Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
> For those of you who don't RTFA
There is no FA, jackass
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"
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You may as well have read past the first paragraph and clicked "here" to access the website.
blah
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.
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.
That is, the moment a closed-source multi-network IM client is released
You mean, like Trillian ?
blah
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.
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/survey
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!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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.
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).
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
Remember, hardware, bandwith and system administrators all cost money.
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.