521–530 of 1001 posts
Where is the hacker spirit here? The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!" is saddening. It is a bit dicey when you're charging for it, but since Mini was entirely client-side it would be feasible for a free version to exist. Apple claims iMessage is E2EE, do we have proof they aren't siphoning the messages from the client once it's been decrypted? The level of trust we have t…
Where is the hacker spirit here? The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!" is saddening. It is a bit dicey when you're charging for it, but since Mini was entirely client-side it would be feasible for a free version to exist. Apple claims iMessage is E2EE, do we have proof they aren't siphoning the messages from the client once it's been decrypted? The level of trust we have t…
As for whatever reasons Apple comes up with: that is probably also not going to be relevant as a multinational that is beholden to money is going to have the legal department and PR do that sort of messaging and not anyone on the technical side of things.
Speculating as to why things are the way they are: Apple knows that people in some socioeconomic ecosystems value iMessage as-is, so we can expect their intent to be aligned with keeping that value. Reusing all in-house crypto and account management certainly makes it easier on the engineering side as well.
Honestly, I have mixed feelings. I REALLY think that iMessage needs to be opened up, but this was not the way to do it. Really hoping the EU swoops in and saves the day here.
Reminder that BlueBubbles and AirMessage both are working and fairly robust. I've used them daily over a year. The downside being that they need a Mac and iPhone to run. But in the spirit of self hosting, you do run the server yourself and don't share your credentials. I don't see a more viable path in the near future.
> The downside being that they need a Mac and iPhone to run. Then why would anyone use BlueBubbles? If you already need the hardware, and presumably an Apple account, what advage would there be? Legitimately curious.
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…
yt-dlp's post on HN garnered a lot of overwhelmingly positive attention [0].
I learned about NewPipe from HN and am now an ardent fan. Also received an overwhelming amount of positive attention recently, with the top comment recommending a fork that blocks even more advertising [1].
Every release of uBlock Origin gets hundreds of upvotes (1.53 got 527 points [2]). Again, overwhelmingly positive attention.
There's a subset of HN that is obsessed with the fediverse, and another subset that is skeptical, but the skepticism is overwhelmingly technical in nature.
If you want to see corporate shills on HN, you'll probably be able to find some, but it's certainly not a majority (much less unanimous!) view.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37474066
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Huh, I used to receive spam on iMessage with blue bubbles. In fact the only blue bubbles I receive are spam.
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If spam is really the problem Apple is worried about, then isn't it conceivable that it happens and that Apple has to work to keep spam low so you have a good experience? Such work is ongoing and sometimes spam gets through anyway. I don't think we should assume Apple's protections on occasional spam are perfect.
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And Apple didn't even need to block any device identifiers, just the IPs Beeper Mini was using to connect to the APN service. This could have been blocked in minutes. The delay was likely to get approval from Legal.
> just the IPs Beeper Mini was using to connect to the APN service. Hmm, wouldn't blocking IPs be overly broad and risked affecting regular users? Considering that IPs are scarce and constantly recycled by ISPs etc. Blocking device identifiers sounds more targeted and, for that reason, realistic.
The amount of legitimate users it would affect would be trivial and can be taken care of by customer support.
The benefit of that is that I can then, at that point, verify if we’re dealing with a legitimate device or not. Geniuses at Apple Stores can obviously do this physically, and remote support has the option to run remote diagnostics and even share screens.
Where is the hacker spirit here? The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!" is saddening. It is a bit dicey when you're charging for it, but since Mini was entirely client-side it would be feasible for a free version to exist. Apple claims iMessage is E2EE, do we have proof they aren't siphoning the messages from the client once it's been decrypted? The level of trust we have t…
And to point out the obvious, Beeper was also closed source. I don't trust apple much, but I trust a random startup much less to believe that they're not either doing something dicey, or screwing up the encryption protocol and creating tons of security holes (esp. if it was retro engineered).
Honestly, as you're pointing out the closed source character of all of that, I'd much rather use something like Signal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.