Goodbye AIM, you were the catalyst to my Information Security career. Good times.
AIM will be discontinued today
11–20 of 274 posts
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#12Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#13End of an era... I remember buying a helio ocean over an original iphone because it had support for AIM.
I had AIM-to-SMS set up so I could keep my chats going even on my flip phone, and then on Windows Mobile even if I didn't have data service. These days I can't even check Facebook unless I have LTE, if the phone says 4G I know I have no service.
Man how things change.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#14It's a shame they couldn't open source the original client and server software, would be interesting to preserve.
I had the same thought. Now that it's dead, maybe releasing/leaking the source would be legally defensible as fair use in the name of historical preservation.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#15It's a shame they couldn't open source the original client and server software, would be interesting to preserve.
For reference, AOLserver (https://aolserver.github.io/) is an open source Tcl-scripted _Web_ server.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#16It's a shame they couldn't open source the original client and server software, would be interesting to preserve.
I had the same thought. Now that it's dead, maybe releasing/leaking the source would be legally defensible as fair use in the name of historical preservation.
I wish the original AOL and CompuServe access clients and the servers could be opened as well.
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#17Truly sad. So much of my young social life was experienced through AIM. Screen names are still part of the identity of some of my friends. For some folks that have already passed, our last conversations are on AIM. Don't know what else to say, but it definitely feels like a link to another era of my life is fading away. Nothing is permanent.
RIP running man!
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#18The part that was IMHO completely un-thought-through:
> Can I save my Buddy List?
> Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List.
--
> What happens to my data?
> Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.
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> Can I save my images and files?
> Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017.
> (Instructions to manually open each chat then scroll through looking for images and files)
Re: AIM will be discontinued today
#19Unfortunately you are not able to save or export your Buddy List.
Your data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.
Yes, you can manually save images and files to your computer until the morning of December 15, 2017.
Whatever you thought of AIM, it's stuff like this that makes you realize just how important software freedom is. Insane that there is just no way at all, without outright hacking the program (to the extent that hacking it is possible), to export your data, that you generated, and should by rights be yours to at the very least save (and not have to comb through potentially decades of chat history to export pictures and files one-by-one).