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Slashdot update: AOL, "We don't read your IMs".. haha.

Summary:
AOL: Ah, no no.  We do not read your IMs, nor do we even store them!  The new TOS is well, just there for our protection.. you know how that goes.  **wink**

Of course, AOL's new terms of service is still the same, and is still up for interpretation.  As far as I can tell, (using my rather weak, but proficient legal translating skillz) Anything that is transmitted through AIM can be claimed as AOL's property if it isn't copyrighted by someone else.

Example:  Lets say I write a song, record it and encode to mp3, and send it (along with lyrics) to a friend.  Well, AOL can technically take the song and lyrics and claim it as their own, and sell it and copyright it--and I would have absolutely no rights to it, even though *I* wrote it. 

Now of course, I'd never use IM to transmit sensitive data, but still, this isn't right.  Now of course, our uses of IM are usually in the field of "Hey, you wanna game?" "Yes, I'm going to pwn j00!"; and are rather boring to corporations.

I don't know, maybe I'm taking this too hard.

Viral: Neither does gaim.  In order to use encryption, both parties must have the plugin downloaded.  I attempted some one-way encryption with a friend of mine using the official AIM for windows, but that failed horribly ( I figured.  But was curious anyway. )

P.S.: After doing some quick searching, it looks like the gaim-encryption plugin will not work with Adium.  Of course, you can try downloading the sourcecode and compiling it...  but it may fail nonetheless, since the  encrypt plugin added some new widgets to my chat window (Encrypt on/off) and those are GTK+, and Adium looks like it uses Cococa or something (I am not up2date with my MacOS widgets).

GPG?  Yeah, I've heard of it.  I'm partial to it, being GNU and all.  Never used it though, cuz I never had to resort to encrypting my messages yet.

I haven't read that other thread lately, but from what I hear, AOL has changed the TOS again stating that they don't read or care about peer-2-peer chats, only other types that really don't involve us.  In otherwords, its back to normal for the most part.

I guess everything can calm down now.  I still don't trust 'em, but I won't be as paranoid as before.  I just won't send "sensitive" info across the aim protocol.  Fair enough.