- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Apple protecting it’s precious garden.
If only there was a secure and open standard that would work on any platform, regardless of ecosystem…
Oh well!
If you are talking about RCS - the encryption aspect is a google proprietary extension
Probably meant Matrix.
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
Thought RCS used the Signal Protocol?
Edit for source: Technical paper: Messages end-to-end encryption
It’s not natively supported by the base RCS standard, in the section at the end of the paper in the section titled “Third Party RCS Clients” Google explains that they’ve built the e2ee their Messages app themselves, (on top of standard RCS).
A developer has to use Google’s implementation specifically in order to send and recieve e2ee messages to Google’s Messages app (and Samsung Messages who also implemented this recently)
Although the e2ee implementation is using the Signal protocol under the hood, it’s for message content only - this is what is transmitted in cleartext (taken from the paper)
- Phone numbers of senders and recipients
- Timestamps of the messages
- IP addresses or other connection information
- Sender and recipient’s mobile carriers
- SIP, MSRP, or CPIM headers, such as User-Agent strings which may contain device manufacturers and models
- Whether the message has an attachment
- The URL on content server where the attachment is stored
- Approximated size of messages, or exact size of attachments
Without using this implementation of the Signal protocol on top of RCS, the message will deliver to the contact’s phone, but shows up as unencrypted garbled text
That is a very useful resource though, never knew there was a paper available on the implementation. Saving 😁
Signal
The problem is actually getting people to use it since they’re all too busy arguing over the color of a message
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.
our walled garden*
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.
No, they were charging money as they had their own APN to BPN bridge. Plus the usual cost of development and more.
To keep Beeper Mini running, Beeper uses a Beeper Push Notification (BPN) service to connect to Apple’s servers and notify you of new messages.
And it uses Apples gateway service for setup.
Yes. I did mention APN (Apple Push Notifications) to Beeper Push Notifications which then routes via FCM for Android. The whole setup does require active server cost + time to work on the app to bring it to parity with iMessage Features.
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Apple already knows that iMessage, alone, is a huge selling point for their iPhones. They held out for a few years keeping iTunes away from the rest of us before finally giving in, but I very much doubt that they’re going to open up iMessage any time soon. It’s pretty much the only thing that keeps iPhone users in their ecosystem anymore.
iMessage keeps in ecosystem? I’m using iPhones for 10 years. Sent my first iMessage 2 years ago. Definitely not a main ecosystem feature for me
That’s true, but it would be more Applelike to develop their own app. They obviously know how to do it, then they could have 100% of the profits and not have to deal with a partner. But Tim Cook said they re not interested in doing anything like that.
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
sheepahem user base don’t know any better.x
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
Funny how the EU just recently found them to NOT be gate keepers.
Text messaging market in EU is totally different from in the United States. This is because US texting was cheap always— not so with the EU.
TBF Europeans just went wild with SMS. Omg. Nowadays it’s all WhatsApp, which I am not happy with.
Gotta protect your users from fake blue bubbles, I get it I get it
not surprising, but super disappointing. Beeper Mini was a dream come true
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.
Obviously I want RCS. But I’m realistic in what I have right now. And right now what I got was working group chats
For those not in the loop, why? It seems like people who want to use Apple products would just buy a iPhone.
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.
If I had friends that would rather exclude me from communication than either use a different app or find some way to include me then I would absolutely not want those people in my life.
Meanwhile, in the UK WhatsApp is the default
That’s worse as it doesn’t even have sms
You would be right if SMS was still relevant in Europe (and asia and africa, I think). That would be kind of like saying a phone isn’t very good because it doesn’t support usenet.
Well nothing else is standardized in the same way SMS is. I don’t want to be forced into one application. SMS and MMS are older but they work across all devices.
There are plenty of standardized communication protocols. There are far less in the smartphone world, which is why we have this problem. Imagine if you couldn’t do voice calls between AT&T and Comcast, North America and Europe, or Apple and Android. Now why on earth would anyone think that text messaging should be that way, or shouldn’t have been standardized decades ago?
You can create a group chat using standard MMS. I have never heard of this being a problem.
Like I said, maybe I’m out of the loop or just lucky.
Some of us like control over our hardware but still want feature parity with our friends and family.
I think everyone saw this coming
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?
Do people like relying on service that requires their real device’s serial number to function?
You can use any apple device to use iMessage, your account isn’t only usable on your device. They were effectively stealing people’s machine IDs to provide this service. That’s fucked up.
“Effectively stealing” means the original machine ID can’t be used by the original machine after it’s stolen, right?
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.
Until Apple will inevitably litigate them to death when they figure out they can’t out engineer them
They spelled “profits” wrong.
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?
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.
Have teens not moved onto social media based messaging? Are they still using old school phone number based chats?
Yes but Apple has convinced a large swath of them that they must have an iPhone to be able to have any conversation with friends simply due to the conveniences of iMessage.
They also went out of their way to make SMS conversations harder to read the text by making the green just annoying enough of a color that it actually makes it harder. There are other things but that’s the gist.
The entire Fiasco is mostly US only. Rest of the World have different apps that dominate in individual regions like WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber etc.
Basic shallow and easily impressionable zoomer bitches
Teenagers care about retarded things like this. Big surprise.
I honestly don’t understand it either. As of yet I’ve never had an Apple device and I am unlikely to buy one in the future
Especially among teens, yes
American teens. It’s not the same around the world.
In the US, for sure. I have been just flatly if ored when they found out I didn’t have an iPhone, and I was just not included in group conversations.
