md5 the password, followed by the fixed salt, followed by the password again.

Rinse and repeat - by the end, the protocol had grown to outrageous complexity. And once the bots caught up, obfuscating it again. Before the captchas arrived in 2007 (which did little in any case), Yahoo battled the bots by obfuscating the login protocol. Yahoo chat was not as full of sexually unfulfilled college girls as the spam bots would have you believe. So Yahoo replaced the troublesome opening bracket or would be rewritten to Zhtml> and Zbody>.Īnd more than a decade later, this methuselan workaround lives on: But all messages went through Yahoo's servers, so they could fix it server-side: block the attack by rewriting the messages before sending them along. Oh dear, what to do? Not everyone would install a security update.

Pager didn't escape message contents, and so it was possible for a message sender to coax the recipient into displaying arbitrary HTML - even fetching images off the web.

Initially, Pager had custom text rendering, but then they replaced it with an HTML view. Support for chat was later added to Pager, their native app, which did its own chugging in Visual Basic. Yahoo chat rooms started life as a Java applet, chugging along in Netscape Navigator 4. Here are three funny stories from the Yahoo chat protocol. But they had a good run, operating for a decade and a half, an Internet eternity. It is for the best, for the spam had spread everywhere. Yahoo's public chat rooms have passed away.

Yahoo chat room programs