Pidgin and Kopete Back to Chatting with Yahoo! Again

To protect its users from phishing scams, Yahoo! changed its login authentication protocol, as they announced June 16. The new protocol expected a specific authentication method version on the client end and refused access if it didn't match. IM services Pidgin and Kopete were recently affected by this.

Pidgin developers were the first to respond to the crisis. They had detected the authentication protocol change through debug reports from the proprietary Yahoo Messenger from Xandros, the only Linux client still using Yahoo!, and reverted to an older server version. The number of servers still using the old authentication protocol is steadily dwindling, thereby causing higher chances of connectivity problems. Pidgin reacted by disabling older versions of Yahoo Messenger in their newest version 2.5.7 and supporting Yahoo!'s revised protocol. Pidgin users should from now on be using the update and targeting the scsa.msg.yahoo.com server.

The Kopete IM service noticed the same problem and committed the new Yahoo! authentication to its Subversion repository on June 24, to judge from a blog by developer Matt Rogers. Rogers also called for a retagging of KDE to include the fix for the KDE 4.3 release arriving in July.