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ICQ will stop working from June 26

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Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#711

Post by fullspectrumdev »

jmbwell wrote: post #251
lxgr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have similar sentimental memories of ICQ. One highlight was being able to connect to it from my phone for the first time; first on my first smartphone (Symbian), then from my "non-smart" Sony Ericsson that succeeded it, via some Java Jabber client and a Jabber-to-ICQ bridge! (Unfortunately nobody else that I knew had it on their phones, so I could only reach people in front of their PCs at home.) On the other hand,…

Being reachable only from a PC at home… man. Now that I miss. The whole lifestyle of having a clear distinction between being at the computer and not. Status messages for a time when “away” was a state of being you ever were . Coming back to see whether your crush had messaged you. Simpler times for sure. Before we even had “wi-fi!”

I remember around 2007 or so a mobile provider here offered these “feature phones”, I think made by Huawei, that had zero rated MSN, Skype, and a couple of other services.

Went from “only available when at the PC” to “always online” overnight.

Got even funnier when someone worked out you could abuse the phone as a rather slow, but free, internet connection due to how poorly implemented the zero rating was done on those services :)

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#712

Post by fullspectrumdev »

lxgr wrote: post #317
101008 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started writing an essay about this topic. I am one of those nostalgics by the old internet. I thought it was the aesthetic (geocities, etc), but after giving it a lot of thought, that wasn't. It was that your life (all of us) was "offline by default". We lived offline and then we connect to the internet for a few minutes, hours, whatever. But you lived your life offline. We attended concerts, took photos, recorded…

The Internet being an opt-in thing that you'd consciously connect to at a set our of the day, not something that would reach out to you and notify you about all kinds of things at random times, was definitely a different feeling. Back then, it felt like a parallel world; now it's more like an overlay on this one.

This captures it quite well. I remember due to having dial up until around 2008, I’d compose a forum post “offline” on the computer, save it as a text file on a flash drive (previously a floppy!), and get around to posting it when I was able to get online.

Same for emails, etc. communication felt a lot more “thought out” in a sense - you would have limited time to send or receive information.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#713

Post by cardiffspaceman »

ido wrote: post #620
trilbyglens wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp is European much more than it is American. Most Americans are just using SMS like cave people.

How much of that due to sms historically being free in the US but cost per-message elsewhere?

WhatsApp is bundled/zero-rated with cellphones, or cellular network access, if I understand the billboards in South America correctly.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#714

Post by nogridbag »

realfeel78 wrote: post #697
nogridbag wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a very long time ago, so I don't remember all details. But yes the download took hours. This was basically the first website I visited when I got internet access (and I would assume most kids did as well). So this predates 28.8 modems. I believe I had a 14.4 modem, was out in the country, and websites were not stable. This is somewhat of a core memory for me, so I do remember some details clearly. Simply goi…

There's no way a 14.4 modem would have taken a whole night to download a wav sound effect. Not even a 2400 modem would take remotely that long. You were doing something wrong.

Got to love HN. "You clicked the download link wrong".

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#715

Post by whamlastxmas »

bangaroo wrote: post #670
RulerOf wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"servers" I don't think anybody actually cares, but I resent discord for this terminology.

there is an entire generation conditioned to call any group chat or instance a “server” and the pedant in me absolutely wants to scream every time I hear it I believe the origin, however, was to help it clearly and directly compete with teamspeak or mumble at the time it launched. You would actually have to invest in some sort of hosted server for your group, so the name made sense as a way to help people visualize h…

If we’re doing pedantry Olympics then the definition of server:

“a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network”

Seems like it could apply to a discord group. The centralized resource being chat data.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#716

Post by ssl-3 »

vidarh wrote: post #665
ssl-3 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you get robbed (or something), and you're physically OK but have no phone and no wallet. You find a phone to use, however you do that, and dial the local emergency number (0118 999 881 999 119 725...3), and maybe they show up and take a report. And then they leave. Now, you're in the same situation you were in before (no phone, no wallet) -- nothing has really changed. What happens next? What's your next move?

I don't think I've ever traveled anywhere where I'd be concerned I would be unable to get at an internet connection long enough to get at my info, including copies of all my documents, or would be unable to find help to arrange transport back to my home or my hotel where I'd have other means. It's feels like a contrived scenario if you travel primarily in developed countries, and mostly urban areas. If I were going s…

> where I'd be concerned I would be unable to get at an internet connection long enough to get at my info, including copies of all my documents, or would be unable to find help to arrange transport back to my home or my hotel where I'd have other means.

I don't even know where to begin getting copies of "all of my documents" online as a native US-born citizen.

> It's feels like a contrived scenario if you travel primarily in developed countries, and mostly urban areas. If I were going somewhere in the middle of nowhere, or a third world country where I'd be concerned about more likely to be targeted, maybe.

I got robbed and beat up walking back from the store in a very clean, well-lit area of a growing city of ~45,000 once -- in Ohio, of all places. I didn't consider myself a target then, and I don't consider myself a target now. But it happened anyway, and if it can happen to me in that seemingly-safe environment, then it can probably happen to anyone else in any other environment.

> I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but having grown up before cellphones and with no expectation of having easy access to a phone, this obsession with being able to easily contact someone just is very foreign to me still.

I'm not saying that your ideas don't have any merit. I also grew up before cell phones and was well into adulthood before they became common.

But I am saying these seem a lot of mental gymnastics to perform in justification of avoidance of the positively arduous and herculean task of...simply committing the phone number for a resourceful friend to memory.

---

And why? Well, because friends are awesome.

"Hey, I'm in San Francisco. I don't have my phone or my wallet. No, no, I'm OK -- I'll tell you about it later. Yeah, some money would help right now. Sure, I can call you back in an hour. Thanks man."

...and soon enough, that resourceful friend will have that sorted well-enough for me that I can at least buy some food somewhere and start getting back towards whatever "normal" is, just as I would do for them.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#717

Post by geek_at »

richarme wrote: post #322

Good memories from a more innocent time. The ICQ client truncated long filenames in the UI, so you could send "image.jpg (50 spaces) .exe" which would open an embedded picture and install a back-door while just seeming like regular picture. I do miss casually texting with people on the computer rather than the phone, and I don't think it's only due to nostalgia or having more leisure time back then: - If someone was…

don't forget they had terrible security even for the time. In their client you could do text customizations like bold, italic, etc. and they did it by just sending HTML over the wire.

This meant that if you used a custom client (which they didn't allow), you could just send HTML which got evaluated so you could force users to download stuff or send HTML forms or iframes

When this became semi public (in hacker circles) they went after the people talking about it with legal action instead of fixing their stuff

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#718

Post by giantrobot »

derwiki wrote: post #585
giantrobot wrote: post #106

This is a thread to ask: are there any good/working tools to process the old databases from ICQ 99/2000 versions? Maybe even the Mac version? I have some old backups I'm sure have ICQ DBs on them and it would be cool to dump the contents.

Dang, props for holding onto that. I’ve only got some low res jpegs from that era. Iirc the .dat file was largely readable if you opened in a text editor; have you tried?

It's definitely possible to read the strings from the dat files with strings (or text editor) but the dat files are a structured database. Two subsequent strings aren't necessarily related to each other, I'd guess they were simply received from the server sequentially.

After posting I went hunting myself and found some interesting things to try:

An ICQ DB spec from Miranda NG: https://github.com/miranda-ng/miranda-ng/blob/master/plugins...

Java exporter tool: https://github.com/patric-r/ICQExport

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#719

Post by fullspectrumdev »

macintux wrote: post #708
fullspectrumdev wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse: for some projects I’ve been interested in, the docs are terribly incomplete and when you ask - you are told to ask in the discord

That’s horrific. I guess every generation gets to re-learn the mistakes of the past.

I’ve spent the last couple of days finding random GitHub and Gitlab projects that use a certain library/project to use as “documentation” in lieu of joining the discord.

Guess what? Most of them are abandoned and have similar bugs that are entirely down to some shit being completely undocumented :)

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#720

Post by bayindirh »

realfeel78 wrote: post #688
bayindirh wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's IRC. IRC is the other one , not the only one. However, Discord is eating its lunch in these days, sadly.

"The other one"?

Yes, "The other one". IRC and ICQ was equal in its use in my circles and both were indispensable for what they did. Plus, we all used alternative clients too.
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