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Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

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Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#131

Post by djhn »

dijit wrote: post #118
djhn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But only two languages are supported, with no easy way to type in three or change the character set of the keyboard, which one can do with one swipe on SwiftKey Android. One of the main reasons, in addition to lack of dual-SIM, I realised switching to iOS simply wasn't worth it for me. Having a private number for my SO, closest friends and select high-retainer-fee clients to reach me 24/7 while also having an easily…

On iOS you can switch the keyboard with the small “globe” key between the “123” button and the dictation button on the lower left hand side of the keyboard, it’s one key press- assuming you added the keyboard in settings.

That's still too many steps - the trouble with bi/tri-lingual life is you often interject words (places, addresses, proper nouns) in the local language into sentences in any of the other two languages.

Constantly opening and closing settings dialogs gets on your nerves in the long run.

Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#132

Post by utouq »

tjpnz wrote: post #80
bubble_talk wrote: post #71

Facebook engineers know exactly what is going on, and I don't think they actually care. If you want to see exactly how creepy the whole thing is going to get in the future, you just have to take a look at the transcripts from the Software Engineering Daily podcast where a group of engineers from FB were interviewed recently. The interviewer never once mentioned the word privacy in the entire interview across all the…

>Facebook engineers know exactly what is going on, and I don't think they actually care. I know of founders who would need to think carefully about even interviewing someone with Facebook on their resume. And I totally get these concerns given the attitude Facebook has towards the privacy of users.

What a witch hunt. This is akin to persecuting people for their politics.

Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#133

Post by coblers »

codeulike wrote: post #19

I've noticed something sneaky about Facebook on my phone. I refuse to install their apps but I do use Facebook a bit so I use it via the phone Browser (in my case, Chrome on Android). I've noticed that sometimes Facebook shows a fake 'youve got a message' icon to try and trick you into installing their messenger app. To re-produce this behaviour: (this works best if you dont get a lot of facebook messages. Also you n…

I have the same setup as you and can confirm this. If I go to facebook.com from my browser, it will always show 1 unread message even though there isn't one. It's pretty annoying.

Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#134

Post by ryanlol »

utouq wrote: post #132
tjpnz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Facebook engineers know exactly what is going on, and I don't think they actually care. I know of founders who would need to think carefully about even interviewing someone with Facebook on their resume. And I totally get these concerns given the attitude Facebook has towards the privacy of users.

What a witch hunt. This is akin to persecuting people for their politics.

>This is akin to persecuting people for their politics.

Whether or not this is a bad thing strictly depends on the politics.

Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#135

Post by dan-robertson »

buildzr wrote: post #96

Am I reading this right? If WhatsApp and similar are no longer able to implement End-To-End crypto because they have to use an Apple API which supports only specific protocols, this is going to be a huge loss for users. I've considered switching to an iOS device, but stuff like this keeps me away, I'm very glad I can keep direct SIP, SSH, IMAP and XMPP connections open at all hours of the day.

It wasn’t clear to me what that sentence meant. My best guess was that maybe WhatsApp needs to do background work to decrypt messages for notifications. Before you’ve unlocked a phone (to allow WhatsApp to access its keys), notifications just show up as “you got an encrypted message” and can’t show what the message is. Perhaps that would happen to all messages after this change.

But then again it seems that apple would want to ensure that there’s still a good way to do end-to-end encryption, so I would guess there would be a workaround.

Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#136

Post by bb101 »

beagle3 wrote: post #111
tannhaeuser wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also switched, after my 1 year old Samsung S8 brick phone dropped to the floor one time too often. I'm not only enjoying the privacy, but also the classic, non-phablet form factor of a brand new iPhone 6s in 2019 and hope it will last me longer. Compared to Samsung's, my typing speed is up, but it's true that autocomplete suggestions are useless.

Have been running my 6s since 2015 - alas, come iOS 13 we’ll likely have to upgrade the hardware or remain with unlatched critical known vulns.

iOS 13 will be supported on the 6s, just not on the 6/6 Plus (and below).

Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#137

Post by dan-robertson »

comex wrote: post #90
makomk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has everything to do with end-to-end encryption. Prior to iOS 10, the only way to display notifications for end-to-end encrypted chat without giving Apple a plaintext copy of everything in the notification was to abuse the VoIP feature. More specifically, the "PushKit VoIP API" Facebook's spokesperson mentioned allowed services to push down an opaque blob of data and have their apps immediately wake up in the back…

> It might be possible for companies like Facebook to rewrite their code to use an iOS 10+ Notification Service app extension to decrypt the notifications instead, but that requires major code changes and has additional limitations. Perhaps, but iOS 10 is now 3 years old; Facebook has had plenty of time to make those major code changes, as opposed to continuing to use VoIP push notifications for things other than VoI…

Facebook aren’t obliged to make a change just because they can. Taking something that works and changing it for its own sake is something people very often get annoyed about.

Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#138

Post by gambiting »

mschuster91 wrote: post #124
gambiting wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I constantly have 4 unread messages in FB messenger(as shown on the main FB page) even though there are none. It's been like this for months.

Check your spam folder, yes FB has something like this for messages.

I have, there is nothing, not in the spam, not in the messages from unknown people, there just aren't 4 unread messages anywhere, yet the notification persists.

Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#139

Post by raverbashing »

rosser wrote: post #23
codeulike wrote: post #19

I've noticed something sneaky about Facebook on my phone. I refuse to install their apps but I do use Facebook a bit so I use it via the phone Browser (in my case, Chrome on Android). I've noticed that sometimes Facebook shows a fake 'youve got a message' icon to try and trick you into installing their messenger app. To re-produce this behaviour: (this works best if you dont get a lot of facebook messages. Also you n…

I don't think it's an attempt to get you to install messenger so much as it's a cheap tactic to drive engagement, generally. I do have Messenger installed on a device, and it also shows unread notifications for conversations where I sent the last message, a bit (I've never timed how long) after the message was sent. I assumed it was just some shitty dark pattern, that (enough) people are Pavlov-ing at unread notifica…

To be honest it seems like a bug (which is totally not uncommon with fb)

I've actually uninstalled the fb app because it was more buggy than using the mobile site.

It seems that notification doesn't get cleared for a while in the mobile site. Since the messenger app does notify of new messages and the notification does get cleared (on the app) once you read it, something is not right on the backend.

Re: Facebook Hit by Apple’s Crackdown on Messaging Feature

#140

Post by dzhiurgis »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #95
codeulike wrote: post #19

I've noticed something sneaky about Facebook on my phone. I refuse to install their apps but I do use Facebook a bit so I use it via the phone Browser (in my case, Chrome on Android). I've noticed that sometimes Facebook shows a fake 'youve got a message' icon to try and trick you into installing their messenger app. To re-produce this behaviour: (this works best if you dont get a lot of facebook messages. Also you n…

Have you tried messenger.com from your browser? Edit: Just went on it. On a browser you have to enable desktop mode for login to show. Also if you login this way and disable desktop mode it forces you out. If you reenable it renders the chat. Theres no reason the chat wouldnt work on Mobile desktop mode isnt using a different browser just lying to the web server and frontend JS. Amazing. I already rarely use Facebook…

This. This is what regulators should be concerned about.
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