I think Philip is raving mad! What prompted you to think that only meebo and not Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft will be having our IM passwords and sneaking into our privacy?
To be able to authenticate to Yahoo!, you need to know a username and password from that service. You are not supposed to share that with anyone else. Meebo is effectively able to MITM your IM conversations.
But thats not the point. Yahoo! may very well read every e-mail IM that I have ever sent. Who told you that the Yahoo! guys ae absolute saints not prone to mischief. Its a matter of trust. If you trust Yahoo!, very well, go forward and use its services. If you trust meebo then go ahead. If you do not then, very well again. But do not spread your mistrust, until you have very sound reasons to back your claims.
Can you prove how Yahoo! is more trustable than meebo?
By the way I will greatly appreciate it if Philip is able to come up with a solution to IMing from behind a proxy.
There is always Jabber. Plus, if you _do_ need IM from work, you should be able to get a hole poked in the proxy. Alternatively, you could always telecommute, or even get another job.
Hahaha my dear friend, you have got it all wrong. I do not do a job, I study in an university where every other Windows IM client works. Yahoo! MEssenger, Google Talk, Rediff Bol, etc.. Therefore the university has no policy to block IM. But not a single UNIX based client works. Not even Gaim, Kopete, Yahoo! Messenger for UNIX. Needless to say that I have tried using Jabber on Gaim. The simple reason being that the Windows clients piggyback the IM packets on HTTP packets and use port 80 for their job, while the UNIX based ones do not. Hence the problem.
Those who have attended Mark's talk on making GNU/Linux more desktop friendly, we have to work out solutions that work on Windoze and GNU/Linux equally well. So do not talk about stuff that require obscure hacking to make them work. I do not have any problem with them, but laymen do have problems doing so!
For your kind information a lot of UNIX based utilities like CVS are very difficult to get to work from behind a proxy (in my case SQUID)!
I expect an answer to my poblems...