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Yahoo Changes Protocol, Blocks Third Party Clients
NaDrew writes "ZDNet reports that Yahoo is once again blocking connections from Trillian (the alternative multi-protocol client). Yahoo tried this a few times last year and it looks like they're trying again. Cerulean, maker of Trillian, employs some excellent protocol engineers, who I have no doubt will quickly figure out Yahoo's latest obfuscation and release a patch. A quick fix discovered late this evening: Change your Y!IM host from scs.msg.yahoo.com to scs.yahoo.com, port 5050, and it should work. This is on Trillian 0.74H, not Pro."
Centericq is also broken. I'd be happy to use an official Yahoo! IM client...if they had one that was console-based.
Yeah, blocking people from chatting with their protocol will help anything.
I think it blocks gaim also.
Help! I'm being repressed!
Anyone know if gaim still works? (no, I didn't RTFA)
The quick fix to changing the server to scs.yahoo.com, port 5050 does not work for most people, and does not work with Miranda IM, GAIM, or other third party IM clients besides Trillian.
It appears to be a separate server, and you won't be able to communicate with other people on the 'fixed' yahoo servers.
Brielle
nope!
Because I happen to be on Yahoo! right now using Trillian 2.012 Pro.
Can someone please explain to me why Yahoo even bother?
As a paying Trillian subscriber, I am disappointed in both Yahoo and Trillian. I figured that they had their differences settled last fall when similar stuff went on. I guess I assumed that Trillian was on a good working relationship with the people at Yahoo. I am up for renewal for my Trillian membership and am going to re-evaluate that purchase if this continues.
Oh, wait...
Haven't been able to connect to Yahoo via Kopete since the block.
While the Open-source people here usually have a hard time comprehending why someone like yahoo would do this, consider the following. Ad revenue from y! Instant Messenger: $$$ As revenue from user connected to trillian: 0 Of course yahoo understands that their client may not be the best out there, yet without any additional ad revenues it makes it tough to explain to upper management that it is worth allowing any old client to connect.
I could dig up the older comments/articles which thoroughly contradict this troll-ish article summary but I don't think it deserves my time.
Yahoo did not, I repeat did *not* try to "block" third party IM clients "several times last year". *All* they did was upgrade their protocol for better reliability/etc (I have personally noticed the increase in reliability/refresh rate etc). It is up to the 3rd party developers to upgrade their protocols if Yahoo decides to do so.
And Yahoo did offer to help them fix their stack to help it work with their servers. I am not affiliated to Yahoo, btw - I just think it receives a lot more undeserved flak then it should.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Isn't it possible that they simply made a protocol change? Clearly they have every right to do that. They simply don't care about trillian customers, probably feeling they should do whatever they think is necessary to support their own service and their own customers.
While it might be nice of them to support trillian as well, that just makes it more difficult to maintain their own service. Don't assume that their change was made maliciously just to irritate trillian users.
Why is it yahoo feels the need to throw a tempertantrum about 3rd party clients in such a way as to disrupt their users. If they truely don't want trillian to use their network, there are better channels to address this. Making their own standalone client would be a start...
In short, scs.yahoo.com:5050 is no good.
I've been using Trillian for about 2 years now and think it's a great application. However, there's a reason Yahoo never gave users the ability to send out a mass-message to everyone on your contact list. When programs such as Trillian start including this feature, the potential for abuse is fairly obvious.
AIM has tried this in the past too, they even went back and forth with Cerulean for about two weeks constantly changing they way the AIM service connects. Finally they gave up and Trillian has worked perfectly even since. You think Yahoo would learn... However, I'm sure Yahoo is not changing thier protocal just to make Trillian not work, probably some underlying security issue we arn't seeing.
Their OS X client sucks, so I just won't use them anymore. Do these people not understand that people use things like Trillian because they're BETTER?
LordBodak's journal.
who needs yahoo messaging without yahoo im themes?
Why is this a Flamebait ?
Has somebody shit in the moderator's cereals ?
We are supposed to be a community, we have knowledge of P2P and IRC, we have huge allies such as Google, so I am just stating the obvious : if we could write Messenger clients that could work upon existing protocols, why not develop them a little further to use ours improved ones ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I guess they don't want Linux/BSD, Etc users to be able to talk to their IM folks. What's the point in that other than to piss us off so we'll hack it again? That's a bit rude, IMO. Another black mark for Yahoo. Who do they think they are? Microsoft?
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Well, does anyone know if this is just a protocol upgrade or if yahoo! is really trying to get rid of the third party clients?
If they want to get rid of 3rd party clients, then this is just another arms race, meaning we will eventually have open clients that work, after some finite delay.
In all honesty I can't blame yahoo! for trying. After all, for each person that doesn't see the ads associated with their official client, they lose revenue.
Yahoo! is a great site and they provide a LOT of stuff for free, so I don't blame them for trying to get some money back for all the free stuff they have given us over the years. I guess since IMing is so popular and so much time is spent in the IM client, to them that's a LOT of missing eyeballs over a long period of time that don't get to see the ads. That's a lot of money lost by the minute. And let's face it.. we are using their computers for free, and not giving anything back each time we use a third party client.
My question though, is that if they hate third party IM clients for cutting into their rev. stream, why don't they take the law out of their own hands and use the law to their advantage? Is there nothing that could be done, by drafting some clever EULA or something, that would make it illegal or something like that to use 3rd party clients? That might actually dampen the efforts with libyahoo and other projects that try to develop an open protocol lib. Sourceforge might even cease to host such projects, being that they are in the realm of piracy or accorting to the DMCA.
While it would suck for me (as I love to use centericq over their stupid client), why don't they just make it illegal to use third party clients?
A quick fix discovered late this evening: Change your Y!IM host from scs.msg.yahoo.com to scs.yahoo.com, port 5050, and it should work. This is on Trillian 0.74H
/.
Works for me now!!! Thanks
"Grumble grumble, stoopid Yahoo."
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
So why not switch to an alternate IM system altogether? *cough*jabber*cough*
If they're going to be such babies about letting *more* people use their system, let 'em. They're pretty much second fiddle to AIM, it seems...
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
Why not simply boycott Yahoo's IM product?? If they keep changing the protocol to thwart easy adoption of alternate clients, especially clients that are designed to run on alternative operating systems, why continue to use them??
Gaim isn't working either... Nothing on their homepage. Hope they will fix this soon.
for Mac users out there... Adium is having problems logging in as well.
Maybe if Yahoo spent some time developing a better client instead of wasting it trying to keep the third parties off, they wouldn't have this problem to begin with.
LordBodak's journal.
Many other clients have been blocked. These include Adium, Fire, Kopete, Proteus and Gaim.
Don't log out.
In an era where instant messaging is touting as the "next big thing", most service providers are always faced with the dilemma of whether to allow third party clients to connect, or prevent.
Messaging clients with advertisement-based model will surely object to allowing third party clients to connect, since it doesnt make any business sense.
Furthermore, they may have allowed such third party clients in the past, to gain that critical mass that ensures market peneration and continued usage, but once they are past the bell curve, they would then clam down on it.
Think of it as an equivalent to Microsoft clamping down on piracy - they never prevented that in the past knowing that so long as its their products being used, they will be able to generate revenues one way or the other. Now that the market penetration is coming to a saturation (or if not, there are far more alternative solutions available than ever before), they have started to really put on the squeeze.
Finally, companies like trillian may well have the best protocol engineers in the world, but such disruptions in service shall push away customers every time, however small the percentage might be. Unless connectivity to widely used messengers is provided by agreement, such connectivity outages will cause most users to move to move away from them.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Of course, the best solution is to create a superior protocol and set of clients, get it standardized, and somehow get them widely adopted (yeah, I know, this is the hard part), and make it so that Yahoo and MSN want their messengers to be compatible with IT.
I know this is pie in the sky, but this whole messenger war seems so stupid. Wasn't someone working on a standards for a messenger protocol? This whole messenger war thing seems so stupid and only serves to piss users off.
This is ind of like copy protection and DRM. They keep trying to stop people and people just keep getting around it. Nobody ever seems to learn. Are they just going to keep beating their heads against the wall until the end of time? Are all these guys that clueless and stubborn?
Who blames them? When they decide to upgrade their product and add new features to their protocol, do you really expect them to test for backwards compatibility with all the unsupported 3rd party IM clients!? They never provided an API/protocol spec. They never provided developer support to 3rd parties. They have *no obligation* to maintain compatiblity and they clearly won't and shouldn't let backwards compatibility interfere with new features in their own clients. Damn tin foil hats.
It occurs to me that one barrier to having a truely open IM is the requirement of a central server for connecting to other users. Hmmm. P2P solution of some sort?
Is this article supposed to make Yahoo look evil? If so, I don't see how. I know the popular notion on /. that "information wants to be free", but Yahoo provides a free service, and as with a free service, you are at the mercy of the provider. So Yahoo wants you to use their official client, it isn't the end of the world, nor do I think it is even newsworthy here on /. I am prepared for the inevitable karma loss on this comment, but I have been maxed out for years, it does not bother me anymore.
I hate sigs.
Yahoo! have a protocol, they can change it. They do not have to freeze it because third parties piggy back on their servers and protocols.
Yahoo! have been rolling out changes, and to be honest, out of all the free email providers, Yahoo! is the best right now (not having tried the closed beta gmail)
I use trillian, I am not actually running it now, but I expect a patch from trillian soon.
That is like saying, Microsoft release longcock, and my windows 3.11 app doesn't work on it, make them fix it, daddy please, waaa waaa.
ffs, give them a break.
[Yahoo! not M$, they can take it in their ass any day, bastards]
Wouldn't this be Jabber?
It's already there, open source, many servers, and intercommunication possible between multiple servers.
And some people have made proxies for jabber-commerical messenger systems communication.
And it works with many, many clients, console-based as well as graphical...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
It would be just another case of embrace and extend, right?
Those who rant about Microsoft often condemn them of shutting out competitors by adopting an open protocol or standard, and then extending that "standard" with additional MS-specific features. Witness kerberos, Java, C++, HTML, etc...
Which makes sense from a competitive standpoint - why would anyone buy Microsoft's version if the free version does exactly the same?
So, do we applaud them for adding extra features, or condemn them for breaking compatibility. And if we condemn them for breaking compatibility, what's our solution - do we expect Yahoo to sit by idly as other other clients add features? Wouldn't we then complain that Yahoo's client is outdated?
So, why does Yahoo get an exception from the "embrace and extend" argument? Or do we hate Microsoft "Just Because"?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I love Trillian, very very disappointed in yahoo, thought they settled this last year.
- ZeroGuard
That's "taking a hint".
Come on, people. Yahoo is upgrading its protocol to prevent message spam. The changes temporarily prevent gaim, Trillian, and other clients from working until they make their own changes. This isn't a sinister act on Yahoo's part and the poster (and ZDnet) have nothing to stand on to say this is about blocking third-party clients.
And to those complaining about the yahoo client, I find it to be the best IM program overall. The new version has a clean interface, quick access to your address book and other features, but is customizable to not show any of that stuff if you don't want the clutter. Best of all, it doesn't deliver ads. NONE. Plus the offline messaging is a great feature.
Perhaps the people complaining haven't used it for a year or two and just think it's awful that a commercial company would break compatibility for an upgrade? It happens all the time in the open source world - cut Yahoo some slack.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
Makes you just itch for a google client doesn't it?
'Cause if it's Google it must be good!
GMail - like turning on the lights and watching the cockaroaches scatter!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I don't know, I thought this was one more of these clients.
Actually I have been using ICQ services for years, first with Everybuddy, then with Fire.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Everyone keeps talking about how Yahoo wants to profit from the ads in it's Y! Messenger Software. What Ads? Unless you look at the other screens [you known the non-chat ones] you will not see any other ads
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but I take Yahoo at their word that they are changing the protocol for security reasons. I typically use Gaim to connect to AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. I use Gaim for Yahoo just because I don't like extra processes running on my Linux machine when they don't need to be. The Yahoo client for Linux doesn't have ads. AFAIK, there's no way to make money off a free client and free service when there's not a single place to carry an ad.
I have heard (but don't know because I've never used Trillian) that Trillian has "broadcast" features that sends messages to a list of users. I believe that Yahoo is trying to block clients that have this type of feature and clients, such as Gaim, that happen to share protocol libraries or access methods with these clients are "collateral damage".
Perhaps if Trillian wanted to have a good working relationship with the service providers, they would not make it so easy to abuse the services in the first place -- IMHO.
later,
tims
"Ahhhh, best laid plans of mice and men... and Cookie Monster." -- Cookie Monster, Sesame Street
"Make it so, Number 1"
I can see the Yahoo engineers trying it now.
I understand that there are valid reasons for not using the Yahoo client like unsupported OS's or "it sucks" - whatever. In the end, you are using their service for free and they aren't obligated to give you a damn thing. They could fold their tents tomorrow and wouldn't owe anyone but their creditors and customers (those who pay for services).
Why doesn't some enterprising person create a P2P chat client? I was going to go on a rant about how if someone wanted to have a totally free IM client, they could buy the servers to host connections, pay for bandwidth, etc.. but the P2P chat may be better in the long run. Granted, that doesn't solve the problem connecting to Yahoo (or the like) but it's a good start, right?
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
I pay for my yahoo pop access and have for the last few years. Now while I'm finally enjoying 2gb of email box space that I dont use since I foward all email to my own server at the house I would appreciate it if yahoo would quit nuking my access through GAIM.
I have noticed though that the majority of my contacts are through AOL and considering all the issues people have had through Yahoo it's any wonder.
actually, something I've noticed is that the friends I've switched to multi-protocol clients tend to sign up with multiple IM accounts; if you and your circle are all present on all three networks, one of the protocols will almost always get through temporary network issues.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Jabber.
BoD
From the CNET article in the second link. Thanks for digging those up, btw.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
How can Yahoo change the protocol without breaking their own clients? Wouldn't such a change need to be implemented in sync with a client upgrade?
Maybe this will help me get my friends to switch to jabber. I've gotten almost everyone I know down to msn and yahoo and jabber. If I can get yahoo to move to jabber, that just leaves msn :-)
Now my question, didn't the gov't come out with a law a while ago forcing AOL to share their IM standards so third party software could integrate with it? And if so, wouldn't this apply to all IM software, including Yahoo?
Yes, and yes. AOL had restrictions placed on IM i January 2001, but they were lifted in Aug. 2003 because that decision had largely rendered them unable to compete in the video conferencing scene that MSN and Yahoo had built up.
A good article summarizing this seems to be this one.
NOW, note that Yahoo! is cozy with the DSL and telephone service provider SBC. Given the news that SBC is laying fiber for residential DSL, your question is completely relevant.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Does anyone find it interesting that they "changed/updated the protocol" in order to "prevent IM SPAM", but yet when I run my current version of Y!M, it connects fine and I STILL get IM SPAM? Do they have a way to dynamically update the protocol on Y!M, or is this potentially marketing BS since their change ONLY seems to affect 3rd party chat clients?
Says TFA:
"This time, however, Yahoo said it will continue changing its protocols to prevent clients such as Trillian from finding new ways to incorporate Yahoo."
So it's obvious that clients like Gaim, Kopete and Trillian need to come up with a scheme to keep up. It would seem prudent to have a feature that detects a failure to connect, asks the user if he would like to update the Yahoo protocol plugin, and if yes, downloads and installs it automatically, and then connects successfully. It just takes some manpower to keep the plugins up to date, but this would be coordinated by a cross-client task force that would share information on the latest protocol changes.
Of course, one can wonder if all this is really worth it. One day the whole world will be on Jabber (except we will rarely call it Jabber since it's so ubiquitous), and we will tell tales to our children of those days when we couldn't necessarily communicate with other IM users since there were competing (!) systems, and IM communication companies spent resources on trying to prevent communication. And they'll smile politely and think "old age has caught up with gramps." (and then they'll fly home in their cars, but that's another story)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Once yahoo makes an encrypted version of the YIM protocol, they can sue the makers of Trillian for DMCA violations.
Even without the DMCA they may be able to bring a case against them if Yahoo's TOS prohibits 3rd party clients.
You should really enlighten yourself. Jabber is a unique, distributed, open IM network with an elegant, extensible and easy-to-understand protocol. You can run your own server and have it talk to the rest of the Jabber network almost like email works. Jabber is really lightyears ahead of any of the "popular" networks today (which is not really "networks", but one or a few servers). Jabber is my only IM network, and I use it to keep in touch with my geekier friends. All the non-geek friends are still on MSN, where they are obliviously happy, but why would I want to IM with them? ;)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
If you don't like what Yahoo! has decided to do, why not go to their feedback page and send a complaint? If enough people say something, maybe they will have a change of heart?
/. effect would at least be temporarily satisfying >=)
Even if you don't think it will do any good, the revenge of giving their inboxes the
-Ares
I was having some problems yesterday (with the actual YIM client). I went through a bunch of hoops changing passwords and stuff and then suddenly it worked. I guess this explains it...
Genius is the art of making everyone think you know what you're talking about.
Kopete's yahoo connectivity seems to be affected as well... it sucks.
What ads are you talking about? I've had to fall back on the Official (and totally crap) Yahoo! client for Mac OS X, and I've never seen any ads in it.
I don't use a 3rd-party client to avoid ads, I use it because Yahoo!s code is terrible. It's ugly, the sounds are badly distorted and played at maximum volume, and it's ugly, and the user interface is clunky... like someone just ported the exact UI from a totally different environment. And on top of that, it's ugly.
Jennifer2727XXXX, Und16Yisha777, TalkHT2ME373737 ....
I've been a Trillian user since its inception. I donated via paypal to cerulean back in the day when you got a personal reply from their founders, and back before it was obligatory (to get the pro version). I use it for the same reason I use Linix, Open Office, and GIMP - because I'm not locked into a company's adware and (incorrectly or not) feel like I get more choice in how I use these apps. Of course, if everyone gave the finger to all closed IM protocols and used Jabber, we'd never have these problems.
When I look back, I remember ICQ being the king of IM. Nowadays, I barely know anyone who still uses it. MSN Messenger took most of the users from them. Now, how did they do that? ICQ had an incredibly large audience, but when masses shifted, lot of other (even geek) people did too. They didn't drive their users away, it was only that another service proved more useful... because it had more people to talk to, and that was because it was more appealing to less tech-savvy audiences...
So, what can we learn from that? For me, that more users, even when they don't use an "official" client, will eventually mean a wider adoption, thus more people will finish up using the official client anyway, even if there are also more people who don't.
Perhaps the mailbox space race will eventually reflect itself in the big competitors IM services... I wouldn't be surprised if google's next big thing is a IM app. Did we need another free email service? Probably not. But people shift, and people seem to be liking gmail. What kind of mess would we get if we get yet another IM? Why can't we all just get along?
It is sad that IM isn't seen as a series of interconnected networks (like email...) :(
I used to use Trillian, before switching to GAIM, before finally using the official clients for Yahoo and MSN. And why?
Hot cam action.
On the one hand, you have unobtrusive, no ad, open source, memory efficient, multi-protocol programs. On the other, hot women.
I know which hand I prefer.
With the existence of Yahoo! Java and HTML clients, doesn't that mean there always has to be an easy way into their system?
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Are there any open IM protocols? I noticed that Trillian now supports IRC, which makes sense so long as your friends all use the same server as you. Are there any IETF working groups for this? It can't be all that complicated to do. Maybe even piggy-back on some existing P2P system so that no one has to bear the expense of a central server?
And already fixed. :)
Instant Messanging is getting to be so passee. I suggest you check out Skype which is a P2P Voice over IP Solution, and quite good.
Instant Messanging is just filling the gap in 'free' communication until we can all talk out loud to our friends using telephony.
Andy
See it here.
You call this a signature?
The Trillian guys have fixed it. You can grab the patches(Trillian Pro 2.013 & Trillian Basic Patch I) from the Trillian download page.
Cerulean Studios just released patch I for the free version of Trillian
. ph p
http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/support/20040624
Good news, both Trillian pro and Trillian non-pro have patches out. 2.013 for pro, .74i for non-pro.
Installed it, yahoo connects like a dream.
GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5243290.html
:)
I only IM with people on ICQ. And I use Trillian.
There is already a patch out at 11am est. Links here
Switching to Linux can be an adventure!
If users are willing to accept ad-pushing, companies like Google could develop a new IM protocol with clients for most platforms, as well as plugins for popular third party clients like trillian, gaim, kopete, etc. The plugins themselves would have access to screen space to display pushed ads. The clients and plugins will most likely be closed source, and transmissions encrypted.
Issues:
- With mutliple protocols screen space for ads becomes an issue.
- Not sure what the impact of a closed source plugin code is on GAIM or Kopete(QT). The kernel today loads (but no support provided) tainted modules (non GPL), so perhaps something similar is doable for GAIM. Not sure about Kopete-QT though. If Google gets one cross platform QT developer license, that should solve that problem.
Have not verified it but:
. ph p
24 June 2004 : New patches reconnect to Yahoo
http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/news_press/index
Isn't it interesting how email works together, regardless of OS or provider? Isn't it interesting how the Web is the same way?
Now look at the IM universe. AIM, MSNM, Y!M, ICQ, Jabber, etc. Of all those systems, only two work together (AIM & ICQ) and that's because they're both owned by the same company (AOL).
Why shouldn't I be able to send a message from AIM to MSNM? We seem to accept this as "this is how it is", but we ought to really think about what this structure truly represents.
Vint Cerf and friends invented TCP/IP, assuring that different systems could talk to each other using a common protocol; the tools came later. The same goes for Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web: without him, we'd have a Microsoft web, a Yahoo! web, an AOL web (though technically, they have one in their weird, proprietary, Rainman-based content) and so on and so forth.
I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank Vint and Tim and all those other folks who made the Internet truly open. All I have to do is look at the IM world to see what would have come about had they not created the open protocols and platforms we use today.
That's why I run GAIM, plus its open source.
http://www.trillian.cc/news_press/
12:50 - press return.
I can't get Yahoo! Mssenger to log me in today either. I'm using the brand new 6.0 client and it just hangs there telling me that it's connecting to Yahoo! but never does.
Directions located at http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php
Goddamn, that makes me feel geeky.
Seriously, why do Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, etc. even attempt to waste their time on this?! When you look at similar attempts to "lock" users into accessing services their way they are always cracked -- it takes time, but it never fails.
For example, CD copy-protection doesn't prevent people from making executables that allow users to override the settings on the CD or main executable (such as no-cd cracks) and/or to "fool" the CD into thinking it's read by the program it was meant to be run with not the very real CD burning software.
If it can be read or accessed in at least one way -- it can be hacked and tricked. The only way to prevent this is making a CD that is completely useless...but what's the point in that? I for one am thankful that isn't possible it gives competition in the software side of things and prevents us from being ad'ed to death when all we want to do is chat with friends and family.
here for Basic right now.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The latest client for MacOS 8/9 (2.5.3) crashes on startup because of this server change. Here's how you fix the 2.5.3 client on MacOS 8/9:
Open a copy of the application in ResEdit. Find the "STR#" resource group, open it. Find ID 130, titled "servers", and open that group. Change string number one from "scs.msg.yahoo.com" to "scs.yahoo.com".
Save changes, quit ResEdit. Launch the copy of Yahoo Messneger you edited, and you'll log in.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
If you add a feature, there shouldn't really be a need to discard old feature.
lets say someone makes a new system call open_blah(...) which opens an array of files to be used as raid5 (stupid example, I know) why kill open() system call even though you can use open_blah(...) only on 1 file.
~omi
Yahoo's practices will not make me switch to them, and ditch Trillian. Their own customers are forced to upgrade as well, so why would I even believe switching to a 1 network client would improve the service I get? The only thing that might happen is that users say farewell to Yahoo as a whole, since there are clearly better IM services.
Cerulean studio is really wonderfull: you can get the patch I (works with 0.74 and 2.013) at Downloads
Imagine if email came into being as corporate-sponsored and client-specific. I mean, can you imagine opening three different email clients to get your Yahoo! email, your AIM email and your MSN email, because you have groups of friends, family and coworkers that each set up their email accounts with specific entities?
Or better yet, what if I had to have three phone lines, one for each phone company, because each one restricted my communication to people using the same phone company? Ridiculous.
That's the primary drive for these standalone clients: instant messaging should be client-transparent, just like email, because it makes sense. If Yahoo! released a client that could also communicate with AIM, MSN and the rest, a lot of Trillian and Kopete users (not all, certainly) would use it -- as they would if AIM did the same thing.
Then again, I'm an old fogie who can't understand why you need a separate client for email and IM, either. After all, couldn't you just treat IM conversations as email threads? Also, if you try to send a note to an "offline" IM user, the client can automatically send it as an email instead.
Oh, wait. That would open the door for authenticating email senders by making sure they're logged into their known IM service when the email is received, under the assumption that anyone currently sending email should also be logged into IM -- and if they're not, the sender's address/IP is probably being spoofed.
Eh, nobody'll ever do it. But it's nice to think about.
Why do most of the Mac OS X jabber clients suck?
Why do most of the Mac OS X Gaim clients have such crappy jabber support?
I will never be able convince any of my non-techy friends to use Jabber until there are great clients. And when we're speaking about Yahoo or MSN, most of my friends on these services live in other countries and seem much less internet-savvy than the average college aged american.
That by itself is enough to make it the clear leader for corporate use. I set up a server for our office LAN and our IT guy installed Psi on every employee's desktop. Now we have a private, low-latency communication system for passing short messages back and forth in real-time. There hasn't been a single problem with the roll-out; I started the server, spent 20 minutes telling the other employees how to use Psi, and walked away from it.
With any other IM service, we'd have to deal with privacy policies (such as mandatory encryption of all messages) or other hassles. With Jabber, we can freely send sensitive information between employees without worrying about outside snooping. Beyond that, we wrote an notification API for use with our internal applications that allows you to send event notices to selected employees via either email or Jabber. It's nice to get instant notification of system status changes without depending on our Internet connection being available.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Trillian has posted updates for both it's 0.74 ( free) and PRO clients to fix this problem.
The links for the patches are available here
Nice turnaround time on this.
Jabber is the only free, open IM standard that's in relatively wide use and there're lots of clients available for it - I personally use Psi. I've switched long ago and haven't looked back.
:) Of course, the Yahoo transport is most likely broken too, but I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo IM, so I don't care.
I often chat with friends that still uses MSN and ICQ through Jabber's transports or whatever it is they call them
We have Yahoo transport patched for this problem. If you need good and stable european server, use njs.netlab.cz, We support Jabber, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, SMTP, Weather, MSN, Multi User Chat etc. And it's totally free! It's best Jabber server in the world with over then 4000 active and happy users.
I usually find that patches are released for trillian less than 24 hours after the problem is discovered... sometimes less than 12 hours. I can sleep that off.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
They didn't discard an old feature, they merely moves the server address! holy cow.
Why does it block service from Trillian but keep it on Kopete? Does Kopete pay royalities or something?
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Just don't use Yahoo Messenger. Most of the messages I get on there are come-ons from strangers, spam for webcams, and other stuff that I'd rather do without. Plus most of my contacts on there are on AIM or MSN Messenger. I like Trillian a lot, but let's get real, this is no big loss.
Many of my fellow posters have suggested that the solution is for people to switch to Jabber. I agree that the solution should start with Jabber, but it's not as easy as asking everyone to please switch.
I'm going to try to identify the obstacles to a migration to open standards, and I hope that others will expand on this and maybe even offer some solutions.
How do you convince ISPs to begin deploying Jabber servers as they would deploy mail servers? Is there any money to be made in deploying and operating a worldwide network of Jabber servers? If so, maybe some entrepreneur could come up with a clever idea for bootstrapping the network.
As some people have mentioned, it is possible that IM may evolve interoperability naturally, but I wouldn't count on that happening anytime soon. The final weapon of the proprietary IM providers will be to add crypto authentication to the protocol, with a key embedded into the clients. They would then have a solid legal recourse (DMCA) against "rogue" clients seeking interoperability. (Who knows, though... that could be a useful selling point for open standards!)
There... now that I've identified the problems, all that's left is for someone to provide the solutions. ;)
Trillian has a patch which allows you to connect normally again. Same place as the original announcement...
We're all full up on Crazy here...
Woah there boy. Methinks your inclusion of Jabber in that list was a little hasty. Jabber has many components for connecting to other IM networks. I noticed that the Yahoo component has stopped working for me today. Oh well, no loss. I don't know anyone on the Yahoo network. I just added it for the hell of it because I already had a Yahoo email account. Bye bye, Yahoo!
Cerulean Studios just released Patch I which fixed Yahoo connectivity. You can download it from here: http://www.trillian.cc/support/20040624.php I just installed it and it seems to work fine.
Yahoo's official Linux client, ymessenger 1.0.4-1, doesn't work either and they haven't updated it on their web page yet as of 11:52 am CDT, 24 Jun 2004. So much for this being about 3rd party applications, so far as I can tell.
It's not malice. It's just yet another poorly implemented version upgrade. And Lord knows the software industry has never seen one of those before.
Someone posted that before: previous changes in the YM authentication scheme did not make it more secure but instead were extremely convoluted and inane AS IF done ON PURPOSE to break other clients.
Without the ads the chat network is a money-losing venture. Soon free chat networks will go the way of the banner-add supported website.
Blar.
I bet Google steps in to make chat a better experience. They'll figure out a way to make it profitable without being annoying... while remaining open. (crosses fingers) Or maybe I'm dreaming because I just got a gmail account and it *is* a better webmail experience.
WASTE been around for ages it has encerypted chat and private chat rooms it dosnt need any companies server and it supports file sharing also .If you have about 50 contacts on your list it can support it no problems .
http://waste.sourceforge.net/
I agree that Yahoo messenger is an awesome application for use on windows. However, most of the people that I have seen usign 3rd party applicatioons are NON-Windows users, in which yahoo basically sucks big time. So There is no reason why someone should not use other msgrs. on non-windows platforms.
:).
I have been actively trying to move away from yahoo to things like jabber, but most of my Yahoo friends use windows, and its afact that jabber sucks for non-/. users. It just isnt that "fancy" for regular users. Afterall, there is more to life then just messaging
who the hell clicks on the ads ?
Trillian has officially release a patch for the Yahoo! connectivity issue. http://trillian.cc/news_press/
Trillian has now released a patch, 2.013 for pro. I just installed in and I can connect to Yahoo, but since I don't actually actively use yahoo as any sort of communication medium I don't care...
http://www.trillian.cc/news_press/
There is also a patch for the free version.
If google made an IM client... It would read all your instant messages, and then hide some advertisements that are relavent to your personal conversations.
This is easy. Assumptions:
- Yahoo wants to sell ads
- Cerulean wants people to use their client
- People want to use Yahoo's network
- People want to use Trillian
- Yahoo is only doing this to make ad revenue
So, if you're Yahoo, what do you do? You open the protocol. You license the technology, without royalites. You require as a term of the license that you display the ad specified in whatever protocol message block. There - you've stuck your neck out and are trying to play fair.If the 3rd party client authors don't follow your terms of service, you get a judge to put an injunction on them. If they come in and try to use your service without a license, you sue them for theft of service.
Instead of this cloak and dagger Spy vs. Spy crap, how about everybody grows up and makes some money?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Messaging clients with advertisement-based model will surely object to allowing third party clients to connect, since it doesnt make any business sense.
Maybe it's just me, but I use the official Yahoo! IM client & I don't see the ads that they would supposedly lose the revenue from if I switched to an alternate client. I suppose it's possible that at some time I checked a preference box "Don't show me ads", but somehow I doubt it.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
Haven't you heard of XMPP?
I just got interested in Adium becuase I use AIM for work and i have friends on both AIM and Y!. Today, I find that it cannot connect to the Y! server. I tried the Y! client I used before I found Adium, and it connected first-try!
For what it's worth, at this writing, my system has Adium version 0.60.1 and Y! IM version 2.5.3 (build 1062). SOMETHING is going on, and I am not inclined to think that it is just "protocol upgrades".
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
But these companies spend millions of dollars on their networks for the hardware and software that is part of it. Let them play a little add here and there to help support it.
All these ad blockers and ways of getting around their revenue streams only make them try and make more annoying advertising.
If trillian wanted to be a good friend to yahoo, they'd pass through their advertising as well or find some other way to compensate them. Just because Yahoo decides to offer their network services for free doesn't mean anyone else can deploy software that uses it as well. It's like having someone write a robot to suck the content off your website, chagnge a few slogans and graphics and publish it on their site as their own minus your advertising.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
I got pro v2.0.
I'm still connected to Y!, I looked and it's set to scs.yahoo.com:5050 (default).
so the story is not 100% true? I'm just lucky?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
The commercial linux client they have doesn't work either, so they've, as far as I can tell, completely locked out all non-windows/Mac clients. Which may be a small amount, but when my company asked me to look for an IM client I went elsewhere because of their lackluster linux support.
Changing the server from "scs.msg.yahoo.com" to "scs.yahoo.com" doesn't fix the problem. It just puts you on a Yahoo! Messenger server that is in a sort of limbo. You can only see other people (using 3rd party clients) connected to the same server, but not anyone using the real Yahoo! Messenger client.
Why don't use Neos? Looks Neos works just fine. Anybody care to coordinate these works? Now, it seems not only they need to fight with Yahoo, msn, but also fighting between each other. United we share, the info.
Um, next time you want to play protocol games with the alternative client kiddies, maybe you should do it sometimes besides the summer when they are out of school and have gobs of time to figure out what you've done. I assume you outsource the crappy client, and the Indian's don't raise their raise their bulk rate during the spring and fall. Hahaha.
Because that doesn't work.Logging into your transport will only allow people to talk to other Yahoo transport users on your server. Not those who are actually running the real Yahoo Messenger, on the Yahoo network.
A real fix for the Jabber component has not yet been released, but is probably just around the corner.
For information, stay tuned to jdev@conference.jabber.org (Jabber Groupchat)
-Ray Dios Haque JID = ray AT gloop.net
Yahoo provides a free service, and as with a free service, you are at the mercy of the provider.
Obviously you've never had the undeniable pleasure of finding that Yahoo has peremptorally and summarily discontinued your account for "TOS Violations". That's all, just a little flag in their database. Nobody keeps any record of *how* or *why* this flag was applied. All your mail, contacts, address book, YIMs, gone. No ability to do a last backup.
Yahoo is evil.
Da Blog
Jabber's Yahoo transport seems to work for me but I don't have any Yahoo contact anyway.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
Yes, it's true, sorry for all geeks ;-). I'm lamer...
an Instant Messenger
Damn!! May be it isn't.
But with the conservation feature and the speed it's no inferior to the other IM clients (atleast if you are sending mails to another gmail account)
Dump the IM clients; Switch to GMail. Well.. if you have an account that is
Was wondering in the evening why I was getting this weird feeling of getting the 0.78 version compiled even though I wasn't having any problems with 0.77 /me logs off from gaim; compiles 0.78; tries to login again
...
phew My password's magically become Incorrect. baaaah!!!
Waiting for 0.79pre3
Good work to the cerulean studios team and we're back in business - thanks guys. ...when's round 2 start I wonder?
I would say that Yahoo has every right to do this. No one pays for their service, it's free, so no one really has much of a right to complain. However, that's not the whole story, in my opinion.
It would be all good and fine for them to do this if they had a functional Yahoo client for UNIX/Linux systems. The client they do release for *NIX has more bugs than I can shake a stick at. I would use it if it worked correctly.
The Windows Yahoo client supports chatrooms, sound, and video. The *NIX one doesn't support chatrooms at all, nor does it support voice or video. Gaim doesn't support voice or video, but the chatrooms do work. Therefore, I use Gaim.
>Which is of course, why not use an official client
>since you are in fact using their network and
>resources to send messages.
If you have to ask that question, you've obviously not tried running the sorry pile of sh**t that Yahoo have for an IM client.
I'm pretty tolerant of free-as-in-beer software, for obvious reasons, but when Yahoo were dicking about with Trillian last year, I thought to myself sod it, I'll download theirs, since most (not all) of my friends are on Y!.
I persevered about three weeks and gave up. It's FAT and UGLY and the video stuff (which Trillian doesn't do) is slow and unreliable as all hell.
Trillian may be limited, but it's clean and unobtrusive, once you get used to the really confusing interface it has under the skin.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Well, yes -- it's open, but that's all that's superior about it. And actually this kind of superiority does not matter a thing in terms of end user experience.
I've honestly tried to switch to Jabber -- in fact, only because it's open ;) -- but it just didn't work for me. Almost all my friends use ICQ, and so there was basically no practical reason to use anything other than some nice ICQ client (I use gnomeicu).
(The other problem was that there was no stable ICQ gateway that had good support for cyrillic encodings. And no, UTF-8 is not an answer, because lots of people still haven't upraded their ICQ clients.)
stay tuned to jdev@conference.jabber.org
Speaking of what doesn't work -- conference.jabber.org doesn't seem to be up.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
I just opened a chat window - no ads.
Restart yahoo, to see if I'm just insensitive to an on_open ad.... nope, none there.
Where the hell are all these ads you're talking about? The only ads I see are when I click on a link that leads to a yahoo page. Those can be adblocked anyways. So all this talk about 3rd party clients allowing us to get around ads - again, I say... Where are these mysterious ads, and how can I make sure I never see them?
....... oh.
*byolinux is giving out gmail invites. This is my obligatory thank-you note.*
Charla is broken too.
This sux because yahoo does not see the needto let MAC's into chat rooms.
Oh, and they changed the java client so I cant get in with safari or firefox either.
It must be written in some windows only java.
bad yahoo
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Jabber is peer-to-peer, unless you use the trendy modern definition of layering a new transport network over the existing transport network.
Jabber's architecture is similar to the email architecture; anyone can run a server and provide themselves and optionally others with an account on that server. The Jabber user ids are in the form user@host, and the servers route messages on the behalf of users between themselves.
The problem here, of course, is that ISPs provide email services for their customers, but they do not provide Jabber services. Jabber came too late for it to be considered one of those things that every ISP has to have, so sadly it's hard to get it adopted because most users don't have the ability to set up a server and no access to anyone else's servers. Anyone can create an account on jabber.org, but that has the same centralisation issues as AIM, MSN and Y!IM and thus doesn't really solve anything, plus jabber.org doesn't quite have the resources to keep the service running with a userbase similar to that of MSN Messenger, I'd wager.
As a side note, a friend of mine was planning to work on an chat client which used "modern" peer-to-peer for a college project. In the end he ended up just creating a general transport network and not the application bit, but we did have some discussions about it; it has the usual problems associated with peer-to-peer file transfer networks such as increased traffic through "small" nodes, bootstrapping and firewalls, but no major showstoppers once coupled with some public key encryption and some kind of key-exchange protocol. If it's to be done, it would be nice if it could somehow be an extension of the Jabber network so that the infrastructure can become more structured if circumstances allow.
Jabber is also much more complicated to configure.
The average user will probably be completely stumped by selecting servers, how that affects their jabber ID, and configuring "transports", not to mention installing the client (which they don't have to do with MSN Msg.)
For anyone who's been affected by this change: the GAIM folks have received info about how to connect to Yahoo from the Trillian people. They expect to be able to release a working version of GAIM tonight.
I'd imagine that other projects will quickly follow suit. More wasted time for Yahoo, to no avail.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
They're not out to break other IM clients. That would be easy, and the various protocol changes they make are minor. They're simply reengineering their own network, and not taking the time to warn Cerulean, because they view them in a bad light.
Look, all Yahoo! did was change what servers were handling what traffic. Historically they do that once every six months, presumably as a load balancing issue (the server list keeps widening and coming from a larger geographic area each time.) Trillian had a patch out in under 12 hours because the change was exceedingly minor.
Yahoo! is not breaking remote clients. They're working on a service they provide, and sometimes other people's emulation of said service just needs to be upgraded to keep up with developments in Yahoo!. Quit with the nefarious tone.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Why can you still connect with the original Yahoo! (tm) Messenger (no matter whether windows, linux or freebsd version)?
I see only two possibilities:
1. Some (large) parts of the Y! protocol are still unknown to developers, so activating some new functions leads to nonfunctioning of all clients that do not understand this.
or
2. Everytime the protocol is changed, a new algorithm is activated. All official clients have a several protocols builtin, and that code exists for months to years (the linux version was last changed some years ago).
So... how do they do it? How did they do it in the past?
When you get a new feature in your mail client, it doesn't break every other client on the market.
When you get a new feature on your Jabber client, it doesn't break every other client on the market.
When you get a new feature on a web browser, it doesn't break every other browser on the market.
When Yahoo introduce a new feature on their client, it magically breaks every other client on the market.
Now sing along: "One of these things is not like the other ones!"
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
A lot of people are whinging they have no choice, and if they us the AIM/MSN etc. clients they, they must watch the adds blah blah blah. My question to them is, why should they give you a free service simply because you want one - I'm really getting tired of seeing this constant gimme gimme argument by Internet users who simply don't want to pay for anything? It costs money to host and support these things and add revenue is one of the ways they do it. As much as I like freedom of choice of client and I can understand why they would be pissed and muight they sokmething like this. Personally, if I found no one was receiving my revenue generating adds I'd tell the lot of them to fuck off and shut the thing down. It is a business after all and not a social charity.
The official yahoo client for linux is seriously lacking and this is the main reason why open source yahoo clones for linux will continue to thrive regardless of how often they change their protocol.
There was a small thread about this on the last article about GMail.
Google has the resources to make their own instant messenging network. Google using jabber for an IM network would be great. It would be a lot easier to convert somebody to "Google Messenger" than "Jabber".
Later, ISP's (if they wanted) could easily add their own servers in addition to Google's network. This second part is probably less likely, but we'd already be using a standard IM protocol, so I could really care less if Google is the only one with servers.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Google wants to make money, and they'll figure out a way to make money off IM if they decide to launch an IM service. Gmail uses text ads based on the content of your mail. Why couldn't it use text ads based on IM conversations? A Web based IM client (which would be neat, because everyone has a Web browser anyway) could easily do this.
Google might even merge Gmail and GM (Google Messaging), and let you archive your conversation in the same way you archive your mail, and they can serve ads based on that, too.
In fact, IM, e-mail and newsgroups are very similar - they are all forms of messaging/communication. You could use one interface and merge everything into an über messaging service, which would probably include Google Groups 2 or a later GG (Google Groups) version adapted for this purpose.
In fact, they could probably make everything look like it's the same thing (which it would be, really), and just let the user decide whether he wants to talk to one person or a group of people. If the person on the other end happens to be available right there and then, you would have realtime discussions (IM). If not, you'd probably get a message from him/her later (mail). Or you would get messages from groups of people (newsgroups/Google Groups 2).
Come to think of it, I think it is just a matter of time before something like this happens...
Clever signature text goes here.
...Unless Yahoo means they want people to use a client that ~allows~ spam to reach you unauthorized by you- paid advertisements.
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
So, does Miranda still work with the Yahoo IM network after their protocol changes? Have they put out a patch to deal with the change? Not to be a jerk, but if they haven't, it'a just as useless as Gaim at the moment for people who want to IM folks using Yahoo...
The web is only a reflection of the world in witch it exists. No that's not phylasophical. Not mostly.
Propriatary solutions don't work because the world was not designed to be propriatary. Look at biological spread, the more the "good stuff" get's out and around the more successfull the speacies. With symbiots, not parasitics being the most successfull.
Look at religion. While there are mass exceptions, relegions that foster decentrilization and "Individual Priesthood" survive the enevitable cataclysims that befall them (Catholics bing the big exception)
Comunism was MORE efficient within specific markets than capatilism! But because it resulted in a narrow range of diversity, and limited flexibility it's net efficiency was dismal compared to capitalsim.
Propriatary will allways loose out in the long term (in the short term legislation may make it succeed), only because buisnesses will continue to require more and more diverse services that eventually a narrow market, that propriatary solutions will enevitably be unable to provide.
I'm not talking about diversity alone. But cross polination between diverse populations. The diverse array of options provided by F/OSS, and the freedom to integrate from the full range without (major) consequence will win the day. At least I think so.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Also, do I understand this correctly, that third party clients are only clients with no servers? In other words, if account X is on MSN and account Y is on Yahoo!, a user with a third party client would use that client to create accounts on both MSN and Yahoo! to be able to communicate with X and Y, even if that account creation is a one-click action from the client user's perspective. If that's the case, such third party client makers are not providing anything in the way of IM protocol consolidation. Consider the possibility of everyone realizing what a great app those third party clients are and started using them. If a good percentage of people abandoned official clients, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and ICQ would have no reason to continue chat support -- they'd shut down the servers. The value of an IM network is comprised of the following:
I think the only thing that would help consolidate different IM protocols is the emergence of standards that talk about routing messages between different chat servers. Is this what Jabber is doing?
Alexey
No, I didn't think it was a troll either.
I did not see the post as stellar, but certainly did not see it as one I would bomb with negative moderation. But the response to the moderation, albeit how riduculous it appears to be, makes it very difficult for me to mark it as "unfair" on my end.
Most of us are pretty reasonable guys and will at least try to metamod fairly. The statistical analysis programs analyzing moderation / metamoderation on Slashdot do do a pretty good job of purging assholes - but it can only minimize, not eliminate.
Please don't namecall. Let us do it for you in metamod. You will never know you have been avenged, nor will anyone else, but Slashdot's moderation accounting system will.