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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

#411

Post by codexb »

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…

This argument doesn't make any sense from a user standpoint though. It would only make sense if users insisted on only using iMessage exclusively and didn't accept non-iMessage SMS messages at all. Getting an iphone and using iMessage doesn't make you less susceptible to spam text messages than Android users or people using other texting platforms, *because everyone uses SMS*. It's impossible not to.

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

#412

Post by skeaker »

the_gastropod wrote: post #330
skeaker wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In that case Beeper Mini themselves are the man in the middle... But that aside, yeah, that's a problem with all closed source E2EE services. If you are a journalist in a warring nation or are being tracked by state actors I would hope you are not using iMessage to stay safe to begin with.

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

#413

Post by skeaker »

tgma wrote: post #332
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?

You’d be surprised how many people in the US have purely iPhone social circles. They won’t care. The graph is almost disjoint. Outside tech nerds, android == poor.

You're still advantaged should you ever make friends with an Android user in the future, or at the very least you're not disadvantaged since you would not have had any difference made to you.

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

#414

Post by skeaker »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #375
skeaker wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes your anecdote more valuable than GP's? You may not know anyone who does the "snobby conformist" act, but GP does. Why should I care that you haven't experienced it when someone who actually has experienced it tells me so? Moreover, since you admit those people exist, why wouldn't you support interoperability between iMessage and other platforms? It would only benefit you as a user since it would allow you…

> What makes your anecdote more valuable than GP's? You may not know anyone who does the "snobby conformist" act, but GP does. Why should I care that you haven't experienced it when someone who actually has experienced it tells me so? Arguably you should care about neither then. > Moreover, since you admit those people exist, why wouldn't you support interoperability between iMessage and other platforms? There is int…

Okay? Again, you're agreeing on every point except an unrelated anecdote. I agree that getting jerked around for using Apple stuff is dumb too. Do you even take any issue with Beeper Mini or did I misread somewhere?

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

#415

Post by turquoisevar »

nneonneo wrote: post #402
turquoisevar wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They indeed used to have data like that encoded in it. Not too long ago, however, they moved to a completely randomized serial format, perhaps partly because of iMessages shenanigans.

iMessage seems to use quite a lot of information from the hardware aside from the serial number. See https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush/blob/main/emulated/data... for the data that is used to calculate the "validation blob" to activate iMessage. Several of the keys (not values!) are random-looking gibberish like "kbjfrfpoJU" and "oycqAZloTNDm", while others are normal things like "product-name" and "IOPlatformUUID"…

Those random looking keys are derived from the hardware and together with the values they serve as seeds for some of the keys.

Server-side there’s a bunch more information used from the Apple ID.

Together it results in a score and the server then decides if it meets the threshold before deciding to play nice.

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

#416

Post by _rs »

rezonant wrote: post #326
turquoisevar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

I’m pretty sure Apple could figure this out pretty easily by running it on an Android device themselves, considering they control the endpoints it talks to

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

#417

Post by inferiorhuman »

orangecat wrote: post #318
joshmanders wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now apply this logic to any other company product, maybe even your own or the company you work for and tell me if this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does me.

Now apply this logic to any other company product Ok...third parties should be able to sell ink that works in your HP printer, or coffee pods that work in your Keurig, or tires that work on your Ford. tell me if this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does me It sounds not ridiculous at all. The only difference with Beeper is that there is some marginal cost to handling messages, but we all know that's not Apple's rea…

  …third parties should be able to sell
To take that analogy a step further: third parties can sell messaging apps for iOS.

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

#418

Post by [deleted] »

qeternity wrote: post #35
echelon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple customers have ample access to iMessage, after all. It's not really fair that Apple gets to build snares around owning the most successful and important platform in modern civilization. This isn't an automobile where there are 50 alternative manufacturers, this is the "everything" device that handles your bills, employment, connections to loved ones, etc. And there's only one other choice of vendor in the Uni…

> This isn't an automobile where there are 50 alternative manufacturers No, it’s exactly this. There are a ton of manufacturers all providing this product. It just so happens that Apple’s is one of the best, if not the best. And as has been mentioned, there are tons of secure messaging alternatives. It’s just that people prefer iMessage. This is not illegal or anticompetitive. Imagine if someone claimed they should b…

[deleted]

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

#419

Post by wpm »

huevosabio wrote: post #406

Completely uninformed question, doesn't this fight just push people to WhatsApp? I never use SMS, and no one in Mexico does either. My friends in Europe seem to largely use WhatsApp as well. So it really seems like Americans are outliers in their choice for iMessage / SMS. So, wouldn't this push Americans to WhatsApp?

Most people who use iMessage here have literally no idea this is even happening and would not care if I told them. It's still just as hard as it's always been to get all of your friends/contacts to "just switch to WhatsApp".

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

#420

Post by BenjiWiebe »

josephg wrote: post #34
unshavedyak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple customers have ample access to iMessage, after all. And as has been noted many, many times, there are many means of accessing secure cross-platform messaging. In fairness, i am a 5+ device apple customer and i can't use it on my two primary desktops. I use Beeper to write texts on my primary computer. Apple feels anti-me. I pay for products and unless i'm 100% into the ecosystem they fight me. Sure, they don'…

Yeah. I’ve got all sorts of Apple stuff in the house. One apple ecosystem piece I adore is being able to copy paste between my Apple devices. I’d love it if that worked from my Linux workstation too. C’mon, Apple.

Thanks to kde connect, I've been really enjoying shared clipboard between Windows, Linux, and my Android phone.
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