Gaim Speaks Out on MSN Ban

joejg writes "As FootNotes is reporting, the developers at Gaim have responded to the ban Microsoft is placing upon users of third-party clients accessing the MSN protocol. It appears that starting October 15th I will not be able to talk to my MSN friend in South Korea." Gaim's site is more optimistic, saying they may still be able to connect, only without a license to do so.

Comments

Login tricks

[shird]

A possible method to block out other 'rogue' clients which was used by AIM for example, is to have the 'challenge' a random number/offset, and the 'response' being the value in the executable at that offset. Hence the only way to connect is to have a copy of the entire executable, any 3rd party clients would need a copy of this and may be breaking some 'DMCA crap' in doing so.

Of course, another method is to just use PKI, but then extracting the key out of the MSN client for use in login may not be seen as a breach of copyright/other rights/DMCA crap etc.

Could this be related to Federal Snoops?

[Desmoden]

I read on bugtraq that one of the anonymous sites had to change the client after federal pressure to provide a back door.

Could this be related? Could M$FT be making some changes for "Patriot Act" related requests that makes 3rd party clients incompatable?

Or am I just getting really paranoid =)

The Issue at Hand...

[paulthomas]

is that people think nothing of the power they give to a third party when they agree to use private and centralized systems such as AIM, or MSN. These systems change often, and with unpublished protocol specifications, interoperability is a mere hack that can be broken at the whim of the company.

What we really need is some sort of Jabber based universal chat system for example. (Or, without trying to start a holy war, maybe we can avoid excessive markup and not use XML).

I use Fire on OS X, and I can interface with both Jabber and AIM. Often I'll set my away message on AIM to: "Download Trillion or Fire to talk to me on the superior Jabber network."

Or... I know! How about a nix `talk` revival!

Give it a go.

so...

[InsaneCreator]

Let me get this straight... They're stopping the development of OutlookExpress, InternetExplorer won't be available for download any more and now they're seriously limiting who can connect to MSN Chat?

Somebody pinch me, I must be dreaming! :)

2 odd sense

[oddbudman]

This really reminds me of the whole netscape / IE thing, except this time they are taking on the IM side of things.

Honestly i have to say that MSN messenger is a great tool. The new additions it has added make total sense,

video conferencing, audio conversation, games.... to me these are totally great things to implement and make a whole lot of sense.

Hey wait a second... video, audio, games,, all through MSN? Is there some sort of trend here? Do MS have plans to continue pushing content onto MSN exclusive setup? If they do to me this is really really dangerous, think about the critical mass they will be able to pull in no time at all. MSN will continue to ship with windblows, no doubt about that.

Perhaps I am subscribing to a conspiracy theory here, but to me it makes sense. MS has pulled stuff like this in the past and will continue to pull stuff like this in the future. Unless they keep dominating, shareholders get angry.

To me the only way this will go away would be to make a better, open alternative, at the moment there isn't.

weird

[Trepidity]

I actually don't know anyone who uses MSN. And most of my friends aren't very computer-savvy. Everyone I know uses AIM, simply because it got their first. They all signed up for AIM accounts in high school 5-6 years ago before MSN existed (or before it was big anyway), and so they've all kept them now. The people at my college pretty much exclusively use AIM too -- it's assumed you have an AIM account, 'cause otherwise you won't be able to talk to anyone, since that's what pretty much every single person at the college uses.

Really I was under the impression that nobody used MSN/Yahoo/Jabber/whatever. But I suppose this might vary regionally.

Re:weird

[FrenZon]

Really I was under the impression that nobody used MSN/Yahoo/Jabber/whatever. But I suppose this might vary regionally.

This is just a personal observation, but I would tend to agree with this - I've not seen AIM used by anyone in Australia save for those who need to talk to Americans. Looking at my Miranda contact list, there is one AIM user, 37 ICQ users and 9 MSN users. The ICQ users are all my techie friends, the MSN users are people who don't use computers that often; they all use it because it's tied in to their hotmail accounts. All the ICQ users use ICQ because no-one here had heard of AIM until last year, presumably due to AOL's lack of local marketing.

The strange thing is that I've been an ICQ user since 1996 or so, and despite conversing with a large number of American users, I hadn't really heard of AIM until a few years ago, and had not met anyone who used it until earlier this year.

Re:weird

[IamTheRealMike]

It is regional, as you might expect. In England, everybody uses MSN. I mean nearly everybody. All of my (non-geek) friends use it, so does my family. It comes with Windows, it's pretty, and it lets them set their display name 3 times a day so I cannot keep track of who they are unless I use Gaim or Jabber.

It's fairly easy to explain this phenomenon. IM networks are just that - networks, and as such they suffer from severe network effects. I hate MSN. It's a pile of dung. Its network is basic, sometimes unreliable, the official client blows chunks, and worst of all it seems to take about 5 minutes to realise you are no longer connected if your dialup drops so friends keep talking to you, then 10 minutes later get a "That message could not be delivered" warning.

Nonetheless, I use it (via Gaim) anyway, because it's either that or don't talk to my friends via IM. My friends are (mostly) local, as are their friends and so on, so it spreads out.

Instant messaging has been such a total mess, for such a long time, that I think this should serve as as a valuable lesson to those who would create new networks on the internet. Back in the days when it was just engineers, things like the web, email, USENET, IRC and so on were born. They became essentially public networks, controlled by nobody. Then the corporates got involved. IM was invented at the wrong time, and it's been a battleground ever since.

If we are not very careful, exactly the same thing will happen again in future. I'm thinking of digital identity here, but luckily so far both corporate attempts at this space have failed - BUT there are no indy hackers working on it! (i wish i still had time for it).

I write this here because statistically if somebody is going to invent a new network, they might well be reading Slashdot. Let's learn our lesson now, or see ourselves shut out of future networks - from our friends, services, business partners - simply because we use the "wrong" product.

Re:Private property

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not paid by advertising, it is an integrated part of windows (according to MS), and as such, windows users already paid for it. The ads are just another form of spam, and users installing an alternative program are just compared to people installing spamfilters.

So, if advertising is the reason for blocking access for clients that filter out spam, IMHO Microsoft can scream about being anti-spam themselves as much as they want, they are still pro-spam and spammers.

Re:Private property

[Malicious]

If you've used MSN 4.6 or earlier lately, you'll notice that you don't get Advertisements anymore. Instead, you've gotten an email from Microsoft advising you, that you MUST upgrade, or you will be cut off from MSN messenger.

My preference is to simply stop using the software when they cut me off.

MSN Messenger under Wine?

[danielrendall]

Two points

1) If using MS' service without using the official client is 'freeloading', I still think that it's in MS' interest that we freeload off them, and not one of their competitors. I use GAIM pretty much exclusively, but most if not all of the people on my buddy list use Messenger under Windows. I add a small amount of value to their experience of the service :-), and this makes them marginally more likely to use it (and hence see the ads etc.) whenever they want to talk to me.

2) I suppose an alternative for those who just want to connect would be to try to run Messenger under Wine. I gave it a cursory try, it didn't work straight away and I moved on to something more pressing, but has anyone else tried this with more success?

Re:Abuse of Power

[26199]

It's possible they don't...

I haven't actually seen anyone mention this yet, so, why not :-)

MSN Messenger is one of the pieces of 'bundled middleware' that is continuing to cause Microsoft legal troubles under antitrust laws... the last I heard things were moving forward in Europe to do something about it.

If there is ever going to be an antitrust ruling about messenger, I'm pretty sure this will make the ruling harder on Microsoft... maybe they'll have to give $200 million worth of software to schools instead of $150 million :-/

(I personally dislike messenger. Virtually everyone I know uses it simply because it came with Windows. This is the sort of thing antitrust laws are supposed to protect against...)

Whatever... there are alternatives.

[FauxReal]

There's the barren wasteland known as ICQ, there's aim, there's the ever so buggy yahoo. And a few more out there... I use trillian which works on multiple networks and doesn't support ads. So I don't really care which system I talk over, and I'm sure many people here use multiple systems. It's not like people will be so desperate to stay with MSN that they won't be willing to leave it. What would be really nice though is if Trillian and Gaim go together and came up with a compatible encrypted messaging standard. Then I could just get all my friends to move over to one of them.

Centralized Messaging Sucks

[Nurgled]

The problem with MSN, AIM, Y!IM and so forth is that they are centralised. One entity both controls and pays for the hub of the service without which the service will not function. Obviously they must somehow recoup costs, which they usually do via advertising in the official client.

What we need is a decentralised IM system. We techically already have one in the form of Jabber, but noone uses it for reasons I can't be sure of. I suspect the major problem is the high barrier of entry: you must either use the jabber.com/jabber.org servers (centralisation, again) or install your own Jabber server, which is where things get tricky.

In order to run your own Jabber server, you must have a box somewhere preferably with an always-on connection and static IP. This box must be Internet-accessible, at least on the ports Jabber uses.

Had Jabber been invented around the same time as email and news, ISPs would no doubt run Jabber servers on behalf of their customers as they do with USENET news servers and SMTP servers. Unfortunately, it's now far too late in the game for this to happen. Convincing one ISP to do this would be nearly impossible, so convincing the majority to do it will never happen.

As with most new things on the Internet today, it seems like peer-to-peer is the only answer. The clients must also be the servers, and it should be no harder than simply running the program. Designing an efficient peer-to-peer system for instant messaging which works behind NAT gateways sounds tricky, but not impossible. Is anyone working on this already?