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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."
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.
Ok, you answered the question I was going to ask.
Which is of course, why not use an official client since you are in fact using their network and resources to send messages.
SO I ask the question to others
How many would use an official ad-encumbered client if one was available for your prefered environment?
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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.
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?
I was using GAIM on Yahoo just last night - not sure if it's still working today.
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/
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]
Some of the clients are just too big. My family uses Yahoo on their PCs. I have a 12" PowerBook and the Yahoo Messenger client for OS X takes up a good 10+% of the screen. Adium, on the other hand, takes up about 10% of the space that Yahoo Messenger does so I can leave it always visible in the corner of the screen. For me it has nothing to do with ads and everything to do with customization for my needs.
I have no idea why anyone wants to use only one of these IM services. My game clan used ICQ, so I had GnomeICU for a while. I just stopped using it (not as easy as IRC), and went back to IRC again. Pretty soon, a lot of people are going to realize that it doesn't take a genius to write a messaging program. Hell, any one of us at Slashdot could whip out a beta in less than a week. I know I could, I already am writing something similar in Tcl.
Anyway, website 'X' will have their own chat protocol, and account registration, and then so will websites 'Y' and 'Z'. Pretty soon it'll be a a service expected of a domain owner, like e-mail. And when that happens, there's going to be the need to interconnect these chat networks. After that, the above will no longer be an issue.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
A fine theory, except there is an official Linux/BSD Yahoo Messenger client available.
I have no idea how good it is as I use GAIM.
I tried Trillian but you can't use it to talk in the rooms, only on a one to one basis. I can already do that with Yahoo Messenger, thanks. What I can't do with YM is avoid being kicked out of the room by people with so called `booter` software. Also, sometimes it takes ages to get into a room. If you press escape you quit, without so much as an `are you sure`. You can't apply filtering to auto-ignore people using arabic (etc) or large fonts. Ignore is patchy and doesn't work from session to session (always). You can't force all fonts to be the same size and colour.
It seems there are a few things Trillian or Yahoo could improve on. I don't care if its proprietary or not - i just want it to work.
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!
Protocol: Jabber. Best client for it? hard to say, but my favorite is Psi. And I'm working on spreading the word to everybody that I can.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
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
I beg to differ.... I am using MirandaIM and the change works fine.
Jeremy
my specific situation wont apply to everyone, but...
I was using trillian until I figured out that all my contacts were on all the four major instant messagers... then I consolidated all my contacts into just one IM client.
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.
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?
That's why I run GAIM, plus its open source.
Except that oddly enough, their Linux client doesn't have ads.
Yahoo has nice webcam support and voice chat as well, and is a non-microsoft product. In my experience, it works better than MSN and is easier to shut off when you don't want it around.
I use it pretty much exclusively for webcam and voice stuff. Same with my friends. When your significant other lives 500+ miles away, its a nice solution to 'see' them, and no where near as irritating as using MSN (which has been a POS every time I've accidentally let it stay active on a system). Otherwise everyone I know uses AIM for chatting.
But yes, I still have my ICQ account from the mid 90's too, and my 40 or so contacts on there are never online anymore.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
What kind of problems do you experience with GAIM? The only thing I can think of is the Video/Voice/File sharing with MSN and AIM, but I never use those anyways.
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?
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
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. ;)
MS crippling Hotmail? Well, if they did do it, would it make a major difference given there are alternatives?
Telephone company blocking the bad side of town? There's a major difference in expectations, while (we agree) this would be "annoying, detrimental to their business, and (need I say?) constipatingly stupid" I'd also have to say that I couldn't reasonably be blamed for being surprised, nor reasonably blamed for making decisions based on BellWhatever continuing to provide a service they're under an obligation to provide, that even in the absense of regulation, I pay them to provide.
Such an assumption would be wrong in Yahoo's case. I know they're being paid by ads. I'm using a non-supported third party client, that doesn't show Yahoo's ads, they receive no other source of funding from me. At the very least, my surprise wouldn't be "Damn, they've shut the service down", it would be "Wow, this works" the first day I try it.
In that respect, the "what right they have to do" does come in it, in that there's a level of expectation here which has to do with what they can do, and what they're going to want to do. It's clearly not necessarily in Yahoo's interests to provide an IM service to people who are making no, direct or indirect, contribution to it. They're clearly Yahoo's servers, to do with as they wish. Why wouldn't I expect them to cut them off?
(This is not to imply that I think Yahoo! has done so in any mean fashion, I suspect this is a straightforward "Yes, we're upgrading the protocol to support new features, because time marches on, and we have no real obligation to devote our time to fixing other people's clients." type situation.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Same with me, I wouldn't mind using Gaim on windows, but last time I tried it (maybe 5 months ago?), it crashed whenever I tweaked certain prefs. I tried working around it for awhile, but eventually got fed up and went back to miranda.
Maybe I'll give it another go one of these days, it was nice using the same client in windows and linux.
Just out of curiosity, what do you consider to be the 4th major IM service? Jabber? IRC?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I use Trillian. I have one person I talk to on Yahoo occasionally. I have my several-year old ICQ account but haven't spoken to anyone on it in nearly a year. Less than a dozen contacts are on AIM and I rarely go on my old IRC channels now. Most of my friends are on MSN but I hate the official MSN client.
I tried GAIM but after it crashed for the 5th time in under 10 minutes just from trying to configure it I uninstalled it and went right back to reliable Trillian.
I'd like it if I could just get my friends to use something open like Jabber. I did have a group of a couple dozen people using WASTE regularly and loved it until most of them stopped logging on to it because it made their machines too slow or they were too dumb to figure out their firewall settings.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
I only ever use MSN, Yahoo & ICQ. I hate bloat ware and advertisements.
Under Linux I use GAIM - it does everything I want it to (except list Yahoo chat rooms). I have yet to explore getting my new WebCam working.
However under Windows, I use Miranda. (It doesn't require GTK). It is a very small program, uses very little memory, and has the features I need (except browsing/entering Yahoo chat rooms). Miranda rocks - it is a subtle program, but has awesome features and many plugins. If I want to use my WebCam - I have to run the Official Yahoo & MSN clients. They are overloaded with fretures that I never use and ads that I never want to see.
If I was super organised, I would take my Miranda drictory to/from work everyday on my USB 128MB stick - to keep the DB & plugins up2date.
No adds in both programs is a huge plus. Full priase for the efforts of these OSS programs!
Mike
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...
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