Solid Block of Ise

I’ve gotten a lot of questions and complaints. Most of them are of the “I don’t know how to do this/I’m too lazy to do it/What is XMPP anyway”-variety, and a few have been of the harsher “How dare you abandon our fantastic friendship, you must continue using MSN”-variety.

To all of you: There’s no going back for me. I don’t trust proprietary protocols any longer. I’ve been lazy for too many years, but now there’s a worthwhile open alternative - and with built-in encryption.

So, here’s a FAQ of sorts to answer some common questions I get:

I don’t want to change IM!

Well, that’s not really a question. But no one is forcing you. You can install any XMPP/Jabber-client alongside your regular choice of MSN or ICQ-client. They will work just fine, you’ll just need to keep track of an extra piece of software.

How difficult is it to use XMPP instead?

At first it’s a little confusing since anyone can setup a server anywhere. XMPP is not controlled by one entity, it’s more like email but for instant messaging and chat. Think of your Jabber-name as your adress on the internet, and then the server you’re connected to talks to all the other XMPP-servers out there. It’s completely decentralized, unlike MSN or ICQ or whatever who has one point of failure.

Can I keep my existing MSN/ICQ-accounts?

Sure. You can either use them through a transport or use a messenger-client with support for multiple simultaneous protocols. Under Windows there’s a good one called Miranda IM which handles multiple protocols. Linux users have Pidgin (which is also available for Windows, but I feel Miranda might be a more powerful choice) and Mac users can use Adium.

A transport works a bit differently, and not all XMPP-servers provide them. A transport is a gateway where you instruct the XMPP-server to connect to ICQ/MSN and then displays your contacts transparently in your Jabber-client. This means you only need to connect using one client yet can still use MSN or whatever. I’m using a transport right now.

Are there drawbacks when using a transport?

Unfortunately yes. Since MSN and ICQ are proprietary protocols there’s no open documentation for them. That means developers of transports have to reverse-engineer (techspeak for “guess”) how the protocols work. That means that some or many of the protocols functions won’t work. For example incoming filetransfers using a MSN-transport is quite flaky. In short: your mileage may vary when using a transport. If you want to be sure I’d recommend using a client with multiple protocol-support instead.

Why are you doing this, more details?

I’m tired of proprietary protocols. This is mostly a philosophical issue rather than a practical one, but I’m deeply tired of proprietary software and am trying to move away from it. Proprietary software is in my eyes legacy-software and has no real long-term future. The same goes for proprietary protocols.

The second major factor in my doing this is encryption. I’m transitioning to encrypting quite a lot of my online-presence and while encryption can be bolted onto proprietary protocols through third-party solutions it’s still not good enough in my opinion. XMPP was designed from the ground-up to have encryption, unlike MSN or ICQ where it’s an afterthought from people not even affiliated with the protocol. Also, the bolt-on solutions are essentially incompatible between different clients, meaning the people you talk to have to have the EXACT same software as you do to be able to encrypt the stream. XMPPs encryption works regardless of client.

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If there are any further questions, feel free to leave a comment or send an email.

License

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