I can't remember how old I was when I first starting using the internet regularly, but it would have been during my early teens. We had a 33.6kbps modem, and an internet package where we recieved a certain amount of hours per month, and after that we started paying rather hefty by the hour charges. It was the ungolden age of the internet - before Google, MSN Messenger or MySpace. However, there was ICQ. ICQ was, from my understanding, the first really accessable IM program. Everyone I knew who had the internet also had ICQ. So I signed up for a number, and started meeting people. I've made some great friends over ICQ, and there's been periods where I haven't connected to my account, and then remembered it was there, and would connect and chat with people I hadn't spoken to in ages. Having a ICQ number in the low 2,000,000s was kind of a status symbol for me - I've been in this since the beginning.
Well, all that is now gone. About a week ago, I logged on to my Mac at work on which I run Adium. I have all my IM accounts linked up to it, and it's quite handy. Anyway, it springs a message telling me to enter my ICQ password. This kind of thing is not uncommon, so I figured it must just have lost my password locally and need updating. So I enter it. It prompts again. After a couple of attempts, I decide it must be a server issue and leave it for the day...
Today, it's been a good week since then, and I've been trying every password I've ever used every day since then. Nothing is working. The password retrieval page won't accept any of my previous email addresses either. My password changed itself, and now I can't get back into my ICQ account, which contains a list of all my old friends who occasionally come online. The only solution I'm offered is to register a new ICQ number. But a new number won't carry with it the history the old one did. It's all gone, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. *sigh* Not only that, but all my details are still in the old one (you can look it up online) but I can't get access to it anymore. It's not very fun.
Gah. Don't you hate it when stuff like this happens?
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3 comments:
Are you sure your account hasn't been deleted?
Because I recently, in the last 6 months at least, provided my new email for my current addresses, and a new password which I knew that I wouldn't forget, yet the ICQ home page claims to have no knowledge of my account. according to them it doesn't exist, and it can't even find an account with the nickname I was using....bugger....
You can do a search in their people database, and I'm still there. Huge amounts of detail about me, which although none of it is incriminating in any way, I'm a bit unhappy that I now can't change it, but everyone can see it. The whole situation just gives me the irrates... :@
This is an interesting phenomenon that will increase as the years go on - your intellectual property being owned by some service provider. This is different to if you have money in a bank, because in that case they have no right to take the money from you - it's yours. But if I play an online MMORPG or create a webmail account - those companies can just disappear and we have no rights to our intellectual property that existed within the universe that they created. It'll be interesting how society adapts to this...
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