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The Internet

Yahoo Restored in Some IM Clients 310

Posted by CmdrTaco from the breathe-freely dept.
Sparks23 writes "Third-party instant messaging clients have begun to reconnect to Yahoo. While the authorization scheme has not been completely decoded -- expect some bumps -- Gaim and Trillian have both partially restored connectivity. Gaim has the new authorization scheme in CVS and their new 0.70 release, and Cerulean has made a beta patch available for Trillian Pro 2.0; consider both patches 'beta' for the moment."
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Yahoo Restored in Some IM Clients More

Yahoo Restored in Some IM Clients

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  • Cooperation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Vengie ( 533896 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:03AM (#7094084)
    For those of you who don't RTFA.....Cerulean studios actually *sent* the GAIM folk the protocol. This is a good example of how Yahoo is actually fostering a good relationship between "competing" clients. [Competing in the sense that they are both alternative...] Kind of nice to see that kind of collaboration....

    • Re:Cooperation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:05AM (#7094111)
      > For those of you who don't RTFA

      There is no FA, jackass

    • Re:Cooperation (Score:2, Insightful)

      by stanmann ( 602645 )
      Hey Genius. There was no FA to R. Would that there had been, Some of us would have known why we should care about this "issue"

    • Yahoo is actually fostering a good relationship between "competing" clients.

      ----

      Great.... I can just see the next headline about this topic on Slashdot:

      Yahoo supports collaboration between "competing" clients.
      In a move that is sure to turn a few heads, a Yahoo spokesperson indicated that collaboration between other clients was their primary goal all along. "It was always our intent to force the competition to work together," said Yahoo. "We never realized it would require this much encouragement."

    • How odd... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mblase ( 200735 )
      A few days ago, I was using Trillian until it started crashing at login every time. A few news articles later informed me that Yahoo's tweaks were to blame.

      Frustrated, I did a quick search for other third-party clients and found Easy Message [easymessage.net]. It's small, not very customizable, but it does the job and connects to my Yahoo account with (as far as I can tell) no problems.

      Very strange. But to be honest, I didn't like Trillian as much as I wanted to anyway.
      • From their front page:

        September 25, 2003 Yahoo support is currently down. A fix is currently being created and will be updated ASAP.

        and then

        September 28, 2003 The Yahoo service is Easy Message is now back online. Easy Message was updated today to version 2.3.640 supporting Yahoo Messenger's new password authentication process. The new process includes multiple layers of hashing, (not necessarily more secure), including MD5, HMAC-SHA1, and some of what looks like Yahoo's own encoding.

        so it loo

      • A few days ago, I was using Trillian until it started crashing at login every time. A few news articles later informed me that Yahoo's tweaks were to blame.

        So the application crashed, and it was the fault of a company that has nothing to do with the application vendor? That is very odd indeed.

      • Yahoo is not at fault for the application crashing, that would be poor bounds checking and error handling on the part of the Trillian developers. Writing fragile code when you are coding to a reverse engineered standard is pretty unacceptable...
    • And the Mac OS X client "fire" (see elsewhere in this post) credits the Gaim people for helping them with the protocol.

      Alex
    • I wonder how much cooperation there would be if Gaim had a real Windows client (yes I know they have a crappy one) and Trillian had a Linux client (they didn't last time I checked).

      It's nice to see the cooperation, but you are right by quoting competing, since they have two different user bases.

      BTW, Gaim .70 is working perfectly so far with Yahoo. Just don't disconnect! :)
      • Actually Gaim for windows has come a long way since .60. It runs very well on the windows machines I've put it on. In fact, I actually encourage people to use it because it supports a higher grade encryption than trillian does (http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net), and has supported stuff like unicode for longer. (though trillian pro now has unicode support--took it long enough).

  • ayttm restored on Sunday (Score:5, Informative)

    by Shin Dig ( 27213 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:04AM (#7094103) Homepage
    Ayttm http://ayttm.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net] had restored service on Sunday, including a 0.4.2 release that included the new support. I think it was the first of the Open Source clients to make it back on line.

    And for other flame bate, it also support GPG encryption of packets over any IM protocol, and is interoperable with Kopete's encryption as well.

    • Kopete 0.7 never lost connection to the Yahoo! servers, thus they were the first to have this "fix" ... as no fix was needed for the client. :)

      Got a bunch of warning from Yahoo! and MSN about the protocol being upgraded, yet still have full connectivity to both ... without changing anything in the client.

      Makes me wonder what the other clients are doing wrong. :D
      • None of the clients did anything wrong. Yahoo changed the protocol all of a sudden, and it took them a couple of days to figure it out.

        Kopete CVS credits Gaim with coming up with the fix. From kopete/protocols/yahoo/libyahoo2/libyahoo2.c:

        1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): /*
        1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): * New auth protocol cracked by Sean Egan from the Gaim team
        1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): * Dude you Rock!
        1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): *
        1.15 (mattr 29-Sep-03): * I should say thanks again to gaim without which th

        • The only client I have installed is Kopete 0.7, and it's been started, stopped, restarted several times over the past week (it's used for work, and only at work). Connects to Yahoo! and MSN without any problems.

          Bizarre, strange, and weird, I guess.

  • Independent IM Client Futures (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sjvn ( 11568 ) <sjvn AT vna1 DOT com> on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:05AM (#7094108) Homepage
    Much as I like both GAIM and Trillian, sooner or later, probably by some kind of hard wired authenication/security mechanism, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsft will manage to block these clients often enough and for long enough that they'll lose their utility.

    Looking down the road, I think the only hope for open clients are open IM servers, probably, IMHO, based on Jabber.

    Steven

    • Re:Independent IM Client Futures (Score:4, Insightful)

      by self assembled struc ( 62483 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:17AM (#7094232) Homepage
      Man, have you ever used Jabber?

      At my current job we use Jabber internally to talk to each other so we don't have to send passwords and the like out over the internet, and use encryption it as well. Jabber is probably the biggest pain the ass to set up and administer and still not all of the clients support enough of the feature set (not even the daemons do) for it to be useful.

      Not saying that it's any better than some of it's competition. At my last job (employer shall remain nameless, but let's say it's Gimbles to Yahoo's Macys and is owned a Spanish company) I was on the team implementing the new IM launch. (yeah! IM in 2003! Let's clean up that market share with our reach. Oh wait. Damn.) It was (is) based on IBM/Lotus' IM implementation (sadly the name escapes me right now) which was just as much of a pain in the ass. At least with Jabber you can view all the databases, files, etc...

      Still, I really doubt jabber will ever gain the critial mass it needs to be the IM software of choice. Not until a company oike AOL, Yahoo! or MS picks it up and starts using it. And that's as likely as Lycos overtaking Yahoo! in the search market by aquiring Google.

      • For the curious ...

        The IBM/Lotus product is named Sametime [lotus.com]. It ties in nicely if you have an existing Domino network. (w/ little isonline icons in your notes mail, and other random integration features.)

        And yes, having setup jabber recently, it is somewhat of a pain in the ass. All the extenions have their own way of being compiled and setup. (AIM extenion, & the Jit ICQ extension) It's starting to make sense how it works, but it's tricky to get the hang of.

        hopefully jabber2 is a bit easier to

      • You may have missed this, but WASTE is once again available for download [sourceforge.net] (there was a /. story about it a while back) under the GPL, this time from sourceforge and not from commercial underling Nullsoft [nullsoft.com]. While it is meant for a somewhat different purpose from Jabber, it's pretty easy to use, and works very well. For small networks, it means not having to even set up a server. Of course, it has some problems, like the fact that anyone can add someone to the network, but other than that it's pretty damned goo
        • Perhaps this is true, but because the status of the software and the intellectual property backing it is under serious legal dispute, any entity with substantial assets to lose would be foolish to employ it.
          • There is certainly some merit to that argument. One alternate suggestion is to run an irc server. There are numerous easy windows irc servers. The only problem with that is a lack of encryption, though certainly it is possible to implement it at some other layer. In order to sslize it, I assume you'd have to use a Unix package, but there's always tunneling - which just turns into a headache again.
      • Jabber is probably the biggest pain the ass to set up and administer and still not all of the clients support enough of the feature set (not even the daemons do) for it to be useful.

        Agreed. But I think that will change. People are really starting to demand an alternative to the big centralized servers, with all these stupid games their owners are playing. And there is some good software out there:

        As far as clients go:

        • For X11, gaim [sourceforge.net] has Jabber support. It's a little crude, but it's coming along. gaim's
    • Much as I like both GAIM and Trillian, sooner or later, probably by some kind of hard wired authenication/security mechanism, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsft will manage to block these clients often enough and for long enough that they'll lose their utility.

      It's called TCPA.

      The point with TCPA and palladium is to be able to force people to use user hostile clients to connect to certain networks/data, and this is a perfect example: in order to connect to the IM networks you will have to use the official clients
    • I'm not sure I really see anything changing too drastically, whether they embrace or oppose 3rd. party clients.

      Look at IRC. It's pretty much the original chat environment for the Internet, and still going strong after all these years. While the IRC client itself might be standard for all IRC servers, many different IRC networks are around that are cut off from each other.

      If you're on EFNet, you can't see what's happening over on Undernet, without establishing a completely seperate connection to their ne

  • Money talks (Score:3, Informative)

    by Westech ( 710854 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:05AM (#7094116) Journal
    According to their homepage [trillian.cc], Trillian is currently only releasing the patch to paying customers.
    • Someone needs to take off the negativity goggles. Trillian has been very good about releasing patches for non-paying customers, and they say in the very same sentence, that they are planing on releasing the patch for 0.74 (the free version) as soon as they finish testing it. What were you expecting, that they implement the patch in 0.74 first, and then leave their customers hanging while they port the patch to 2.0? Of course they give preference to people that support them and not the leeches.
    • Quoth Cerulean: "Yahoo Patch Beta 1 is available for Pro customers; patches for 1.0 and .74 are on the way and will be released once the patch is 100%... "

      That's right on their homepage. Its in the "News" column. I couldn't find anywhere on their site that said they're only releasing to paying customers. Stop the FUD please. Cerulean Studios creates a good product and has a good history of responding to protocol changes and communicating to customers.

    • Re:Money talks (Score:3, Informative)

      by rmohr02 ( 208447 )
      According to the Gaim [sourceforge.net] website, Trillian submitted the patch to Gaim as well as their paying customers. My opinion of Cerulean Studios has just improved.
  • Yahoo just wants to be the exclusive program for their IM network... While they may have the right to do that, it's a huge mistake... I have no intention of installing 4 different IM clients on my pc - if they don't want me to use their services, then I wont....

    • Re:Everyone wants to win (Score:5, Informative)

      by colinleroy ( 592025 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:11AM (#7094178) Homepage
      You're completely wrong. Their spokewoman stated that "We're open and interested in talking with all providers that share our common goal of opening the IM community in a seamless, convenient and secure manner."
      (see this news.com.com article [com.com]).

      • Re:Everyone wants to win (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Honest Man ( 539717 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:22AM (#7094282)
        Am I? "... interested in talking ..." is a polite way of saying.. 'sure, we'll let them use our protocol.....for a price'....and if they really wanted others running on their protocol they'd have made some effort to post a 'change of protocol' information out so the alternative IM companies didn't have to run sniffers to figure out what changed... If they had, we would not have been in yahoo-limbo, now would we.

        Stop believing everything you read. Sheesh.
        • Why should Yahoo be the only one paying for using their protocol?

          Remember, hardware, bandwith and system administrators all cost money.

          • Remember, hardware, bandwith and system administrators all cost money.

            So, please, by all means, charge me (as an end user) for the costs. Don't everybody (MSN,AIM/ICQ,Yahoo) try to leverage existing market dominance into a messenger monopoly. The network cost is not an excuse when you're dumping your way into a market.

            Right now, I have friends using only one of MSN or AIM/ICQ. They were all, on occasion, uncontactable due to their respective IM network owners trying to finally shoot up to the IM market

    • While they may have the right to do that, it's a huge mistake... I have no intention of installing 4 different IM clients on my pc - if they don't want me to use their services, then I wont....

      I do not believe your position is typical of the average IM user.

      Let's see... keep a few million non-technical people using the IM services but let a few thousand geeks (who never see any ads or use hooks to other Yahoo services) leave, VS keeping everybody... you know, from a business perspective they're practical
      • I do not believe your position is typical of the average IM user.

        As IM becomes more and more an essential feature of people's internet experience (and not just teenagers), people seem to be getting much more sensitive to the issue. A lot of (non-geek)people are moving toward trillian for this very reason. It may take time, but interoperability is becoming important enough to enough people that that the closed proprietary services just won't last forever.

        Trillian now includes Jabber plug in in the Pr

  • I read your chat (Score:5, Funny)

    by airuck ( 300354 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:06AM (#7094125)

    I love internet chat sessions. I snoop on them with ethereal at every opportunity.

  • Anyone know of a .deb archive of the GAIM CVS code? I checked http://www.apt-get.org/search.php , no such.

  • For OS X users ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by paxcirca ( 694737 ) <pertristis @ g mail.com> on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:08AM (#7094147)
    The latest release of Fire [sourceforge.net], v.0.32.f, also restored Yahoo! connectivity. The MSN network will be blocked [sourceforge.net] on October 15th, though.

  • "Cracking" protocoles and DMCA? (Score:4, Funny)

    by file-exists-p ( 681756 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:09AM (#7094155)
    From http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ Our friends over at Cerulean Studios managed to break my speed record at cracking Yahoo authentication schemes with an impressive feat of hackery.

    Can't Yahoo use the DMCA to send all those people to Guantanamo?

    • Re:"Cracking" protocoles and DMCA? (Score:5, Informative)

      by headkase ( 533448 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:23AM (#7094300)
      Actually, reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is expressly permitted by the DMCA. Under the current laws the best Yahoo! or MSN can hope to do is stay one step ahead in an IM arms race - locking out competing clients until they reverse engineer the protocol again.

  • Why bother? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:10AM (#7094171) Journal
    Why don't we all just say screw these proprietary IM clients.

    If all your non-techie friends know that they cant contact you for free tech support over MSN or Yahoo, they wont use it.

    Let them die due to lack of use, or at least cripple 'em. Don't legitimize that kind of dogshit.

  • Isn't Microsoft supposed to be blocking as well? Is there an exact date when this will happen?

  • Slashdot summary (Score:5, Funny)

    by Syberghost ( 10557 ) <syberghost@@@syberghost...com> on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:11AM (#7094180)
    Summary of the current state of discussion regarding Yahoo on Slashdot:

    1. "Poor Yahoo. Nasty Indian government officials restricting this company from providing its valuable services to the internet."

    2. "Damn Yahoo. Nasty corporate goons restricting people from using its services. We should all switch to Jabber."

  • Source (Score:2)

    by rf0 ( 159958 )
    Downloaded the source, compiled, restarted gaim. Got pounced on by customers. Fantastic :)

    However good job to Trillain for passing the code on. Lets just see how long it lasts though as I can't help but think yahoo will change the protocol again

    Rus

  • dmca (Score:2)

    by kipple ( 244681 )
    what about DMCA concerns? couldn't this be considered reverse engineering?

  • YahElite was also prevented from working, maybe about a month ago, but as of last week, the updates allow YahElite to once again function with the Yahoo network.

    Yahoo is alright, it's nice that they have sort of a directory structure to build the rooms off of (I still have a hard time not saying "channel"), and the lack of published IP address prevents people from trying to nuke your box directly, but its standard client is the buggiest, cobbled-together piece of crap. It combines the worst elements of v

  • Well the recent Yahoo block convinced my girlfriend to stop using it and switch to ICQ, since she shouldn't talk to me any longer since I was running Gaim, and her dad runs ICQ as well. Now Gaim has since restored connectivity to Yahoo, but I recently ditched Gaim on windows since it runs like crap on it, randomly locks up, crashes, etc. I could file a bug report, but the fact is that I want something that works now.

    Oddly enough I was running Trillian/free before all this, and switched to Gaim because

  • Yahoo plans to release source (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:27AM (#7094333) Homepage Journal
    Everybody bickering about Yahoo trying to kill of "competing" clients, RTFA, and take note of this:


    Yahoo has been trying to help the other Y! messenger clients update their code to work with the new protocol....they're NOT trying to kill them off.


    I'm particularly happy to see this move, because Yahoo is about the only big corporation which is working on Unix versions of their client. Yahoo has Solaris, BSD, and Linux versions of the messenger. Moreover, from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ymessenger/ mailing list they're ACTUALLY speculating on releasing their source code for their UNIX clients:

    Subject: New poll for ymessenger

    Enter your vote today! A new poll has been created for the ymessenger group:

    Would you like to have access to Yahoo Messenger Sources?

    o Yes
    o No
    o Why should I?

    To vote, please visit the following web page:

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ymessenger/surveys ?i d=11283317

    Note: Please do not reply to this message. Poll votes are not collected via email. To vote, you must go to the Yahoo! Groups web site listed above.

    Thanks!

  • What was the purpose of the change? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RichiP ( 18379 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:32AM (#7094379) Homepage
    From the new protocol, can anyone gather what and more importantly why Yahoo changed? Was it security reasons? Or was it simply to lock other clients out?

  • I always wonder about these sorts of converation.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Osrin ( 599427 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:35AM (#7094405) Homepage
    "It's only fair that we get to use their protocol".

    Surely the debate has little if anything to do with the protocol, it has everything to do with Yahoo's server base that sits behind their IM client and the business model that they have in place that sustains those servers.

    Sure, we all have a right to use the protocol, it's only bits and bytes and does not cost anybody anything. Who gives us the right to use their servers though?
    • > Who gives us the right to use their servers though?

      Nobody. That's why we shouldn't use non-open networks.
      • so in an "open" network who provides the server services that Yahoo currently deliver? who provides directory services, and why would they do it?

        The "open" community developed bind/DNS a long time ago to provide a distributed directory service for finding machines, is it time we started looking at some similar mechinism for finding people and setting about doing the work to make it pervasive?
    • The right to use the protocol, while debatable, is an issue for developers. The right to use the servers, which as far as I'm concerned is nonexistent (I use Yahoo! for yahoo, ICQ for ICQ, MSNM for MSN and so on, because no other client supports all the features of these networks - well except ICQ which doesn't really have any) is an issue for users.
  • Tell me, what's to stop Yahoo! (or AOL or MSN) from just looking at this source and patching their holes that allow these clients access? You're boldly telling your opponent (Yahoo) how you are going to sneak past them before you make the attempt.

  • The wrong approach ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by merdaccia ( 695940 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:39AM (#7094436)

    As much as I respect the Trillian and Gaim developers for adapting their clients on such short notice, I think they've got the wrong approach to the whole IM thing. For now, the two groups (or group and company I guess) are integrating IM clients into a single program with a clean interface. Many of us love the idea, and use their two clients, but this isn't fixing the underlying problems which allow MS and Yahoo to cause havoc by modifying their proprietary protocols. What Gaim and Trillian need to do is integrate users.

    The main instant messaging protocols are already supported, namely Yahoo, AIM, MSN and ICQ. The problem, which has been addressed a ton of times on /., is that users go to the IM network that their friends are on, and so all four networks (with ICQ trailing) have significant user bases. But this can change if Gaim and Trillian get a bit creative. Simply put, add an open source protocol to the mix of supported protocols (Jabber) and let the rest work itself out.

    What I think would happen is that Gaim and Trillian users would use Jabber to talk to each other, and use the commercial protocols to talk to the rest of their friends. As time goes on, these other friends could be migrated to Trillian or Gaim, maintaining contact with their MSN/AIM/etc buddies while now speaking Jabber to their Trillian and Gaim friends. This could be repeated indefinitely, and as Gaim and Trillian's user bases grow over time, there would be no reason to use commercial protocols because most people would already speak Jabber, courtesy of Gaim and Trillian supporting it.

    In short, I believe Gaim and Trillian could serve as middlemen in switching users over to open source protocols like Jabber. The clients' ability to speak a multitude of protocols can bridge the gap between those pushing forward to open source protocols and those retaining backwards compatibility to their commercial protocol speaking friends.

    • I agree completely. Although you may not know it, Trillian *does* have a Jabber plug-in. It is only for the pro version now, but I there are indications they are going to put it in the free version soon.

      I posted this [weblogz.com] to trillians message board the other day (I can't link to it directly because it is in the paid users only group), which suggests a way to transition people by getting ISP's invloved.

  • Whever I see the IM wars start up again... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Trolling4Dollars ( 627073 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:41AM (#7094454) Journal
    ...all I can picture is the "Rock-em Sock-em Robots" (as MS and Yahoo) having at each other. It's a damn funny image if you ask me. Speaking of which, how many here think that iD software got their inspiration for the Doom and Quake soldiers from Rock-em Sock-em Robots?

  • centericq also updated (Score:3)

    by xenoweeno ( 246136 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:51AM (#7094544)
    centericq is also fixed for Yahoo in the latest CVS [centericq.de].

  • Trillian phones home (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alexo ( 9335 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @11:52AM (#7094563) Journal
    FYI: Trillian 2.0 Pro tries to authenticate the user over the internet and refuses to work if it cannot contact the Cerulean Studios servers.

    This misfeature originally appeared in the beta and we (the users) were led to believe (in the forums) that it will not make it into the final release. Guess what, it did.

    This creates problems with users behind corporate firewalls, those running local servers on intranets, etc. It makes Trillian vulnerable to DOS attacks on a single source and in general is a pain (for example, on my machine it starts and tries to connect before the SW firewall finishes loading).

    While "patches" for this behaviour are widely available (no, I will not link to one, use your favourite "crack search" site then contemplate the fallacy of "copy protection"), I see it more as a trust issue.
    Cerulean Studios doesn't trust me (a paying customer) and, after that stunt, I have a hard time trusting them.

    Therefore, I am no longer recommending Trillian to anyone. Rather, I urge people to look at the available alternatives (Gaim [sourceforge.net], Easy Message [easymessage.net], AYTTM [sourceforge.net] and others [sourceforge.net]).

    Hmmm... Can anyone take it upon themselves to compile a comparison between the available multiprotocol IM clients?
    • My opinion of Cerulean Studios just changed when I found out they submitted their Yahoo fix to Gaim, but not it's just changed back. O well. I liked them for 10 minutes.

      • > My opinion of Cerulean Studios just changed when I found out they submitted their Yahoo fix to Gaim, but [now] it's just changed back. O well. I liked them for 10 minutes.

        No need to change your opinion so often...

        1) See this message [slashdot.org]: "We helped Trillian awhile back connect to Yahoo when they changed the protocol. They're returning the favor. We have a good relationship with the Trillian people."

        2) The "phone home" misfeature does not mean that Cerulean studios are "evil", just misguided.

  • Trillian 0.74E -- transitory solution (Score:4, Informative)

    by ciurana ( 2603 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @12:13PM (#7094806) Homepage Journal
    Greetings,

    Like a lot of people here I was experiencing the crashes every time Trillian tried to connect to Yahoo! Messenger. The quick and dirty solution is to go into your Trillian directory and rename yahoo.dll to whatever else, then start the program. All the other services will work just fine.

    This may be a way to remain on-line until a patch is offered for 0.74. The current patch is only good for 2.0 Pro, as far as I know.

    Cheers!

    Eugene

  • Want Telecom Deregulated? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GoodNicsTken ( 688415 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @12:19PM (#7094882)
    Think about this for a minute. Everyone agrees the current telecom inter-carrier payment system is a mess and needs an overhaul. However, IM is a perfect example of what would happen witout such systems in place.

    We would have a bunch of independent companies refusing to talk to each other, forcing you buy thier phones (remember thoes days?), and not completeing calls between different companies. I'm a Trillian user, but I side with the IM provides on this one.

    We need a good reliable, easy to use, open source, P2P IM network, then we can do away with all the nonsense.

    Copy protection - One more reason for me to find a perfectly functional copy on the Internet.
  • If you run the 'free' version, you are still outta luck..
  • Finally pushed me to install a Jabber server for my circle of friends. I've been using Gaim for a year or so, and its time to get my wife off Trillian ASAFP. I'm just sick of using closed source apps against a few servers who's owners occasionally show a propensity to piss all of us off.

    Nice to have an alternative available that *I* control, end to end. And no, the Gaim Win32 interface does not suck. Just use the Wimp theme.
    • Nice to have an alternative available that *I* control, end to end.

      Well, I guess if you have that much control over all your contacts (and your wife), you are alright.

      I find I generally have to talk to my contacts on the medium they already use.
  • After v0.59, GAIM team changed the core libraries and requirements. I was unable to meet the new dependencies -- too messy and can't seem to meet the requirements. I am still using old Red Hat Linux 7.1 and 7.2. Is there a workaround to get its Yahoo Messenger working? apt-get says I already have the latest version. I tried compiling from source and that told me dependency problems. I am not planning to upgrade my old OS' for a while.

    Thank you in advance.

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