What happened to "ICQ" (part 2)
Yesterday's epic thread about the incident associated with the next change of the ICQ-protocol by AOL caused unprecedented interest not only from registered users of Habr, but also from several tens of thousands of visitors who came to the site. Habr became the first resource on the Web, most fully and reliably describing the real situation that has developed around the ICQ service. Thank you for this you need one of the developers of the popular ICQ-client Miranda IM Vitaly Igonin ( persei ), who, at my request, in detail and, most importantly, very quickly told us all about what happened and how happened with “ICQ”.
Since the topic written by Vitaly has become too heavy (more than 1000 comments), I will give a brief retrospective of the events:
- around 1:00 pm Moscow time, AOL servers didn’t connect all alternative ICQ messengers to themselves; site icq.com subject to entering it from CIS-shnyh IP looks like this ;
- after a couple of hours, it became clear that AOL servers block alternative clients not in all cases, but as if selectively: many users continue to connect without any problems;
- some time later, it becomes clear that the connection is blocked only if the IP of the CIS countries is used. Obviously, AOL deliberately fights, first of all, with Russian users of alternative ICQ-clients;
- around 19:00 MSK, Miranda developer Vitaly Igonin publishes a detailed article about what happened on Habré and reports that, together with the QIP developers, a solution is being sought to solve the problem;
- around 22:00 Moscow time, the guys find the first clues and promise to overcome the problem in the near future;
- around one in the morning, QIP developers are releasing a new QIP Infium (9022) build that connects to AOL servers without problems;
- Next, the Miranda IM development team releases the revised version of the Miranda IM ICQ + plugin;
- another attempt by AOL to put alternative ICQ-clients on blades fails within 24 hours!
And now - the most interesting: Vitaly Igonin tells how they managed to defeat AOL:
So, the problem, as was originally supposed, turned out to be in the generated values ​​of the sequence number for flap-packet headers.
')
AOL's official documentation states that initial values ​​should be randomly generated, and all subsequent ones simply increment. However, as the QIP developers have noticed, if this value is really random, then, as a rule, authorization is not possible. That is, for a successful login as the first sequence number after connecting to the BOS server, you need to send a value that satisfies some rules unknown to us. Having managed to pick up several of these values, we were able to ensure the efficiency of customers.
Important! The serviceability of clients of Miranda, QIP, BayanICQ and some others has been restored by now. We are ready to share with the developers of the remaining clients the information we have, but you do not need to attack my JID.
Some details you can tell in our jabber-conferences, but we strongly advise you to wait for the corrections to be downloaded to the Miranda Code Store today, then you will be able to appreciate everything more clearly.
As far as I know, AOL hasn’t given any comments so far.
All this is another good incentive to finally begin an organized transition to gabber, and not to depend on the whims of corporations.
Note from Shuha:
AOL has really not yet made any clear comments on what happened. The same is true of Rambler, which collaborates with AOL and supports the Rambler-ICQ project: employees of the company refuse to give any comments. As for ICQ mobile clients, Mail.ru has already officially announced the release of fresh Windows and Symbian versions of Mail.Ru Agent, supporting the updated ICQ protocol.
Once again I want to say a big thank you to Vitaly Igonin ( persei ) in particular, and to all the gallant developers of alternative ICQ-clients.
UPD1: It seems that some AOL servers have started to launch alternative ICQ clients again. Perhaps the company either thought better of it (which is unlikely) or decided to change tactics.
UPD2: I was able to communicate with representatives of Mail.ru: I asked them about what they think about the recent events with ICQ and whether they cooperate with AOL. And that's what they told me, I quote:
Speaker - Anna Artamonova, Vice President, Director of Marketing and PR Mail.Ru.
A paradoxical situation has developed around the ICQ protocol: the overwhelming majority of its users prefer to work not with an official client, but with alternative ones (such as Mail.Ru Agent). It is just that the original program, to all appearances, does not suit users to such an extent, both in terms of interface and functionality.
I think that such tough methods of fighting ICQ with alternative clients - which also “offend” the users of the original program (according to our data, owners of some versions of the official client could not connect to the ICQ network) could lead to a serious outflow of people to other protocols instant messaging, in particular, Mail.Ru Agent (which is now the only serious market player after ICQ).
As for cooperation and interaction (with the AOL company, - author's note) - we tried to establish it more than once (in particular, we offered to do peering between the ICQ and Mail.Ru Agent networks), but the attempts were not successful.
UPD3: Miranda users patch released: persei.miranda.im/files/icq+.patch
And the code itself will soon be uploaded to the official SVN Miranda IM Team.
Since the topic written by Vitaly has become too heavy (more than 1000 comments), I will give a brief retrospective of the events:
- around 1:00 pm Moscow time, AOL servers didn’t connect all alternative ICQ messengers to themselves; site icq.com subject to entering it from CIS-shnyh IP looks like this ;
- after a couple of hours, it became clear that AOL servers block alternative clients not in all cases, but as if selectively: many users continue to connect without any problems;
- some time later, it becomes clear that the connection is blocked only if the IP of the CIS countries is used. Obviously, AOL deliberately fights, first of all, with Russian users of alternative ICQ-clients;
- around 19:00 MSK, Miranda developer Vitaly Igonin publishes a detailed article about what happened on Habré and reports that, together with the QIP developers, a solution is being sought to solve the problem;
- around 22:00 Moscow time, the guys find the first clues and promise to overcome the problem in the near future;
- around one in the morning, QIP developers are releasing a new QIP Infium (9022) build that connects to AOL servers without problems;
- Next, the Miranda IM development team releases the revised version of the Miranda IM ICQ + plugin;
- another attempt by AOL to put alternative ICQ-clients on blades fails within 24 hours!
And now - the most interesting: Vitaly Igonin tells how they managed to defeat AOL:
So, the problem, as was originally supposed, turned out to be in the generated values ​​of the sequence number for flap-packet headers.
')
AOL's official documentation states that initial values ​​should be randomly generated, and all subsequent ones simply increment. However, as the QIP developers have noticed, if this value is really random, then, as a rule, authorization is not possible. That is, for a successful login as the first sequence number after connecting to the BOS server, you need to send a value that satisfies some rules unknown to us. Having managed to pick up several of these values, we were able to ensure the efficiency of customers.
Important! The serviceability of clients of Miranda, QIP, BayanICQ and some others has been restored by now. We are ready to share with the developers of the remaining clients the information we have, but you do not need to attack my JID.
Some details you can tell in our jabber-conferences, but we strongly advise you to wait for the corrections to be downloaded to the Miranda Code Store today, then you will be able to appreciate everything more clearly.
As far as I know, AOL hasn’t given any comments so far.
All this is another good incentive to finally begin an organized transition to gabber, and not to depend on the whims of corporations.
Note from Shuha:
AOL has really not yet made any clear comments on what happened. The same is true of Rambler, which collaborates with AOL and supports the Rambler-ICQ project: employees of the company refuse to give any comments. As for ICQ mobile clients, Mail.ru has already officially announced the release of fresh Windows and Symbian versions of Mail.Ru Agent, supporting the updated ICQ protocol.
Once again I want to say a big thank you to Vitaly Igonin ( persei ) in particular, and to all the gallant developers of alternative ICQ-clients.
UPD1: It seems that some AOL servers have started to launch alternative ICQ clients again. Perhaps the company either thought better of it (which is unlikely) or decided to change tactics.
UPD2: I was able to communicate with representatives of Mail.ru: I asked them about what they think about the recent events with ICQ and whether they cooperate with AOL. And that's what they told me, I quote:
Speaker - Anna Artamonova, Vice President, Director of Marketing and PR Mail.Ru.
A paradoxical situation has developed around the ICQ protocol: the overwhelming majority of its users prefer to work not with an official client, but with alternative ones (such as Mail.Ru Agent). It is just that the original program, to all appearances, does not suit users to such an extent, both in terms of interface and functionality.
I think that such tough methods of fighting ICQ with alternative clients - which also “offend” the users of the original program (according to our data, owners of some versions of the official client could not connect to the ICQ network) could lead to a serious outflow of people to other protocols instant messaging, in particular, Mail.Ru Agent (which is now the only serious market player after ICQ).
As for cooperation and interaction (with the AOL company, - author's note) - we tried to establish it more than once (in particular, we offered to do peering between the ICQ and Mail.Ru Agent networks), but the attempts were not successful.
UPD3: Miranda users patch released: persei.miranda.im/files/icq+.patch
And the code itself will soon be uploaded to the official SVN Miranda IM Team.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/49877/
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