ILoveIM.com Blog

MSN Roaming Profile and Add/Remove Contacts

Posted by Pavel under Features, Instant Messaging, News

If you use MSN Messenger for some time, you might now that Microsoft has introduced “Roaming Profile” feature recently. Roaming Profile is your personal storage on MSN servers that keeps your Display Picture, Nickname and some other details.

It’s very useful feature for those of you who sign into MSN Messenger from multiple computers, because you don’t have to upload your custom picture again and/or change other details. And it’s totally useless if you use just one computer because MSN Messenger client stores everything at your computer’s hard drive.

We are happy to tell you that ILoveIM Web Messenger has added Roaming Profile support at this weekend release. You probably noticed it already by seeing your own display picture instead of our default “ILoveIM” avatar.

And there is another part of that – we have revised contact list management part for MSN Messenger as well and now it should work much better then before. You would be able to add new contacts, see pending invites into your contact list, accept/decline new friend and block buddies at your convenience. There were multiple reports past months about the problems with contact list management and I hope it will work much smoother at this point.

Enjoy!

ILoveIM adds Password Encryption

Posted by Pavel under Features, Instant Messaging, News, Security

We have done a great step forward to make a better experience for our users – we have introduced a solid password encryption using 1024-bit RSA keys. For those of you who are not aware of that or simply don’t care that much about the technical details, here is a short explanation of RSA encryption logic:

Basically there are two big numbers (“keys”) are used. Or I would better say not just big – HUGE numbers (like a hundred digits or so). One of these numbers is called Public Key and another one is Private Key. Public Key is used to “encrypt” data and Private Key is used to “decrypt” it.

The main trick of RSA algorithm is that Public Key can’t be used to decrypt information. It works one way only – to encrypt something. You must know a valid Private Key to do that and no other way around.

So, in our case - once you click Login button, our page executes a special JavaScript code that uses RSA Public Key to transform your password into an encrypted text and sends it to our servers. Private Keys are available on our servers and they are able to transform your encrypted password back to its original form (decrypt it) to process it and log you into a messenger network.

If someone tries to interrupt the process – they will get encrypted password and without a valid Private Key it’s useless!

We hope this new security enhancements at our side will make you more comfortable to use our web messenger service.
Feel free to contact us if you have a question or/and concerns about that.

Update (or What to do if you can’t login now)
For those of you who experience problems to login into our service, please clean your browser temporary files and try again.
If it still fails after that - contact us and we will work with you in person to solve the problem.