Google Begins Blocking Third-Party Jabber Invites 92
New submitter kxra writes "Do you have a federated jabber instant messaging account that never gets responses from Google accounts anymore? Or do you have a Gmail account that a friend has been unable to invite from their 3rd party Jabber account? The Free Software Foundation reports, 'Google users can still send subscription requests to contacts whose accounts are hosted elsewhere. But they cannot accept incoming requests. This change is akin to Google no longer accepting incoming e-mail for @gmail.com addresses from non-Google domains.' This sounds like something Facebook would try in order to gain even tighter control over the network, but they never even federated their Jabber service to begin with. According to a public mailing list conversation, Google is doing this as a lazy way to handle a spam problem."
Google has been quite evil this week (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Banning ad-blocker apps from the Google Play App store
2. Banning jabber invites
3. Killing Google Reader
They're too big to need to play nice with anyone.
Re:TFS last sentence untrue (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting AC for obvious reasons.
I run the helpdesk for a medium-sized email service (~350,000 users) that also provides federated XMPP service. We've had users complaining for several days that they while they can IM users at Google Talk, they can't request presence notifications (e.g. requesting to see if a buddy is online, away, etc.). They're able to chat with Google Talk users but can't see if they're online or not, which is a major issue. We've been really annoyed as we thought it was an issue on our end and assumed that Google knew what it was doing when it came to operating large-scale XMPP service.
It's wasted a lot of our admin time and resulted in frustrated users.
It's one thing to do a temporary ban of servers that are emitting gobs of spam or spammy invites, but it's a different thing to start blocking basic XMPP functions like requesting authorization for presence notifications. It's even more of an entirely different thing to block auth requests from the entire internet.
CAPTCHA (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe instead of silently dropping invitation requests, Google should send a rejection notice (regardless of whether the target Gmail account exists, to prevent probing) with a link to a CAPTCHA; completing the captcha would allow retrying the request.
Given their track record, I'd be surprised if Google bothers to implement this kind of non-lazy approach to re-enable interoperability, though.