Hmmmm……. Could be a variety of things. Temporary solution for now…… download a file-splitter and you can break up whatever you’re sending him into 1mb. chunks if needs be. Then, he could assemble it fully on the other end. This actually works quite well.

Oops….. my bad. The sexual ones do infact come in .gif format. I had to look again to make sure. They also come in bitmap (.bmp) format as well. It’s the default ones that just come in the .gif format which don’t animate. I was had that wrong. The default set doesn’t come in bitmap format but it wouldn’t be hard to convert them to a still image .bmp file…. not that anyone would care to do this anyway cuz it wouldn’t be animated. 🙂

No problem Oreo. Black Ice…….errrrr…….. not a big fan at all for too many reasons. As far as I’m concerned their exploitful history isn’t very impressive. From what I know in the security field….. Sygate pro 5 is the best there is for a Windows machine currently. I attend ITT-Tech in Dayton, Ohio and they use Sygate on all there computers as well. With Sygate Pro you get a whole arsenal of goodies like dll-authentication, anti-ip spoofing, anti-mac address spoofing, and a crapload more stuff that makes the firewall the best that there is, imo. It’s not only an awesome stateful packet inspecting firewall suite but a full blown Intrusion Detection System as well. It is a hybrid of both. It also has a 30-day free trial on it. Whatever works though works. Different strokes for different folks. Glad to be of help Oreo. Even with a firewall like Sygate, and Y!TunnelPro in your defense, there still are ways to get booted from messenger. The biggest way is through using exploits in voice chats. When you initiate voice chat two of the known and documented udp ports 5000 – 5010 are opened locally on your computer to receive yahoo’s audio data stream from the actual voice server. Yahoo does the poorest job of validating this actual data stream and it’s contents and making sure that the data is actually coming from the source ip address that it’s supposed to (yahoo’s voice servers). So, pretty much, anyone with some udp protocol knowledge and a bit of programming knowledge can probe for exploits, find one, and implement it into a program (usually in vb6 for ease of use) based around the udp protocol. Once the prog is written, if correctly done, it can inject it’s customly written udp malformed packets into yahoo’s voice stream data and have it broadcasted to the entire targeted room giving ypager errors to everyone in there running the targeted ver. and build of messenger that the exploit(s) effect. This is a packeting denial of service attack which have been around for years now. Luckily, blocking these udp ports won’t deny you voice chatting on messenger. Yahoo Messenger reverts to the tcp protocol when it realizes that it’s default udp port range is blocked off and chooses a random tcp port for the audio data stream to be received locally. TCP packets are much harder to write so hackers or potential hackers normally don’t want to bother with even trying to exploit you. UDP doesn’t establish a connection-state so the attackers ip wouldn’t be revealed to the targets as well as this proto doesn’t use congestion control that would slow the data down from hitting the potential victims. UDP also supports multicasting which would be ideal for dos attacks. So, udp can be a dangerous protocol when the malicious packets are crafted right. Having your voice chats over the tcp protocol is much safer as this proto actually does error-control & correction and validation…… not to mention that hackers would never be able to guess which tcp port is receiving the audio data on your end normally. Without this knowledge, they wouldn’t know which port(s) running the service to target. Only thing that kind of sucks about tcp protocol is that they use congestion control and this can bog down streaming data communication, which at times, you can notice in voice chats on low-band dialup connections. UDP is the most ideal for streaming data because it lacks congestion control…meaning less lag between your bi-directional connection. Just thought that some people might want to know this as firewalls wouldn’t stop some of these exploit-boots in certain situations using new malformed packeting techiniques targeting certain ports. Everyday someone is figuring something new out that can be potentially malicious. The question is……. will it ever be exploited ? It all depends on who has the knowledge and what their intentions are. Knowledge is power……. no doubt about it.