Yahoo Changes Protocol, Blocks Third Party Clients 506
NaDrew writes "ZDNet reports that Yahoo is once again blocking connections from Trillian (the alternative multi-protocol client). Yahoo tried this a few times last year and it looks like they're trying again. Cerulean, maker of Trillian, employs some excellent protocol engineers, who I have no doubt will quickly figure out Yahoo's latest obfuscation and release a patch. A quick fix discovered late this evening: Change your Y!IM host from scs.msg.yahoo.com to scs.yahoo.com, port 5050, and it should work. This is on Trillian 0.74H, not Pro."
pfft (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it blocks gaim also.
The business case sadly makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Are they responsible for trillian? (Score:2, Insightful)
While it might be nice of them to support trillian as well, that just makes it more difficult to maintain their own service. Don't assume that their change was made maliciously just to irritate trillian users.
Re:pfft (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily a bad thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Centericq is also broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gaim..?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why do they bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Adopting a new protocol (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this is pie in the sky, but this whole messenger war seems so stupid. Wasn't someone working on a standards for a messenger protocol? This whole messenger war thing seems so stupid and only serves to piss users off.
This is ind of like copy protection and DRM. They keep trying to stop people and people just keep getting around it. Nobody ever seems to learn. Are they just going to keep beating their heads against the wall until the end of time? Are all these guys that clueless and stubborn?
Re:Trillian (Score:2, Insightful)
there lies the problem. how is yahoo benefitting from offering its network and resources and have trillian charge for their client?
money speaks. and since trillian is making money by piggybacking on yahoo resources while yahoo sees none of it, yahoo stops trillian.
Re:The business case sadly makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes people prefer trillian?
If yahoo can figure that out instead of trying to lock people out maybe they won't have to lock people out.
Re:PLEASE NOTE (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. It's an unfortunate side-effect.
They're also forcing all their users that DO use the Yahoo! approved clients to upgrade to their new client. A client with more bloat, more featuritis. No choice for the lowly user in all this. Yet the entire value of their messenger service is the number of people on it. That's the only reason 3rd party apps are made; people want to talk to other people who are on the Yahoo network. Instead of recognizing their users, even if they don't pay for the privilege of using the network, as a valuable asset, they treat them like, well, sheeple. Especially if you happen to be on a third party client.
Even AOL treats third party clients better, by "supporting" an oudated version of their protocol. It might not have all the whizz-bang features, but it keeps even those damn geek hippies on the network, which is a good thing for all those involved, really.
How would you feel if Microsoft suddenly changed the "hotmail" protocol, so you could send e-mail to any one on hotmail, or receive any from them? Even if it's your girlfriend, or your mother?
How about if your telephone company suddenly won't let you connect to the bad side of town? All those free phonecalls cost em, you know?
Backwards compatibility with unsupported products? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about the law? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well I disagree. First off, I don't think that the 'suits' that are paid to think about how to ruin our lives haven't already thought of this. I don't think that by censoring my thinking I am doing anyone any good. By asking the question that I did, I think that will eventually reveal that in fact Yahoo! doesn't really want to kill the 3rd party clients -- at least not yet. I think that if they really wanted to, they would have been more aggressive about it already. And believe me, by my posting that question here on
I think that in actuality they prefer for the time being that as many people as possible use their Y!IM network. Maybe sometime later in the future when they are a monopoly (if that ever happens) they will then proceed to kick the ass of every 3rd party client.. but until then, they secretly believe 'the more the merrier'.
That's the cool thing about having so many competing systems. And that's the problem with something like Microsoft where they managed to kill off all their competition. They become dicks and stop doing a good job as soon as that happens.
Re:Adopting a new protocol (Score:3, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this supposed to be the goal of Jabber [jabber.org]?
It doesn't seem to have gained much momentum in any case.
Re:They're begging for it (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that it's not as simple as one person changing messenger clients. If I change, I can't talk to anyone I currently do unless 5 other people change (I am apparently in the minority with such a small list
And that's why multi-service chat programs are needed.
Re:Trillian (Score:5, Insightful)
hmmm.... (ponders the ethical dillema)....
Anyone know why Trillian isn't paying for use? Have Yahoo and company offered?
Re:The business case sadly makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Arrogance.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand that there are valid reasons for not using the Yahoo client like unsupported OS's or "it sucks" - whatever. In the end, you are using their service for free and they aren't obligated to give you a damn thing. They could fold their tents tomorrow and wouldn't owe anyone but their creditors and customers (those who pay for services).
Why doesn't some enterprising person create a P2P chat client? I was going to go on a rant about how if someone wanted to have a totally free IM client, they could buy the servers to host connections, pay for bandwidth, etc.. but the P2P chat may be better in the long run. Granted, that doesn't solve the problem connecting to Yahoo (or the like) but it's a good start, right?
Re:The business case sadly makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's face it, IM is not rocket science. The basic functionality is easy to code, and, unsurprisingly, there are already tons [gentoo-portage.com] of open source clients out there. The cost per user to operate a server is minimal, too, which means: Anyone who's trying to charge you money (or for all that matters force you to receive advertisements) for basic IM services, is attempting to rip you off. If you want to make use of functionality in AIM or MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger which open source clients cannot offer, then you'll be using their official clients anyway. If not, you have two options: Cave in to their extortion, or switch to an open protocol like Jabber [jabber.org].
Btw, that's one reason why many companies want TCPA. It would give them an unhackable way of enforcing a particular client.
Re:Trillian (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't cost the kernel developers anything for RedHat to sell their work. They produce the kernel for their own use and for others to use. Redhat packages it up and sells it.
When you use Trillian to send an IM via Yahoo, you're using Yahoo's servers, which they purchase and pay to maintain, and their bendwidth, which they also pay for. You're costing them money, and you're not viewing their ads, which is the method they use to make money. From their viewpoint, you're a leech on their services.
No such drain occurs on the kernel developers from Redhat selling their product.
I have no problem with Open Source products which use Yahoo or other IM providers. But if Trillian wants to make money off their product, then they should license the right to access Yahoo's servers. That's a personal opinion; my understanding is that they're not be under any _legal_ obligation to do so, and I'm not implying anything different here.
Not Yahoo! -- Yahoo / SBC (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and yes. AOL had restrictions placed on IM i January 2001, but they were lifted in Aug. 2003 because that decision had largely rendered them unable to compete in the video conferencing scene that MSN and Yahoo had built up.
A good article summarizing this seems to be this [com.com] one.
NOW, note that Yahoo! is cozy with the DSL and telephone service provider SBC. Given the news [slashdot.org] that SBC is laying fiber for residential DSL, your question is completely relevant.
Re:What about the law? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. We're giving them a community for their clients to speak to. We use their computers for free, and they get our time for free. Sounds like a fair swap. If we didn't use 3rd party clients, there would be nobody except YIM users for YIM users to talk to. YIM users see the ads, but if YIM users didn't have anyone to talk to they wouldn't bother to use YIM in the first place.
I'm quite sure, if they wanted to, AOL, Y! etc could all encrypt their *IM servers and invoke the DMCA on whoever reverse engineered their protocols. The fact that they don't do this shows that they know a community of people who don't eyeball their adverts actually contributes, albeit indirectly, to their bottom lines. Hence why Cerulean are still in existence and haven't been sued into the ground (assuming of course they're Americans).
Re:Why do they bother? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The business case sadly makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is the answer anyway.
More users means wider audience (Score:2, Insightful)
When I look back, I remember ICQ being the king of IM. Nowadays, I barely know anyone who still uses it. MSN Messenger took most of the users from them. Now, how did they do that? ICQ had an incredibly large audience, but when masses shifted, lot of other (even geek) people did too. They didn't drive their users away, it was only that another service proved more useful... because it had more people to talk to, and that was because it was more appealing to less tech-savvy audiences...
So, what can we learn from that? For me, that more users, even when they don't use an "official" client, will eventually mean a wider adoption, thus more people will finish up using the official client anyway, even if there are also more people who don't.
Perhaps the mailbox space race will eventually reflect itself in the big competitors IM services... I wouldn't be surprised if google's next big thing is a IM app. Did we need another free email service? Probably not. But people shift, and people seem to be liking gmail. What kind of mess would we get if we get yet another IM? Why can't we all just get along?
It is sad that IM isn't seen as a series of interconnected networks (like email...) :(
Re:malicious intent? piffle! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:pfft (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why do they bother? (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, I've never had ads when using their official client. There isn't even a little space for them to show up. Do most people see ads or are we just assuming that that's the reason they're doing this?
Re:Trillian (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you ever wondered, perhaps where technology is taking us is incompatible with capitalism in some deep and fundamental way?
Re:pfft (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, that's exactly his point - what makes you think you should get something for nothing? If you jump ship, you just end up costing your new ship money until they decide they can't be free either.
Just let them make money. (Score:4, Insightful)
But these companies spend millions of dollars on their networks for the hardware and software that is part of it. Let them play a little add here and there to help support it.
All these ad blockers and ways of getting around their revenue streams only make them try and make more annoying advertising.
If trillian wanted to be a good friend to yahoo, they'd pass through their advertising as well or find some other way to compensate them. Just because Yahoo decides to offer their network services for free doesn't mean anyone else can deploy software that uses it as well. It's like having someone write a robot to suck the content off your website, chagnge a few slogans and graphics and publish it on their site as their own minus your advertising.
Oh honestly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, all Yahoo! did was change what servers were handling what traffic. Historically they do that once every six months, presumably as a load balancing issue (the server list keeps widening and coming from a larger geographic area each time.) Trillian had a patch out in under 12 hours because the change was exceedingly minor.
Yahoo! is not breaking remote clients. They're working on a service they provide, and sometimes other people's emulation of said service just needs to be upgraded to keep up with developments in Yahoo!. Quit with the nefarious tone.
I can undestand the whole add thing... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Quick fix does not work (Score:3, Insightful)