this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 134 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I don't understand why the article writes that iMessage is the only way for encrypted messaging between Android and iOS. I can thing of several off the top of my head:

  • Matrix
  • Signal
  • WhatsApp
  • Facebook Messanger (very soon)
  • Threema
  • Telegram
  • Viber
  • Line
  • Skype

And there are surly more ...

[–] [email protected] 57 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (18 children)

cause of lazy iOS users that can't be bothered to use anything else

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Most of those are proprietary. My list:

  • Matrix
  • Session
  • Signal and signal clients
  • Simplex Chat
  • Jami
  • Briar (android only)
  • Nextcloud talk (needs nextcloud)
  • probably a lot more
[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (7 children)

telegram is not encrypted by default, and does its best to make you forget to enable it for each individual contact. if you want to do a group chat, you're out of luck.

Telegram is only (partially) secure for pedantic power users, which most people aren't.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Technically, yes, this is a solution.

Socially, no. This is not a solution. People are just too lazy.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Apple protecting it's precious garden.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Oh look, a weed slipped through.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 11 months ago (3 children)

If only there was a secure and open standard that would work on any platform, regardless of ecosystem...

Oh well!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (4 children)

If you are talking about RCS - the encryption aspect is a google proprietary extension

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

True, but the Apple RCS announcement said that they were going to work with the GSM association and google to build it into the base spec

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

The problem is actually getting people to use it since they're all too busy arguing over the color of a message

[–] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Aside from the obvious reasons of competition, Beeper also used Apples infrastructure, that Beeper was then going to monetize. Not too surprising they shut it down.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago

We took steps to protect or users by forcing them to communicate to Android phones using unencrypted channels. After all, those peasants are not iPhone users, they deserve to be spied.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe.

At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading vendor locking tactics to distance our brand from other lesser ones.

We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.

We're not letting anyone breach this walled garden, but nice try.

These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.

By using these tactics we can keep our users away from solutions that have any interoperability whatsoever and keep promoting decade-old features as new, as our ~~sheep~~ ahem user base don't know any better.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

So many of these comments are pulling up the other encrypted alternatives that you can use between iPhone and other platforms. But few seem to actually be addressing the problem of actually getting other non-tech savvy people to use this stuff because they don't actually see a problem with what they have.

You may not realize it, but not everyone is thinking about whether or not their messages are encrypted. My own family looks at me like "🀨" when I try to convince them to use something encrypted, like I'm trying to hide a crime or something. And I've only gotten my parents to use other services (WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger with end to encryption turned on) by digging my heels to get them to stop using SMS. I still haven't convinced my almost 16-year-old sister (she doesn't really message me that much anyway. But she's in that phase where she thinks she's all independent, and her first places are the simple stuff she knows).

Might I add that digging your heels at every attempt for someone to use SMS isn't socially acceptable. I've only done it because they're family and I love them

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Funny how the EU just recently found them to NOT be gate keepers.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Text messaging market in EU is totally different from in the United States. This is because US texting was cheap alwaysβ€” not so with the EU.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Gotta protect your users from fake blue bubbles, I get it I get it

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Serious question since I don't use iMessage whatsoever, what's going on with the iMessage stuff? Seems like multiple companies recently have tried to make apps that connect to iMessage, but there's nothing I've heard about Apple opening that up. Did something happen for this to suddenly pop up more frequently?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Someone (possibly recently?) figured out the protocol and how to register a phone number without needing an apple device. Older versions of stuff like this required having a Mac virtual machine and routing messages through it using a user's AppleID, so this was much easier. I saw a video that was bragging about how this new method would be very difficult to block because doing so could affect regular users, and I just kinda laughed at the naivety.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

In the US it's the messaging standard because they are too lazy to install a cross platform messenger like everybody else in the world. So Android has a 40% market share there, which is the minority but not a crushing minority like Windows–Linux but for whatever reason American society rather focuses on iMessage than just to install Signal or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Pretty much it's the Beeper devs and one other. But the initial setups were really nothing more than using a Mac on the backend with a an adapter to Android.

Beeper and one (maybe two) other were pretty effective at it.

Beeper Mini is a different thing altogether. It uses a service to translate ANP (Apple Notification Protocol?) to GCM (Google Cloud Messaging), which are the respective notification handlers.

The Android client is able to comm directly with iMessage servers, unlike the original Beeper and the other ones.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

not surprising, but super disappointing. Beeper Mini was a dream come true

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You need to dream bigger. That should be the companies (Google, Apple, carriers, etc) working together and using a non-proprietary standard (an open RCS). Mini Beeper, to me, was just a proof of concept to show something akin to what Apple could do.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

For those not in the loop, why? It seems like people who want to use Apple products would just buy a iPhone.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Those of use who have friends or groups of friends that use iPhones but us ourselves do not. In the US, iMessage is the #1 way to create a group chat, and if you don't have an iPhone you're often just excluded and rely on someone else to update you about plans, etc.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Apple is dumb but if iMessage is the reason somebody cant be fucked to message you id rethink those friends.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Lots of sarcastic comments in here, but Beeper’s method was to literally spoof the serial numbers and whatnot of real machines. Do people really not see how that would be a problem?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Do people like relying on service that requires their real device's serial number to function?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

I think everyone saw this coming

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Beeper already fixed iMessage on Beeper Cloud and is working on restoring Beeper Mini. Might take some back and forth but it still wouldn't be surprise if it makes their reimplementation more resilient to Apple tampering.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Until Apple will inevitably litigate them to death when they figure out they can't out engineer them

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (8 children)

Apart from online commentary I don't know a single person that gives a shit about this blue bubble green bubble thing. Is it really such a big thing?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Green/blue bubbles is just a simple way to say sms sucks. Besides those stories about teens getting social pressured, all anyone cares about is basically just sending photos that don't look like they were taken 20 years ago.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

The entire Fiasco is mostly US only. Rest of the World have different apps that dominate in individual regions like WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber etc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Basic shallow and easily impressionable zoomer bitches

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