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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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I admire their dedication, but at the same time strongly disagree with asking people to pay money for a service, that's fundamentally based on a hole in a reverse engineered protocol. They won't win this
They're doing more than riding on apples services for free. They had to build and run a notification relay server to make this work.
Same thing that's been in the news about Apple sharing info with police. The content of the messages are ETE encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not
My objection wouldn’t be that they didn’t put in enough effort, because it was clearly a lot, but that the service is a doomed idea.
Beeper Mini's GCM server only handles a "new message waiting" trigger, it doesn't contain any private data like who the message is from or its contents, just that a new message is available.
I'm happy to pay to support them.
If you'd rather not pay the Beeper Cloud service is free and all of the matrix bridges it uses are open source.
The source code behind how Beeper Mini works is available as well but will require a client of some sort to be written since you can't just use a matrix bridge and a matrix app.
The guy who started Beeper also created the Pebble Watch and they have always maintained open source alternatives for their bridges.
I'm just happy that a company with those ethics is the one to take up this fight against Apple, this could have been a $10/month app from a company who believes in closed source and pushing ads/tracking users' data.
Beeper is a good company that actually cares about privacy and security and that should be commended.
You should look at american legal precedent surrounding reverse engineering. Legally speaking, it's quite hopeful.
If the open source community could provide such a thing for free I think they would have done it already?
But presumably they lack the ability, the motivation or both.
They did. That's why Beeper Mini exists.
https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush
https://jjtech.dev/reverse-engineering/imessage-explained/
https://www.wired.com/story/beeper-android-iphone-texting-blue-bubbles/
They did. Its called airmessage. Has been around for almost 3 years now
do you need your own server
Yes.
n̈
You need a Mac of some kind, Minis are often used.
I used airmessage for a while when I was on iOS because I missed able able to message from the web while I was at work.
As much as I want it to he open source what could the risks be of apple finding a way to patch any exploits by looking at the open source code
I believe it’s a system that uses an actual Mac as a server for relay. Not really a way for them to stop that, and I doubt they care that much since it requires someone to have a Mac.
That's how Beeper works. Beeper Mini doesn't do that and instead imitates the Mac software, which is why Apple broke it.
I thought they meant airmessage.
I wouldn't mind paying $2 a month for Beeper. I've been using it for months to consolidate all of my messaging apps. It's worth $2 a month for me. Beeper Mini is just iMessage, so I don't know if it's worth it for me. They said they'll eventually move all of the other chat services over to Beeper Mini, at which point it will just be Beeper.