Slashdot Mirror
MSN Messenger Kickbans Third-Party IM Clients
No_Weak_Heart writes "As reported here back in August, October 15th is the day Microsoft set to ban third party clients from logging in to their IM service. This eWeek article notes that the day is upon us, and MS is offering few details about its progress in creating licensing agreements to continue access. The licensing issue was previously discussed here. And my copy of Fire cannot log in. Anyone else find their IM clients non-responsive?"
My trillian .74F seems to be responsive
Stripes: Because stars are overrated
CenterICQ is working fine on MSN for me at present...
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Lock users into your service .. then force them to use your product exclusively ??
How can you blame them? MS provides the hardware, the bandwidth, and the assumes the risk of operating this chat network. I like my 3rd party client, but you know what? I leach from MS by using it. They have every right to restrict who can use their network and how. If they want to use technological measures to limit who can access the network, than fine, so be it. I'll use their product or a competeting protocol.
The main difference between this an Mono and inference is that letting 3rd party clients onto the MSN network costs MS real cash dollars each time a message is sent or received.
As long as IM service is free but centrlised, providers will try to lock out non-offical clients through whatever means are necessary.
This is not directly attached to Messenger but rather their chat service.
Oct 14th was the day they decided to also nix their free chat service in favor of their charge people roughly $20 a year for it.
TK2CHATCHATA06 are 984 users and 45 invisible on 1 servers, this is roughly a 90% reduction from oct 13th.
Why I bring this up you ask. Well very simple, msn is shooting them selves in the foot really. Their chat service it's very much possible they wanted roughly 90% of their population to leave, heck it's easier to manage. But the policy on Messenger clients, well I can't imagine anything really good will come out of banning 3rd party clients. Your typical user won't notice anyway, where as your power user with multi-clients will make a stand and leave for other services that work.
But it looks good on paper, I imagine that's their pressent mission is with both Messenger and chat, making a good case for the shareholders why such services are money markers.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
You're probably running an old version of Gaim if you're getting that message.
:)
MSN Protocol v9 has been supported for a version or two now.
I just tried my Gaim 0.70 here (haven't updated to 0.71 yet), and it works perfectly. And it's quite definately not the 15th any more
What happened was that yesterday, the older MSNP8 protocol for accessing the MSN Messenger Network was discontinued; only clients capable of the new MSNP9 protocol can now connect. :-( but you can't have everything) because it negotiates via the Secure Sockets Layer; i.e. your IMs are encrypted with a strong algorithm and cannot easily be read by people with NICs in promiscuous mode on your network hardware.
MSNP9 is actually better than the previous protocol (as well as incompatible
There already exist third-party clients that can make use of this newer MSNP9 system; if your client does not then maybe it's worth (i)switching, (ii)asking the maintainers to add support, (iii)grabbing the source and doing it yourself you lazy wossname! However, Trillian frmo Cerulean Studios apparently does the business. I am currently connected to the MSN Network by Al's MSN; you must use at least v0.83 in order to connect.