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What I'm more disappointed in is that third-party developers aren't even trying anymore. Back in the day, there were some truly impressive efforts to reverse-e
by amyjess 12y ago
What I'm more disappointed in is that third-party developers aren't even trying anymore.
Back in the day, there were some truly impressive efforts to reverse-engineer AIM's protocol (and Yahoo! and MSN...) despite AOL actively trying to defeat them.
Nowadays, nobody even tries. When Google launched Hangouts, there was no massive reverse-engineering effort. Just people saying "I'll stick with XMPP and just not use the new Hangouts features". It's sad.
- ge0rg 12y agoThere are just too many different proprietary IM protocols, and they are often fast moving targets. You can't keep up with a team of Google engineers tweaking their protocol every day. Have a look at WhatsApp, there was a bunch of efforts to reverse engineer their protocol, and they ended up non-working, abandoned or C&Ded [0] [0] https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI/issues/83 https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI/issues/83
- SEJeff 12y agoSean Eagen is the more or less single person behind a LOT of that work. If you've ever used GAIM/Pidgin, you've used his work. Sadly, he was hired by google to work on libjingle, their XMPP video standard. Then he went on to work on google talk and now I believe google maps, but I've not looked him up in eons.