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Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

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Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#811

Post by truegoric »

crazygringo wrote: post #410
russelg wrote: post #336

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 hacker spirit is the fun of reverse engineering. The hacker spirit is about personal use. It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business , or a popular app, that wouldn't quickly be shut down. That's just common sense. > Myself for example owns a Macbook, but an Android phone. Am I not allowed to use iMessage? I paid the toll. Of course you can. It's sitting there on y…

> The hacker spirit is the fun of reverse engineering. The hacker spirit is about personal use.

„We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.”

I believe that if you want to see hackers as only kids doing „fun stuff” at their desk at night making their (metaphorical and not) parents angry then either you are missing the bigger picture, or capitalism has gotten their ideological claws on the hacker culture and turned it into an obedient bunch of techbros that wouldn’t even dream of making the information free, as it wants to be.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#812

Post by rezonant »

kelnos wrote: post #769
russelg wrote: post #336

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? I'm torn on this. Is it following the hacker spirit to get more people plugged into Apple's closed ecosystem? Maybe? Maybe not? Reverse engineering a proprietary protocol is certainly hacker-y. But building a business around that -- essentially charging people to put more load onto someone else's infrastructure, who have to bear the costs (even a rich behemoth like Apple) -- I'm not…

> I'm torn on this. Is it following the hacker spirit to get more people plugged into Apple's closed ecosystem? Maybe? Maybe not?

Agreed here. But I understand deeply why it's appealing for my fellow android users who are tired of being bullied into buying phones they just don't want by their friends who overwhelmingly drink the Kool aid. it's not great, and in the US the effect is very real.

> I think it'd be a lot more hacker-y to bring something like Signal up to the usability standards of iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc.,

Good idea... what about an existing open standard that is already adopted by a billion devices and can be implemented by any mobile phone manufacturer and carrier network.

Something that takes what's good about SMS and adds all those nice features. I bet we'd have to work together to make end to end encryption interoperable, and some of the fancier stuff is too new to be in the spec yet, but that's not too hard in the grand scheme of things.

Oh, RCS exists.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#813

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Grustaf wrote: post #786
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course you can. It's sitting there on your Mac where you can use it as much as you like. For what? I own a Mac an iPhone and an iPad but iMessage and FaceTime are entirely useless to me because no one I communicate with on a regular basis uses Apple devices. Same thing with various iCloud sharing features. Not using the family sharing offers is entirely uneconomical as well. So what happens is that I gravitate t…

If you don't want to communicate with other Apple owners over iMessage, then there is no issue. What Beeper set out to do was to solve the opposite problem, people who don't have Apple devices, but want to use iMessage. And the poster above did have an Apple device, and wanted to use iMessage, but didn't seem to realise that iMessage works on Macs too.

>If you don't want to communicate with other Apple owners over iMessage, then there is no issue.

The issue is that I as an Apple user want to be able to use iMessage to communicate with Android users.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#814

Post by kevincox »

corobo wrote: post #54
phailhaus wrote: post #41

Crazy that the CEO even tried to create an entire company based on something that they absolutely cannot control. Was this an acquisition play?

Beeper (not mini) is already a company - it's an app that aggregates the various other networks friends and family insist on using. WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Telegram, Instagram, etc. Been using it a while now, pretty good. This was a proof of concept to expand that app, it's not the entire company

I would agree if they hadn't completely redone their website to remove every reference to Beeper Cloud. They really made it look like a deprecated product, not a good alternative that won't get blocked.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#815

Post by octodog »

interpol_p wrote: post #588
prmoustache wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these iMessage group chat really a thing? In my part of the world Whatsapp is the defacto standard for group chat and even for things like scheduling anpointment to a doctor/dentist/hairdresser. And that is because it is available on android, apple devices and even those cheap kaios halfsmartphones.

In my family they are. I am in Australia and almost everyone I text has their phone number come up in blue, signifying iMessage/iPhone For example, when RSVPing to a kid's birthday party, other parents' numbers are inevitably blue. When selling and buying items, the contacts for those sales have always been blue numbers, it's rare to encounter a number that doesn't "turn blue" when I enter it into the "to" field I wo…

It's highly dependent on the demographic I think. I'd guess that I'm younger than you based on your comment about having kids, and everyone in my social circles use Facebook messenger or instagram.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#816

Post by Raicuparta »

throw310822 wrote: post #792
increscent wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched from Android to iOS just for iMessage. SMS is quite unreliable even in 2023. SMS messages don't have the same delivery guarantees as IP-based messaging services. And often I have internet access, but spotty cellular service. The thing that pushed me over the edge was that my carrier happened to block all my SMS for a day. I only found out about it later in the day, after I had missed many (unrecov…

I don't understand, why don't you force them to use Whatsapp (or Signal, or whatever) to contact you? Get an app that rejects by default SMSes coming from certain numbers. They want to text you at all? They need to use Whatsapp, otherwise they can go fuck themselves. (It worked for me when a friend wanted to force me to contact him on Telegram rather than Whatsapp- I resisted for weeks but at the end I gave in). Once…

I don't use SMS myself but in this case it sounds like I'd be better off just not being your friend.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#817

Post by faverin »

Jesus i'm old. This happened twenty years ago with the ICQ/Yahoo/MSN messenger wars. Everything old does become new again. I wish Congress and the EU figured this out with crypto expert advice - surely we can have apps that only show you the recent messages or something. All on phone so secure but convenient.

A/S/L anyone? +5 Insightful

Some links for the befuddled

An overview: This made the front page https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/24/business/in-cyberspace-ri... https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/oct/13/yahoo.digitalm... A delightful internal MS assembly hacking rivals message apps interview. https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#818

Post by clnq »

martimarkov wrote: post #634
dylan604 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with a lack of spirit. It's a 800lbs of reality crashing down. There's nothing wrong with trying to hack the Gibson. However, this wasn't just a hack, but a severe threat to Apple's walled garden. As long as they are allowed to have it, they will protect it at all costs. Thinking any differently is just naive. So of course this is the ultimate result.

It’s identical to a jailbreak which gets patched ASAP so not sure what is has to do with walled garden as much. I’ve played with the same idea of making an Android client but I would never build a product on that because I know the limitations on my side. As a company you are 100% allowed to break 3rd party client when they don’t have an agreement with you. It’s your product after all. Heck even with an agreement API…

The jailbreak patches are for the walled garden, too. Security is not a concern for those who use jailbreaks. They want to get their devices in the insecure state and go to lengths to do it.

It's similar to how OpenAI uses "safety" to make sure their LLMs don't get them in hot water, and PlayStation uses "safety" to make sure their consoles do not become associated with piracy and make publishers think twice.

This kind of "safety" is about business interests. :) Some companies can say it openly that they wish to protect their business, as fundamentally there is nothing wrong with that. Others can't as that will bode poorly for their monopoly status and they will suffer (overdue) legal repercussions. So it becomes "safety".

Notice how companies that argue against user freedom for "safety" are always in circumstances where bringing up business interests behind "safety" won't bode well.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#819

Post by grishka »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #707
crazygringo wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is the hacker spirit here? The hacker spirit is the fun of reverse engineering. The hacker spirit is about personal use. It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business , or a popular app, that wouldn't quickly be shut down. That's just common sense. > Myself for example owns a Macbook, but an Android phone. Am I not allowed to use iMessage? I paid the toll. Of course you can. It's sitting there on y…

> Of course you can. It's sitting there on your Mac where you can use it as much as you like. For what? I own a Mac an iPhone and an iPad but iMessage and FaceTime are entirely useless to me because no one I communicate with on a regular basis uses Apple devices. Same thing with various iCloud sharing features. Not using the family sharing offers is entirely uneconomical as well. So what happens is that I gravitate t…

> So what happens is that I gravitate to other ecosystems.

I use a Mac but an Android phone. Android because I require the ability to install apps from arbitrary sources, including piracy. Mac because modern Windows is so contemptuous towards its users, and desktop Linux falls apart unless you know the intricacies of its internals.

Anyway, transferring files between the two was a pain in the butt that eventually grew so immense I reverse engineered Google's Nearby Share and made this: https://github.com/grishka/NearDrop

Though yes, I'm not North American so iMessage is just a non-issue to me. I don't know anyone who uses it. No one uses SMS for actual messaging between people, everyone's SMS inbox is 99% OTP codes and various other automatic notifications. Literally everyone who I communicate with is reachable through Telegram.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#820

Post by jeroenhd »

_rs wrote: post #653
jeroenhd wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it would ruin the experience in practice (not being able to receive any notifications), I don't see why someone couldn't perfectly reverse engineer the protocol. Beeper made several design decisions that made the app super easy to use (i.e. using a single certificate that wasn't supplied by a user's phone), but if you extract the necessary source material from an old jailbroken iDevice, you could create an iMes…

Any source/articles about the AIM RCE and it being left open? Would love to read about that

Here's a long writeup by someone who worked at Microsoft at the time: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
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