Slashdot Mirror

Here's MSN's.

I had actually forgotten those - the hash functions it talks about have been needed when you change to a newer protocol version. Concatenate some strings, do a quick MD5, send the result back.

They're "challenges" in the Messenger parlance:
http://hypothetic.org/docs/msn/notification/pings_ challenges.php

Each time a new Messenger release uses a different challenge, the new challenge text is generally quickly found; while I agree that it's a "stumbling block" that I'd forgotten about, it's no real protection method (since it's fairly discoverable with a debugger). You can also still use the "older" protocols (available since MSN6's launch in 2003), with a well-known hash text. If MSFT were trying to lock people out, they'd simply kill the older protocols faster than the community can release patches.

Isn't this basically just emphasing what groups have been trying to do for years?

RFC's for example:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1730.txt being the IMAP4 Protocol.

That is of course assuming that Protocols can be defined as Standards.

Or is this just people trying get get other systems such as the MSN Protocol in the open? Rather than people trying to work it out http://www.hypothetic.org/docs/msn/index.php?

Back on track:
I always feel "cleaner" when I follow standards. Building websites with the proper usage of CSS for example.

/me carries on RTFA.

Not really. They released, a log time ago, some official documentation. It was valid until MSNP8, which added someting like a ping which can't been replyed without a string reverse-engineered. You can read more here.

Why not just look at how Kopete does it?
Kopete can ONLY transfer files through MSN.
This site should show how

Except Microsoft originally released their protocol for Messenger: http://www.hypothetic.org/docs/msn/ietf_draft.txt.

And then did not complain about unofficial clients using it. It's probably just a trick to get people using other clients to require using Messenger so much that they have to switch to MSN's client where they can see advertising.

Microsoft is the only "commercial" IM provider that has been in favour of a standard protocol for IM. They published this draft in 1999, a complete spec of the MSN Messenger 1.0 Protocol.

Stop bitching about Microsoft for a change. Microsoft is the only "commercial" IM provider that has been in favour of a standard protocol for IM. They published this draft in 1999, a complete spec of the MSN Messenger 1.0 Protocol.

Thanks for the link to the jdev archive. I found this url in one of the posts discussing the new msn 8/9 protocol. Looks interesting.

From the site's main page: "This website is intended to be an unofficial guide to the MSN Messenger protocol. It is written primarily for programmers that want to utilize the MSN Messenger protocol in software."

messenger.hotmail.com always sends XFR, but gateway.messenger.hotmail.com never does. Microsoft's other notification servers very rarely send XFR - presumably, they send it when they are overloaded or going down for maintainence.

The firewall blocks all packets to/from messenger.hotmail.com. The XFR packet never gets there.

This is a good site for a rundown of most of the protocol, I believe libMSN is also LGPL and there are many other sources you can find out about or use the protocol from.

Most IM systems are OS agnostic. Do you think MS will publish their protocol?

Actually, Microsoft submitted the protocol to the IETF and it's all documented here.