[JDEV] The Future of Jabber?

[Eric Crahen]

----- Original Message -----
From: Scott Robinson <scott at tranzoa.com>
To: <jdev at jabber.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 07, 1999 5:36 PM
Subject: [JDEV] The Future of Jabber?


> However, to
> compete with what I know is coming (I've taken a few interesting tours and
> talking to a few interesting industry folks and this gives me an
interesting
> problem of now getting near breaking NDAs...) I'm going to throw out a
> collection of suggestions that I've been placing into a text file.

What's coming? Give us the juicy nformation! :)

>
> Security has been discussed, but I'd like to make a few suggestions as to
> how it is implemented. First, cleartext logins and communications is evil.
> It would overjoy me if we could implement a public key swap for
> authorization and encryption of the XML stream. Second, and sprouting from
> the first, I see no reason not to use public keys as our UIDs... or more
> specifically, our "keyID at server" as the UIDs. For transport of the keys,
we
> can either create our own Jabber structure for propagation or link into
> wwwkeys.pgp.net and the keyserver network. Third, since servers would need
> keys for the swap, giving them another (more useful) purpose in life would
> be great. I'm a user of the Gale messaging system (www.gale.org) and the
> servers there use a heirarchical key system for server authentication. the
> ".com" key signs a ".tranzoa.com" key which causes it to be valid. The
> client has a ".com" key and when it logs into tranzoa.com, it can tell the
> server's ".tranzoa.com" key is valid. I'm not suggesting a
reimplementation
> of the Gale messaging system, but I am pushing for something very close to
> it.

This is an excellent idea.

>
> POP3/SMTP JabberBox's have been noted. However, we need to go a step
> further. Millions of potential users are using Hotmail for their primary
> e-mail address. If we wrote a JabberTransport to Hotmail, we would sweeten
> the pot, so to speak, for every one of those users to be a Jabber user.
> Yahoo! Mail, Lycos, Altavista, email.com and many many others could all be
> supported with intelligent and well-updated scripts. It would be a grind,
no
> doubt, but well worth the effort.
>

I have been poking around on the main jabber web page and looks like it
changes around quite a bit. What is the status of the various segments of
this project? I was working a pure java application that interfaced aim.icq
& yahoo seemlessly until I stumbled upon this and was a little disappointed
that my idea wasn't so original after all. If there are transports that need
help, or ones that haven't even begun (I take it the hotmail transport is
one) I would like to sign on
and assist. Please get back to me with some information as soon as someone
has the chance to do so. Thanks.

(I think I'll just leave my old project as an ICQ client web applet)

- Eric