Skirting AOL Checksumming -- Legally?

A less-than-anonymous coward pointed out an interesting story on NewsForge outlining a (hypothetical) system for avoiding AOL's occasional cutting-off of non-official clients. Whether this is particularly legal, or only hard to catch, is another question, but it sounds workable. Of course, wouldn't it be better to just use an actually open and extensible format instead?

Comments

Hey, wait

[Conor6]

You know, I hate to say this and all, AOL being the evil empire that it is... but has anyone thought that, given that AOL pays for the maintenance of the servers we all use, regardless of which client, then they should maybe get a little say in how they get used?
~Conor (The Odd One)

AOL should embrace open standards

[eries]

Many people have correctly pointed out on this thread that AOL is under no obligation to allow us access to their network. They own it. They paid for it. They continue to pay for its maintenance. That is why they are within their rights in blocking access by third-party clients.

However, that is not the whole story. Members of various AIM-interoperability groups (most notably, Jabber) have repeatedly offered to work with AOL to find a mutually acceptable solution to this problem. People with legitimate AOL IM accounts want to access those accounts through non-AIM clients. AOL, though not legally required to, ought to work with them instead of fighting them. It is never good business sense (IMHO) to fight, sue, or otherwise harrass your customers.

AOL is exploring the limits of their legal and technical abilities to exclude people from their network. They are within their rights. But we are also within our rights in exploring our legal and technical abilities to fight back. At the very least, we ought to find out what is and is not legal. And, more importantly, we should do whatever we can to make it clear to big corporations that they are better off working with us than against us.

Opening up standards?

[Steeltoe]

"I don'st mean to pick on AOL in this article, except that it's the first big company (that I know of) to take the fight against open standards to this level. Because this system is implemented on top of Freenet, it should be trivial to extend it to other applications besides AIM. The point of implementing it is not just to beat AOL, but also to provide a real live deterrent to other companies contemplating the same thing. If companies know that we can trivially and legally circumvent their "control" schemes, they won't bother with them in the first place. And that's what open standards are all about. "

Sorry, but you've lost me. If someone won't play ball with you, you should break into their network and take what you want? AOL is not ethical, but this is not any better. The last paragraph about "open standards" really smells badly in my nose. This is going to be a final solution, just like genocide was/is in all the wars. This is excactly how wars arise, and continue beyond the original participants' lifespans.

Don't take me wrong on this. I respect your right to do as you think is right. It's sort of cool to hack things. However, instead of fighting this over with AOL I would leave AOL networks, and explain my friends why.

- Steeltoe

The Free Software Community is going too far...

[alexhmit01]

The Open Source proponents of depliticizing the movement and making it open to business is failling. Everyone is coming off as a hippie communist looking to take stuff from others.

This is beyond bizarre. AOL runs a group of expensive servers and has told you to use their client. You CAN'T even claim interoperability, there IS a Linux client, and there IS a Java Express Client, and the tickle client floating around.

They have made every effort to have a compatible client available for you.

The fact that you would prefer your own doesn't give you a right to their services.

However, by showing that we won't respect the law nor attempts at technical limitations, you discredit all of us. For those of us trying to win adoption for Open Source tools and platforms, stuff like this is a huge step back.

We're not sure if this is legal, but we think we might have finally found a loophole.

Congratulations, you have violated ehd spirit of the law but not the letter. That doesn't make you a moral person.

And immoral behavior is not acceptable because the victim is a corporation.

Re:The Free Software Community is going too far...

[dhamsaic]

They have made every effort to have a compatible client available for you. -- Not really. The AIM *beta* for Linux is hardly functional. File transfer is not supported. Until recently, you couldn't change away messages. The beta hasn't been updated since December. It's usability is severely limited. As for the Java client, the same problems plague that, add Java's extreme resource requirements and you have a client that's not very useful on a number of not-so-out-of-date machines. Enter Gaim, my client of choice. It offers the TOC protocol as well as Oscar, and since I use TOC now, I'm on firm ground. But I used to use Oscar. Why? Because the TOC protocol is severely limited as well. There's no away message checking. File transfer is a hack job. AOL *could* change this, but they haven't. So please don't say that they've made every effort - they certainly have not.

Add to that the fact that they're seemingly unwilling to have any talks about this, any negotiations about a new protocol, and your above referenced argument looks absurd.

What it boils down to is that it's in AOL's best interest to support alternative operating systems, at the very least, by allowing us Linux and BeOS users to connect. If you're on Windows or Mac, use that client. I'll stick to Gaim. And increase the AIM userbase, so AOL can tell their advertisers "We have 30 zillion users." - I'm a part of that if I can connect. If I can't, I'm not.