I recently tried to send a file to a small group of friends on Facebook. After uploading, it rejected the file because it was a video with a copyrighted song playing in the background.
"This file cannot be sent, since its content cannot be confirmed to be safe and virus-free". Maybe not today, but it's not an inconceivable next step...
You guys are acting like it's such a big deal to steno it into a word document by base26-ing it into sentences as initialisms using markov chains. Facebook sends my 14 megabyte word files no problem (to transfer a 700 kb wav file). I mean sure it was easier on me or my recipients when I could just dump the base64 in there. And when it started rejecting that, adding the markov chains as initialisms was no walk in the park, you have to let your recipient know how to get it back out again (basically a perl one-liner). But at least there's lots of Gutenberg ebooks to train on and really it's just not that big of a deal. Anyone can do it in an hour or two in pretty much any language, just follow tutorials. Then just tell your recipients what to do and they'll jump through whatever hoops you want. I mean how else am I going to send a 700 kilobyte wav file? FedEx a custom-pressed CD under my own label?
I tried to send a zipped archive of some code on Google the other week (old project), it rejected it, so I zipped it again with a password, it still rejected it.
In the end I had to throw it up on the web with a strong password.
Not sure if they the prior attempt unpassworded set a flat for the subsequent attempt but Google though is almost superhuman when it comes to blocking malicious stuff I do wonder what the false positive rate is like.
I wouldn't blame them because there is so much "easy" bad things people do except that all the ad networks apparently allow an advertiser to run whatever JavaScript they want in a third party website. I would be in their side if they disallowed JavaScript in ads.
Oh no, I've encountered this many times already. Sometimes, double-wrapping the archive satisfies a system that isn't recursively extracting archives. :/