Comment Re:Can free ICQ clients use ICQ servers, reloaded (Score 1) 39
Same discussion as 30 years ago with open source clones of messaging apps such as ICQ. The open source client pretends, on those days through reverse engineering, to be the official client. Ultimately, it was okay then, because it was beneficial for the operators to have a larger network of users who can talk to each other. Does this dynamic apply here?
I'd have gone with "Every web browser is Mozilla", personally, but yes.
If you're using a user agent for any sort of security purpose, you're not just doing security wrong; you're doing security so wrong that somebody is going to write an entire book as a postmortem about your company.
Moreover, if your service can't handle the traffic of a mere thousands of clients (four-digit QPS) hitting it at once, you have much bigger problems than security. I forgot how to count that low a long time ago.
Finally, the elephant in this room is that those "unauthorized" clients are YOUR USERS. They are people who bought YOUR HARDWARE and want to use it with your service. Basically, you're flipping off your paying customers. That's the fastest, easiest way to ensure that you don't have any of those anymore.