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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.
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
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.
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.
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pag econtent?lp=de_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pressetext. de%2Fpte.mc%3Fpte%3D070511018