19 June 2009

Offline...

I have blogged in the past about my dislike for Yahoo, a dislike which from time to time grow to real hate, like right now about the inability to log intro Y!M with Pidgin.

In Romania Instant Messenger (or shortly "mess") is practically all Yahoo, no no matter how geek you are, you have to be on Yahoo Messenger to be able to communicate with the people around you. Which is doable, as Pidgin, while far from perfect, is acceptable as a client. Well... until now, when Yahoo is performing an upgrade to their servers and enforcing a new authentication method, with the direct result of locking-out everything else beside Y!M 9, so no Pidgin and not even Y!M 8.

You can see geeks gathering where they can (IRC, mailing lists, even Jabber) and talking about the futility of a revolution and impossible ways to move the entire country out from the Yahoo Messenger network.

At least it is not all black, the next version of Pidgin, 2.6.0, still under development and with an expected release in a few weeks is supposed to work again, so the Romanian geeks can take a little vacancy from chatting online with their girlfriends and do some useful stuff, like writiing code or drinking beer, right?


PS: after a round of feedback I decided to leave out from this post some explicit imagery about my feelings.

Update: thanks to a tip from Rahul, it seems gyachi still work (but what horrible interface it has...)

6 comments:

  1. on forum.ubuntu.ro there are 11000+ views on a topic regarding Y!M . That's desperate people are to find an exact copy of Yahoo's client on Linux.

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  2. You can try alternate servers to authenticate as explained on this page : http://www.celticwolf.com/useful-information/faqs/26-pidgin-yahoo

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  3. It seems gyachi still can connect...

    @Laurent: yes, but that list is shrinking as the servers are updated progressively.

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  4. I don't if you can but can try Digsby. It has a similar to Pidgin's UI, but it Win only, right now.

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  5. digsby is spyware http://digg.com/tech_news/A_turn_for_the_worse_Digsby_IM_client_is_becoming_spyware

    also now that they have fixed in pidgin 2.5.7 http://pidgin.im/

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  6. Yeah, I am running for a while the new Pidgin

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