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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper Mini is back

#721

Post by danaris »

_gabe_ wrote: post #154
SpaceManNabs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iPhone customers desperately want to be able to chat together is also laughably false lol. iPhone users just want android users to get an iphone.

It’s false based on what? Your own anecdotal experience? I have a friend group that has iPhones and Androids. We went on vacation and had to jump through so many hoops just to share our pictures. We don’t care what devices everybody uses, because why the heck should that matter? The fact that it can be simple to share high fidelity pictures and videos, but it isn’t just because Apple wants their walled garden benefit…

It's not hard "just because Apple wants their walled garden benefits nobody but Apple". It's hard because SMS does not and cannot support those features.

If you want group picture sharing, just pick a chat protocol that actually supports that, rather than bitching at Apple over what SMS, a protocol they have zero control over, can and can't do.

Apple is not deliberately degrading the experience for SMS users, or refusing to allow sharing high-quality videos and photos with SMS users. That's like saying Apple is discriminating against your grandmother by not letting you video call her landline phone from 1985.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#722

Post by brigade »

zeven7 wrote: post #698
brigade wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking why cryptographic attestation isn't a requirement to use a service that still supports >10-year old x86 Macs?

Yeah? Asymmetric cryptography has been around a lot longer than a decade.

That's the foundation of attestation, not attestation itself. Macs did not ship with a TPM, and had no facilities for hardware chain-of-trust until the T2 chip in 2017.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#723

Post by jorvi »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #447

Some useful history, the AOL/MSN chat wars: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ AOL finally "won" that one by making a buffer exploit in their own client part of the required protocol. Later a court required them to allow messaging interop (as part of the Time Warner merger). They never implemented it.

Did AOL really win in the end though?

My youth was in the late 90s and 2000s and I don’t know a single soul that used AOL, ICQ, or Yahoo. I imagine all of them must have been hoping for the reverse at that point, access to MSN.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#724

Post by mardifoufs »

dontlaugh wrote: post #715
js2 wrote: post #471

> Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. [...] Even worse, when iPhone customers added an Android phone number to an existing iMessage secure encrypted group chat, the Messages app would by default switch the entire group chat to using unencrypted, unsecure SMS. These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and in…

It hardly matters, almost everyone on earth uses WhatsApp for group chats.

I'm not American and I've never seen anyone use WhatsApp. I only use it to text my family back in Morocco. Facebook Messenger is even more universal than WhatsApp in my experience

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#725

Post by kevinsync »

dhosek wrote: post #688
gorjusborg wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only blocker is that Apple doesn't want it to exist. This is my main source of excitement around this project. The existence of this project shows that there is no technical reason it can't exist. So, what is the reason it doesn't exist? Exactly what you said: Apple thinks it is in its best interest not to.

There’s also the fact that iMessages have a cost to them. An individual message might not amount to much, but millions of them? Apple is hosting the computing to manage the delivery of iMessages. Should they provide that free of charge to the world out of the goodness of their heart?

As of iOS 6.1 (2013), Apple said APNS had delivered over 4 trillion notifications already. A 2018 paper [0] claimed (with an admittedly-small sample size) that people receive on average 56 notifications a day (delivered, not necessarily interacted with). It's almost 2024. Even going off those old numbers, assuming 2 billion active devices [1], APNS would be delivering close to 41 TRILLION messages a year, and likely growing.

That's a lot of pepperoni, guys. Expensive pepperoni. Just some food for thought.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3229434.3229445 [0]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1383887/number-of-apple-... [1]

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#726

Post by [deleted] »

magnio wrote: post #418

Not living in US so it's fun to see people poking at big corporations like the mouse-and-cat chase of ad-blockers and anti-ad-blockers. Unfortunately, in the end, it is usually the big companies that have both the moral and technical high grounds, just like YouTube and Reddit did. Also funny to see HN trashes on Google for their Web Environment Integrity while Apple pulling off the biggest attestation scheme in histo…

[deleted]

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#727

Post by Shekelphile »

sneak wrote: post #720
Shekelphile wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Beeper Mini does not MITM messages - it's a reverse engineering of how iMessage works, and runs entirely on-device, without putting messages thru Beeper's servers. It talks directly to Apple and pretends to be an iPhone. It doesn't matter. It's closed source and not easily audited - they could easily just be doing a naive solution and piping every message back to themselves after it's decrypted by the client.

iMessage is also closed source, and iOS (as documented by Apple) backdoors the encryption in iMessage by including the cross-device “Messages in iCloud” endpoint iMessage sync keys in the non-e2ee iCloud Backup (as documented plainly in Apple’s own HT202303). This means Apple can read the iCloud Backup contents, and Apple has the Messages in iCloud device endpoint keys, and Apple can decrypt the iMessages sent to or…

> It’s not fair to level these sorts of potential/speculative security concerns at Beeper Mini when iMessage’s first-party implementation has way worse problems that are actually documented.

Apple has a proven track record of not handing over all your messages to russian and chinese intelligence, something that beeper is almost certainly doing (as their business model revolves entirely around MITMing your email and chat)

You sound like a fifth columnist.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#728

Post by rplnt »

dwaite wrote: post #646
rplnt wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an iPhone (and macbook if that matters) and have no idea what all the rage is about. Is iMessage the default sms client? It's just called Messages on my phone. What does it offer? Mine looks like the stock android one. I see virtually zero options to do anything else than to send a message. Is it US only thing?

Messages sends SMS/MMS (on a Phone or configured Mac/iPad/Watch), but will transparently upgrade to the iMessage protocol when talking to another Apple user. This has substantially better features over SMS, including network access and the ability to send higher quality multimedia. If you don't ever want to fall back to SMS, you pick some other app (WhatsApp, Signal, etc). In the US, unlimited texting became a thing…

Thanks for the details and background. If I recall correctly, back when I had an Android, every app (Signal, Telegram, Messwnger I think) wanted to become my default messaging app. I'm assuming to do basically do what you are describing. Google had like 20 messaging apps over the years, but they never combined ot or I guess other vendors went with stock sms-only one instead?

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#729

Post by dontlaugh »

mardifoufs wrote: post #724
dontlaugh wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hardly matters, almost everyone on earth uses WhatsApp for group chats.

I'm not American and I've never seen anyone use WhatsApp. I only use it to text my family back in Morocco. Facebook Messenger is even more universal than WhatsApp in my experience

Sure, that one is popular too. My point was that almost no one uses iMessage group chats.
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