I miss the days of GAIM/Pidgin/Trillium/Adium and hope Beeper prevails here.
The top reply addresses your points:
> The hacker spirit is the fun of reverse engineering. The hacker spirit is about personal use.
> It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business, or a popular app, that wouldn't quickly be shut down. That's just common sense.
Beeper’s CEO is acting high and mighty, speaking like he’s some kind of ideological liberator, while charging for a service using another’s infrastructure. Had it been free and open-source from the start¹ you’d see a lot more people on their side. As soon as you start charging, you lose a lot of “hacker” sympathy.
It’s possible to disagree with Apple for not providing iMessage on Android while at the same time disagreeing with Beeper’s approach.
¹ And I do mean the whole app, not the proof-of-concept from the teenager.
I'm not sure how all this points to "get-rich-quick" silicon valley startup type to you but the behavior looks pretty different to me. Given their history, my guess is they put beeper mini out there primarily to put pressure on apple. If apple doesn't shut it down, cool, everyone has access to imessage through beeper. If apple does shut it down, at least it leaves little doubt about the situation: interoperability is not impossibly hard, apple really doesn't care about the security or privacy of their customers as much as they like to say they do, and at the end of the day imessage is only limited to apple devices because apple is apple. (For most companies I would say imessage is locked to apple devices because it's about the money but apple is one of those companies that takes weirdly principled positions even when it makes no sense, kind of similar to nintendo in that way.)
I suppose if all I had seen was the past month of buzz around them then I might perceive them differently.
Who ever argued it was? Apple never claimed they wouldn’t bring iMessage to Android because it was hard. Them making an Android app would be trivial, they simply choose not to. Which I disagree with, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with Beeper’s approach.
> apple really doesn't care about the security or privacy of their customers as much as they like to say they do
That’s a bogus argument from Beeper. Why would Apple trust them? Beeper probably isn’t siphoning messages from user’s devices to spy on them but Apple doesn’t know that, none of us do. And if they allow that use, the app that comes next might be nefarious.
> For most companies I would say imessage is locked to apple devices because it's about the money but apple is one of those companies that takes weirdly principled positions even when it makes no sense
I think lots of lobbyists were making such arguments about the DMA in Europe.
> That’s a bogus argument from Beeper. Why would Apple trust them?
This has little to do with beeper's client. The point is, apple could easily bring imessage to android and doing so would increase their customers privacy, because now all their android conversations could be e2ee. apple of course chooses not to do this even with how trivial it would be, showing that their privacy focused marketing is really just empty words. Beeper's role here is simply bringing more attention to this two faced apple propaganda.
> https://www.techemails.com/p/imessage-for-android
It's possible that imessage wasn't brought to android for monetary purposes early on, but at this point it's pretty clear there's a large segment of android users willing to pay a subscription to get imessage and that would be practically free money for apple. I think the main reason they still haven't included android is it goes against their vertical integration philosophy. They want to control everything (they don't control android, or the android app store) and are willing to make sacrifices and gambles in pursuit of that (eg them sinking loads of money to try and engineer their own modems even though it is likely to be worse than qualcomm's for quite some time, and who knows if they'll ever even ship an iphone with an apple modem before they shut the division down).
I reject this idea completely. The "hacker spirit" in no way excludes doing business or making money. Hackers creating businesses to bring the benefits of their hacking to the world are the very foundation of YC who created and operate this site.
> charging for a service using another’s infrastructure
Beeper doesn't get any benefit from using Apple's infrastructure per se. The resource usage is trivial. If there was a way to go around Apple's infrastructure and communicate with Apple's iMessage users directly Beeper would be all over it and more than happy to replace all that "infrastructure" themselves at no cost to Apple.
Apple has inserted themselves between their users and the world, making it impossible for anyone to send proper group or video messages to their unchangeable default messaging app without going through Apple. Beeper is simply doing the only thing that will work to fix Apple's intentional crippling of communication with Android for their own benefit.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies
What hacking benefits are brought by the top 5 companies in this list?
I disagree. There is a clear line in many business from "cool hacking shit" to "cool/profitable business", but that hacker spirit is lost every single time.
The "hacking spirit" is never about money either - see any 90s/00s movie about hacking, or any of the 80s/90s manifestos online.
These aren't freedom fighters, trying to fight Goliath and bring messaging to the people. The original project they built on was. Beeper are profiteers, seeking to middle man some money. There nothing wrong with that - good on them - but that's hardly "hacker spirit".
I consider it so because of recent reports that 87% of US teens own iPhones, and colloquial knowledge of how "green bubbles" negatively affect teens' social and mental health.
Apple's goal is for iMessage to remain an exclusive feature of their hardware. That exclusivity is what Beeper -- or an Apple-vended Android client, or RCS interoperability, or federation generally -- threatens.
And -- it's exactly the proposition of, "to use our popular offering in market X, you must also purchase our offering in market Y" which is anticompetitive.
The issue isn't so much Beeper as it is the open the door to anyone on the Internet. I.e. Apple probably cares little about Beeper itself, and more about the risk of 3rd party software accessing its services/users.
A good number of us have had to combat spam/abuse in our careers, and we're sympathetic to the plight.
(I'd still prefer to see 3rd party clients as I appreciate the integration those can bring. But the hardware lock-in is particularly egregious.)
Creating barrier to entry for spam definitely reduces it but we know for a fact that's not a very effective spam fighting strategy.
I also think modern anti-spam tech is really good. My Samsung phone here is really good at blocking robo calls here in Thailand. In fact I handn't received one since my upgrade to S22. If Samsung can block robo calls and open protocols like federation and email can stop spam through simple tech and volunteer work then multibillion company with some of the best engineers surely can't find this that challenging right? So I find the spam argument for closing off iMessages not very convincing to say the least.
You lost me here. iMessages in particular are not able to be automated because they always require user input before they’re sent.
There are very few OS processes that have an escalated privilege which allows sending iMessage without user input, but given the lack of widespread iMessage spam vs. SMS spam, it seems those processes aren’t actively being exploited.
Even iPhones in general are actually very hard to automate.
So honestly I have no clue what you’re talking about.
Sentiment at the time was that we wished AOL would welcome third party clients but it was not their duty or obligation to do so. Likewise most people believed the third party clients were free to adapt to the changes. Both had the right to play cat/mouse as long as they wished.
Beeper is making a very different argument: that the courts and/or law should force anyone exposing an endpoint to the internet to bend over backwards so third parties can use the endpoint too (for free) because that would be convenient for end users. That Beeper can decide, at its own discretion, what is or is not allowable for something that was never intended to allow third party access.
Every company is almost by definition a monopolist with regard to its own products and services because even mostly equivalent things are still different in some way that could matter to a customer. It is all about where you draw the lines.
Several other comment mention "piggybacking", but there are plenty of services piggybacking on tech giants: SearX, Nitter, Invidious, Teddit, Libreddit. One can even argue that LineageOS and GrapheneOS are piggybacking on Google's efforts.
Beeper is requesting money for illegally distributing Apples copyrighted code which they then use in a questionable way. Cry me a river.
Here they simply provide someone else’s library to perform the authentication. That’s just basic copyright infringement, however lofty the goal.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/858511/what-is-com-apple...
https://www.theregister.com/2003/08/11/habeas_cans_spammer/
You can’t write an emulator and sell it including the bios written by Sony. Has been enforced many times. Similarly, you can’t do what Beeper is doing here.
This is exactly the case here. The barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce this obfuscated code which, crucially, serves no other purpose. Even if it would be theoretically possible to achieve interoperability otherwise by heroic reverse engineering of said code, that doesn't matter just as it didn't matter in Sega v. Accolade where that exact argument was made unsuccessfully by Sega.
This is not analogous to reproducing a whole BIOS which is not obfuscated code and is used for miscellaneous purposes having nothing to do with access restriction. This is clearly fair use according to precedent.
Ultimately either Apple will successfully block Beeper permanently or they will DMCA them and the courts will have their say. We’ll see.