AIM will shut down after 20 years • Hacker News Board

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#231

Post by trumpownsyou420 » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:09 PM UTC

cvwright wrote: post #186

mozumder wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids these days with their AIM Away Messages. In my days, we had to "finger" people their .project/.plan files in VAX/VMS & Unix systems.

OK, I can't resist. Time for a story. Once upon a time when the net was still new, a friend of mine (then a Unix newbie) was trying to catch up with another friends' current status. Unfortunately this other colleague had quite a lot of info in their .plan, and so many lines and lines of text scrolled by too fast for my friend to read. Needing a reminder about the syntax of Unix pipes and the "less" command, she turns…

sounds like he missed out on some pussy, brah

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#232

Post by slimshady94 » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:09 PM UTC

What a golden thread. Something tells me I will be writing similar eulogies after twenty years about facebook and whatsapp.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#233

Post by mschaef » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

mulletbum wrote: post #180

mschaef wrote: post #171

Sad to see AIM go for sentimental reasons, but I can't say it's too surprising. The world has moved on. Technically, one of the more interesting aspects of AIM was that it was built on Boxely... one of the earlier (~2004-2006) markup based rendering engines. Boxely was a project by Joe Hewitt (FireBug, etc.) in which the UI was defined entirely in XML with stylesheets and Javascript to make it live. These days it's p…

I am unsure how this is true considering AIM was around when I was in highschool back in 1999-2003. If Boxely didn't come around till 2004 that would be like the AIM reboot era.

AIM Triton. Not the original.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#234

Post by andybak » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:15 PM UTC

aczerepinski wrote: post #201

empath75 wrote: post #28

5 years ago, aol still used aim internally for everything that people use slack for today. Group chats, bots, notifications for builds, etc, etc. Then gradually individual teams picked up slack and within maybe 18 months, we went from 100% aim to a gigantic corporate slack team. That was the end of AIM, I think. Aol and yahoo both use gmail internally so I suspect they’re going to shitcan their email services eventua…

Sorry to reply with an off topic question but do you still work at AOL? If so, do you think there’s any chance AOL would consider allowing passwords longer than 16 characters? I only use AOL for junk/spam mail but even in that instance would prefer to use a strong password. When you see the “password too long” error message it’s easy to worry that the password is being stored plain text in some space constrained colu…

Unless you're using a very constrained character set then 16 characters is pretty strong in my books.

What's your threat model?

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#235

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:18 PM UTC

I'd be really interested in the dynamics behind the rise and fall, the life-cycle, of various chat and communications systems and platforms.

What is it, specifically, that tends to precipitate the decline of a platform, or the rise of a new one?

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#236

Post by SapphireSun » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:18 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #187

SapphireSun wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a strange feature of an economic system where the incentives require that successful participants blow themselves up. It requires that new=good and old=bad.

It doesn’t require that all. If anything, we are now seeing the opposite where top companies with considerable resources are remaining agile and innovative, effectively out-competing many new startups.

You're right... for now. We're seeing incredible concentration of wealth. Eventually they will become lazy and overly bureaucratic. Google, Apple, and Facebook in particular made their mark by dismissing customer service and by not addressing customer complaints, creating a culture of the "one true way". That culture + monopoly status will create (and is creating) a toxic miasma.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#237

Post by pitzips » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:21 PM UTC

My first program was a visual basic registry editor that allowed me to add more than 200 buddies. Thanks AIM!

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#238

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:28 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #234

aczerepinski wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to reply with an off topic question but do you still work at AOL? If so, do you think there’s any chance AOL would consider allowing passwords longer than 16 characters? I only use AOL for junk/spam mail but even in that instance would prefer to use a strong password. When you see the “password too long” error message it’s easy to worry that the password is being stored plain text in some space constrained colu…

Unless you're using a very constrained character set then 16 characters is pretty strong in my books. What's your threat model?

NIST guidelines are for a minimum length of 8 characters and a maximum length of no fewer than 64 characters.

What is your basis for suggesting anything less than those guidelines is sufficient?

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/

https://qz.com/981941/the-us-standards-office-wants-to-do-aw...

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#239

Post by pwg » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:42 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #92

It's very surprising to me that person-to-person text communication is divided into two completely different and incompatible types of service: short latency (~20 sec, "email") and very short latency (~1 sec, "instant messaging"). A priori, I'd have just imagined that the former would arrive first for technical reasons but then would be consumed by the latter, which has no fundamental technical barriers to being bett…

> It's very surprising to me that person-to-person text communication is divided into two completely different and incompatible types of service: short latency (~20 sec, "email") and very short latency (~1 sec, "instant messaging").

Email, for network connected machines with delivery direct into the recipients inbox (this is how SMTP works if both sides are network connected and online, and in fact was how SMTP was designed to work for connected systems) is also sub 1 sec delivery latency (at least for normal sized emails, 2G of attached photos will take a moment to ship over).

20 seconds for delivery of email (ignoring intermittently disconnected systems, which email still supports) is only because most email clients work in a polling pull mode from a central server, and the polling delay in the client is what adds the apparent latency. It is a result of how most clients are designed, not an inherent built in latency of the system.

Re: AIM will shut down after 20 years

#240

Post by listic » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:45 PM UTC

_e wrote: post #98

santaclaus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have my ICQ id The real important question is how many digits.

If I recall correctly, six digit icq id's were selling for thousands of dollars.

Nah, $6+ if you buy in the right place. $300+ for 5-digits

http://www.myuin.com