Pidgin not connecting to Yahoo?

For the past couple of days I’ve been having this problem with some of my users not being able to sign on to Yahoo with Pidgin. They would try to sign on to Yahoo, and it would say ‘Connecting..’, and then eventually just time out. We had that problem a few months ago, where the Yahoo Page Server’s DNS wasn’t resolving the hostname. I solved that particular issue, by editing the “Page Server” field in the Yahoo account of the affected users in Pidgin, and switching hostname with IP. You can get the IP of a Yahoo Page Server (or any server for that matter) in the following way. Open your terminal and type:

$ host scs.msg.yahoo.com

Your output should look something like this:

$ host scs.msg.yahoo.com
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 66.163.181.170
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 66.163.181.171
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 66.163.181.172
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 66.163.181.173
…..
…..
…..

Copy anyone of the IP numbers and in Pidgin go to Accounts –> –> Edit Accounts. Click on the “Advanced” tab and replace the scs.msg.yahoo.com in the Page Server field with the IP number you’ve just copied. You should now be able to connect to Yahoo with Pidgin. But back to the issue we had. Mind you, this is after we had to replace the hostname of the Page Server with its IP a few months back, so now a group of my users have got an IP in their Page Server field. And what happened? Well, one IP points to one server. THAT particular Yahoo Page Server was down. Along with half a dozen other YPS. How horrible. My colleagues were not able to chat with their friends during work hours. Oooh, the drama! One way of finding a YPS that is up and running is by typing this in your terminal:

$ telnet scs.msg.yahoo.com 5050

Your output might look something like this:

$ telnet scs.msg.yahoo.com 5050
Trying 66.163.181.169…
Trying 66.163.181.170…
Trying 66.163.181.171…
Trying 66.163.181.172…
Trying 66.163.181.173…
Trying 66.163.181.174…
Trying 66.163.181.175…
Trying 66.163.181.176…
Connected to scs.msg.yahoo.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.

What you’re doing with the above command is trying to telnet into scs.msg.yahoo.com at port 5050. Telnet probes the IPs till it finds one that works, in this case the one right before the line that says “Connect to scs.msg.yahoo.com”, which is 66.163.181.176. That’s the IP you want to paste into the Page Server field of your Yahoo account setting in Pidgin. Or you could also just paste scs.msg.yahoo.com in there, if that works for you, too. Or you could just use meebo.com.

Only God has the right to close his source code

Everything that everyone learns, researches, discovers, creates is always based on what others have learned, researched, discovered or created. Human knowledge is not original, rather it is a natural consequence of previous human knowledge. We are not ever really creators. Instead we are discoverers of truths.

Knowledge is global property. Imagine a world, where all the progress and discoveries made in say the field of cancer research were treated as proprietary knowledge. Not enough people would have access to life-saving knowledge, and more people would suffer and die. The pharma industry, one of the most sinister elements of the realm of patent-mongery, is guilty of hiding knowledge, and preventing the discovery or spread of knowledge for the sake of material profit. Look at the battles Big Pharma wages against generic HIV drugs.

What Big Pharma is saying is, they get to decide who knows or knows not. Who lives or dies. For the sake of profit. Overpaid executives playing God with the wretched lives of brown children in far away lands.

Knowledge is for everybody. To monopolize it, is to steal from all mankind. I believe in (Free) and Open-Source Software (FOSS). Imagine people like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein had closed their knowledge from the eyes of the world. Imagine, a world where only one man or one group of people know how to develop aspirin, birth control pills or band-aids.

Proprietary knowledge is the enslavement of the minds of people.