511–520 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh, I used to receive spam on iMessage with blue bubbles. In fact the only blue bubbles I receive are spam.
[flagged]
Where is the hacker spirit here? The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!" is saddening. It is a bit dicey when you're charging for it, but since Mini was entirely client-side it would be feasible for a free version to exist. Apple claims iMessage is E2EE, do we have proof they aren't siphoning the messages from the client once it's been decrypted? The level of trust we have t…
> Where is the hacker spirit here? The site is called "Hacker News" but it's predominantly existed over the years as a funnel for the business-centric Valley industry. Which is to say that I think you're trying to apply one specific definition of "hacker" when it doesn't really work that way.
An app like Beeper Mini wants to be something like NewPipe for YouTube: installable only if you know how to download F-Droid, maintained by a community of fans, used only by people who understand that Google can break it at any time and it might take days to weeks for it to recover.
What Beeper did instead was build a startup and sell subscriptions to mainstream users, and now that it inevitably broke they come off as very whiny about it. It's not just Silicon Valley business types who see that and wince: it's offensive to old-school hackers too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you've got Beeper Mini mixed up with other iMessage bridges. The whole thing with Beeper Mini (vs other iMessage bridges) was that it was entirely client side on the phone, no server to block. So the "IPs Beeper Mini was using to connect to the APN service", those IPs were just the IP addresses of every individual phone with Beeper Mini installed on it, no centralized place to block.
No, the BPN server is a server side service that persistently recieves APNs to forward to the phone (that don't contain the message data) since unlike iPhones, Android phones can't persistently check for APNs (at least that's what I understood from the announcement article). AIUI that's what you're paying for. But that wouldn't explain why sending is broken.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you've got Beeper Mini mixed up with other iMessage bridges. The whole thing with Beeper Mini (vs other iMessage bridges) was that it was entirely client side on the phone, no server to block. So the "IPs Beeper Mini was using to connect to the APN service", those IPs were just the IP addresses of every individual phone with Beeper Mini installed on it, no centralized place to block.
If you check the How it Works post, they do show the Beeper Push Notification Service running in the cloud [1] to intercept 'new message available' APNs and then notify the Android device a new message is available. [1] https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember another post that was very well-received where an individual hacker wrote his own homebrew iMessage client for his own personal purposes. HN really liked that! I think HN exists at an intersection of individual hackerism and business. If a project is clearly by-hackers-for-hackers it gets a lot more leeway for unsustainable concepts / implementations. But this is building a business on adversarial interope…
youtube-dl, NewPipe, and uBlock Origin exist solely for the purpose of empowering the individual, yet they are constantly attacked on HN as being tools used unfairly to harm Google's profitability. Open-source projects like Matrix, PeerTube, Mastodon, are built to be free and open-source for the benefit of end-users and lack of vendor lockin. Yet each is derided on HackerNews for not being enough like their corporate…
Note: this is very different from "but I want to block all ads", that's not what I'm writing here and also not what others might be writing.
As for the audience, it varies, but this website is a VC thing, so it makes some sense that a bunch of visitors are from the VC ecosystem and as such might be very money-oriented.
As usual, Gruber was right on the money. Via Threads yesterday: "My prediction is that Apple will make changes—fixing bugs and/or closing loopholes—that break Beeper Mini. It’s untenable that there’s unsanctioned client software for a messaging platform for which privacy and security are a primary feature. It’s a very nice app, remarkably clever, and for now works like a charm, but if Apple wanted an iMessage client…
>It’s untenable that there’s unsanctioned client software for a messaging platform for which privacy and security are a primary feature. I don't follow this logic at all. Shouldn't supporting thirdparty clients be desirable if security is a primary feature in the interest of transparency? Especially if the reference client is proprietary and undocumented.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am reasonably sure that their main driver is profit which really means exploitation of people Just wondering if you've forgotten what site you're on. This is YC which exists to build companies whose main driver will always be profit.
There are companies who have come out of YC who have main drivers other than profit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This should have been obvious to anyone who saw the code where it simply contained the raw literal string `FAIRPLAY_PRIVATE_KEY = b64decode(“…”)`. I suppose now we’ll see how accurate the commenter’s claim “if this becomes a problem, I know how to generate new keys” is. https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush/blob/main/albert.py#L16
[flagged]
From what I gather, the private key was private until it was leaked to / stolen by the team who published it for this use case.
I don't have enough context to say, because I have to admit that once published, the keypair corresponding to the private key is likely to be revoked/discarded.
Where is the hacker spirit here? The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!" is saddening. It is a bit dicey when you're charging for it, but since Mini was entirely client-side it would be feasible for a free version to exist. Apple claims iMessage is E2EE, do we have proof they aren't siphoning the messages from the client once it's been decrypted? The level of trust we have t…
I remember another post that was very well-received where an individual hacker wrote his own homebrew iMessage client for his own personal purposes. HN really liked that! I think HN exists at an intersection of individual hackerism and business. If a project is clearly by-hackers-for-hackers it gets a lot more leeway for unsustainable concepts / implementations. But this is building a business on adversarial interope…
I mean go for it, hack away! I hope apple keeps android far far away from me though lol