Jerry Yang the current CEO and one of the original founders will be leaving the CEO post soon and returning to the position of “Chief Yahoo” (http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/11/18/0151242.shtml). Many are speculating that pressure from the Microsoft take-over offer a few months ago has led Yang to step down from his current position. Several stock holds expressed anger when the Microsoft proposal was not accepted. The search for a new CEO should take several months and there might even be an announcement sometime in January (http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200811181727DOWJONESDJONLINE000659_FORTUNE5.htm) (http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/18/technology/yahoo_ceo.fortune/?postversion=2008111816).

Yahoo! has released an updated version of Messenger and is now at version 9.0.0.234 (http://www.ymessengerblog.com/blog/2008/11/18/updated-90-addresses-vista-issues/). This is apparently due to some problems with the previous version working under Microsoft Vista after the official Vista version was discontinued.

Yahoo! announced on their official Messenger blog (ymessengerblog.com) that unspecified changes will be made to the way firewalled users will use Messenger. The article mentions that only users that are using version 8.x and signed in from behind a firewall will be affected. An official message will be sent by Yahoo! urging users to upgrade to the latest 9.x version of the software.

From a programming standpoint this will most likely only affect Messenger operations that require a peer to peer (p2p) connection such as file sharing. When performing a peer to peer operation, Messenger makes a discussion (largely based on the firewall settings but not always) to either create a true peer to peer connection or to use the Yahoo! servers to create a pseudo peer to peer connection. The pseudo p2p connection uses a Yahoo! server as a proxy to create the connection because one of the clients does not have to ability to accept unsolicited connections. I do not know why this is only affecting 8.x users because the 9.x series has the same capability to offer proxy connections. Perhaps this is a drive to get users to switch to the latest version but at any rate, users of 8.x software should still be able to use that version as long as you don’t need to use the pseudo p2p connection.