TOC (protocol)

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The TOC protocol (Talk to OSCAR Protocol) is an outdated protocol that was used as a wrapper for the OSCAR protocol . It was mainly used by providers of the AOL Instant Messenger , at times including AOL itself. On August 19, 2005, AOL discontinued support and has not used it in its clients since then . AOL published the specification to promote open source projects. Among other things, it also developed its own clients, such as B. TiK and TAC .

history

TOC was published by AOL in late 1998 under the GNU General Public License as the instant messaging protocol. Together with the string-based protocol, they released a Tcl / Tk client called TiK. Since its release, a number of other TOC clients have been written for Linux, the most popular being Gaim .

background

TOC is an ASCII -based protocol, as opposed to OSCAR, which is binary. It has significantly fewer features than OSCAR. Among other things, profile pictures, file transfers and the possibility of integrating advertising are missing.

In principle, you can see a TOC server as an OSCAR client that translates and forwards messages. TOC uses like OSCAR FLAP . The server can work in HTTP mode (port 80) so that it cannot be distinguished from a normal web server. This is because FLAP has been hacked and can run on port 80. When a client establishes a connection, instead of sending an HTTP request, it sends the string " FLAPON ", followed by two line breaks , and the server then accepts FLAP messages. After the user profile has been loaded, the server expects a new connection from the client, which can then access a normal HTTP server that has saved the user profile as HTML .

There are two different messaging systems in FLAP. Client-to-server messages were in a format similar to the Unix command line: commands with arguments separated by whitespace , backslash, or escape characters . Server-to-client messages were structured even more simply: ASCII strings separated by a colon, as is known from Unix configuration files. It was therefore relatively easy to read and send the messages.

TOC2

The TOC2 protocol is a revised version of the "Talk to OSCAR" protocol. It has never been documented by AOL and is only used in some AOL Instant Messenger clients. In contrast to its predecessor, TOC2 is still supported by AOL, so that many other clients have switched to TOC2 as well. Like its predecessor, TOC2 is an ASCII protocol and leaves out a number of OSCAR features, including file transfers and profile pictures.

Because of the similarities between TOC1.0 and TOC2.0, they are more likely to be determined by their differences, of which there are few. For example, there was a toc_add_deny command in TOC1.0 , but there was no command like toc_remove_deny . This has been corrected in TOC2.0. The login process is basically the same as for TOC1.0, but with a few new parameters: version, a number and a code created from a username and password. The purpose of the number is unknown. The default setting is 160 and changing it has no effect.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Audit: TOC (AOL) IM Usage. Retrieved May 31, 2019 .
  2. ↑ startraders: TOC. Retrieved May 31, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b TOC protocol. January 16, 2018, accessed May 31, 2019 (Dutch).