Hacker News Reader

Comment by flomo | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't seem hard, people like your father can be allow-listed, he's not signing-up out of the blue. (I'm wondering if this "works" because the early adopters were hackintosh types who were already on imessage and not abusers. When the H3rb8l V18gr8 crowd shows up, that is the end.)

View on HN

Now then.. if I am a professional spammer (which I am not), what stops me from buying a second hand mac or a second hand iphone (for $150 each) and start 'doing business' with iMessage? Unless it's an issue of 'iPhones can't be JB-ed like Androids can be rooted to run all shorts of malware/spamming softwares'.

I get Apple's "this is our toy, you won't be making $2/month/user on us".

But "keeping the spammers out" it's a bit.. weird..?

Can someone please describe the WHAT is the technical advantage of Android users to spam over iPhone/Mac users to spam.

> what stops me from buying a second hand mac or a second hand iphone (for $150 each) and start 'doing business' with iMessage?

Nothing, that's why iMessage is full of spam already.

What scammers do is buying boxes of old half broken iphones and they turn them into relays exactly as you said.

I have never received a single spam message through iMessage, but regardless. If they have to keep buying new phones all the time as they get blacklisted, in order to keep spamming, the economics of spamming changes.

That does raise the bar a little bit but it's probably mitigated by the combination of targeting higher spending users and the additional trust iMessage provides.

The difference between being able to send unlimited messages for free, and having to get a new phone every hundred or so texts is pretty large. Free vs 1 dollar per spam text.

I did recieve some spam messages there, so Apple's claims about muh security etc. already is bogus

> Unless it's an issue of 'iPhones can't be JB-ed like Androids can be rooted to run all shorts of malware/spamming softwares'.

We're also talking about old, non-updated iOS versions here, jailbreaks are more likely to last when they target these versions.

The whitelist would be on the phone number/icloud id and not tied to the device.

That’d be pretty difficult to get second hand, especially when you can just spam over SMS.

They could even release a new iMessage protocol with another bubble color and let the blue ones become uncool.

The what crowd?

Spam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com