Hacker News Reader

AFAIK the players like AIM, MSN, ICQ didn’t cut off access to third party clients.

Maybe they wanted to, but it was too onerous back then to force client software updates that they had to continue supporting reverse-engineered versions of the protocol?

View on HN

They absolutely did. AOL in particular used a buffer overflow bug in AIM to execute arbitrary code to determine if the client was actually AIM or a third-party client pretending to be AIM.

MSN Messenger and Yahoo IM both cried foul about this and called out for interoperability, but then turned around and denied third-party clients access to their own networks once they got big enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com