Invisible Yahoo!

This is for the first time somebody asking me something from a blog I posted very long ago. I already gave a couple of personal replies (and some part of this blog is part of that personal mail, well, what I write is my intellectual property and copy righted …hehehe). Anyway, I got some questions about the invisibility feature of yahoo. And some religion related from some other reader (it is not doubt about religion but my views on certain things). Writing a fuller blog about that religion stuff is not easy. I need to think a little and may be read a little too.

So, the invisibility feature of Yahoo!. I don’t want to write a detailed one about that too. But anyway, it is still possible to find out the invisible person, that is my answer.

About ‘yahoo’s security holes’. Sorry, I am not a security expert, though I had studied about some basic protocols. Am not the right person to comment on it. I observed those things from a common man’s perspective. And I mailed yahoo people about it too. But its of no use. Even in the latest version 9 beta of the yahoo IM, theses issues exist.

So, is yahoo keeping it for some purpose? I don’t know.

How to find out the invisible people? Well, the people who asked me weren’t my friends. I don’t know them. Somehow they happened to read my blog. Well, that is enough. Use your that skill and find it out all by yourself. And I am sure that you can find out.

But I have some requests. Please don’t mess up with your computer’s security and sensitive data. There are applications available for FREE for this purpose. Why do they want to give you a free software? How are they managing their overheads to maintain a website and keep it running? It doesn’t look like a hobbyist work nor does a charity activity.

There is one very popular application in this regard which is said to be open source. Well, I could not find out the source code in that site. May be I have to write to the moderator and get it. But that is not the way Open Source applications work. If you ever find out such a code (I will be sooo happy if you let me know it too), go through it and compile it and use it, rather than using the original application for better safety. And don’t forget to compare the file size of the one you compiled and the one you got it as ready made ( I am not talking about any genuine open source GNU licensed ones). There are many sites which tell that these applications are Spywares. It many fail to find your invisible friend but it won’t fail to do its other job, keep that in mind.

Then there are web based services. There too, they hide the code. If you don’t believe me, try to find the code by opting for ‘view source’. I am not sure what exactly is happening. They might steal something from your computer or there is something fishy about it. Is it worth doing that just to find out who is hiding from you? If you think yes….well…..

I have been asked whether I had tried it or not. The answer is yes. And the result?

You can’t trust most of these popular applications, in most of the cases. It does fail and provide you with wrong results. And you might unwantedly suspect a real friend of yours. And I came to know that yahoo constantly changes the servers to counter these applications. Some applications address this too. They will give you options to choose different servers and thus you can do some trials. Is it worth? What if you get different results? Which one is right and which one is wrong?

Web services were better than these installable applications. They were more accurate too. But that too failed many times. I tested with my own yahoo account and hence I am sure about my status. If you are doing these checks while yahoo updating their logics and servers, the possibility of a false positive is more.

What if it works fine? It might definitely hurt you. When you find out your ‘close’ friend was all fake and liar, what else is your emotion other than getting hurt and being angry or irritated? Will it give you any positive emotion as a result? I don’t think so. It might also lead to some misunderstandings. It can spoil a relationship of any kind. (but I am not telling that it doesn’t have any positives to offer). And you will always become suspicious about your yahoo buddies.

How to counter these checks and still be invisible? As of now, I don’t know any fool proof method and if I come across, I will update my blog.

Is yahoo very much aware of it? I really think so. Is yahoo providing a tool to find out the invisible ones? Yes and No.

No because yahoo did not name it that way and its categorized in a different way. And it seems they have fixed this issue lately.

Yes because yahoo provides many IMVironments and one of them has/had this ability to find the invisible one and this fact is there all over the net. This works/worked 100% but the problem here is you can not do this without the other person knowing it. Because, you need to send at least a character to the other person and thus there will come a pop-up window and the IMVirontment gets loaded. (some web based ones too send the other person a window, but from their side, and thus 'informs' the user that they have been checked for their invisibility). Naturally the other person might think why this person starts with an IMVrinment. The IMVronment used for this purpose was ‘DOODLE’. So, if you ever received such a thing when you were invisible, well, somebody did a try. But this is an ethical hack.

I don’t want to encourage anybody to tryout stuffs which may not be legal or causing security threats. And let us hope yahoo will address this issue when the final version of 9 comes.

But one unfortunate thing I expect after posting this blog is, some of my own friends would start suspecting me. Coz that is how things happen in this world. But what if it helps avoid many misunderstandings and breakups among many others?