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AOL Locks Out AIM Screen Names
dshaw858 writes "According to a story on eWeek, AOL has mistakenly suspended a very large number of AOL Instant Messenger (one of the most widely used IM programs) accounts, by mistake. I don't know about you guys, but this happened to me and a large percentage of friends and coworkers. AOL says that a fix should be ready by Monday."
I can vouch that this was indeed the case. Two of the handful of screenames I use on a regular basis were being punted at stage two of the sign in with an error about the account being suspended.
The box had a little "More Info" button that I clicked on that was supposed to explain why my account had been suspended. Two of them had to do with actual AOL accounts (mine are AIM only), the third had to do with being less than 13 (I can buy beer), and the last was a "you violated the TOS" option.
Dunno what happended, but as of last night, all of my screen namers were back up and running. The disconnections seemed to have no relation to the e-mail address they were registered to or when the last time I used them was.
*shrug*
This happened to me MONTHS ago. I had my AIM account for six or seven years and had at least a couple hundred contacts (personal and professional) in it. I used it for work and personal. I've lost touch with many people because I no longer have that account or their information.
It just happened out of the blue. I called AOL and they said that they couldn't help me unless I was an AOL user. They suggested that I pay to become an AOL user, then call in and get them to fix my AIM account, then cancel my AOL account after a couple months. Of course, why would I want AOL?!
Previously, my employer had provided a free AOL account to me (all employees, even though none of us used it). It happened to be my firstname and last initial, which is the same as my AIM name. Then, my company closed their AOL accounts. And, even though my AIM account was YEARS older than the AOL account in the same name, they shut down *both*... at least, that's the best guess. Since AOL won't offer any help or even an explanation as to why after seven years my account stopped working without me buying an AOL account, I don't know for sure.
Please for the love of God look into Gaim. Far less bloated, no ads, and it just plain works.
Interesting, because almost everyone I know uses AIM solely. I guess different segments of the population tend to split into groups...
But on another hand, the problem is worse than that of an OS. I can switch to Linux very easily (in fact I have). It may not be popular, but that doesn't affect my use much. On the other hand, if I were to switch from AIM to Messenger or ICQ, it'd be useless because I know about 3 people who use them.
Me: "AIM is down. Try this cool new program."
Them: "Why? Nobody I know is on this thing except you and it doesn't seem any better than MSN/AIM/ICQ anyways. You say it's "open". What does "open" mean? Oh, I see. So what?"
As long as AOL is the worlds largest ISP, AIM will probably be the largest instant messaging system. As long as Windows Messenger comes with Windows, it'll probably be right there in second (if not first at some point).
I'd love to see Jabber take over, but I hold no illusions. FireFox is bad-ass, but will it ever totally supplant IE? Probably not.
Sigh...
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
That would be XMPP/Jabber.
I have different experiences. All of my friends, and pretty much everyone I'm aware of at my university uses AIM, and we're all 22 or under.
I haven't met anyone who uses ICQ in years, although I hear it's more popular outside of the US.
I can't comment on the growing MSN population though. I always forget to ask that when I lure children into my van with promises of free candy and ice cream.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
In my experience, AIM tends to be very popular among the college-age crowd in the Midwest and East Coast, while MSN has the majority of the market in Canada and on the West Coast. Seeing new students come to school from various areas of the country seems to confirm this, although almost everyone gets an AIM address to use while they are here, even those on MSN back home.
I have Jabber, you have Jabber... are we on the same Jabber network? How do I connect to your network?
No, really, you don't understand how Jabber works. You don't connect to their network, the server handles all that.
You are user@server.org. That is your Jabber ID. server.org is the name of your jabber server. You want to talk to other@network.net. network.net is their jabber server. You just send them a message! Your client tells your server to route the message over to them. It's completely transparent to you (and to your client, even). The network connection part all happens on the server.
The only difference is that you use email-address type things instead of usernames. But that's how MSN works too, and it's not hurting for users.
I have Jabber, you have Jabber... are we on the same Jabber network? How do I connect to your network?
What? You're not making any sense - it's all automatic. If I'm logged onto the server example1.com with username "bar" and you're logged onto example2.com with username "foo" then I can IM foo@example2.com and it Just Works - this is exactly the same as how you send mail - you don't need to worry about how the network interconnects, you just address your email to someuser@somedomain.com and it Just Works.
What you are saying might be true of other protocols auch as AIM whcih aren't designed to cope with a network of servers - there you may well have 2 AIM servers with no way of communicating with eachother, but with Jabber they will automatically talk so long as there are no firewalls blocking the data between the servers.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Yea, in europe MSN has become insanely popular and has literally killed ICQ in just under two years. AFAIK Asia is still on hooked on ICQ but are also switching to MSN. Except for the chinese who have their own nifty program, I think it's called QQQ.
Thanks for browsing at -1
Please vistit my blog: www.framtiden.nu
That's precisely when I switched to using Trillian as a client and, more recently, Gaim since switching to Linux.
Most of my contacts were ICQ, but I had a few on MSN and a couple on AIM. Trillian or Gaim meant that I could have one program open yet be on multiple networks, meaning I could communicate with all of them.
The distribution's a bit different now, as most of my contacts are on MSN, but it's still useful because of this. If I meet someone new on one of the other networks I'm not out of contact simply because I mainly use another.
Sure if one of the networks dies (or folds totally) it'd still bite for that network, but can still access the others. Plus I can build up a list of contacts on a different network without having to move away from the current one.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
Personally, all my contacts use ICQ (geeks and non-geeks alike).
you know that aim and icq are connected right? as long as you're using vaguely recent clients for icq and aim, then clients on each can speak to the other easily, and appear on buddy lists etc.
I use ichat and have both aim and icq accounts on my buddylist.
FYI. in ichat, to enter in icq buddies, you simple put them in your address book, add a new aim account to that person and put their icq number in it. then use ichat to add that person as a new buddy.
dave
It certainly is happening for more than a week.Check out this thread.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
This age verification flaw was already in the limelight sometime back.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Interesting to note that the early days of ICQ everyone said its like a buddy list for the internet, in other words, aol invented the concept?
No they didn't. In the early years ICQ had nothing to do with AOL. It was created and maintained by an israelian corporation. AOL bought it years later.
AOL obviously doesn't release their server software, but the client software allows you to connect to any server/port you like. So, you can choose your own provider, and since part of the AIM protocol is open (Oscar? I think?), you could do your own server.
But then you are cut off from the rest of the network, whereas a decentralised protocol such as Jabber allows everyone to run their own servers whilest remaining part of the network.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Isn't this the same thing with IRC: if a server becomes disconnected, the users logged onto that server still can communicate among each other, just not with the other users of the network. Of course, things may get messy when the networks comes up again, and it turns out that during the partition there have been duplicate usernames, channel names, etc...