An audience of two

Sunday October 08, 2006

AIM considered harmful

There's a lot of buzz over AIM these days. At CEC you could send questions to the General Session presenters usig AIM. People have their AIM handle on their emails, even on their business card. Lots of technical discussion goes on over AIM.

It's always surprised me that this is allowed to go on. I've heard of development groups where AIM is the preferred communication mechanism. Yet it's not secure, as an article on Yahoo comments

I'm not anti-Instant Messaging, and Om knows I'm no security wonk. But Sun has an internal instant messaging tool that uses Java over SSL, and I use it regularly. It works from outside SWAN too. I don't know why that isn't better promoted. Finally I did appreciate this cartoon from UserFriendly earlier this week. You'd think we'd have a technology that was better than messaging, like instant voice over wire communications.