[OTR-users] QQ is blocking OTR

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Ananda Samaddar
<ananda.samaddar at gmx.co.uk> wrote:
[snip]
> We
> currently have to rely on the goodwill of Microsoft / Yahoo / AOL /
> Google / Your Jabber admin not to block OTR.  A weak point indeed.

This is still true even if OTR never had a fixed string: they could
always block anything that doesn't look like recognizable human
language and while OTR data could be converted to something that
looked like plaintext the overhead would be enormous and it would
simply become a perceptual arms race.

There is another type of goodwill involved here:  If MSN/Yahoo/AOL/etc
started blocking OTR it would make them look a little more evil. It
would cost them goodwill from the public. So doing so doesn't make
economic sense.  If it ever does, then there is probably nothing we
can reasonably do to stop them.

This is a good reason to support Jabber:  It doesn't depend on a
single party controlled server.

I think that the only thing we can do in regard to this is to make
sure that the OTR blocking doesn't cause a silent failure for the
client and thus encourage people to think OTR doesn't work and
deinstall it.