On June 20th, 2008 Yahoo! went live with two new root domains for mail. The additional names are “@ymail.com” and “@rocketmail.com”. The two new domains are listed along with the standard “yahoo.com” in a new drop list on the account creation page (https://edit.yahoo.com/registration?).
The request has already been made and you should expect this added functionality in the next version of YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker.
While Yahoo! was off fighting Microsoft, they made some deals with Google to put a slightly tainted taste into the merger deal. The most notable one was an ad revenue “trial” where Google would serve the ads on Yahoo! pages in return for a very favorable share of the profit. Over the past week it appears that the trials were very successful and Yahoo! has agreed to a more permanent deal with Google that would continue the deal, pending any anti-trust issues. Mixed up in this agreement is a paragraph that indicates future interoperability between the two IM platforms (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9967942-7.html) (http://stuff.techwhack.com/3860-yahoo-google-messenger) (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121366428372879463.html?mod=googlenews_wsj). In short you may be talking to Google Talk users using Yahoo! Messenger in the future.
This will be a great steep towards getting the major players to talk to each other but I’m not sure how Microsoft is going to take this news. Currently Messenger can communicate with MSN users so does this mean that Google Talk users will be able to talk to MSN users? This also opens up the issue of how the two networks will communicate. Google talk uses an open source protocol called XMPP while Yahoo! is closed source.
I don’t know what happened this last time but the site is back up again. Apparently it went down on Friday and I didn’t realize it until Sunday. After badgering the support staff, they fixed the DNS entry.
• Changed the name from YCC Bot Maker to YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker. This is to remove any confusion between other YCC products such as YCC AIM Bot Maker.
• Fixed a problem with version 1.2.1 where the only response would be Invalid SEC Word. This was due to a change in the Yahoo! servers and a new technology that they implemented which profiles the user agent making the request. YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker uses a .NET object called httpWebRequest to make connections to Yahoo! Although YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker’s requests have been designed to mimic Internet Explorer, The Yahoo! servers analyze the requests at a low enough level to see a difference and possible attack. The Yahoo! servers do not see this as an out right attack or bot so the response from the server is to ask for another CAPTCHA even if the first one has been entered correctly. The back-end logic of YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker used to connect to the Yahoo! servers has been changed to allow for multiple CAPTCHA attempts.
• A new GUI and appropriate logic. Most of the GUI and logic above the server request class has been rebuilt. This means that this release is truly 2.0 and distinctly different from versions 1.x.
• Queue. This is a new queuing system that allows multiple requests to be generated at the same time. This helps to eliminate the waiting time between CAPTCHA image loads. The number of items in the queue is variable but only the top three are visible. Addition information about each request can be found on each queue item and each item can be dismissed by pressing “x”. The last processed request is shown in the Last Request box.
• Fixed a bug in the Name Options box where the radio buttons were not being checked. The type of name generation will no longer be saved between sessions.
• Proxy support. This is a GUI representation of the properties exposed by the httpWebRequest object. Proxies are not fully supported and should be used at your own risk. The address field requires a fully qualified URI and must contain “http://” or “https://”. The use of localhost is not permitted (.NET limitation). I also did not implement a fancy multiple proxy list scheme as I have found that most of the public proxies do not support registering Yahoo! accounts due to SSL restrictions on the proxy server. If you use this function I suggest the use of a high quality and most likely paid proxy server. If the proxy server returns an unexpected result or the httpWebRequest object throws an exception, YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker will not die gracefully.
• User Dictionary name option. A new name generation method where you can provide your own dictionary of names to be used.
• Rotate servers. Now that YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker has a queue, it is only natural that the servers should be rotated while making requests.
• Statistics for each server.
• Many other things that I can not remember now.
The beta release for YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker 2.0 can be found at http://ycoderscookbook.com/Files/YCC Yahoo Bot Maker 2.0 Beta.zip. I am releasing this as a solution to the recent Yahoo! server change that made version 1.2 of Bot Maker nonoperational.
I have to admit that I am not completely happy with this release because Yahoo! requires the user to answer two CAPTCHAs to create an account instead of just one compared to Internet Explorer. This has to do with a new profiling technology on the Yahoo! servers that can tell that YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker is not exactly like Internet Explorer or Firefox but still creates an account if additional validation is given. I still feel that this is better than creating multiple accounts using a web browser. I am already planning an update to YCC Yahoo! Bot Maker that will take away this restriction (watch for an additional post soon about this) but it will take a lot more programming and I know there are several users that would like an update now.
Another feature that you will notice is the new queuing system. This allows for multiple names to be requested so you do not have to wait on the server. In addition to the new GUI, the backend logic has almost completely been reworked to accommodate the new queue. With an almost new program I decided to change the version to 2.0.
For the next few days the beta will only be released through the blog and forums. If you do happen to try version 2.0 I encourage you to leave feedback in the forum and let me know of any bugs. I tried to get all the bugs out but I know I did not catch them all. The actual code should be complete without any new features but the help and supporting files still need to be completed. Once again if you try out the beta please let me have feedback even if everything works perfect.
I have relied heavily on capture tools to produce what I have now. I primarily use Wireshark but most of the Yahoo! pages are SSL so Wireshark is useless. There is a way to decode SSL packets with Wireshark but you have to have the server private key which I don’t think Yahoo! is willing to give up anytime soon. The next best thing is Fiddler (http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/) which is an Internet Explorer sniffer. It adds a certificate to the system that acts like a man in the middle attack and you are able to see all of the SSL traffic coming into and out of Internet Explorer. It does have a downside in that you can not see the entire packet but only the TCP payload which is usually enough. The best part is that it is free and the most powerful of this class of tool.
Currently my httpWebRequest mimics Internet Explorer in all of the HTTP fields but not the order. The only thing left that I can see is that the COOKIE field is placed ahead of the KEEP-ALIVE field. No matter what I do I can not change the order to place the COOKIE at the end just before the /r/n/r/n. I suppose the httpWebRequest class automatically places the keep alive at the end during the automatic generation of the request headers and the placement is hard coded. From a specification standpoint this should not matter but this could be the thing that Yahoo! is punishing me for.
My next task is to create my own httpWebRequest class where I can have finer control of the headers. This will be a lot of extra work but it looks like that’s the only way to get around this problem. I have also been exploring using the .NET Webbrowser object to just script my way through the registration process but that has opened a whole new set of problems and I am not happy with the results. Even when using the unmanaged ActiveX control I keep getting scripting error pop-ups and it is about 10 times slower than using my current method. I have successfully created accounts using this method but it was not painless and there is much work to be done before this is a viable method. This just once again shows that there is some fundamental difference between using httpWebRequest and Internet Explorer to create Yahoo! accounts.
P.S. I done some extra exploratory work this weekend to compare the results from HTTPHelper to Internet Explorer when requesting www.google.com (because of the SSL problem mentioned earlier). When the captures from Wireshark are run through diff there is no difference at all. The packets are identical down to the smallest detail.
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