Sean's blog

Maybank2u Agent M with Pidgin on Ubuntu

Maybank2u Agent M

The Malaysian web can be a frustrating experience if you’re not using any Microsoft products. Maybank2u have an ‘online banking buddy’ to help their customers ask questions and avoid giving them answers. We were recently wondering about changing online merchant payment processors, and considered giving Maybank a go.

We like to try out new stuff on the Internet, so we were quite keen to try our “but how much does it cost?” question. We don’t have any Microsoft products on our home network, for financial, security, performance and utility reasons. The ‘Agent M’ promoted on Maybank’s website at the moment is a Windows Live Messenger chatbot. “Oh cool” we thought, and fired up Pidgin, a free and (previously) very reliable instant messaging client. It didn’t work!

It was a bit of a slow-motion pain signing up for MSN accounts so we could use Pidgin on MSN. The pain was made worse by Streamyx suffering from 50% packet loss today. I’ve got bored with reporting packet loss every few days. It’s so frequent that Streamyx is unusably slow that I just want to weep. Never mind, we’ve got a DiGi EDGE connection as a fall-back, which was very handy today.

Pidgin Instant Messenger

Pidgin just didn’t seem to connect properly to the MSN network, but neither did it report any failure. Whatever it was, it wasn’t connecting to Agent M, or for that matter any of the other MSN accounts we set up to test it with. Finally, some online searching suggested that connecting Pidgin to the MSN network has been a bit problematic since January. All you need to do is add the ‘msn-pecan’ plugin – a Windows Live Messenger protocol – via synaptic (or sudo apt-get install msn-pecan). You’ll have to delete and add your MSN account, but choose the ‘WLM’ protocol. Then you can connect to Agent M.

While clicking randomly on webpages in frustration at how long it took to connect to Agent M, we discovered that the Maybank e-commerce merchant program can only accept payments from credit cards issued in Malaysia. Since many of our customers are overseas, that means it’s unsuitable for our needs. An afternoon wasted.

The thing that really bites is that it was Microsoft’s fault that I couldn’t connect to Maybank. Microsoft keep their protocols secret to prevent third party makers of software from competing with them. Open source software developers (like the Pidgin project) are constantly having to struggle to work out what new technique Microsoft have come up with to break their applications. In this case, Microsoft have deliberately made it more difficult for me to contact my bank.

I don’t really understand companies like Maybank locking themselves into a single-vendor arrangement as they have with Agent M. There are plenty of other IM protocols in existence – including open source ones, such as XMPP. Maybank customers needn’t even have an IM client – Maybank could provide an in-browser chat client such as JWChat, if they didn’t fancy the Java applet route. Or perhaps being insulated from annoying customers by a chatbot is even more effective if it doesn’t actually work?