Slashdot Mirror

Artem Tashkinov writes: The XKCD comics has posted a wonderful and exceptionally relevant post in regard to the today's situation with various instant messaging solutions. E-mail has served us well in the past, however, it's not suitable for any real-time communications involving video and audio. XMPP was a nice idea, however, it has largely failed except for a low number of geeks who stick to it. Nowadays, some people install up to seven instant messengers to be able to keep up with various circles of people. How do you see this situation being resolved?

People desperately need a universal solution which is secure, decentralized, fault tolerant, not attached to your phone number, protects your privacy, supports video and audio chats and sending of files, works behind NATs and other firewalls and has the ability to send offline messages. I believe we need a modern version of SMTP. [How would you solve the instant messaging problem?]

Via El Reg comes news that major XMPP (formerly known as Jabber, likely the only widely used distributed instant messaging protocol other than IRC) operators have all begun requiring encryption for client-to-server and server-to-server connections. Quoting the Prosidy developers: "Last year Peter Saint-Andre laid out a plan for strengthening the security of the XMPP network. The manifesto, to date signed by over 70 XMPP service operators and software developers, offered a rallying point for those interested in ensuring the security of XMPP for its users. Today is the date that the manifesto gave for the final 'flip of the switch': as of today many XMPP services will begin refusing unencrypted connections. If you run an XMPP service, we encourage you to do the same. On the xmpp.org wiki you can find instructions for all the popular XMPP server software. While XMPP is an open distributed network, obviously no single entity can 'mandate' encryption for the whole network — but as a group we are moving in the right direction." There is a handy tool to test your server. A result worth noting is Google's: they still do not support TLS for server-to-server connections, and their sudden dropping of TLS s2s connections a few years ago is likely the primary reason operators switched off mandatory TLS for s2s (I know that's why I did it). Although Google Hangouts offers no federation, GTalk still does, but it appears that the XMPP network-at-large will now cease to federate with Google voluntarily.

Cbs228 writes "During last week's Google I/O conference, the company announced a replacement for its aging Talk instant messenger: Google Hangouts. Hangouts, which is only available for Android, iOS, and Chrome, offers closer integration with Google+. Unfortunately, the new product drops support for the XMPP instant messaging protocol, which has been an integral part of Talk for over ten years. XMPP delivers instant messages to desktop clients, like Pidgin, and enables communication between users on different instant messaging networks. Hangouts users attempting to communicate with contacts on non-Google servers, such as jabber.org, have found that all communications have been suddenly and inexplicably severed. A Google account is now required to communicate with Hangouts users. Google Hangouts joins the ranks of an already-crowded ecosystem of closed, incompatible chat products like Skype." Interesting, because Google Wave was based on XMPP and Google was integral to the creation of the Jingle extension that enabled video chatting over XMPP. Note that no end date has been set for Talk yet, but the end must surely be nigh given Google's recent history of axing products like Reader and CalDAV support from their calendar app without much notice.

Open Standard Lover writes "XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) has been getting a lot of attention during the last month and it seems that the protocol is finally taking off as a general purpose glue to build distributed web applications. It has been covered that AOL was experimenting with an XMPP gateway for its instant messaging platform. XMPP has been designed since the beginning as an open technology for generalized XML routing. However, the idea of an XMPP application server is taking shape and getting supporters. A recent example shows that ejabberd XMPP server can be used to develop a distributed Twitter-like system."

Open Standard Lover writes "XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) has been getting a lot of attention during the last month and it seems that the protocol is finally taking off as a general purpose glue to build distributed web applications. It has been covered that AOL was experimenting with an XMPP gateway for its instant messaging platform. XMPP has been designed since the beginning as an open technology for generalized XML routing. However, the idea of an XMPP application server is taking shape and getting supporters. A recent example shows that ejabberd XMPP server can be used to develop a distributed Twitter-like system."

IceFox writes "On Google Gtalk blog Mike Jazayeri announced open federation for the Google Talk service. Nothing to do with Star Trek it means they now support open federation with any service provider that supports the industry standard XMPP protocol. Although they don't specifically mention AIM compatibility, at CES GTalk was shown with buddy icons so it can't be that far away."

fernique writes "Jive Software, a leading provider of knowledge-based support software, announced today that it will license its Jive Messenger application under the GPL Open Source license. Jive Messenger, based on the open IETF standard XMPP protocol, is a Java-based server for comprehensive group chat and instant messaging (IM)."