271–280 of 902 posts
Recently I got a spam iMessage from a sort of empty contact. There was no number, no email address. I thought this was impossible, that there had to some kind of ID connected. Can someone explain what's going on?
I just got some iMessage spam yesterday. Now I know why. This jailbreak will make it less likely for someone to be able to trust iMessage.
Whenever this issue of iMessage crops up on HN, I’ve come to expect the usual points from both sides. However, the one thing that’s never addressed is the “why” of it all. For a group that ostensibly values openness and interoperability, why spend so much effort and energy to climb into a walled garden?
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Android phones are free? I have to buy the phone no matter what, so I don't see that as a differentiator. I don't want multiple ecosystems that don't interoperate at all. I don't want to give my private conversations over to an ad company like Facebook. I like iMessage because it adds features without taking. I don't worry about what app I need to use depending on who I want to talk to, I just send them a message and…
You can run Android apps on almost any non-Apple brand of phones, Windows PCs, Linux, Mac OS and Chromebooks. You can run iMessage on Apple devices, nowhere else. Surely you see the difference.
I know what argument you're trying to make, but I think it is disingenuous to pretend that WhatsApp is free while iMessage is not. As a practical matter neither is free, and both are free.
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This is absolutely not true. iMessage is a full E2E implementation; it’s nothing like SMS.
I'm curious how Apple implements Keychain in the sense that they claim it is also e2ee but they also use e2ee for ADP and its absolutely not (or at least not zero knowledge), rather it is convergent encryption which is not zero-knowledge and also allows for knowledge of filenames and hashes cuz "de-dupe" is so important for people with TB of cloud storage at the expense of their privacy.
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A hash of a phone number would be trivial to brute force.
Hmm, could it be salted somehow?
No, even a gigantic salt wouldn't help because the input data is too low entropy - only 10 digits that are 0-9. Salts are only helpful to prevent rainbow table attacks by making the size of the pre-computed output space too large to fit on a drive.
The salt has to be stored in plain text in order for the verifying algorithm to compute the hash of the input and compare it, so if you have the hash you also have the salt and can brute-force old school and crack all of them in short order.
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What problem? Increased compatibility?
From Apple's perspective, yes. Social pressure to buy Apple devices to use Apple's messaging app is part of Apple's marketing strategy. Apple also claims that blocking devices by serial number or similar unique hardware identifiers is a key part of its anti-spam strategy. If true, an end-run around that will likely create problems for users as well.
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Your literally talking about WhatsApp and Telegram as if they aren't their own segregated microcosms you can't message from whatsapp to telegram for instance so obviously they are their own segregated users by platform, its just a software platform not a hardware platform.
They are hardware agnostic, iMessage is restricted to users of very specific hardware.
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iMessage is not free though? Apple's "free" services are all dependent on you having bought apple products. When you buy a device, the "profit" on the hardware (the oft reference BoM only cost) also pays for the software development, the services, etc. Claiming that anyone should be able to use those services because they're "free" is like saying anyone should be able to get free service at Toyota garages because Toy…
I think it's a lot more nuanced than that. Should we, as a society, allow companies to lock people into platforms, and discriminate against those who have decided not to fall prey to that lock-in? Especially when avoiding that lock-in (which is often a passive financial/economic choice, not an active rights/freedom one) actually causes social and emotional harm (the whole "green bubble bullying" is a real thing; yes,…
Running a service costs money.
That money has to come from somewhere.
Google makes that money by spying on people and using that for ads.
Apple makes that money by selling hardware.
You're saying that both companies should be required to provide the services they render, but apple's model of paying for it by selling hardware should be banned.
Also, go talk to someone who has bought a new car, and ask them how much their servicing costs. If they go to their manufacturer's service centers the regular services are free for the first few years, but if they go to an unrelated mechanic it costs money.
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> Signal is the same, they C&D every fork that becomes popular, the only official clients are the CLI and the ones they release This always rubbed me the wrong way and made it seem like it's an NSA operation
The source to Signal is open to analysis if you doubt its security. I suspect they C&D forks because they don't follow coding/security practices as upstream does, and it would be too hard to ensure they would if they just let anyone fork it.