Software Update: Pidgin 2.12.0

Version 2.12 of Pidgin has been released. This multi-protocol instant messaging program can handle the networks of AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, irc, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, Silc, Simple, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo and Zephyr. During installation, you can choose from as many as seventy different languages ​​and add spell check. Binaries are available for Windows, but the source code can be compiled under Linux. The program also integrates well into Gnome and the KDE SC. The OS X port is released under the name Adium. The changelog shows the following list of changes and improvements.

libpurple:

• Fix an out of bounds memory read in purple_markup_unescape_entity. CVE-2017-2640
• Fix use of uninitialized memory if running non-debug-enabled versions of glib
• Updated AIM dev and dist ID’s to new ones that were assigned by AOL.
• TLS certificate verification now uses SHA-256 checksums.
• Fixed SASL external auth for Freenode.
• Removed the MSN protocol plugin. It has been unusable and dormant for some time. MSNP18 has been discontinued and the protocol plugin would require a large update to start working again. See: The third-party Pidgin SkypeWeb plugin, however, should provide enough functionality as a replacement if people still want to use MSN:
• Removed Mxit protocol plugin. The service was closed at the end of September 2016. See
• Removed the MySpaceIM protocol plugin. The service has been defunct for a long time. (#15356)
• Remove the Yahoo! protocol plugin. Yahoo has completely reimplemented their protocol, so this version is no longer operable as of August 5th, 2016. A new protocol plugin has been written to support the new protocol. It can be found here. This also removes support for Yahoo! Japan. according to the service ended March 26th, 2014.
• Remove the Facebook (XMPP) account option. According to the XMPP Chat API service ended April 30th, 2015. A new protocol plugin has been written, using a different method, to support Facebook. It can be found at
• Fixed gnutls certificate validation errors that mainly affected google (Dequis)

General

• Replaced instances of d.pidgin.im with developer.pidgin.im and updated the urls to use https. (#17036)

IRC

• Fixed issue of messages being silently cut off at 500 characters. Large messages are now split into parts and sent one by one. (#4753)