“Apple took away Messages.app UI scripting capabilities in OS X 10.11”
github.com
github.com
If you want something more open, that exists too, which is great. It doesn't make sense to complain that iMessage isn't what you want it to be. Choice means that open and closed solutions exist in the market.
This is a massive unsolved problem.
"This word that doesn't mean this other word means this other word."
What?
Somehow people recognize that illusion of choice when talking about Facebook, but fail to recognize it here? Weird.
She can text me, but when I or anybody else On an iPhone try to text her it goes to iMessage and she never receives it.
Yes this is "just a bug", but it also seriously promotes lock-in. It's a very strategic bug, and if she hadn't bought a new phone she would probably be back on iMessage.
iMessage is not always a choice, sometimes it's for life whether you wanted it to be or not.
Why not? I don't know the specifics of this case, but if you are a user as well as developer that is going to release apps on the App Store and give x% of your revenue to Apple, it might make a lot of sense for Apple to listen carefully when you complain that iMessage is horrible and a pain to script around.
You really love iMessage because it is free from spam and abuse, not because it is tied-down. It is Apple's job to make it the former and avoid the latter.
Because alternatives exist that satisfy your needs.
> You really love iMessage because it is free from spam and abuse, not because it is tied-down.
It is free from spam and abuse because it is tied-down. This isn't a controversial statement; it's one of the famously difficult problems in computer networks. Nobody has solved it.
This argument makes sense only in applications that can be substituted for one another. With IMs, like with social networks, you'd have to replace not just the app, but also your friends.
Since you are in a way being forced to use that particular communications app, it makes sense to ask it to complain about it getting worse.
1. Requiring a unique phone number for signup, and heavily restricting accounts which appear to have used a VOIP phone number for signup (including Google Voice numbers). Restricted accounts can't initiate conversations, so they can't really send spam.
2. Allowing users to report spammers that get past #1, and limiting the accounts of users that get reported.
For details, see: https://telegram.org/faq_spam
While you enjoy your "spam free" service, some of us will have to work with the separate but not equal alternative. In case you haven't noticed, as the common communication environment has become more and more locked-down (starting with mobile, and now spilling over into desktop), fewer people are using open alternatives. Simply observing that open protocols exist doesn't make them an actual de facto alternative.
Are you paying for it?
I can be reached by telephone. What I don't have is a unique telephone number. This works perfectly fine for actual voice communication. If you think I can simply afford an extra monthly expense, you're wrong.
> You are like 0.0000001% of the market.
Made up statistics reveal your presuppositions.
There are a lot of people that don't have a unique phone number. It's a minority position, but that's kind of my point: chat services do not inherently depend on traditional phone numbers, and requiring one is going to exclude more people than you probably realize.
And of course that statistic is made up. It was a joke.
Are you in a country which doesn't have pay-and-go service?
but for IM
Similarly if you'd only accept cryptographically signed mail by default the spam problem would go away as a bye product.
Security problems aren't solved through closed protocols, and open protocols don't have to have security problems.
In this case, at the very least a mailbox address would be a cryptographically unguessable identifier. Ideally, each person to whom you are introduced would get their own unguessable mailbox address that acts as a proxy for your real mailbox, and you can delete that proxy anytime you wish to stop receiving e-mail from that person (and anyone with whom they shared your address). This completely eliminates the viability of selling your personal information to advertisers and spammers. Obviously this process has to be simple and semi-automatic, preferably transparent, or people won't be able to use it (like the web of trust), but the idea is sound, and based on capability security.
People already do something like this manually with subaddressing, and it seems the general concept I presented above has an official name as "disposable e-mail addresses" [1].
Spam on IM? I've honestly only seen this on skype. Is this actually an issue on other networks/countries?
Almost every iMessage user who activated with a Chinese mobile number has been receiving 3~10 spam iMessages everyday about online gambling and etc since ~2012 when iMessage service went live in China. The content for those messages have been pretty much the same with some minor variant on wording.
With the scale of the spam, I believe it's likely not sent thru UI scripting, but the iMessage protocol might have been well reverse-engineered and exploited by spammers. So disabling UI scripting won't help anything but cause trouble for developers with legit usage.
Generally I am not that upset if a business uses a captcha; I'm willing to meet in the middle. I as the customer am the one paying for fraud, do you think the CEO just takes fraud as a deduction out of their paycheck?
(My second paragraph was actually directed at a reply to your comment.)
Yes, and if Google's captcha didn't get much harder, I wouldn't mention it. At least they stopped showing impossible to read random words. They had one variant which I never once passed and had to reload until I got something with distinctive letters.
Try using Tor for a few days. You'll see plenty of lovely captchas, courtesy of our CloudFlare overlords. /s
EDIT: what's /s
As for /s: It's a sarcasm tag, to make sure people get the tone of the sentence "You'll see plenty of lovely captchas, courtesy of our CloudFlare overlords."
I consistently fail captchas, last iterations are simply too hard for humans. Googles aren't even the worse.
Perhaps the OP really is talking about the Messages.app UI, but the screenshot on github imply that this is some sort of alternate UI (curses-based). Perhaps I'm misundestanding.
tell application "Messages" to send "This is an SMS" to buddy "+14155555555" of service "SMS"Unless it's been disabled with 10.11.5 it's still working :)
tell application "Messages"
set iMessageService to (first service whose service type is iMessage)
send "Hello World" to buddy "0123456789" of iMessageService
end tellThere were people selling apps that bought iMessage to other platforms, by using VMs in servers running the desktop App and using the scripting functionality.
It was a nasty hack for interoperability but it worked and is probably the only thing that would work. It also indicates how much Apple cares about squashing interoperability for iMessage. Whether you feel this is because it presents a security risk or a business risk is down to the cut of your tin foil hat.
It's also a way to squash spam and whatnot from iMessage.
In 10.11 Apple added System Integrity Protection[1][2], so it might not be as simple as it once was to hack preinstalled apps. From wiki:
Most preinstalled Apple applications in /Applications are protected as well. The kernel stops all processes without specific privileges from writing to flagged files and folders. It also prevents code injection, runtime attachment (like debugging) and DTrace
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204899 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Integrity_Protection
Still technically works if you disable SIP, but that's a big ask just to be able to use my little toy app.
It is understandable that Apple doesn't want malware to easily read people's messages.
Edit: I mean for the purposes of spam, not for the purposes of making an app like the one OP linked to.