorrentFreak. “Theoretically there could be a non-copyright related reason for the blocking, but we have failed to come up with one. On the other hand, in tests where we sent our contacts links to similar sites did not produce the same results, which is odd.”
Update: Red-Sky, the company that owns FilesTube responded and said that it has no idea why Yahoo! would block FilesTube. The company’s CEO, Arkadiusz Senko, advised users to switch to “other instant messengers, respectful of freedom of the Internet”.
Yahoo! Messenger is a handy way of staying in touch with your friends and share your thoughts with them. It’s not so useful if what your want to share with your friends are FilesTube links. TorrentFreak, site that specializes in everything torrent related, has found that if you send someone in your Yahoo! Messenger friends list a link to FilesTube, your friend will not get the link.
When I first read TorrentFreak’s report I said to myself “nah, this can’t be right.” So I decided to give it a try. Fired up Yahoo! Messenger and contacted Bob from accounting. Here’s how the conversation went:
George: Hey Bob, check out this link on FilesTube. It’s the link to the third episode of Pioneer One, a sci-fi TV show offered free of charge by its makers exclusively on torrent sites.
George: This is where the link was, but it didn’t show up in Bob’s conversation window.
Bob: What link?
George: Probably didn’t go through or something. I’ll send it again.
George: Nope, it didn’t show up this time either.
Bob: Still nothing.
George: okay Bob, let me try something else.
I then tried to put the link as my status. Pasted the link and I was presented with this message: “Abuse content found. Please modify your status update and share it again.”
“TorrentFreak contacted Yahoo! to try and shed some light on the issue, but since we haven’t heard back yet all we can do at this point is speculate,” said Ernesto, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of TorrentFreak. “Theoretically there could be a non-copyright related reason for the blocking, but we have failed to come up with one. On the other hand, in tests where we sent our contacts links to similar sites did not produce the same results, which is odd.”
Update: Red-Sky, the company that owns FilesTube responded and said that it has no idea why Yahoo! would block FilesTube. The company’s CEO, Arkadiusz Senko, advised users to switch to “other instant messengers, respectful of freedom of the Internet”.
