Launched after less than two months of development from Israeli company Mirabilis, it predated and influenced many of the popular chat programs of the era including AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger. Microsoft's trailblazing Windows 95 was barely a year old, Nintendo had just introduced the N64, and those with a reason to have a cell phone actually used it to talk on.

talk finally getting some security so you will be able to gtalk securely soon.ICQ, short for the phrase 'I Seek You,' laid the groundwork for standalone instant messaging clients when it arrived in November 1996. ICQ Wow, yes, I should check my BBS account. I even had a strong password, alphanumeric and all, but it goes to show several years of using the same 'strong' password coupled with a crappy ICQ authentication system that allows 10+ retries on entering passwords each session, means that someone will eventually be able to break in. The password got changed and the email address got changed making it impossible for me to reset the password. It's just you don't want people to know what you're talking about.Īnyways, onward to find a new platform that supports encryption.Īctng wrote: ↑After 14-15 years of service, my 6 digit ICQ account finally got hacked. Sometimes it's not about encrypting my chat sessions cuz I'm talking about national secrets. Anyone on the same LAN as you with a network sniffer can read everything you're typing.

Those of you that don't know, MSN or even http based Gtalk sends your messages transparently as clear text through the network.

With GAIM or TRILLIAN, you had the ability to encrypt your chat msgs using SecureIM, which meant this was great for use at work. I know a lot of people don't even know what ICQ is, but the truth is that using aftermarket chat clients, ICQ was one of the most robust chat platforms ever. After 14-15 years of service, my 6 digit ICQ account finally got hacked.

My icq number