Extensible Messaging News Today

ICQ's impending shutdown is making us downright nostalgic. How do you remember using the once mighty cross-platform client?

Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp and Messenger, has revealed its strategy for implementing interoperability with third-party messaging services, aligning with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) enforced by the European Union.

TLDR; Thirty years after the advent of the first instant messaging services, we still haven't reached the stage where instant messaging platforms can freely communicate with each other, as is the case with email. In 1999, the Jabber/XMPP protocol was created and standardized for this purpose by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Since then,

The decision of Meta’s Threads to join Fediverse–a network of social media platforms including Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, GNU Social and PeerTube–has underscored the need for a decentralised social internet that enables users of different platforms to interact with each other

Most applications communicate over a TCP or UDP port. Ports 0-1023 are usually privileged and require administrator or superuser access to bind a network socket to an IP with the corresponding port. But anything over 1024 is up for grabs. IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) can “reserve” ports for specific applications — but this is only a formality; users and applications are free to use whatever port they wish. So a look at some port numbers (1024+) and how they are used as defaul...

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a lightweight messaging protocol designed for constrained devices and unreliable networks.

Eric Migicovsky likes to tinker. And the former CEO of Pebble — he's now a partner at Y Combinator — knows a thing or two about messaging. "You remember on the Pebble," he asked me, "how we had this microphone, and on Android you could reply to all kinds of messages?" Migicovsky liked that featur...

The Digital Markets Act is ambitious in its aims, with objectives that take into account the interests of not a single stakeholder group, but the interests of many -...

Misconfigured XMPP (aka Jabber) servers may not be the most common service you encounter during pen tests, but they can prove very valuable. Read more.

Why Jabber reigns across the Russian cybercrime underground Photo by Anton Fomkin/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) Share Apr 19, 2017 | CYBERSCOOP Much of the Russian cybercrime underworld is an enigma, but one technology serves as a crucial common link across all of it: Jabber. In a space of cutting-edge tech, creativity and crime, the 18-year-old instant messenger is the most popular communication tool among Russian-speaking cybercriminals, according to new research from the security f...