MSN carried out last night their desire to lock out third party clients from the MSN instant messaging network. By switching to a new protocol and requiring an SSL based login system, MSN ideally wanted "unauthorised" clients to be barred from their popular instant messaging system. Their network, their bandwidth, their rules, you might say.
Where does this leave RISC OS clients? Phil Hardy's MSN client cannot log into the MSN network at all now, although he has released the client's source code under a BSD licence so that people can attempt to fix the client and bring it up to date.
The Natter developer hasn't returned our email yet, but the free demo version fails to connect to the network. Natter author Russell Palmer seems unconcerned however, as the Natter website reads: "I will be focussing my efforts on updating natter to work with the latest MSN protocols, and see no technical reasons why natter will not continue to work after the changes are introduced".
R-Comp's Grapevine has seemingly escaped unscathed after users received an SSL update earlier this month. A few users initially reported login problems to us, but the majority of people emailing us have confirmed Grapevine is still working as usual.
"My understanding is (at the time of writing), MSNP7 and earlier have been disabled, and of the three RISC OS MSN apps, only Grapevine is still working", R-Comp's Andrew 'so modest' Rawnsley told us earlier.
Update
Russell Palmer of Natter fame got in touch with us and had this to say: "I am working towards solving the issues, but unfortunately I cannot give you a date by which I expect to have finished. It will be a matter of weeks, rather than days. Of course, ICQ operation is still completely functional!"
Links
Microsoft Mum on Third-Party IM Licenses from eWeek
Related articles
New free MSN client available for all
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