If you’re having trouble logging into your MSN (aka Windows Live Messenger) account in Pidgin this morning then there’s a good chance that it’s because the certificate for omega.contacts.msn.com has expired. Thankfully the solution is easy:
Quit Pidgin completely, open a terminal, cd into ${HOME}/.purple and move certificates to certificates.old. Restart Pidgin and you should be able to log in to the MSN network.
Update:
And it’s broken again. Moving/deleting the above directory doesn’t have any effect now. Sad face.
Update 2:
Found a solution, thanks to some pointers on Twitter. Handiest way to fix this is to go to https://omega.contacts.msn.com/ and export that site’s SSL cert to a file called omega.contacts.msn.com. Move that file to ${HOME}/.purple/certificates/x509/tls_peers/ and everything should be fine.
God knows how that can be changed in Empathy, which seems to be having a similar problem – I can’t for the life of me figure out where Empathy stores its certificates etc.