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Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

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Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#21

Post by intelVISA »

userbinator wrote: post #20

This amazes me with just how bloated and inefficient simple things have become. In ~4 decades we went from literal 'netcat chat' where your message may be shorter than TCP/IP headers most of the time, to slightly more featureful but still simple with IRC, and then the IM protocols of the 90s/2000s with even more features but usually quite tame (speaking from experience of working with MSNP). After that it started get…

40B message transmuted into 730B of meta-data gold.

Pretty good ROI! If it's free you're the product (et cetera)

Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#22

Post by xuhu »

userbinator wrote: post #20

This amazes me with just how bloated and inefficient simple things have become. In ~4 decades we went from literal 'netcat chat' where your message may be shorter than TCP/IP headers most of the time, to slightly more featureful but still simple with IRC, and then the IM protocols of the 90s/2000s with even more features but usually quite tame (speaking from experience of working with MSNP). After that it started get…

Messenger conversations are persistent, so a more apples to apples comparison would be against emails.

Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#23

Post by koen_hendriks »

grishka wrote: post #17

It would've probably been much less ugly if the author reverse engineered one of the mobile apps instead of the web version. Those must use a much saner API that actually feels like an API. I myself reverse engineered and patched Instagram for Android once because I got fed up with ads in my feed, but there's a high probability that all Facebook apps use the same "proxygen" HTTP client library. This library is notabl…

Sounds like app "Instander"

Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#24

Post by tmdh »

grishka wrote: post #17

It would've probably been much less ugly if the author reverse engineered one of the mobile apps instead of the web version. Those must use a much saner API that actually feels like an API. I myself reverse engineered and patched Instagram for Android once because I got fed up with ads in my feed, but there's a high probability that all Facebook apps use the same "proxygen" HTTP client library. This library is notabl…

I know Kotlin and Java. Can you point me to any resources on this?

Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#25

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

mschuster91 wrote: post #15
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind elaborating on why you think that should be a law?

Because platforms intentionally go away from their open beginnings once they gain traction and moat. Facebook's removal of xmpp was the first, then Twitter came along with restricting features to only the official client (polls and medis in DMs) years ago, and now it's cat and mouse, with Twitter kicking off apps with zero notice. Even Reddit, which has historically been extremely open towards third party apps, now g…

I’m not saying that walled gardens aren’t bad, but they’re the property of those organisations. Even if you wanna start bashing holes into problematic gardens then they’d be the bottom of the list, cloud providers being more open (or at least consistent) would have a massive reduction in human time / cost.

Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#26

Post by franga2000 »

grishka wrote: post #17

It would've probably been much less ugly if the author reverse engineered one of the mobile apps instead of the web version. Those must use a much saner API that actually feels like an API. I myself reverse engineered and patched Instagram for Android once because I got fed up with ads in my feed, but there's a high probability that all Facebook apps use the same "proxygen" HTTP client library. This library is notabl…

> Xposed is very underrated as a reverse engineering tool.

I fully agree, but on the off chance you don't know about it already, I highly suggest you look into Frida as well. It can do all the same things Xposed can (hook function, see or change output), but is a lot faster to iterate on since you don't need to compile anything and can even do some things in a REPL.

That, coupled with the new jadx-gui's "copy as frida/xposed" snippet and the usual suspects for network monitoring (mitmproxy/charles), is a crazy powerful Android reverse engineering workflow.

Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#27

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » 

    "Sending automated (or non-automated) spam to other users
     Downloading people's data without their consent
     Putting undue load on infrastructure you are not paying for"
This applies in both directions.

     Sending automated (or non-automated) unsolicited ads/content to users
     Harvesting users' data without their consent
     Putting undue load on computers/devices/network connections you are not paying for

Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#28

Post by honkler »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #25
mschuster91 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because platforms intentionally go away from their open beginnings once they gain traction and moat. Facebook's removal of xmpp was the first, then Twitter came along with restricting features to only the official client (polls and medis in DMs) years ago, and now it's cat and mouse, with Twitter kicking off apps with zero notice. Even Reddit, which has historically been extremely open towards third party apps, now g…

I’m not saying that walled gardens aren’t bad, but they’re the property of those organisations. Even if you wanna start bashing holes into problematic gardens then they’d be the bottom of the list, cloud providers being more open (or at least consistent) would have a massive reduction in human time / cost.

property is a man made idea. No reason to treat is as something sacred. And we already don't care about property when government bails out these crooks.

Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#29

Post by rrdharan »

3np wrote: post #12
hardware2win wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FB is big enough to afford investigation teams that cooperate with law enforcement to tackle the spam at the source. Same can be said about Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc Yet spam still exists, how is that possible if your assumption was true?

Lack of incentives due to costs being externalized. It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to enough.

Their profit motives are entirely aligned with reducing spam.

I don’t understand why people always think hard problems aren’t solved because of some deep conspiracy. Sometimes they’re just hard.

Re: Reverse Engineering the Facebook Messenger API

#30

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

honkler wrote: post #28
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying that walled gardens aren’t bad, but they’re the property of those organisations. Even if you wanna start bashing holes into problematic gardens then they’d be the bottom of the list, cloud providers being more open (or at least consistent) would have a massive reduction in human time / cost.

property is a man made idea. No reason to treat is as something sacred. And we already don't care about property when government bails out these crooks.

On that basis, hand over the keys to your house and car and kindly vacate promptly.
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