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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."
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....
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
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.
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors than zombies or vampires anyway.
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
According to their homepage, Trillian is currently only releasing the patch to paying customers.
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....
I love internet chat sessions. I snoop on them with ethereal at every opportunity.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
The latest release of Fire, v.0.32.f, also restored Yahoo! connectivity. The MSN network will be blocked on October 15th, though.
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?
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!!!!
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."
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
liqbase
October 15 is the announced lock-out date for older versions of the client.
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.
Didn't the GAIM team get the fix from Cerulean? At least that's what they seem to say here.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
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.
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
0.70 (which has the fix) is in unstable now. It's not in testing or stable.
>> Trillian people didn't make this patch
.74 are on the way and will be released once the patch is 100%...
>> 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
Source: http://www.trillian.cc/ (Bottom right of page)
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.
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?
"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?
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/
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.
*blinking cursor*
...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?
Un-news
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.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
centericq is also fixed for Yahoo in the latest CVS.
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?
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
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
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.
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.