this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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[–] noodlejetski@lemm.ee 29 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The security and privacy of Beeper Mini is unchanged. It is still local, end-to-end encrypted on your device, as we described in our post.

what "they've been doing for several years" was relaying messages through Mac VMs, if I'm not mistaken, so it's not exactly the same.

[–] admin@beehaw.org 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And the following as well:

Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now sign in with an AppleID. Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently working on a fix for this.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Promises promises.

I really don't understand why they bother. Do they really think they can "beat" some of the best programmers in the world that actually controls the servers their service is dependent on?

I suppose there was hope in the beginning that Apple might just let it slide but at this point it's abundantly clear that that's not going to happen. Their users are going to continue to experience interruptions and just give up.

Eric keeps making strawman about "not bothering because it's hard".

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Do they really think they can "beat" some of the best programmers in the world that actually controls the servers their service is dependent on?

Compaq "beat" IBM.

Apple can only change the iMessage protocol itself very slowly if they don't want to break service for millions of older iPhones. Beeper Mini can and will change on a dime. The cat and mouse can only go so far before Apple run out of ways to try to fuck them over that don't fuck over millions of legitimate users.

[–] tombuben@beehaw.org 8 points 11 months ago

Not just that. Apple themselves beat Microsoft where they reverse engineered MS Office and played the cat and mouse game long enough that Microsoft released their office file format specifications publicly for everyone as a standardized format.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Compaq "beat" IBM.

I don't know anything about Compaq. Was their business built on reverse engineering IBMs system and impersonating IBM hardware to gain unauthorized access to their servers and services?

Apple can only change the iMessage protocol itself very slowly

They changed it in <3 days.

iMessage is a giant cash cow for them. They've stated as much. They will dedicate a massive amount of resources to ensure that is not lost.

Beeper users will eventually become tired after the 3rd or 4th time they can't send/receive messages to Apple users at all anymore because they can't deregister their phone number from iMessage and Beeper Mini is broken.

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know anything about Compaq. Was their business built on reverse engineering IBMs system and impersonating IBM hardware to gain unauthorized access to their servers and services?

It was actually even more hardcore than that. They reverse engineered IBM's BIOS to create the first fully compatible non-IBM PC that could run MS-DOS and all IBM PC software natively. Then they won in court after proving they didn't copy any of IBM's source code and that the people who programmed the compatible BIOS had never even seen the original documentation for the IBM code, let alone the code itself.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm not even going to argue with you because all of that is way over my head.

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 11 months ago

Basically the answer to your question is "yes, and it was way more lucrative than Beeper Mini is"

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

it's not exactly the same.

Yes that's what I said.

[–] noodlejetski@lemm.ee 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I was referring to you saying that it's what "they've been doing for several years". it's not.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 1 points 11 months ago

What "they've been doing for several years", as I stated, is requiring you to use an email for iMessage, so in that way, yes it is.