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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.
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.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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/
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
"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
How does stealing from AOL amount to someone being a 'programmer's hero'?
Obviously, you haven't been on Slashdot very long, so let me explain things to you.
Big corporations are evil because they are in the position of both controlling the government through financial leverage and the general population through employment and other more insidious dirty tricks such as advertising and control of the media and cultural brainwashing. Therefore, it is AOK to steal from big corporations. As King Missile once put it, "It's your duty as an oppressed worker to steal from your oppressor! Take stuff from work, and goof off on the company time!"
Conversely, smart people are always heroic. Compare the works of Alan Turing to the works of Jesus. Who is more heroic? Why, Alan Turing, of course, because Jesus couldn't come up with a Universal Turing Machine (the basis for modern computer science) without some kind of Divine Intervention, which is cheating. Turing was also gay, but that only annoys the trolls, and there are little pieces of the "Secret Gospel of Jesus" which imply strongly that Jesus may also have been gay.
Therefore, to use a favorite Slashdot analogy, various democracies around the world have been usurped by a giant multinational aristocracy, and only we (and Seattle anarchists) seem to understand this. Only Jedi Knights (l33t h4xx0rs) can bring this empire to its knees, with the aid of the force (l33t kernal h4xx0ring).
In conclusion, the l33t 0-day work done on AOL's IM client is a minor victory for the forces of good, since, through raw brainpower alone, a guy we claim as our own (although he'd kick us in the teeth if we claimed him to his face) has taken a tiny bit of money and power from Steve Case, and given it back to the poor (by which I mean college nerds with fast computers), Robin Hood style (Ayn Rand can fuck herself).
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
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
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
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
It's not "Stealing from AOL" any more than the UNIX clients are. The UNIX AIM clients (TiK, GAIM, KAIM, etc.) all use the TiK/ToC protocol, which was created by AOL as a slightly feature-crippled protocol (usually a version or so behind the normal one) that is easy to read/implement (it's passed over the wire as plain text). 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.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's another program that actually hides the ads (resizes your aim window smaller). It's also open sourced.
win32aimad
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.