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XMPP Gets An IETF Working Group
An anonymous reader writes "The IETF has approved the formation of a Working Group to continue evolving the XMPP protocol." Interoperable instant messaging, who'd a thunk it. Our previous story has more information.
I'm glad that it is finally dawning on the Big Technology powers-that-be that proprietary messaging schemes are bad for everyone's business. This is definitely needed if wireless is really to be the way of the future, and since there is so much money being spent on the gadgets, it's inevitable that they are going to have to play nice and compete on some other basis besides lock-out.
Don't read this!
With easy-to-remember resource locators like that, I don't see any way that Freenet can fail.
It would be nice if Mozilla supported links like freenet://whatever
I think most people find sites using The Freedom Engine, which is linked from the fproxy main page.
However, there is no guarantee that they will be implemented properly. For instance, Microsoft has had a long history of perverting open standards/languages (i.e. creating MSSMB instead of using the current standard and bastardizing Java). So, yes, this is a good thing, but some how, I don't see a lot of the established messaging services changing their ways. I hope I am wrong though.
I don't see any of the big players adopting it when they all want control of the space. Why should AOL or Microsoft get on board to be inter-operable? They loose the control over what the end user sees.
for I have heard of nothing as addictive and will-sapping as Instant Messenger.
What, Adam, what about pornography?
While pornography is a sin, there is something about the instant feedback of an IM session that quickly dissolves one sense of right. If you look at a pornographic picture of a threesome, Satan may tempt you, but you are able to quickly dismiss him and delete that filth. But if you talk about a threesome on an IM, soon enough someone will also talk to you about it, and the two, or three of you quickly degenerate into very sinful talk.
Similarly, if you look at an unclad woman, you may feel some loin-stirring, but most men can quickly turn away. But, if you start to IM with a woman, you soon start to feel an emotional involvement, and you may find temptation outide your strength.
From my counciling groups, I have found that 70% of affairs have started via "innocent" IM chats. Anything that eases IM chatting, including a universal client, makes it that much easier for people to be tempted into sin electronically, rather than focusing on the hard work of making a real world relationship work (yes, I know it's Slashdot, but some of readers will eventually be in a real relationshop, heed these words so that you can make it work).
In my parenting workgroups, I tell parents to get rid of chatting clients; AIM, jabber, Yahoo Instant Messenger, AOL. I tell the same things in my engagement workshops. While the children and couples protest at first, years later they thank me. You will to.
A. Rightmann
As you can see in Patent#93993229, we invented the idea of instant message interopability. You don't believe us? Look at our next version of AIM and ICQ, they're combined! combined I tell you!
Now I should only have to uninstall a single IM client when I service the computers for my workplace!
but their he is
that should be:
but there he is
learn how to spell
If these standards are implemented will it mean that people on many different chat clients will be able to make false assertions about my sexual preferences no matter which client I am using? I can't wait.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
as long as i get ads for "HOT TEEN SHAVEN PUSSY" when i log onto AOL IM...
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
The headline is a little misleading. This isn't a working group to create some new standard for interoperability. This is a working group to evaluate and possibly improve Jabber's protocol.
In other words, this new group will ensure that Jabber's existing protocol is secure and has good support for localization. But it has nothing to do with AIM/ICQ, Yahoo Messanger, or anything like that. You can use XMPP today - it's called Jabber (and it's pretty cool).
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
What really makes me shake my head, though, is the client they provided. It's locked on the jabber.com server. What's up with that? They sell you a server, and then give you a client that you can only use with a server they didn't sell you?!
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
While the emergence of a standard will quickly generate open source implementations (I can easily see, say, licq supporting the standard within days of the first draft) there is no incentive for the big corporate players to support it, and indeed a great many reasons not to.
Their interrest lies not in interoperability, but making sure that their customers can only talk to their customers so that if you want to be able to IM your brother-in-law or somesuch you have to subscribe to their service (even if it's in a way just as "simple" as feeding them your email for generating spam).
This means that, in the long run, the mass market consumer will not be able to talk to the open source clients we geeks will be using.
Like I said, wishful thinking. If we're really lucky this is how things will happen, and we'll have an IM that isn't swamped with hundreds of thousands of inane twinks and lusers spamming us with request for pr0n or cybersex. :-)
-- MG
First off that the IETF supporting a working group for XMPP/Jabber kicks ass. But it will not give us what it promises. In no fault of its own... I am sure it will do what it is designed for from a tech POV. Business (read: AOL MSN Yahoo, etc) don't want it. They more than don't want it, they are probably keeping an eye on it out of concern. AOL is the best example of this. They get people to sign up because their friends signed up and they can chat (and according to the ads you can even send pictures in email! WOW!) They don't want you to be able to use just any ISP. Or just any anything. They will not use XMPP/Jabber. They will intentionally not work with XMPP/Jabber. AOL excels at not cooperating in the IM client area. They want it to bee this way, not because they could not from a protocol/technology point of view
In the end XMPP/Jabber will only work with itself. A marvel of interoperability.
And this suits me just fine. They can keep their IM-BS. The rest of us can use somthing else.
Is that a 386 - 3?
the eXtensible Marijuana Policy Project
What, Adam, what about pornography?
Do you need to refer to yourself in the third person Adam? Is it because you've sinned ? Are you a sinner Adam? Control your evil self... control Adam control him... God's watching you Adam.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
So what's new here? Back in the early 80's, I used the talk(1) command a lot, and it worked between all the systems that were then capable of using the Internet.
Of course, those systems were limited to a hundred or so unix clones, plus VMS. But it would have worked just find on Windoze and the Mac, too, if they had bothered to pay attention to what was already developed and available for free.
It's really just another case of the commercial world laboriously reinventing the wheel, and loudly proclaiming that their shape wheel (square, hexagonal, etc.) are the best, while carefully ignoring the long existence of a round wheel.
(1) See any unix manual from the early 80's.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Today there are a bunch of competing networks -- AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! and, to a lesser extent, Groove -- none of which interoperate at the protocol level. There is no infrastructure counterpart to SMTP, RFC-822, MIME etc.
XMPP, aka Jabber, is the IM counterpart to SMTP, conceptually -- it's a unified protocol that IM software needs to standardize on -- as well as technologically: it's an asynchronous, routed, queuing messaging protocol. XMPP leverages RFC-822 for addressing, MIME and HTML for content, and further refines the SMTP idea by adding an extensible syntax (XML with namespaces), presence, persistent connections, deferral metadata, named services, group chat, file transfer etc.
To say that XMPP exists for interoperability is like saying HTTP exists for interoperability. XMPP isn't really the glue that could tie proprietary IM networks together, although it certainly does that, too.
Not incidentally, to get started with Jabber, pick up the best Jabber client for Linux/Windows/MacOS X and register with one of the free public Jabber servers. The account setup takes about 10 seconds and is done through the program.
At first I thought this post was supposed to be a joke (seeing the +3 Funny and all). But then I took a look at this guy's other posts... he really is a religious nutball, folks!
Adam, why don't you just download the amazing NetAccountability
software, so your friends and fellow church-goers can help you insure you never look at pornography again.
After all, every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten.
"And like that
What we really need is interoperability at the back-end--AOL IM servers need to talk to MSN IM and to IRC. Maybe standardized protocols would help with that a little (the AOL server could pretend to be a client for MSN), but I suspect lack of connectivity is more of a business thing.
Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP)
SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE)
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
Common Presence and Instant Messaging (CPIM) (Still a draft)
In addition to these guys, Wireless Village is an IM standard created by Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia. It's getting very strong traction among wireless carriers who want to deploy IM on phones and other mobile devices. Of these different offerings, SIP isn't strictly an IM thing, but there are people trying to use it to set up IM sessions. Microsoft uses SIP in their Messenger offering (which is how they claim they are "standards-based").
CPIM is probably dead.
IMPP has some traction in the 3GPP wireless groups, but not really anywhere else (read "probably dead").
SIMPLE has tons of backers including IBM (Lotus) and is probably going to emerge as one of the dominant standards.
Jabber is just trying to stay afloat in all this standards chaos. This was a very good move for them since they actually have millions of deployed users. Jabber is the only IETF-related working group that can claim real-world deployment like this. None of the other standards have any subtantial deployed user base (if any users at all).
Probably what will happen is that as IM servers emerge, they will support a handful of these protocols, just like email servers currently support IMAP, POP, etc.
Notice that AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! are not pushing their protocols as standards anymore. They are plying the Mexican stand-off thing and probably will have to scramble to jump on one of these standards as things shake out.
If you take the time to read between the lines of his other posts you'll see their shot through with subtle irony.
Guess : "Adam Rightmann" (if that is his name and not an ironic nom de plume) is an ascerbic Brit with a penchant for poking fun at the Catlick Church.
Really. Talk never worked that well. I believe that it also had byte order dependency problems.
-Dom
I see the IETF now has three WG doing IM standards
XMPP (The jabber stuff)
IMPP Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol
SIMPLE SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions
I notice most the people I know you AOL, MSN, and Yahoo.
Yes and no. He probably is a Brit but the most likely target would be Southern US Protestants of the Pat 'Hatred' Robertson or Jerry 'Hatred' Falwell variety, the type who talk about the love of Christ etc. etc. but have hatred as their middle name.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
An article on News.com mentions that "the new working group could have some competition from IBM and Microsoft, which have promoted a separate standard known as SIMPLE". This also has a IETF working group - here's the charter
Meanwhile a group of users in finance industry are pushing for exactly this sort of integrated solution. Called FIMA they "say it is non-partisan, and is open to any company that wishes to promote Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) IM standards and protocols within the financial services community. By endorsing IETF instant-messaging standards, FIMA wants to promote "interoperability and beneficial competition among instant-messaging vendors."
There is an air of enevitability about the integration of protocols - but it may not be based on Jabber.... but SIMPLE doesn't sound all that hot...
Wouldn't it be conceptually easy to map an AIM name, say, HotSw33tie, to the ID HotSw33tie@aol.com, and the MSN Messenger name GatezRox to GatezRox@msn.com and so on? Since AOL and MSN both use a big centralized server, wouldn't this just require a simple extension of AOL's servers to interact with the full Jabber-style IM world? They could still retain compatibility for people using older AIM clients, anyway, but those people wouldn't be able to talk to MSN/ICQ/Jabber folks.
And does this whole setup mean that I can run my own IM host? As in, I can be BadAssBob@bobshost.com? No external service necessary? I can IM WimpAssFred@wimpybox.com just like that, no centralized server necessary? Just like email?
Oh... oh my pants!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca