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Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

techcrunch.com

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Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#491

Post by jrflowers »

willseth wrote: post #458
jrflowers wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think about it, blocking an app and stealing your fire extinguishers are both actions that a person or corporation could theoretically do. Since they are both actions, they are equivalent. Therefore blocking an app, burning down your house, baking a pie, writing a sonnet, doing a backflip are all the same thing.

Ahhh and to think all this time I thought I knew what a metaphor was. It’s literally any comparison! Silly me!

It’s spooky. If you think about it if Apple can block an app what is to stop them from breaking into your garage and modifying your car to talk like KITT from Knight Rider but instead of being helpful it makes mean remarks about your clothes that make you cry?? What if Apple filled your refrigerator with concrete? They could build a brick wall in front of your house and paint a replica of the outside on it so you run into it like a looney toon!

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#492

Post by pxeboot »

zxt_tzx wrote: post #457
pxeboot wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take a look at their How it Works post [1] this is not an entirety client side implementation, so there would presumably be a small number of IPs that would need to be blocked. [1] https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works

Are you referring to the step where Beeper's servers make a persistent connection with Apple's APN service to listen to new messages ? So your point is Apple can presumably distinguish between an actual iOS connection and Beeper's connection by looking at "how many connections per IP"? Still seems prone to false positives to me, unless there is something else I missed. (Upon re-reading the post, I realized that the p…

Yes. An Apple sysadmin could just install Beeper, watch what IP their APN requests are coming from and block it. Then repeat the process occasionally.

They don't need to break it completely. If Beeper is unreliable, nobody is going to pay for it.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#493

Post by rezonant »

bradleybuda wrote: post #481
empyrrhicist wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, totally understandable that this would be blocked within our legal system... but its a proof of concept that it would not be burdensome for apple to enable interoperability. We should be demanding support for open standards for messaging from mono/duopolists like Apple/Google.

Also WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, LINE, and a handful of others with more than a half-billion users. Are those heptopolists or septopolists? The word "monopolist" in 2023 seems to mean "a company whose corporate values are different than my personal ones and/or whose pricing and packaging don't match my consumption function and/or who has a lot of money and of whom I am jealous".

I think you might be mistaking what monopoly/duopoly is being mentioned here. Those companies aren't phone manufacturers and they don't make phone texting apps. The distinction might not matter to you, but it's clearly the meaning of the GP.

You can say iMessage isn't a texting app because iMessage functionally (as in, the technical details) works like a non-texting app, but it is the only texting app on those phones and is the way normal texting is done. Perhaps it would be different if iMessage was just installable from the app store.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#495

Post by vore »

jiggawatts wrote: post #463
explaininjs wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should have been obvious to anyone who saw the code where it simply contained the raw literal string `FAIRPLAY_PRIVATE_KEY = b64decode(“…”)`. I suppose now we’ll see how accurate the commenter’s claim “if this becomes a problem, I know how to generate new keys” is. https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush/blob/main/albert.py#L16

[flagged]

Because "private" here is regarding the cryptography and not regarding the disclosure? How are users supposed to obtain this key to use the service without it being published?

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#496

Post by hu3 »

meepmorp wrote: post #394
cycomanic wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realised this the other day, a friend send me a video via mms (I'm on android) and the quality was super poor (like 90s gif like quality). I though she must have some issue with her camera or so, no next time I saw her we looked at her phone (which is an iPhone), perfectly fine video. It's just apple degrading the performance for who is not on an iPhone. I mean just imagine they'd degrade sound to nearly noise if y…

> It's just apple degrading the performance for who is not on an iPhone. The reason the video looks like ass is because MMS messages aren't meant to be very large. While (iirc) there isn't a hard limit, the recommended maximum message size is ~600KB. The only way to fit a video into that range is to compress the hell out of it.

That's the technical reason.

Apple knows of such limitations and does nothing to improve the situation. In fact they ban those who try. FTA.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#497

Post by MBCook »

throw310822 wrote: post #288
MBCook wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think it would be a good idea for android to reject all SMSes?

No, obviously not, that's why I specified "if it's possible to tell apart those coming from iMessage".

It’s not. They don’t come from iMessage. They’re went like any other SMS.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#498

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ysofunny wrote: post #319
CharlesW wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that this is spin — Erik's statement is ridiculous, and he knows it. To think that Apple would somehow not treat Beeper like any other bad actor hacking iMessage protocols is delulu.

but the real problem some of use have with Apple's behavior is the real underlying reasons they're doing this I am reasonably sure that their main driver is profit which really means exploitation of people; I consider their public arguments lies made up to cover up the fact that what they account for as profit comes from what are in the end some really ugly historical and traditional imperialistic (colonial, neocolon…

> reasonably sure that their main driver is profit

As opposed to Beeper?

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#499

Post by aprilthird2021 »

toastercat wrote: post #478
runnerup wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember another post that was very well-received where an individual hacker wrote his own homebrew iMessage client for his own personal purposes. HN really liked that! I think HN exists at an intersection of individual hackerism and business. If a project is clearly by-hackers-for-hackers it gets a lot more leeway for unsustainable concepts / implementations. But this is building a business on adversarial interope…

youtube-dl, NewPipe, and uBlock Origin exist solely for the purpose of empowering the individual, yet they are constantly attacked on HN as being tools used unfairly to harm Google's profitability. Open-source projects like Matrix, PeerTube, Mastodon, are built to be free and open-source for the benefit of end-users and lack of vendor lockin. Yet each is derided on HackerNews for not being enough like their corporate…

I pretty much found out about all these from HN. I think most of their traffic / downloads comes from this site.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#500

Post by rezonant »

Analemma_ wrote: post #479
vachina wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I used to receive spam on iMessage with blue bubbles. In fact the only blue bubbles I receive are spam.

[flagged]

The GP is using a euphemism popular in the US. Indeed, the sent messages are colored not the received ones, but the euphemism labels the cause of the color, not the person receiving the text. If you are not from the US I'm sure this is weird.
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