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Facebook crawls links in PDFs you send in Messenger

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Re: Facebook crawls links in PDFs you send in Messenger

#121

Post by RaiseProfits »

Spivak wrote: post #116
steelframe wrote: post #112

My company's malware detection crap on my work laptop once scanned a PDF of a security research paper I was reading for my project, found a link to a web site with malware on it because that's what the research was about, and then it summarily deleted the PDF to "protect" the company from that link.

I mean how is the security scanner supposed to know that you’re working on a project which is super specific edge case? I mean almost all of the time that PDF will be malware designed to trick the reader into clicking that link and it did the right thing.

Presumably by disabling it on the workstations of security researchers. Or just the feature that flags linked content rather than content itself.

Re: Facebook crawls links in PDFs you send in Messenger

#122

Post by stevewilhelm »

djohnston wrote: post #70

And if they didn't the headline would read: "Facebook fails to stop malicious and illegal content from being shared on their Network! Should they be shut down?!"

So we want Facebook to stop propagating fake news and hate speech and we want them to do so without crawling URLs?

Re: Facebook crawls links in PDFs you send in Messenger

#123

Post by yellow_lead »

datameta wrote: post #86
BubRoss wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just make it a broken link and tell them how to correct it?

I imagine it is quite easy to reassemble a broken link with some extra whitespace or random characters (unless you really scramble it which makes the process of manually "decoding" tedious). At that point you might as well automate the process and use base64

This one. I believe I tried that but they are able to reconstruct them to some extent at least with trivial broken-ness

Re: Facebook crawls links in PDFs you send in Messenger

#124

Post by yellow_lead »

hermanradtke wrote: post #113
BubRoss wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just make it a broken link and tell them how to correct it?

Why not just use an e2e messaging service? If you can convince people to decode a link then I am sure you can convince them to use Signal.

This was just a quick fix, but I agree with you on the e2e messaging service. However, I do wish more e2e services like Telegram would open source their backend. Looks like Signal does now at least!

Re: Facebook crawls links in PDFs you send in Messenger

#126

Post by saagarjha »

symlinkk wrote: post #95
sodosopa wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the same people who kept that AOL walled garden alive, just migrated to Facebook. To them Facebook is the web, the restaurants they like are there, the tired celebs they worship are there and whatever crazed conspiracy theories someone told them at work or at church are under Facebook News. It's comfortable and I agree with you and like how you phrased it as "the same loops of well-trodden space."

Sort of like how all of us check Hacker News daily? Don’t act like we’re any better

I go to websites other than Hacker News.

Re: Facebook crawls links in PDFs you send in Messenger

#127

Post by catalogia »

buboard wrote: post #5

Sidenote i wonder why FB doesnt launch a search engine since they crawl most of the web anyways

> "According to legend, upon hearing of Colt's entrance into the lever-action rifle market, Winchester began to develop a prototype revolver to compete with Colt's market. A "gentleman's agreement" then followed between Colt and Winchester, with Colt agreeing to drop production of the Burgess and Winchester abandoning its plans to develop a revolver. The truth of this story has never been fully verified, and as such, the reason for the Burgess rifle's short production history is unknown.[1][4][5]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt-Burgess_rifle

Re: Facebook crawls links in PDFs you send in Messenger

#128

Post by ttsda »

yellow_lead wrote: post #124
hermanradtke wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use an e2e messaging service? If you can convince people to decode a link then I am sure you can convince them to use Signal.

This was just a quick fix, but I agree with you on the e2e messaging service. However, I do wish more e2e services like Telegram would open source their backend. Looks like Signal does now at least!

Telegram is barely e2e.

Re: Facebook crawls links in PDFs you send in Messenger

#130

Post by archie2 »

Spivak wrote: post #116
steelframe wrote: post #112

My company's malware detection crap on my work laptop once scanned a PDF of a security research paper I was reading for my project, found a link to a web site with malware on it because that's what the research was about, and then it summarily deleted the PDF to "protect" the company from that link.

I mean how is the security scanner supposed to know that you’re working on a project which is super specific edge case? I mean almost all of the time that PDF will be malware designed to trick the reader into clicking that link and it did the right thing.

Most security scanners allow you to create exclusion folders, where it doesn't scan files in those folders. Something somebody researching malware on a company computer with a malware detector should probably be aware of.
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