Historically, IM has existed on closed and proprietary systems, with dedicated clients that can only connect to a single network. For many years users with accounts on multiple networks (say, AOL and MSN), would have to keep multiple programs open, which ate up system resources and cluttered desktops. By 2000 a handful of clients emerged that would allow users to manage multiple IM accounts from a single program. These stayed largely under the radar until 2002, when a client called Trillian hit 1 million downloads (and then jumped to 5 million six months later).

IM is also ripe for innovation, but developers have been hampered by a near-complete lack of cooperation from the major IM networks. Perhaps developers will take advantage of the growing number of networks that are open, adding new features that make them attractive to users still stuck on the old behemoths. Then Yahoo and Microsoft might be compelled to finally change - or perish.

As of today, Yahoo! Messenger for Vista will no longer be available for download from the Yahoo! Messenger website. We have discontinued stand-alone releases of the Yahoo! Messenger for Vista application in order to focus on delivering one Windows experience that is optimized for all Windows users.

This decision will help us increase efficiencies on our team and deliver one consistent, full-featured product for all of our Windows users. Our application was based on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) platform which we will continue to experiment with and invest in. The knowledge we gathered from developing Yahoo! Messenger for Vista will also help us improve future versions of our Windows software.

This quick tutorial will show you how to develop your own functional IM bot that works with Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live and all other popular instant messaging clients.

To get started, all you need to know are some very basic programming skills (any language would do) and web space to host your 'bot'.

For this example, I have created a dummy bot called 'labnol' that listens to your IM messages and return related search phrases based on Google Suggest. To see this live, add labnol@bot.im to your GTalk buddy list and start chatting.

Persistent text formatting
Now when you change your font, text size or color for your IM messages, we’ll save your settings between sessions. So if you like to IM in font size 14 using red letters in Arial Bold, we’ll remember!

Voice improvements
We updated the user interface for the voice feature to make the buttons more clear and added a new voice visualization called “Color Burst”. Plus there’s an updated incoming call notification that appears front and center when a call comes in.

No webcam yet, but we’re making that clear
A lot of our feedback has been from users asking for webcam support or users that look for the webcam feature but can’t find it in the product. Currently, we don’t have webcam support in Yahoo! Messenger for Vista but to shorten our users’ search for it, we added a webcam menu item. Those not in-the-know will get a message telling them that webcam support is coming soon.

• Organize your conversations into tabs, or drag and drop a tab out to create a new window
• Keep up with your favorite contacts by dragging them into the Windows Sidebar gadget
• Send enhanced emoticons that have some extra oomph
• Change the color of your IM windows with a built-in skin chooser. Go crazy with a different skin for every IM window!
• Adjust the display size of your contacts with a handy slider
• Arrange your contact list into multiple columns just by resizing your window
• Send instant messages to your Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger contacts
• Send files to friends as large as 2 GB
• Find contacts quickly with the contact search bar. Type in a few letters of the contact's name or ID and they'll come up in filtered results.
• As-you-type spell checker that's smart enough to know that 'LOL' is not something to correct
• A preferences menu you can access by right-clicking anywhere at the top of the main Messenger window

Even if you installed Yahoo! Messenger as recently as August 20th, 2007 you may not have the very latest version.

You can check to see if you have the latest version by clicking the 'Help' menu option at the top right of your Yahoo! Messenger window, and then clicking 'About Yahoo! Messenger' or 'Check for Updates'.

If your Yahoo! Messenger version number is 8.1.0.416 (or higher) then you have the latest and do not need to take any immediate action. If you are running anything lower than 8.1.0.416 then please upgrade to the latest version.

It seems like a classic heap overflow which can be triggered when the victim accepts a webcam invite. Note that this vulnerability is different from the recently patched one in June which exploited the Yahoo! Webcam ActiveX controls.

We've been able to reach Yahoo! security team and have informed them about this issue.

We recommend the following to users using Yahoo! Messenger Webcam:

1. Don't accept webcam invites from untrusted sources until a patch for this is released.
2. It's advisable to block outgoing traffic on TCP port 5100 until the vendor patches this vulnerability.