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The Guardian (and likely everyone else) is reporting that AOL is killing off their instant messenger service. For those of us who never quite got the hang of IRC, AOL Messenger (not to mention MSN Messenger at the same time) was a truly fun way to chat with people we knew in an age before smart phones and SMS. And yes, my AOL screen name wound up becoming my default ID almost everywhere.
An article on AOL's website on Friday said AOL Instant Messenger will be discontinued on 15 December. The program will still function until then but after that, users won't be able to sign in and all data will be deleted. AOL says people with an aim.com email address will still be able to use it.
In a blogpost, a spokesman for AOL's parent company explained the platform's demise as the casualty of the evolving way people communicate.
"AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed," wrote Michael Albers, vice president of communications at Oath.
Launched in 1997, AOL Instant Messenger was at the forefront of what was called at the time the biggest trend in online communication since email.
I for one would happily trade in WhatsApp, Google Chat, and all of the others for a return to AOL Messenger.
Also at USA TODAY: RIP AIM: AOL Instant Messenger dies in December
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Sunday October 08 2017, @03:21AM (10 children)
Good riddance to AOL. But are there any good IRC servers still around?
I quit my last online game when coldfront shut down and the other players all moved to diskord. It's depressing to see, the last vestiges of the free internet dying off and being replaced with all this proprietary garbage and people just accept it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 08 2017, @03:58AM
There are a couple of IRC networks around, but whether or not they are "good" is up to interpretation. Some have different features and services than others, plus different networks cater towards different groups.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Sunday October 08 2017, @05:39AM (6 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday October 08 2017, @05:49AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday October 08 2017, @06:00AM (4 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 08 2017, @06:09AM
Game of Fonts
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Sunday October 08 2017, @06:40AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday October 08 2017, @07:04AM
I was quite fond of the latter, however.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 08 2017, @10:50AM
Options:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday October 08 2017, @08:50AM
(Assuming you are asking about networks and not servers)
For programming Freenode ( https://freenode.net/kb/answer/chat [freenode.net] ) is quite active.
For social activities it varies quite a bit - but the old nets [IRCNet, EFNet, DALNet..] are still around.
And there are lots of small (semi-)private nets and smaller nets and lone servers (like soylent) around.
(Score: 4, Touché) by RamiK on Sunday October 08 2017, @10:49AM
Considering Slashdot and Soylentnews are to newsgroups and mailing lists as AOL's Messenger is to IRC, are we really ones to judge? I mean, I don't know about you, but despite the trolling and bot wars, I still haven't found an alternative to comp.arch or most of comp.* really.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday October 08 2017, @03:54AM (2 children)
So ... is the September that never ended, finally about to end?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday October 08 2017, @05:43AM
Blimey, is it the 6083rd of December already?
alias aoldate='echo $((`date +%s`/86400-8643))'
alias ggdate='echo $((`date +%s`/86400-11364))'
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 08 2017, @08:22AM
No.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Sunday October 08 2017, @05:10AM (6 children)
Missing from the many articles I've seen on this is the important and very interesting fact that the courts forced AOL to provide an API for the service. AOL was fairly strong, though nothing compared to the position that Faecebook is in now, and the courts saw too much potential for locking people into the company's services. As a result the courts did something about it, in 2001 if I recall correctly, as they should have also done long ago with Faecebook.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday October 08 2017, @05:46AM (1 child)
Deliberate? It's new to me. I like it.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 08 2017, @05:56AM
It's the shit :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 08 2017, @06:15AM
Facebook has a published API.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 08 2017, @06:45AM (2 children)
Except for your suggestion, I can't find anything on this supposed court diktat. Link, please, or it's not interesting. Or fact.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday October 08 2017, @08:01AM
Thanks for the push. I'm still looking for the mention of their going to court and not going to go to PACER for that... The closest I can find in casual browsing was that there were conditions regarding AIM as a prerequisite for the Time-Warner deal [nytimes.com].
However, already in 1999 things got heated as AOL tried to lock out competing compatible clients. The other clients, according to AOL, were made possible by following the FOSS version launched as support for GNU/Linux. The GNU/Linux client was released in spite of the AOL management behing rabidly against FOSS
That was before Bill Gates started his $300 million a year reputation management and before M$ gained full control over the trade press.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday October 08 2017, @11:12AM
Since many are unlikely to wade through the now ancient article from 2001, here is the relevant quote:
Source : F.C.C. Approves AOL-Time Warner Deal, With Conditions [nytimes.com] (2001)
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday October 08 2017, @02:10PM (5 children)
AIM is providing yet another demonstration of the inherent problems with a server based architecture, and with a proprietary service. No more servers = no more service. Centralized control has a few advantages, but it's just too much of a target, as Napster learned. It's a single point of failure. It's too tempting for the providers to use their power against the community to raise prices, force ads and DRM upon the users, spy on everyone, and break 3rd party apps again and again. Pidgin has gone through a lot of updates just to keep up with the unnecessary protocol changes these instant messenger service providers keep making. One of "updates" added video advertising. The AIM client used so much of the computer's CPU and bandwidth to run these video ads, even when minimized, that it interfered with work. That's when I replaced their client with Pidgin, permanently.
AOL has a long history of extractive, anti-social moves. Like, continuing to bill people for service after they quit AOL, pretending that they didn't leave, trying to drag the exit process out forever. Many ISPs, such as Prodigy and a local one I used for a year, demanded 30 days written notice to end service. So much of the corporate world thinks they have to behave that way to survive. I continue to wonder why the public puts up with way more than I'd ever tolerate now. In part I think it's the naivety of youth and nerdiness. I didn't used to have a good sense of what constituted an acceptable provision in a contract for service, or employment, and was too trusting that a reputable company wouldn't ask too much, tended to believe and accept their assertions that questionable provisions were normal and standard and that "everyone does it". I'm guessing this quality is part of why age discrimination is so severe in technology.
What's stopping instant messaging, chat, VoIP, etc. from being p2p? Nothing I can see, other than political and corporate control considerations. We know how to dynamically reconfigure and recreate networks as participants join and leave.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Aiwendil on Sunday October 08 2017, @05:24PM (4 children)
* Bootstrapping.
From two perspectives.
1) ~"The value of a network is the square of its participants"
2) How will you find the first Other in the network? (From whom you'll download the list of Others)
* Fragmentation
Easy to end up with multiple islands, especially in "circle of friends"
* Latency/bandwidth
Easier to reduce this in a server-client as long as the data is unique
* Offline messages
How do you deliver a message to someone who is disconnected?
* Firewalls
Assume all parties are behind different firewalls
* Dynamic ip
"Join us and search for your friends - each time you joun"
* Administration
How do you keep it from becomming a spambot haven?
* Anonymity
How (without a hefty penalty in bandwidth or latency) do you keep yourself anonymous to the other party? (Assumes you distrust the server-operator less than whoever you're chatting with)
* Upgrades
Since the design will have flaws, how do you push upgrades without causing fragmentation?
* New client software
Woho! More crap to install (see point below, above and bootstrapping)
* Sucky clients
Most "OMFG, I Have a solution" tends to come with worse clients than was before (if your client has higher requirements than Irssi then count me out) and runs on fewer platforms (got telnet? Sweet. Then I can IRC, send emails, surf and search the web, and read usenet. Also comment for next point)
* Messy protocol
Keep it between the complexity of smtp and irc, I want to be able to (s)telnet it (makes debugging clients a lot easier).
But if you really want to give it a try, write an irc-NfP (Newfangled Protocol) bridge a la bitlbee and it would pique my curiosity if all of the above is solved without servers.
Quite frankly the issues with most multi-server nets
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday October 08 2017, @08:51PM (3 children)
BitTorrent has solved a lot of the questions you raise.
> How will you find the first Other
> Dynamic ip
Need a neutral connector protocol service. Yes, I know, still somewhat centralized. This service would do connections only, and would not know or need to know the service for which it is providing connection info. Would have to use some sort of anonymous ID for each service. All it does is reply to queries with IP addresses that match the ID. Then the client can talk directly to those IP addresses and the peers at the other ends can take it from there.
> How do you deliver a message to someone who is disconnected?
Email has no problem with that, and can even be fairly decentralized with generous numbers of local servers holding mail for users.
> How do you keep it from becoming a spambot haven?
Everyone has that problem, and there are many solutions of varying effectiveness, of course.
> Latency/bandwidth
Ought to be even lower latency and higher bandwidth with direct connections, and no laggy server in the middle.
> How (without a hefty penalty in bandwidth or latency) do you keep yourself anonymous
VPN
> Messy protocol
IP has multicasting. It's not used often, but it's in there.
Anyway, I think the answer to my question is not technical difficulties, it's financial.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Aiwendil on Sunday October 08 2017, @09:57PM
No, not really, just have added another layer of abstraction.
Not somewhat, that is a hard server requirement right there. (ICQ did a similar thing actually, it tried connect directly first to serverprovided ip and if that failed it went via servers)
Yup, they solved it by using centralized servers :)
So, the solution for this to get to P2P is to add more servers (which means more points that will be breached).
So far havn't seen even a barely working solution in P2P setups (beyond obscurity).
On non-p2 a simple flooding protection or looking for repeated checksums tends to do the job.
Up until someone decides to ddos you, or just ping flood you...
But yeah, this point was a brainfart on my behalf.
VPN is a hefty latency (my ping times tend to be between 1.05 and 1.90ms on average to sites within my country - and yes, I notice the 145ms latency to soylentnews)
Ahh, the stuff that tends to be blocked at isp-level and route badly. :)
No, the issue is that the idea is trivial but the implementation hasn't been solved yet.
Oh, I also forgot - how to best solve it when someone has multiple clients for the same id? (For instance I right now have skype open on six devices for the same account, one machine is purely to gather logs)
(Quite frankly - so far modifying an ircd to share serverlists [with network id for each] would be a lot more useful. P2P servers makes more sense for ephermal stuff. Also could use pgp-signing to solve the irc-services problem that will arise)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @02:22AM (1 child)
Once NAT goes away, pure peer-to-peer services will flourish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:15AM
That doesn't solve the problem. It might have 30 years ago, when every computer had a fixed IP address. However, a few inventions that you might have missed gets in the way: Laptops, phones, tablets... Devices moving from one network to another. These devices (which are probably most devices nowadays) keep changing IP address, which comes with basically the same problems as NAT.
You cannot connect to them until you know their current IP address. They can't connect to you until they know yours.
A central service solves this problem, just as it did with NAT. By having the user side connect to the central service before any communication can take place.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Sunday October 08 2017, @11:41PM
Today marks the day. Amen.
Ahhh.. the good old days of dial-up modem sounds and trolling 10 year olds in MUD channels..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @08:15AM
IMHO they should have attempted a comeback instead.
I personally haven't used AIM, it was never popular around here. I started on ICQ, then went with MSN Messenger when everyone else moved there. At some point Skype came along with a shitty client and a proprietary protocol, and some people ended up having both, but MSN won mostly by being supported by other clients (e.g. Pidgin).
Unfortunately, Microsoft decided that shitty + proprietary was a perfect match for their corporate culture, bought Skype and shut down MSN Messenger.
At that point, AOL should have tried to make a comeback with AIM, taking over all the people who were using MSN Messenger with Pidgin, Trillian, etc, and who didn't want to be forced into the Skype sh*t.
At the moment, it's pretty much either Skype (for those who love sh*tty software) or e-mail. XMPP never became a huge success, and finding a server that works on Windows without a ton of runtimes and compatibility libraries is hopeless, and SIP is not much better especially when looking for the IM part not the phone part.