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Thousands of ICQ Numbers Deleted
BondGamer writes "Many ICQ users woke up and found their ICQ numbers were no longer working. There is a topic on the ICQ support with more than 1,500 replies. There are pages upon pages of other topics asking what happened. As of yet, there has been no official response from AOL about what has happened."
You don't have to bother with registration or obnoxious UI. And if you use a fairly unique nickname, you can still keep in touch with friends.
I'm from central Europe, and here everybody is using ICQ. It's gone so far that ICQ is synonymous with IM, and people exchange ICQ UINs instead of phone numbers...
Number of people i _personally_ know who use ICQ: pretty much everyone.
Number of people i _personally_ know who use something else than ICQ: pretty much noone.
Here in Czechia, ICQ is simply THE im to use.
IT just makes no sense to register on something else when you know you wont be able to talk to anyone. And it makes no sense to switch if majority does no switch with you.
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In the end stuff like aim or messenger have exaclty same type of bloat (sometimes even more anoying than icq bloat) and zero killer features.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
It appears to just be a bug, and your numbers are safe. Backup, remove, reinstall as described here: http://boards.icq.com/boards/view_messages.php?tid =4555&topic_id=2216365.
YMMV
IIRC the numbers started at 6 digits. UIN's with fewer digits were internal staff use only. 127XXX = me
09-f9-11-02-9* (G^GCA_++{>. RV>>>>+++ NO CARRIER
At least among my frineds/colleagues there is no substitution for ICQ. Anyone with MS Messenger or other IM clients seems to be like a white crow. For example in Russia ICQ for sure has 90%+ IM share (if not 99.9%). I worked in central Europe - almost same situation. Everyone uses ICQ. And one more remark - official client sucks. That's true, so noone really bothers using it. There are so many nice substitutions. Like "qip".
Seems it's not server problem (not for all at least):
Citing board post
"[...]This is a nasty ICQ6 bug, but it is fixed with a complete uninstall of all user data and reinstall.[...]"
Some other users also say that it helped. Maybe it's an organized hoax, but whatever. You may want to backup your data and try.
The odds of those bits coming together by chance in a movie file, in that exact order, are the same as your odds of guessing another of the MPAA's hex keys completely by chance, out of thin air.
Wrong. The ICQ numbers aren't random, they go from 1 to how many users have been created. That means that when they reached 65535 users created, every 16-bit number had been used. I'm not sure how high the user count is now, probably around 32 bits.
So if the HD-DVD DRM had used 16 or 32 bit keys, they would already have them. NOT by chance, but by simple brute force.
The keys are 128 bits, though, so hitting them are going to take a few million years. Still not by chance, but by simple brute force. (Unless you count the chance of the key selected starting with 98 zeroes).
Not correct. Let's think this through.
The infamous hex key you refer to is a collection of sixteen hex bytes. That's 128 bits, for a grand total of 2^128 = ~3.4 x 10^38 possible values. Your odds of guessing one of their keys is one out of 3.4 x10^38.
Now let's look at what GP said:
The decimal representation of those movies consists, by definition, solely of digits 0 through 9. ICQ numbers consist (last I checked) of integers between 1 and 999,999,999. So to be conservative, let's call an ICQ number any string of nine decimal digits.
If we converted a whole movie's worth of bytes into decimal digits, how many thousand ICQ numbers do you think we'd come up with? Especially if you start with any arbitrary digit and don't divide it into nine-digit chunks? I had typed out the math, but the point is already well enough made, I think.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
In an ideal world, this would teach people something about the disadvantages of relying on a centralized server controlled by a corporation over which you have no influence for your communication-infrastructure.
Msn, and Aim have similar problems.Meanwhile, Jabber is the way of the future. Open protocol. Multiple interoperable implementations. Gateways to these "legacy"-protocols anyway, so you can still talk to your icq/msn-using friends. Multiple simultaneous logins. Server-side storage of buddy-lists (so log on from a different location/new computer and everything is there)
Oh, and for added bonus, jabber-ids on the format of email-adresses are a lot easier to remember than ICQ-uins.
in case it helps, the equivalent of Trillian for macintosh is Adium -and I fully agree with the previous post :-)
Herve S.
The Netherlands is central? You're on the coast.
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pag econtent?lp=de_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pressetext. de%2Fpte.mc%3Fpte%3D070511018
Ok, for the interested readers, here is the explanation of the AC's computation.
The expression:
(9 * (10^9) * 8 * (log(2) / log(10)))
is the number of decimal digits in 9 GB. 9*(10^9)*8 is the number of bits in 9 GB, and log(2)/log(10) is the factor to convert into the number of decimal digits (look up how to perform base changes when using logarithms). This is about Nd = 21.7 billion decimal digits.
Now, there is about the same number of sequences of 9 digits in the stream of decimal digits as the number of digits itself... in fact, there is only 8 less sequences than there are digits, so Nd-8 sequences, which is about Nd.
When picking a random sequence of 9 digits, the probability of it being a particular 9-digits ICQ number is 1 in 10^9. Correspondingly, the probability of it *not* being the particular ICQ number is ( 10^9 - 1 ) in 10^9. Thus, repeating the experiment Nd times, the probability of not hitting the ICQ number becomes ((10^9-1)/10^9)^Nd, so about 3.86e-10. Thus, the probability of finding the ICQ number is 1 minus 3.86e-10, very very close to 1.
I think the AC made an error in evaluating the probability of not hitting the ICQ number as (9/10)^9. This would be the probability of guessing an incorrect digit nine times in a row in an independant fashion, instead of guessing a 9-digits number wrongly a single time. But feel free to correct me if anyone thinks I'm wrong.
Either way, this shows that it's almost impossible for a given 9-digit ICQ number *not* to show up in the decimal stream representation of a 9 GB movie.