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Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

arstechnica.com

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Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#201

Post by mcpeepants »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #120
rrreese wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m baffled as to when this time was? Back in the day there was ICQ, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger (and no doubt a dozen I forget). Before the there there the proprietary networks (Aol, CompuServe and others) along with BBS, IRC, Newsgroups, etc. I literally don’t remember a time in my life where messaging hasn’t been fragmented.

A brief period (~2008-2015) when XMPP had momentum and federation was trendy, if incomplete. Apps like Trillian, Pidgin (Gaim), Adium actually allowed chatting across many platforms on the client side. To some extent they still can, with add-ons.

Trillian was a fantastic piece of software

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#202

Post by sottol »

lm411 wrote: post #184
josephcsible wrote: post #126

When Ma Bell didn't let people use third-party phones with their service, the government made them change their ways. Why is the government letting Apple get away with the equivalent?

It's not the equivalent. If the third party phones allowed users access to Ma Bell's network, switching systems, etc, without paying Ma Bell - then it might be equivalent. I'm pretty sure that would be considered theft of communication services.

I feel that's not right either. Apple did not physically build the phone network and nobody is piggybacking on their network, Apple isn't hosting anyone's photos or videos afaict and the user pays for bandwidth, they maybe pay for notification relay to their own users.

It's more like phone manufacturer X that accesses Ma Bell's network creates phone with slightly better call quality that only works with other X phones and is worse with anyone else's phones. And they start doing that once they have >50% market share.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#203

Post by jiggawatts »

ewoodrich wrote: post #109
jiggawatts wrote: post #55

The fundamental issue is that there are no readily-available iPhone emulators that can send iMessages, and this is a good thing that people pay for. The benefit of the Apple walled garden is that the spammers are kept out, because they can't get fifty SIM cards, plug them in to a "SIM box"[1], and start sending hundreds of thousands of scam messages via iMessage. This is easy in an uncontrolled, open-source ecosystem…

Isn't there? You can use iMessage via the Messages app on a Mac and tools like BlueBubbles already have hooks to send and receive iMessages using the official client.

Macs are an Apple product and have the very nearly the same hardware protections.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#204

Post by nicce »

GeekyBear wrote: post #200
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any service online is under no obligation to allow for widespread interpoperation - that would be madness. Lol, "madness". The Digital Services Act in the EU would like a word.

Although the final determination is not yet locked in, the word is that Bing and iMessage have been found to not be popular enough in the EU to fall under the DMA. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-06/apple-ime...

You can see full list of current decisions here without paywall:

https://digital-markets-act-cases.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#205

Post by viraptor »

bscphil wrote: post #167
stouset wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ma Bell had a monopoly. This is one messaging app on one brand of phone. Nothing stops you from using another phone, or multiple or other messaging apps. And messaging apps aren’t restricted by a “default” in quite the same way a web browser is. I have friends on WhatsApp and Signal and Instagram and I message them all without any appreciable difference in effort.

You can run that argument the other way. It's desirable for there to be only one system of phone lines installed everywhere, where anyone with a telephone number can call anyone else. It would be desirable for there to be only one e2e encrypted "double-ratchet" messaging protocol, for the same reasons. In the case of Bell, the universal lines already existed, the problem was that Bell owned them all and wouldn't let…

> It's desirable for there to be only one system

What gets a bit lost in the conversation for iMessage is that the protocol/infra and implementation get merged into one. This is approached in many countries for telcos by splitting the companies providing the lines from the companies providing service on top of them. It's not perfect, but it's better than previous approaches.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#206

Post by dylan604 »

turquoisevar wrote: post #81
NettleBurr wrote: post #28

>Apple on Wednesday appeared to have blocked what Beeper described as "~5% of Beeper Mini users" from accessing iMessages >Apple previously issued a (somewhat uncommon) statement about Beeper's iMessage access, stating that it "took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage." Citing privacy, security, and spam concerns, Apple stated it would "c…

> Not commenting about the ethics of all this, just wondering why technically Apple can only block ~5% of Beeper Mini users instead of all of them? Could this potentially be tied to the use of an email id as the iMessage handle? Apple could block 100% of the people using Beeper and throw Hackintosh users into that as a bonus as well. The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences a…

>Apple could also push out an update tomorrow that would end this once and for all by utilizing device attestation and leveraging Secure Enclave, but this would potentially lock out older devices, something they were willing to do when they upgraded the FaceTime protocol a couple of years ago, but they might not want to do that this time around.

Just give it a couple more hardware generations to ensure the largest % of older hardware upgrades. Anything pre-secure enclave chip would need to be in the low digits I'm guessing. Then again, if they are going to block Messages, that might be the incentive to get these older device users to upgrade.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#207

Post by skeaker »

function_seven wrote: post #143
josephcsible wrote: post #126

When Ma Bell didn't let people use third-party phones with their service, the government made them change their ways. Why is the government letting Apple get away with the equivalent?

Because Ma Bell was a regulated monopoly, and iMessage is not a monopoly. People routinely use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, SMS, FB Messenger, etc. Don't get me wrong, I love that these guys are poking the bear. I wish Apple would do something to let me send high-quality photos and videos to my Android-owning friends via "text". But I don't think the government has a place to force that issue. Plenty of alternatives e…

Why not let the government intervene here? Typically my reason for wanting government to not do stuff is because it could affect me, but none of us will never be a trillionaire corporate entity, so anything done to Apple wouldn't apply to us as a precedent. If anything, you could argue that part of the purpose of the government is to stand up to these giant businesses that the average person can do nothing to.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#208

Post by jwells89 »

turquoisevar wrote: post #81
NettleBurr wrote: post #28

>Apple on Wednesday appeared to have blocked what Beeper described as "~5% of Beeper Mini users" from accessing iMessages >Apple previously issued a (somewhat uncommon) statement about Beeper's iMessage access, stating that it "took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage." Citing privacy, security, and spam concerns, Apple stated it would "c…

> Not commenting about the ethics of all this, just wondering why technically Apple can only block ~5% of Beeper Mini users instead of all of them? Could this potentially be tied to the use of an email id as the iMessage handle? Apple could block 100% of the people using Beeper and throw Hackintosh users into that as a bonus as well. The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences a…

> The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences as some are using someone else’s actual device serial number and those people would be inconvenienced.

One is supposed to try to find a plausible (follows certain rules) but invalid serial to use for hackintoshing and not use real serials, but of course in practice there’s always some number of careless users…

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#209

Post by bilsbie »

Semi related. I got a smart watch with a phone number but I can’t text from it.

Can this product or a different product let me enter my number and let me participate in texting? Maybe a paid app?

(Could I build this with service otherwise?)

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#210

Post by nextos »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #120
rrreese wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m baffled as to when this time was? Back in the day there was ICQ, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger (and no doubt a dozen I forget). Before the there there the proprietary networks (Aol, CompuServe and others) along with BBS, IRC, Newsgroups, etc. I literally don’t remember a time in my life where messaging hasn’t been fragmented.

A brief period (~2008-2015) when XMPP had momentum and federation was trendy, if incomplete. Apps like Trillian, Pidgin (Gaim), Adium actually allowed chatting across many platforms on the client side. To some extent they still can, with add-ons.

This was a great time, and I indeed miss XMPP, with proper federation to lots of different servers, including Google Talk, and Jingle videocalls!

Modern XMPP is really great, Conversations is a fantastic client, supports E2E encryption, is open source, and makes minimal use of resources.

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