Illegal?

[Mark Doliner]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Maik Schäfer
<maik-schaefer at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a way to "impersonate" that I'm using ICQ ( while using Pidgin ) so
> that they can't find out that I'm using Pidgin? I'm a little bit afraid that
> they'll ban my account.

No.  You could change the Pidgin source code to behave identically to
official ICQ clients and eliminate most of the differences with not
too much trouble, if you knew what you were doing.  But I don't think
it's worth it.  I think it's unlikely they'll ban people's ICQ
accounts for using 3rd party clients.  I think that would hurt their
business more than help it (it would piss off a significant percentage
of their user base, and once you've lost your contact list what would
stop you from switching to a different IM network?).  If they were
going to try to stop people from using 3rd party clients I think it's
more likely they would just prevent you from logging in.