I must protest that this kind of announcement belies the stupidity of proprietary chat protocols. Remember when IRC was king, and basically, anyone could write an IRC client? Anyone could write a MUD client, or even a Telnet client. Those are open protocols. When Pidgin came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for me. In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially un…
> I must protest that this kind of announcement belies the stupidity of proprietary chat protocols. [...] In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true. ICQ was also a proprietary chat protocol. The Pidgin (then "Gaim") developers had to reverse-engineer it. Fortunately the folks at ICQ were less hostile toward third-party cl…
Even in those heady early days of the mid-90s, it was recognized that many end-users were behind NAT and firewalls and otherwise-inaccessible endpoints of the Internet. Many of us were also on dialup lines that were intermittently connected, so they needed to establish some sort of persistent presence.
So the ICQ client was designed to check-in with a central server to indicate the online/away/DND/offline status of the client. I do not know how much of ICQ's messaging went through that server, but I believe that a lot of clients in those days were designed to, eventually, connect peer-to-peer for delivering files and stuff. Mainly, because the operators of servers didn't want to be overwhelmed with transferring lots of data!
Interestingly, ICQ and Livejournal as well were completely invaded and taken over by Russians. Or perhaps it was not an invasion, but a planned psy-op all along. My original UIN was 279866, and my girlfriend's was slightly below that: she had signed up first and got me on-board.
But eventually, Russians broke into my account, changed the profile, and commandeered it for their own purposes. And Livejournal got sold to Russian interests too.
I believe it was them watching us over here all along. It must have been a personal-data goldmine to know when teens and young adults were online and who they were connected to, on the social graph, whether it was IM'ing or blogging the old-fashioned way on Livejournal.
So beware with your modern "disruptive" apps, particularly ones like those fun e-Scooters you can share and rent. They are probably psy-ops from foreign-based actors who enjoy watching and recording our movements.