AOL Selling AIM Gateway/Listener To Employers

PizzaFace writes "After pushing free instant messaging to more than 100,000,000 users, AOL is now selling AIM-monitoring software to businesses that want to monitor and control the messaging of their employees. AIM Enterprise Gateway will reportedly sell for about $35/employee/year."

Comments

aol is NOT monitoring aim

[jfruhlinger]

AOL will NOT be monitoring AIM communications -- what this product essentially does is set up a private network WITHIN a company, based on the AIM protocols. It is that internal communication that is being monitored -- and not by AOL but by the company that buys the software from AOL. I imagine that the users will be able to use their clients to communicate with other AIM users outside their network, but if they don't want to be monitored, they can just download the standard free AIM client and use that instead.

Several of my friends work for IBM, and they have been using something like this software, called Sametime, for a couple years. Sametime may have been a beta of this product.

jf

Did NO ONE look at what this is?

[batkiwi]

It's not a magical AIM filter, which is what all the comments are suggesting.

It's a way to run your OWN aim gateway server at your business.

So I am at franks widgets (fwidg). I install the gateway server. Everyone at fwidg logs into the company aim server instead of the official AIM server, as employee@fwidg.com.

So now we have intranet messaging, and apparently others can add us to the contact list as well (outsiders).

OBVIOUSLY since all communication is going through this server, they can log/etc it. But htis is not some sort of magical firewall dropin that listens to aim conversations... there's been opensource projects that can do that for years now.

It looks to me like it's aiming at the jabber and MSN/exchange messenger market. It's a locally hosted central server, so your business stuff isn't going out over the internet, and it authenticates against stuff you already have, according to their marketing. I'd guess that means ldap and active-directory.

My solution to AIM monitoring...

[Ageless]

For the past few weeks I have been writing a program I currently call SecureIM. It is a encrypting proxy server that runs on your computer and allows you to have secure conversations over AIM. It's runs under Win32 and is tested with AIM 4.x and higher and Trillian.

If you would like to check out the beta version, it's available at http://www.vonnieda.org/SecureIM

The program will be getting a name change before v1.0 since there are several SecureIMs out there.

Before you flame me about security or what not, please at least have a read of the Readme.txt file where I think I explain pretty well what SecureIM is and isn't capable of.

I hope someone finds some use of it. Enjoy :)

Re:Yet another reason to use Trillian

[Tassach]

That is why you open a SSH tunnel to a trusted outside server with access to a squid proxy, and set your AIM proxy to point to the forwarded port on localhost: ssh -L 3128:proxyhost:3128 trusteduser@trustedhost Substitute plink for ssh if using Windows.