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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.
I can't remember the last time I saw anyone use AOL much less AIM. Got to be over a decade ago...
It's either AD revenue, or government monitoring behind this one. There's no reason to not support a third party client otherwise. Especially when the client already exists. (Time and money to change the protocol implementation for what? Some cat and mouse game that the third party will win given enough time?)
AOL began notifying users of at least one third-party app, Adium, that it would become obsolete starting on March 28th.
It might've been more efficient to personally notify the last 6 users.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I still have a handful of friends who haven't transitioned to xmpp or another system in pidgin.
Apple's iChat uses (used?) OSCAR/AIM for chat and initiating video conferencing. I'm not sure if that's still the case, as they've been through several major changes more recently. (to messages and facetime apps)
Anyone have more information on this?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Don't get me wrong, I used it quite a lot a decade ago. But anymore these days, it was basically only still on my system because it's pretty trivial to paste the username and password into Pidgin.
I guess Pidgin will just be for my ever-dwindling list of XMPP services, now.
I put Adium in the Dock of all the Macs that I tend to at work. I will not remove Adium because it supports other protocols like XMPP. I will not install a separate AIM app because in removing OSCAR, AOL is admitting that AIM is a futile exercise.
--- Andy West http://andywest.org
This is bound to upset AIM's remaining users: both of them.
How ya like dat?
No more reason for me to use AOL. Please come and take all your floppy disks back.
Have gnu, will travel.
Telegram and Discord both still doesn't have a basic usable contact list, so I have no fucking clue what the shit you mean by features.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
" It sounds like Ars and friends don't know what they're talking about and couldn't be assed to do a little research."
So, in other words, business as usual over at Ars?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That is, all they are announcing is that they are discontinuing some protocol, not that they are discontinuing support for all third party clients.
The headline is typical of the fake news outrage machine: "Some people in group X are affected by Y" turns into "People in group X are affected by Y", which then morphs into "Y decides to screw over everybody in group X because Y is evil!"
TOC2 has been shut down for years, last I checked.
A beginning is a very delicate time. Know then, that is is the year 1997. The known universe is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Bill Gates, my father. In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is code. The code extends life. The code expands consciousness. The code is vital to the internet. The Microsoft Corporation and its engineers, who the code has mutated over 22 years, use the code, which gives them the ability to dominate the market place. That is, rule the mindshare without moving. Because the Microsoft Corporation controls the default operating system, they are the highest power in the Universe. The Code also plays a very secret role in the Open Source community, of which I am a part. The open source community has been interfering with the proprietary code, and the corporations producing it thereof, of the great Internet of the Universe, cleverly replacing proprietary code with open source to form the FOSS, a super being. They plan to control this super being and use its powers for their own purposes. The coding plan has been carried out in a strict manner since the GNU project in 1984. The goal of the super being is in sight. But now, so close to the prize, a crazy student, Linus, the bound debtor of the University of Helsinki, who has been ordered to bear only proprietary code, has given birth to a kernal. Oh, yes. I forgot to tell you. The code exists all over the entire Internet. Hidden away within the rocks of this vast network are a people known as the Free Software Foundation, who have long held a prophecy that a man would come, a messiah, who would lead them to true freedom. The URL is https://www.fsf.org/, also known as FSF.
Telegram requires a phone number. Discord has by far the worst UI I've ever seen in a software product.
And I've used dBASE II, so that's saying something.
My friends and I have been using AIM for about 20 years. I'm not adverse to trying out a new chat protocol, but why should we? What benefits do the new chats have that are worth convincing people to change to?
If some of your friends are not satisfied with AIM, for example because compatibility with their favorite client is broken, this is a good enough reason to change.
While mainstream consumers have long since moved on from AIM commodities traders still rely on it as their primary IM client between brokers. And since trading falls under the purview of the Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) legislation must be recorded. Although AIM has a conversation history feature it cannot be centrally administrated. This has led to a third party IM recording industry. If this change cuts off these third parties access to the server then traders will not be allowed to use AIM and there will be a scramble to find an alternative. Since Intercontinental Exchange's ICE chat already communicates with AIM servers many firms have moved to it. But this might also affect ICE chat's ability to connect to AIM servers.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
none of which have open, client side crypto, optional cutesy space wasting emojis, and UI environment conformance (eg discord).
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>
Discord doesn't have a well designed desktop client - the experience is like using a java application except it's javascript instead. A memory hungry UI that doesn't conform to desktop conventions, takes too much space, and is frankly ugly, esp when up next to all the other skinned applications foisted on us these days (eg steam, two grey colored windows and they don't even match). It also lacks open client side crypto (eg OTR).
Will give you the whooosh, but here... open up a browser, go to AOL's AIM site, and then work from there }:-)
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
Back in the day (2014), this was mandatory geek reading:
David Auerbach: Chat Wars
I thought that AOL died when they stopped selling desktops that read floppy disks? Now I feel like I've been in the woods past 19 years.
Telegram requires a phone number.
Telegram also shows all your contacts as being online 24-hours/day, which really sucks because you have no idea if that person is "around" or available for chatting. Eventually there were people I used to chat with often but rarely chat with now because the chances of seeing a response to a hello is low, as opposed to catching someone when they're online. I feel like folks switch to Telegram and then they don't chat on the network anymore, at least not as much as they used to. I sure don't, and it's because I don't know who is around.
Discord has by far the worst UI I've ever seen in a software product.
I would like to introduce you to Steam chat (the chat portion of Steam). I have yet to see anything worse, even Discord is a breath of fresh air compared to it. For fuck's sake, you can't even change the incredibly tiny fonts, there's no ability to log, no offline messages... yucky on every level.
The idea of "bring online" is itself a relic of the pre-smartphone age.
Yes and no. I'm interested in having an actual synchronous conversation with someone, not "hey" "at the store" etcetc. And they're interested in that too, but the technology now makes little distinction. And when they're actually "Around" at home, that's something we do. But finding out those time periods is harder than it used to be. I really don't want to bother people at dinner, and I sure as hell don't want my phone buzzing while I'm in a movie or at work for that matter, so I turned Telegram off on the phone (actually I uninstalled it when it went through my contacts without asking and sent an alert to each and every one of them with the telegram account that I'd thought was private. Talk about invasive).
And these aren't random people or strangers, they're friends, and we will chat a lot. It's just that on the "always connected" network, everyone always appears to be around and but isn't, and you never know.