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Google Begins Blocking Third-Party Jabber Invites
New submitter kxra writes "Do you have a federated jabber instant messaging account that never gets responses from Google accounts anymore? Or do you have a Gmail account that a friend has been unable to invite from their 3rd party Jabber account? The Free Software Foundation reports, 'Google users can still send subscription requests to contacts whose accounts are hosted elsewhere. But they cannot accept incoming requests. This change is akin to Google no longer accepting incoming e-mail for @gmail.com addresses from non-Google domains.' This sounds like something Facebook would try in order to gain even tighter control over the network, but they never even federated their Jabber service to begin with. According to a public mailing list conversation, Google is doing this as a lazy way to handle a spam problem."
You forgot them killing the open standard CalDAV support and replacing with their proprietary Calendar API.
http://www.zdnet.com/google-do-what-you-want-with-reader-but-dont-kill-caldav-7000012628/
This space for rent.
I know it says rate-limiting, but from our logs, the accepted rate appears to be 0. We don't have that many users; certainly not enough to trigger a rate limit in the scope of the kind of rate they would be worried about. And while we did not say "lazy" in the original article, but rather expressed our sympathies for having to grapple with the spam problem, this is not an acceptable solution. As other commenters are pointing out, this is essentially shifting the burden to much smaller entities, who now have to respond to their users' complaints. If Google would publicly describe the problem, and the scope of it, and publicly explain what they are *actually* doing, then the rest of us could help find a solution. Right now, this definitely looks like "easiest way out for us, broader principle of federation and workloads of other entities be damned."