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ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

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Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#111

Post by Cyph0n »

peterwwillis wrote: post #83

Fun fact: So many international criminals use ICQ to make deals that "unspecified federal investigators" (read: spooks) had "brought concerns to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S." (the treasury) protesting its sale to a Russian company and asking them to stop it. ICQ is specifically referenced in speeches by FBI and intelligence agency directors. So that's a pretty neat rep to have.

From back when I was active in the "black market" (around 2009), nobody would deal with you if you didn't use ICQ or OTP. Carders especially used ICQ almost exclusively.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#112

Post by norea-armozel »

FigBug wrote: post #9

Around 2000 I got annoyed with the ads and crap in ICQ, so I wrote Miranda ICQ, now called Miranda IM ( http://www.miranda-im.org/ ) based on libicq. One of my main inspirations to write the app was I wanted to connect a chatbot to ICQ to harass my friends, but the standard API wouldn't allow sending messages. So I added a plugin API, connected the MegaHAL chatbot and good times ensued. I lost interest in Miranda sho…

Oh I loved Miranda when it came out. Thanks.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#113

Post by drinchev »

mikey_p wrote: post #64

The craziest thing about all of this, is that my number 7672xxx still works! Every few years I download the client, and my username and password from the late 90s is still valid. This is no small feat in the age of shutdowns and spin-offs. In other news, WebRings still exists as well.

Just a question. I see more of the commenters have posted their ICQ UIDs with the last digits hidden, like yours ( xxx in the end ).

Is there a particular reason for not revealing it?

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#114

Post by flukus »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #109
mahyarm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tinder is kind of like that? Wechat has something similar in China. I worked at a messaging company, and I found out those kind of 'unsolicited date messaging' features are a really good way to scare away your female users pretty quickly.

ICQ happened to figure something out - girls wrote boys as well, I remember getting messages from strangers as often as initiating those. Anyway, it was more about talking than about romantic relationship. Not many people expected to ever meet their virtual friends. You can definitely ruin that, for example, if you do not randomize well enough and a small subset of user base gets too much attention.

You sure those girls were girls?

Remember, this was the internet back when men were men and women were men and children were FBI agents.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#115

Post by flukus »

pimeys wrote: post #56
chris_wot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me if this is incredibly ignorant, but I thought this was targeted at the gay community?

Well, on this side of the fence it pretty much still works as OP described. Nothing has changed and you don't even need to be drunk!

Difference is, the gay community (or some subset of it that I don't know the size of) has always had it's quick hook up methods.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#116

Post by empath75 »

chris_wot wrote: post #45
Tepix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4 person team getting $400 million after a few years is "blowing it"?

From my perspective the "they" being referenced is AOL.

They blew so many things but basically the problem is that after the time warner deal, time warner just bled them dry, hoarding all the dialup money and refusing to invest in anything.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#117

Post by flukus »

j2bax wrote: post #71
josefresco wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm I didn't but I knew people who did ;) ;) Your description matches "my friends" experience 100% Back when hacking was more about pranking and fun.

Yeah it was 100% fun, no malicious intent. Judging by the downvotes, people don't find it amusing. I can see that now that I'm not a dumb teenage... but it made for fond memories none the less! And the fact that pretty non-technical 15 year olds could pull that off in a matter of minutes, probably drove companies to take security a bit more seriously (hopefully)!

It was pre digital photography, so not like anyone had private nudes on their hard drive to poke through.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#119

Post by guard-of-terra »

flukus wrote: post #114
guard-of-terra wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICQ happened to figure something out - girls wrote boys as well, I remember getting messages from strangers as often as initiating those. Anyway, it was more about talking than about romantic relationship. Not many people expected to ever meet their virtual friends. You can definitely ruin that, for example, if you do not randomize well enough and a small subset of user base gets too much attention.

You sure those girls were girls? Remember, this was the internet back when men were men and women were men and children were FBI agents.

Women were comparably more fond of ICQ and even now it's them who still hold on to it. It's very unlike the IRC sausage party. I think you would more likely to run into a girl pretending to be male.

Also, I have this feeling that it's much harder to disguise your gender in Russian than it is in English. First of all, everybody has it as first language with all its nuance and can guess a lot of things about their penpal. Discussions are also deeper, making it harder to fake.

Re: ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit

#120

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

jandrese wrote: post #107
bluedino wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't really messengers.

Unix talk is pretty close. Also, BBS chat software would be another good example, although that was somewhat rare since few BBS systems had multiple lines and even on the ones that did you wouldn't just hang out waiting to chat. I missed the low UIN boat on ICQ because I was solidly into FreeBSD back then and the ICQ client was only on Windows. It also looked sketchy as hell with the crudely drawn flower icon and pub…

What about IRC?
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