Yahoo Restored in Some IM Clients

Sparks23 writes "Third-party instant messaging clients have begun to reconnect to Yahoo. While the authorization scheme has not been completely decoded -- expect some bumps -- Gaim and Trillian have both partially restored connectivity. Gaim has the new authorization scheme in CVS and their new 0.70 release, and Cerulean has made a beta patch available for Trillian Pro 2.0; consider both patches 'beta' for the moment."

Comments

Cooperation

[Vengie]

For those of you who don't RTFA.....Cerulean studios actually *sent* the GAIM folk the protocol. This is a good example of how Yahoo is actually fostering a good relationship between "competing" clients. [Competing in the sense that they are both alternative...] Kind of nice to see that kind of collaboration....

Re:Cooperation

[Anonymous Coward]

> For those of you who don't RTFA

There is no FA, jackass

Re:Cooperation

[stanmann]

Hey Genius. There was no FA to R. Would that there had been, Some of us would have known why we should care about this "issue"

Re:Cooperation

[liam193]

Yahoo is actually fostering a good relationship between "competing" clients.

----

Great.... I can just see the next headline about this topic on Slashdot:

Yahoo supports collaboration between "competing" clients.
In a move that is sure to turn a few heads, a Yahoo spokesperson indicated that collaboration between other clients was their primary goal all along. "It was always our intent to force the competition to work together," said Yahoo. "We never realized it would require this much encouragement." According to the information released by Yahoo, they had no intention of keeping users of other clients off their network; they were simply forcing the other client vendors to improve their products through collaboration.

Re:Cooperation

[mopslik]

Cerulean studios actually *sent* the GAIM folk the protocol. This is a good example of how Yahoo is actually fostering a good relationship between "competing" clients.

Yahoo! has nothing to do with Cerulean Studios or GAIM. The cooperation between these "competing" IM clients was fostered between those two parties. Yahoo! itself isn't fostering anything.

Re:Cooperation

[WalterSobchak]

And the Mac OS X client "fire" (see elsewhere in this post) credits the Gaim people for helping them with the protocol.

Alex

Re:Cooperation

[steelerguy]

I wonder how much cooperation there would be if Gaim had a real Windows client (yes I know they have a crappy one) and Trillian had a Linux client (they didn't last time I checked).

It's nice to see the cooperation, but you are right by quoting competing, since they have two different user bases.

BTW, Gaim .70 is working perfectly so far with Yahoo. Just don't disconnect! :)

Re:Cooperation

[drinkypoo]

Try the URL referenced in the title under "Gaim" - http://gaim.sourceforge.net/. The top news item says "Our friends over at Cerulean Studios managed to break my speed record at cracking Yahoo authentication schemes with an impressive feat of hackery. They sent it over and here it is in Gaim 0.70."

Okay, so a site ain't an article, but all you had to do was follow a link, and there it is. Train harder, grasshopper.

Re:Cooperation

[Skeezix]

Actually, there was a FA to R. You just had to STFW. Google for "gaim" and hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Re:Cooperation

[Blob Pet]

you didn't click on the gaim link did you?

Re:Cooperation

[Anonymous Coward]

But but but... if, like, Yahoo didn't do what they did, these two never would have cooperated! Right!? Yahoo planned it this way because they looked pretty far ahead and saw that the best way to beat Microsoft was to get competitors to cooperate! See!? It makes a lot of sense! It's a smooth business operation!

Re:Cooperation

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is so crappy about the windows port? It works great for me, I can't tell any difference between it and the unix version under fbsd.

Re:Cooperation

[billatq]

Actually Gaim for windows has come a long way since .60. It runs very well on the windows machines I've put it on. In fact, I actually encourage people to use it because it supports a higher grade encryption than trillian does (http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net), and has supported stuff like unicode for longer. (though trillian pro now has unicode support--took it long enough).

Re:Cooperation

[jo42]

Ctrl-Alt-Del!
Ctrl-Alt-Del!
Ctrl-Alt-Del!

Re:Cooperation

[catbutt]

Well, maybe they fostered it in the same way Germany fostered cooperation between the US and Soviet Union in WWII.

Re:Cooperation

[stanmann]

Ok, that was great, but I"m at work. I didn't want to download Gaim or trillian, just read about it. Therefore since I've clicked on those links previously, I felt no obligation to do so again.

Re:Cooperation

[Anonymous Coward]

Therefore since I've clicked on those links previously, I felt no obligation to do so again.

Yeah, I followed a link to CNN 's main page once. Wait, they don't update that thing now and again, do they?

Re:Cooperation

[RedBear]

There was no FA to R.

Yes, but was there an R to the FA?

An H to the SO?

A G to the SA?

Lemme hear ya say, "Heyyyy, hooo!"

Where am I? What? No thank you, I think I've had enough Red Bull for today...

Re:Cooperation

[Sj0]

FYI BTW, WTF?

Re:Cooperation

[Geek of Tech]

RTFA.... BTW.... M-O-U-S-E!

Re:Cooperation

[Sj0]

LOL!

GTG, TTYL!

Great!

[stanmann]

Now I can chat with everyone again. Perhaps Instant Messaging will rise again...

Personally though the open ports don't make me too confident of the success of IMing in todays more suspicious world.

new ym

[fredopalus]

And a new version of Yahoo Messenger is out.

Re:new ym

[Commykilla]

New YM!! Like, oh my gawd no way, is it the one with Justin Timberlake!?!? I'd better run to the mawl...

ayttm restored on Sunday

[Shin Dig]

Ayttm http://ayttm.sourceforge.net had restored service on Sunday, including a 0.4.2 release that included the new support. I think it was the first of the Open Source clients to make it back on line.

And for other flame bate, it also support GPG encryption of packets over any IM protocol, and is interoperable with Kopete's encryption as well.

Re:ayttm restored on Sunday

[colinleroy]

You may as well have read past the first paragraph and clicked "here" to access the website.

Re:ayttm restored on Sunday

[Mauvaisours]

Had you learned to read, you would have seen that the page contains a link to the (former) home page.

And free speech certainly belongs to the american people only...

Re:ayttm restored on Sunday

[Anonymous Coward]

And free speech certainly belongs to the american people only...

...but the French have cornered the market on being arrogant douchebags.

Re:ayttm restored on Sunday

[breser]

Not everyone involved in the project is French. Nor do I imagine all of us agree with the stuff on the front of the main page. But as other people have pointed out to you, the site is still up, you just have to click through. So it's not really such a big deal now is it.

Re:ayttm restored on Sunday

[schtum]

wait, i can't tell which one of you is being sarcastic.

Re:ayttm restored on Sunday

[phoenix_rizzen]

Kopete 0.7 never lost connection to the Yahoo! servers, thus they were the first to have this "fix" ... as no fix was needed for the client. :)

Got a bunch of warning from Yahoo! and MSN about the protocol being upgraded, yet still have full connectivity to both ... without changing anything in the client.

Makes me wonder what the other clients are doing wrong. :D

Re:ayttm restored on Sunday

[brianosaurus]

None of the clients did anything wrong. Yahoo changed the protocol all of a sudden, and it took them a couple of days to figure it out.

Kopete CVS credits Gaim with coming up with the fix. From kopete/protocols/yahoo/libyahoo2/libyahoo2.c:

1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): /*
1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): * New auth protocol cracked by Sean Egan from the Gaim team
1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): * Dude you Rock!
1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): *
1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): * I should say thanks again to gaim without which this library
1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): * would not have been possible
1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): */
1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): static void yahoo_process_auth_0x0b(struct yahoo_input_data *yid, const char *seed, const char *sn)

When Yahoo made the update, any connected clients stayed connected, but new logins needed the new protocol. I'm not sure what your situation is, but Kopete definitely needed some sort of upgrade to stay be able to connect. Perhaps a shared library version of libyahoo2 got updated on your system?

Re:ayttm restored on Sunday

[phoenix_rizzen]

The only client I have installed is Kopete 0.7, and it's been started, stopped, restarted several times over the past week (it's used for work, and only at work). Connects to Yahoo! and MSN without any problems.

Bizarre, strange, and weird, I guess.

Re:ayttm restored on Sunday

[gilesjuk]

Cracked? not the most ideal language to be using in an open source project given it's negative connotations.

Independent IM Client Futures

[sjvn]

Much as I like both GAIM and Trillian, sooner or later, probably by some kind of hard wired authenication/security mechanism, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsft will manage to block these clients often enough and for long enough that they'll lose their utility.

Looking down the road, I think the only hope for open clients are open IM servers, probably, IMHO, based on Jabber.

Steven

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[self assembled struc]

Man, have you ever used Jabber?

At my current job we use Jabber internally to talk to each other so we don't have to send passwords and the like out over the internet, and use encryption it as well. Jabber is probably the biggest pain the ass to set up and administer and still not all of the clients support enough of the feature set (not even the daemons do) for it to be useful.

Not saying that it's any better than some of it's competition. At my last job (employer shall remain nameless, but let's say it's Gimbles to Yahoo's Macys and is owned a Spanish company) I was on the team implementing the new IM launch. (yeah! IM in 2003! Let's clean up that market share with our reach. Oh wait. Damn.) It was (is) based on IBM/Lotus' IM implementation (sadly the name escapes me right now) which was just as much of a pain in the ass. At least with Jabber you can view all the databases, files, etc...

Still, I really doubt jabber will ever gain the critial mass it needs to be the IM software of choice. Not until a company oike AOL, Yahoo! or MS picks it up and starts using it. And that's as likely as Lycos overtaking Yahoo! in the search market by aquiring Google.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[hanssprudel]

Much as I like both GAIM and Trillian, sooner or later, probably by some kind of hard wired authenication/security mechanism, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsft will manage to block these clients often enough and for long enough that they'll lose their utility.

It's called TCPA.

The point with TCPA and palladium is to be able to force people to use user hostile clients to connect to certain networks/data, and this is a perfect example: in order to connect to the IM networks you will have to use the official clients (which are user hostile in that for example they use screen space for ads that the user would presumably disable if they could.)

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Anonymous Coward]

"At my current job we use Jabber internally to talk to each other"

What's wrong with email?

"so we don't have to send passwords and the like out over the internet"

Why would you need to do that to use email? Or any other chat client?

"and use encryption it as well"

as you could with email.

"Jabber is probably the biggest pain the ass to set up and administer and stil not all of the clients support enough of the feature set (not even the daemons do) for it to be useful"

You're using it, and recommending it, but it's not useful?

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Smedrick]

Actually, if you follow eWeek, they have an article about how the companies are giving in to the demand for interoperability. MS said they plan on implementing a third party layer to MSN Messenger to allow other apps to work with it. There's also a follow-up story on how Reuters and MS are joining their IM networks and offering connectivity to Yahoo and AOL.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[mystik]

For the curious ...

The IBM/Lotus product is named Sametime. It ties in nicely if you have an existing Domino network. (w/ little isonline icons in your notes mail, and other random integration features.)

And yes, having setup jabber recently, it is somewhat of a pain in the ass. All the extenions have their own way of being compiled and setup. (AIM extenion, & the Jit ICQ extension) It's starting to make sense how it works, but it's tricky to get the hang of.

hopefully jabber2 is a bit easier to setup ...

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Highlander]

Lotus = Sametime

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[drinkypoo]

You may have missed this, but WASTE is once again available for download (there was a /. story about it a while back) under the GPL, this time from sourceforge and not from commercial underling Nullsoft. While it is meant for a somewhat different purpose from Jabber, it's pretty easy to use, and works very well. For small networks, it means not having to even set up a server. Of course, it has some problems, like the fact that anyone can add someone to the network, but other than that it's pretty damned good. And, it supports encryption.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[wo1verin3]

I work at a medium-large (household name) sized software company and have basically nil Linux knowledge. However, going through the docs jabber took only a few hours to setup, creating contact lists for everyone took some time but since they were XML i loved it.

The only jabber chat rooms developer folks were really helpful with a few questions that came up.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[slamb]

Jabber is probably the biggest pain the ass to set up and administer and still not all of the clients support enough of the feature set (not even the daemons do) for it to be useful.

Agreed. But I think that will change. People are really starting to demand an alternative to the big centralized servers, with all these stupid games their owners are playing. And there is some good software out there:

As far as clients go:

• For X11, gaim has Jabber support. It's a little crude, but it's coming along. gaim's UI is getting pretty good, so this will be a pretty friendly client.
• For OS X, I've implemented crude Jabber support in Adium using the Nitro library and will work to improve it as I find time. Adium is an IM (mostly AIM) client that has a really good user interface, so if I just get the protocol-specific stuff working well, it will be worlds better than most Jabber clients out there.
• For Windows, miranda has a Jabber plugin now. I haven't tried it out, but miranda has a pretty good UI also, once you install a few essential plugins.

The server still needs work, though, you're right. I haven't played with any of the commercial offerings, but jabberd is kind of lacking. jabberd2 looks promising, at least in its ability to support database-based storage stuff better. If someone wanted to contribute, I'm sure the jabberd people would welcome them in ironing out bugs, making the install process easier, and implementing new features. The killer feature I'd like to see is support for server-side logs. Then you could log in from anywhere and see all of your old chat logs. Storing them on the client just doesn't work for people who access it from several different places.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Anonymous Coward]

e-mail isn't for realtime conversations dumbass.

IM is very useful in the workplace.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Otterley]

Perhaps this is true, but because the status of the software and the intellectual property backing it is under serious legal dispute, any entity with substantial assets to lose would be foolish to employ it.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally agree here. I tried to setup a server (the free Linux one) a while ago. I was almost successful, but I couldn't get it work with clients on the same machine as the server, while at the same time allowing remote clients (having localhost as the server name only allowed localhost, and using the IP address as the server name prevented a localhost client but allowed remote clients). I'm sure there is a solution (involving the hosts file maybe?), but setting it up wasn't straightforward.

That said, Jabber is very cool. With some work it can really be nice.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Anonymous Coward]

"e-mail isn't for realtime conversations dumbass.
IM is very useful in the workplace."

How slow is your network that it's not realtime on your intranet?

Use the phone if it needs to be any faster than a minute or so per message, or you need to have multiple exchanges. Didn't you know? Face to face is better for business. I've never worked anywhere where IM was used internally.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Anonymous Coward]

The killer feature I'd like to see is support for server-side logs

If this is implemented, they must do this in a way that makes this optional. I don't want people reading my conversations. It's not that I have something to hide, but I want to have some privacy

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[homer_ca]

"Use the phone if it needs to be any faster than a minute or so per message"

Have you ever talked with someone who goes on and on and never lets you off the phone? That would explain at least some of the popularity of text messaging phones and IM. Sometimes you need to send a quick message without talking to someone.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Andrewkov]

My life is stressful enough as it is .. e-mail is plently "real-time" enough for my users when they need to get in conatct with me. Last thing I need is a bunch of IM messages popping up a hundred times a day.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[another misanthrope]

not so sure about this - I use gotmail to fetch (well, forward really) mail from a *otmail account to my pop address. There was a time when hotmail was changing their re-directs at least daily and if you could wait the update would be out that night. I'm pretty sure the same thing will happen with MSN

OTOH - if MSN is successful in blocking out 3rd party clients then their membership #'s will no doubt suffer and people will move to Yahoo or ICQ or whatever... Sony has taught us this lesson over and over since the Betamax.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[drinkypoo]

There is certainly some merit to that argument. One alternate suggestion is to run an irc server. There are numerous easy windows irc servers. The only problem with that is a lack of encryption, though certainly it is possible to implement it at some other layer. In order to sslize it, I assume you'd have to use a Unix package, but there's always tunneling - which just turns into a headache again.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[generic-man]

Many companies, particularly financial institutions, require that all IMs be logged. If Jabber gains server-side logging, then it will become acceptable to use at companies that must log all IMs.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[GenericJoe]

IM can be very useful. It's faster than email (and while email can be sent very quickly, getting a response back quickly due to the human element) can be difficult. It's better than phone for a lot of reasons: First, there's no mistaking what someone says for detailed things. If were're talking about code here, it's wonderful.

Also, if you're in a big enough organization (I used to work for one of the top 5 american banks), you wind up in more phone meetings than anything else, waiting for your turn to speak.

In the meantime, you can IM with the others on your team who are reporting, getting thigns ready to do it as efficiently as possible (and get us all off the stupid phones).

IM is going to become more, not less, important in business as time goes on.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[slamb]

If this is implemented, they must do this in a way that makes this optional. I don't want people reading my conversations. It's not that I have something to hide, but I want to have some privacy

Absolutely. But keep in mind that the people running your Jabber server will probably be the same people who already run your email server. If you don't trust them, you're in trouble. Whether or not the jabberd people implement this feature (and I'm talking about logs for you to view, with client support for viewing and searching), it would be easy for someone to hack together something crude to spy on you. You need to have someone you trust running the server, period.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Hatta]

Well of course setting up a server is gonna be a pain in the ass. But a normal user doesn't need to do that. They can just make an account on jabber.org, which is just as easy as setting up AIM or Yahoo

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[SCHecklerX]

So set up an IRC server internally instead. That's what we do, and windoze users with their trillian can still use it...or use xchat, or even mirc(barf).

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[ChaosDiscord]

Jabber is probably the biggest pain the ass to set up and administer and still not all of the clients support enough of the feature set (not even the daemons do) for it to be useful.

Interesting. We were recently considering other options for our development team when GAIM stopped talking to Yahoo. One of my coworkers downloaded and got the Jabber daemons running in about ten minutes. He and I were chatting using GAIM a few minutes later.

If you need more advanced features perhaps what you say is true. But for basic functionality it worked quite well out of the box. And many people just need the basic functionality.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[Suppafly]

For a business environment that is already going with a domino network, sametime is great.

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[KrazzeeKooter]

It's more likely that eventually millions of people will get sick of having to open 3 or 4 IM programs to stay in touch with friends and if Yahoo and MSN keep closing and changing their standards users will just DROP MSN and Yahoo and move to an open standards leaving all the money put into these proprietary apps and non-standards and the cost of creating a vertical market monopoly a mute point so we don't have to constantly suffer our time dealing with this crap and talking about this crap and wasting our time doing what we're doing right now. But right now it's important we do. Otherwise who's going to learn. So... all these IM wars, web browser wars, all these vertical market monopolies the market, and the corporations who abuse their users by utilizing such techniques can burn in hell as they should, so we can stop having stupid conversations about cracking their damn closed standards and which one is best when none of them are.

Vertical market monopolies are a modern problem. This is not just coke vs. pepsi. God I wish it were, the cola wars were so much fun. What this is, is Coke if Coke owned refrigerators vs. Pepsi who owned the other half of the refrigerators and you couldn't put coke in pepsi's fridge and pepsi in coke's fridge. You as a consumer are not going to run out and buy one of each. Suddenly because the technology, IM-ware in this case, is "free" it's alright? No.

This is buying an Epson printer when their ink costs Epson .0001 an ounce, but costs you more per ounce that Dom Perignon because they OWN exclusive rights to the ink. Epson spends 20 times the price of the ink to actually implement the patented proprietary controlled crap which manufactures cracked, which Epson has sued over and courts dismissed. This why Microsoft IE is the only browser that doesn't have a prominent feature to block popup ads. This is why Verisign better never get the right to redirect miss-typed urls, this is Bell telephone owning the phones and the lines and you having to "rent" your phone from them, this is Standard Oil buying the train lines to force out it's competitors. You we can't allow the owners of the distribution channels and the content, the protocol and the program, the operating system and the software. The radio station and the record label, the tv station and the movie house. It fundamentally corrupts.

Open source and open standards can't fail here because Open Source developers ARE the users and represent the users needs best and provide the best experience.

They fill a very real need. The very fact that this IM thing is such an issue is proof that Yahoo and MSN's IM-ware are evil and deserve to DIE.

So , NO, open source developers will not bother to stop cracking the standards of proprietary technology until the issue ceases to be a mute point because it's what the client wants. Open Source is not fundamentally the great equalizer, that's not it's purpose, but within it is the space to fill a need to create standards and infrastructures like the national road system, but without the government picking up the tab. This infrastructure will have a tremendous and fundamental long term impact.

As long as the demand for collaboration and standards are there the need will be met. This is open source 101. I am a monkey and this is slashdot. Goo goo g' joob

Re:Independent IM Client Futures

[JamieF]

>Didn't you know? Face to face is better for business.
Ah, I didn't realize you meant *video*phones. Don't use IM, use videophones. Practical advice; kudos!

>How slow is your network that it's not realtime on your intranet?
"Didn't you know?" Some companies are so large that they have _multiple offices_. Some companies even let people work from outside of the office!

>I've never worked anywhere where IM was used internally
Well, that's your problem. It's a really nice thing to have, and you can't really have multiple different conversations at the same time on the phone like you can with IM. Also, you can't send links over the phone effectively.

Email is not a real-time medium, and everybody else seems to know this since they send all sorts of messages that don't need to be dealt with right this second. It's not practical to mix realtime messages with asynchronous messages, because employees will always have to stop what they're doing and read the message... in order to find out if they actually needed to stop and read the message right now. People can be much more productive if they can *ignore* email for large periods of time, concentrate on work, and only answer phone calls and IMs which are real-time media that carry with them an implied urgency. And no, IM is not interchangeable with the phone; phones carry even higher urgency and are more disruptive. It's best to have all three.

Money talks

[Westech]

According to their homepage, Trillian is currently only releasing the patch to paying customers.

Re:Money talks

[Numeric]

I am sure they will release the patch to all users however paying customers get first dibs on their download servers.

Re:Money talks

[Talez]

I am sure they will release the patch to all users however paying customers get first dibs on their download servers.

But they haven't wherein lies the problem. Trillian are only giving out the Yahoo connection code to paying customers. Therefore, for the moment at least, if you want to access Yahoo with Trillian you have to give Cerulean Studios money.

They didn't do anything to the Yahoo network besides consume resources and they're making hard currency off it. I do hope Yahoo clobber them around the head with the DMCA.

Re:Money talks

[pavon]

Someone needs to take off the negativity goggles. Trillian has been very good about releasing patches for non-paying customers, and they say in the very same sentence, that they are planing on releasing the patch for 0.74 (the free version) as soon as they finish testing it. What were you expecting, that they implement the patch in 0.74 first, and then leave their customers hanging while they port the patch to 2.0? Of course they give preference to people that support them and not the leeches.

Re:Money talks

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you think a beta patch is going to be tested? By beta testers, of course... just consider the paying customers as the beta testers, and once everything gets ironed out, both the pay and free clients will have new updated patches released.

The paying customers are used as beta testers because they payed for the product, and are more important to Cerulean Studios, but that doesn't mean free is forgotten. Just think of it as free getting quality, not quantity.

Re:Money talks

[Anonymous Coward]

IE is preinstalled? Who cares, everyone uses Netscape anyway...

Mozilla not supported? Who cares, everyone uses IE anyway.

Re:Money talks

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to worry. The full Trillian Pro 2 with plugins and crack and Yahoo patch can be easily found via P2P. Long live piracy.

Re:Money talks

[Draculax]

I think trillian has done a job, I don't know why so many of you feel they are devil and other thirdparty IM is such angels, IMHO trillian is as good as the other IM, althought trillian does offer an paid version of software, they still do supply the free version to everyone. The might release the patch for the free version later but come to think of it again, if you were in their shoes which patch will you release first? To those who feed you or to those who suck up your bandwidth?

Re:Money talks

[Numeric]

okay, if you give money to slashdot you can see stories in the future. what does slashdot provide? basically a link to a story. since i pay, i get to see the story first before its get slashdotted.

now, i donated money to Trillian and i get to download the patches first before non-paying customers. see the the correlation?

money talks on /.

Re:Money talks

[Westech]

"According to their homepage, Trillian is currently only releasing the patch to paying customers."

I was just stating the facts. No negativity about it.

Re:Money talks

[rmohr02]

According to the Gaim website, Trillian submitted the patch to Gaim as well as their paying customers. My opinion of Cerulean Studios has just improved.

Re:Money talks

[/dev/trash]

People pay for IM clients???

Re:Money talks

[Flopper]

Trillian is currently only releasing the patch to paying customers.

Yes, as it's for the Pro version of their software. IMO they would release the patch officially to the free version when it's out of beta. Customers paid for a software, they get a beta hack to get around the Yahoo! "protection". That's the price the free community which hasn't any right for the software has to pay. That's business, nothing else. And not all can be free. Trillian people were nice to give out the new protocol to GAIM, so don't complain (o:

Re:Money talks

[griffjon]

Trillian's pretty cool. It's #1 on the list of IM clients that I would consider paying for. Of course, that list is about 2 long, so...

Re:Money talks

[Anonymous Coward]

Never did trillian say that customers had to pay to get the yahoo patch.
Economics 101 teaches us that people will not pay for something they do not see the value in.... I can use the basic version of trillian for free, but why in heck should i expect equal or better tech support then those people who forked over some cash? Personally, i have no doubt that the people over at Cruellean Studios want to release the patch to everyone asap... but they have to make the customers who gave them money happy, or they will have no repeat customers. More power to them... BTW, right to complain currently costs about 25.00 USD ;-)

Re:Money talks

[the_greywolf]

big deal. it's only $30/year. cancel one of your magazine subscriptions if you can't afford it.

Re:Money talks

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey idiot, they posted a BETA to their paying customers. Their website clearly states that the FINAL patch will be posted for everyone.

Limiting beta testing to a smaller group? The horror.

Re:This story can also be found at

[Sir Haxalot]

Correction. It's at the Yahoo website, but it's presented by www.PCworld.com. Sorry for any confusion.

Everyone wants to win

[Honest Man]

Yahoo just wants to be the exclusive program for their IM network... While they may have the right to do that, it's a huge mistake... I have no intention of installing 4 different IM clients on my pc - if they don't want me to use their services, then I wont....

Re:Everyone wants to win

[colinleroy]

You're completely wrong. Their spokewoman stated that "We're open and interested in talking with all providers that share our common goal of opening the IM community in a seamless, convenient and secure manner."
(see this news.com.com article).

Re:Everyone wants to win

[Honest Man]

Am I? "... interested in talking ..." is a polite way of saying.. 'sure, we'll let them use our protocol.....for a price'....and if they really wanted others running on their protocol they'd have made some effort to post a 'change of protocol' information out so the alternative IM companies didn't have to run sniffers to figure out what changed... If they had, we would not have been in yahoo-limbo, now would we.

Stop believing everything you read. Sheesh.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[Anonymous Coward]

Then yahoo wins also. They don't care about the customers that aren't viewing their add

Re:Everyone wants to win

[colinleroy]

That is, the moment a closed-source multi-network IM client is released

You mean, like Trillian ?

Re:Everyone wants to win

[gid]

Yeah, and where does that leave the free clients? Back in the dust. If they were really interested in keeping it open, they couldn't have blocked anything, and would release an SDK that developers could use as a guideline for connecting their clients to them. Well they still might release an SDK, but it'll cost ya for sure.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[ajnlth]

Why should Yahoo be the only one paying for using their protocol?

Remember, hardware, bandwith and system administrators all cost money.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[lightspawn]

While they may have the right to do that, it's a huge mistake... I have no intention of installing 4 different IM clients on my pc - if they don't want me to use their services, then I wont....

I do not believe your position is typical of the average IM user.

Let's see... keep a few million non-technical people using the IM services but let a few thousand geeks (who never see any ads or use hooks to other Yahoo services) leave, VS keeping everybody... you know, from a business perspective they're practically identical. In fact, the first may be slightly preferable.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, geeks are using Gaim. But many many non-geeks are using Trillian.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[catbutt]

I do not believe your position is typical of the average IM user.

As IM becomes more and more an essential feature of people's internet experience (and not just teenagers), people seem to be getting much more sensitive to the issue. A lot of (non-geek)people are moving toward trillian for this very reason. It may take time, but interoperability is becoming important enough to enough people that that the closed proprietary services just won't last forever.

Trillian now includes Jabber plug in in the Pro version, and they supposedly will include it in their free version soon. That is a big start....people can still talk to their yaho/aim/msn buddies, but for their friends who also use trillian, they can use Jabber and be free of all this mess.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[Anonymous Coward]

But for an IM service, it is essential to have a large userbase. People will only use yahoo IM, if they have friends that also use yahoo IM. If all the Trillian and gaim yahoo users disappear, they're going to take with them some users of yahoo's client.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[Anonymous Coward]

This is dumb. They stated that they made the change to stop hackers and spammers. If they posted the protocol change, then the hackers/spammers could easily update their scripts/programs, and the change would be worthless.

Think before you type.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[Khazunga]

Remember, hardware, bandwith and system administrators all cost money.

So, please, by all means, charge me (as an end user) for the costs. Don't everybody (MSN,AIM/ICQ,Yahoo) try to leverage existing market dominance into a messenger monopoly. The network cost is not an excuse when you're dumping your way into a market.

Right now, I have friends using only one of MSN or AIM/ICQ. They were all, on occasion, uncontactable due to their respective IM network owners trying to finally shoot up to the IM market top position by closing protocols. Yahoo protocol closing was not so bad just because they have a crappy protocol. None of my friends use Yahoo as the only IM client.

I just hope all this nonsense makes people start switching to open protocols, even if they're just plain old IRC.

Re:Everyone wants to win

[drinkypoo]

I figure if people will agree to show their ads they'll probably bend over backwards to help them. I think this is only fair, it's not like yahoo's client doesn't show ads. I'm sure that they'll also be glad to send it out for a licensing fee. In other words, multi-network IMs are going to have to either show ads, or pay royalties, perhaps both (one free, one pro/commercial.) I think someone should open themselves to this idea. I personally really don't mind the ads all that much. They are kind of annoying but I don't have to pay so it all works out. Besides, there are various sneakier ways to stop displaying ads.

I read your chat

[airuck]

I love internet chat sessions. I snoop on them with ethereal at every opportunity.

Re:I read your chat

[solowlr]

How do you snoop on them with Ethereal? How can you construct the packets into a readable sequence?

Re:I read your chat

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you sniff packets for networks your not on? Unless you're at an ISP listening to outbound traffic I guess...

Re:I read your chat

[Anonymous Coward]

duh.. RTFM..
If you're not a weiner that can only handle graphical sniffers you could also try tcpdump (standard on every *nix I think) and filter on that. Or use sniffit, etc etc etc... Ethereal isn't bad but it's too fat.

Re:I read your chat

[Creepy Crawler]

Let's see.. You enable forwarding, shim the gateway (via ettercap or arpspoof), and then start a capture program.

Ethereal has a neat feature as "Follow TCP stream". And if you know anything about TCP, there's a sequence number that allows easy "digestion" of the conversation.

And there's DSNIFF, which does he similar things, but with auth protocols. There's a few others, but I dont want to encourage the kiddies.

Re:I read your chat

[Anonymous Coward]

except tcpdump only captures packet header information. not really very useful for sniffing a conversation.

Re:I read your chat

[Anonymous Coward]

No, if you supply the right options you can get the whole packet.

Re:I read your chat

[caluml]

Muppet. -s 65535 -X will do it.

Re:I read your chat

[Anonymous Coward]

luser@linux [~/bin] $ Muppet.
bash: Muppet.: command not found
luser@linux [~/bin] $

where can I get this Muppet?

GAIM CVS?

[the Man in Black]

Anyone know of a .deb archive of the GAIM CVS code? I checked http://www.apt-get.org/search.php , no such.

Re:GAIM CVS?

[Creepy Crawler]

It's in the stable branch of the master debian servers.

Just do a "apt-get install gaim*"

It'll work as long as /etc/apt/sources.conf is pointing in the right place.

Re:GAIM CVS?

[dabuk]

0.70 (which has the fix) is in unstable now. It's not in testing or stable.

Re:GAIM CVS?

[Anonymous Coward]

he said CVS, not gaim 0.52.

Re:GAIM CVS?

[heikkih]

Try getting the version in unstable.

0.70 hit it yesterday. It includes some additional Yahoo-patches as well.

A cvs version of 0.69 has been in experimental since 18. sep, but it was only there for some preliminary testing of the new msn-protcol.

gaim (1:0.70-2) unstable; is the one to get.

You could try 'apt-get source gaim' from unstable and rebuild it for sarge or woody, as the package has to wait a couple of days to get into testing.

Re:GAIM CVS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but Debian uses so called "stable" packages. They are usually out of date given the excuse that they are supposedly "stable". Never mind the fact that the newer versions have more bugs kinked out, never mind that security holes in the old versions are fixed. Instead, they try and "backport" code (read: cut and paste the newer functions into the older code base), which of course makes it even more of a kludge.

Ironicly, "unstable" is more stable than stable debian (I wonder why?).

Debian distros are out of date, hard to use, supports little hardware and the developers are more interested in flamewars about YAOSPL rather then actually update their packages. You still are forced to use ext2 as your file system (fsck, fsck and more fsck). Even debians only advantage apt-get is being replaced with tools such as yum and urpmi, which support the industry standard RPM rather than the propeitery DEB format.

Debian has lost a lot of market share recently, with people either forking it (see knoppix, xandros, lindows) or switching to decent free distros (see Mandrake Cooker, Gentoo, Fedora which usually have packages in days, if not hours or minutes).

Debian zealots, flame if you like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why I should use Debian over more upto date, easier to use and install Linux distros. And if this post is -1, troll/flamebait, that means they can't think of any reasons, because there aren't any!

Re:GAIM CVS?

[Anonymous Coward]

True enough in many ways. Thought "ooo, for my server stable would make a lot of sense" then I tried to get spamassassin checking my e-mail... to get it to pick anything up I had to get a newer version... well that meant moving away from stable packages, oops.

Whew

[nf0]

And I thought I was going to have to just work all day.

For OS X users ...

[paxcirca]

The latest release of Fire, v.0.32.f, also restored Yahoo! connectivity. The MSN network will be blocked on October 15th, though.

Re:For OS X users ...

[secondsun]

Thank God.

Re:For OS X users ...

[the_proton]

Another multi-service IM application for Mac OS X Proteus will have the Yahoo! connectivity restored in an official release later today. Until then, there is an updated Yahoo plugin available from this forum thread.

Additionally, Proteus 3.02 and later shouldn't have any problems with the MSN network, provided Microsoft don't have any tricks up their sleeve.

- proton

"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[file-exists-p]

From http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ Our friends over at Cerulean Studios managed to break my speed record at cracking Yahoo authentication schemes with an impressive feat of hackery.

Can't Yahoo use the DMCA to send all those people to Guantanamo?

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[headkase]

Actually, reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is expressly permitted by the DMCA. Under the current laws the best Yahoo! or MSN can hope to do is stay one step ahead in an IM arms race - locking out competing clients until they reverse engineer the protocol again.

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[file-exists-p]

Hm. Maybe I should have added a non-cynical translation. Okay, here it is:

I am wondering to what extent Yahoo could use the DMCA to prevent this kind of initiative ? It seems to me that unfortunately this is to prevent this sort of thing that the DMCA was created. Am I wrong ?

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[file-exists-p]

Maybe I completely missed the point, but then why DeCSS prohibited ?

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[Yrd]

Because, as I understand it, CSS is a device intended to restrict access to copyrighted material. DeCSS gives unrestricted access to said material, and so counts as a 'circumvention device', allowing you to make DivXs or whatever of the original and distribute them illegally.

Or just watch them in Linux, but then that's not important at all is it.

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[headkase]

Because the judge was an idiot. IMHO of course.
But the court case for deCSS was tried on piracy grounds, not interoperability grounds and that's what broke the case.

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[smitty45]

copying DVDs was possible before DeCSS. the cracking of CSS was to provide for machines other than "licensed" ones to play DVDs. (i.e. to get dvd playback on Linux machines....hence, interoperability.

yes, althought IANAL, I think Yahoo could possibly pull some DMCA stunt to go after folks.

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[Yrd]

Copying DVDs without DeCSS is possible, yes... copying them into other formats is a lot easier with DeCSS though. And that's all the MPAA see :-(

Yahoo could pull something with the DMCA, but hopefully it would be shot down in court. Interoperability is essential! Although if everyone thought that, Microsoft would have open file formats.

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[arkanes]

Sort of correct. The courts ruled that DeCSS didn't have signifigant non-infringing use, and that it's intented and main use was not compatibility, but copyright infringment. The DeCSS team argued otherwise, of course, but was not sufficently convincing.

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[jezor]

The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are not actually about infringement; they are separate restrictions beyond copyright. The question of "significant non-infringing use" is not really relevant to the anti-circumvention debate. {Jonathan}

-------------------
Prof. Jonathan I. Ezor
Associate Professor of Law and Technology
Director, Institute for Business, Law and Technology (IBLT)
Touro Law Center
300 Nassau Road, Huntington, NY 11743
Tel: 631-421-2244 x412 Fax: 516-977-3001
e. jezor@tourolaw.edu
BizLawTech Blog: http://iblt.tourolaw.edu/blog

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[file-exists-p]

AFAIU, the DMCA criminalizes the design of circumvention devices, whatever their usage may be. Then, everything is in the definition of 'circumvention' ?

For instance interoperability between a remote controler and a garage door is allowed, but interoperability between an OS and a DVD is not ? What matters is the state of mind of the guy who made the thing one try to deal with ? If I make my DVD standard to be a "protection", then bypassing it is circumvention ? Then the garage trial would have had finished another way if, say, the protocole had been encrypted or something ?

Do we both agree that it's sort of hard/impossible to predict by advance what is and what is not allowed ?

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

I Agree, I think the recent "security" enhancements to MSM are setting up DMCA circumvention legal suits to those people who try to use their service. Yahoo my be able to do the same if the new "protocol" has security additions that are designed to prevent the service (copyrighted software) from being used by someone else.

Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA?

[jonbryce]

DeCSS is a tool which is allegedly used to assist in copying DVDs. There is nothing you could argue that Trillian is assisting in copying, as far as I am aware.

Why bother?

[stratjakt]

Why don't we all just say screw these proprietary IM clients.

If all your non-techie friends know that they cant contact you for free tech support over MSN or Yahoo, they wont use it.

Let them die due to lack of use, or at least cripple 'em. Don't legitimize that kind of dogshit.

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they'll realize that you're a freak, and won't talk to you anymore. But at least your self-righteousness will keep you from being lonely, right?

Re:Why bother?

[westlake]

This is "insightful?"

Have you seen your non-techie friends on IRC or USENET lately? I thought not. IM is where it's at. But, Hey Geek! look around, you're just one name on a contact list and there are million others which can take your place.

Don't expect anyone to start crying in their beer because you dislike their proprietary IM clients.

MSN?

[golgotha007]

Isn't Microsoft supposed to be blocking as well? Is there an exact date when this will happen?

Re:MSN?

[puck71]

October 15 is the announced lock-out date for older versions of the client.

Re:MSN?

[MynockGuano]

October 15

Re:MSN?

[colinleroy]

Most of the opensource clients have already catched up with new new protocol (trillian, gaim, ayttm, eb-lite and more).

Re:MSN?

[Anonymous Coward]

trillian thought they had with yahoo (they managed to make the warning go away)

THEY WERE WRONG

why couldn't the same happen with msn

Slashdot summary

[Syberghost]

Summary of the current state of discussion regarding Yahoo on Slashdot:

1. "Poor Yahoo. Nasty Indian government officials restricting this company from providing its valuable services to the internet."

2. "Damn Yahoo. Nasty corporate goons restricting people from using its services. We should all switch to Jabber."

Re:Slashdot summary

[theantix]

Wow, it's almost like reality can't be summarized into a battle of Good vs. Evil. If slashdot can figure this out, perhaps someone can inform President Bush... there is still hope!

Re:Slashdot summary

[Syberghost]

Wow, it's almost like reality can't be summarized into a battle of Good vs. Evil.

If you think there's no such thing as Evil, you can't see the forest because you're a tree.

Re:Slashdot summary

[Anonymous Coward]

While this is true, it makes my weiner hurt. Perhaps you could discuss something more pleasant.

Re:Could this be considered terrorism?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be "slash slash" not backslashes, moron.

Source

[rf0]

Downloaded the source, compiled, restarted gaim. Got pounced on by customers. Fantastic :)

However good job to Trillain for passing the code on. Lets just see how long it lasts though as I can't help but think yahoo will change the protocol again

Rus

Re:Source

[rusty0101]

Unfortunately they don't need to change the protocol at all to break compatibility for the moment.

The authentication protocol in question uses a table of authentication options. Currently they are using a function that has been cracked. The table in question has a large number of possible functions that can be used as alternatives, and in combination. Since only the one function is being used, it is the only one that can be declared to be working as expected. The remaining functions can be used by Yahoo at any time, simply by changing the request to the client to use a different function, or combination of functions. When that happens, unless the remaining functions have been tested somehow, alternative clients will loose compatibility for a time.

When the initial announcements started comming out that Yahoo was going to a new protocol, I responded to one of them with a thank you for providing me with a further incentive to ask my buddies and friends to move to Jabber or another Open source IM platform.

Then again, I could be wrong. You can go search the message boards for yourself.

-Rusty

libYahoo

[Numeric]

from the fire release notes:

Yahoo!(R)
- Updated to libyahoo2 v 0.7.2(http://libyahoo.sourceforge.net) (gb/ah) Thanks to Philip Tellis and the libyahoo2 team for releasing a fix. Thanks also to the GAIM team for engineering the new authentication mechanism and publishing the results to the open source community.

Re:libYahoo

[Speed Racer]

Didn't the GAIM team get the fix from Cerulean? At least that's what they seem to say here.

Re:libYahoo

[DemonMucha]

Shhhh.... A developer for a WINDOWS program helped the open source people!! Say it ain't so joe! And yes, They did help them out. From the front page: Our friends over at Cerulean Studios managed to break my speed record at cracking Yahoo authentication schemes with an impressive feat of hackery. They sent it over and here it is in Gaim 0.70.

Re:libYahoo

[brianosaurus]

GAIM got a fix from Cerulean, but they made some tweaks to make it work on Mac and other big-endian computers. the comments in the gaim code gives "uber-mad props" to Cerulean.

I'm just happy to be able to get back on Yahoo IM after a few days "off".

What about MSN?

[Kandel]

It's great to see that the third-party client arena has recieved some lime-light recently, but what Microsofts effort to block third-party clients? I knew that they were going to block these clients the day after the shutting down of their online-chatting facilities, which I believe has already occured.
Is it possible that these changes have been made, and that third party clients have been unaffected?

Re:This story can also be found at

[LiquidCoooled]

errrrrrrrrrrr dont mean to burst your bubble, but this link is ancient - it was published in 2001.
It involves the MSN Messenger crash and chaos that caused:

MSN Messenger Restored, But Some Buddies Lost Service is running after a week of intermittent problems, but some data destroyed.

Jennifer DiSabatino, Computerworld Tuesday, July 10, 2001

Maybe in your primative web browser!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, IE automagically fixes that for me so I don't need to know the difference!

Re:Maybe in your primative web browser!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is rote memorization of inane trivia just in order to accomplish a simple task something to be proud of?

You must use *BSD!

Re:Maybe in your primative web browser!

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it "inane trivia" or "rote memorization"? Thats like claiming spelling or grammar is "inane trivia". Just admit it, you're ignorant and proud. I bet you must be a Libertarian![1]

[1]: I was going to put "Republican", but then I realised that Republicans at least have some basic grasp of reality.

Re:Maybe in your primative web browser!

[Anonymous Coward]

d00d, th|5 |5 5l45hd0t, it's a frognoe cnoclsuion taht sepllnig and garmmar are ianne tirvia! (Wh0t's this cahratcer (&) called agian?)

How odd...

[mblase]

A few days ago, I was using Trillian until it started crashing at login every time. A few news articles later informed me that Yahoo's tweaks were to blame.

Frustrated, I did a quick search for other third-party clients and found Easy Message. It's small, not very customizable, but it does the job and connects to my Yahoo account with (as far as I can tell) no problems.

Very strange. But to be honest, I didn't like Trillian as much as I wanted to anyway.

Re:How odd...

[damn_hippy]

..and if you bothered to download the trillian patch you would see it doesnt crash anymore.

Re:How odd...

[batkiwi]

From their front page:

September 25, 2003 Yahoo support is currently down. A fix is currently being created and will be updated ASAP.

and then

September 28, 2003 The Yahoo service is Easy Message is now back online. Easy Message was updated today to version 2.3.640 supporting Yahoo Messenger's new password authentication process. The new process includes multiple layers of hashing, (not necessarily more secure), including MD5, HMAC-SHA1, and some of what looks like Yahoo's own encoding.

so it looks like they had the same problem as everyone else.

Re:How odd...

[lightspawn]

A few days ago, I was using Trillian until it started crashing at login every time. A few news articles later informed me that Yahoo's tweaks were to blame.

So the application crashed, and it was the fault of a company that has nothing to do with the application vendor? That is very odd indeed.

Re:How odd...

[Knightmare]

Yahoo is not at fault for the application crashing, that would be poor bounds checking and error handling on the part of the Trillian developers. Writing fragile code when you are coding to a reverse engineered standard is pretty unacceptable...

Re:How odd...

[Anonymous Coward]

0.74E was crashing for me yesterday.

Re:How odd...

[Anonymous Coward]

So trillian developers are supposed to write code, in advance, for any and every possible changes yahoo may make in the future. It is just like saying the sportscasters are suppose to know the final score before the game is even played.

Re:How odd...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I don't think its unreasonable to expect that whatever the network throws at you, you keep the program from crashing.

Re:How odd...

[Anonymous Coward]

i used the 0.74 version of trillian, and it works fine, but when i upgraded to 0.74e it started crashing every time it started. thankfully i backed up before i upgraded so im back to usin the older version for now

Re:How odd...

[catbutt]

Agree (in a perfect world), but reality is that early versions (alphas and betas) of most programs will crash here and there due to one bug or another. People report the crashes, they track down the bugs and fix them. With something like this, the bug slipped through because the thing that triggered it never happened till now.

Not saying that it *should* have happened, just saying that it isn't surprising that hard-to-test-for bugs can slip through.

Re:How odd...

[RoundSparrow]

Are you sure it was a true crash?
A lot of users use the term crash when they mean "does not work" or even a error dialog they consider a "crash".
Let alone how the word Bug is often used to mean "feature I want".

Re:How odd...

[Espectr0]

easy message sucks. no tabbed windows a la gaim, and it asks permission for the 600 people in my reverse list (msn) to be added.

The only good thing about it is its size. BTW, their webpage listed yahoo as broken too.

Re:How odd...

[Anonymous Coward]

whatever. the blame for the crash of an application *always* goes on the application vendor.
"but that behavior wasn't expected!"
exceptional safety, read about it.

Re:How odd...

[efextra]

Yes, it is a "true" crash. The application shuts down shortly after starting and Windows XP aks you to submit a error report to MS website. If you submit the report, a webpage opens up advising you to contact Cerulean Studios.

Re:How odd...

[ZZT2]

Funny thing, if you would look at the Trillian site, you would know that logic only works if you're using Trillian Pro. Cerulean Studios didn't release a patch for basic Trillian yet concerning the Yahoo! connection issue.

Re:How odd...

[CowboyMeal]

The application still shouldn't *crash* when it recieves garbage from Yahoo. Any network application should be able to accept garbage from the host it's connecting to without crashing. Especially an IM application in this hostile environment.

but thinking of the economics of it

[Knights who say 'INT]

Being pleased that privately owned protocols are being left open with a limited license is short-sighted. Even Yahoo realizes the meaning of "network externalities". Shouldn't they be adopting an open basic protocol - even if they are going to extend it with proprietary featuritis? You can't blame people for acting in their best interest, and you can't bleat once ICQ lite is turned into bloatware again. That's the way it works.

Re:This story can also be found at

[Anonymous Coward]

he's a troll! duh!

Re:Cooperation (no, QAing)

[otisg]

Trillian people didn't make this patch available in their free version, but they did give it to GAIM developers. Weird, no?
Sounds like they are just using GAIM and its community, which probablly includes more sw developers than Trillian has behind it, to do some QAing and bug fixing for Trillian.

dmca

[kipple]

what about DMCA concerns? couldn't this be considered reverse engineering?

Re:dmca

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Reverse engineering FOR THE PURPOSES OF INTEROPERABILITY....protected from the DMCA

I am not a lawyer

Re:dmca

[squiggleslash]

1. There are no DMCA concerns, nothing to do with copyright is being breached.

2. Reverse engineering is legal

Only implementing certain algorithms (such as to bypass an access control mechanism for a copyrighted work) or breaking contracts is illegal (in some shape or form.) Neither apply in this case.

Re:dmca

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

But if the code MSM added was for the purpose of protecting access to their copyrighted code then they can claim that circumvention of that code "IS" a violation of DMCA, as this is not just matching a protocol for interoperability.

I don't know if Yahoo changes contained Security features like Microsoft claimed for the new changes to MSM

YahElite up to date!

[adipocere]

YahElite was also prevented from working, maybe about a month ago, but as of last week, the updates allow YahElite to once again function with the Yahoo network.

Yahoo is alright, it's nice that they have sort of a directory structure to build the rooms off of (I still have a hard time not saying "channel"), and the lack of published IP address prevents people from trying to nuke your box directly, but its standard client is the buggiest, cobbled-together piece of crap. It combines the worst elements of very old-school HTML with C in that you can actually tag things to cause, well, I don't know about buffer overflows, but something that will lock the program up, and pretty easily. Certainly, nobody programming it learned the lessons taught by IRC. Worse yet, it has built-in ad space. FLASH ad space, enormous Flash ads guaranteed to send my pitiful processor to the ceiling. I don't mind paying a little mindshare and eye real estate to pay for the service, but it has to leave my computer at the least functional. Messenger is so wretched in terms of stability that someone has written a now pay-for program to bolt over the IM client so that it does not crumple at the slightest sign of trouble.

There is, of course, a Java IM client written by Yahoo, but its functionality is limited. More importantly, it's annoying and slow.

In short, it's not just the uninteroperability (to coin a bad word) of the default clients that drives people to third-party clients, it's the fact that, even if you were only using one network, most of these clients SUCK. These large companies could wipe out the third party guys if they spent a fraction of what they use to lawyer on, oh, serious programming with an eye towards reliability and user interface issues, rather than alluring gee-gaws that end up being more irritating than useful.

Re:YahElite up to date!

[pantycrickets]

Messenger is so wretched in terms of stability that someone has written a now pay-for program to bolt over the IM client so that it does not crumple at the slightest sign of trouble.

I've used Yahoo for messaging for a couple of years now, and have never had it crash once. It's running 24/7. It has more features than any other standard IM software. Webcam, chat rooms, themes, voice, send files with online caching.. etc. I mean compared to ICQ or AIM, it seems like it's obviously the superior choice. I don't really get why people don't like it, or say it's unstable and things like that.

There is, of course, a Java IM client written by Yahoo, but its functionality is limited. More importantly, it's annoying and slow.

[troll]Java, annoying, slow? Surely you jest![/troll] :)

Yahoo blocks...

[gid]

Well the recent Yahoo block convinced my girlfriend to stop using it and switch to ICQ, since she shouldn't talk to me any longer since I was running Gaim, and her dad runs ICQ as well. Now Gaim has since restored connectivity to Yahoo, but I recently ditched Gaim on windows since it runs like crap on it, randomly locks up, crashes, etc. I could file a bug report, but the fact is that I want something that works now.

Oddly enough I was running Trillian/free before all this, and switched to Gaim because Trillian was confusing the shit out me, with it's plethora of options, I got tired of fucking with it. Sure I can figure it out, but I'd rather not have to figure it out, I'd rather just use it, and put my brain to use where it belongs, in my Job..

I now run Miranda again like I did long ago when it was the lone messenger on Windows which is also free and still runs like a dream. Although no buddy icons in aim :( for it. Who knows why I switched from Miranda to Trillian, probably because my buddy was touting it. Kinda fun that I'm back at square one now. :)

I still run Gaim on linux tho, as it runs perfect there.

My point? Miranda has to be the best free client out there. :)

Re:Yahoo blocks...

[Jugalator]

Yes, I agree Miranda is a great and super configurable IM. You basically make it what you want to, and before you should even think about Miranda might be missing a feature, you should look at the plugin section containing around 200 categorized plugins. :) The plugins in Miranda get access to lots of areas of the IM, so even if Miranda for example didn't support displaying which soundtrack Winamp plays, or even smileys, these features can still be enabled through simple plugins. You can also make it look quite beautiful by skinning it and using some professional-quality graphics plugins.

Re:Yahoo blocks...

[BladeMelbourne]

I use GAIM 0.70 in Linux, and Miranda 0.3.1 in Windows in a VMWare window. It's much easier to block/unblock MSN contacts in Miranda. Miranda is WAY smaller to download.

Miranda users who use Yahoo will want to go to: http://www.coincoins.net/index.php?id=59
to get the latest unofficial Yahoo plugin. It doesn't appear on the plugin page of miranda-im.org, probably because it's very beta.

Mike

Yahoo plans to release source

[GillBates0]

Everybody bickering about Yahoo trying to kill of "competing" clients, RTFA, and take note of this:

Yahoo has been trying to help the other Y! messenger clients update their code to work with the new protocol....they're NOT trying to kill them off.

I'm particularly happy to see this move, because Yahoo is about the only big corporation which is working on Unix versions of their client. Yahoo has Solaris, BSD, and Linux versions of the messenger. Moreover, from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ymessenger/ mailing list they're ACTUALLY speculating on releasing their source code for their UNIX clients:

Subject: New poll for ymessenger

Enter your vote today! A new poll has been created for the ymessenger group:

Would you like to have access to Yahoo Messenger Sources?

o Yes
o No
o Why should I?

To vote, please visit the following web page:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ymessenger/surveys ?i d=11283317

Note: Please do not reply to this message. Poll votes are not collected via email. To vote, you must go to the Yahoo! Groups web site listed above.

Thanks!

Re:Yahoo plans to release source

[Anonymous Coward]

The link to the poll is here. (registration required for group membership).

Re:Yahoo plans to release source

[XO]

It's too bad those Unix clients haven't been updated in 3 years.

Re:Yahoo plans to release source

[mytec]

"...Yahoo has Solaris, BSD, and Linux versions of the messenger..." To further support your point, Yahoo has an OS X client as well. http://download.yahoo.com/dl/mac/ymsgr_2.5.3-osx_i nstall.bin

Re:Yahoo plans to release source

[g1zmo]

I've been lurking on this group for some time now, and have never seen this poll. I just logged in and still don't see any poll even remotely similar to what you mentioned.

I think we've been trolled.

Re:Yahoo plans to release source

[arkane1234]

Yeah, that's why they just updated to 1.0.somethingorother from .9somethingorother.

Re:Yahoo plans to release source

[XO]

hmm. checked it last night, and it was still the same big ass pile o' crap client that they've had on there for years. and it wouldn't login either. maybe they updated the auth code today? dunno.

with luck they've done some actual development, rather than just tweaking the auth code, so that it's not a big pile o' pooh.

Re:Yahoo plans to release source

[Anonymous Coward]

mister, you can bore it, stroke it, and jam it up your old tan track just as fast and as far as it will go.

The IM bloc (Yahoo, AOL, et al) will lose this one

[Ophidian P. Jones]

These companies need to get smart. These protocol changes are going to be reverse engineered. There's just too many people who are too smart and too willing to work in groups for lockout strategies to work. A protocol change won't chase away these guys; it makes them drool.

What lockouts do, however, is annoy the rest of the user base. Some people won't want to upgrade. Some people don't want to use Yahoo!'s software or can't. Most people don't want to be warned about impending protocol changes every time they login. Almost everyone wants to be able to talk to their friends, regardless of their friends' software choices. These lockouts hurt the people using the official client just as much as everyone else. The only way Yahoo!'s going to stay a step ahead of hackers is to kill their service: repeated protocol changes will do it.

What needs to happen is cooperation. IM providers can make life easier on developers by offering specs. These benefits trickle down to users, since they always have the latest and greatest. Developers can return the favor to the IM providers by agreeing to introduce branding. The IM provider benefits overall by not threatening its userbase with lockouts, in addition to the publicity (and credibility) boost among geeks and others. "Don't like our software? Yahoo! supports the Open Source and Free Software movements by providing protocol documentation for our popular services. Read more here!" Imagine that!

One has to wonder if AIM would be faring better had AOL committed to this strategy, rather than going only a quarter of the way.

The Jabber Yahoo transport...

[Hawke666]

...also has a fix in CVS.

Re:Cooperation (no, QAing)

[wo1verin3]

>> Trillian people didn't make this patch
>> available in their free version,

Not yet. The Pro version was first priority but have announced patches will be available for all versions.

Yahoo Patch Beta 1 is available for Pro customers; patches for 1.0 and .74 are on the way and will be released once the patch is 100%...

Source: http://www.trillian.cc/ (Bottom right of page)

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[frp001]

I don't know if Y!Messenger is inferior or not. But I've got to the point where I'm fed up : If Y!, MSN & others do not want us, what's the point?
I've moved on to Jabber and suggested to all my friends to follow on. If they don't tough luck for me; I could still reach some through MSN gateway (until oct 15th?)
I will not relog into Y! again and if MSN breaks again, I'll take it as a sign...

And as stated above : afterall "cool people use Jabber" ;-)

Re:This story can also be found at

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, don't burst his bubble!

Re:Cooperation (no, QAing)

[ChipX86]

You know what they say about "assume."

We helped Trillian awhile back connect to Yahoo when they changed the protocol. They're returning the favor. We have a good relationship with the Trillian people.

Re:Cooperation (no, QAing)

[Lshmael]

...or it could be just another way to convince people using the free version of Trillian to upgrade to the paid version. There are certain features in Trillian Pro that are not included in the free version of Trillian; it seems that Yahoo! support has been added to that list.

What was the purpose of the change?

[RichiP]

From the new protocol, can anyone gather what and more importantly why Yahoo changed? Was it security reasons? Or was it simply to lock other clients out?

Re:What was the purpose of the change?

[Anonymous Coward]

they "claim" it was blocking spam

but noone can verify whether this was the real reason or not

Competition...

[johnwyles]

I see one of two things happening:

- The companies of the top IM clients will start making it impossible (for sure this time) to piggy back without their official client

- They will keep doing what they have been doing in smaller incriments to create a developer maintenance nightmare to support the protocol.

- Third I have listed anyway: the companies will cooperate and help provide information on how to support the protocol (yeah right, this doesn't make money and that's what they're after first and foremost)

I only hope that there is a single open source IM protocol that everyone will use and that is scalable above and beyond the current IM clients/protocols. *cough*jabber*cough*

Re:Cooperation (no, QAing)

[typobox43]

I don't consider it so weird. First of all, the patch is still considered beta (and if you frequent their forums, you will see people who it hasn't fixed the problem for - I don't think anyone's crashing anymore, but some still can't connect.) Also, from what I see there wasn't really a patch per se submitted to Gaim by Cerulean - more like a quick doc on the "new" protocol.

I always wonder about these sorts of converation..

[Osrin]

"It's only fair that we get to use their protocol".

Surely the debate has little if anything to do with the protocol, it has everything to do with Yahoo's server base that sits behind their IM client and the business model that they have in place that sustains those servers.

Sure, we all have a right to use the protocol, it's only bits and bytes and does not cost anybody anything. Who gives us the right to use their servers though?

#GAIM

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically, the GAIM dev team uses an IRC channel.

OrngeTide: The solution to this point is to buy ungoldy over-priced expensive hardware that you would max out and be very careful when doing shit.
stryst, i am well aware of what needs and what uses real-time.
OrngeTide: Exactly... It's time for a real real-time OS.
So you're planning on selling your OS to tivo and make a cool 100 million? then have Letterman promote it too?
OrngeTide: One of the many problems my OS will solve.
stryst, vxworks and pSos definently fit their own definition of real-time which is good enough for fighter jet instrumentation.
oddly enough.
zapbranni: I plan on making the OS for myself and letting someone else worry about selling it.
How many years in development is it?
OrngeTide: Dear God VXWorks is horrible.
OrngeTide: What's pSos?
zapbranni: Only a few months but it's a collection of ideas I've had for awhile.
zapbranni: I'm still in the research and design phase.
stryst, vxworks nucleus is okay. the add-on shit they sell you is utter garbage. i know the people who wrote both the garbage and the nucleus. ehhe.

Re:#GAIM

[mschoolbus]

Ironically, the GAIM dev team uses an IRC channel

Yea... Give their IRC client a try sometime...

Re:#GAIM

[arkane1234]

Ironically, the GAIM dev team uses an IRC channel.

What's so ironic about that?
IRC has been around for one hell of alot longer than IM, and there's a plugin on gaim for it.

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[pirhana]

I guess you are from US. Yahoo messenger(or even msn) wouldnt be very popular there. But thats not the case in other parts of world. Where I know(India and now Middle east) yahoo and msn are extremely popular and AIM is virtually absent. And regarding your comment on not using yahoo, its a fine idea but not practical IMHO . Because people use it and if you need to chat with them, you have to use it(or something like gaim which speaks that protocol). Also, I dont think yahoo protocol is inferior comparing to msn and all. It has some cool features like offline messaging and "invisible mode" which seems to be absent in others (atleast msn, I dont know about AIM).

Giving away secrets?

[mr100percent]

Tell me, what's to stop Yahoo! (or AOL or MSN) from just looking at this source and patching their holes that allow these clients access? You're boldly telling your opponent (Yahoo) how you are going to sneak past them before you make the attempt.

Re:Giving away secrets?

[Loonacy]

Tell me, what's to stop Yahoo! (or AOL or MSN) from just looking at this source and patching their holes that allow these clients access?

Then they'd have to patch their official client, and then the users of the official clients would have to go and upgrade. There are only so many times you can force users to upgrade before they'll start jumping ship.

The wrong approach ...

[merdaccia]

As much as I respect the Trillian and Gaim developers for adapting their clients on such short notice, I think they've got the wrong approach to the whole IM thing. For now, the two groups (or group and company I guess) are integrating IM clients into a single program with a clean interface. Many of us love the idea, and use their two clients, but this isn't fixing the underlying problems which allow MS and Yahoo to cause havoc by modifying their proprietary protocols. What Gaim and Trillian need to do is integrate users.

The main instant messaging protocols are already supported, namely Yahoo, AIM, MSN and ICQ. The problem, which has been addressed a ton of times on /., is that users go to the IM network that their friends are on, and so all four networks (with ICQ trailing) have significant user bases. But this can change if Gaim and Trillian get a bit creative. Simply put, add an open source protocol to the mix of supported protocols (Jabber) and let the rest work itself out.

What I think would happen is that Gaim and Trillian users would use Jabber to talk to each other, and use the commercial protocols to talk to the rest of their friends. As time goes on, these other friends could be migrated to Trillian or Gaim, maintaining contact with their MSN/AIM/etc buddies while now speaking Jabber to their Trillian and Gaim friends. This could be repeated indefinitely, and as Gaim and Trillian's user bases grow over time, there would be no reason to use commercial protocols because most people would already speak Jabber, courtesy of Gaim and Trillian supporting it.

In short, I believe Gaim and Trillian could serve as middlemen in switching users over to open source protocols like Jabber. The clients' ability to speak a multitude of protocols can bridge the gap between those pushing forward to open source protocols and those retaining backwards compatibility to their commercial protocol speaking friends.

Re:The wrong approach ...

[catbutt]

I agree completely. Although you may not know it, Trillian *does* have a Jabber plug-in. It is only for the pro version now, but I there are indications they are going to put it in the free version soon.

I posted this to trillians message board the other day (I can't link to it directly because it is in the paid users only group), which suggests a way to transition people by getting ISP's invloved.

Re:The wrong approach ...

[myz24]

Why has ICQ lost so much "market share" IIRC, it used to be the only way to go and then all of a sudden it just wasn't. I know I quit using it because it kept my contacts local only make it a pain to re-add everyone if I reinstalled my machine or signed on from somewhere else.

Re:The wrong approach ...

[Espectr0]

yes, yes, jabber rules because it's open source... but in the real world, jabber sucks, no web cam, audio, file sending/receiving through the im transports, buddy icons, etc.

People will use jabber when it gets good enough to be used other than in a corporate environtment

Re:The wrong approach ...

[ImpTech]

Hmm... well that all sounds very nice, except that it doesn't seem to really work. Why do I say that? Because GAIM at least (and supposedly Trillian pro) already have Jabber connectivity. And you know what? Nobody's transitioning. Its still far easier to just use my AIM account to talk to my Windows friends rather than try and convince them to use Jabber, and my Linux friends feel the same, so everybody just uses AIM. For that matter, I don't even know anybody who uses Jabber. Its a real "if it ain't broke..." type of problem. Currently we can all use AIM, ICQ, and (once again) Yahoo, so nobody sees the need to go to something like Jabber. One day perhaps they will, and fortunately the clients are already available to help, but I still think that day is a ways off.

WTF does Cerulean have to do with Yahoo...

[s88]

I am having trouble following your argument after I RYFP.

So I am to take away that Yahoo is "actually fostering a good relationship between "competing" clients" because "Cerulean studios actually *sent* the GAIM folk the protocol"?

Last time I checked, Cerulean studios != Yahooo, and Cerulean studios action having nothing to Fin do with Yahoo's stance on third party clients.

Scott

Re:WTF does Cerulean have to do with Yahoo...

[Idimmu Xul]

You're a bit think aren't you.

It was CLEARLY a tongue in cheak statement, due to Yahoo trying to block other third party messaging clients, they are now banding together and sharing resources in order to beable to access Yahoo's network again. As such Yahoo have inadvertantly 'fostered' a good relationship between the different third party vendors.

Re:WTF does Cerulean have to do with Yahoo...

[s88]

Yes I am think.

Oww, my IM client!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not supposed to get jigs in it!

Whever I see the IM wars start up again...

[Trolling4Dollars]

...all I can picture is the "Rock-em Sock-em Robots" (as MS and Yahoo) having at each other. It's a damn funny image if you ask me. Speaking of which, how many here think that iD software got their inspiration for the Doom and Quake soldiers from Rock-em Sock-em Robots?

YHBT by Seth FINK-LE-STEIN, not FINK-EL-STEIN

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT! Seth "Finklestein" is a phony, not "Seth Finkelstein".

deCSS

[headkase]

Also, if deCSS was part of a larger program that played DVD's under Linux then in my opinion it would have much stronger grounds in the DMCA interoperability context. But just by itself, with one function of decoding the CSS stream, it is very vulnerable to being labeled a piracy tool.

Re:deCSS

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course, the idea that writing the code to decode the CSS stream was one step in writing that larger program never occurred to the court...

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[Tom7]

> Who gives us the right to use their servers though?

Nobody. That's why we shouldn't use non-open networks.

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[Anonymous Coward]

Man.. He didn't even mention AIM...
JABBER -> http://www.jabber.org
And get your friends on it too!

Try reading the homepage first

[Lizard_King]

Quoth Cerulean: "Yahoo Patch Beta 1 is available for Pro customers; patches for 1.0 and .74 are on the way and will be released once the patch is 100%... "

That's right on their homepage. Its in the "News" column. I couldn't find anywhere on their site that said they're only releasing to paying customers. Stop the FUD please. Cerulean Studios creates a good product and has a good history of responding to protocol changes and communicating to customers.

Re:Try reading the homepage first

[sciencewhiz]

Trillian Pro is for paying customers only. .74 (and earlier) is the only free version, and they are witholding the patch for it for the time being.

Stop the FUD please.

Re:Try reading the homepage first

[Lizard_King]

Thanks genius. They've done this before in the past... Paying customers have a right to download the patch before the masses using the free version (including myself) consume most of their bandwidth.

Nowhere (nor have they ever) do they comminucate to their user population that they are only releasing to paying customers.

Back in my time......

[aaron_ds]

Having Yahoo change their protocol once is small compared to what things used to be like. When I first started using trillian, long long ago when there was only one version of trillian and it was completely free. AOL varied its protocol almost daily in attempt to block third party clients. Ultimatly it failed, due to the perserverence of the Cerulean team. Things used to be a lot lot worse. Its not like we didnt know it was comming a month in advance either; Yahoo even warned us, we those annoying IM ads. If yahoo truely wanted to block all third party clients, I believe it wouild resort to varying its protocol similar to what AOL did.

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[drinkypoo]

The right to use the protocol, while debatable, is an issue for developers. The right to use the servers, which as far as I'm concerned is nonexistent (I use Yahoo! for yahoo, ICQ for ICQ, MSNM for MSN and so on, because no other client supports all the features of these networks - well except ICQ which doesn't really have any) is an issue for users.

centericq also updated

[xenoweeno]

centericq is also fixed for Yahoo in the latest CVS.

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[Osrin]

so in an "open" network who provides the server services that Yahoo currently deliver? who provides directory services, and why would they do it?

The "open" community developed bind/DNS a long time ago to provide a distributed directory service for finding machines, is it time we started looking at some similar mechinism for finding people and setting about doing the work to make it pervasive?

Trillian phones home

[alexo]

FYI: Trillian 2.0 Pro tries to authenticate the user over the internet and refuses to work if it cannot contact the Cerulean Studios servers.

This misfeature originally appeared in the beta and we (the users) were led to believe (in the forums) that it will not make it into the final release. Guess what, it did.

This creates problems with users behind corporate firewalls, those running local servers on intranets, etc. It makes Trillian vulnerable to DOS attacks on a single source and in general is a pain (for example, on my machine it starts and tries to connect before the SW firewall finishes loading).

While "patches" for this behaviour are widely available (no, I will not link to one, use your favourite "crack search" site then contemplate the fallacy of "copy protection"), I see it more as a trust issue.
Cerulean Studios doesn't trust me (a paying customer) and, after that stunt, I have a hard time trusting them.

Therefore, I am no longer recommending Trillian to anyone. Rather, I urge people to look at the available alternatives (Gaim, Easy Message, AYTTM and others).

Hmmm... Can anyone take it upon themselves to compile a comparison between the available multiprotocol IM clients?

Re:Trillian phones home

[rmohr02]

My opinion of Cerulean Studios just changed when I found out they submitted their Yahoo fix to Gaim, but not it's just changed back. O well. I liked them for 10 minutes.

Re:Trillian phones home

[rmohr02]

- not
+ now

Re:Trillian phones home

[alexo]

> My opinion of Cerulean Studios just changed when I found out they submitted their Yahoo fix to Gaim, but [now] it's just changed back. O well. I liked them for 10 minutes.

No need to change your opinion so often...

1) See this message: "We helped Trillian awhile back connect to Yahoo when they changed the protocol. They're returning the favor. We have a good relationship with the Trillian people."

2) The "phone home" misfeature does not mean that Cerulean studios are "evil", just misguided.

Re:Trillian phones home

[Griim]

Personally I'd use Gaim over Trillian except that Trillian will show my individual status on each protocol, as well as any mail sitting in my Yahoo/hotmail accounts; Gaim does not. Gaim *does* pop up a notice if you get new mail (at least in Hotmail), but if you ignore that popup, it's gone.

Otherwise, Gaim is much more lightweight, if it had the above two features, I would use it instead.

Re:Trillian phones home

[M3wThr33]

There's a good reason not to trust customers, because searching for Trillian online has more cracked versions than anything else. I'm fine with depending on them to sign on, but they need to find a better way to authenticate it.

Re:Trillian phones home

[alexo]

> There's a good reason not to trust customers, because searching for Trillian online has more cracked versions than anything else. I'm fine with depending on them to sign on, but they need to find a better way to authenticate it.

So, as usual, the "protection" inconveniences the legitimate users while having no effect on the illegitimate ones.

When will they learn???

Re:Trillian phones home

[kyhwana]

Well, Miranda-IM does this.
http://www.miranda-im.org
It supports all the protocols and has a libyahoo2 plugin that seems to be working.

(It's an open source windows client)

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[greed]

Surely the debate has little if anything to do with the protocol, it has everything to do with Yahoo's server base that sits behind their IM client and the business model that they have in place that sustains those servers.

Having recently had to switch to the truly abysmal Yahoo! Mac OS X client, I can't figure out which business model you could possibly be referring to.

The official Mac OS client, while being a good example of a bad UI:

• Does not display advertisements.
• Does not automatically open a web browser to any of Yahoo!'s sites (it will if you click on certain things).
• Does not require any sort of payment to use.
• Does play distorted sounds at 150% relative system volume (not adjustable), with a very noticable pop at the start and finish (bad sample editing--non-zero at ends?)
• Does look like someone converted a Windows program to Mac OS Classic and then to Mac OS X and didn't understand any of the UI conventions on the 3 systems.

If that's a business model, I have no sympathies for them. I do have friends on Yahoo!, so I'll be using something other than Yahoo!'s awful client to connect. (Hopefully Proteus 3, but Fire will do nicely if Proteus doesn't make me happy.)

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's really open. Or didn't you notice the story about a company screwing everything up?

What about the network?

[C0C0C0]

This is a bit more challenging than deciding on a common protocal and grabbing a client off of SourceForge. What would we use for a network? The current Jabber plan is to use an interenal corporate network. Is someone willing to open that up to the masses? Would the masses want that to be hosted in a single place, like that? How could something like this be distributed, and still be real time? Obviously, this will need to involve a sort of "supernode" scheme, such is used for DNS. I haven't heard a whiff of something like this being in the works, though.

Re:What about the network?

[Darren Winsper]

Have you actually tried Jabber? It essentially works like e-mail in terms of addresses. I have my own Jabber server for my domain, whereas a friend of mine uses jabber.earth.li. I can see his presence in real-time and I can send messages to and from.

Jabbers distributed nature doesn't require anything in the form of a supernode at all. There is a central Jabber user directory, but it's by no means required.

Re:What about the network?

[C0C0C0]

Have you actually tried Jabber?

Well, I guess it's fairly obvious that I haven't, but I might now. Good info. Thanks.

Trillian 0.74E -- transitory solution

[ciurana]

Greetings,

Like a lot of people here I was experiencing the crashes every time Trillian tried to connect to Yahoo! Messenger. The quick and dirty solution is to go into your Trillian directory and rename yahoo.dll to whatever else, then start the program. All the other services will work just fine.

This may be a way to remain on-line until a patch is offered for 0.74. The current patch is only good for 2.0 Pro, as far as I know.

Cheers!

Eugene

Re:Trillian 0.74E -- transitory solution

[akharon]

Actually, the best way is to edit your yahoo.ini so that auto connect=0 instead of 1.

Want Telecom Deregulated?

[GoodNicsTken]

Think about this for a minute. Everyone agrees the current telecom inter-carrier payment system is a mess and needs an overhaul. However, IM is a perfect example of what would happen witout such systems in place.

We would have a bunch of independent companies refusing to talk to each other, forcing you buy thier phones (remember thoes days?), and not completeing calls between different companies. I'm a Trillian user, but I side with the IM provides on this one.

We need a good reliable, easy to use, open source, P2P IM network, then we can do away with all the nonsense.

Copy protection - One more reason for me to find a perfectly functional copy on the Internet.

Re:Want Telecom Deregulated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your contridicting yourself. You said IM is a perfect example of what would happen if the Telecom Industry was deregulated, however since they are doing just that and locking out 3rd party clients, wouldn't you be on the 3rd party side, since they are trying to mantain the protocals, to keep the service open? Instead you say your on the IM providers side, but they are locking out 3rd party clients. Your statements make no sense.

Now work with GYACH?

[wb9bbc]

As of last weekend, I have been unable to login to Yahoo using GYACH (v0.9.4) chat client on my linux box. Tho not a IM client, it has never failed log-in til their recent changes...I'd try myself, but am presently held captive to my WIN laptop.

Re:Now work with GYACH?

[buy_more_pepsi]

v0.9.6 was released a couple days ago.

Re:Now work with GYACH?

[wb9bbc]

Thanks for the update. As of SAT, they still listed 0.9.4 on their website. Good Find. tnx....bill

IM will rise again...

[Principal Skinner]

You mean like the South?

Barney: [dressed like Lincoln] But I'm not too crazy about our Stonewall Jackson.

[Apu emerges from the Men's room dressed like a Hindu military official]
Apu: The South shall [brightly] come again!

gaim, trillian

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Gaim, and fuck Trillian. Use Miranda if you're on Windows.

Trillian has 2 active verions..

[nurb432]

If you run the 'free' version, you are still outta luck..

Re: Ultimately....

[King_TJ]

I'm not sure I really see anything changing too drastically, whether they embrace or oppose 3rd. party clients.

Look at IRC. It's pretty much the original chat environment for the Internet, and still going strong after all these years. While the IRC client itself might be standard for all IRC servers, many different IRC networks are around that are cut off from each other.

If you're on EFNet, you can't see what's happening over on Undernet, without establishing a completely seperate connection to their network first.

IM chat is the same way. If I'm using ICQ, I can't chat with the people over on MSN Messenger. So what? You can run multiple IM clients if you desire, or you can try to come to agreement with your friends on which IM software they're going to standardize on so you can all talk to each other.

There will always be people trying to "break the rules" by building cross-network compatible clients, but it'll just be a "cat and mouse game" unless the network providers decide those clients are "ok" for use with their systems.

I get enough "spam IM's" as it is that I don't really want to be connected to several IM networks at one time! I chose to stick with ICQ, as did most of the people I want to chat with - and it serves the purpose.

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[pirhana]

I have utmost respect with his opinion about jabber and my post was not to criticize him. All I meant was yahoo IS popular and is not inferior as far as other POPULAR protocols are concerned.I admit, I dont know the intricacies of these protocols and am talking on the user perspective. Regarding Jabber, the problem is that nobody from my contact list (or an average user for that matter) uses it and its next to impossible to convince them to use it. I personally use free (speech) software for 99.9% of my use(both work and personal). I have been stubbornly doing so for a long time also. But IM clients are a different case and we are forced to use the proprietory protocols(atleast the Free software clients of it) IMHO.

Sick of this IM overlord crap

[LinuxHam]

Finally pushed me to install a Jabber server for my circle of friends. I've been using Gaim for a year or so, and its time to get my wife off Trillian ASAFP. I'm just sick of using closed source apps against a few servers who's owners occasionally show a propensity to piss all of us off.

Nice to have an alternative available that *I* control, end to end. And no, the Gaim Win32 interface does not suck. Just use the Wimp theme.

Re:Sick of this IM overlord crap

[catbutt]

Nice to have an alternative available that *I* control, end to end.

Well, I guess if you have that much control over all your contacts (and your wife), you are alright.

I find I generally have to talk to my contacts on the medium they already use.

Re:Sick of this IM overlord crap

[Anonymous Coward]

its time to get my wife off Trillian ASAFP

So that is the real problem, isnt it???

Re:Sick of this IM overlord crap

[LinuxHam]

Sounds like I have a much smaller circle of friends. Remember, too, that when you put up your own Jabber server, you can still connect with your contacts on those privately owned systems. The difference is that if they prefer to use a "chat aggregation client" like Gaim or Trillian, you will be able to offer them an alternative when the owners of their preferred IM system throw the big red switch on 3rd party clients.

Jabber was not built to just switch everyone over to a new, privately owned network. It was designed from the beginning to allow groups, defined any way you want, to run their own server, with its own custom features, but still link to any outside networks with their own set of users, either Jabber, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, or anything else.

Re:Sick of this IM overlord crap

[catbutt]

My version of trillian has jabber support (it's the pay version though, but I'm told that they will support jabber on future free versions). To me it is the best of both worlds....good connectivity to the main services, a nice interface, and a smooth migration path to jabber.

Only problem is I currently have exactly zero people on my jabber contact list...feel free be my first! (robbrown @ jabber.org)

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[eabell]

Tell me about it. I went traipsing about the globe recently, and AIM was on maybe one computer that I saw (and someone probably installed it there themselves). Yahoo was much, much more prevalent. This was in New Zealand & Australia, South Africa, and some bits of Europe.

As an unrelated aside, most annoying were internet cafes that didn't have any of them installed, and only had computers that let you web browse. You couldn't even open a regular telnet prompt on them. I'd heard rumors of a web-based Yahoo client or something, but figured even if it existed it'd require machine permissions those "web browser only" machines wouldn't have.

Other Anti Firewall Devices

[nurb432]

Are there any generic ways to do this via ssh ( or other tool )? Just forward a port or two, to your home machine, to get past a pain in the butt firewall?

Forwarding part is easy, but what about getting the clients to actually use the tunnel?

Http-tunnel is going pay.. their service was nice, but its too unstable fo pay for.

How about older GAIM versions like v0.59?

[antdude]

After v0.59, GAIM team changed the core libraries and requirements. I was unable to meet the new dependencies -- too messy and can't seem to meet the requirements. I am still using old Red Hat Linux 7.1 and 7.2. Is there a workaround to get its Yahoo Messenger working? apt-get says I already have the latest version. I tried compiling from source and that told me dependency problems. I am not planning to upgrade my old OS' for a while.

Thank you in advance.

Re:How about older GAIM versions like v0.59?

[EllF]

Erm? The only change is that you need to install GTK2. That's not hard, generally -- what seems to be giving you trouble?

Re:How about older GAIM versions like v0.59?

[antdude]

EllF: That's the thing. GTK2+ wants a bunch of updates to meet its requirements. Then, other packages wants all the other requirements. It never ends. If you want to help me privately, then please let me know. It drove me nuts!

Re:How about older GAIM versions like v0.59?

[The Analog Kid]

Ah, RPM hell, perhaps if you install APT-RPM?

Re:How about older GAIM versions like v0.59?

[antdude]

The Analog Kid: Isn't that the same with apt-get command? If so, then it told me I already have the latest version. :/

I guess no one updated GAIM for Red Hat 7.x. I could be wrong.

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[AlanS2002]

I guess you are from US. Yahoo messenger(or even msn) wouldnt be very popular there. But thats not the case in other parts of world. Where I know(India and now Middle east) yahoo and msn are extremely popular and AIM is virtually absent. And regarding your comment on not using yahoo, its a fine idea but not practical IMHO . Because people use it and if you need to chat with them, you have to use it(or something like gaim which speaks that protocol). Also, I dont think yahoo protocol is inferior comparing to msn and all. It has some cool features like offline messaging and "invisible mode" which seems to be absent in others (atleast msn, I dont know about AIM).

ICQ has both of those features that you mentioned. It's also pretty prevelant in Australia.

and her dad runs ICQ as well!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

What a romantic moment. I wonder how long before her dad's on your pr0n teen chat logs that you know he IS keeping!

Look before you yell

[GillBates0]

It's not My fault you can't perform a simple search in the archive. Just to help you out, it's message #354. Enter the keyword "sources" in the blank textbox and click on the rectangular "Search Archive" button. It's the 4th message in the list.

Look before you yell Troll.

Re:Look before you yell

[arekq]

I don't think he's trolling. I couldn't get to that poll either.

I only saw 3 open polls:

what do you consider most important for the future development of ymessenger?

Do you think there should be Yahoo Messenger releases for other arch's like ppc and sparc maybe?

Should the group be moderated to cut down on the whining and sniveling so the group can focus on more serious discussion?

Re:Cooperation (no, QAing)

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you actually take the time to read anything. Trillian has been extreamly careful and supportive of its free users.

What yahoo needs to do

[ShadowRage]

is support the opensource 3rd parties more becuase it's bad enough they dont even have the decency to even update their own software for unix systems, same with aol.
they need to wake up and realise they there is more than one operating system out there.

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[Espectr0]

Here in Venezuela:

99.99% use msn
0.01% use yahoo only
5% use msn and yahoo
1% use msn and icq
0% use aim

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[Solosoft]

Actually Everyone but "Oscar" has the "Invisible" mode I believe. I don't know if ICQ still has it, it used to back in the day (ICQ 1999b) but that was the last version I used. It's all a matter of prefrence. It seems quite the people in canada use MSN. (I guess since most people have an hotmail address there already signed up) it seems in the US ALOT of people use AIM and ICQ. Honestly before MSN 6 I found Yahoo to be the most feature full IM (second to ICQ back in the day). Now with MSN 6 it has icon , emoticion support (meaning you can make your own and it sends it to people when you display them.) My Opinion on the current question at hand :/

Screw Yahoo

[Cyno01]

I'm a trillian user, and i was having problems with the program itself since the yahoo block. Aparantly whatever yahoo did would crash Trillian if it tried to connect. I managed to fix things by deleting the yahoo dll file on my Win 98 laptop, which would crash completly because trillian loaded and connected on startup, but i had to go through this crap to fix it on my XP box. Its fine if yahoo wants to try to block out third party clients, but they definitly should not do it in a way that crashes peoples computers.

Re:Screw Yahoo

[base3]

I agree that they shouldn't intentionally crash an IM client, but an IM client shouldn't crash because of a bad or unexpected network response, either.

Re: Ultimately....

[unclethursday]

IM chat is the same way. If I'm using ICQ, I can't chat with the people over on MSN Messenger. So what? You can run multiple IM clients if you desire, or you can try to come to agreement with your friends on which IM software they're going to standardize on so you can all talk to each other.

Personally, I LIKE seeing all my contacts on one list, rather than having 3 different IM clients open (Through Trillian Pro I use ICQ, AIM, and Yahoo, I don't use MSN). I also prefer to have only one client program running as opposed to 3 at the same time.

Rather than try and get all my contacts onto one IM client, or have multiple clients running, I can see them all when I want to see them.

There will always be people trying to "break the rules" by building cross-network compatible clients, but it'll just be a "cat and mouse game" unless the network providers decide those clients are "ok" for use with their systems.

Demand is what will either force interoperability, and third party clients; or it will kill it.

Remember, Microsoft bitched and moaned, as did Yahoo, about AOL not allowing them access to AIM's network. Now both companies have some marketshare, and want to pull the same shit they complained about. Not out of the ordinary for either Microsoft or Yahoo, though.

But why should these comapnies decide on what consumers want/need? If the consumer wants to use a third party IM client, then so be it. That's what the consumer chose. If the consumer wants to use the first party IM client, then fine, that's what the consumer chose. Note the consumer choice issue...not corporate choice.

Of course, Microsoft has never been one to really push consumer choice....like with their OEM dealings to get Netscape out of the Internet browsaer market and integrating IE, WMP, etc. into Windows.

Thursdae

[OT]

[garaged]

I wonder if slashdot readers in mexico were locked when kids, I certainly wasnt, I I dont remember any locked kid in schools, there were some stupid orcs, but they where pretty controled after one of the nerds confronted them

:-)

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[Bob Uhl]

Sure, we all have a right to use the protocol, it's only bits and bytes and does not cost anybody anything. Who gives us the right to use their servers though?

We've as much right to use public messaging servers as we've a right to use public email servers. Imagine if there were a grazillion different email protocols, each with its own proprietary clients and its own userbase. Oh wait--we had that, and it sucked so badly that Simple Mail Transport Protocol, which is in several ways quite brain-damaged, took over the world.

So too will Jabber or something similar, given enough time and freedom.

No thank you

[cybersquid]

I use gaim on Linux.
Yahoo doesn't want me on their network.
I'm OK with that. I dropped my Yahoo account. My friends now use either AIM or jabber to talk to me.

Re:No thank you

[Ziviyr]

Amen!

Yahoo won't be burning bridges to any effect on me now.

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Venezuela nobody know how to add to 100 :-p

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[Tom7]

Perhaps for the same reason that big networks provide backbones: because they can sell the bandwidth to people at either side who want to communicate.

It could maybe work as a peer-to-peer system, in which case you wouldn't need that at all. It could almost certainly work as a network of volunteer-based servers (a la IRC).

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[Osrin]

interesting, but these messaging servers are NOT public, last time I looked they all belonged to commercial entities that have stood them up for a particular purpose.

Re: consumer choice

[King_TJ]

Well, the only sticking point is, these chat services are free of charge to use, yet the companies offering them have to spend a considerable amount of money providing servers for them (bandwidth, employees maintaining them, etc. etc.).

That's why they get to choose "what consumers want/need" in this case. They're the ones footing the bill for the "back end" that the clients require to be useful.

Ultimately, sure - consumers force the market to conform to their desires, but that's only valid when they can vote with their dollars, and stop purchasing products that don't meet their needs. When you're using free handouts, you don't have that same leverage.

Simpler?

[cyberwench]

Another solution is to just do a "global disconnect" immediately after you start trillian up, before yahoo connects. Then uncheck the box in the yahoo connection manager for autoconnect.

Ok, admittedly, that _sounds_ more complicated... but it works fine for me.

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[Bob Uhl]

They are public: they are on the internet; they accept connexions from anyone who establishes one. They are exactly parallel to mail servers, and locking out legitimate users from chat servers makes as much sense as locking out legitimate users from email. If AOL users couldn't send email to Yahoo users and vice versa, would email be nearly so useful as it is? Of course not.

My hope is that, much like SMTP slowly broke down the walled communities of Genie, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy &c., so too will jabber slowly break down the walled communities of AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Wotsit &c.

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[Osrin]

Although you can indeed send mail to my mail server you are not personally entitled to connect to it with your mail client, indeed I will challenge you for a password and reject your connection if you try. Mail servers are not open for all to use, they generally exist for a business reason and are configured to meet that need.

Re:I always wonder about these sorts of converatio

[Bob Uhl]

You're confused about SMTP vs. POP or IMAP. When I send you email, I send it first to a mail server, which then turns around and acts as a client to your mail server. Or I might just connect my client directly to your mail server (SMTP, not POP or IMAP).

You're right that I do not have an account in your POP or IMAP server--but that's irrelevant. Trust me on this, or read up on how email works: if I (or my designee) cannot act as a client to your mail server, I could not send you mail.

Re:Nobody uses Yahoo! Messenger

[Espectr0]

i think you should go back to school and learn about Venn's diagrams all over again.

Read my previous answer again. It wasn't supposed to add to 100, because for example, 99.99% of msn use is divided in how much of that 99.99% where using msn by itself or using msn with another service like yahoo

Gaim Access Yahoo via SSH port forwarding

[Anonymous Coward]

Gaim Access Yahoo via SSH port forwarding still doesn't work. When you do:

(host1)#ssh -L 5050:scs.yahoo.com:5050 host2

and then on host1, run gaim with yahoo server set to localhost and port set to 5050, gaim always disconnect saying invalid password. When run gaim on host2 with regular configuration, it works.