Facebook Messenger blocks messages containing “di.wang” (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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).

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??

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

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.