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AIM will be discontinued today

help.aol.com

201–210 of 274 posts

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the point is that they aren't retained, and in turn, leave young people in a position where they won't be blackmailed as adults for the shitty things they said as a teenager on platforms they thought were safe.

They are retained by the other organizations. It's good that at least snapchat itself removes it's copies though.

Who are the other organizations? You sound super sure, I feel like I missed a news story recently that you read.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LTE equals 4G.

In the U.S., at least on AT&T, there is a difference between 4G and LTE. When my iPhone 6S+ switches the indicator from LTE to 4G, the data speeds are many times slower.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#203
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can give you the reason. Everybody at aol stopped using it years ago for internal communication and switched to slack. The team had also been cut down to a skeleton crew a long time ago and they stopped development on it. The reason why they are killing it as opposed to letting it hang around for ever is that aol has been in a multi-year long process of moving everything to AWS and due to the way aim is architected…

I was amazed the other day to discover my favorite board game publisher, Rio Grande Games, has the email address (posted in their games as of 2017) of riogames@aol.com, which really surprised me. I wonder if they're still making money off of AOL email accounts?

Verizon bought AOL in 2015 [0] and has recently started discontinuing their ISP provided @verizon.net email addresses and servers[1] in favor of @aol.com addresses.

0: https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-to-buy-aol-for-4-4-bill... 1: https://help.aol.com/products/aol-mail-verizon

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#204
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure wha GP is referring to exactly. But at least in theory, it’s possible for Google to access the images, since they’re stored on Google servers. In practice this is very unlikely. If you save the snaps to your camera roll, then any app with photos permissions has access to them (along with any metadata). But that’s obvious.

I am astounded of the faith people still have that companies and 3 letter agencies will not store and use their data forever, after all the revelations in the past years. And to think this is YCombinator News, not some random news website.

Safe assumptions:

1) The network is compromised.

2) Users have hostile intent.

3) (Cloud) storage is publicly visible.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#205
post #27

> Why is AIM shutting down? > We know there are so many loyal fans who have used AIM for decades; and we loved working and building the first chat app of its kind since 1997. Our focus will always be on providing the kind of innovative experiences consumers want. We’re more excited than ever to focus on building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products. Corporate BS-speak at its best. Three sen…

The worst part is they didn't even have to include this question. Including it and then giving such a bullshit non-answer is like a slap on the reader's face.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are retained by the other organizations. It's good that at least snapchat itself removes it's copies though.

Who are the other organizations? You sound super sure, I feel like I missed a news story recently that you read.

I'm not sure if there has been confirmation anywhere but it would be foolish to assume nobody is storing the messages you send on a closed platform. You don't know how it works so your only safe assumption is the worst case.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#207
I still used AIM up until today. My friends and I just switched over to a private XMPP server, and we've been using Pidgin/Adium anyway, so it's not a huge change. AIM has been extremely reliable, I've been able to use it on every platform I've ever owned (usually with free software), and it's easy to end-to-end encrypt messages.

My friends and I just never saw a reason to move away from AIM. Everyone just decided to switch to things that were newer for novelty's sake, and transferred their friendships and conversations into non-private, non-free systems. Even Google, which at first used an open protocol, moved to a siloed system while adding nothing of much value (as evidenced by Google's low share of the messaging market). And now to talk to people I have to switch between Google, Skype, Apple, and Facebook, all of whom inter-compatible systems, all of whom reneged on their promises, and none of whom offer me any value whatsoever.

This is not a happy day for me.

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are retained by the other organizations. It's good that at least snapchat itself removes it's copies though.

Who are the other organizations? You sound super sure, I feel like I missed a news story recently that you read.

We all thought Usenet was ephemeral and then Dejanews revealed themselves...

Re: AIM will be discontinued today

#209

One thing I'll miss about AIM is that it's a communication modality that doesn't exist right now. It was everywhere, and on MacOS it was integrated into the OS. For most people I knew, they had it set to join when they got on the computer. So it meant that you knew when your friends were at the computer, and you knew when you could have long "in the background" conversations with your friends. It was just a different…

I still used it pretty regularly until today. I only had like 2 people I talked to on it, but I like that we were all on it all the time and I was on it when I was otherwise unavailable online to everyone but those couple close friends.
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