The evolution of network communication methods. Part II

So back to the beginning of the 2000s. Against the background of the popularity of chats, both public and private, connoisseurs of unhurried, thorough communication of interests were mastered by online forums, which from the very beginning offered an advantage in the form of saving all correspondence - this kind of e-mail was put on public display. Successfully overcoming the primary stage of the tree-like branch, the forums turned into a thriving and still online conference with its own, sometimes very multi-level user hierarchy (from beginner to administrator), with limited access to a series of discussions (for specialists or interest groups), as well as with a wide multimedia and interactive functionality, starting with the possibility of inserting photos and videos and ending with voting forms, as well as - a surprise! - own integrated instant messengers.

The emergence of IM-messengers, chat rooms and forums at the beginning of the third millennium with good reason can be called the very first wave of Internet socialization in human history. I remember that on Friday evenings all the capital's fast-food outlets and cafes were literally beaten up by fans of this or that chat or forum, gathered for the next “chopper meeting”. Among my friends there are many happy families, whose fate was due to such meetings. Fun times were!

From elite IT-exotic to nationwide recognition

Communication with friends in early-version chat rooms was sometimes very problematic and even dangerous, since simplified registration or its complete absence made it possible to take the well-known nickname call sign to anyone, and some dodgers even faked nicks using characters from other encodings. In addition to happy communication stories, there were, alas, quite sad ones, since the gaps in the identification of chat users created a great temptation for fraud.
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Unlike chat chaos, IM messengers, the most famous of which are ICQ, Miranda IM, Trillian, AIM, MSN Messenger, were originally developed with a user registration and authentication mechanism. At the same time, each was given a unique identifier (most often a digital one), rigidly tied, for example, to an email address, and each user could see in the window of his messenger only his own "friendly list" of approved users.

The idea of ​​instant and, unlike SMS, completely free messaging very quickly gained tens and hundreds of millions of fans around the world, at that time many even specifically connected to the Internet for access to various IM services, which account, by the way, to the beginning of the millennium went to dozens.

So they would have remained incompatible with each other, if in the year 2000 a new service called Jabber had not appeared. Jabber servers using the standardized protocol XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) interfered with the IM protocols, acting as gateways and eliminating the need to install multiple IM clients.

Technology, meanwhile, did not stand still. By the middle of zero, Internet access was simplified and cheaper, the speed and stability of data transfer channels increased, and at the same time data compression algorithms were improved. By that time, the messengers had learned not only to send instant messages, but also to send attached files. The appearance and gaining popularity of instant messengers with support for voice transmission was a matter of time and luck, and the first to be lucky Estonian Skype developers. In August 2003, they presented the first beta version of their telecommunications application with instant messaging, which, in addition to voice transmission with a unique at the time algorithm of super-compression for the Internet channel of a dial-up telephone line, provided an incredible miracle - a gateway to connect Internet calls to regular landlines and mobile phones! Interestingly, it was on Skype that many of us - again for the first time - were faced with the possibility of paying for online services in the same way.

You all know the further history of instant messaging in the dialogue mode - it has not yet had time to become “a great old tradition”. Toward the end of the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, instant messengers became the norm, they began to be embedded into completely unthinkable applications. So, for example, today, without its own built-in messenger, there is not one more or less popular social network. Facebook Chat has its IM system, in general, and Twitter within the framework of the Web 2.0 concept can be viewed as such. Today, instant messengers are even embedded in the interfaces of game consoles and online stores, and Google has managed to integrate the instant messenger into services such as Google+ and YouTube. For companies, the presence of an intra-corporate messenger, which sometimes connects departments at different parts of the world, has also become an everyday reality, a norm.

Unfortunately, the wide distribution of instant messengers has not been without the hassles associated with the security of storing personal data and transmitted information. Needless to say, the first IM messengers were made pioneers in this area, as they say, “on the knee” - without following a number of specific data protection requirements: without traffic encryption, without interaction with firewalls and without the support of the HTTPS protocol. And at the early stage of their development, network protocols were gaping with real holes in protection, which is why viruses, worms and Trojans from infected sites spread instantly through thousands of contacts of infected lists.

Today, the hacking of public and corporate networks with the aim of illegal access to information has become a real underground industry. Moreover: now we are on the verge of a new Internet era, which is commonly called the Internet of Things (IoT), when devices, mechanisms, and even individual sensors become participants in the instant messaging process.

The comfort and convenience of secure communication necessarily require a serious attitude to the process of developing instant messengers, which today in no case can not be trusted by amateurs and amateurs - will cost more. We'll talk about how professionals do this next time.