Where is the hacker spirit here? The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!" is saddening. It is a bit dicey when you're charging for it, but since Mini was entirely client-side it would be feasible for a free version to exist.
Apple claims iMessage is E2EE, do we have proof they aren't siphoning the messages from the client once it's been decrypted? The level of trust we have to have for Apple is approximately the same for any other iMessage client. Obviously Mini was using the encryption properly else it wouldn't have worked to begin with. Of course, it's very unlikely Apple is doing that. Just putting the thought out there.
One other point raised that I saw was about how iMessage costs Apple money to run, and non-product owners should not have access since they haven't contributed. This falls apart if you own any Apple devices. Myself for example owns a Macbook, but an Android phone. Am I not allowed to use iMessage? I paid the toll.
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.
Of course you can. It's sitting there on your Mac where you can use it as much as you like.
> Of course you can. It's sitting there on your Mac where you can use it as much as you like.
For what?
I own a Mac an iPhone and an iPad but iMessage and FaceTime are entirely useless to me because no one I communicate with on a regular basis uses Apple devices. Same thing with various iCloud sharing features. Not using the family sharing offers is entirely uneconomical as well.
So what happens is that I gravitate to other ecosystems. I use WhatsApp. I upload all my photos to Google Photos. I mirror my iCloud Drive to Google Drive to share and collaborate with people on various things.
I have enabled Apple’s advanced data protection for end to end encryption but it’s entirely farcical as my stuff is all over the place anyway.
Almost everything Apple does in terms of software and services is useless to me. They are not locking me in. They are locking me out.
I’m paying for their excellent hardware, the m-series CPUs in particular, but I’m using my “spare” Pixel phone more often because the software suits me better.
I appreciate a lot of things that Apple does but it’s only a question of time until some other ARM based hardware catches up enough for me to stop overpaying Apple for software I can’t use anyway.
If you don't want to communicate with other Apple owners over iMessage, then there is no issue.
What Beeper set out to do was to solve the opposite problem, people who don't have Apple devices, but want to use iMessage.
And the poster above did have an Apple device, and wanted to use iMessage, but didn't seem to realise that iMessage works on Macs too.
>If you don't want to communicate with other Apple owners over iMessage, then there is no issue.
The issue is that I as an Apple user want to be able to use iMessage to communicate with Android users.
Given Android users don’t have iMessage that’s kind of not an issue then.
This _is_ the issue and it's what this whole debate is about.
It isn't a debate. You're demanding access to a walled garden on the grounds that you don't think the wall should be there.
You're entitled to use or not use iMessage per your preference. You are not entitled to use of iMessage on a platform of your choosing. Where do we stop this? Is Apple then required to create iMessage clients for Windows Phone as well? Perhaps a Blackberry client too? Maybe a website?
If you want to share an iMessage account and all the rest of the ecosystem benefits Apple provides, then get an iPhone. That's how you do that. And you can still absolutely talk to Android users once you have an iPhone, because the iPhone provides the essential middle-agent between iMessage and SMS that enables you to do that. Apple has done this forever and has designed Messages to degrade gracefully: you are not barred from texting anyone who doesn't have an iPhone, instead your message is converted to SMS completely seamlessly and sent from your phone even if you actually sent it from a Mac or iPad.
The endless moaning and whining from people not in their ecosystem about iMessage is so, so fucking tired at this point: from the accusations of platform lockout to the bitching about the fact that SMS messages are green instead of blue, on and on. If you guys are SO HARD UP for that iMessage goodness then just pony up for an iPhone, holy shit. Or at the very least, go bitch up Google's tree so they'll develop a decent messaging client that won't be abandonware within 6 months.
But that's not within your control. To use iMessage with Android users you'd need to convince them to use an iMessage client. Usually that means buying an Apple device, but with Beeper Mini the burden was reduced to an app install. But you still need Android users to take affirmative action for you to use iMessage with them.
Only via email address. You need an iPhone to receive iMessage via phone number, and in a country where texting is dominant, you're going to be texted via that phone number, even by your iPhone friends.
If you set it up on an iPhone once, is the number then linked somehow? Since fully Apple users do get phone number iMessages pop up on macOS too right? Or is that only locally synchronised by Bluetooth or something?
Yes, you can receive iMessages to the phone number on linked devices when the phone is off. You cannot receive SMS when the phone is off.
The poster does - he was claiming that since he bought one Mac device capable of iMessage that he should then he allowed to use it also in his android device (where it would be far more useful) since he already paid the apple "tax" or what have you for iMessage access.
What’s the problem here? Seems like you found fine alternatives.
My problem is that I'm paying for something that could be far more useful than it is, and I haven't actually found satisfactory alternatives. For instance, I haven't found an end-to-end encrypted and still user friendly cloud option for my photos.
Apple's problem is that they are selling less to me than they could and risk losing me as a hardware customer as well.
Now, I totally get their strategy. It's a bet that net net they are locking more people in than they are locking out. It's hard to tell whether or not this is paying off for them. Not even Apple can know the counterfactuals.
I’m trying to figure out why it’s a crappy experience elsewhere, but not on Apple devices. I don’t think Apple deliberately contributes to Android hardware development to just make it less usable.
The ball is in the court of Google et al. to make messaging and video chats less frustrating.
That's the thing - android to android with RCS and e2e enabled is pretty comparable to iMessage now. And apple could have just opted into adopting the open standard years ago
iCloud Photos is E2EE if you turn on iCloud’s “Advanced Data Protection”. That migrates the vast majority of your iCloud data into E2EE storage.
I know. That's my whole point. Apple has it but it's of little use to me because of their limited cross-platform sharing.
I use a Mac but an Android phone. Android because I require the ability to install apps from arbitrary sources, including piracy. Mac because modern Windows is so contemptuous towards its users, and desktop Linux falls apart unless you know the intricacies of its internals.
Anyway, transferring files between the two was a pain in the butt that eventually grew so immense I reverse engineered Google's Nearby Share and made this: https://github.com/grishka/NearDrop
Though yes, I'm not North American so iMessage is just a non-issue to me. I don't know anyone who uses it. No one uses SMS for actual messaging between people, everyone's SMS inbox is 99% OTP codes and various other automatic notifications. Literally everyone who I communicate with is reachable through Telegram.
No one "requires" access to theft.
Piracy isn't theft because it doesn't deprive anyone of anything, and English isn't my native language.
If you want to play semantics, you can't "buy" a digital service
Actually it is more like knowing the intricacies of its distribution specific internals.
Can you do what people did with Windows in the noughties, install a different OS and get a refund for the OS portion of your purchase (or for the apps portion??), it sounds like you're not using it?
AFAIK macOS is free for people with an Apple device, so this won't work.
...Where did you get that from their post?
Unless my eyes are just completely missing it, I didn't see anywhere that they said or implied that they weren't using macOS or iOS on their Apple devices.
Welcome! Pixel is all you need.
No. Hacker spirit is owning your machine to its full extent. For fun, for profit or just for mayhem.
Apple using instant messaging, where no meaningful innovation happened for decades to build their moat is pathetic and disgusting.
If your mayhem requires communicating with third party servers, who owns those computers?
then to OP’s “where’s the hacker spirit” question: the answer would be “the hacker spirit is to replace iMessage with anything less controlled”, right? that’s still equally as subversive against The Powers in the sense that “hacker spirit” implies any form of subversion.
Just like how all we needed to do to replace Facebook in its heyday was to make a better Facebook! Remember Diaspora? Any day now its going to dethrone the king and I'll be able to see all my friends updates on Diaspora!
The social graph lock in problem is well documented and well understood. If most people use a certain solution (in this case texting, and particularly in regions where its dominant such as the US) then attempts to make a replacement solution whose success depends on mass adoption has an exponentially more difficult time in achieving adoption, because there's no incentive for users early on (because the social graph isnt there).
At least in the US, texting has a ton of "gravity" compared to other forms of messaging because it is built in to every phone and entirely free with your phone plan, so every user knows they can reach every other person they meet via texting.
New platforms gain critical mass more due to circumstance and luck than anything else. Or, such as the case with TikTok, via deep pockets and relentless advertising.
i don't actually think it is. i don't know _anyone_ who uses just a single messaging app (and thereby a single protocol-level social graph). i have some mental map in my head: "if i want to reach friend A, i do it on Signal. friend B: Discord. friend C: SMS/tel/PSTN. friend D: Matrix". i think this is a pretty common experience these days: i'd hazard that my mix of 4 apps is on the _small_ side.
i admire Beeper, JMP.chat, and other groups trying to improve messaging via better abstractions. i think it'd be cool if they could maintain iMessage support, i also think it's not critical to their success. the pain points caused by that graph problem you point to is 1) maintaining that mental map and 2) coordinating large group chats. i don't see that the client-side/Beeper-style solution to this is notably worse if they support only 29 protocols instead of 30: for as long as my peers are reachable by more than one messaging app, the odds of bridging between them isn't radically different.
Nitpicking but I was saying that the general social graph lock in problem (also referred to as chicken/egg) is well documented.
Hi! Nice to meet you! I use only one messaging app for all of my friends! It's called texting. As far as I know, all of my friends do the same, with the only exception being a few Internet-only friends where we use Discord.
The "mental map" that you are describing is exactly what I want to avoid. I am thankful that I have not had to make one yet, and when people tell me to use over-the-top chat apps like Whatsapp, I can see that the map must be made.
Just because this is the norm, doesn't mean I'm going to do it, especially since we don't do it now. As much as the interoperability problem between RCS and iMessage is an incredibly annoying problem, I would take a single unified messaging experience over some crazy fragmented one with a zillion apps any day.
A little confused by this, because Beeper and other unifying clients cannot in fact make groups which have participants on multiple platforms at all.
You said you need 4 messaging apps right now to communicate with everyone you communicate with. How many of those users also have all 4 of those messaging apps? Obviously it's not all of them, or you'd just use one messaging app. The fact that you need four implies that for a given selection of contacts, there is a chance that it is impossible to create that group chat, because there is no shared platform they are all on. Then you factor in that in some scenarios you need your contacts to include additional contacts, and perhaps your 4 messaging apps needs to grow to make it happen. And of course if you already made the group and you need to just add one more person then you might have to scrap and remake the group somewhere else. But then that group that already has some messages in it still exists, and people will keep texting it! Now you've split your group chats!
On top of this, I want to note that the mental map you have built is also prone to becoming stale. If one of your friends is on Signal and Whatsapp but prefers Whatsapp, but then uninstalls Whatsapp and forgets to tell you, then you very well may send a message to that person and have it never arrive. Of course they might bail out of both Whatsapp and Signal, and just go back to SMS. Now none of your messages will land- you didn't even think they were interested in SMS.
Sure, if they are a close friend its likely they'll let you know. Most people have 1-5 close friends. But most people also have far more contacts in their contact book, and some of those people they might only message a few times a year. That's not a mental map that can be maintained, or if it can, I don't want to.
i admire the resolve. on the other hand i think that rules out iMessage playing much role in that long-term, right? like, they're just never going to play nicely with others, it's not easy for the broader developer base to integrate with much less improve, and so on. so you're back to SMS, and the baseline SMS experience now is pretty limiting and stalled (much as SMTP stalled): a big part of why people leave for app-based messengers is for features like voice memos, video-chat, multi-device (e.g. PC) support, better multimedia support, etc. to say "SMS forever" i think is to say "i'm okay never having these features" -- which is a fine decision but important to note.
i'm pointing to where i understand the landscape to be headed. for channel-based chat systems like Discord, irc, Matrix, XMPP/jabber, Slack, it's common enough to find channels which are bridged across 2 or more of those protocols. my experience with ephemeral group chats is that if i want to plan a large enough event i just end up starting multiple group chats, and the unimportant details are chaotic but the important ones like where/when we're meeting i make sure find their way into both chats. there's a possible future where i start two group chats and my client bridges messages between them in the same way those channel-based systems bridge.
Well Apple is implementing RCS, so that's good. But look, I don't really think the blue bubble stuff stems from not being able to put stickers on the conversation. It definitely doesn't come from not being able to emoji-react ("tapback" as Apple calls it) because that still works on SMS, but the SMS participant receives a text message describing the tapback. In Google Messages and other modern clients, that gets interpreted by the phone and turned back into an emoji reaction [1].
I don't think the blue bubble hate comes from people not being able to do inline replies. I don't think it comes from the inability to edit your messages when in an SMS conversation.
The source of the blue bubble hate comes from group chat splitting. When you have an iMessage group chat and you hit Add to add a new user, but that user is not an iMessage user, you are shown a prompt that says "Create a New Group? Contacts not using iMesage can only be added to a new MMS group with the same members. Contacts using email address handles will use a phone number instead."
You are given two options: "Cancel" and "New Group".
If you choose New Group, you'll now have two groups. If you do nothing else, no one knows a new group was created, since no messages were received. If you send a message, its still entirely possible for the other group members to message either or both group chats. Chaos ensues.
It's not clear that Apple is actually going to fix this with RCS. Seems most likely they will not, that group chat splitting will still occur, just replacing SMS with RCS.
Bridging is hacky, and involves not showing contact information for each user. You (of course), can't start a DM with such a user, and I'd assume things like @ mentions are ambiguous or nonfunctional.
Sure it _can_ be done, but it is kind of a terrible experience. Even Matrix and IRC have the same problem, and that's one I've actively experienced from both sides (IRC and Matrix).
I commend you, because you take a lot more effort than most humans to make sure things end up on both ends. In my experience, with the humans I have to deal with, its about a 5-10% of the time this happens, and usually its by sending a screenshot of the other group chat with half of the first line of the next message showing more important details that they decided "weren't relevant" or just didnt fit on the phone screen.
Also it should be obvious but some kinds of planning are simply not possible or require people to perform special courier roles to complete. Things like planning for what weekend everyone's free or what elements of a potluck everyone's going to bring are pretty tedious to manage between 2 group chats.
Furthermore, in my experience events that need planning aren't given dedicated ephemeral group chats, instead they are simply planned on whatever group chats they already have. People don't tend to put a lot of thought into making sure people are included, especially if the group chat is large. Some of the family group chats I'm in are 12-14 people. Not all of those people are coming to the potluck. They still use it, and honestly I think that's better than having to juggle every combination of every participant and keep track of whos in each one.
[1] Side note here, after Google started interpreting the (fairly annoying) iPhone tapback SMS messages as tapbacks, Apple introduced a similar feature to interpret tapback SMS messages --- but only for iPhone sent tapbacks. So the scenario is a group chat with 2 iPhone users in it-- the tapbacks show as SMS to the receiving iPhone, but it gets turned back into a tapback emoji reaction. This only works for iPhone style tapback SMS messages. The slightly different format that Google Messages sends is... ignored...
Pretty much the most smug Apple way they could possibly implement that feature... but now the Pixel in the chat works in all cases and the iPhone only works in half the cases, so it actually only hurts Apple users' experiences
Depends who you ask. Me personally? The hacker spirit is coming across an impossible task and doing it anyway.
Figuring it out is much more fun than just using something else!
Make money, don't make money, cash is unrelated to the definition.
I thought it was about owning anyone's machine to the full extent. Did this change during the past 30 years?
you be the judge - https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
I probably contributed to the how to ask section at some point.
hacking vs cracking
Hacking vs. cracking is a useful system of classification, but the distinction is not absolute, there is a gray area between these two. Many well-respected hackers started their careers by compromising systems of other organizations, cracking copy-protection in commercial systems, or obtaining privileged information about proprietary systems (famously AT&T's telephone system), but these acts were committed mostly out of curiosity, as technical challenges, or as a protest of the perceived power imbalance that violates the spirit of hacking - rather than motivated by monetary gains or a desire to bring mayhem and destruction. Whether or not these activities are acceptable depends on someone's own personal interpretation in a case-by-case basis.
Well 30 years ago owning your machine could be taken for granted. Today - not necessarily.
What is the meaningful innovation in messaging that happened elsewhere?
It didn't happen anywhere. Yet IM vendors (not only Apple) still pretend we need propertiary protocol to transport a few bytes of unicode. It should be standardized long time ago.
Is there an existing open standard that works just like iMessage?
You mean E2EE chat? Yes. There are even federated protocols.
This is a bit strong, “disgusting” conjures up other things for me.
Use WhatsApp - it works on both platforms.
The hacker spirit uses Signal. Promoting WhatsApp over the more open community-supported alternative is worse than gloating over Beeper.
I would very much prefer to use something other than WhatsApp (especially as Facebook has banned me for life from all their other apps), but my attempts keep failing.
My wife won't use Signal because it includes a crypto wallet and crypto transactions are taxable.
Matrix/Element would be my preferred option, but it causes so many security or encryption related issues that it has scared off everyone I tried using it with. Nobody knows what to do with the incessant popups demanding to "verify" something or other. Nobody (including myself) knows why older messages often can't be decrypted.
Telegram is less secure than WhatsApp.
Threema is not free, which makes it difficult for me to ask people to install it. It's not open source either.
iMessage is Apple only.
So what's left besides WhatsApp?
I think the crypto wallet is lame, and am disappointed the Signal folks decided to integrate something like that, but it's entirely opt-in. If she doesn't want to worry about being taxed on crypto transactions, she can simply not use that part of the app. I actually forgot for a second it was there until you brought it up, and I'm a daily Signal user.
I told her it's not activated by default but she doesn't want to touch crypto with a 10 ft pole. She says if it's in there then tax authorities might eventually come asking if the feature becomes popular. And then she would have to keep evidence of not actually using it.
I think her concerns are overblown, but it shows how incompatible taxable transactions are with a privacy focused app. The two things should be kept well apart.
[Edit] Politically, it kind of defeats the purpose as well. You want to be able to argue that you have a right to privacy when it comes to personal communication. You don't want to be in a position of having to defend the privacy of trading securities.
It does not show this.
Separately, you've either misunderstood her position, or it's poorly thought out, and/or ideologically based.
What path would tax authorities use to ask Signal users (and only Signal users) if they've used cryptocurrency?
>What path would tax authorities use to ask Signal users (and only Signal users) if they've used cryptocurrency?
Tax law. In the UK, every single payment in cryptocurrencies, however small, is a taxable disposal that you have to include in your tax return if your total proceeds or gains from all investments are above a certain threshold.
I'm not ideologically opposed to cryptocurrencies and neither is my wife. She's just allergic to anything that could potentially raise tax questions.
Now I'm seriously wondering how hard is to fill taxes in the UK. I think I have done worse mistakes than a few cents in crypto and all I got was having to resubmit the forms.
Edit: On second thought, I don't own a business, so I guess nobody is going to look into my tax fillings with the same suspicion since they do not expect me to be doing anything funny with my accounting.
>Now I'm seriously wondering how hard is to fill taxes in the UK
Doing it correctly is non-trivial. You have to submit a so called computation for each individual disposal, which can easily run into several pages.
The algorithm for working out the cost of a disposal is actually a pretty interesting test case for learning a new programming language or paradigm. Try implementing UK share identification rules in SQL for instance :)
This is why I also have my signal set for automatically disappearing messages. I want you all to try to delete your messages if you have iCloud turned on. It’s impossible and if you managed to do it they’re stuck on the server for 30 days. Apple is a spy service.
You do not have to activate the "crypto wallet", even less use it.
TIL it even has one.
I responded to this in the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580504
I wish watching ads on Facebook was treated as personal income that you have report to IRS. Social graph would fix itself in a nanosecond.
I use many messengers, Signal too. It lacks in polish and features compared to all the others. Its security premise is undermined by insistence of using a phone number – which can be spoofed or taken over – to sign up.
I see it as the result of hacking spirit running the development, not the product team. Currently it can’t compete.
What strange woman lying in a pond gave you a sword to make you Decider Of The Hacker Spirit?
not only does the hacker spirit use Signal, but they tell people that’s the only way they want to communicate. At least that’s what I do. It forced my friends to install Signal because of it six more people are using Signal.
People who contact me over SMS get an immediate phone call from me in response.
WhatsApp (meta / facebook) acts exactly like apple here: they're sending cease and desist letters to OSS projects.
Better use matrix which is an open protocol.
Like ActivityPub ???. Problem is public mindshare and adoption.
As I am sure we all understood, OP meant on their Android.
The the OP should read what he is buying.
I have a TV from 95 am I not allowed to watch Netflix? It runs on my phone.
Yes the limitations are different but you know them beforehand you just go and say it’s unfair I can’t have everything just the way I want it.
You don’t like iMessage - we have plenty of alternatives.
That's a pretty defeatist take. What if I want Android because SyncThing works better on it than on iOS? Then I can't have iMessage?
If you told people in 1995 that operating system vendors and service providers would arbitrarily block certain apps to lock you into their ecosystem people wouldn't have believed you.
I want to use adb to communicate with my iPhones. Google is evil using adb as a moat and locking away my access to adb! See how silly that sounds?
It only sounds silly if you have a highly technical background.
What are you trying to say? That iMessage is somehow "required" to interoperate with others because it does not require a highly technical background to use, but adb is exempt? I'm not following your train of thought.
Correct. iMessage is an Apple service. If you want to make use of Apple services you should probably use Apple products. \_O_/
“DOS ain’t done til Lotus won’t run”
Whether that was ever fully policy at Microsoft, people sure believed it was.
1995 was also around the time MS was pursing its embrace-extend-extinguish strategy to the internet with internet explorer.
Really? Wasn’t that somewhat common back then?
One of these is inherent, dictated by technological abilities. The other virtual, made up and kept in place by abusing a monopoly.
What monopoly would that be? Apple quite literally advertises alternatives to its Messages app on the app store landing page.
How many of those alternatives come pre-installed and can't be removed?
How is that even relevant? The stock Messages app doesn't conflict with any of the other messaging apps.
Lawsuits on Microsoft & IE pretty well established that defaults matter for antitrust actions.
You can get alternative SMS apps on iOS?
For the sake of the argumt, let's say there is no monopoly, but a competitive landscape filled with alternatives and switching costs are zero.
Does that change my point about the difference in those examples?
iMessage is just the iOS texting app. When someone says "I'm having trouble getting Stranger Things to play on Netflix" you don't tell them "You should switch to Hulu". Netflix (iMessage / texting apps) has Stranger Things (texting) and Hulu ("alternatives" like Whatsapp et al) do not.
As an Android user, in theory I shouldn't care about iMessage. However, because of the way that iMessage creates schisms, miscommunications, lost communications, broken texting experiences and more between my Android friends and my iPhone friends, I have to. I would like the texting features of these phones to interoperate so we can all text together in peace.
I wrote up a scenario (user story?) that I think helps to explain the problems I think should be solved that seem to fly over so many people's heads, especially when they advocate for over-the-top messaging apps like Whatsapp to solve the problem (particularly in the US context): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38578101
It’s also at severe risk of ruining the fun for numerous other hacker-spirit communities like hackintosh or opencore. Apple can come down on this in ways that potentially make it much more difficult for hackintosh to operate, or for people to update their legitimate apple systems after the end of official support. Which was pointed out in those threads too.
See also geohot taking some other PS3 exploits that were already published and combining them into a piracy kit that caused Sony to come down on them and patch the exploits, ruining it for the rest of the homebrew community.
There’s a reason homebrew people try to keep it low-key, it doesn’t take many assholes to ruin it for everyone. Let alone turning it into an app on their own platform lmao.
A decent number of other hobbies also involve some collective good-behavior and self-control lest the hammer come down for everyone. Doesn’t take many assholes doing donuts on quads before you’ll find motor access to that area removed or prohibited, etc. Drones also ruined in like 5 years what r/c airplanes had been safely doing for decades. Etc
Hackintosh is already on a death march.
Sooner or later Apple will remove support for all x86 OSX versions.
Its life can be extended a bit by hackers who try to backport the software from ARM to x86.
But you can't sustain the entire Apple ecosystem by volunteer work alone.
Why spend resources trying to kill it when we all know it will die ln its own in a few years?
Arm based PCs are becoming a thing too. Won't the hackintosh have a new home there?
Arm-based PC SoC designed by former Apple M1 team leadership, no less.
I feel that contributing to these closed source extension hostile software never ends up benefiting anyone long term.
I know people gotta make a buck though. Sucks.
The only people ruining anything for anyone in your examples are Apple and Sony.
Sure, but when fighting asymmetric warfare self control is paramount is it not?
Would you not be mad at the guy bragging that he’s a member of the Resistance? They are not the Oppressor with the capital O, but they are at least an asshole.
Recruiting reduces asymmetry.
Nah, assholes ruining access to the beach is a very real phenomenon
what a comment. "geohot bad sony good" is certainly one of the more unusual takes i've seen on HN. however, i don't quite care for the taste of boot myself.
No, it's "geohot unwise, Sony bad".
That’s not quite or hardly at all what they said. Nuance is a thing..
All these activities live in a grey area: "We are breaking some rules, but in such a small-time way that the big guys don't bother enforcing the them". Fly below radars, and you will have your small joys for indefinitely long.
This raises the question: is that a space worth inhabiting? Are hackintosh or homebrew PlayStation games worth it, compared to more open platforms where you are not breaking ToS?
Answers, of course, differ! But the question is worth asking.
At least regarding homebrew PlayStation games, for me that was a very valuable grey area space on the PSP and then PSVita, since back then there weren't many other kid-friendly options for similar portable computers (this being relevant because as an adult I am not dependent on convincing someone else to buy me things).
Nowadays smartphones are so much more capable and so much more accessible to kids, plus you can even get literal handheld PCs like the Steam Deck, so homebrew is a lot less worthwhile in my opinion (except for just the sake of hacking, since consoles at least tended to have very interesting security/DRM arrangements).
When I noticed that there is 2 dollar subscription required to use this app, then all my blame from Apple went to these developers.
You can't really expect to do business with other company's service's without asking permission or cooperating. Especially, if the required interfaces are not exactly public.
Maybe this App had hope as free version, but not as business. What they were thinking.
It's called a "phone". It works with the "phone network", AT&T communicates with Verizon. They each fund themselves and are interoperable.
For "phone" features, there are own standards and all the "phones" support them. They are public and everyone cooperates.
iMessage is like Discord. It is messaging service tied to specific backend, and also devices in this case.
What if I reverse-engineer Discord, make a commercial application which uses their non-public backend (not with webview) and never tell anything for Discord? Should the "phone" argument hold in this case?
Discord is not the best example, because it 'allows' third-party level clients on some level, but above should not be the case.
It's different, because the only texting app on the iPhone automatically prefers iMessage. Did you make a group with 2 iPhone friends and now you're adding a non-iPhone? Congratulations you now have two group chats. No way to merge it, and you have to manually tell everyone not to use the first one. But they will anyway, and the conversation splits.
The problem you are describing is more like a social problem, and applies to many other aspects as well.
Usually people know the consequences of their actions. If they don't use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or any other "currently" popular social platform, there is always risk that you isolate yourself from the part of group which prefers the former.
Is that one person important enough that other group members ditch the other groups?
Here comes the reason why Meta, Discord or any other social platform with enough user base is highly valuable. Social pressure keeps users on their platforms.
Apple is doing the same with iMessage in hopes of pushing device sales. But it is still messaging service. It does not forbid you using regular cellural standards.
The question is that are the set defaults same as known decision? Not for everyone, but I don't think that conversation splitting is good enough argument here to reason why making business in this case would be good decision.
Yes! But it's a social problem created by an intentional product choice that makes their own users have a worse experience in service of retaining their walled garden at the expense of your customers relationships on a service that they are embracing and extending for their own ends...
And they could fix it too. There is zero reason to leave that original iMessage chat around from a technical perspective. They can even put a big scary banner at the end of the iMessage history saying Hey this is not encrypted anymore! watch out!
Yes, choosing not to use the three Meta apps you listed is your own damn fault. You're isolated because of your own poor choices. Just give up and feed the beast instead of, you know, trusting the phone/OS manufacturer you purchased your premium phone from and the carrier that you pay for your phone service.
This is the part that's not actually true, because you cannot make an MMS group with only iMessage participants. You cannot opt out of iMessage on 1x1 conversations either.
Using or not using iMessage isn't actually a choice, it's an automatic "upgrade"
I'm not even sure it's possible to disable iMessage entirely. EDIT: This exists actually
EDIT 2: "Messages app automatically chooses the type of group message to send based on settings, network connection, and carrier plan." https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724
In the scenario you describe, you can’t add a third iPhone user either. You can only add people when there are already at least 3 participants.
The phone network in the US was basically the same 50 years ago.[1] It took a major antitrust fight to bring about "cooperation". So strange, folk strenuously defending obviously anticompetitive conduct.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
I would say that this is not proper comparison.
It would be proper if iMessage would be the only messaging service phone users can use and installation and usage of the others are restricted.
But anyway, my whole comment is about making commercial messenger with the expense of other product (aka. backend services of Apple) without permission, cooperation or anything else. There aren't official public APIs for iMessage other than for Business use.
„We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.”
I believe that if you want to see hackers as only kids doing „fun stuff” at their desk at night making their (metaphorical and not) parents angry then either you are missing the bigger picture, or capitalism has gotten their ideological claws on the hacker culture and turned it into an obedient bunch of techbros that wouldn’t even dream of making the information free, as it wants to be.
Can you even imagine the reaction if the uBlock Origin folks attempted to make the case that Youtube updating their site to prevent ad blockers from working was some sort of nefarious violation of "the hacker spirit"?
I remember another post that was very well-received where an individual hacker wrote his own homebrew iMessage client for his own personal purposes. HN really liked that!
I think HN exists at an intersection of individual hackerism and business. If a project is clearly by-hackers-for-hackers it gets a lot more leeway for unsustainable concepts / implementations. But this is building a business on adversarial interoperability, and many people who LOVE the concept and technical achievements will still post mostly critical things about the business model because it’s fairly clearly a very very challenging business model.
youtube-dl, NewPipe, and uBlock Origin exist solely for the purpose of empowering the individual, yet they are constantly attacked on HN as being tools used unfairly to harm Google's profitability. Open-source projects like Matrix, PeerTube, Mastodon, are built to be free and open-source for the benefit of end-users and lack of vendor lockin. Yet each is derided on HackerNews for not being enough like their corporate counterparts. Yes, there are those here who don't do that, but as cynical as it sounds, I do think this site's audience is mostly folk who like the status quos set by FAANG-types and don't really care about hackerism outside of toy websites.
The projects can be appreciated while also acknowledging that advertisements are part of the value exchange. There's nothing wrong with knowing that if your options are to either watch ads or pay for a service, and you privateer the service instead, that that is not as reasonable as it seems to some people.
Note: this is very different from "but I want to block all ads", that's not what I'm writing here and also not what others might be writing.
As for the audience, it varies, but this website is a VC thing, so it makes some sense that a bunch of visitors are from the VC ecosystem and as such might be very money-oriented.
> The projects can be appreciated while also acknowledging that advertisements are part of the value exchange.
No, this is preposterous and I will continue to refute this silly idea every time it shows up here. It is not stealing from radio stations to change the station when ads come on. It is not stealing from TV channels to go get a drink when ads come on. There is no moral compunction to watch ads, from anyone, anywhere. Stop trying to normalize advertising, which is to say, stop trying to normalize the enshittification of the human mind.
Meanwhile, a web browser is a user agent running on my machine. Youtube's content is a guest on my hardware. Once it's on my machine, I have the moral right to do whatever I please with it. If Google doesn't want to serve it to me, then it has the right to prevent me from accessing their server, such as in exchange for payment. But again, advertising is not payment, it's just corporate-sanctioned, socially-acceptable brainwashing.
Sure, but Google also has the moral right to do everything possible with their code to make it as hard as possible for you to skip ads on their videos. You both get to try as hard as you can, so good luck to you both.
There's no brainwashing here. It's just a business trying to make money, and trying to outsmart the users trying to outsmart it.
Advertising is at least trying to make you think thoughts it feeds you. "Buy Brand X, you'll get women!" If the advertising is effective, you'll associate Brand X with something positive and want to buy it.
It's kind of blanket brainwashing with extra steps because it's more indirect. Similar technological brainwashing might be joining an algorithmic social media site and becoming convinced of something the algorithm felt was the most engaging thing that day and spread, regardless of truth. Choosing to believe what social media or advertising tells without healthy skepticism you is willingly accepting some brainwashing.
There are people who feel really strongly about ads, and I'm one of them. I hate them, they don't share my values, and they are only trying to extract value from me. I run ad blocker in my browser, but mute and skip any ads I can like a peasant on my TV or phone. So overall I end up watching more ads than not since I don't watch videos on my PC much.
I can't say I never see an ad, but I avoid/cancel services with ads, or happily sign up at the no-ad level.
When I do see ads its shocking. Car ads have little to do with cars, and everything to do with insecurity and Pavlovian hacks. Idiocracy drip by drip.
People expose themselves to crap influences day in and day out, then imagine this or that ad isn't impacting them. The stream has profoundly impacted them or they wouldn't tolerate any of it.
I can't really remember the last time I saw an ad. And as a result (probably?) I find I "want" for far fewer things than most people who let themselves be drawn in by ads. If a million dollars just hopped into my bank account, I'd probably just invest it and go back to living, more or less, the same. And I'm in no way whatsoever rich. But contentedness is cheap, and easy, when you don't let yourself get drowned into the endless vacuum of artificial demand. [1]
I am absolutely certain that the exponential increase in advertising is probably going to ultimately have been found to be at least partly responsible for so many of the mental and psychological problems that seem to be on the exponential increase in places like America. Humans are not designed to live our lives as donkeys chasing a carrot on a stick.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_demand
> People expose themselves to crap influences day in and day out, then imagine this or that ad isn't impacting them.
Precisely. Subjecting yourself to advertising (or allowing your children to be subjected to advertising) is simply bad mental hygiene.
That's because most car ads aren't actually trying to sell you the car. They are instead trying to sell you the idea of the car's status[0]. While people are most familiar with ads that are blatant attempts to get you to buy something, many are much more indirect. It's also why native advertising is so nefarious. A large portion of ads actually aren't the direct version, but most often people don't notice they're taking in an ad, and that's kinda the point.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-26-me-62995-...
BuT aDs DoN't AfFeCt Me!
I'm honestly frequently impressed how how often people don't understand what ads are or do. Especially considering they funds most of our paychecks. Everyone is affected by ads and convincing yourself that you aren't makes you more vulnerable to them.
I think the problem comes from people thinking ads exclusively are about selling things that have a monetary value. But ads sell ideas. Often that idea is that you should buy something, but sometimes it is a preference like a politician or a celebrity in their latest scandal or rise to fame. Ads can be good too, like public service announcements. But for sure we're over inundated with them and there's too many bad ones.
I am also particularly peeved about the ads that come from email addresses I can't exactly block. I really don't think anyone should be accountable for missing an important email if the sender also sends 90% junk from the same address. I'm looking at you every university ever[0]
Maybe check out reVanced. You can recompile the YouTube APK to be ad free.
[0] Here's the text from my uni's page when you click unsubscribe. What a joke. I don't need emails from the alumni association, publicity channels, or all that. And you have the audacity to try to convince me it isn't spam? What a joke. I'm glad I use a third party mail client that can filter this stuff but it is an absolute joke that we think this is acceptable. It shouldn't require special tools. There is a clear difference between police reports and the alumni association and they even come from different senders. In fact, not allowing for you to unsubscribe actually goes counter to the safety claim because it teaches people to ignore your emails.
I understand not all advertising is bad as a good product might not spread during the critical growth phase without it. It just raises a lot of red flags for me when someone is desperate for my attention like ads are. Google reeeally wants me to buy a Pixel 8 lol
Glad you can filter the crap, but I guess from a CYA perspective the school can say "we notified everyone through our official email channel" whether you were ever going to read that email or not.
There's also things like PSAs that can be good ads. I think it's important we remember that it's not always about consumerism.
Haha there's only a few places I get ads and I lock as much down as I can. There's a certain sense of joy when you get ads so misaligned from you that you know they are reaching.
Oh it's a constant battle to filter. But what worries me is actually that people honestly do not get it. These are clearly little metric hacking and I'm afraid we're just traveling deeper and deeper into Goodhart's Hell.
So, like use an entirely different part of the company like Chrome to push for WEI to make adblockers not run?
Or maybe use chrome to push for manifest v3?
Maybe the __moral right to do everything possible__ isn't actually moral when it's using its leverage in a separate market to protect another one of its assets. Maybe we should see this as something to anti-trust them?
I dunno -- you've still got the moral right to use Firefox or Safari or a Chromium fork.
Ads and adblockers are always going to be a cat and mouse game, so I don't see any reason to complain.
Antitrust doesn't really enter the picture. Chrome doesn't even come preinstalled on PCs or Macs anyways -- you've got to go out of your way to choose to install it. So just don't, if you don't like it.
I don't think this is true. Google Meet, Youtube, etc all perform worse on non-Chrome/Chromium based browsers.
I do think that the world's most popular browser, being owned by the same entity that owns Youtube, actively working to block adblockers (adblockers which, do *not* harm Chrome but do harm Youtube) is something for regulatory bodies to take into consideration.
The person you're replying to acknowledges this, albeit indirectly.
But the point still stands: if Google sends me the bits, I am free (morally, and, at least for now, legally) to discard the bits that correspond to the ads if I can figure out how to do so without watching them. If Google can figure out ahead of time that's what I'm planning to do, and refuses to give me the bits, that's of course Google's right.
Advertising is psychological manipulation to coerce you to buy whatever product is on offer. The "best" advertising will convince you that you need a product that you'd never consider buying otherwise. "Brainwashing" might be a sensationalized way of putting it, but I don't think that's particularly inaccurate.
Huh, you can throw the guest out by not watching youtube. Ripping off guest seems strange moral right.
Seems like you are deciding on everyone's behalf on what one should do with their mind.
The alternative is to leave to a for profit company. That company should not have that right.
If the content is rendered in my browser I can manipulate the JS and HTML as much as like. If you don’t like that -> feel free to put protections. But the same way a browser interprets the code I can put stuff on top of that interpretation.
So morally I’m okay to use a blocker if that’s what I want to do. It’s also immoral to track me but Google seems to be okay with it. If that is the relationship they want to establish so be it. I will act in the reciprocal manner.
The idea is not to decide on what someone else is going to do with their mind. Hence the idea that everyone is free to do what they want. Ads are not a natural part of the world so making the argument that not watching them is somehow wrong is what is actually a decision being pushed on others.
If companies didn’t try to normalize ads and tell you off for using adblockers then nobody would have a problem with it. But given that people say: You need to watch ads otherwise you are stealing is putting decisions in someone’s mind.
PREACH. I love and 100% agree with your passion.
Wow. Eloquent. Awesome!
The tools should exist and Google shouldn't fight them. But at least for me, I'm usually trying to remind people that the ad money is a large part of how the content creator survives too. If you block the ads, then please consider donating to your favorite creators Patreon or using YT premium (which is actually typically more lucrative for content creators than ads are).
I don't care about Google's profits but I figure we should try to support the content we enjoy in some way or else all we'll be left with is MrBeast, PewDiePie and content farm videos (ie the stuff that is so hyper scale that no amount of ad blocking can effectively hurt them)
If it was literally impossible to profit from digital video content creation, there'd be still be countless videos, and the overall quality (in terms of content value, not production value) would also probably be higher. People like sharing content, even for free - hence sites like this one, which we've all probably spent far too many hours on, and I've yet to receive a single payment from Dang!? And Google will never scrap YouTube because they gain immense profit just from profiling you, regardless of how many ads they can force you to watch. And perhaps even scarier from their perspective is the rise in marketshare that'd give to competitors.
In many ways it'd probably be far better for the world if making videos was not perceived as being profitable. The number of children who now want to be 'streamers' or 'youtubers' instead of astronauts, engineers, and scientists is not a good direction for society.
This is pretty questionable. Quality takes time. If you need an income to pay your rent, 40 hours or more of your work week are taken up. That leaves a few hours before dinner and sleep to work on your videos (since in this hypothetical, it is "literally impossible" to make money on your videos).
Of course you could work on the weekend, and many do. But let's not forget that making videos is work, and it's important to do the things, you know, we invented weekends for. Like spending time with your family, reading a book, or playing a video game. How entitled this content creator must be to have a weekend. This is of course assuming that the creator's day job is a traditional one-- more than likely they work partial days 7 days a week at varying hours as is the norm for crappier jobs.
That 40 hours gives you enough income to pay your expenses, but unfortunately, for most people, doesn't give you the income you need to get a real camera, so you're just using the webcam that you already had on your computer.
The audio is terrible and the video looks like it came out of the early days of YouTube, but somehow that qualifies as "high production values".
Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of reality when working in a highly paid specialized field like engineering.
Well you are watching that content, presumably. Do you feel it provides value to you?
There are an awful lot of small science educators on YouTube. They are doing the work to inspire people to get into the sciences. Is that not valuable? Those people have an outsized dependency on the ad revenue and patreon income they receive so they can keep making videos that are accurate and engaging. For them, another hundred people blocking ads could mean the difference between doing what they love and releasing quality videos or having to go back to a day job that occupies all their time.
If there was no YouTube, how do our kids get inspired to become scientists-- by watching the latest MCU movie? By watching cable programming?
YouTube isn't all just MrBeast and dramatube videos but I get the impression that this is what you think of. It reminds me of the "algorithm slip" where users make broad assumptions about a platform because of what it serves to them, but really it says more about you than properly evaluating what content is on the platform.
When I sum up your take, it sounds like only those people with passive income should have the privilege to make videos, and that's actually not a world I want.
Same as everyone before YouTube. Role models and seeing/reading things.
So only people with role models close to them or in a place where inspiring things are happening should be inspired?
Before YouTube and the Internet in general, only affluent people had these things, and we left behind a huge portion of the worlds population. Those people have the same potential as people of means or the luck to be born in an affluent country or an urban area.
I do get that you also include reading things on the Internet, but that's not always engaging enough to create a spark for people.
This is bordering on ridiculous. No, not only affluent people had role models FFS. Carl Sagan, for instance, was a 1st gen son of poor immigrants. His mother was a house-wife, his father a garment worker. His inspiration came from what scientifically curious people used to do before the internet - like going to the library, talking to his teachers, or even going to a museum every once in a while.
Since the advent of the internet the entire developed world has been getting literally dumber, so far as IQ can measure. [1] That's, to my knowledge, the latest study but a quick search for 'reversal of flynn effect' will turn up a zillion hits. In other words, what I'm saying is not controversial in the least. And one of the hypothesis for why this is happening (as per the linked paper) is, unsurprisingly, increased media exposure. YouTube is playing a significant role in literally making the world more stupid.
I love plenty of 'sciency' YouTubers - Veritassium, Cody's Lab, Smarter Every Day, and many more. But in reality, you're not like to learn much of anything from these sort of scientainment. It's just candy with a sciency coating, more likely to inspire people to want to make more candy, than to actually pursue science.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
That's a pretty thorny question, come to think of it.
Perhaps it's like eating chocolate. It provides value to some part of me, but at the same time, a more reasonable part can judge that I as a whole would be better off if the chocolate wasn't there and I'd eat something healthier instead. So I can both consume it and desire an environment where I wouldn't consume it.
You're free to not eat the chocolate, but are you suggesting that it's the chocolate's fault for existing, and that chocolate should go away so you aren't tempted?
I'd assert that a lot of content on YouTube is not chocolate. There are high quality "healthy" options right there on the app. How about Technology Connections or the 4 hour long retrospectives on your favorite book, film, or video game? What about the years of technical and learning content? Those aren't chocolate, those are spinach.
A lot of YouTubers I enjoy watching are very tech/science focused and use proceeds from their videos to purchase equipment that is used to create content. I don't think their channels would be nearly as interesting if they didn't make shiny-toy-money from it.
People desiring to be famous isn't an idea that started in the age of YouTube and TikTok. The medium changes with what's the dominant platform. If anything, YouTube and TikTok democratized the process.
"Democratized" is just a fancy way of saying "made it easier for more people to get into it". So you get the same result: more people seeing that becoming famous is actually attainable, which drains talent from more useful endeavors.
(And yes, I'm going to assert that becoming an astronaut, engineer, scientist, etc. is immeasurably more useful than becoming an influencer or whatever. It's fine to disagree with me there, but that's my position.)
Having said that, I do get a lot of value and understanding and useful information from some YouTube channels (which I do my best to support through Patreon and my YT Premium subscription). But not all channels are created equal.
I think there’s a sorites paradox here: if it were actually impossible to make money from digital video, then YouTube wouldn’t exist at all because it couldn’t pay for the hosting and bandwidth it needs to distribute videos. What is true is that YouTube is basically not harmed by some fraction of their users blocking ads but, were that fraction to hit some percentage of the total traffic, YouTube would be forced to either discontinue free video hosting or charge to watch (or it would be killed as unprofitable).
Exactly right. I think we are incredibly far from that breaking point, and what Google is doing is chasing growth for their shareholders more than anything else, especially at the end of the free money era.
The platform itself may be replaced but the incredible result of the YouTube platform is that there are millions of excellent creators who are making a living by making their videos, and even making enough to keep raising the bar on their work.
It's not a given that growing such a swelling stream of creative work will ever again be possible if this one dies out. YouTube was in the right place at the right time with the right subsidization available while they made the systems work at scale, and scale them up to insane hyper scale levels. This happened because of the advertising bubble, which is showing heavy signs of stress especially in the last few years. Society is already pushing back against the data collection that makes advertising at these scales as lucrative as it is, and if the bubble finally pops it's possibly it'll never inflate this way again.
This is why it's important to support the small creators you enjoy in some way. Direct contribution is certainly the best of them all. Sure this might not be relevant for superstar YouTubers, but take for example Technology Connections. Alec is an amazing communicator who puts insane effort (full time) into producing super informative videos about electronics and engineering.
This is just factually not true. A lot of YouTubers eventually quit their jobs and become full time content creators. That's means they are able to create more content and the quality of their content can increase as they are able to spend more time on production and editing.
They are also able to invest in their channels. Many bigger YouTubers have small production studios, very expensive camera equipment (think $70k Red Dragon/ARRI cameras, 5 figure lighting setups,etc), and full time staff. They can production quality that rivals a TV studio. None of that would be possible if video content couldn't be monetized.
I sort of agree about the obsession with being a "content creator". But at the same time, kids have always wanted to be rock stars, professional athletes, and movie stars. Content creator is just a new type of celebrity for kids to idolize.
TV, documentaries, movies and music videos are video content just the same. Even most sports is consumed in video format.
Only served via a different platform (or not really anymore for some like music videos).
People wanting to be streamers/youtubers is the same as them wanting to be any other celebrity.
To be able to show some valuable content, there has to be something valuable happening, and hopefully that still directs enough people to be astronauts, engineers and scientists (so eg NASA can live stream their flying to Moon or something).
All I am saying nothing has changed, really, other than the platform and accessibility.
I pretty much found out about all these from HN. I think most of their traffic / downloads comes from this site.
Reddit and other social media platforms almost certainly drive in order of magnitude more downloads of these extensions than HN.
Reddit and other social media platforms are at least an order of magnitude larger than HN. That's a good thing honestly.
This is extremely false.
something something someone's salary and getting them to see something
”It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
Difficult but not impossible. Like programming.
I can't remember any of those being derided other than Mastodon, which has major issues nothing to do with the fact it's competing with something.
There isn't one Hacker News. Nearly every product you list also has it's greatest champions here on HN.
yt-dlp's post on HN garnered a lot of overwhelmingly positive attention [0].
I learned about NewPipe from HN and am now an ardent fan. Also received an overwhelming amount of positive attention recently, with the top comment recommending a fork that blocks even more advertising [1].
Every release of uBlock Origin gets hundreds of upvotes (1.53 got 527 points [2]). Again, overwhelmingly positive attention.
There's a subset of HN that is obsessed with the fediverse, and another subset that is skeptical, but the skepticism is overwhelmingly technical in nature.
If you want to see corporate shills on HN, you'll probably be able to find some, but it's certainly not a majority (much less unanimous!) view.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37474066
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144400
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094620
My experience here is exactly the opposite: I see the projects you talk about get a lot of positive attention and praise. Sure, there are detractors as you say, but they seem to me to be a very small minority.
The projects you listed are overwhelmingly celebrated on Hacker News! I'm sure you can find a critical post if you look hard enough—HN isn't a hive mind—but it's not a common sentiment.
Who doesn’t like the first few tools you mentioned? YouTube-do and ublock origin are great.
You're allowed to admire the technical implementation while denouncing the business model at the same time.
Is letting our hearts bleed for trillion dollar companies really the best way to spend our finite compassionate bandwidth?
Observing that a particular business model is very likely to fail because of the conflict with another business model that happens to have much more powerful backing requires no compassion spend.
But also, it seems to me that compassion is an involuntary reaction.
Compassion is very much a quality that can be developed and nurtured.
I believe you're talking about capacity for compassion, and I'm speaking of the triggering of compassion.
I'd agree that both capacity and scope of triggers can be altered, but it seems to me that that's a process that takes some time and effort. Distinct from choosing in the moment "I am going to feel a certain way about this, right now".
Are we talking about Beeper Mini, or Apple?
Pretty much all Adtech comes to mind here.
This is IMO the exact spirit we should have
In what world is interoperability adversarial? What the actual?
It's adversarial because one party explicitly does not want to interoperate and can be expected to try to break interop.
OP didn't coin the term, it looks like it comes from Cory Doctorow [0].
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
Cory is talking about it in the sense that the tech industry at large said “adversarial interop” is stupid and lobbied against it. It seems HN has lost the plot judging by the number of people on this thread defending Apple engaging in such a slimy practice.
Anyway the comment I was replying to was implying that Beeper is the adversary which is not a correct use of the term.
You can't have a single-party adversarial system. Each party is an adversary of the other: party A wants to interop against the wishes of party B, and party B wants to lock party A out. OP wasn't implying that Beeper is "the" adversary and Apple is in the clear, OP was just saying that trying to build a business around adversarial interoperability is extremely difficult and the outcome is unsurprising.
Noting that the results are unsurprising does not imply that we condone the system that makes such results nearly inevitable.
Are you trying to ignore the state of what's going on? Beeper's business model was as interoperable with Apple as my neighbors cracking my wifi password to use for their household. The interoperability wasn't intended.
Forcing someone to interoperate with you doesn't immediately make it all collaborative any more than a stranger walking up to me at lunch and declaring they're my friend now makes me want to invite them home after.
The adversary is the incumbent that’s working to artificially stifle innovation, strong arm the market, and exclude competition.
Beeper is not someone who hacked your wifi. Beeper is sending legitimate packets to your router and Apple is saying “I don’t like those packets because they threaten my artificial hold on the market”.
Hacking? Hacking means whining when what you are hacking fights back?
I mean go for it, hack away! I hope apple keeps android far far away from me though lol
Personally for me it's people who buy Frigidaire appliances. They are the worst!
What a bizarre thing to say.
Actually it is documented by Apple themselves that they receive the encrypted messages and the key to decrypt them when iCloud backup is used (unless you and the person you are messaging have specifically enabled their "advanced data protection" feature). They have decrypted messages in response to law enforcement requests.
You left off the point that that only true if you had iCloud backup of iMessages enabled. If you didn't have iCloud backup enabled then they've always been E2EE.
No, I mentioned that.
Correction: if you and the person you're messaging both didn't have iCloud backup enabled. And also it's worth noting that Apple forbids you from using any cloud backup system other than theirs.
You seem to have written a very misleading comment. Apple is offering privacy minded folks two options:
1. Don't turn on iCloud Backups and receive E2EE on your messages 2. Turn on iCloud Backups AND advanced data protection and recieve E2EE on your messages
This is not some kind of nefarious plan on their end. Any user service will have a vulnerability on the user end of back-ups. For instance, Whatsapp backups will also have their keys available to Apple/Google. They need to offer this as for most users, the risk of losing their whole digital lives because they forgot their passwords outweights E2EE. For users who find that important, they have the two options listed above. Sounds like an appropriate trade-off to me.
Just because WhatsApp does it too, doesn't make it right.
These apps are not e2ee if almost every user has in effect encryption disabled.
Which app would qualify in your case? Signal suffers from the same client-side problem.
not by default, which is a massive difference.
I am not sure what the answer is here. What you are arguing for will hurt regular users who will lose their digital lives if they lose their passwords.
Signal will be backed-up on iCloud _by default_ and client side will be an issue.
No, it absolutely is not. It seems like you don't have a good understanding of how actual E2EE systems work.
"lose their digital lives" is hyperbolic emotive language. We're talking about a loss of chat history, not the death of people. Lots of people lose their chat histories all the time, it hurts but people get over it.
Matrix also provides the ability to back up keys in the server, but you select a separate passphrase for encrypting them before they're uploaded.
(Yes, it would be nice if the user didn't need two passphrases for this use, but Matrix cannot safely revert to key derivation because client could accidentally leak the master password to the server due to existing implementations.)
iPhones with iCloud backup enabled without ADP are almost certainly the majority. I believe this is essentially the default configuration. Even if you disable backups or enable ADP Apple almost certainly still has most of your messages from the other end of the conversation. It is false advertising to claim your service is E2EE without any disclaimer when in reality you collect the keys to the majority of messages and decrypt them at the request of law enforcement.
I have addressed your concern in my comment
There is no clear trade-off that is an option.
"I can't imagine a way for this feature we advertised to not suck" is not an excuse for false advertising! But there is a way to do better. Google's Android backup is E2EE by default. It does not require remembering a long password. All it requires is your phone unlock code, which you normally enter at least once per day and are extremely unlikely to forget. This is actually how Apple's works too, when ADP is enabled. Either it should be enabled by default or Apple should stop claiming iMessage is E2EE.
Sounds like you're just confirming Apple tries very hard to make sure it's not E2EE.
Turning on advanced data protection is not hard.
Here is the explanation why it's completely impractical and therefore doesn't provide actual privacy, along with other anti-privacy configurations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37875370
I was not mislead by that comment. It was clear that most people have their messages accessible to Apple, which is what the article also talks about - how privacy of "blue bubble" messages is at the center of this.
There are ways to opt out. But that's for the margin of people who worry about these things. So what that comment said is very relevant and accurate.
If this is true, how is that legal?
What would make it illegal, short of antitrust law?
I the the argument is that it should be in the law.
Not even that - Because Apple controls the key exchange, Apple could also just silenty register another recipient (their own mitm) and siphon off all your messages if they wanted to. You must trust that Apple (or Whatsapp or whatever) does not do that.
This isn’t true because you will get notified that another device was added to your account.
Who do you think sends that notification?
Do you think the Apple that would surreptitiously add another 'device' into your iMessage recipients would not be able to suppress that notification?
Or, how could you verify that you've been notified about every device added?
And who delivers that notification?
It uses a server for bridging APNs to GCM. Sure, that could be maintained on a donation basis, but it’s not completely infrastructure-free in any case.
If you think about it, it's actually not even a technological requirement. It's plenty possible to use an Android system service which maintains a connection for Beeper Mini persistently from the phone. After all that's what GCM does too. Yes, it would require backgrounding permissions, but that is something pretty justifiable for a messaging app, and when using the right UI practices, you can explain this to the user before they grant it.
So yes, it's absolutely possible for this app to be 100% client side and I wish Beeper would've done that to start, if for no other reason than to dispel the misinformation around that BPNs is somehow required for the core operation of the app.
To be fair, they probably thought making this explicit in their How It Works article would be sufficient.
Is this actually still possible without (or even with) a foreground notification? I thought Google clamped down on that practice a while ago, since it increases power, data, and memory usage.
I don't really follow the reasoning. If saving on power, data, and memory usage were more important than the ability to receive messages, it would follow that you were better off carrying around a cinder block than a phone.
Having n apps all actively querying various servers all the time will waste resources. The solution Google provides is Firebase Cloud Messaging which is the blessed notification service on the system which handles querrying notifications for all apps. FCM even avoids waking up the system from idle if the notification received is not high priority and can wait until sometime in the future when the device momentarily stops idling to processing everything at once before idling again.
Well except that maintaining a connection to APNs is cheaper than spinning up periodic tasks to connect to APNs to check for new messages, and is exactly the same process that GCM itself uses (persistent connection), and you probably only have one such messaging app, so unless GCM is considered a major battery drain (hint, it's not) I think it would be fine.
And in this case, GCM actually creates potential vulnerability. This should be allowed, and if Google sees it as a problem, they should implement a system service to retrieve from APNs. I believe the API is public.
Backgrounding is problematic when devs do it wrong or disrespect the user, but this isn't one of those cases.
Android preventing background processes in this case is worse for the user.
That sounds extremely unrealistic. If nothing else, you already have GCM – I don’t think it deactivates the persistent connection even if you don’t have any notification registrations.
But how would Google distinguish “disrespecting” from intentional use cases?
I’ve used Android for years, and uncontrollable background services were a big problem.
It’s as much a battery drain as APNs. The point is that I want as few of these persistent connections and background services as possible, and the ideal number is one.
I'm confused. GCM is Google Cloud Messaging. It's also known as FCM or Firebase Cloud Messaging. It is the Google Play equivalent of Apple Push Notification Service (APNs). It's job is just to provide a persistent connection for delivering push notifications.
It seems almost impossible to be running an Android phone that has zero push notification subscriptions registered.
Via app review and banning apps that abuse those use cases. It turns out you can also decimate the user's battery using the stuff Google still lets you do (like periodic background tasks), but we don't ban those things because otherwise your phone would be useless at that point. Of course both the periodic task system and the persistent background service both would show up in your battery usage statistics, so the user and the system would be plenty aware that the app is misbehaving. And of course Google Play Protect can send along that feedback back to the Play Store in both cases.
Cool, I also have used Android for a long time! Started on the Nexus 5 back in 2013 and have used Android devices ever since.
Hm, I wouldn't say they were a big problem but I guess I just used well behaved apps. Certainly restricting background behavior helped battery life, but at what cost?
What you might not realize is that there are a number of permissions that you can declare in the Android manifest that trigger the Play Store review to be... just a little more thorough about your apps behavior. This should be one of those permissions. Using it for a persistent connection to a messaging service is absolutely a valid use case for this sort of thing. That's not the kind of thing that caused battery problems on your older Android phones though.
This is also very analogous in App Store. You declare certain plist declarations that need to be justified, and cause your app to be more carefully reviewed.
Well, Google just wants you to use GCM since it solves the same problem without reverting to a cinder block.
Very possible on Android versions that are closer to AOSP. Shitty vendor forks, probably not.
Not really, unless the user goes to the settings and disables battery optimization for the app. If the device is idling the app will only be able to wake up periodically. Starting at 15 minutes and exponentially grows to up to 6 hours [0]. Element works around this by abusing exact alarms, which require the user to grant a permission, together with a wakelock, but this approach will probably not last forever.
[0] https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/+/maste...
That sounds "very possible" to me. Apps can even pop up a dialog on first run instructing the user to disable battery optimization, and then load up that settings page when the user taps a button in the dialog. Certainly some people will be confused by it, still not know what to do, or not want to do it, but it's still quite possible.
And if the user won't do it, the app can still spin up a service with a foreground notification if they really want to keep things working decently well, and use Android's scheduled jobs mechanism to restart the service every 10 minutes (or however often) to catch cases where the service still ends up getting killed.
I wanted to implement my own notification bridge and patch the app to use my self hosted instance. Now of course there may not be much point
It was the same when Apple banned Fortnite for daring to accept payments outside of their walled garden and the forced 30% cut. People falling over themselves to hate on Epic and defend Apple's forced cut and the total removal of developer freedom. If it was Microsoft the entire tone would be completely different.
Does Epic Games give developers "total freedom" with Unreal Engine or will they insist upon their royalty when applicable? You can read their FAQ and there's literally a section titled "Why does Epic think it’s fair to ask for a percentage of a developer’s product revenue?"
What's good for the goose, etc.
5% Royalty past $1m for using the most high tech game engine in the world is a totally reasonable price. Just like 3% for using payment services is totally reasonable. But 30% for using a distribution service is just absurd. The only reason the app stores can charge that much is because of their iron grip on the platforms.
It’s the market rate. Almost all retail stores online and offline charge 30%.
Boxed software at physical retail stores was more like 70–90% of revenues, split between the retailer, distributor, publisher, and manufacturing.
I doubt manufacturing gets a percentage cut - doubt they want such a cut. Manufacturing likely charges by how much you ask them to produce. They will quote you a price for your order and maybe include a discount for large volumes.
Manufacturers gets paid, and they'll expect to make a profit. No, they don't take a percentage, but that's a rather academic distinction when the unit cost for manufacturing is $5 and your product isn't marketable with a price exceeding $50.
By agreeing that some amount is acceptable, you've conceded the principle. As the famous saying goes, we’re just haggling over the price.
As for whether 3% is reasonable, again we can look to Epic for evidence. Epic's own Steam competitor takes a 12% cut — and they admitted in court that it was a money-losing venture. That should stop and make you think. The Epic Games Store isn't even a complex ecosystem, it's just a glorified Windows app downloader and even then they couldn't make a profit at 12%.
Apple argues that their 15% fee for most (30% for the ultra-successful) pays for a lot more than just payment services. It pays for absorbing the cost of fraud. It pays for dealing with refunds. It pays for developing the APIs. It pays for employing an enormous team to perform some imperfect-but-useful oversight over the 1,800,000 apps in their store. It pays for a lot of things.
If you think Apple makes too much money, fine. That's a perfectly fine argument to make. That's a very different one to claiming that they're not entitled to make money. Or that the government should dictate prices at them.
EGS only loses money because they have to buy their customers by giving away free games, to try to dislodge Steam's position. The infrastructure costs of EGS cannot be that high.
But we are not haggling over the price. apple has control over an enormous portion of the market. I can't haggle because the big guy controls everything.
And saying apples cut pays for more services is just hilarious. we are forced to use those services and forced to pay for them. Stripe does refunds and fraud detection. There are other app development platforms for API's like kotlin and flutter.
And you and I both know that apple's margins on the app store is a joke. Thats why they dont report it seperatly in their financials. Whether epic couldnt make it is their problem.
You wonder why the company with 95% market share is treated differently than the company with 40% market share.
Is making wild claims and then immediately trying to disavow them in the next sentences the hacker spirit?
How does it at all follow that Beeper Mini is using encryption properly (or else it wouldn't work) but it's unlikely Apple is? How would Beeper have been able to reverse engineer it if Apple's not using it? Who did they model their correct implementation of Apple's protocol off of?
Is implicitly trusting authority the hacker spirit?
And by implicitly trusting authority, you mean trusting the device manufacturer with billions of sales and intense scrutiny from security researchers and state actors spanning decades, right? You mean trusting the entire of the security industry to have managed not to miss this glaring and easy to detect invasion or privacy? This isn’t “it’s not happening because Apple promises it’s not”. This is one of the most scrutinized platforms in the world. Making wild claims and disavowing them immediately is lazy rhetoric, just as oversimplifying this as an appeal to authority is lazy rhetoric.
Going back to the original claim:
The answer here is no. Yes, making a wild claim afterwards is lazy, but the fact remains: there is no system in place to get anywhere close to "proof".
The best we have is researchers reporting trust violations when they find them, escalating those violations in the media, and sometimes forcing the company to change behavior. Relying on (ever more skilled!) unpaid volunteer work to verify the claims of the largest company in the world seems like an appeal to authority. It also doesn't scale as they make more claims and build more complex software.
Yes, breaking E2EE for everyone is so large that it would be impossible to do at scale without anyone noticing. Breaking it selectively to target individuals (the threat people are actually worried about!) is much harder to detect, no?
That's because it's a ridiculous premise. We don't have any evidence that Tim Cook isn't robbing banks in his spare time either. I'm not saying he does.. I'm just throwing it out there because he might be.
Not to mention the fact that you can't prove a negative anyway.
If it’s a ridiculous premise, then why do we even try?
Apple added Contact Key Verification to eliminate one possible class of attack involving a lack of user transparency. Still trusting a whole lot of trust in the stack, but is an improvement.
What you think of as a ridiculous premise I think of as a goal to aspire to
You certainly can prove that a system is cryptographically or otherwise sound. There is an entire field of formal verification. Proving that an implementation is correct is often more difficult, but not impossible.
The claim is that (a) both entities are properly encrypting the data _in transit_ and (b) either company could _steal_ the plaintext client-side (after decryption).
Trust that a third-party application isn't stealing the decrypted messages requires the same type and amount of trust that Apple is not stealing the decrypted messages (or maybe less trust if the third-party solution is open source, etc.).
Except the stakes for Apple are so much higher. If they’ve lied to everyone and are stealing messages, that’s a multi-billion dollar class action, against very little upside to Apple.
For a tiny company like Beeper, the incentives are different. The upside of being dishonest far outweighs the risks.
Not that I believe Beeper is nefarious. They probably aren’t. But their risk/reward for abusing trust is very different from Apple’s
> Where is the hacker spirit here?
The site is called "Hacker News" but it's predominantly existed over the years as a funnel for the business-centric Valley industry.
Which is to say that I think you're trying to apply one specific definition of "hacker" when it doesn't really work that way.
There's that, but I'm not an SV person and my reaction was still "well, duh!".
An app like Beeper Mini wants to be something like NewPipe for YouTube: installable only if you know how to download F-Droid, maintained by a community of fans, used only by people who understand that Google can break it at any time and it might take days to weeks for it to recover.
What Beeper did instead was build a startup and sell subscriptions to mainstream users, and now that it inevitably broke they come off as very whiny about it. It's not just Silicon Valley business types who see that and wince: it's offensive to old-school hackers too.
Know how to download F-droid? As in, "Google F-droid, click link to f-droid.org, click 'Download F-droid'"?
I guess I can only speak for myself, but I'm pretty alright with people building apps with the expectation that would-be users will need to know how to install apps.
I didn't say it was a high bar, but it's enough of a barrier to drive off most of the entitled complaints when Google periodically breaks the app.
Everyone deserves a path around vendor bullshit, not just "true hackers".
Please, no. I do not want to have to clean malware off my inlaws phones in addition to their fucked up computers.
This site was originally called "Startup News" then renamed to "Hacker News".
Apple wouldn't even exist if not for this type of hacking. One of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's first projects was selling blue boxes[1] to play around on AT&T's telephone system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box
Which didn’t scale because it doesn’t scale because the blue box stopped working. Sort of like Beeper.
Beeper's true purpose was to show people that it's possible without an iPhone. What you don't know how many other clients like this worked and for how long...
What’s your basis for saying that? Honestly asking. Seems like Beeper’s true purpose could just as well have been to make money.
Of course this is possible without an iPhone. Apple could build it anytime they want, they just don’t. Which I disagree with, but that’s a different argument.
This should be the top comment
And the penalty for getting caught wasn't merely having your connection turned off, it was a trial.
Selling a device that transgressed the boundaries doesn't mean they thought that no boundaries should exist, it just means they knew it was possible to do something technically interesting and would allow them to make money.
If Jobs and Woz thought there should be now penalties for using blue boxes, my guess is that they thought the telco should merely implement a better system, not that everybody should get free access to it.
I'm torn on this. Is it following the hacker spirit to get more people plugged into Apple's closed ecosystem? Maybe? Maybe not? Reverse engineering a proprietary protocol is certainly hacker-y. But building a business around that -- essentially charging people to put more load onto someone else's infrastructure, who have to bear the costs (even a rich behemoth like Apple) -- I'm not sure that qualifies. If we were talking about some open source project that was releasing this app to F-Droid, maybe it'd be more clear?
I don't think that's Apple apologism, that's just "duh, obviously Apple is going to try to shut them down, and probably succeed". It's lame. It's just as lame as when AOL kept breaking Gaim/Pidgin's ability to talk AIM's OSCAR protocol. But acknowledging that Apple is going to pull something like that isn't apologism, it's just stating reality.
(As for the AOL/AIM example, I think reverse-engineering OSCAR was actually hacker-spirit-y, as AIM was a free service open to anyone, just they didn't feel like supporting Linux users, as was the SOP of many companies at the time. Linux users were a fairly small percentage of users, so it wasn't a big thing. But there are tons of Android users; more than iOS users, globally, even. That's not really the same, to me.)
In the context of the overwhelmingly saturated messaging space, I think it'd be a lot more hacker-y to bring something like Signal up to the usability standards of iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc., and evangelize the hell out of it to get people out of closed platforms. Even Signal isn't perfect there, since they refuse to enable federation in the protocol, and only release updates to their server-side software a long time after it's been running in production. But it's certainly better than getting more people hooked in Apple's walled garden.
Agreed here. But I understand deeply why it's appealing for my fellow android users who are tired of being bullied into buying phones they just don't want by their friends who overwhelmingly drink the Kool aid. it's not great, and in the US the effect is very real.
Good idea... what about an existing open standard that is already adopted by a billion devices and can be implemented by any mobile phone manufacturer and carrier network.
Something that takes what's good about SMS and adds all those nice features. I bet we'd have to work together to make end to end encryption interoperable, and some of the fancier stuff is too new to be in the spec yet, but that's not too hard in the grand scheme of things.
Oh, RCS exists.
You need android an flash linageOs. Welcome to the club.
As one of the top posts that presumably the GP post is talking about, precisely. Nowhere was I apologizing for Apple, nor did I "crawl out".
When this product was first announced I observed that Apple was going to shut it down, and that they had obvious avenues (both technically given the way messages are attested to, and legally -- this product is the textbook definition of computer misuse! And they're charging for it making it a slam dunk). Loads of people "crawled out" to gloat that this is it, Apple has no avenue to do anything about it. And then Apple did something. Apple did the easiest, lightest option, but they could go full scorched Earth if they wanted to. I don't want them to, and am not celebrating that, but these are basic obvious facts.
To your other point, exactly. The hacker spirit is getting your friends and family on Signal. It isn't cementing iMessages as the foundation.
Yes — it's adversarial interoperability, and that is always a good thing because it breaks lock-ins. Though mostly irrelevant to this particular case, adversarial interoperability also forces the service owner to compete with third-party clients which always put the user first; it removes the service owner's of control over the UX and presentation.
I don't know about AIM, but ICQ also used OSCAR protocol. The official ICQ clients were bloated, shitty and full of ads. Not many people used them. Most people used QIP, Miranda, Pidgin, Adium, Jimm, or even NatICQ. No one cared about how ICQ's owner would make money — and, really, no one should care about that, it's their own problem. Maybe if they made a client that's better than third-party offerings, then people would switch to it. But they never did.
It has nothing to do with a lack of spirit. It's a 800lbs of reality crashing down. There's nothing wrong with trying to hack the Gibson. However, this wasn't just a hack, but a severe threat to Apple's walled garden. As long as they are allowed to have it, they will protect it at all costs. Thinking any differently is just naive. So of course this is the ultimate result.
It’s identical to a jailbreak which gets patched ASAP so not sure what is has to do with walled garden as much.
I’ve played with the same idea of making an Android client but I would never build a product on that because I know the limitations on my side.
As a company you are 100% allowed to break 3rd party client when they don’t have an agreement with you. It’s your product after all. Heck even with an agreement APIs don’t support old versions.
Why do you think they don't want you to run a jailbreak? It's to protect the walled garden. If you can install apps other than their store, that's lost revenue. They claim security blah blah, but it's removing mouths from the teet. So, it has everything to do with the walled garden. How does that not make sense to you?
The jailbreak patches are for the walled garden, too. Security is not a concern for those who use jailbreaks. They want to get their devices in the insecure state and go to lengths to do it.
It's similar to how OpenAI uses "safety" to make sure their LLMs don't get them in hot water, and PlayStation uses "safety" to make sure their consoles do not become associated with piracy and make publishers think twice.
This kind of "safety" is about business interests. :) Some companies can say it openly that they wish to protect their business, as fundamentally there is nothing wrong with that. Others can't as that will bode poorly for their monopoly status and they will suffer (overdue) legal repercussions. So it becomes "safety".
Notice how companies that argue against user freedom for "safety" are always in circumstances where bringing up business interests behind "safety" won't bode well.
Seems like if this is allowed to stand you'll get massive spam issues on iMessage within a few months... better to kill it fast.
I like/love Apple, but it's not really about hacker spirit. I think Steve and Steve were at the start, for sure. But then, it's like Steve figured out how to "evolve" hacker spirit into a business model. And not just any business model: but a totalitarian vertically integrated model. I mean, fabulously successful and don't let the negative political connotations of totalitarian offend you here, it's but a minor jab, because there are downsides to this model in the Apple-verse, for sure: the lack of "hackability" of their devices.
But it's perhaps a momentary cultural variation in a sea of changing priorities for Apple. They have embraced right to repair: perhaps in future, "hacker spirit" evolves further to become, a "right" for all citizenry of the Apple-verse, backed by their tremendous business model. In the same way that you can conceptualize (again, without judgement or making regard as to truth or not), that "human rights" emerge not out of a vacuum, but out of what the infrastructure of state can conceive and provide.
In other words, today's action may be but the anachronistic kneejerk of some poobah in the Apple bureaucracy. A vestige of the old guard, perhaps soon dying out.
If that makes sense? :)
To be fair, all computing business from the 1980's was vertical integration, the exception being CP/M, the university folks porting the UNIX tapes into their vertical integrated mainframes, and Compaq getting lucky on how they reverse engineered IBM PC's.
CP/M systems eventually died, UNIX startups created by some of those university folks were just as vertically integrated as the mainframes they replaced, leaving only the PC clones.
Had Compaq not gotten lucky, and today's computing landscape would look much different, probably like the laptops and all-in-one PCs that are being pushed nowadays as the OEM margins cannot get any thinner.
Not just that but it is no longer Steve's company (If he were alive). It is now a multinational public company with shareholders, employees and 1000's of vendors (and their employees, etc...)
It is all but required for a company of this size to take action in this way.
I love my iPhone but apple is a publicly traded corp lol. The only reason they're embracing right to repair is because of huge efforts of people outside the company to get bills passed that make them embrace it.
Just want to point out this isn’t inherently true. For example an insecurely generated session key would work fine but not be secure.
Apple is doing what? Not using encryption properly? What reason do you have to believe that?
They didn't mean that, they meant siphoning off data client side, for reasons, like CSAM.
The point, which I agree with, is having to trust a single closed source implementation of a client is not so different to trusting the servers of a non E2E service.
The BIG difference is that you have to trust the hardware and the operating system already, and as these are made by apple, you already have to trust them.
"Trusting the servers of a non E2E service" is adding another trusted party.
If you don't trust apple, you don't have an iPhone.
iMessage is Apple's service, and they can do with it whatever they want. No other arguments are really relevant.
As for whatever reasons Apple comes up with: that is probably also not going to be relevant as a multinational that is beholden to money is going to have the legal department and PR do that sort of messaging and not anyone on the technical side of things.
Speculating as to why things are the way they are: Apple knows that people in some socioeconomic ecosystems value iMessage as-is, so we can expect their intent to be aligned with keeping that value. Reusing all in-house crypto and account management certainly makes it easier on the engineering side as well.
They can't, if they have extreme market power, mich like Microsoft can't do anything they want with Windows
And that's where that 'if' is important: iMessage isn't very relevant outside of the US. Worldwide it doesn't even reach the top 5. Inside the US, even Facebook Messenger is apparently used more than iMessage.
HN's obsession with Apple feels like some twisted mix of Stockholm syndrome, american nationalism and sunk cost falacy. Truly bizare to the point I wouldn't be surprised if we find out Apple is actively astroturfing this and many other topics. No other tech focused forum does this.
No astroturfing needed. It's called the Apple Cult for a reason.
The troll toll?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
ratwiki is /literally/ a troll website. it has the same validity as encyclopedia dramatica.
I tried beeper before (not Mini though, so could be wrong about Mini) but it seemed to be running a VM somewhere and passing messages to the MacOS Messages.app via some kind of scripting interface.
So beeper itself (the full version) was not “speaking” iMessage protocol at all.
The old version indeed worked that way. Mini was implementing a fully reverse engineered protocol.
If you got iCloud backup enabled then they absolutely siphone everything that happens on your phone. And the disgusting part is that when enabling a new iphone it automatically has it switched on. I remember the case with some terrorists that Apple have to the US authorities everything on the dude's iCloud backups, but the authorities weren't content with only the backups and wanted to crack the phone - so backups have their keys managed by Apple.
You mean the San Bernardino terrorist where Apple refused to break open the phone for the US government?
And recently, they've released an updated version of cloud sync that doesn't even let Apple have your keys.
There was none to begin with. It was an attempt to build a business on top of a virtual macOS.
Edit: sorry, confused them with a different service. This one used previously published research on reverse engineering iMessage to build the business.
You need a device key to use an iCloud account, and all Beeper clients were using the same device key. So unsurprisingly, it’s not hard for Apple to block. And this doesn’t mean they peep into the messages.
You should not be surprised around the risk of depending on reverse engineered third party integrations which the provider can seek to cut you off of unauthorized interactions.
That makes no sense for Beeper.
The hacker spirit in relation to Apple was long gone when the Mac Classic was released.
People that imagine otherwise haven't lived through those days.
Kind of silly to buy apple devices (especially iphone) and expect to be able to hack their services. Apple is the last place to look for hacker friendly products. Ffs you can't even run your own software on an iPhone. Spend your hacker energy somewhere worthwhile, on devices and platforms that welcome that kind of tinkering (or at least tolerate it).
There are so many relatively open messaging services. Telegram has a rich API and bots framework. Much more hacker like to build something interesting on that. People trying to force imessage are just fighting a battle that is already lost. Why spend time and energy on something that will perpetuate closed ecosystems even if they succeed?
Their house, their rules.
You are allowed, you get to use your iCloud account.
Go support the hackers then. Here you seem to be heckling people who don't share your viewpoint.
You can use iMessage on your MacBook, right?
I wouldn't take that as a lack of hacker spirit ; and honestly saying this was to be anticipated is not being an applogist. You could tell this would happen, notably because they were selling a product on top of a retro-engineered API, and it made quite the noise. Even if they hadn't closed it at a technical level, they'd probably have done it at a legal level.
And to point out the obvious, Beeper was also closed source. I don't trust apple much, but I trust a random startup much less to believe that they're not either doing something dicey, or screwing up the encryption protocol and creating tons of security holes (esp. if it was retro engineered).
Honestly, as you're pointing out the closed source character of all of that, I'd much rather use something like Signal.
Not much point in engaging with someone who sees all opposing views as “apologists” “crawling out”
This assumes that Apple can periodically extract money from users after they bought the product.
Apple customers are the fur wearers of the tech world.
There is a value to the iphone users, not just the android users, but neither Apple nor most iphone users will ever acknowledge that.