I just wanted to say thanks to all the members, staff and admins/owners for all the help they have given me with all my problems. I see how huge this site is, and how active it is, and it amazes me how well run it is, and what great staff you guys got here - __James__ 
Live Messenger URL Blocking: Problem now resolved
Posted by: Tweaker
Date added: 23:46, 12th May 2008 GMT
Source: Windows Live Messenger
As some of you might have faced problem with Windows Live Messenger blocking some of the URLs, now the problem has been fixed and this is what Messenger Team had to say :
"Greetings Messenger fans
As some of you noticed, we had a problem from Friday night to Saturday morning where our Messenger service was incorrectly blocking some legitimate IP addresses. We sincerely apologize for any difficulties this caused our users. And we want to thank those of you that reported this problem to us so that we could quickly fix it. Because of your help, the incorrect block was only in place for a few hours.
As you can imagine, we are very serious about our efforts to block virus, malware and other harmful URLs from being passed on to our users. And we're continually working to improve this process so that we can keep our users safe without having a negative impact on your Messenger service.
There have been some pretty outlandish speculations on what happened so I'd like to give you some facts about our process for trying to block unsafe URLs and about what happened Friday night:
* There are a number of factors that can be used to determine whether a URL is potentially harmful: number of times a URL is sent, the frequency of the URL being sent, the number of accounts the URL is sent from, manually checking the URL, comparing with other "block lists", etc.
* When a URL is deemed harmful, a block can be instated for a specific URL (i.e. www..com/) or an entire domain (i.e. *..com)
* This entire process for Messenger is managed by a 3rd party that is a Microsoft partner
* On Friday, Microsoft did not request to block any of the URLs that were accidentally blocked
* The blocks were made by our partner as a result of their process to block harmful URLs
* We are still investigating the specific reason our partner made these incorrect blocks and we will work with them to improve their process for detecting harmful URLs while not blocking safe ones
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