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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper Mini is back

#911

Post by lotsofpulp »

microtonal wrote: post #452
lotsofpulp wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most likely reason is that Apple has become utterly boring when it comes to innovation. I recently purchased an iPhone 15, coming from the iPhone 13, I can honestly not say what has changed or improved Is there some law of nature that allows humans to achieve a rate of technological advancement that is beyond what “bores” you?

Is there some law of nature that allows humans to achieve a rate of technological advancement that is beyond what “bores” you? I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say? Are you saying that I am not entitled to progress? If so, I am not saying that I am. I am just saying that (IMO) some other companies are now more innovative and that should worry Apple more. Short term they can try retain users by locking t…

Apple's whole schtick is that they exercise restraint on design so that it works well across many constraints, not just optimizing for one, such as newest or best feature.

I am sure engineering these devices involves lots of compromise, and maybe they did not find sufficient benefits to outweigh the drawbacks for those other features.

Maybe it is possible they swing the pendulum too far into the cautious territory, but given their track record, I would not bet on it.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#912

Post by Sephr »

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.

Clients could probably hook/trap a fake buffer exploit for protocol compatibility without the security concerns. This ends up becoming a game of cat and mouse resulting in even more intricate technical workarounds and hacks.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#913

Post by nojs »

Sephr wrote: post #912
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.

Clients could probably hook/trap a fake buffer exploit for protocol compatibility without the security concerns. This ends up becoming a game of cat and mouse resulting in even more intricate technical workarounds and hacks.

That would be pretty hard in general because you’d have to read the code they sent and figure out what’s safe to execute.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#914

Post by barkerja »

alickz wrote: post #818
dbbk wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the UK and have not seen an MMS conversation in about 15 years. This is crazy.

even SMS is seen as outdated here i feel

What do financial institutions where you live use to communicate TOTP codes? Here in the states, it's almost entirely TOTP codes over SMS (via a shortcode).

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#915

Post by MobiusHorizons »

lallysingh wrote: post #884
hornban wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change. The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple i…

Shh don't mention Voice. Google obviously forgot that they still had it turned on. If they remember it'll get killed.

Google voice has a paid version via Google Workspace, so I doubt the service will go away. But I wouldn't bet on the free version staying free, or not losing features forever.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#916

Post by bentt »

quantumsequoia wrote: post #776
bentt wrote: post #273

The whole green bubble thing with Android SMS on iPhone is a problem, but the solution is to get everyone to use a different chat app. Apple will never give this up. Google could be leading that charge and providing a world beating chat app that works across all phones and all desktop devices. They have every reason to provide the best chat app in the world and yank iPhone users over to it. Instead they have given up…

> but the solution is to get everyone to use a different chat app And how do you do that?

Google could just leverage the very popular Gmail app and start piping people into chat from there. They don't even try. Their Hangouts/Meet app on iPhone is a withered husk.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#917

Post by shazzdeeds »

mholm wrote: post #37

> If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users. Presumably this would only be if Apple agreed to allow the beeper mini users by default? I appreciate Beeper's stance on all of this, and hope they can continue operating.

It’s also either naive or a troll. If that did become the handshake it would be reverse engineered and spoofed by bad actors just the same.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#918

Post by mike_d »

modeless wrote: post #422
mike_d wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not true. iMessage content is encrypted in iCloud with keys stored in your keychain only accessible to your devices. When you add a new device to your account it learns the keys from one of your existing devices and requires touch/face ID approval. In an "all devices lost" situation the keychain is backed up to iCloud but encrypted using a key stored in an HSM that requires authentication using things only yo…

You have been misled. The truth is that the iMessage keys stored in iCloud are accessible to Apple unless you have enabled the non-default Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature. This is clearly documented by Apple themselves[1]. And even if you do enable it, your messages are still accessible to Apple in the iCloud backups of the people you are messaging, since they likely didn't enable a non-default feature like AD…

From that page: "For additional privacy and security, 14 data categories — including Health and passwords in iCloud Keychain — are end-to-end encrypted. Apple doesn't have the encryption keys for these categories, and we can't help you recover this data if you lose access to your account." The page goes on to list iMessage as always E2E. Other types of data like Calendar are only encrypted in transit and at rest so they can do server side processing.

You may also find their legal explanation a bit clearer: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/messages/

Specifically: "We designed iMessage to use end-to-end encryption, so there’s no way for Apple to decrypt the content of your conversations when they are in transit between devices. Attachments you send over iMessage (such as photos or videos) are encrypted so that no one but the sender and receiver(s) can access them."

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#919

Post by haswell »

s3p wrote: post #864
roamerz wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> And it matters to me that my choice of device impacts the users I interact with. Interesting. How does this impact an Android user who sends text to you? To them everyone is green (or whatever color Android uses) correct?

Exactly I can’t see how this is as big an issue as they let on

I would recommend finding a friend or looking up a YT video or whatever to see what the experience is like. Theres a reason this keeps hitting the front page, and it isn’t because the current experience is good.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#920

Post by sterlind »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #874
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…

[flagged]

The study in your first link seems fatally flawed. They should compare photos of Android vs. iPhone users with their phones in the frame vs. photos without phones. It could just be that iPhone users are more likely to be fashionistas, and Android users are more likely to be schlubs. Or that iPhone users are just richer, and wealth is attractive more generally.
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