AOL Not Planning Temporary Cancellation of AIM Service
APRIL FOOLS!
We hope you all had fun with the April Fools gag and apologize to those who took this too seriously. We were a bit surprised by the reaction, both negative and positive responses. AOL is NOT threating BetaNews. The client does have the bug however, and we recommend we update your AIM client.
In a surprise move by the Internet giant America Online, its popular AOL Instant Messenger service will be temporarily shut down effective midnight tonight. After pressure from several major security firms that confirmed previous reports on BetaNews concerning an error in the program's code, which allowed any malicious user with a newer client to crash an older one, AOL decided to temporarily shut down the system beginning tomorrow while engineers design a server-side work around for the bug.
Blaming the need to shut down on BetaNews, AOL filed a motion in federal court in Virginia late Friday afternoon to issue a temporary injunction against the news site from running the story. AOL refused comment at press time and currently there is no word of further litigation against the Web site.
The bug reportedly caused Windows AIM clients to crash with a general protection fault, forcing the user to log on again, and in some cases reboot their computers. Apparently the glitch lies in the instant messenger program's ability to interpret HTML and convert it into text. A simple escape sequence sent to the user causes the program to panic and crash. Tests done at BetaNews showed that only previous versions of AIM clients up to 3.5.1856 would crash.
Read the report concerning the flaw in programming on BetaNews, and keep checking back as the case develops.