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Justin Frankel of Nullsoft Hacks AIM
Trinition writes "Justin Frankel from Nullsoft, the creators of WinAmp, as gone and hacked away at his new Parent Company's popular AIM service. He's remove the ads. Read the ZDNet article for details." Apparently AOL yanked it from the firehose page, but it's on Zeropaid.Update: 09/22 02:40 AM by H :Thanks to a couple people who pointed out that it is still on firehose.
Personally I find this rather amusing. It seems that nullsoft is trying to cause as much trouble for AOL as possible. You will remember how gnutella was created and then removed by AOL and now this.
I wonder if Frankel and other at nullsoft are trying to see how far AOL will allow them to go, or maybe they are just unhappy with their job at AOL. Most companies have you sign a non-disclosure agreement in regards to the software owned by the company. This would blatently infringe on this contract.
Perhaps Frankel is doing this to get back at AOL for buying his company out (even though it made him rich). To me this course of action doesn't seem logical. It would be like a microsoft employee putting out a free version of a windows like operating system which he based on the windows code.
I think the whole concept is funny as hell, though. If he (or someone else) could write one that would show the name of the song being played, the time left, the artist, etc...that would be less annoying, and more useful.
--SpookComix
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
I really don't see why anyone would have any sympathy towards AOL. These are the people who put advertisements in their properitary software that people pay $21.95 a month to use, a high price to pay for slow, unreliable 56k access. AOL just wants to bomard the world with advertisements in any way they can and their customers don't seem to care that they're paying to see advertisements. The worse is yet to come because the FCC seems to have given the green light for the AOL-Time Warner merger. It's going to be a AOL world as far as information goes.
Well, you can have the grits, grits, eggs, pancakes and grits. That hasn't got much grits in it.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
If that.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Like I'm really gonna download that piece of junk and leave it running just to not see ads in AIM. I think having to look at it all the time is worse than seeing ads.
-lx
I don't know about you guys, but I keep the damn thing minimized to the system tray.
NightmareDNS =)
If ya didn't want grits, wha'd you order breakfast for?
Maybe it's time for a First Post section? Taco submits a story to it randomly, and whoever posts first, wins a point.
The kicker is the "free time" part. Define "free time" when you're salaried. It was easy when I punched a clock. Now, it is really fuzzy...
Not at all. Any time spent not at the office doing anything not explicitly asked of you by your employer is your "free time". This is a pretty easy definition.
In this particular, the "not asked of him by his employer is pretty obvious", something tells me that AOL isn't going to ask him to write a clone of their software minus advertisements. So, the only thing left is, was it done at the "office".
I'll make the guess that justin is really working to piss off AOL and would want to protect his ass, so it likely was really done at home during non work hours.
** Martin
I wish all of ./ers who can program would give their time to things like Nullsoft, and not like /dev/null soft. While I would prefer to have a full open-sourced client, crippling the AOL one seems like a nice job to me. Congrats, Justin!
yay! this one:
http://jove.prohosti ng.com/~ieskins/other/AIM/AIM4.1AdHack.sit
...works great. it's a little patching app, so you don't even need to fire up ResEdit.
- isaac =)
I thought this was ZDNet! Man, I'm really confused.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I can't see what right my employer has on _my_ code, written in _my_ free time, with _my_ compilers that _I_ bought (well, downloaded GCC, anyway...)
I wonder how legal this actually is... OK, a contract is a contract, but "unfair contract" rules apply, over here in the UK, at least...
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
The URL in this story is incorrect. It is actually at http://www.firehose.net. (fireHOSE, not fireHOUSE) You can actually still download it here: http://www.firehose.net/free. Enjoy.
Hey, I'm not a troll!
:)
I was just answering his question
I'm on a chair.
Just goes to show what happens to the bloodflow from wearing a tie around the neck. :-)
;-)
Maybe they could buy an ad on zeropaid
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Trolls .. they really whip the llama's ass!
Here's how you disable AIM Advertisements:
Make sure AIM isn't running (not even the icon in the tray). Use notepad to open aim.odl. Scroll down to where there are two sections that have "advert" followed by "required". Remove the word required in both cases, and save the file. Now delete or rename your advert.ocm file (I renamed mine advert.bak). Now start AIM. When you sign on, no more annoying advertisements at the top of your buddy list.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
There's either some real happy computer consultants out there for the extra business, or some real unhappy ones, that they either didn't have more banners up.
Well, I'd like to point out to you , instead of Turing, you should really be comparing Jesus to Frank Sinatra. Sinatra is partially responsible for one of the best X-Files moments of all time, in the Christmas episode of two years ago, when his song 'Have Yourself a Merry Litte Christmas' played near the end. While he is not gay, I think we have to take into account that Sinatra actually has product, abeit indirectly, a much better Christmas episode then Jesus ever did. I agree with the rest of this, though.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It's not "Stealing from AOL" any more than the UNIX clients are.
Is using Tivo stealing? Is taping a show and fast-forwarding through the commercials stealing? Is changing the channel when a commercial comes on stealing? Is using junkbuster stealing?
AOL created this protocol, along with the TiK TCL/Tk client, so people could create AIM clients for alternative OS's. NONE of these clients have ads. In fact, there is nothing in the protocol to grab/retrieve ads.
Precisely. AOL is welcome to develop a UNIX AIM client. If they put some useful features in it, I can put up with the ads. I think part of the reason AOL allows UNIX clients to get by without ads is the following:
1. UNIX users who use AIM are far, far, far outnumbers by Windows users.
2. It costs money to prevent UNIX AIM users from using a service that doesn't show ads. In all liklihood that costs outweigh the benefits (see number 1 for a reason why).
3. AOL probably doesn't want to alienate UNIX folks. Why? For one they probaby know that UNIX types will develop their own protocols, e.g. Jabber. Secondly, AOL and Netscape are buddies. It's been said that Netscape depends heavily on Mozilla. Who develops Mozilla? Right Virginia, UNIX folks (ok, not exclusively, but you know...). Thirdly, AOL really doesn't want to get people pissed at them with the impending Time-Warner deal.
All of the above reasons boil down to one thing: it's in AOL's best interest to allow UNIX AIM development to continue.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Think about it... if someone gave you that much money, do you think that you'd give a damn about losing your job? I didnt think so.
tagline
... hi bingo
Go here:
http://www.ResExcellence.com/user_cursors.shtml
Do what it says.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You claim that big business exploits technology to control individuals? How is exactly? Through ads?
I dont find ads to be exploitive. I find ads to be annoying and often dumb, but never to the level of exploitation.
Well, how about the tobacco companies deliberately targetting ads at teen-agers, to get the maximum mileage from them over their lifetime, even when they know the product's causing them harm?
Why is there only one Monopolies commission?
ooops I replied to a anon coward.
Did you even read the artical? They don't make money fromt he ads. All the Ads are AOL advertizements. That's why they don't care if the alternative protocol doesn't have support.
Also, the alternative protocol was NOT made to make up for the fact that the UNIX clients won't have ads. It was made for ease of development, and it actually has a few extra features, like saving/loading your buddy list on the AOL servers, rater than on the local machines. It's not specifically crippled, it's simply a version or two behind because less time is spent working on it. I should have been clearer in my earlier post.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
That would be legitamite, and inflame more people than removing ads from AOL, would be to work on avifile [www.avifile.org].
;-), and Cinepak. It uses about 50k of Wine code, the bare bones needed to support Windows codecs on Linux. The licensing agreements for most codecs seem to be liberal enough to make this legally OK. The 0.5 versions is quite useable.
AviFile is a library, currently at 0.5, which can play a stack of Windows-only file formats, including MS MPEG 4, WMA and WMV, Intel Indeo, DivX
The current best player for AviFile is SMPEG XMMS, avaliable from
ftp.xmms.org/xmms/plugins/smpeg-xmms/.
Course they could always sue him on the grounds that they paid him (bought the company) and he's intentionally damaging profits and attempting to damage their stock price. The SEC might be interested in locking his ass up for a bit as well.
When you're done with that, click on my homepage to get a small but effective ad-blocking host file.
They paid Perot $700million to resign his seat on the board, sign a 5-year(?) non-compete, an agreement not to try to hostile takeover GM and they bought all of his shares.
He should have held out for more.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
It seems like AOL's recent buy-out of Nullsoft is turning out to be quite the thorn in their side. :)
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
they have, its called Fire.app (search Softrak on stepwise.com for it). Its been around since at least the 1st few releases of Rhapsody. Also, I would just like to say that my friend Greg hacked the AIM for Mac client ages ago, removed the ads. One would think that it would be easy with Mac resource forks and all. unfortunately no, since AIM decompresses its code eac time it starts up (thats why its so damn slow on even the fastest Macs...its basically unstuffing/unzipping its own code). But yes, he removed it and it was nice to have an AIM client that didnt take up so much window realestate :) that was way back in the 1.x or 2.x versions tho
---
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
That .5" by .5" square was taking up valuable room which could be used for porn and UT and watching RIAA sanctioned DVD's.
First off, it's firehose.net, not firehouse.net.... secondly, the software is still posted on the webpage, unless I'm hallucinating....
http://www.firehose.net/free/aimazing/
1. He could get fired and sued.
2. He could get promoted and told to "lay off" the special projects
3. He could get "talked to" and fold like a napkin.
Me, I'm guessing he gets promoted.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Notise up at the top that it says "AOL's loose CANON". haha, funny ZDnet, they can't spell for beans.
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Mozilla.org was going to write a framework to support chatting within the browser. They created an API with which you could write plugins to support different protocols. All they released was the API for that framework. They might've released a plugin that let you use the Unix Talk protocol, but that's about it. They did not release anything at all that was directly related to AIM.
my Win AIM client just put up an ad for th is page, which seems not to be an AOL site.
:)
pathfinder.com == Time
Time == Time Warner
Time Warner == AOL Time Warner
okay, so I'm stretching things a bit (and I'm not sure if the merger is complete yet...
btw, this doesn't affect your argument one way or the other, I'm just making the observation.
deus does not exist but if he does
You're kidding right? Let me guess, he is evil for "Stealing" money from AOL. I'm not condoning stealing money from HUGE conglomerates. BUT... I won't be shedding a tear for AOL, or shaking my fist at "evil" programmers. Everything won't be free on net. I can accept that. But slapping an AD on everything that is free & having some bean counter justify it by saying there is a huge overhead for running his service is bogus. You can't possibly think a corporation of their size doesn't consider the cost of running a service before making it free. What changed in the last few years that would make the price of maintain the AIM service rise to the point where you now need to charge or run an AD. Did we loose a shipment of code; is OPEC also holding back bandwidth? What is it? Just my opinion.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. --Bertrand Russell
Simply put, time spent using non-company resources is your "free time." For instance, if you go home and use a PC that you own to do anything, you own that work (unless the company has a claim to it otherwise [i.e. copyright, it started as a work project, etc]).
Also, depending on the terms of your employment, there are "work hours" for which you get paid (even on salary). If you do non-work-related things outside of "work hours", that would be free time.
Although I bet that some employers would see it differently.
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
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"Rock over London... Rock on Chicago..." -Wesley Willis
There will always be a way to remove the ads from AIM, people were doing it (better) before Frankel and they will keep doing it regardless of what happens to him, only reason this is a story is cause the person writing the program is owned by AOL, not because it's anything new.
Yeah, in fact what the fsck's that box at the top of the Slashdot page? Come on, Capt Quesadilla, let's get rid of these evil advertisers.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
I don't know about you, but just because someone has put an advertisement there doesn't mean I have to watch it. When I watch Farscape I shrink the window when an advertisement comes up. Am I stealing from Jim Henson? Or SciFi Network?
I have no problem with them putting ads in the shows, but on the other hand they're not coming to strap me down and pry my eyes if I decide not to watch them either. And I think we'd be more then a little upset if the did.
What if people just moved the window up a little so the ads were off-screen? Would that also constitute theft?
Perception: AOL is for dumb newbies, and AOL's IM client has annoying ads.
So they buy Nullsoft, and get cool hacks like this. We love it, AOL loses nothing (those ads were worthless!), and AIM gets to bask in Winamp's reflected glory.
Reflected glory!!
Your sig should read:
Rafiki: Aahh. Change is good.
Simba: Yeah, but it's not easy.
Just my few cents...or maybe more
~KONala ^..^
firehose.net is what you're looking for. firehouse.net is a guy who does security consulting, mostly in a BSD context. A great guy, too. :) (I work with him sometimes.)
;-)
He's getting about a hundred hits a minute off that bogus link. Luckily, he's not a Microsoft guy, or you'd have crashed his system.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
A lot of the time, I think that ads don't have power over me. Then I get scared when I want a new pair of trainers and I don't like anything but the big-brand names. Ditto with soft-drinks: I will always buy the red one in preference to the one starting with "P" - even though I don't think they taste particularly different.
All I'm trying to say is that ads are weird - really weird. They've tinkered with my mind a little. That doesn't make me immediately scream "horrible global capitalism!", but it does make me just a little wary.
Of course, if you want real bug-eyed paranoia, read The Space Merchants and The Merchants' War by Pohl (& Kornbluth for the first). That's a recommendation BTW...
nal 11
Between this and Gnutella, it looks like Justin's trying to get himself fired. I guess he's not really happy at AOL.
Perot sold EDS in 1984 to General Motors for $2.5 billion. He retained ownership in the company, which made him GM's largest individual stockholder and a member of the board of directors. From the start, Perot and GM head Roger Smith quarreled, and Perot criticized the quality of GM automobiles. In 1986, GM bought out Perot's stock for $700 million with the agreement that he could not compete with EDS for three years. Perot ignored the agreement. Two years later, he started a new computer service company, Perot Systems, which operates in the United States and Europe.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Hold your friends close, hold your enemies closer
Intelligent: Pay these guys off and assign them something less damaging to their filthy aspirations of world domination
Unintelligent: "Hey! You can't do that, you're fired!" - thus they go beyond the control of their might evil masters and really rip them.
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This isn't as good of an example as something like DeCSS, but eventually, big business will have to notice that every new technology they come out with gets hacked.
Eventually they will run out of Time, Will and PR to prosecute hobbyists. Eventually, this will help us retain our freedom.
Think about it, if every protection method they make gets cracked just for fun, and they prosecute the hell out of everyone who participates, eventually the PR damage will be extensive.
Large newspapers are noticably starting to slide towards the poor-little-napster angle in their articles.
Keep it up!
-lb
Come on, AOL offers a service, Instant Messenger, which costs them money to maintain and support, for free. The ads allow them to recoup some of their costs.
How does stealing from AOL amount to someone being a 'programmer's hero'?
When is everyone going to get it through their head that most of the services on the internet eventually will not, and cannot continue to be free. You will either have to pay hard cash, or pay with your eyeballs.
-josh
some people have way way too much free time.
This doesn't seem to make the product "Better" in anyway, just gets rid of the annoying ads that help pay for the AIM servers.
Now if he could only get rid of those annoying ads that pay for slashdot.
I'm truly underwhelmed.
The point about these sorts of contracts is to avoid you looking at all the employer's "trade secrets" and figuring out something really whizz-bang using them, and then setting up in direct competition. Many contracts forbid you setting up in direct competition (or working at the direct competition) within 6-12 months of leaving, too.
But what you've got to remember about contracts is that (a) they're legally binding and (b) they are negotiable. Never forget (b) - it's your best friend.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Bah! It wasn't really pulled, you can still access it at http://www.mozilla.org/webtools/bonsai/cvsvie w2.cgi?diff_mode=context&whitespace_mode=show&root =/cvsroot&subdir=mozilla-org/html/projec ts/chat&command=DIFF_FRAMESET&root=/cvsroot&file=i m-apispec.html&rev1=1.1&rev2=1.5
You'll see somthing like this: .
Just change the %n holder to some random "www.blah.com" address (keep the quotes). You'll kill the ads, or any boxs or whatever. If you want to get more elaborate, you can put your own pics and stuff there as well.
All I ever see on AIM is ads for AOL itself. AIM itself could be considered one big AOL ad.
So why have the ads at all?
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Linux unzips its own kernel, and that's not slow at all.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Or his $86 million dollars...
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Are you scared about the merger yet?
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
There are dozens of legal, open source AIM clients.
This is just somewhere in between creating your own client and using theirs. I don't see what the problem is.
The code is running on your machine.
-lb
yes but thats the ONLY things its doing at the time... its not running networking + havng a few dozen processes running :P
---
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I also got rid of that stupid news ticker with a couple of these:
  ; load_ocm ticker
now if I could only find a way to loose that search bar, I'd be happy
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
Notise
???
Dirty Pirate Hooker
They say next that they'll distribute this AIM program via WuFTP and Netscape, two programs that also allow free trading of copyright music files over the Internet. Those pirating bastards!
I'm just trying to protect the artists!
The Other Nate
The Other Nate
this was the start of the clusterfuck that is this whole AIM steaming shitpile: AOL published the spec a couple of years ago, then when clients started appearing that used it, AOL blocked them claiming "network security."
Want AIM without ads in Windows? Just use Novell InstantME. http://www.novell.com/download/index.html
ResExcellence has the scoop.
Paul
http://www.nullsoft.com/free/aimazing/
Source code included! Apparently, AOL took it off of Firehouse, but forgot about Nullsoft's own website. Heh heh.
And, just in case they take it off of that website, you can still get it (a slightly older version) from BetaNews, right here:
http://fileforum.efront.com/d etail.php3?fid=968658671
The owls are not what they seem.
--
"As for AOL, it says it isn't troubled by the software because it doesn't affect outside advertisers. The Instant Messenger box has two advertising spots, and right now they are being used to promote AOL's service. "Since AIM does not have [paid] ads, this is a moot point," says Tricia Primrose, an AOL spokeswoman."
The article is available for free at MSNBC. Also, here's a screenshot from a link at Zeropaid.
==
www.sitesherpa.com
I seem to recall a great Nullsoft product being announced on /. then dying a horrible, horrible death... makes you think who's working for who...
.sdrawkcab si gis siht
AIMazing and other useful binaries are available at www.nullsoft.com
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What I mean though is that it shouldn't take much time to unzip AIM - AOL must have written really shoddy decompression code.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
neither has he *VERI*fied your speling.
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well yeah, they werent concerned with efficiency, and i guess they just wrote their own compression code. they did it, im guessing, so ppl couldnt hack it up in ResEdit :(... bastards!
---
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
releasing the source might not be such a hot idea. Justin would face certain legal action, and any developers who managed to RE the protocol on their own would have to prove that they didn't use any code from AIM (I'm not sure what the status of leaked code would be, but wouldn't it still be copyrighted?). Besides, it wouldn't be as fun to write a compatible IM client with the stuff right there in front of you to work from, it would piss hem off much more to know that we did it without any help :-)
Maybe AOL should just hire EDS. AOL is having a problem managing their programmers, and EDS has that cat herding ad...
h tml).
Cat herding: (http://www.adcritic.com/content/eds-cat-herders.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
I know the proverbial 'cat' is already out of the bag -- but AOL couldn't be *TOO* worried about this, otherwise i'm sure they would have pulled the software from the nullsoft homepage ... just a thought.
bemis
shut up dude! i'm trying to impress your mom!
Actually, Mozilla.org released the API for AIM, but it got pulled soon afterward. Here is the page where it was and it tells why the API was pulled from the site.
Thank you. Thank you. Please no applause; just throw money
I wonder about this, because the suits try to convince us annually that anything we create belongs to the company. All the employment contracts I've seen try to tie down developers so that the company gets first shot at anything they come up with. I don't know what his contract states, but how many of you working engineers could get away with releasing something to the public and then proclaiming that you did it on your free time?
What is 'free' time when your on salary?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
A description of how to remove aim ads is available at my website at http://www.omlettesoft.com/impage.php3 with two caveats. One: everyone here has already described it. Two: everyone seems to ignore the fact that doing it places lots of weird menu items in your menu that look weird, but are mostly harmless but could scare you into thinking you did something wrong.
But this isn't just about removing ads is it? it's about replacing it with the winamp oscilloscope. Whee.
Netscape AIM has no ads, neither does Novell InstantME, but the latter is horribly unstable.
As is mentioned on my home page, I have one burning question: who originally came up with the idea of removing aim ads? I'd love to speak to the guy/gal... Does that person want to remain anonymous?
TiK (tik.sourceforge.net) has no ads and it's open source. kickass.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
THe instant messaging client integrated into netscape 6 also has no advertisements, and they are also a subdivision of AOL, so this isn't a big unique thing...
AOL must be regretting getting Frankel on board the way General Motors came to regret ending up with Ross Perot after acquiring EDS. Maybe Frankel is pursuing the same strategy; GM finally paid Perot huge bucks just to go the hell away and stop making their lives miserable.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Well, I guess we can hope anyways..
Hemos has not verify the submitter spelling
give me all your garmonbozia
He didn't just pull the adspace out, he lets you replace the adspace with an oscilloscope from the winamp mp3 you're currently playing. less of a hack than an overlay.
but he does seem to be a 6 million dollar loose cannon. more proof to time warner that the truly gifted are beyond their control?
perhaps.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
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I'll try it at home tonight.
Becuase AIM is infinitely more secure, and has a much different user base. Most of the people I know who use ICQ or IRC, that I'm actually interested in talking to, also have AIM; the reverse is not true. ICQ and IRC have historically been open to security holes, while AIM has been very secure - you can't even get my IP address if I don't want you to have it.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Who killed Kennedy? :)
--
Change is inevitable.
Change is inevitable.
Progress is not.
/* begin remove_ads.c */
}#include <windows.h>
int main(){
Actually, it took longer to format the damn html than to write this. What the hell did slashdot do to the <pre> tag? err.
People have been taking the ads out of the Mac version for quite some time, no code required.
The oscilloscope is, admittedly, a new thing. But I could do that before with a WinAmp plugin (if I used WinAmp, anyway, which I don't).
But geez; first Gnutella and now this. Is this guy trying to make his bosses mad?
Incidentally, AIM has no paid ads; the only ads there advertise AOL's own stuff. So he hasn't damaged revenues at all, since the ads don't pay for anything AOL does.
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microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I'd think that they'd be on pretty shaky ground with their superiors after Gnutella came to be... i doubt the AOL higher ups like this stunt either
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
he replaced the AOL ad with a _winamp_ad_ !!
and it's promoting both winamp and AOL instead of just AOL..
so like everybody is still happy..
no wonder they let him do it..
It's much easier to reply to the parent than to all the "but they are only aol ads" or "but they allow free *nix clients" or other people objecting to this post, so, I am.
I bring you a dictionary definition:
loss leader (lôs ldr) -- n. -- A commodity offered especially by a retail store at cost or below cost to attract customers.
AIM is, in a sense, a loss leader. They provide the service free of charge in order to get more people using the service. The ads may be only AOL ads, but they do get money when someone signs up.
AIM has another loss leaderish aspect. "Look how good this product is, and imagine how great the whole service must be!" Sure, that doesn't apply to the TiK using group (and other flavors), but it does to the geek's friends. (I'll refrain from posting the definition of "friend.") One doesn't lose the ability to "talk" with TiK using buddies when they sign up for AOL.
Oh, and my Win AIM client just put up an ad for th is page, which seems not to be an AOL site. But that has nothing to do with the idea of AIM being a loss leader.
and watching RIAA sanctioned DVD's.
AAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!
MPAA! MPAA! Say MPAA, bobdammit!
RIAA is the music industry cartel. MPAA is the movie industry cartel. RIAA hates Napster and MP3. MPAA hates DeCSS and css-auth. This shit's related, but it's not hard to discern.
I'm about this close to producing a mini-FAQ on copyright battles just so people no longer have an excuse to screw this up.
*exhales*...all better now.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
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Check the nullsoft website. It's still there.
// Ian Shaughnessy
I see it this way: Frankel gets bought by AOL, and AOL puts its restrictions on him. So, in retaliation, he tweaks with AIM to get the ads out! Now all that he needs to do to achieve the coup de Case is to release the source code/protocol details of AIM! The open source crowd would love that!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Hopefully, let them be..
lf.o
is the fact that so many on /. are such l33t hax0rs and have an intimate knowledge of AOL instant messenger, that they know of multiple ways to hack it.
w/m
Argh! again. Nullsoft bought themselves back from AOL after a month or two from the time they were bought. Of course no one remembers this except me... Guess I'm the only one that bothered to visit the winamp main page back then...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
dies horribly with winnt 4.0sp6 workstation
^^;;
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Why not write a patch for WinAmp that enables writing MP3 streams to disk?
I was severly pissed off the day I wanted to save the stream from an interview conducted live on a college radio station and found out at the last minute that post-AOL-buyout versions of WinAmp can't do this due to the "potential for copyright violations".
The Other Nate
This program does not resize correctly on my machine. Know of anything else that's similar?
This software could be considered a circumvention-mechanism under the DMCA, violating AOL's intellectual-property rights to its ads. I'd be very wary, if I were Justin Frankel.
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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
Just from peeking over the shoulder of my friend time after time, I can speculate that what he did was this:
When the plugin (it REALLY is a plugin, not an ad remover) is loaded, it finds out what the parent hwin of AIM is, goes through it's resource list and gets the hwin handle for the ad boxes. It whites them out initially. When you turn on winamp, it simply paints the vu meter/o-scope to the hijacked hwins. It also probably updates AIM's resource list with a couple of invisible hwins (I don't know if MS has a null hwin).
It's not as hard or as cynical as a lot of people have posed.
'Bogus
Here's another program that actually hides the ads (resizes your aim window smaller). It's also open sourced.
win32aimad
I mirrored the thing already. Check my sig.
Actually, AOL has ported their normal AIM client to Linux - it's available in beta, and works OK though I reverted to Gaim for reasons I can't remember any more...
Yahoo Messenger is also available on Linux as well - quite weird having these official versions coming out...
It isn't Firehouse, it is FireHOSE.net
The software can be found at Firehose.net/free
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
It makes him a 31337 haxor.
no sig
Nothing like bringing down the One True Evil Way- The Next Generation (tm) from the inside.
Salute, Justin!
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
There's a contest here on Slashdot. Every time you get a first post, it sends an e-mail to CmdrTaco. He tabulates all of the first posts every week and if you win, you get a point. At the end of the contest, the person with the most points wins a bowl of hot grits, signed by CmdrTaco himself! If you get 100 first posts, Natalie Portman personally pours the hot grits down your pants!
I'm on a chair.
Like that "written in his spare time" comment. Almost all "spare time" progects I've seen were written during work hours. Man I wish I had his job, or his boss.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Just a sidenote -- just noticed that this made the "download spotlight" spot on the front page of download.com . guess it aint to big deal...
bemis
-my shadow ran away again!
The url was not firehouse.net but firehose.net and the plugin is available freely at firehose.net/free/ or nullsoft.com/free/ no one knows how to read these days.