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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: 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.