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."
Why do they bother? (Score:0, Interesting)
Trillian (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Centericq is also broken (Score:2, Interesting)
Which is of course, why not use an official client since you are in fact using their network and resources to send messages.
SO I ask the question to others
How many would use an official ad-encumbered client if one was available for your prefered environment?
AIM (Score:2, Interesting)
What about the law? (Score:5, Interesting)
If they want to get rid of 3rd party clients, then this is just another arms race, meaning we will eventually have open clients that work, after some finite delay.
In all honesty I can't blame yahoo! for trying. After all, for each person that doesn't see the ads associated with their official client, they lose revenue.
Yahoo! is a great site and they provide a LOT of stuff for free, so I don't blame them for trying to get some money back for all the free stuff they have given us over the years. I guess since IMing is so popular and so much time is spent in the IM client, to them that's a LOT of missing eyeballs over a long period of time that don't get to see the ads. That's a lot of money lost by the minute. And let's face it.. we are using their computers for free, and not giving anything back each time we use a third party client.
My question though, is that if they hate third party IM clients for cutting into their rev. stream, why don't they take the law out of their own hands and use the law to their advantage? Is there nothing that could be done, by drafting some clever EULA or something, that would make it illegal or something like that to use 3rd party clients? That might actually dampen the efforts with libyahoo and other projects that try to develop an open protocol lib. Sourceforge might even cease to host such projects, being that they are in the realm of piracy or accorting to the DMCA.
While it would suck for me (as I love to use centericq over their stupid client), why don't they just make it illegal to use third party clients?
Re:Why do they bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now my question, didn't the gov't come out with a law a while ago forcing AOL to share their IM standards so third party software could integrate with it? And if so, wouldn't this apply to all IM software, including Yahoo?
Re:Gaim..?? (Score:2, Interesting)
I was using GAIM on Yahoo just last night - not sure if it's still working today.
Re: Yahoo Changes Protocol, Blocks Third Party Cli (Score:5, Interesting)
Messaging clients with advertisement-based model will surely object to allowing third party clients to connect, since it doesnt make any business sense.
Furthermore, they may have allowed such third party clients in the past, to gain that critical mass that ensures market peneration and continued usage, but once they are past the bell curve, they would then clam down on it.
Think of it as an equivalent to Microsoft clamping down on piracy - they never prevented that in the past knowing that so long as its their products being used, they will be able to generate revenues one way or the other. Now that the market penetration is coming to a saturation (or if not, there are far more alternative solutions available than ever before), they have started to really put on the squeeze.
Finally, companies like trillian may well have the best protocol engineers in the world, but such disruptions in service shall push away customers every time, however small the percentage might be. Unless connectivity to widely used messengers is provided by agreement, such connectivity outages will cause most users to move to move away from them.
Awfully sorry. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo! Have Not Blocked Connections (Score:1, Interesting)
Yahoo! have been rolling out changes, and to be honest, out of all the free email providers, Yahoo! is the best right now (not having tried the closed beta gmail)
I use trillian, I am not actually running it now, but I expect a patch from trillian soon.
That is like saying, Microsoft release longcock, and my windows 3.11 app doesn't work on it, make them fix it, daddy please, waaa waaa.
ffs, give them a break.
[Yahoo! not M$, they can take it in their ass any day, bastards]
Re:Centericq is also broken (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The business case sadly makes sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, website 'X' will have their own chat protocol, and account registration, and then so will websites 'Y' and 'Z'. Pretty soon it'll be a a service expected of a domain owner, like e-mail. And when that happens, there's going to be the need to interconnect these chat networks. After that, the above will no longer be an issue.
Re:What's the point in that?? (Score:2, Interesting)
A fine theory, except there is an official Linux/BSD Yahoo Messenger client [yahoo.com] available.
I have no idea how good it is as I use GAIM [sourceforge.net].
Re:The business case sadly makes sense (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems there are a few things Trillian or Yahoo could improve on. I don't care if its proprietary or not - i just want it to work.
malicious intent? piffle! (Score:4, Interesting)
And to those complaining about the yahoo client, I find it to be the best IM program overall. The new version has a clean interface, quick access to your address book and other features, but is customizable to not show any of that stuff if you don't want the clutter. Best of all, it doesn't deliver ads. NONE. Plus the offline messaging is a great feature.
Perhaps the people complaining haven't used it for a year or two and just think it's awful that a commercial company would break compatibility for an upgrade? It happens all the time in the open source world - cut Yahoo some slack.
Re:Adopting a new protocol (Score:5, Interesting)
Another point... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have heard (but don't know because I've never used Trillian) that Trillian has "broadcast" features that sends messages to a list of users. I believe that Yahoo is trying to block clients that have this type of feature and clients, such as Gaim, that happen to share protocol libraries or access methods with these clients are "collateral damage".
Perhaps if Trillian wanted to have a good working relationship with the service providers, they would not make it so easy to abuse the services in the first place -- IMHO.
later,
tims
Re:Why do they bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just for completeness, it is possible that they have technical reasons for changing the protocol too. Maybe the new one is more secure or runs better on their servers, yadda yadda. But without further comment from Yahoo!, I'm going with revenue enhancement.
Re:Quick fix does not work (Score:1, Interesting)
Jeremy
Re:Why do they bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, 3rd party clients are the ONLY way they receive revenue from some of us. I keep a Yahoo and Hotmail email account. I rarely IM anyone outside of AIM. Trillian's checking of Yahoo email drives me to their site (where I see their ads). No checking, I don't go as often to check my mail. They lose money. As far as I'm concerned, Yahoo is shooting themselves in the foot.
Re:Centericq is also broken (Score:5, Interesting)
I was using trillian until I figured out that all my contacts were on all the four major instant messagers... then I consolidated all my contacts into just one IM client.
Begun, this Yahoo-versus-Users war has. (Score:3, Interesting)
"This time, however, Yahoo said it will continue changing its protocols to prevent clients such as Trillian from finding new ways to incorporate Yahoo."
So it's obvious that clients like Gaim, Kopete and Trillian need to come up with a scheme to keep up. It would seem prudent to have a feature that detects a failure to connect, asks the user if he would like to update the Yahoo protocol plugin, and if yes, downloads and installs it automatically, and then connects successfully. It just takes some manpower to keep the plugins up to date, but this would be coordinated by a cross-client task force that would share information on the latest protocol changes.
Of course, one can wonder if all this is really worth it. One day the whole world will be on Jabber (except we will rarely call it Jabber since it's so ubiquitous), and we will tell tales to our children of those days when we couldn't necessarily communicate with other IM users since there were competing (!) systems, and IM communication companies spent resources on trying to prevent communication. And they'll smile politely and think "old age has caught up with gramps." (and then they'll fly home in their cars, but that's another story)
How long until Yahoo sues Trillian? (Score:3, Interesting)
Even without the DMCA they may be able to bring a case against them if Yahoo's TOS prohibits 3rd party clients.
Re:Trillian (Score:2, Interesting)
Open protocols (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Awfully sorry. (Score:3, Interesting)
As it happens, I do not know anybody who uses Y!IM so I do not care about this. The story would be very different if it was MSN Messenger. I use Linux, my job requires it in fact, and of course there is no official MSN client for Linux and probably never will be. I would LOVE for all my friends to use Jabber, but I tried many years ago to persuade said friends to use Jabber instead of MSN and to be frank MSN beat the snot out of Jabber through being better for them. Don't flame me for this, it's just the truth: Jabber takes more setup, thought and time than MSN and the clients and network are not as appealing for teenagers. Deal with it.
Since then I haven't bothered again, it would just be a repeat performance. Therefore I really want to be able to access MSN from my computer, this is one of the no1 electronic ways (after texting) people of my age in England communicate. I could tell all my friends I wasn't going to talk to them online anymore because Microsoft was being evil blah blah blah, but most people don't really understand the interplays and market conditions in the IT industry and wouldn't really understand. Or, they would more likely take it as a personal affront - "he won't just install MSN to talk to me, I guess he doesn't like me" etc.
So, I use MSN because it's the lesser of two evils. If they started blocking me of course they'd have a legit business motive for that but I'd still be pissed off because I never wanted to use their services in the first place. I have to use it though OR not talk to any of my friends online. Once you start boycotting companies like that you end up with the Nestle situation where people run "boycotts" against their milk but still eat chocolate or breakfast cereals manufactured by them without even realising it.
So that's one reason why people are bitching about it. I think it's perfectly justified: if my friends choice of service didn't affect my choice of service (like with email) I'd have no problem. But it does.
Gaim (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:pfft (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why do they bother? (Score:2, Interesting)
Which , while driving traffic to their sites via news and other links, does not send any ads directly via the IM client.
Re:Damn... (Score:3, Interesting)
I use it pretty much exclusively for webcam and voice stuff. Same with my friends. When your significant other lives 500+ miles away, its a nice solution to 'see' them, and no where near as irritating as using MSN (which has been a POS every time I've accidentally let it stay active on a system). Otherwise everyone I know uses AIM for chatting.
But yes, I still have my ICQ account from the mid 90's too, and my 40 or so contacts on there are never online anymore.
Re:Gaim (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So (Score:4, Interesting)
That by itself is enough to make it the clear leader for corporate use. I set up a server for our office LAN and our IT guy installed Psi on every employee's desktop. Now we have a private, low-latency communication system for passing short messages back and forth in real-time. There hasn't been a single problem with the roll-out; I started the server, spent 20 minutes telling the other employees how to use Psi, and walked away from it.
With any other IM service, we'd have to deal with privacy policies (such as mandatory encryption of all messages) or other hassles. With Jabber, we can freely send sensitive information between employees without worrying about outside snooping. Beyond that, we wrote an notification API for use with our internal applications that allows you to send event notices to selected employees via either email or Jabber. It's nice to get instant notification of system status changes without depending on our Internet connection being available.
Use Jabber... (Score:3, Interesting)
I often chat with friends that still uses MSN and ICQ through Jabber's transports or whatever it is they call them
How to win back IM? (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of my fellow posters have suggested that the solution is for people to switch to Jabber. I agree that the solution should start with Jabber, but it's not as easy as asking everyone to please switch.
I'm going to try to identify the obstacles to a migration to open standards, and I hope that others will expand on this and maybe even offer some solutions.
How do you convince ISPs to begin deploying Jabber servers as they would deploy mail servers? Is there any money to be made in deploying and operating a worldwide network of Jabber servers? If so, maybe some entrepreneur could come up with a clever idea for bootstrapping the network.
As some people have mentioned, it is possible that IM may evolve interoperability naturally, but I wouldn't count on that happening anytime soon. The final weapon of the proprietary IM providers will be to add crypto authentication to the protocol, with a key embedded into the clients. They would then have a solid legal recourse (DMCA) against "rogue" clients seeking interoperability. (Who knows, though... that could be a useful selling point for open standards!)
There... now that I've identified the problems, all that's left is for someone to provide the solutions. ;)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gaim (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe I'll give it another go one of these days, it was nice using the same client in windows and linux.
Re:Centericq is also broken (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Damn... (Score:1, Interesting)
I tried GAIM but after it crashed for the 5th time in under 10 minutes just from trying to configure it I uninstalled it and went right back to reliable Trillian.
I'd like it if I could just get my friends to use something open like Jabber. I did have a group of a couple dozen people using WASTE regularly and loved it until most of them stopped logging on to it because it made their machines too slow or they were too dumb to figure out their firewall settings.
Re:Trillian (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Gaim (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gaim (Score:3, Interesting)
Under Linux I use GAIM - it does everything I want it to (except list Yahoo chat rooms). I have yet to explore getting my new WebCam working.
However under Windows, I use Miranda. (It doesn't require GTK). It is a very small program, uses very little memory, and has the features I need (except browsing/entering Yahoo chat rooms). Miranda rocks - it is a subtle program, but has awesome features and many plugins. If I want to use my WebCam - I have to run the Official Yahoo & MSN clients. They are overloaded with fretures that I never use and ads that I never want to see.
If I was super organised, I would take my Miranda drictory to/from work everyday on my USB 128MB stick - to keep the DB & plugins up2date.
No adds in both programs is a huge plus. Full priase for the efforts of these OSS programs!
Mike
Gmail and GM - Google Messaging? (Score:3, Interesting)
Google wants to make money, and they'll figure out a way to make money off IM if they decide to launch an IM service. Gmail uses text ads based on the content of your mail. Why couldn't it use text ads based on IM conversations? A Web based IM client (which would be neat, because everyone has a Web browser anyway) could easily do this.
Google might even merge Gmail and GM (Google Messaging), and let you archive your conversation in the same way you archive your mail, and they can serve ads based on that, too.
In fact, IM, e-mail and newsgroups are very similar - they are all forms of messaging/communication. You could use one interface and merge everything into an über messaging service, which would probably include Google Groups 2 [google.com] or a later GG (Google Groups) version adapted for this purpose.
In fact, they could probably make everything look like it's the same thing (which it would be, really), and just let the user decide whether he wants to talk to one person or a group of people. If the person on the other end happens to be available right there and then, you would have realtime discussions (IM). If not, you'd probably get a message from him/her later (mail). Or you would get messages from groups of people (newsgroups/Google Groups 2).
Come to think of it, I think it is just a matter of time before something like this happens...