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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

#321

Post by SpaghettiCthulu »

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…

I must be doing something wrong because I've never received more than one SMS spam message per year.

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

#322

Post by burlesona »

api wrote: post #144

A lot of people don’t understand the absolutely insane (and totally stupid) power of “blue text” in social settings, especially among teens. “Green text” is social suicide, largely because a lot of reactions and emojis and stuff don’t work. It’s also a status symbol… even though high end Android phones cost about what higher end iPhones cost and refurb iPhones are cheap. The iMessage platform is probably the stronges…

This is a weird take when iMessage isn’t even popular outside the US, and Android has 70% global market share. The market is very competitive.

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

#323

Post by jvolkman »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #224
heywire wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost 100% of my chat messages are through iMessage. The only ones that aren’t are group or individual threads with Android users (which btw have never seemed to be an issue. Reactions and gifs all seem to work fine, albeit in reduced quality compared to messages received via iMessage). Every once in a while someone will message me on Facebook, but that’s usually just to share a funny meme or something. I don’t have…

Reactions and gifs work fine for you. They work poorly for the android user. When a friend on an iphone heart emoji reacts to a text, on my end I get a text that says " loved a text". It's obviously not a huge deal, but it's pretty badly executed.

Switch to Google Messages and these messages are handled better.

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

#324

Post by wrboyce »

MR4D wrote: post #153
MR4D wrote: post #130

I don't understand how this is not theft of service, or at least unlawful access. If I am reading the articles on Beeper correctly, they've applied a pretty brilliant hack to gain access to the iMessage network without an Apple ID . That last part seems key (pardon the pun). Can someone explain this to me? I feel like this technical issue is really in the weeds, so I'm sure there are multiple nuances I'm missing...

Ok, people clearly aren't reading the first few words (nor the last line) of my post: "I don't understand..." "Can someone explain this to me? "

I think the problem is that you do understand and have explained it perfectly, but some people can’t handle the truth. These threads have brought out some ludicrous opinions (as anything Apple centric tends to on HN).

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

#325

Post by jmye »

freedomben wrote: post #259
jmye wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are y’all so intent on using iMessage? I (honestly) don’t understand the serious passion behind forcing Apple to open it to everyone. SMS still gets through, and other apps still work. It seems weird to focus so much on this and not on just using something that fits your use case, but maybe I’m missing something.

This has been discussed ad nauseam. In the US, not being a "blue bubble" can have a very high social cost and get you excluded from groups and communication opportunities. People just want to be able to communicate without ridiculous walled garden vendors throwing stupid road blocks in their way and making things artificially harder to get you to "buy your mom an iphone."

That’s a ridiculous reason to demand an open protocol from Apple. I get that it sucks when you’re in high school and kids are massive jerks about social standing, but this can’t be a serious use case post college, right?

Anecdotes about mean girls on Tinder dumping Android users don’t really seem compelling, either.

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

#326

Post by rezonant »

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.

As far as I know, it's not actually known what model numbers, serial numbers, and disk UUIDs Beeper Mini is sending (and no the POC repository doesn't really tell us)-- if you have a source that talks about this I'd love to read it!

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

#327

Post by unstatusthequo »

rezonant wrote: post #313

I think this is kinda technically a win for Beeper. I would've expected another 100% lockout to be Apple's priority. They were instead only able to block 5%, which sounds like a heuristic being applied, and possibly not even an intentional block of Beeper (in the sense that some anti-spam service may be identifying some Beeper users). They can certainly escalate with protocol changes, but they still have to contend w…

Apple owns the delivery mechanism. I don’t believe that a third party using their ecosystem will last long. Nor do I want it. There are plenty of cross-platform things out there. Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp. Why does everyone care so much? Google can paint their Android robot blue. Then maybe all this silliness will end?

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

#328

Post by jmye »

shrimpx wrote: post #265
jmye wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are y’all so intent on using iMessage? I (honestly) don’t understand the serious passion behind forcing Apple to open it to everyone. SMS still gets through, and other apps still work. It seems weird to focus so much on this and not on just using something that fits your use case, but maybe I’m missing something.

It's because SMS is unencrypted, and this is an effort to have secure communication between iOS users and Android users (since iMessage is Apple-device-only). There's also a status factor, where Android users are lowly "green bubbles" in iMessage, which signals decreased security and questionable support for the interactions available to iMessage users. Of course everyone can switch to Signal and this is a moot point…

How many people really care about encrypted text messages? Most of the time, I’m sending my girlfriend pictures of our dogs. If I cared about encryption, we’d download something else (or use gchat or whatever). This just doesn’t seem like it should be that big a deal.

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

#329

Post by skeaker »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #308
skeaker wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is being able to send iMessages to your Android-user friends from your iPhone not to your advantage as an Apple customer?

It's not to Apple's advantage, though.

That does not address my question.

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

#330

Post by the_gastropod »

skeaker wrote: post #255
the_gastropod wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Much of the value of iMessage is the high degree of confidence in its security. Apple controls, end-to-end, the delivery of iMessages from device-to-device. This includes how it handles storage of messages, attachments, app diagnostics, crash reports, etc.. Beeper is an unauthorized user of this supposed-to-be closed-system, and I think it's deteriorating the trust users have in the platform entirely.

How does accessibility hurt security? Security issues for a messaging platform manifest when messages can be intercepted. Having the option to send or receive from more users does not put a man in the middle. If you are doing something that definitely requires E2EE that you are certain works and forces the user on the other end to comply, then maybe I could see your point. You would be in the vast minority of users a…

There are more threat vectors than man-in-the-middle attacks. Beeper Mini does not make the iMessage protocol any less safe. It's end-to-end encrypted. Great. No problem there.

The problem is: the client application itself is a big unknown. Beeper says it's secure, and it very well could be. But we have no idea. But if it receives, decrypts, then sends sensitive information, as diagnostics, back to a a central server unencrypted, for example, that's obviously a huge problem.

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