AOL Plays Cat and Mouse with IM

Over the last week or so, AOL started blocking Jabber, gaim, and Fire clients from connecting to AIM servers. At first AOL was doing IP blocking of Jabber servers, but at a certain point the strategy switched, and AOL started targeting libfaim, a library used by all these clients to communicate with AIM. The result was a classic cat-and-mouse game where AOL changes their protocol to block libfaim and open source programmers alter the library.

Here's one post from the jabber dev list from the middle of last week: "Top of tree gaim sources (at sourceforge.net) generally have the latest workarounds. You'll have to dig into the oscar subtree, most likely. Last I heard there was a new block added yesterday but as of this morning gaim had a workaround. This tit-for-tat cycle is likely to continue since AOL has infinite resources to throw at it and no more reason to be interested in openness (courtesy of the FCC)."

By Thursday, March 29, AOL programmers were throwing even craftier firepower at the program, doing client checking in rather interesting ways. Eric Warmenhoven of Gaim documents the issue on the gaim site. The gist of it is that Gaim (and presumably Jabber and Fire) won't connect to AIM unless you have aim.exe on your machine. According to Eric, currently obvious workarounds aren't pretty.

"This is an incredibly clever hack by the AOL developers. If it didn't really piss me off I would have to commend them on their ingenuity," he writes.

On Friday, March 30, the Gaim site was reporting, "AOL is no longer requesting aim.exe. They are now requesting proto.ocm, a different file in an AIM installation. (Stunts like this make it difficult to have a server that provides "correct" values to use, and impossible to embed aim.exe, unforunately.)"

Messages on developer.jabber.org were suggesting virtual sit-ins of AOL, and flooding of AOL, etc.; that sort of talk likely led to this message on the Gaim home page: "Please do NOT flame AOL, or anyone that works for AOL. The Jabber team is trying very hard to have some sort of dialog and agreement with them. It is important, though, that AOL knows that people are upset that they are working against interoperability. But please, be polite when requesting that AOL representatives talk to people from Jabber."