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Enhanced Instant Messaging with IMSmarter
Zanek writes "Engadget has an article about David Weekly who has created IMsmarter. What is IMSmarter? David describes it as a 'secretary that helps you out by sitting between you and the rest of the world, letting you know about things that are interesting and taking notes'. Works on all computers, no software to install." Gaim and other clients have good logging and search capabilities, but this goes a few steps beyond that.
Sorry, but I don't quite trust this service as they would be able to log every IM request that I send or receive.
4.1 Advertisers
Some of the services offered by Coceve are paid for by targeted advertising. As a result, Coceve may share aggregate demographic information about you and people like you with advertisers (including ad serving companies), allowing them to customize the ads that you might see. We will not release any personally identifiable information to them. However, if you click on an ad, sign up for an advertised product or service, or otherwise interact with an advertiser, the advertiser may separately record information about you or your computer, not subject to this Privacy Policy.
4.2 Contractors
Coceve may hire people or businesses to work with or for us on projects, such as performing security audits or providing customer support, in which they may require access to portions of your personally identifying information to do their job. Before we provide any such information to them, however, they must sign confidentiality agreements promising to protect that information, and if applicable, promise its return or destruction when the work is complete.
4.3 Compelled Disclosure
Coceve may be requested by subpoena, court order, or legal process, to disclose information about you. Coceve believes strongly in the privacy of its subscribers, and will attempt to notify you that your information has been requested, unless we are prohibited by law from doing so. If you are a Basic Subscriber, we will send notification to your email address. If you are a Premium Subscriber, we will send notice to both your email address, and your postal mailing address. We may be required by law to disclose your information if you do not challenge the disclosure request through appropriate legal channels.
4.4 Other Disclosure
Coceve may disclose information about you to comply with legal process served on Coceve, to protect Coceve rights or property, to investigate or report suspected illegal activities, or to take emergency action to protect the personal safety of users of Coceve services or the public.
Coceve may be acquired by or merged with another company. Before your information is shared with or transferred to that company, you will be notified via email, and via Coceve.com or IMSmarter.com, and provided the opportunity to agree to the transfer (including acceptance of any resulting privacy policy) or to erase your information and cease receiving services from Coceve.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It tells you when your laundry is done?! No software installed...that leaves...hardware?
Gaim is 1 step further... its free
KARMA POLICE ARREST THIS MAN HE TALKS IN MATHS- radiohead
One thing I wish the interviewer had covered was the privacy aspect of the IMSmarter. What prevents others from accessing your chats and collections of notes through the service? How is it protected from malicious intruders? Why should I trust David to hold onto my stuff? All of which, of course, is not going to stop me from trying it out. If I have something important to say, I don't say it via instant message. It's just an aspect I'd like to see covered in the interview. It is covered in the sites privacy policy, but I'd like to hear a little more from the creator on that front.
A lot of people have logging turned off specifically for the reason "Whatever happens in the box, stays in the box".
this proxy is a nice idea, if you don't value your privacy.
# Search your IM chat history...at work or at home!
:
# Discover when your friends update their blogs
# Blog as easily as sending an IM
# Remember the laundry you just put in the wash
# Recall web sites, phone numbers, and email addresses mentioned on IM
Ok, this is nice. But no software to install... this means that it has to store (or at least transmit) my IM chat history. To boot, it parse phone numbers, web sites and EMAIL ADRESSES. And their privacy policy say
4.2 Contractors
Coceve may hire people or businesses to work with or for us on projects, such as performing security audits or providing customer support, in which they may require access to portions of your personally identifying information to do their job. Before we provide any such information to them, however, they must sign confidentiality agreements promising to protect that information, and if applicable, promise its return or destruction when the work is complete.
Oh... they'll give my personal info to business who PROMISED they won't give it to others... right.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
"secretary that helps you out by sitting between you and the rest of the world, letting you know about things that are interesting and taking notes."
Isn't this what the irritating green parrot, and later purple fuzzy monkey-thing, were supposed to do? We all know how effective and well-loved those things were. Cute for a week, then you wanted to strangle them, and never once did I get a useful suggestion.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
RTFA...IMSmarter is free too.
So, in essence, this takes a bunch of simple functions most people already have access to, and in exchange for not having to go through the arduous task of opening multiple apps or contextual menus, you hand over as much personal info as you could ever hope to cram into a single app to a company who states that their express purpose for this is to give it to advertisers. Also, let's say you actually use their features and become reliant on them. What happens when, all of a sudden, they decide to charge premium usage fees for access to, say, your online chat logs? Never trust data you may want or need some day to a host you can't rely on having indefinite free access to.
How is this newsworthy?
There's no mention of size limit, so just IM all your files to yourself and imsmarter will back it up for you, encrypted and private. Whee!
No kidding. Someday these folks are going to break out the databases of information they have been gethering for the past fifteen or so years and it is going to be a huge shock to most people.
From their FAQ: "Using IM Smarter is pretty cool"
Like "Quality food", "Exciting sale opportunity", and "Innovative new features", if you have to say it, it probably isn't.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Far superior.
vaporware!
Finally an article I can post on! :) We host IMSmarter's many servers (yay, another Slashdotting for Simpli!) and David is a personal friend of mine. I've been using his service for a few weeks and I can offer you my feedback.
First, the thing about IMSmarter is not what it can do right now, but the platform it's enabling for the future. David has been working hard for the past year developing the backend things; it's just in the past month that he's really started to turn his focus to adding features. Some of the things he's been chewing on include:
1) To-do lists. These are mostly implemented now and are mentioned in the article. They are basically reminders without the cumbersome Outlook interface. "Remind me in 20 minutes to call my friend," you type to the proxy, and it dutifully does so. No more setting up calendar appointments for simple things.
2) Logging (and yes, for the paranoid out there, you can turn this off.) This is actually pretty useful as the logs are stored on a central server. I can't tell you how many times I've logged into my PC from home just to dig through chat logs; now I don't have to.
3) Website updates. This is the one I've been bugging David about. The service will automatically notify your friends when you update your personal website. I can't wait to use this one for my blog.
4) Fedex/UPS tracking. Notifies you when a package you've shipped has arrived, for instance.
Basically, David's vision for this (as I understand it) is to get rid of those hundreds of annoying emails we all get saying "Someone has replied to a thread you posted in" or "Your package has been shipped" or "XYZ updated his blog today." Those are things for which email is not as useful as IM is.
Knowing how motivated David is in this venture, I know we'll see great things from IMSmarter. It still needs maturation -- right now, the platform is there to build on, but not too many implementations have been built. He needs beta testers, and beta testing is pretty simple (you just set up a proxy on your IM client and sign up through their website.) Check it out and mark this one down as "one to watch."
-Erica
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
firmly with DON'T try!
F/OSS & IT Consultant
i'm imagining a Beowulf Cluster of YOUR MOM!
Who'd a figured?! Next he'll be posting links to Roland's blog...!
... Microsoft announced today it will create a server-side indexing solution for Windows users to keep track of their warez.
IMDumber
This is a new way for people to record conversations without them knowing. There should some sort of DRM protection for instant messages
Whats wrong with they way I currently check my chat logs? That is by reading them? Why would I want to use a proxy to read a log file in my home dir?
"So what do you say to all the people concerned about privacy as a close personal friend of this guy?"
;)
Well, first, IMSmarter allows you to turn logging off by sending the proxy a message. That's the first thing.
The second thing I would mention is that, since IMSmarter isn't selling your information to advertisers (and, as far as I know, has no plans to introduce this as a revenue stream), it's far less dangerous than even your standard webmail client. (What, you think Yahoo or AOL administrators can't read your webmail or IM chats?)
David will have to introduce more fine-grained logging controls in the future (i.e. never log conversations with xyz; always log conversations with abc; delete the last hour of logs with asdf.) This is all coming. You are seeing a project that is in its very early beta stage right now, and I think this Slashdotting should jump-start some of the things that IMSmarter needs to do. You and I both know, however, that people care more about features than privacy. If we all cared about privacy first and foremost, none of us would have a Gmail account.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
It's a SOCKS proxy server, and all mainstream IM clients already support SOCKS proxies, so all you have to do is configure your chat client to use the proxy.
I've been using it for a few minutes and I think it's pretty damned cool.
KDE has a feature that functions as a reminder that sits in the system try next to the clock, i am sure Gnome has something like this too...
most chat clients offer logging capabilities already...
No kidding! Besides, it should be fairly easy to set something up like this as a plugin to most Jabber clients. My jabber client already retains all of the conversations I ever have and is searchable. It should be simple enough to add a reminder/note service and something that captures all addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and URLs into a simple database.
It seems interesting - but I don't want my data going out there. Besides, I doubt it would work if you use SSL.
There really isn't anything to prevent them from using the logs in a similar fashion to the out of control cyber-vigilante web site Perverted Justice other than a privacy policy that seems to leave a lot of questions in my mind as to the security of the system.
According to their privacy policy:
"Access to your personal information other than your chat logs and buddy lists (which are protected according to Section 2.3) is limited to employees who reasonably require access to it in the course of doing their jobs, such as providing customer support to you. We require those employees to sign confidentiality agreements promising to safeguard your information."
There's been a few highly publicized cases of insiders stealing information. I've got to pass on IMSmarter.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Wake up, by saying that, you are the terrorist.
Yeah my knee jerk reaction to this was "never in a thousand years" too, don't forget that the person you are messaging may be using this service *and you'd never know*.
Hey David!!
If I email you, can you let me know when my wash is done?
As if your privacy isn't of utmost concern, what about your friends'? So now, I could be targeted for advertising if a friend IMs me asking for my email. I type it in as one would expect, and now, instantly, this is logged on IMSmarter's servers. Next time a "contracter" "comes in" to perform some "service", I start getting SPAM. Wait a minute, I never agreed to receive SPAM from you!
I don't like this service simply because it doesn't require the other party's consent.
I came with a better way to solve that here. A Perl script.
Basically, it's a small script that talks to a mysql database, and a set of filters that convert log files to an universal (currently very ugly) format. You just run this from cron or whatever, and then can search the database. Comes quite handy when you have several computers with different IM services.
Currently Psi, Kopete, kvirc and mbox/maildir.
While it my not have a monatary cost, it is not free as they collect and sell info about you and your usage habits.
Here's another thing I just ran across in their site, under Questions.
"Can I delete my logs? Yes. You can delete your chat history at any time, and we'll erase it from our servers as expediently and thoroughly as possible. (We try to make it pretty clear that you're doing this so you don't end up deleting your logs by accident!)"
The words "expediently and throughly as possible" really make me wonder. I want to have control and a guarantee of what I delete, which means I'll archive my chats on my own system, thank you.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
i hate when people make new piggyback programs like this that are gay so i can search my fag friends weblogs
Where's the Gaim plugin?
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
What is wrong here in our very little corner of geekness these days, winamp dead, gropuper was a bloated WASTE and now this IMSmarter which is only a Socks4 Proxy to something that there is not even a screenshot of it. How long till they shut it down becuase people start to abuse Socks proxy to gain access to who knows what?.........
It reminded me that I have a load of laundry in the wash that I need to move over to the dryer.
Just because it's posted on slashdot, doesn't mean it's safe. Anyone know what it does to your computer when you do this, and how to remove it once it's done?
...I'm sticking with IR Baboon.
Get a clue slashdot editors, promoting spyware like this is a smack in the face to any slashdotter.
We have higher expectations then to see slashdot whoring spyware as if it was the greatest thing since silicon wafers.
-gater
-gain
-any other spyware
all are invasive and damaging to those that are fooled into using them!
I dare ask.
From here:
:)
:)
What if I forgot my password for the website?
Easy! Just type FORGOT to the service, and it will send you a link that you can use to log in again and reset your password! Try to remember your new password.
How do I get the service to bug me less often?
No problem. Just type BUG ME LESS to the service and it will send you a link that you can use to log in again and reset your password! Try to remember your new password.
Looks like someone got a little lazy.
Michael I am sorry Broda' but are you on hard drugs? or in love? Becuase how in the name of the H*ll has this story something to do with /. , is beyond my comprehensions!
This Stuff Doesn't matter at all!
I don't even know David, but I'm sure if you ask nicely he'll ignore you, because he's already written a nice program to "bug me in ten minutes not to post dumb jokes to slashdot." ;)
And while your privacy concerns are understandable, I can vouch for his total commitment to maintaining privacy through this service. He's a great guy, do a little google work and judge for yourself.
I am his friend though so while I can speak to his motives beter than most, I am biased.
-Ian
Now, all I need is someone to talk to.
I've been using it for a few minutes and I think it's pretty damned cool.
And definately you are using AOL IM
I dont really see a point in this. There are other apps that track personal inforation if you want them too. And now this company could know everything I am doing... Not worth my time...
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
Those all strike me as things for which e-mail is vastly superior to IM. I don't want to be interrupted by an asynchronous notification of a low-priority event that doesn't require an immediate response.
I, for one, welcome our new smarter overlords. If you'd put I, for one, welcome our new IMSmarter overlords. maybe you wouldn't have gotten modded -1 off topic.
So this is what's really evil about Gator et al -- they make *actual* innovators look bad. David's a geek, a damn cool one, and he's genuinely trying to make a really useful service even better, through liberal application of mind-bogglingly cool hackery.
:)
This should be cool, right?
So I used to live with David. I'm a moderately well known packet hacker type, and around the time I was living with him, I put together this hack for SSH called Dynamic Forwarding. SSH has the ability to forward TCP-based services, like email and such. But you used to need to pre-specify all your forwards before connecting. Dynamic Forwarding put a SOCKS server in the SSH client, so any application that could speak SOCKS could gain access to the cryptographically encrypted channel.
David had a much more expansive vision -- rather than just encrypt the chat session, why not add new features to it? IM is this brutally efficient communications medium where all sorts of otherwise superfluous communication artifacts are dispensed with; perhaps this efficiency could be used as an appropriate channel to organize one's life?
So -- no joke, he marshalled his savings, quit his job, and became this total guru of instant messaging protocols so he could explore the potential of this (very good) idea. No VC's, no ulterior motives, and when he's talking about security engineers who some day might need to examine the system to validate his architecture -- well, that'd probably include me, and seriously, I don't want to know anything about your life thank you very much
Honestly, it's a bit ridiculous to talk about IMSmarter as creating any serious alteration to IM privacy. You're using an unencrypted channel to a centralized messaging clearing house that, in AOL's case, is located in Virginia. Ahem. I'm not saying privacy isn't important -- just that David's got way more interesting things to worry about than who you've got a crush on. Ultimately, his service isn't a very good place to spy from anyway, because he doesn't get all messages from all people, just those that are intentionally routed through him. And as anyone will tell you, global views trump self-selection any day of the week.
Honestly -- he's pulling some really cool protocol tricks, and I'm happy to see his wonky-as-hell hack actually become something my mom could use. I know there's alot of creepy corporate virus vendors who are doing some truly nasty things -- someday I want to find the guy who replaces people's TCP/IP stacks and replace a few of his vertebrae -- but David's not one of 'em. Good guy with cool code -- he deserves to be encouraged.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
Now if only it could Do the laundry for you...
Then i might sign up for it, but being reminded that I'm slacking off and not doing my laundry sounds EVIL.
Isn't this a kindda stereo type thuogh, a cool geek who is trying to offer a simple to use service out of his honesty. While he should be encouraged, I advise him to first get an encrypted connection line, then offer such a geeky service out of his honesty.
Maybe if it was google, I would trust it's reliability more. But, honestly, the local solutions I have now are better because I have more control over it (i.e. it's right here, doesn't require a net connection, etc.)
File transfers. Either they're blocking them, which makes their service useless as you'll have to turn on/off the proxy to send/receive files, or every file sent through IM is going to go through them.
That could really add up, especially with that gaim-based filesharing thing coming out...
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
It must do your laundry too, since I sure as hell didn't start it...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
It requires that you already have an IM client on your system. If you don't, then there's software you need to install right there to use this facility. The tagline of "no software to install" is misleading.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You can set it to watch the log-in, log-out and status messages of specific people on any given IM service, allowing you to figure out when they tend to be at their computer.
It's not exactly the same as IMSmarter, but i've become a giant fan of bittlbee + irssi + screen.
2^5
god you are a moron.
That sounds GREAT! Seriously! Where can I download their proxy? I want to run one for myself! ;) :P
What? I can't have it? Why?
Thinking a bit about this, it should actually be trivial to make a plugin for Miranda-IM, or some other OS-product, hey even bitlbee could be extended (since that is designed to run on your server anyway)...
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
cheers
Jogger, Jabber/XMPP powered blog is better solution, Jogger. Loggin chat on private/corporate XMPP server is better solution.
MSN, ICQ and Yahoo + SmarterIM is not smarter as XMPP!
they got what they wanted. no matter how much we critisize them, the fact is, they just wanted the ad and probablly they don't care what we have to say
Bug AOL, Yahoo, and MSN about encrypted sessions ... if any of their clients supported SOCKS over SSL, IMSmarter would have been happy to have worked with it. David and I have actually discussed adding crypto to the mix; lack of client support and necessary CPU resources (SSL negotiation is very expensive) is hampering that effort.
--Dan
Hi, everyone! I'm David, the author of IM Smarter. I'm glad that people are interested enough in the service to post about it. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to post this earlier, as I was in a (very long) meeting with some folks from the Chicago Beck Foundation to discuss different ways to promote literacy in the third world.
Anyhow, I'm here now, and I'd like to respond to some of the higher-order points that people have made. I think that it's correct that trust is a big issue here. This is part of the reason why we tried to create a privacy policy that would clearly hold your private data as sacred to us. This is also why we took the unusual step of making a privacy promise. The comments in this forum make it clear that we didn't do a good enough job in making it clear that your private data is yours alone. We would be delighted to work, with your constructive feedback, on a privacy policy that does a better job making it clear that your chats are for your eyes only. I actually did ask the EFF to edit and review my privacy policy, but they haven't set up a program for doing that. If any of you know of a consumer-rights organization that would be interested in working with a company on drafting a consumer-focused privacy policy, please do let me know about them.
Let me be very clear here: we will not scrape the content of your IM chats to deliver advertising to you. This is not GMail. We will not sell or otherwise disclose your personally identifiable information to third parties. We are here to use your information for you, not against you. If that makes it harder for me to rake in the big bucks as quickly, so be it. I am here to protect your privacy and improve your IM. (The last time I was on Slashdot, it was because my non-profit had successfully sued Diebold in federal court for infringing free speech rights. We won - thank you EFF!)
There was some concern that our intended deployment of Premium features would suddenly disable currently-available features. This is not true. There are a suite of kickass *new* features planned for Premium - the services that are currently offered as Free will continue to be offered without cost throughout the service's lifetime.
If you have any other questions or concerns about the service, I'd be happy to hear about them. Having launched less than two weeks age we frankly weren't ready for Slashdot with regards to our privacy messaging or site design (which, yes, totally blows but should be fixed in the next week or two). We've got a lot of great features yet to deploy - as I said on the Engadget interview, logging is really only the tip of the iceberg. Logging isn't the *point*. The point is having an agent who can work on your behalf to keep you in the loop about things you want to know about and who can keep away messages you don't want brought to you (at the moment because you're busy, or ever).
This is my baby, the fruit of my labors of a year. I realize my baby's pretty ugly and infantile right now, but my metric for going out of private beta was to launch at the point when I could imagine that at least one random person out there on the Internet could plausibly find the service interesting enough to use on a regular basis. I think we're at that point now, albeit not at the point where we're the service "everyone obviously should use". The service continues to make progress on a regular basis. I can only hope and pray that people will be patient with me as it creaks onwards towards becoming a great, genuinely useful service for people.
Have a great Saturday night, everyone.
Peace,
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
But, I already have that - I read Slashdot.
I clicked on to setup the MSN setup and it ended up installing a virus. I noticed some weird behaviour and McAfee confirmed that the site installed a worm.
From the IMSmarter website:
Give us some example of IM Smarter in action.
It's 4pm; you're at work and you remember you were going to meet your buddy for dinner tonight, but you've forgotten where. He's not online, but you had IMmed with him last night from home to discuss where you'd meet up. Without IM Smarter, you'd be screwed - with IM Smarter you just log in to the web site, click on your buddy's name, and see the chat you had last night.
Try turning on logging in your IM client. In MSN Messenger, perhaps other IM clients, you can then dive back as far as you need into your chat history whether or not your friend is online. Thus, this software serves no purpose. For Messenger at least.
- IP
No one will care, I mean if they can still get a tub of butter for 2 cents cheaper....
>And you think that your IM service cant?
no. it can't. we run our own jabber server here. =)
Your messages are travelling across any number of hops to a central server owned by AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo! or some guy who wanted to donate his bandwidth to Jabber. This is really just adding one more hop.
Unless you're encrypting your conversations, you can't assume for a minute that you have any kind of privacy online.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/
Honestly, it's a bit ridiculous to talk about IMSmarter as creating any serious alteration to IM privacy. You're using an unencrypted channel to a centralized messaging clearing house that, in AOL's case, is located in Virginia. Ahem.
I don't buy this whole "Whats stopping AOL from logging all of your conversations and sacrificing them to the holy gods of advertising or homeland security?" on several levels.
Taking a look at AOL's privacy policy, there is no mention of logs in the "Collection of Your AIM Information" section even though they explicitly mention all the types of data they collect in that section. Not being one to trust AOL, now allow me to examine the practicality of actually logging every single AIM conversation.
There are more than 260,000,000 registered AIM names, so through the utilization of the highly scientific method of WAG (wild ass guess) I'll estimate 20,000,000 people are connected/ active at any given time. I just finished logging about 30 minutes of AIM activity in Trillian, averaging around 2.12 kbits/s. Therefore:
About 42,400,000 bits of loggable information passes through AOL's servers every second.
2544000000 (303.27 mbytes) every minute.
152640000000 (17.77 gbytes) every hour.
3663360000000 (426.47 gbytes) every day.
25643520000000 (2.92 tbytes) every week.
113564160000000 (12.9 tbytes) every month.
1338042240000000 (0.15 PETAbytes) every year.
Assuming they would use some type of ATA or SCSI based NAS (tape drives would be too slow), price per gigabyte could easily be around $8-10. So, that would mean AOL would need nearly $400,000 worth of hardware to support a 3-month logging cycle (and that's just initial cost, not counting maintenance, floor space cost, cooling, power, etc). I highly doubt peeking into the petty conversations of their users is worth that much money to them.
Besides, even if AOL does log all AIM convos, it doesn't change the fact that the basic premise behind IMSmarter - storing all your logs on a remote server, is an invasion of privacy waiting to happen. Why should we trust IMSmarter?
Some Jabber clients (eg. psi) allow client-to-client OpenPGP encryption of messages. That means that nobody except the intended recipient (and possibly the NSA :)) gets to read the message. I'm not really sure how integrated-into-Jabber this is, but it obviously does require some client support since only the client software can encrypt messages before they are sent over the wire.
(Oh, and like someone pointed out, SSL only encrypts your connection to the server not to the other client.)
HAND.
Unless you're also encrypting your messages, you shouldn't seriously count on disabled logging to protect your privacy. Most IM protocols send messages through the server nowadays, so there's one vulnerability. And if it's plain text, it could be vulnerable to snooping along the network path as well.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
i downloaded the reg file from the site and installed it... now i cant connect thro' my yahoo messg.. i didnt backup my registry... plz tell me how to remove this entry from the registry...
I must attest that David Weekly is essentially today's equivalent of Hiro Protagonist - the sportbike-riding, authority-defying, world-trotting, party-throwing l33t h4x0r in the unspoiled sense of the expression. He runs an incredibly useful community non-profit, he apparently quit his job to write this, and he recently took two weeks to educade kids in Ghana about technology.
.sig is not just hot air. He backs that up with actions.
:)
While I wouldn't normally be likely to believe the words he's saying about protecting users' privacy on this service given the considerably sleazy EULA, I am definitely inclined to believe it when David is saying it. The slogan he puts in his
I should also add that he's the coolest Stanfurd grad I've ever seen (I'm just about to finish my degree at Cal, you see, and am rather pleased with the spanking administered yesterday, even though I'm not normally a fan of football
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Why is he a moron? I don't have any IM software installed, nor do I want any. I actually go through the extra trouble to uninstall MSN Messenger from all my Windows XP installs, otherwise it loads on boot all the time asking you to log into a service that you don't have or want. IM eats time like candy, you are much more productive without it. Let people send me an e-mail instead.
Well, first of all there's only about 1.3 bits per byte of english text. So that 150TB/yr figure goes down to about 25TB.
:)
Second of all, my friend used to *run* the AOL datacenter. What was that he said? "We just passed a petabyte." That was in around '98 or '99. I don't think you understand how big AOL is...his exact words to me were, "We cache the web every two hours."
Third, AOL ain't the only big fish in Virginia. That's all I'm going to say about that, except maybe that it's relatively common knowledge that IRC's been logged for at least the last decade and probably longer.
There's this great quote: "If you think it, don't say it. If you say it, don't write it. If you write it, don't be surprised." Expressing yourself means that others will register your expression -- some for good, others not. The goal is that the positive aspects of being social will exceed the negatives aspects of it. You ask, why trust IMSmarter? I change that to -- why trust the dozen or so routers between you and AOL? Why trust AOL itself? Why communicate with anyone?
Because there's value in human communication. IMSmarter is being built by a very smart friend of mine who's working to increase that value. It's neat
--Dan
Yeah, gaim-e uses gpg, which is not exactly the cleanest piece of code to API through (as in, there is no API, everything passes through the command line, and the interface dies if you look at it funny). Plus, there's a whole "no software to install" model David's working towards right now -- gaim-e requires not only software, but not using the genuine AOL/Yahoo/MSN client.
If you don't have use any IM programs, then you wouldn't use this service in the first place.
So yes, the poster before you was correct in saying that the parent poster is a moron.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
Sounds nice, but I'm not certain I want to give up my IMSoSmrt client from Compuglobalhypermeganet.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?