Dear Microsoft: fsf.org is not a "gambling site"

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/dear-microsoft-fsf.org-is-not-a-gambling-site

by pwg • 14 years ago

201 53 14 years ago

This seems like a Hanlon's razor situation to me. A lot of these lists are purchased from third parties who do this for a living (make blacklists).

While we cannot say anything for certain until Microsoft responds - I think their response will essentially blame a "partner" and release an update which removes the FSF from the gambling blacklist.

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

Honestly I think Grey's Law should apply here.

eropple• 14 years ago

Grey's Law? Because Snidely Whiplash at Microsoft really and fundamentally cares about what the FSF is going to say to people, right? They care so deeply that they're going to unleash a bwa-ha-ha eeeeeevil campaign to call the FSF's site a gambling site?

Or, shock of shocks, maybe one person, working for the third-party that sold Microsoft that particular "dodgy domains" list, clicked the wrong checkbox on that one domain (of many hojillions checked per week).

cezar_sl• 14 years ago

Well, truth being said, using free software without the support you get from buying Microsoft is a gamble.

cgranade2• 14 years ago

From the article: "Proprietary security software is an oxymoron -- if the user is not fundamentally in control of the software, the user has no security."

I could not agree more.

sseveran• 14 years ago

For most users I could not agree less.

cgranade2• 14 years ago

Make software secure-by-default, make it difficult to override defaults by accident, easy to override on purpose. This is the thought process that seems to be behind, for example, CyanogenMod's recent decision to disable root access by default.

To me, the essence of that quote is that any sane security model must include the vendor as a threat, but when I do not have control over my own hardware and software, I have little to no ability to respond to that threat. Moreover, without access to source code, I have little to no ability to audit my own security. Fundamentally, I do not believe in the idea that security can reasonably exist without auditability.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

The problem is that, in most cases, the user is unable to judge quality. The difference here is software anyone with knowledge can audit and software only the vendor can.

If the vendor is in control, you aren't secure.

arihant2• 14 years ago

I cannot agree with you. A user, on a given day, interacts with countless interfaces, not all of those interfaces have to do with technology.

If you give everyone 100% control over every interface - this will drive the world crazy. How much control do you have on your house lock - do you take it apart everyday? How much control do you have on temperature regulation in your fridge, except for temperature dial?

People in computing must realize that a computer is just another interface for a user. For a programmer, I agree with you. But if I made cupcakes for a living, I'd want control over my oven, not my computer. As a programmer though, I trust that my oven company did their job and eat food out of it everyday.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

If my house lock automatically rejected anyone it arbitrarily deemed "morally suspect", I'd sure as heck want control over it.

ori_b• 14 years ago

> How much control do you have on your house lock - do you take it apart everyday

I actually have taken apart the locking mechanism once to repair it. It got stuck, the door wouldn't open, so I fixed it. I didn't take out the barrel or dig too deep in, but I didn't need to. If I hadn't been technically competent to do that, I would have been able to hire someone else to do it for me.

rlpb• 14 years ago

> How much control do you have on your house lock - do you take it apart everyday?

No, but I can hire any locksmith of my choosing to look at it.

The point isn't that end-users are in control of it, but that end-users can hire experts to adjust it if needed. Giving a manufacturer complete aftermarket control of their product is entirely different.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

That's not really a valid analogy. Why? Well, the user of an open source product gets the same sort of interface as the user of a proprietary product. It can be a pretty GUI that only presents the things you care about.

The difference comes when you want to customize its behavior--in the open source version, you could five until the code yourself or, more likely, hire somebody to look into it for you. Similarly, if you were very worried about security, you could run an independent audit of the code yourself. Neither of these options exists for a proprietary product.

Basically, you're arguing against a straw man. Nobody is suggesting giving the user more options in the interface. Rather, the suggestion is to give the user access to the source code in case they want something modified.

The "fundamental control" in question is about who gets to see and use the source code, not about what the average user can do from a GUI.

cooldeal2• 14 years ago

The users are in control of the software, they can disable the gateway or add exceptions to it.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd441041.aspx

Unless you consider the 'user' to be the employee sitting at the desk which is a topic for another discussion, unless the FSF is claiming that website blocking by an employer is user abuse.

Edit: There's speculation that the gambling classification was triggered by a pattern matching algorithm because of accepting bitcoin which mostly gambling sites tend to do. Maybe that's why only the donation page got blocked.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

> The users are in control of the software, they can disable the gateway or add exceptions to it.

Still, you have to trust Microsoft the software will run as expected. With proprietary software, you have no option but to trust the provider. It doesn't matter how much they claim the software is secure, you will never know.

DanBC• 14 years ago

Could someone explain how a mistake like this happens?

If there was a person typing IP addresses into a list I can imagine them making a typo, but obviously that's absurd and these lists are auto-created. So how does a website get labelled as a gambling site?

UnoriginalGuy3• 14 years ago

Based on non-Microsoft software, what happens is that uncategorised sites are fed back upstream, so the software provider receives a list of pages.

They will then forward this to a partner likely owned in the West but who out-sources most of the actual work to somewhere cheap: like India or perhaps China.

Then you have a bunch of people who come into work, and work their way through a massive list of web-pages trying to spend no more than few seconds on each (metrics etc) and put them into boxes: - Adult - Web Mail - Social Media - News - Entertainment - Gambling - et al

These lists are then sold to many companies like Microsoft, firewall vendors like Sonicwall, Parent Software like Netnanny, and also sold on to people who write anti-spam software.

Essentially it is an entire industry.

gcr• 14 years ago

Sounds like machine learning could be competitive here. It shouldn't be very hard to outperform a system that gives false positives for FSF.org

simonbrown2• 14 years ago

Is each page generally only categorised by one person?

apaprocki• 14 years ago

Each of these systems are probably different, but the way one vendor's system has been explained to me is that an automated classifier will eventually visit most sites and will come up with a computed category for only the main page. The system does not want to give full access to the site with a lot more potential harm, so if a customer visits one of these automatically classified sites and sees it is restricted, they can submit a classification at which point an employee will verify the classification and unlock the full site. Sometimes the restrictions are bizarre, such as allowing the HTML content to be viewed, but not the CSS. This process takes up to 24 hrs. From what I've seen, these automated classifiers are not always friendly to hostnames tacked onto a domain name (e.g., fsf.org/donate would probably be better than donate.fsf.org). They also routinely prevent visiting new domain names thrown up in Show HN posts until the URL is submitted for classification and gets whitelisted.

AlexFromBelgium2• 14 years ago

"This reminds me of another situation several years ago, when BadVista campaign pages were conspicuously absent from Microsoft's live.com search results,..."

If you have poo, fling it now!

AlexFromBelgium2• 14 years ago

Humor isn't HN's strong spot :S

thebigshane• 14 years ago

Off topic...

  BadVista campaign pages were conspicuously absent from 
  Microsoft's live.com search results, even though the same 
  pages had been appearing on the first page of "windows 
  vista" Google results for some time. Many people contacted 
  Microsoft about this, and eventually the pages began 
  appearing as one would expect.

I wonder if services like DuckDuckGo, who aggregate search results across multiple providers, are effective at bypassing this kind of censorship[1]? For example if Yahoo started filtering out sites that are negative towards Yahoo, and Microsoft did the same for their brand, and Google did the same for their brand. I think DuckDuckGo would be able to provide a more balanced result set.

(Unfortunately the place where DDG seems to least effective is when I'm looking for a particular article by searching for a certain phrase; Google always seems to find it and with DDG I have to dig around. So hopefully that article isn't anti-Google...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship

nhebb• 14 years ago

The software in question appears to be Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway. From the features page [1], it states:

"Forefront TMG 2010 blocks malicious sites more effectively by using aggregated data from multiple URL filtering vendors and the anti-phishing and anti-malware technologies that also protect Internet Explorer 8 users. The highly accurate categorization of websites also blocks sites that may violate corporate policies."

Unless IE8 blocks fsf, then we can assume that the "multiple URL filtering vendors" are the source. Does anyone know who the URL filtering vendors might be?

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/forefront/threat...

cooldeal2• 14 years ago

This reminds me of working at a place where the Sonicwall filtering service would block the browser "Opera Desktop Blog" link claiming it was a swimsuit/modeling site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websense#Blocking_errors

billpatrianakos• 14 years ago

At the end they ask people to ask their employers to stop using Microsoft software like the kind causing this problem.

First, I really doubt all but a handful of companies would actually do this on account of the FSF site being blocked. It's a simple cost benefit analysis. The cost of replacing such software is high and the occurrences of such mistakes that would actually hurt a company are rare. Therefor it's not happening the vast majority of times.

Secondly, I'm surprised the FSF is using a service that has anything to do with proprietary, closed source, non-free software. Given their philosophy you'd think they'd have found some way to collect donations that uses free software from top to bottom. Maybe I'm way off on this but one of my first thoughts was that maybe even complaining about this takes away just a bit of the FSF's credibility. They preach the gospel of free software but when it's time to fundraise they make an exception? Is this a "do as I say, not as I do" situation now?

I'm not trying to be overly critical and I realize this may be a bit pedantic too. It's not a big deal to me, just thought it interesting. Food for thought maybe.

kaolinite2• 14 years ago

When you say mention "a service", are you referring to PayPal? In fairness, there are 0 payment gateways (as far as I know) that are open-source, sadly, so they don't have much choice. I guess the only option they have is Bitcoin, which they accept, however as that hasn't caught on they have little choice other services too.

ams6110• 14 years ago

So, when it comes to walking the walk, are you saying FSF is just like everyone else: free software is great, as long as it doesn't stand in the way of making money?

simonbrown2• 14 years ago

They could have people mail cheques.

isaacaggrey• 14 years ago

> Secondly, I'm surprised the FSF is using a service that has anything to do with proprietary, closed source, non-free software.

Where does FSF's post say anything about FSF using proprietary software? As far as I can tell, the post is simply about how some r/GNU redditors [1] noticed how Microsoft's gateway was incorrectly categorizing donate.fsf.org, not that FSF itself is using a service that is proprietary (unless you mean PayPal).

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/gnu/comments/v21q3/how_microsoft_thr...

pmorici• 14 years ago

They accept donations in BitCoins http://bitcoin.org/ who's reference implementation is open source.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/bitcoins-a-new-way-to-don...

readme• 14 years ago

> We will avoid attributing this error to malice just yet, and wait for their correction

That's OK. I'm pretty sure it's malice already.

shellox• 14 years ago

I know this cases from work:

* perl.org => pornography * duckduckgo => web proxy * google images => image sharing * flickr, devianart, youtube, vimeo etc. => media sharing * HN => hacking * securityfocus => gambling

There are more cases, of course. That's why I use tethering to access the internet at work ;)

clebio• 14 years ago

I read this discussion when it showed up a few days ago, but at my work, fsf.org is accessible. Today, though, I was reading this article on Reacreational SVG (http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/02/16/Recreational-SVG) and find that the linked Open Solutions Alliance page (http://www.opensolutionsalliance.org/) is blocked by my employer's filtering (BlueCoat), so I'm somewhat distressed. I gather OSA is a benevolent organization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Solutions_Alliance) and certainly not 'Scam/Questionable/Illegal' as the blocking page claims. Ach, schade.

Dear Microsoft: fsf.org is not a "gambling site"

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