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iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

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Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#151

Post by Nextgrid »

njovin wrote: post #54
spideymans wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial to use software to automate spam on more open web-based platforms, such as Facebook Messenger. This is a lot tricker with iMessage, where only authenticated Apple devices, with a unique identifier, can connect to the service. Buying truckloads of Apple equipment to spam iMessage is obviously uneconomical(and totally ineffective, given that Apple will swiftly ban any spamming devices), and software hacks…

I thought Facebook Messenger was very strict about assigning page-specific user IDs to avoid this. Last I checked there was no way to send a message to a Facebook user using their profile ID.

Facebook Messenger (and similar) can be spammed through UI interaction automation (on Android) or even manually with cheap labor in third-world countries.

iMessage is more resistant to this attack because the device is your credentials to the network (instead of an account) which makes such an attack very expensive if you need to replace banned iPhones every day.

I’ve actually seen spam on iMessage (a friend’s Apple account was compromised and she started seeing the spam messages sent by someone else thanks to iMessages’s iCloud sync) but I’m not too concerned because I assume the offending devices will be banned relatively quickly.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#152

Post by dvduval »

I have been a Windows user and an Android user for a long time, and I never seem to have the need to venture into the Apple ecosystem. I actually did have an Apple phone for several months and it was okay. No complaints. But there's just not an ecosystem that I need. I have everything I need without the Apple ecosystem. There's nothing that gives me passion to use something that is exclusively an Apple product. In a way it's kind of weird. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. But I'm sure there's other people like me.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#153

Post by quantummkv »

harpratap wrote: post #95
spideymans wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's app has a pretty massive spam and fake news problem. It's an unfortunate side effect of WhatsApp's ability to forward message to your contacts. Users will forward fake news to their contacts, those contacts will then forward to their contacts and so on. It's essentially a modern reincarnation of chain emails of the 90s and early 2000s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/02/whatsap... I've had di…

Has nothing to do with the software. I use Whatsapp as my main IM and never had this issue. Pretty sure the same would happen on iMessage too if it targetted the same demographic. So your parent comment wasn't really a fair comparison because you left out the biggest IM service which does actually compete really well with iMessage without the vendor lock-in.

In my experience, it has. I use both iMessages and Whatsapp in India. I have never dealt with fake news and all the low signal forwarded memes and garbage on iMessages.

Whatsapp, on the other hand, is filled with it. The only solace in whatsapp is that I can disable auto media downloading to escape it to some extent.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#154

Post by sneak »

locusofself wrote: post #143

Oh man. Apple has us by the nuts. I love my iMessage. I've been on a macbook for ~10 years, but I just started working at Microsoft and thus have been spending a lot of time in Windows. Multiple times per day I think of something I want to send my wife, like a link to something I'm reading or something, and I look for the iMessage on the dock and of course there is no dock and no iMessage. I want iMessage for Windows…

I was in exactly this same boat for a long time. I bought maybe a dozen iPhones through the years to upgrade friends and partners from Android just so I could iMessage them.

Turns out, most of iCloud is not e2e encrypted, critically, notes and pictures and contacts and backups. Apple (and by extension, US military intelligence and FBI/DHS) can read your private notes and see your nudes, and review your address book and message history. I knew I was going to need to switch eventually.

* iCloud device backup is on by default. This syncs all of your unencrypted iMessage history to Apple. It also syncs all of your conversation partners’ message histories, from their phones, to Apple. It is not e2e encrypted so it suffers from the Zoom Problem: Apple has the keys and can decrypt it, for themselves or the government via the illegal PRISM program.

* iMessage (despite being e2e) can be arbitrarily wiretapped by injecting a surveillance key because the client trusts the key list from the server blindly, with no UI notifications for the sender on key changes/amendments.

* I can’t run the client on half of my computers

* Signal works on ios/android and has desktop clients for all major platforms... and critically now supports iPads. It also has the nice property of being e2e without implicit trust in the server, although hopefully the TOFU model can be improved.

I switched. I am now signed out of iMessage on all my computers, and it’s great.

If I can do it, anyone can. I was in as far as one can go.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#155

Post by collegeburner »

spideymans wrote: post #51
harpratap wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why? They definitely do. Not sure what your age or demographic is, but young folks do care a lot about higher social status which is tied to blue bubble because of iPhone prices. It has nothing to do with privacy though.

They care because the green bubbles indicate a severely impaired user experience. For example, multimedia may not work, and even if it does, its typically very poor quality.

HS senior here. Maybe a little, but it's mostly status/class. It's the twenty-first century equivalent of wearing expensive clothes to school.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#156

Post by pottertheotter »

aphroz wrote: post #141

It is really interesting to see the difference between countries, I travel between Asia and Europe and I knew that iMessage existed, but I thought people dropped it like SMS, years ago. Interesting to see that in a globalized world some differences still persist. I have asked around me to Iphone owners if they used iMessage and they almost never use it. It must be something specific to the US. Please do not downvote…

So people don't use SMS outside the US? I knew WhatsApp was big in other countries, but didn't realize no one even uses SMS not iMessage.

What do people use in Europe?

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#157

Post by harpratap »

the_snooze wrote: post #131
battery_cowboy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying some people exclude others from their friends group because of fucking smiley faces on a message? God that would be stupid if true.

Social dynamics are subtle. For example, group SMS doesn’t support contact names. If you add someone to a group SMS, the other people only see a phone number unless they go out of their way to add the new guy to their contact list. Likewise, the new person has to add everyone else to see names. Decades of research in behavioral economics show just how powerful defaults are, so most people probably won’t bother to add…

Your argument fails when you consider Whatsapp - the biggest messaging platform, where you need to add people's number in your contact to be able to see their names.

I agree with power of defaults though. Only reason iMessage took off, and so did other Apple services.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#158

Post by chucksmash »

kelnos wrote: post #43
gkoberger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to imply that; I meant to explicitly say that.

... which appears to be explicitly incorrect.

If M is the set of all imessage users and S is "has received a blue dot spam message", then:

gkoberger said:

∃m∈M ¬S(m)

then mmlgr said pardon me, but:

∃m∈M S(m)

and then you were like:

∃m∈M S(m)≡¬∃m∈M ¬S(m)

but I've got to tell you:

∃m∈M S(m)≡¬∀m∈M ¬S(m)

∃m∈M ¬S(m)≡¬∀m∈M S(m)

∃m∈M S(m)≢∀m∈M S(m)

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#159

Post by fao_ »

jamescostian wrote: post #79
harpratap wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why? They definitely do. Not sure what your age or demographic is, but young folks do care a lot about higher social status which is tied to blue bubble because of iPhone prices. It has nothing to do with privacy though.

I'm 22 and live in a mid-sized city, and I've seen people trying to get into a relationship (or even something more casual, but not a platonic friendship) get rejected because of the dreaded "green bubbles" - and really, I'm not exaggerating. And not from rich people who have the latest iPhone either. In addition, I have been in friend groups that would exclude Android users because if you have even 1 Android user in…

Honestly this seems like a feature of the social circles involved. I can't really imagine being, or even wanting to be, around people who are so shallow they won't have someone in a group because they can't change the chat name, or at least, people who wouldn't be willing to move to other types of software to accomodate people in the group. It seems like basic human decency that when someone in the group says "I can't xyz" you go "ok what can we do instead?". I'm not sure I can imagine caring so little about other people, and I definitely do not want to be around people who don't.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#160

Post by Answerawake »

AnonC wrote: post #115
sandeeps_ wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you have never used Whatsapp!

If your snark needs another snarky reply, it would be this: “Looks like you have never used Telegram.” This game can go on and on, but WhatsApp is nowhere close to being the best messaging app feature wise.

One thing I have come to appreciate about WhatsApp is its ability to handle low bandwidth environments better than iMessage. Back in 2015, I was traveling around Europe and had T-Mobile's unlimited roaming plan. I think the data speed was capped at like 64 or 128kbps? In addition, many hostels had less than 1Mbps wifi. iMessage would just choke trying to send pictures or large messages. In particular, it would be stuck in the middle of that "sending" blue line indefinitely like it was quietly timing out and would sometimes require a reboot of the phone to recover because it would remain stuck in the "sending" phase forever. Whatsapp seemed better tested and more solid when it came to transmitting messages. You'd see consistent progressing updates in the progress bar until it either timed out(unlikely) or finally transmitted.
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