Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ICQ will stop working from June 26

icq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 776 posts

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#751

Post by scooke »

kazinator wrote: post #721
scooke wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the point. The point wasn't the nature of the tool itself. Anyone could join, and one could chat with anyone. It was used "by the people" and not curated by corps.

ICQ was not "curated" by a corporation; it was produced and operated by one from scratch. The present-day, mainstream, proprietary chat systems are open to anyone to join and chat with anyone. Most of whatever restrictions they have are necessitated by spam. Allowing new members to immediately post unlimited amounts of material into any chat room or any other member's inbox is a bad idea, even in an open-source, fede…

Curated referring to content.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#752

Post by qubex »

charles_f wrote: post #493
dkga wrote: post #470

I will forever treasure my ICQ memories. The sounds it made. The moving image when it was connecting. Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded. Being able to randomly connect to people you would filter. Yes, I want to talk to someone more or less my age but in Iceland. Or any other country. But most of all, the feeling of being connected. As a teenager in the autis…

> The sounds it made To this day, my text notifications ring "hey ho"

I set it up as a specific notification for my best friend with whom I used to chat over ICQ back in the late nineties/early twothousands,

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#753

Post by qubex »

XorNot wrote: post #627
lxgr wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is one of those things where I just don't understand what world people are living in, but it's always written in this bizarre passive voice where someone is just "the victim" of installing the Facebook app on their phone. What is your experience of your phone and why are you so passive about it? You're getting unwanted notifications but, then, what, don't uninstall the app? Don't mute the app? Don't click "sign…

Facebook and its ilk are barred from issuing notifications on my devices. There’s so little real ‘friend’ interaction these days I don’t miss anything and they abused notifications so thoroughly by literally spamming me random group stuff that I’ve just disabled notifications as a way of counteracting the lack of granularity. Must be five years now.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#754

Post by ssl-3 »

vidarh wrote: post #732
ssl-3 wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prim…

You miss the point - I have copies of everything I need easily reachable anywhere I can get online. And if beaten up and robbed, it just seems inconceivable to me that if I can get to a phone to get help, I can't also subsequently get online. It's not a lot of mental gymnastics - this discussion is the majority of the time I've spent on this in a lifetime. I just don't live in fear of anything like that happening. If…

I mean, you do you.

You're obviously free to avoid remembering anyone's phone number for the rest of your existence, and it certainly does not behoove me to attempt to saddle you with such a profound and monumentally exhausting mental debt.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#755

Post by richarme »

geek_at wrote: post #717
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…

Eww, I wasn't even aware of that. I thought the filename UI issue was actually kind of a subtle fail and I was proud to find it, but that one is terrible.

Here's another blast from the past.. List of ICQ exploits on neworder.box.sk, the website I learned my first 1337 h4xx0r skills from: https://web.archive.org/web/20040829081726/http://neworder.b...

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#757

Post by niutech »

neffo wrote: post #696
incompatible wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was commercial, wasn't it? And only worked on Windows? IRC was the open alternative.

This was the 90s, so I guess reverse engineering the protocols was simple. There were even Amiga clients of it, like stricq.

It was the OSCAR protocol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#758

Post by lxgr »

XorNot wrote: post #627
lxgr wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is one of those things where I just don't understand what world people are living in, but it's always written in this bizarre passive voice where someone is just "the victim" of installing the Facebook app on their phone. What is your experience of your phone and why are you so passive about it? You're getting unwanted notifications but, then, what, don't uninstall the app? Don't mute the app? Don't click "sign…

It seems like you’re projecting a value statement into a comment which was really only intended to be an observation.

What gave you the idea that I’m getting unwanted notifications or that I am in some other way helpless about them?

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#759

Post by sumtechguy »

lxgr wrote: post #523
toast0 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOL had 'AOL Quick Buddy', a Java applet client and later AIM Express that used Adobe Flash. I definitely used quick buddy from computers at my junior college (98-2000), but I don't remember using AIM express.

Ah, I never used AIM directly. Maybe that would have worked with ICQ too, though? In any case, Meebo worked using the (back then) advanced, exciting magic of AJAX :)

I used the icq web interface for a few years. It was 'ok' it was missing a lot of features but worked in a pinch.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#760

Post by niutech »

mattl wrote: post #675
sgarland wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t imagine that the typical IRC user has any interest in Discord. They are wildly different in every conceivable way.

Unfortunately projects are increasingly using Discord or Slack instead of IRC.

How can we oppose to this? At least open source projects should use open source communication tools.
Post reply on HN