Xah Web Dev Blog Archive 2012-05

Microsoft Classified FSF Donation site as Gambling

There's this piece of news going around:

In summary, a Microsoft security site “Microsoft Reputation Services” classified Free Software Foundation's donation site https://donate.fsf.org/ as in the “gambling” category. (but also {Technical Information, Shareware/Freeware})

This means, corporations using Microsoft's services will automatically block visiting such site. More about this is has been written by FSF:

• Dear Microsoft: fsf.org is not a “gambling site” 2012-06-22 By Posted John Sullivan. At http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/dear-microsoft-fsf.org-is-not-a-gambling-site

I was curious about what Microsoft thought of my website.

my website xahlee.org is classified by Microsoft as {Pornography, Blogs/Wiki, Shareware/Freeware}. See: https://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/mrs/default.aspx. LOL. It appears, their service is quite off.

Here is a correction i submitted to their site:

hi, your service classified my site xahlee.org as Pornography, Blogs/Wiki, Shareware/Freeware. I think the porn and shareware/ware labels are quite inaccurate.

My site has 5 thousand pages. There are about maybe 10 pages that features explicit images of sex, and is accompanied by social commentary. There are about 20 pages featuring nudity or swimsuit, they are collections of a cultural phenomenon of wearing flags as underwear. And maybe 20 more pages about human sexuality. All in all, less that 100 page has anything to do with sex. Also, my site doesn't host any shareware/freeware. The rest 4 thousand nine hundred pages are about mathematics, computer programing, classical english literature, arts (gallery, some nudity), architecture (gallery), linguistics, as references, tutorials, or essays/blogs.

It's more correct to be: {Education/Reference, Blogs/Wiki, Nudity, Technical Information}.

Thanks for looking at this.

The complete list of their categories and definitions is: http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/mrs/categories/MRS_Categories.en-us.htm (local mirror)

Wikipedia's style sheet size is 63k. They also embed image files (icons, etc) as base64 strings. Like this:

a.feedlink{background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAA…) …}

See: CSS: Data URI Scheme