Re: TI-H: AOL chat rooms


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Re: TI-H: AOL chat rooms




>Okay, now for proof... do the same packet analysis for an IRC 
session...

I was actually going to do a side-by-side comparison, but that
would require that I add an Ident server to the program I was
using to capture the data.
However, before Ident was commonly used for IRC servers, I did
run it through, and the IRC servers look quite different.  You
can (and I have) actually run an IRC server via telnet, using
just your keyboard.  This would be nearly impossable with AOLs
format.
If you are curious, look up the IRC protocol in the appropriate
RFC (sorry, don't have then number handy), its all text.

>see what the differences are (besides the obvious aol:// URL
>spec and the HTML tags)  I'm pretty sure that the packets will
>return similar contents.

Only in that the chat text is included.  The /command format
is not supported on AOL.  AOL does not support multiple chat
sessions, and therefore does not send the name of the channel
for which chat text is intended, which IRC requires, no matter
if you are in one channel or many.
If I could recall the IRC protocol better I could probably give
more examples.

I did dial up to AOL about an hour ago and connect to
irc02.irc.aol.com.  None of the chat rooms there are the
same as the chat rooms accessable from the AOL software,
and many of them support more than the 23 AOL limits a room
too (some had as many as 200 users).
This only tells us that if the AOL chat rooms are IRC based,
the server that servers them is not at irc02.irc.aol.com, it
is possable that they are simply different servers (however
unlikely :) )

DK

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