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Legacy Yahoo Messenger App Being Retired (pcmag.com)
Reader Irishman writes: Looks like August 5, 2016 is the last day for people clinging to the old desktop version of Yahoo Messenger. A new version is supposedly in the works but otherwise, it will be the mobile app or the web version. From a PCMag report: According to a new announcement from Yahoo, the company is officially killing off the old version of Messenger for good. You might be able to find it to download from some software archive website, but you won't be able to use it to chat with your friends. Yahoo is also switching up how it archives previous conversations. Any conversation histories you currently have (from using Messenger) are archived in Yahoo Mail, but they'll be going away on August 5 as well. You'll be able to export them to your desktop or laptop if you really need to save whatever it is you have typed to your friends.
who cares?
Logged in to icq.com to change my icq password and suddenly it reported a compromised account (i guess because it never saw the ip before) and required me to add a mobile number to the account. If i were an attacker, i now not only had the old password (and can change it to a new one), but would even have added my number as recovery option. So i guess security isn't the issue here, they want to collect phone numbers.
And without adding it, i can login with a client, but sending a message returns, that the account is locked.
Thankfully it was only an old account i never used much and not my primary one.
Google talk has a decent phone based chat but their desktop software is web based and annoying. There are some plugins for Pidgin but they don't work as well as the official software.