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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

As far as “siphoning off resources” is concerned, it’s not that different from sending emails to an iCloud Mail address, which also makes use of Apple’s servers. Beeper’s purpose is not for Android users to communicate among themselves, but to communicate with Apple users. It’s only natural that this would involve Apple’s servers, as it does with email.

This is not to say that this entitles anyone to do so without Apple’s consent, but the argument about resource usage is a straw man here, IMO. This is not about who pays for the servers. Even if Beeper would offer Apple an appropriate portion of their revenue (edit: and they actually do in TFA), Apple would not agree. For Apple, this is about keeping the garden wall up.

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> As far as “siphoning off resources” is concerned, it’s not that different from sending emails to an iCloud Mail address, which also makes use of Apple’s servers.

Which is the intent of running those email servers. These are the “public-use” servers. The iMessage servers are private.

That’s not how email works. Your email provider maintains servers to send and receive messages on your behalf, and your email client checks in with your provider for messages. iMessage not like email.

Sending an email will connect to Apple’s SMTP server and make use of Apple’s resources that way. (I happen to run my own mail server that does exactly that.) Yes, receiving iMessage messages presumably works differently from receiving email, in that it’s probably pull rather than push, but that doesn’t change the basic argument.

The fundamental difference is that iCloud email is based on a 41 year old plain-text open protocol which was designed to be federated and lacks any real security or E2EE built-in.

It seems that you agree that resource usage isn’t the issue. Which was the point of the analogy.

Agree, but it is a closed service. Hacking for shit-n-giggles is fine. Doing it for security research and bug bounties is also fine. Offering another service (and planning to charge, no less!) that uses that closed service without concent isn't, irresepective of motive or ethics. Ethically, whether you advocate FOSS or not, it is wrong. I'm no Stallman fan, but I admire his ethics here; if it's closed, he won't entertain using a service.

But why do you run your own mail server if you can just use Apple's?

Same reason I don't use Gmail: I don't want all of my emails on a big tech company's servers. I pay for Fastmail.

It’s not just that: for email providers, they’re responsible for storing messages that their customer has received. Your server you pay to maintain holds your messages.

On iMessage, all messages are stored on Apple’s servers (at least in-transit), even those that would be destined between two Android users communicating via iMessage.

At least with email it’s a bit easier to filter out spam, but iMessage is also E2E encrypted so automatic spam detection is much harder.

It’s completely different. Email is a decentralized network. iMessage is centralized. Email servers, like Mastodon, Usenet (RIP), etc. implicitly agree to federate (usually!) with other servers. All iMessage traffic sent or received has to go through an Apple owned iMessage server and propagate through the iMessage network, so every additional iMessage client has a direct cost to Apple that Apple didn't agree to.

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