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AOL Is Cutting Off Third-Party App Access To AIM (9to5mac.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: AOL announced today that it is starting to cut off third-party app access to its Instant Messenger service. As first noticed by ArsTechnica, AOL began notifying users of at least one third-party app, Adium, that it would become obsolete starting on March 28th. At this point, it's unclear whether or not all third-party applications will be rendered useless come March 28th, but the message presented to Adium users seemed to strongly imply that: "Hello. Effective 3/28, we will no longer support connections to the AIM network via this method. If you wish to use the free consumer AIM product, we invite you to visit http://www.aim.com/ for more information." What this likely means is that AOL is shutting down the OSCAR chat protocol that is used to handle AIM messages. The service will, however, continue to be available via AOL's own chat app that is supported on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.
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That was my initial reaction too.
Similar story: yahoo did the same thing with the yahoo messenger protocol last September. Up until then I was using pidgin to chat on yahoo. After September I just quit using yahoo. So long and thanks for all the fish.
AOL is doing no such thing. The whole thing is false.
Here are the facts that I know:
On Sept. 21st, the Tech Director of Product Management and Support of the AIM Platform reached out via the Pidgin mailing list, advising that there will be a breaking change in the way AIM handles client logins. This was done specifically to ensure a smooth transition to the new login method. He then worked with Pidgin developers to provide an alternative.
Pidgin 2.12, due to be released in a week or so, will support the new authentication method. Since Adium uses the same communication library, I believe it will also support it. I do not know if Trillian, Miranda and other other 3rd-party clients will make the change.
What is happening is that AOL is alerting its users that the "old" login method will be obsoleted in a month and that they should either upgrade their client or switch to another one in order to keep using the service.
<rant> I remember the times when /. was more about facts and informed discussion than clickbait and knee-jerk tirades. Damn, I feel old. </rant>
The notification have also been coming in on Pidgin. I heard someone say that AOL is changing he authenitication mechanism (not at all improbable), and that Pidgin will update the ode to handle the new mechanism . I am guessing they are upgrading to stronger encryption mechanisms. So if this is true Pidgin will keep on working with the new Pidgin release.
AIM and Pidgin is still useful, still very reliable way to communicate and still is nice to be able to use a native client on the desktop rather than have to use a web client.
Hopefully pidgin will include OTR by defualt soon which would provide end to end encyrption on by default, because things have been a little stagnant lately