AVG 8 "Feature" Blocks Windows Live Messenger
Over the course of the last week or so, I’ve noticed that I’ve been having more and more problems logging in to Windows Live Messenger at work. Usually I would have to try a couple of times to get it to login, but otherwise, it would report that it was attempting to sign in, but would just spin for ten minutes or so before I gave up on it.
This morning I decided that I’d use Pidgin instead, and got this interesting error:
Disconnected: Our protocol is not supported by the server.
WTF? Microsoft trying to block other IM applications from accessing its server? No, that wouldn’t make sense, because logging in with WLM should work. Entered the error message into Google, and it appears to be a known issue with the latest version of AVG 8, but there was a fix listed:
- Open AVG
- Click Tools -> Advanced Settings
- Click on the ‘+’ beside Web Shield to expand it
- Select Instant Messaging, and untick the "Enable Instant Messaging Shield"
- After clicking OK you should be able to login to Messenger with no trouble
Note that there are a couple of options for enabling protection on ICQ and MSN. Simply unchecking the box for MSN Protection isn’t enough. You’re required to disable the Instant Messaging Shield.
This will also make AVG complain that you’re not fully protected, and it will report that the Web Shield is only partially functional.
A Self-Inflicted DDoS
This happens to be a couple of days old, but I just heard about it this morning, so thought I’d post about it. Turns out that the government of Pakistan was a little less than enamoured with YouTube, because they were showing either blasphemous content, or videos that were critical of the government and recent elections, so they issued a decree that Pakistani ISPs needed to block access to YouTube.
Evidently one of the ISPs (PieNet), decided that the best way to do this would be to change the DNS records for YouTube so that they pointed to something a little more appropriate, in their opinion. Apparently they didn’t think this all the way through, though, as it had the effect of knocking YouTube offline for about an hour, and even more dramatically for the Pakistani ISPs, they were now handling all of the DNS requests for YouTube, which brought their own segment of the Internet crashing to the ground under the crush of bandwidth.
PCCW, which is the primary carrier of Pakistan’s traffic, then determined that until they could get this sorted out, the best way to deal with it would be to knock the *entire country* offline. Effectively they suffered a self-inflicted DDoS attack.
Now, China has a history of changing DNS entries inside their country in order to block web users from getting to some sites, but evidently they’re a little better at doing it because it never gets outside the country. Not that it’s right, but they don’t bork the whole internet due to their censorship. However, whatever the Pakistani ISP did really messed things up, and it’s scary to think that it was seemingly that simple to knock off one of the busiest sites on the Internet.
To say nothing of the horror that geeks everywhere must have felt when they couldn’t watch the dancing cats or the ripped music videos or TV shows.
But what if it had been Google that they pulled down? Or a large-scale national ISP? While this incident may have been accidental, hopefully it’s not a sign of things to come.
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