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ICQ and LiveJournal were the two greatest Russian psyops of the 1990s. UIN: 279866

• moltar 1mo ago
  I think ICQ was from Israel.
  • iddan 1mo ago
    > Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group (now VK) in 2010.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ
  • ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
    Okay, Mossad then My ICQ UIN was one of the few online accounts that I completely lost control of. Some "Russian hacker" took it over, by guessing the password, credential stuffing, or some other method, and I noticed that my profile had been usurped into a Cyrillic one. And that was long, long before 2010.
• ventana 1mo ago
  Actually, ICQ had no relation to Russia in 1990s. It was acquired by AOL in 1998, went through several rounds of enshittification and protocol changes to defeat third party clients which did not show ads, and finally landed in Mail.Ru group in 2010. In about 2-3 years no one cared about ICQ anymore. Then, it slowly died. I registered my account in 1998 (got a 7-digit number starting with 9) and the whole thing felt like a miracle back then. My first employer in 2003 used ICQ as a corporate messenger similar to how we now use Slack. Since I mostly used Linux back then, I was very happy to find centericq, then centerim, then finch. One of my first contributions to an open source project was a small patch to centericq, something about contacts panel resize if I remember correctly. I believe the last time I actually launched any ICQ client was around 2012, and never since then.
  • deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]