Can you trust your chat service?

If you are like millions of Internet users you probably use a chat service daily. Whether you use your provider’s client or a third party client, you need to be able to trust that your chat provider is going transmit your messages reliably and accuratly. Nevermind concerns that one or more agencies of our Republican Overlords have set up a secret closet at our provider to capture and catalog our conversations, since that is a given; but we still expect them to transfer them intact.

Personally, I use Adium for OS X because it has an awesome interface and allows me to consolidate all my chat accounts under one application. My only complaint with Adium is that it only writes out the chat logs when the application is closed. I tend to leave Adium running for days, or weeks, at a time on my laptop because I only reboot for OS updates; so when Adium does crash I lose a fairly large chunk of my chat history. Enough of that though, I just wanted to disclose the chat client I was using when I noticed that a particular chat service was not working as expected.

I hate spelling out URLs, so when I saw a blog posting that I thought would interest my World of Warcraft addicted girlfriend I tried to IM her the URL. I sent it, and then after a couple of moments when she wasn’t smirking I asked she had received it yet. She hadn’t, so I resent. Then I logged out and back in, no go. She did the same. Still no URL over IM. So, I started munging the URL to see what happend, and it became obvious that it was the domain in the URL that was causing my message to be filtered out.

Time I sent this on Yahoo! IM My GF received
6:28 http://ntproject.blogspot.com/  
I disconnected  
I connected  
6:30 http://ntproject.blogspot.com/  
  she disconnected
  she connected
6:30 http://ntproject.blogspot.com/  
6:30 . .
6:30 http://ntproject.blogspot.com/  
6:30 son of a bitch… http://ntproject.blogspot.com/  
6:30 son of a bitch son of a bitch
6:31 ntproject.blogspot.com/  
6:31 ntproject.blogspot.com  
6:31 ntproject blogspot com/ ntproject blogspot com/
6:31 ntproject blogspot com ntproject blogspot com
6:31 http://www.1up.com/ http://www.1up.com/
6:31 http://nuggie.blogspot.com/  
6:32 skfjhsdkjhdfgkjdfhkdjfhdkfjhdfghj.blogspot.com  
6:32 nuggie.blogspit.com nuggie.blogspit.com

Needless to say, things look odd. Is the issue Adium, or is it Yahoo? My GF and I both have AIM accounts set up with our Adium clients, so I send her the same URL via AIM. Entirely different results:

Time I sent this on AOL IM My GF received
6:35 http://ntproject.blogspot.com/ http://ntproject.blogspot.com/

I have tested this by sending a blogspot.com URL to another friend on Yahoo, and it failed to arrive as well. Give it a try. Send the above blogspot.com URL to someone you know, and feel free to post a comment here with your results.

At this point, it seems fairly obvious that Yahoo! IM is filtering out messages that contain blogspot.com in the message. So far I have only found this one thing that they are filtering, but that is enough to destroy my confidence in them. How many times in the past was a dropped message actually filtered and not a network issue or a failure of Yahoo to adequately handshake the transaction and confirm delivery. I guess I’ll have to find a more trustworthy chat service, but I can’t help feeling like I’ve been through an earthquake: You don’t expect the earth to shake under you, and I didn’t expect Yahoo! to filter chat messages.

-Chris

WiFi Done Wrong: The Sprint Way

As a 15 year cell phone user, I am rarely surprised to hear the various ways that cellular companies will try to screw their customers. I left Sprint for T-Mobile when Sprint changed their policy to force users into a two-year contract extension for any account change, as that seemed like extortion that flew in the face of market competition. In most cases companies try to be competitive in the market place in regards to their offerings. It seemed to me that Sprint knew they were losing market share and rather than be competitive they chose the route of trying to lock customers in with unreasonable contract extensions for minor service changes.

As wireless internet access has ballooned in popularity lots of companies have wanted a piece of the pie. Cell phone carriers such as Sprint and T-Mobile have jumped in; and at least one carrier seems to have brought its poor attitude with it.

I was at the Oakland airport recently and they have a Sprint WiFi network. Apparently it doesn’t have a peering agreement with T-Mobile, so my regular account won’t work. They do offer a 24 hour ‘day pass’ for $9.95. I’ve got three hours to kill, and no book to read, so I sign up and agree to pay for my day pass. Lucky for me that I did, because an issue arose at the office that I was able to deal with just before my boarding group was called.

Off I fly to Chicago where I land at the Midway Airport. Midway also has WiFi, so I decide to login and check my email in case that last minute issue I handled has blossomed into a disaster. Midway doesn’t use T-Mobile either, though there was a pseudo peering agreement in place. I could use my T-Mobile, but an additional charge would be billed to my account. My T-Mobile account belongs to a client who lets me use it so I can provide them with roaming support, and I don’t want to add an unexpected charge to their bill. A ‘day pass’ is $6.95 and I’m about to pay it when I realize that they have a peering agreement with Sprint. Well, it’s still the same day, so I check to see if my Sprint day pass is still working. I log in without any problems and check my email before leaving the airport.

Around midnight that same night I’m checking email in my hotel room and I get a billing summary from Sprint. I was charged for two day passes. I called Sprint to verify, and yes, a day pass is only good for the location that your purchase it. Logging into the second location automatically charged me for a second day pass, even though Sprint was charging $3 more than I would have paid had I just signed up with the provider at Midway.

I am sure that the monkeys at Sprint thought they were quite clever coming up with a policy that geographically locked a day pass, and would cause some customers to pay multiple times in the same day. Clever they were for that additional $9.95 they got me to pay. There is a fine line between clever and stupid though, and while I was talking to the Sprint customer service drone I had him delete my account. I will never again spend a dime with Sprint; not on cell phones, wifi access, or whatever they think to offer next. Take that Sprint, and shove it up your clever marketing ass. Was it worth $9.95 to lose a customer forever?

-Chris

I use Amazon affiliate links in some of my posts. I think it is fair to say my writing is not influenced by the $0.40 I earned in 2022.