Open Oscar Server: open-source server compatible with AIM and ICQ clients | Hacker News Reader

Open Oscar Server: open-source server compatible with AIM and ICQ clients

github.com

67 pointsgregsadetsky20 comments

I was always more of an MSN Messenger guy. But the Open OSCAR Server project is a fantastic labor of love stewarded by a kind soul.

They put up with (if not were outright amused at) me digging up the weirdest 3rd party clients I could [1] and just kicking them around against the server software to find bugs [2]

[1] https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/AIM_Clients

[2] https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server/issues/120

[2] https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server/issues/122

[2] https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server/issues/123

The hacked MSN client from mess.be was amazing. You could spam the "nudge" that made your friend's client take focus and shake and make a noise!

Oh how I wish modern chat platforms would let me use a client of my own choosing. It's all so locked down and usually garbage-tier because the user has no choice.

Matrix has lots of choice. Garbage choice. :/

Now that's not fair. Matrix gives you plenty of options to be flooded with CSAM or have all your chats become inexplicably unable to ever be decrypted again

The future is now!

i threw the oscar server up on a container at work last year and sent my friends the clients. absolute trip hearing that open door sound again lmao. good times. we all just warned each other for the rest of the day.

somehow that experience eclipsed microsoft teams. i suppose thats unsurprising

Hey all, If you're looking for a public server to jump into to start chatting on aim again, please check out https://logon.chat/

It is fully backed by OOS

Neat. At some early startups, we used AIM similar to how Slack is used today.

ICQ was my first messaging experience. Good old times!

I remember when I discovered a remote ICQ buffer overflow in high school. I didn't have the skills to gain code execution at the time, but I created an app that could DoS and crash the client of anyone, if I knew their username.

If you want to use Pidgin with it, check out https://github.com/pidgin/retro-prpl

The Github page has a link to a Discord chat. Hah, where's the dogfooding?

ICQ? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time... a long time.

FWIW, ICQ was being discussed here less than a month ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224443

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167258

OK, OK... to be fair "discussed" is an over statement. Let's say "ICQ was mentioned here less than a month ago. :-)

As TinCan phones are getting popular in my kid’s friend circle, I am getting second hand pride at her low number like I had (have?) for my ICQ number

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

UIN: 279866

I think ICQ was from Israel.

> 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

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.

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.

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