Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Net Messaging Standards War Brewing
Author: Tim Danner Posted: 7/23/1999; 9:02:38 AM Topic: Today's scriptingNews Outline Msg #: 8684 (In response to 8680) Prev/Next: 8683 / 8685
Minor clarification: I believe AOL's reference to "hackers" has more to do with the long-standing practice of malicious AOL users of posing as an AOL official and asking clueless users for their passwords. AOL policy says (all over the place) that one should not give the password anywhere other than the AOL login box.An open standard is without a doubt what is needed here. Is anyone familiar with the IETF proposed standard mentioned?
My desktop of choice is linux, and many of my friends use ICQ. Mirabilis provides an ancient, poorly-written, and minimally functional Java client. Out of curiosity, I decompiled it with the freely available Mocha program. Not much luck though - it had been obfuscated. All of the class, method, and member variable names were nonsense, and local variable names are not preserved in compiled java.
However, the protocol has been reverse engineered and free (GPL) replacements have been written. Of course, at any time Mirabilis could do as AOL just did to Microsoft. Further, the legal standing of a third-party ICQ client is questionable. Does AOL have a right to control what software makes use of its server resources? Clearly they have sought to do this, simply by keeping their protocol proprietary. With an open standard, this question would be moot, because public servers would almost certainly be established (a la IRC).
Another note: AOL owns Mirabilis (ICQ).
Tim
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