Former AOLer here. It was to stop Microsoft. This was the third time Microsoft tried to take out AOL. They tried saying that they were running on MacOS earlier

Former AOLer here. It was to stop Microsoft. This was the third time Microsoft tried to take out AOL. They tried saying that they were running on MacOS earlier but in that case TCP fingerprinting was added to the Mac client logging path and windows looks different from Mac at the TCP layer. Sequence numbers if I recall. We didn’t feel it was bad to buffer overflow our own code, since it was client code we wrote in the first place. Later client versions had some sort of “checksum this range of virtual memory and return the checksum” and the buffer overflow fixed. As far as GAIM the dev team didn’t care about that, and efforts to stop it were pretty much half hearted, if I recall. We ended up hosting an end point “toc.oscar.aol.com” to let things like the TCL client and the elisp client work. We couldn’t convince people to release the protocol specs for the full Oscar protocol unfortunately.