Lawmakers Push DOJ To Investigate Apple Following Beeper Shutdowns (theverge.com) 55
Following a tumultuous few weeks for Beeper, which has been trying to provide an iMessage-compatible Android app, a group of US lawmakers are pushing for the DOJ to investigate Apple for "potentially anticompetitive conduct" over its attempts to disable Beeper's services. From a report: Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) as well as Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Ken Buck (R-CO) said in a letter to the DOJ that Beeper's Android messaging app, Beeper Mini, was a threat to Apple's leverage by "creating [a] more competitive mobile applications market, which in turn [creates] a more competitive mobile device market."
In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky and 16-year-old developer James Gill talked about the fight to keep Beeper Mini alive. Migicovsky told CBS News that Beeper is trying to provide a service people want and reiterated his belief that Apple has a monopoly over its iMessage service. The company created Beeper Mini after being contacted by Gill, who said he reverse-engineered the software by "poking at it" using a "real Mac and a real iPhone." [...] The lawmakers' letter also pointed to a Department of Commerce report calling Apple a "gatekeeper," mirroring language used in the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) that went into force earlier this year, regulating the "core" services of several tech platforms (though, notably, iMessage may not be included in this). They went on to cite Migicovsky's December 2021 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony that "the dominant messaging services would use their position to impose barriers to interoperability" and keep companies like Beeper from offering certain services. "Given Apple's recent actions, that concern appears prescient," they added.
In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky and 16-year-old developer James Gill talked about the fight to keep Beeper Mini alive. Migicovsky told CBS News that Beeper is trying to provide a service people want and reiterated his belief that Apple has a monopoly over its iMessage service. The company created Beeper Mini after being contacted by Gill, who said he reverse-engineered the software by "poking at it" using a "real Mac and a real iPhone." [...] The lawmakers' letter also pointed to a Department of Commerce report calling Apple a "gatekeeper," mirroring language used in the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) that went into force earlier this year, regulating the "core" services of several tech platforms (though, notably, iMessage may not be included in this). They went on to cite Migicovsky's December 2021 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony that "the dominant messaging services would use their position to impose barriers to interoperability" and keep companies like Beeper from offering certain services. "Given Apple's recent actions, that concern appears prescient," they added.
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Re:apple just needs to remove app store rules but (Score:4, Informative)
I really hate the term "side loading" as it implies that something shady is being done.
Can we just call it "normal installing" or something? Because the device user being able to install software from any source of their choosing is the normal way software is supposed to be installed. Going through an "app store" gatekeeper is NOT normal, it's the shady way.
(And that's really not relevant here, since this article is about Apple breaking their promise to open source the iMessage protocol, and then breaking the workaround when somebody figured out how to use it anyway.)
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This is going to make you feel old but this app store being normal thing has been the standard for 16+ years. There is an entire generation of kids hitting adulthood where this has been ingrained since they have been old enough to use a smartphone. Most don't even have computers. Grandparents who never learned how to use a PC have been useing appstores successfully for a decade and a half.
There are more people who have access to smartphones on this earth than running water toilets.
This is the norm, Unfortun
Re: apple just needs to remove app store rules but (Score:2)
Another Appletologist repeating everything T Don Cookard says... Probably worth mentioning that NSO group keeps iPhone exploits on reserve, and they find them all the damn time. You know your security model sucks when you keep getting owned by text parsing bugs.
Yet NSO still haven't even managed to crack the bootloader on many Android devices that are over 5 years old.
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https://www.cisa.gov/news-even... [cisa.gov]
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And yet, the App Store has been part of the iPhone ecosystem for a good decade and a half now. iMessage has been a thing for about a decade itself. And Apple's "walled garden" philosophy has been open knowledge that entire time, and longer even... literally going back decades to Jef Raskin's original concept for the Macintosh in the 1970s! So not a soul in the world one can claim to have been surprised, bait-and-switched, or otherwise tricked. Meanwhile Android is, and always has been, an unrestricted f
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Also, emphasizing that it's irregular to install by any means other than Google's store does reinforce the reality of Google's monopoly in the minds of the public. Even if it does also discourage them from escaping. It becomes that much harder for Google to deny their position.
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I really hate the term "side loading" as it implies that something shady is being done.
Can we just call it "normal installing" or something? Because the device user being able to install software from any source of their choosing is the normal way software is supposed to be installed. Going through an "app store" gatekeeper is NOT normal, it's the shady way.
(And that's really not relevant here, since this article is about Apple breaking their promise to open source the iMessage protocol, and then breaking the workaround when somebody figured out how to use it anyway.)
I feel the same way. I don't even like to tell people I rooted my phone. I say I enabled software installation.
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(And that's really not relevant here, since this article is about Apple breaking their promise to open source the iMessage protocol, and then breaking the workaround when somebody figured out how to use it anyway.)
You are right, that tirade about the App Store was not just stupid, but also off topic. But then, your claim about "Apple breaking their promise to open source the iMessage protocol" is also bullshit, so my advice is to shut the fuck up when you have no clue.
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The DMCA has nothing to do with reverse engineering. The DMCA is an expansion of copyright.
The anti-circumvention clause bans methods of circumventing DRM to copy stuff.
There's no copyright issue here. Nobody's copying Apple's code, or trying to.
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If I was 16-year-old Gill, I'd be shitting myself (Score:4, Insightful)
Gill, who said he reverse-engineered the software by "poking at it" using a "real Mac and a real iPhone."
If I had reverse-engineered an Apple product, I wouldn't reveal my name and yap in the press about it.
This poor kid stands to have his entire life utterly ruined by Apple suing him for DMCA violation for untold kajillions of dollars in damages. I really hope for him it won't happen. It very nearly happened to me 24 years ago and I sure shat myself.
maybe the press will get him funds for legal help (Score:2)
maybe the press will get him funds for legal help and if apple sues then he may need $500k+ to cover the costs.
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maybe the press will get him funds for legal help and if apple sues then he may need $500k+ to cover the costs.
$500K? Maybe as a down payment. Apple has armies of lawyers. I don't think it will come to that though. Apple will just keep changing the iMessage protocol just enough to string Beeper along into bankruptcy.
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Which I don't have a problem with BTW. Apple pays to run their iMessage infrastructure. Beeper is trying to piggy back on that for free. Apple has no obligation to open their system
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And that is likely going to be a sticking point in the end. It's all Apple owned and operated infrastructure. If you're going to force Apple to make Beeper work, then it would force everyone else to open up as well - Facebook to open up Whatsapp, Telegram and etc. also need to be opened up, etc.
Of course, Apple could just start being unreliable for Beeper - if yo
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Wrong verb. It's not Apple's job to make a third-party app work. What's probably going to happen is that Apple will have to let Beeper work with iMessage.
Re: maybe the press will get him funds for legal h (Score:2)
No, they wonâ(TM)t. Weâ(TM)ve already been through all of this with IM clients on desktops. At the end of the day, this is Appleâ(TM)s infrastructure, iMessages travel over Apple servers, and Apple have no reason or requirement to allow anyone else to use it, especially when it costs them real money. I love to cheer for the little guy, but this is not the way, and itâ(TM)s never going to work, at least not reliably enough to be viable.
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That's what they've been doing. It's not their problem if Beeper can't keep up with their API.
This is pretty comparable to a company selling counterfeit FedEx shipping labels and then complaining about "monopoly" and "freedom of choice" when FedEx learns how to exclude the counterfeits. Boasting that this is a service "people want" is a pretty shady red herring.
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This is true for countless messaging platforms throughout history, like MSN Messenger, AIM, etc, and yet, 3rd party apps like Adium X, and Pidgin have maintained compatibility with these services.
Re:If I was 16-year-old Gill, I'd be shitting myse (Score:5, Interesting)
You seem to have Apple confused with Sony.
Remember "DVD Jon?" He didn't just break CSS. He also broke Apple's DRM on the iTunes Store. And what did Apple do? Pretty much nothing. Oh, they'd update FairPlay (The DRM system in question.) occasionally to thwart Jon, who would promptly update his hack and who was otherwise totally unmolested by Apple. Even the "hackintosh" scene is mostly unmolested by Apple. Make your hacked bootloader publically available? Fine. Distribute detailed instructions on how to build a hackintosh? Fine. Publically encourage others to do so? Also fine. It was only when some people built an acutal business around building and selling the things that Apple took exception.
Sony, on the other hand... when someone posted a jailbreak for the PS3 back in the day; Sony sued and tried to have him prosecuted [wikipedia.org] under everything from the DMCA to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to breach of contract and tortious interference to (WTF?) trespassing!
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DVD Jon was tried in Norway. They don't have the DMCA in Norway. Also, unlike the US, you can defend yourself in court without going broke - or worse, opt not to defend yourself even if you're innocent because you have less money than the guy suing you.
DVD Jon would have been annihilated if he had been tried in the US.
This is going nowhere (Score:4, Informative)
Android phones can already message iPhones and vice-versa. So you get a green bubble, big deal.
Reading how beeper works it seems full of potential security issues https://help.beeper.com/chat-n... [beeper.com]
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The bubble color is irrelevant. What the bubble color MEANS (that the message was sent unencrypted) is INCREDIBLY relevant.
And yeah, how this app operates is also dangerous. But it's no more dangerous than sending unencrypted text messages.
The fix is for Apple to be forced to open up the protocol like they promised they were going to do many years ago.
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My understanding is that it's storing your Apple ID login info on somebody else's computer. That's dangerous.
Re: This is going nowhere (Score:1)
No, it doesn't do that at all...
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As usual, people have a tendency to over-simplify problems to make it appear as though one side or another is being unreasonable.
It's not about the green vs. blue bubbles and never has been.
If it was, I would imagine that a green bubble would be more desirable anyway because green == good.
The color is just an indicator that the entire conversation is being downgraded to a lower quality because older technology (SMS/MMS) is being used by one or more people in the chat.
Once Apple embraces RCS, which it sounds
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> The color is just an indicator that the entire
> conversation is being downgraded to a lower quality
> because older technology
Wrong. That's backwards. Originally ALL text messages on the iPhone were green. iMessage came out a few years after the iPhone. And the blue bubbles were introduced to inform the user that the EXTRA features Apple intriduced in iMessage were available in that conversation. But green was always the default baseline available to all, not some intentionally degraded or st
Now they're worried about competition? (Score:2)
Where are these people when it comes to competition for internet service? Where are they when it comes to competition for mobile phone service?
It would be nice if these folks would figure out which road they're going to stand on.
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It would be nice if these folks would figure out which road they're going to stand on.
They're going to stand on the road where they get paid, of course.
You expected anything different?
Right to charge for Apple's server infrastructure? (Score:3)
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This is like someone finding a hole in the fences around Disney World, setting up a “competing” ticket booth in front of the hole, then complaining when Disney adds security and kicks them off the property for trespassing.
iMessage is not a public service, it’s restricted access. Apple doesn’t run it out of the goodness of their hearts, they sell access with each hardware purchase. You are no more entitled to sell access to Disney World than Beeper is to sell access to iMessage.
I get
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Re: Right to charge for Apple's server infrastruct (Score:2)
Re: Right to charge for Apple's server infrastruct (Score:2)
In a nutshell (Score:2)
Asking Apple to open iMessage instead of pushing them to support RCS is like asking to allow a Ford engine to be installed on a GM truck because everything must be allowed to the competition as a drop in replacement that just works.
And Breeper is the garage that reverse engineered all the transmission, computers and wiring bits. They are more than happy to reverse engineer until the service is stable and they can paywall the service, then becoming as competitive as Apple and their free iMessage for Apple de
I don't get this (Score:2)
Messages/iMessage is an Apple technology they developed in-house for their users to use to send messages to each other. Apple runs the servers that do this, and provides the service free to Apple users. I don't understand why people (or lawmakers) think that other companies may use Apple technologies on their devices. That's just doesn't make sense.
I feel like this is no different than Microsoft not releasing Access for Mac, or Office for Linux Messages is proprietary Apple technology if you want to do away
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I have to admit that I'm puzzled by the idea that Apple would be investigated for blocking unauthorized use of their IT services, given that there are criminal laws that target unauthorized use. These laws have been used to successfully prosecute people in the past. Heck, people have been prosecuted for merely crafting URLs following discovered patterns to access data not made accessible to them through a link on a page.
Apple provides a wide spectrum of services including data storage, data synchronizati