On Tuesday, AOL (yes, it’s still around) suddenly announced to users of AOL Instant Messenger (including yours truly) that it would be disabling older, and less-secure access to its network through at least one third-party messaging app (Adium) as of March 28.
Just got this AIM message. Anyone else still using AIM out there? pic.twitter.com/2WpR1lTwmH
— Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar) February 28, 2017
UPDATE Wednesday 3:40pm ET: Specifically, the company is yanking support for the MD5 hash function associated with password authentication. For nearly a decade, that function has been dubbed as "cryptographically broken." Some third-party chat apps like Adium, Trillian, or Pidgin had been using MD5 to authenticate logins.
In a message posted to an e-mail list called "pidgin support," Donald Le, AIM's tech director, wrote last October:
All DistID used for login.oscar.aol.com and slogin.oscar.aol.com will be blocked. The date is tbd and AIM client upgrade will start Feb 24th 2017.
Ars was unaware of this posting until Wednesday morning, when @dekisu, a Pidgin developer, contacted us and pointed us to this e-mail exchange, and we got in touch with Le himself. Dekisu said that Pidgin will be releasing an update as of next week that would incorporate these new changes. However, users of Adium, which hasn't been updated in nearly a year, are seemingly out of luck.