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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."
America Offline
There is no sig
If they'd mistakenly suspended those accounts on purpose, I'd be really worried about it!
fish and pipes
I knew I should have opened the attachment on that e-mail which AOL was tracking to make sure my account was tracking :(
wtf? u2?
Bah, who needs AIM? I build my own IM clients out of Lego.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
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*
It seems the computer industry is prone to these accidental 'monopolies'. Sure, there are other instant messaging networks, but almost everyone uses AOL/AIM. Sure, there are other OS's, but almost everyone uses Windows.
Too bad there isn't a more decentralized open standard for instant messaging..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
1) Oh no! This could really hurt AOL's rock-solid reputation as a competent and professional Internet service provider!
..." Oh, the hell with it.
2) I heard they're gonna ship the patch for this problem on ten million CDs!
3) The good news is, almost all AOL users are too dumb to notice they've been locked out!
4) "You've got
you sucsessfully made me log into AIM for the first time in months ti see if I was affected, only to be greeted by annoying friends from a long time ago with LONG TIME NO SEE...
bah
Why would they suspend accounts in the first place? I've never heard of anything like this. I guess the accounts of the IM spammers could be susceptible to suspension. Other than that, what else?
Workplace productivity grows by leaps and bounds for a three day stretch.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
I know a lot of people will take this opportunity to laught at AIM users for using a closed protocol. Now lets be honest: how many of you here use AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or MSN Messenger? I suspect that whichever of these services most of your friends use, you are likely to use.
Here's my whole point. Instead of saying it's the user's fault and proprietary protocols lead to this sort of thing, why don't we use it as an opportunity? With the outage of AIM for a weekend fresh in their minds, talk to your friends. Let them know that you found a "cool, new program" called Jabber (or some other open-protocol service) that wasn't out for the weekend. Get a few to at least try it out.
If at least a few of each of our friends AND WE try a different protocol and chat program, there's a chance that we can finally stop making fun of AIM users. (I know it's fun, but wouldn't using a better protocol be even better?)
Just remember - AOL may have given us a golden opportunity here. Let's take advantage of it rather than complain for the next year.
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.
Dude, spell it right. It's "Protocol".
The protocol is not the problem. Actually, there is no problem. This is a company hosting a free service on THEIR servers. In other words, it is none of your business whether they decide to contribute to the community and give up code or not. They definitely aren't setting a standard with their antiquated IM service compared to other alternatives. Would you really want the code? Just download jabber and be quiet until you get a grasp on reality.
I mod you down as a fanboy.
.conf somewhere and a kill -HUP promptly turns into a kill -9, I'll say that open source is flakey and untested.
Download an open source Jabber server, set it up. Create a ton of accounts. Then, turn it over to a team of staff members to run.
One day, when they accidentally delete some accounts, or lock some out, our make a typo in a
And I'd be equally stupid for saying so...
This isn't an issue of "closed protocol"/"closed source" and more of an issue of "poor management". This can happen just as easily (and arguably easier, in fact) with open source products.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Please for the love of God look into Gaim. Far less bloated, no ads, and it just plain works.
AIM users might be forced into interacting with real people for a whole weekend...
No, wait. There's still TV.
AOL Instant Messenger (one of the most widely used IM programs)
...in the US. And whoever said slashdot isn't US-centred?
Thanks for browsing at -1
Please vistit my blog: www.framtiden.nu
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.
Almost everyone I know (I am a college student) uses AIM exclusively. If AIM were to suddenly disappear, many people would be lost. At the rate AOL is going, how long can AIM be sustained? It costs them money to pay for the servers and update the software. Are there any good alternatives that have some sort of guarantee of staying power?
100,000 people are now unable to connect.
Is this Jabbers fault? No... it's your fault for b0rking your server.
I would be inclined to say it's your fault for hosting so many people on the same server with no "high availability" fail over system in place.
However, if 100,000 people is 100% of your network then that's really bad (this is the case of AOL) but if that 100,000 people on the same server is 1% of your network then it's not quite such an issue.
That said, I'm happy to blame AOL for being idiots... but blaming the OSCAR protocol just because it's closed is idiotic.
The fault of the protocol is that it doesn't allow multiple servers to be run by multiple providers - if it did then the scope for the fsck up would be a lot more limited. You will _always_ get screwups, part of protocol design is to limit the impact of said screwups. the AIM protocol (along with the MSN protocol, etc) were all designed by monopolies who wanted to be in charge of their own servers. The Jabber protocol was designed to be open and allow anyone to run their own server if they so choose.
Other Bad Things about the monopolistic approach to protocol design are:
1. If AOL wanted to discontinue the service they can just pull the plug on the servers and all their users are screwed (similarly they could sudenly decide to charge for the service)
2. If AOL want to completely change the protocol in an incompatable way then they can and that causes much hassle for the users.
The multiple independent server approach guarantees that you can continue using the service, even if you end up having to move to a new server, whcih I see as a Good Thing for the end user.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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
No, I do know how jabber works and I'm well aware of how inter-server messages are relayed, right down to the the XMPP schema that actually relays the message.
Thanks for the lesson though... it'd have been better if ya, you know, commented on the point rather than just having a fan-boy outburst.
IF YOUR STAFF CRASH YOUR JABBER SERVER, I CANNOT TALK TO YOU. THIS IS NOT BECAUSE JABBER IS OPEN OR CLOSED, BUT BECAUSE SOMEBODY CRASHED THE SERVER.
As much as you think it can unite warring cultures, send men to Mars and create water-powered cars, open source/protocols/technologies still can't save you from human error... which is exactly what caused this AOL problem.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
"shit"
Say it with me. It's not hard, and no one will die.
How does one pronounce $h!t?
"Hey guys, i'll be back in a minute. I've got to take an h-bang-t dollars."
If it said "very large number", it surely is a small percentage of the total overal AIM userbase. I'm still connected. However, seems amusing that AOL did that.
As for it being one of the most widely used, that's probably true. But to all those who think the AIM protocol or whatnot is junk, one could say the same about any other protocols. Instead, one should be asking yourself as to what another person would say had a bunch of friends were on Yahoo! or Messenger? To me, I've a bunch of people on AIM. And sure enough, there are people who has a bunch of people on Yahoo! as well. You use whatever IM protocol your contacts use. And if you need to use multiple protocols because someone is on a different IM network, it's easy to solve that problem as there's gaim, Jabber, Trillian, and IM2 available.
I do not see why people are picking points on this. We just use whatever IM network we end up using. We deal with it and perhaps like it. So everyone, let's all run along now and go about on our usual routines.
~ Old Warriors Society
UPDATE users SET suspended = 1; Oops, we forgot the where part!
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
This shows once more the many drawbacks of proprietary IM protocols and servers.
Let's not even mention that they probably log all messages that has ever been sent through them, just like Google logs all search queries.
Jabber doesn't have these problems and it's an open standard with free software available.
You can setup your own servers. It can talk to other jabber servers. You can use SSL/TLS encryption to talk to your server and you can use OpenPGP end-to-end encryption if you want no cleartext available at the servers. There are tons of clients available for all imaginable platforms, from mobile phones to Windows.
Go Jabber!
But, once again, this has nothing to do with the protocol...
I agree that this incident was an administrative cock-up, but I'm saying that the design is flawed by the fact that the user's are not given the chance to choose their AIM service provider (or indeed run their own server) - if the user decides that AOL are not competent enough to run the server they have no choice but to switch to a different IM network (which is often not easy given that everyone you speak to is probably only on a single network)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
You know, you got modded as flamebait, and I'll probably get modded down for saying this, but I have to agree. What is with everyone and just blindly using a network controlled by a company you hate? I, at least, have morals. I wouldn't use AIM any more than I'd buy a bunch of Microsoft products. I use Debian GNU/Linux and Jabber. Ok, I'm an extremist. But don't you think that using AIM is just a *little* bit hypocritical? I guess I'll just accept my modding down from the grumpy AIM users who won't accept the truth about AIM's owners.
I feel completely the same way.
Have you tried BitlBee? It lets you access the lesser networks from IRC. In my experience, it has been rock solid.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
the real old schoolers telnet into each other's machines and use a chat daemon.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Several universities utilize AIM for holding on-line office hours. In some cases it is professor preference, but in others there is a specified/required tool. Students who are not savvy computer users look for ease of use and AOL has the greater share of that market. If a student disappears from chat sessions that is one thing, but when this professor disappeared one week before finals it was not a happy time. Luckily us old Unix geeks wear a belt and suspenders and the odds of Yahoo and *Egads* MSN Messenger going down at the same time are minimal.
--- Location Unknown
And this right here is how we know he's lying, children. ;-)
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Perhaps this is related to the recent layoffs at AOL?
Speak truth to power.
I think you missed RAMMS+EIN's point. If you want to use Jabber to talk to your existing contacts that use AIM, you will need an AIM account to do so. And AOL could accidently suspend that AIM account just as easily as they suspended one used by a normal AIM user.
Most people I know don't use AIM because of the wonderful featureset or reliability of the service, they use it because everyone else they know uses it. That's certainly why I use AIM.
AOL fires a bunch of employees, and later in the week a "glitch" causes a bunch of screen names to stop working.
:)
Upset former employee's parting shot maybe... or me being paranoid. (more likely)
Yahoo also did this a while back, I had an existing account (kallahar) but at some point it stopped working. No errors, no warnings, just "invalid username". I couldn't even recreate it or add a new number at the end.
Turns out they ban any username with the word "allah" in it, which my name coincidentally has.
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...