Beeper Mini’s iMessage fight with Apple is about platforms, protocols, and power - The Verge
Beeper Mini’s iMessage fight with Apple is about platforms, protocols, and power - The Verge
Beeper is right about the world, and Apple is right about Beeper.
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@ijeff this article is factually wrong.
Can you be more specific?
@Dave I stopped reading the moment I saw that his thesis is based on the wrong fact that Beeper Mini relays messages through their servers. It doesn't, it connects directly w/ Apple, and the code is OSS & verifiable.
Are you referring to this?
Beeper is also, in many ways, a series of elaborate hacks. For a while, it made its iMessage connection work by storing all your messages on a Mac Mini in a data center.
It's the only place I can see it mentioning storing messages on their server. The article doesn't seem to touch on how Beeper Mini works at all, it's referring to the old matrix bridge on what they are now calling "Beeper Cloud".
Is that what you were referring to, or something else?
@Dave I meant this dissertation:
> ... The way Apple sees the situation: ...This tiny company [Beeper] has effectively hacked a closed protocol, and now millions of users are potentially having their messages handled by a company they’ve never heard of. What’s worse, since they’re sending blue-bubble msgs, those users will assume they’re sending encrypted msgs through a trusted source — Apple — and they’ll never know about this intermediary that promises it’s trustworthy, but who really knows?What's inaccurate about that? It's saying that previously iMessage users knew that any blue bubble message was going direct to an iPhone, now they can't trust that their messages are secure as another app can now connect (beeper or otherwise) which they have no control over. It doesn't really matter how beeper is doing it or if they are trustworthy, the point is that they are the first third party to insert themselves into what was previously a closed ecosystem.
@Dave beeper is not an intermediary, it does not handle the messages. An e2e imsg from an iphone A to an iphone B goes like this: A -> apple -> B. With beeper, the only difference is that either A, B, or both, ain't an iphone. Beeper is a compatibility layer kind of like wine on Linux.
It does not matter. They never claimed otherwise. What matters is that now this proof of concept is published, anyone can make an app that connects. Beeper might be trustworthy but someone rlse might make another app and have it harvest messages. Apple doesn't care about Beeper in particular, they care about other apps coming into their ecosystem. They are trying to shut it down before it gets any bigger.
But I guess my original point is that the comment is not factually incorrect because it's not even talking about Beeper directly, just saying they can't trust a third party that reverse engineered their protocol, which is true. Beeper could easily harvest the messages if they wanted to, the fact they don't is beside the point.
Explain your thought.