Comment by xinayder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xinayder | Hacker News Reader

From their blogpost: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-cloud-and-product-roadmap

> Everything changed in August when a security researcher reverse engineered the iMessage protocol.

> At a high level, here’s our product plan for the near future (in very rough order, and very subject to change): > Add support for SMS, WhatsApp and Signal into Beeper Mini, using the same end-to-end encrypted client-side connection architecture. No cloud servers in the middle.

so they are changing their whole business model to rely on illegal proceedings, breaking the ToS of every service they want to provide an alternative for.

I'm pretty sure Apple isn't fond of random people using their servers and their proprietary protocol on a client they haven't created. Signal is the same, they C&D every fork that becomes popular, the only official clients are the CLI and the ones they release (Signal is open source though). WhatsApp is also similar.

It's interesting and disappointing to see that they are hoping to create a business model on top of that, and it will probably backfire and hurt Matrix users as well, because these chat companies will become stricter and completely forbid third-party clients.

Beeper (Cloud) has been around for 3 years. It supports iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal and 12 other chat networks. We have 100,000 users on Beeper Cloud.

We haven't had a single problem like the one you're describing. Not to say it will never happen.

If Beeper Cloud uses a Mac in the middle then I would have assumed that is actually permitted, as its presumably a legitimate iMessage client and some software to forward your messages after that.

It seems similar to the parallel of iOS builds where its been possible to do so with virtualized MacOS on non-Mac hardware for a long time but its a violation of the TOS of MacOS to do so. Apple does spend effort ensuring that companies running cloud builds do so on Mac hardware; they don't care that the true end user is running Windows and achieving an iOS build as long as there was Mac hardware doing the actual building.

So this reply is along the lines of "we did something for 3 years that allow and they never stopped us" which isn't very strong evidence they won't stop you now that you're doing something they don't allow.

They may not do anything here thanks to the current EU climate though, I only mean that the fact they did nothing about Beeper Cloud is not evidence one way or the other.

Apple or Meta (WhatsApp) trying to take down something like this would almost certainly be viewed unfavorably by the ever-lurking EU regulators.

That's the only reason I'm not confident that Apple will kill this. They wouldn't want the regulatory attention and (at least for now) this is a niche area that few people know about.

Easier to kill something when it is a small niche area that few people know about rather than wait until it gets bigger and more people use it.

Except that Matrix never profited from it. Beeper is the first company to provide a paid service for it and had their own servers. But now they are providing a paid (with a free tier) service that runs on Apple/Meta/Signal infrastructure.

This is asking to draw unwanted attention towards yourself.

Please read this:

https://gist.github.com/smashah/667d4d5cf31670ee87547450861a...

The game being played here is poker. If they call beeper's bluff then they risk setting a whole industry wide precedent that interop supercedes ToS (that's the only angle).

As it stands, ToS based C&D for interop is untested afaik.

We as a community need to discuss ToS-trolling and fight against it.

This doesn't hold up.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9966

https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37

unless the EU rushes out their legislation that interop is not grounds for terminating someone's account, I'm sorry, but they can do whatever they want to with their app.

Would you feel happy if someone used your home network to seed torrents? Using your bandwidth to seed them?

Terminating accounts is fair game. Billion dollar companies making legal threats to OSS devs is another.

I can kick said person off my network. It shouldn't be grounds for me to go and start legal proceedings against the developers of uTorrent.

Do you remember back when Pidgin, Trillian, and others created clients that worked across AOL, MSN, and other messengers. They worked for a while, they'd stop working, they'd update and start working, and that went over and over again. I'm not really looking forward to having that experience again.

As others pointed out, you used official Apple hardware.

Now you're replacing that with Apple's own infrastructure.

They won't like this and I really hope an eventual C&D from Apple, Meta and Signal won't affect the development of the Mautrix bridges.

Yeah Apple won't like this or ever officially approve of it, but you make it sound like you'd call the police if you saw someone using an unofficial AIM client. I think the dramatics can be chilled. The ToS is dumb and not worth the virtual paper its written on. If Beeper can keep up with the cat-and-mouse game, this is no different than Trillian or GAIM/Pidgin/Bitlbee/libpurple or aMSN or Miranda IM or Gtkcord4 and on and on and on... Apple doesn't need an internet defense force for their stupid ToS.

I feel like there are two questions Beeper needs to ask itself...

1) Are they going all-in on being an antagonist to Apple?

2) Will the users be willing to stick around during any outages/downtime/failures due to the cat-and-mouse game? (That I agree will follow and continue.)

I can't answer for Beeper, but why would they be unnecessarily antagonistic to Apple? It's not related to their product or mission. Beeper offers interoperability. Antagonism is an undesired byproduct of any of this work, and it's immature to be antagonistic for no reason.

Will it be a cat-and-mouse game? Maybe. Will users stay? Probably. In many cases, Beeper users already WERE iMessage users. Beeper users ARE Discord users. They are users of the upstream service and explicitly want a unified and interoperable chat system, for one reason or another. Maybe it's more practicality than ideals, but it's all the same in the end.

That said, it's not like Beeper is new, and it doesn't seem like antagonism is a primary driver of operational issues yet, so it's not clear it's about to start any time soon, either. Perhaps one of the most annoying tech company strategies is to try to establish a horrid status quo before regulators and law enforcement have time to catch up with you, making it much harder to actually do anything about. I see Beeper as one of a small number of companies that are basically on the opposite end; if they gain a large enough mass of users, it's going to be harder and harder to antagonize Beeper without antagonizing their own userbase, especially when you consider that the value of IM networks is largely in the connections between users. So, the clock is ticking.

When there's money involved, the results are way more dramatic.

If Beeper was free, sure, they wouldn't bother that much.

But Beeper relies on this business model. Apple and co wont let this slip.

When TOSes forbid interoperability, breaking them is just.

but now explain this in "Legaleeze" to Apple, to Nintendo, etc....

Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.

17 U.S. Code § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems

Has this ever succeeded in court? Has it ever even gotten to court or do people just give up at the first lawyer's letter?

Yes, it has been tested many times, famously for unlicensed video games on consoles.

You do know DMCA is not the only law they can refer to to sue freeloaders, right?

I agree with this statement but in the end, the effects of Beeper will negatively impact everyone else who hosts a bridge for these services.

Just because a legal binding document seems stupid it doesn't mean you can break them.

I find most laws stupidly worded, it doesn't mean I should disrespect them.

> Signal is the same, [...], the only official clients are the CLI and the ones they release

Is there an officially supported CLI for Signal? Please tell me it's true, that would mean so much for small scale automation!

Not official but this works darn well: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli

It's not official but they don't want to kill it for some reason, maybe their own devs use it for testing

> Signal is the same, they C&D every fork that becomes popular, the only official clients are the CLI and the ones they release

This always rubbed me the wrong way and made it seem like it's an NSA operation

The source to Signal is open to analysis if you doubt its security. I suspect they C&D forks because they don't follow coding/security practices as upstream does, and it would be too hard to ensure they would if they just let anyone fork it.

No guarantee the build on the app store is the same as on github.

> No guarantee the build on the app store is the same as on github.

I don't know why this comment always pops up on HN every time Signal is mentioned.

Signal builds on Android have been reproducible on Signal for nearly eight years - basically the entire time Signal has existed as an app under that name.

On iOS? No, because Apple doesn't allow reproducible builds on the App Store, period. But you can't blame Signal for that.

https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/

Not really. Moxie just said "we pay for the infrastructure so it's unfair that you get to use the servers we pay for".

Nah. Not NSA. CIA

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