Slashdot Mirror

Which version of Everybuddy were you using? IIRC M$N support is broken in the latest stable release. If that was what you wanted Everybuddy for, try to track down a beta from just before the stable release. It works fairly well and supports MSN, though it's ICQ support is kinda limited. I don't think it supported file transfers, etc.

If you just need simple ICQ support (messaging, not much else) try this. I still prefer licq (preferably 1.0.4, I've had lots of trouble with 1.0.3) for my IM needs.

On how and what you do with your machine. Forget it if you work with desktop publishing, use heavy graphics...

Now if you want to do light stuff, such as instant-messaging you can use ICQ Lite, a web-based ICQ client.

For e-mail you can use any webmail. There are thousands.

If you want to compile small programs, you can quite easily make a CGI that does this. It would get the program as input in a form and send back the compiled version.

But, as already mentioned, VNC would be very helpful, as it let you access your own machine from anywhere. And do you know that you can have an Unix VNC server and use windows as client ? The opposite is also true. Heck, you dont even have to install a client. You can access if via a java applet through a browser. So VNC would help a lot on your quest.

I still use an older ICQ client that doesn't even serve up ads. This is partially because I have seizures just looking at icq.com and also because I have no real reason to upgrade. Hooray for ICQ!

This is not meant as a troll, but:
I've been able to ICQ to/from my GSM handset (as SMS) for ~1 year now.

More info here.

Apparently, one of our local CDMA carriers (Tellus) is offering AIM on their phones, as well..

A note on the Alpha version I was taking about: I just checked ICQ's site and it was released as beta (ie release, why does ICQ never get past beta?) on Nov. 4.

You can get it here: ICQ 2001

ICQ Lite is for you then! (if you don't mind using Java in a web browser)

It does everything you ask, and nothing more. Since it runs in the web browser it doesn't have the tray icon, and it is a regular window. I like how ICQ gets out of the way. The upside is ICQ Lite works with any Java enabled browser so you can use it pretty much anywhere, on any machine. (yes it even works in Linux!) Also since ICQ with thier newest release saves contact lists to the server and since I tried the alpha out I already had my list for ICQ Lite created.

Speaking of the new ICQ alpha, it isn't as bloated as the current one because it is all plugin based. The thing I couldn't stand was that it still had all the options as menu options saying (Install now) or somthing to that effect. Hopefully it is reworked for the beta release! Beware the alpha if you decide to try it, it made my hard drive write something about every 30 seconds!?

I still don't think I'd want to use ICQ Lite as my primary ICQ client, but it does the job when I'm not on my computer. A native ICQ Lite would be best.

I hope they don't leave out ICQ. I actually kind of suprised that support for it has not been added since AOL bought Mirabilis. I would think that AOL would want to incorporate the large community of ICQ users into their AIM pool for bragging / advertising purposes. I am glad they are finally working on it though, because running 3-4 different IM clients is getting to be rather of an annoyance.

-----

or so it seems ..

Rob sent me an e-mail this morning letting me know of their troubles with AOL, seems like I'm not the only one getting hounded by them!

I've recieved a letter by AOL's lawyers concerning my domain icqbot.net, they said that the name was "confusingly" similar to www.icq.com and they wanted me to turn it over immediately, inclosed in the letter was a transfer form..

Rather than transfer www.icqbot.net into their control, (I had it appraised and it's worth almost $6,000) .. I decided to keep it .. I sent back a couple of letters to their lawyers.. it would seem, atleast for the moment, that they've dropped the attack against me!

I submitted this story to slashdot back when it first happened, I was a little disheartened that it never made it in. But either way, I encourage you to keep up the fight, I sent Rob some advice based on my legal research when they attacked me.

best of luck!

Ps. My software is an AI program for ICQ.

Lonnie A. Waugh www.icqbot.net

Please note, that ICQ Inc. does not want to receive any confidential, secret or proprietary information and material from you through the ICQ Web site, ICQ Inc.'s mail and e-mail addresses, the ICQ Services and Information or in any other way. Any information or material submitted or sent to ICQ Inc., excluding private communications between a user and other users that are not subsequently made available to ICQ Inc., will be deemed not to be confidential or secret. By submitting or sending documents, information or other material ("Material") to ICQ Inc. or by posting information entered on the various ICQ directories, tools and messages on the ICQ message boards you (1) warrant that you have no rights of any kind to the Material; that to the best of your knowledge no other party has any rights to the Material; (2) grant ICQ Inc. an unrestricted, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify, transmit and distribute the Material, and you further agree that ICQ Inc. is free to use any ideas, know-how, concepts or techniques you send us for any purpose.

Ok, so GAIM is another aol contender... any news on Tik? ...I'm an ICQ person myself, just beginning to dabble in the world of AIM. I've used AOL's official java client tiktoc for soooo long that Tik is a wonderful alternative. How are these two players effected?

I'm reading this story and I remember to turn my ICQ on. Oddly enough, it seems that ICQ is down right now. Their site is down as well as their connection servers.

Strangley this is also very close on the heels of the Ceo to CFO logs that have recently gone public, taken from ICQ logs. I would have to say they are having an all time bad day right now.

Okay, I didn't realize it'd require a port. However, I take offense to your "hostile to free software" comment. Windows has an extensive freeward community

I assume "freeward" is a misspelling for "freeware." In that case, I know about all royalty-free binaries, but most of them are not free software. There's a difference.

OSS software does not need to run on an OSSOS.

But copylefted free software can never be written in Visual Basic, as that would require providing the source code of the MS Visual Basic runtime and releasing it under a compatible license. Tough luck getting Microsoft to comply there. (Or is the VB runtime covered by the operating system exception to the common licenses?)

And there isn't that large of a library of GPL'd Windows software to infect Windows programs with GPL either.

all in all, this idea seems to have been cooked up by people who really have no idea what's going on in the world of instant messaging...

I agree with beebware that this will be resolved internally. The Open Directory Project prides itself on being a complete directory - I'm confident that useful listings (such as those about suicide, etc.) won't be lost when illegal sites are removed.

Remember, it's "sites with unlawful content" we're looking at here - unlawful content. As far as I know (and I am not a lawyer), it's perfectly legal to talk about suicide - actually committing suicide is illegal, but you can talk about it all you like. Sites containing child pornography are illegal because the pornography itself is what's illegal. (Of course, this is the way I see it - it's up to the lawyers to decide what actually happens. And I'll keep editing after they do.)

And an important note on the subject of this article: Dmoz is not "aka AOL" at all. It is owned by AOL/Time-Warner, but it's a separate project. Remember that ICQ has also been owned by AOL since June 8, 1998, and even Mozilla - related to Netscape - belongs to AOL. Just because a project is owned by AOL doesn't mean it's "aka AOL" - you got that part all wrong.

Frankel is a loose cannon. If I tried any of the shit he's pulled I'd get administrated out of existance... relegated to my very own special "R&D Broom Closet" in the company's sub-basement.

They deep-sixed Gnutella and weren't enthused that he'd done it on their tab. Now their own software is being taken appart by one of their own. He should concentrate on integrating their toys with WinAmp to make a suite of apps and compete with ICQ, ultimately a better program than AIM anyway. I'm a big fan of Justin's but I'm not impressed with his latest innovation and I doubt that AOL's uppers are in love with him right now either.

The moral of the story: If he'd messed around with a revenue generator he would be clearing out his desk now instead of laughing about these latest headlines with his buddies at the pub... after a point the mangement stops caring about how smart you are and fires your ass.
-Duke

Actually, AOL bought an entity that sunk to this level years ago. Imagine an instant messaging protocol where you have to connect directly to the other user (or send messages through a server, which is disabled by default). Imagine one where the original implementation is already poor, so people have to create third-party clients that are actually functional and don't cause permanent eye damage from looking at ugly yellow icons.

Hell, people have even created phony ICQ clients (distributing them as if they were leaked betas -- ICQ's client isn't even out of beta test yet!) that have backdoors or run l33t VBScripts. The amount of spam over ICQ was unbearable for a time; now it's just bothersome. Still, I really wish that ICQ would just curl up into a little friendly flower-shaped ball and die.

What I really love is how AOL, ICQ, and similar services pronounce that they each have some 70-80 million users. Spammers and users in general (I've created four AIM names, but only have used two) regularly create multiple names to inflate the numbers. If you were to sign up for AOL today by yourself, you would be entitled to seven screen names by yourself.

Haha, you're kidding, right? It's true that AOL members get spammed all the time with e-mail and ads, but I have almost never received spam in the years that I've been using AIM. ICQ, on the other hand, publishes your profile data on a web site, so that any halfway-intelligent person can write a script to check which User ID's are valid. There was a time when I would receive at least five or six "Check out this porn site!" messages a day on ICQ. Now I only receive that many per week.

ICQ is a piece of shit. Its official clients are buggy, feature-bloated, and even less standards-compliant than AOL's software. The only reason I use it is because I have some friends who still insist on using it. Everybuddy manages to trim most of the fat, fortunately.

According to ICQ's homepage they currently have over 72 million users. Last month C| Net claimed thatt AIM has 91 million users which may have changed since ICQ had 62 million at the time. All AOL has to do is make ICQ and AIM interoperate and any move by the remaining companies whose combined userbase dwarfs AIM's or ICQ's will be a waste of time.

Frankly I don't understand why people still hassle AOL, didn't they submit their Open IM Architecture Design to the IETF?

Since no one else is posting any sites to find info... here goes.

Yahoo! People Search
FAQ: How to find people's E-mail addresses
Yahoo! People Search
InfoSpace
ICQ Search
BigYellow.com

...and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Try a search on deja.com for your name, you might be surprised.

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

To quote the ICQ Terms Of Service: [bold added]

Please note that the ICQ service is not for use by children under 13 years of age. If it comes to ICQ's attention through reliable means that a registered user is a child under 13 years of age, ICQ will cancel that user's account.

Now if someone spams you on ICQ, or just generally pisses you off, whip up a genuine-sounding letter and fire it off to them...

Presto, your problem has been resolved.

Thank you for using ICQ, and have a nice day.

BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

--

From the Usage Notices

Children Under 13
The ICQ service, software, network, system, Web site, servers, various directories and listings,
various message and news boards, tools, information and databases, are NOT FOR USE BY CHILDREN UNDER 13 YEARS OF AGE. Please note that if it comes to ICQ's attention through reliable means that a registered user is a child under 13 years of age, ICQ will cancel that user's account.

So, yes, you can lie to them, and they don't have to care about it until they have good reason to beleive you to be under 13. Yes, this isn't very specific, but that's all the grounds they need. And if they kick you out for being under 13 when you're actually not, your civil liberties have not been violated. It's a service they're letting you use, and they always, regardless of age, have the right to kick you off.

http://www.icq.com/legal/usenote.html
---
seumas.com

Host it on either a mainframe, or on your internet server, using unique logins for everyone on the project, assigning proper permissions based on what each person is going to do.

"What management structures/tools are helpful?"

Visit http://www.download.com and download a schedule program. There are a bunch of other little progs that can help you keep everything going. Also get a text replacer program that does find/replace over a whole directory or more.

"At minimum we'll need a source-code repository and a mailinglist/newsgroup, right?"

Absoloootly. Depending on how limited your budget is, you can host a repository by opening an ftp from your cable-based home pc. I use g6 server, which you can also get from download.com. You can burn off the source code in a dated directory and allow access to your coders so they can download fresh copies.

Each time you compile your code, you can then post updated (and approved) copies to the ftp, so coders can grab them.

"Anything else considered critical?" A web page is pretty critical, or at least you should have a scheduler program running where people can look up what's going on in your project. You can do this using a web format, or you could go all out and code up an ASP web page where users login, set their .plan files (or work logs) and also list what files are in play, and what objective exist upon each file.

"What are some effective control stuctures?"

Schedules are important, email lists will help control things and so will ICQ if you can get people to use it.

You can go really fancy on the SQL or ASP functions if you want, making the whole project keep tabs on everyone. IF you have people upload their work logs or answer questions BEFORE downloading the recent code source, you can force people to do things your way, and collect data from them as you go. It doesn't take too long to do this either, and it can be done in any size shop.

"Who should determine what makes it into an official release?

Beta testers. If you want certain things in, you can say they go, but if you get any serious resistance, you should really focus on clearing the path with revisions.

On early releases, it is the lead coder's decision, but after that, I would reccomend either private or public beta testing to determine what is really necessary.

"Who should be able to add code to the tree?

No one should be able to write to the source. I would have everyone write new code modules and then have one person splice them all together with the old code. IF you have to cut out old stuff, you may just want to go in and decide what goes, and then comment it out for your tests. If it passes, I would still keep the old commented code and list where your changes are in each case.

Only after 'point O' releases, should you be using cleaned out code. ie: keep your backups but move the project to new fresh code bases after you clear bugs and add 1.0 or 2.0...etc features.

"What kinds of resources do we need to commit to this project to make it effective?"

When you have time, you need no money.

"In short, what advice do you have on the mechanics and management of open source projects?"

Stay on top of organization and keep your objectives clear. TOE charts are the best for this, in any language.

Form and function are important, yet function should be the highest on your list.

Keep it simple. Do not do anything you don't have to.

Sometimes it's better to have a clunky program that works than a really fast one that is broken and keeps crashing... but I prefer the latter. :P

You can always fix bugs, but you can't speed up a dead mule in a day.

/d

I make no excuses for my paranoia, but here goes.

Anyone here use ICQ?

AOL bought them out a while ago, if I remember rightly.

Anyone remember that registry hack on Win95/98 you had to do to stop it checking your HD? I never wanted to find out what happened to the information it got on our users' PCs.

Now add to that thought that AOL owns winamp and will probably increase its stake in the MP3 world...anyone here ever download a dodgy MP3 off a warez site? I know I have (Themes from crappy kids TV I grew up with, if you're wondering).

Ok, so it's a Windoze app, but the Big Brother idea isn't just tied up with existing TW/AOL users, they could potentially get info on just about any half-clued up newbie who actually uses ICQ#. And heaven knows what other nefarious apps they'll come up with in the months ahead.

Privacy? What a quaint 20th century idea...

Of course, regardless of my fears, look forward to a big, BIG push in MP3 sales in the coming year. AOL won't just be combating ISPs/cable etc, it'll be going up against music formats, CD/MC/MD, whatever, in the years ahead. Not particularly of interest to slashdot, I know, sorry...

There, paranoid rant over and done with.

Yes, the ICQ Homepage is truly an example of how NOT to create and maintain web pages: from its HUGE (atleast 400KB) front page that almost never updates, to its clumsy infrastructure and through its excessive graphics shananigans (can this be misspelled?), it is a mightmare to visit...
Your second comment is also true, but i rather think that the ICQ developers do actually understand the meaning of the terms Alpha, Beta and Build, but acknowledge the quality of their product, and therefore keep it under the Beta label...

The ICQ homepage? Sweet jesus... just last night friends and I were laughing about how it's universally mocked for illegibility. Is this really where Mirabilis makes money from ICQ, which has been in "beta" for the four-odd years I've been using it?

I know this is probably wishful thinking at this point, but it would be cool...

--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org