Looking at Beeper’s website, I can see
> We currently offer a 7 day free trial, afterwards there is a $1.99 per month subscription.
I can’t imagine any company being okay with another company reverse-engineering their product and then charging for it, without at least paying for the infrastructure they’re using. Why is Apple expected to accept it?
Isn’t the reverse-engineering against Apple ToS anyway? As far as I know, it’s a pretty standard clause in basically every company’s ToS. How is Beeper supposed to "win" here, short of that sort of ToS clause being declared unenforceable?
Reverse engineering is not a problem.
Shutting down a competitor business draws scrutiny. Beeper’s strategy is not clean, but apple’s behavior in this space could be framed as anti competitive to begin with. They’re probably hoping so for some kind of concession that will force apple to open and provide a way for beeper to operate that is more above the table.
And both Apple’s OS licenses and Apple’s MediaToS, both of which require agreement before being able to reach the parts that were reverse engineered, explicitly prohibit reverse engineering.
But the civil liability isn’t the most interesting part of this story.
The interesting part is that this referral to the DOJ can blow up in Beeper’s face in a violent way.
While there’s nothing the antitrust division of the DOJ can do here no matter how badly the congressional critters misrepresent the situation in the letter, CCIPS can definitely pursue computer trespass charges as defined in the CFAA due to Beeper’s unauthorized access of Apple’s servers.
0: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...
If you're a grocery store, it's anti-competitive to try and shut down the store down the street.
It's not anti-competitive to arrest the shoplifter who's selling their spoils in your parking lot.
Let's say I own a lemon orchid and it's known around the area people are welcome to come pick a few as they want, but we primarily sell wholesale. One day, John down the road (who doesn't own an orchid$ decides he wants to sell lemons wholesale too. He proceeds to recruit pickers and they start combing through my open orchid stripping trees to sell.
As a reaction to this behaviour - which I clearly didn't intend for, but did technically allow - am I being anti-competitive? Would you classify this as "shutting down a competitors business"?
People are free to pay Beeper for a service and Apple isn't stopping that. Apple is stopping unauthorized access a private network they run.
- The explicit carve-out of reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability in the DMCA
- The European Digital Markets Act, which will require chat networks to provide interoperability
What's not clear to me is how relevant the DMCA is here, and/or if a ToS can supersede these laws.
> I can’t imagine any company being okay with another company reverse-engineering their product and then charging for it
There is a whole ecosystem of products built on this premise. Quicken, for example, relies on a library of reverse engineered banking interfaces to automate interaction and data aggregation of one's accounts.
Search and LLM products are also built on the consumption of other people's data and then charging for it.
I'm not arguing that Apple is ok with this, but that as a model, it's not uncommon.
I think this would be _fan-tas-tic_. But beeper is not a chat network. It is a company that simply wants to be be the iMessage for Android client, using Apple's network.
Their case would be stronger if they did have their own network and used this reverse engineered iMessage connection to provider interop between the two networks.
Explicit prohibitions against reverse engineering in ToS and licenses, as is the case here, supersede the DMCA exception as per Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2003)[0]
> The European Digital Markets Act, which will require chat networks to provide interoperability
Only for ones that are big enough to meet a threshold, which iMessage does not. If it did it would only be enforceable in the EU, so that wouldn’t affect US users.
> There is a whole ecosystem of products built on this premise. Quicken, for example, relies on a library of reverse engineered banking interfaces to automate interaction and data aggregation of one's accounts.
The big difference with your example and this case is that in your example it leads to a new product that is sold, whereas in this case it’s the repackaging of someone else’s product, which is then subsequently sold and relies on someone else’s infrastructure.
Note that Apple hasn’t sued Beeper (yet) for reselling/sub-licensing iMessage, instead they’ve tightened access of their infrastructure.
It goes without saying that even if you’d believe that the DMCA reverse engineering exception allows for repackaging and resale of the reverse engineered product (which it doesn’t), it certainly doesn’t come with entitlement to the resources of owner of the reverse engineered product.
> Search and LLM products are also built on the consumption of other people's data and then charging for it.
Ignoring the fact that the adjudication on the legality of this has yet to be resolved for a second, this is still not analogous to the situation at hand.
Consumption of other people’s data to produce, generally, new data in new forms and context is not the same as repackaging and reselling. It’d be different if Beeper used their reverse engineering to setup their own competing chat network, although then you get into the territory of clean rooms etc.
0: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...
iMessage (and Bing) don't have a large enough user base in the EU to fall under the DMA.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861030/imessage-bing-eur...
I am curious what a judge or legislators will decide on this, can a company force you to use their client to connect to their service? Then Google can force us to use Google approved and signed apps to access youtube and google apps, even if they can't block alternatives they can bully the alternatives with the justice system.
It would be also interesting to know if using this app instead of the fallback it is actually using maybe less resources and it would be a benefit for the world for Apple to open the protocol.
Some examples spring to mind: carrier locked cellphones. Game consoles. Reddit.
> The user will create an account so IMO if I have an Apple account (I own an old Apple laptop) then WTF would Apple care I send the bytes from a differrent application.
Actually, the initial version of beeper mini did not require an apple ID. And actually this was one feature they seemed to advertised a lot. Only the phone number was used: "No Apple ID is required" [1].
I guess the idea was that they could provide an upgrade to the current, unencrypted communication between iMessage and android (that does not require an apple id either). But I guess the issue here, was that people who used it did not necessarily have an apple ID, and thus not consented to apple's ToS, which as I understand makes it different than pidgin etc. And they actually say that this is a problem they are trying to fix: "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." [2]
Unless I misunderstand something, beeper mini stopped working because apple somehow disabled this "feature".
I mean I do not have any invested interest in this, I do not own an iphone and even if I did all people I know use other chatting apps, I do not own apple stocks or anything, I am all for piracy and whatnot, but I would not consider blocking access to their service when there is no ToS agreement "anti-competitive behaviour".
[1] https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works (initial announcement) [2] https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-mini-is-back
How is this not a violation of the same Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was used to prosecute Aaron Swartz for unauthorized access to a web server?
RIP Aaron Swartz
They may not be ok with it but they should be forced to allow and not attempt to thwart "adversarial interoperability", on which the computing and the internet were built!
You mean if a monopoly is created, it should be regulated like a utility. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, not sure what's invalid about this way of thinking.
Very cut and dry CFAA case, I'm guessing Beeper saw how well it went for Epic Games when they leveraged the useful idiots to sway public opinion, so they are doing the same for a quick buck and hoping it gets political enough to avoid getting fined.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards...
Perhaps the outcome of challenging Apple's ToS depends on where the case would be filed. For example, 5th Cir would favour Beeper as it follows Vault v Quaid. 1st Cir follows Bowers v Baystate and would favour Apple. 8th Cir has followed Bowers (See Davidson, the Blizzard case).
"[P]rivate parties are free to contractually forego the limited ability to reverse engineer a software product under the exemptions of the Copyright Act[,]" Bowers v. Baystate Techs, Inc., 320 F.3d 1317, 132526 (Fed. Cir. 2003)
But note that in Bowers, Baystate did not actually attempt to plead fair use or copyright misuse. It only focused on preemption. The Bowers case is used to argue against reverse engineering as fair use but Baystate never asserted that defense.
The so-called "tech" companies and their supporters would prefer Bowers to apply everywhere. But it does not apply everywhere.
What is more interesting than the copyright issues, IMHO, is the idea of an antitrust illegality defense to breach of a software license. From 1996,
https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v09/09HarvJLTech23...
Samuelson and Scotchmer mentioned it again in 2002.
"While antitrust and competition law may regulate antireverse engineering clauses in an appropriate case or context, no such claim has as yet been brought, let alone sustained."
Beeper (theoretically) exists to allow Android users to communicate with iPhone users, so one of the two users in the conversation already gave Apple hundreds of dollars. They'll survive.
Beeper exists solely to make Android users feel better about the color of their bubble and their social standing thereof.
Which is right, it's only good for consumers if Apple just sucks it up and accepts that they need to support stuff like this.
They're happy enough to use wifi/Bluetooth/other comms specs. Vendor lock in special cult club effect I guess. It's just a phone...
I miss the days of GAIM/Pidgin/Trillium/Adium and hope Beeper prevails here.
The top reply addresses your points:
> The hacker spirit is the fun of reverse engineering. The hacker spirit is about personal use.
> It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business, or a popular app, that wouldn't quickly be shut down. That's just common sense.
Beeper’s CEO is acting high and mighty, speaking like he’s some kind of ideological liberator, while charging for a service using another’s infrastructure. Had it been free and open-source from the start¹ you’d see a lot more people on their side. As soon as you start charging, you lose a lot of “hacker” sympathy.
It’s possible to disagree with Apple for not providing iMessage on Android while at the same time disagreeing with Beeper’s approach.
¹ And I do mean the whole app, not the proof-of-concept from the teenager.
I reject this idea completely. The "hacker spirit" in no way excludes doing business or making money. Hackers creating businesses to bring the benefits of their hacking to the world are the very foundation of YC who created and operate this site.
> charging for a service using another’s infrastructure
Beeper doesn't get any benefit from using Apple's infrastructure per se. The resource usage is trivial. If there was a way to go around Apple's infrastructure and communicate with Apple's iMessage users directly Beeper would be all over it and more than happy to replace all that "infrastructure" themselves at no cost to Apple.
Apple has inserted themselves between their users and the world, making it impossible for anyone to send proper group or video messages to their unchangeable default messaging app without going through Apple. Beeper is simply doing the only thing that will work to fix Apple's intentional crippling of communication with Android for their own benefit.
Apple's goal is for iMessage to remain an exclusive feature of their hardware. That exclusivity is what Beeper -- or an Apple-vended Android client, or RCS interoperability, or federation generally -- threatens.
And -- it's exactly the proposition of, "to use our popular offering in market X, you must also purchase our offering in market Y" which is anticompetitive.
The issue isn't so much Beeper as it is the open the door to anyone on the Internet. I.e. Apple probably cares little about Beeper itself, and more about the risk of 3rd party software accessing its services/users.
A good number of us have had to combat spam/abuse in our careers, and we're sympathetic to the plight.
(I'd still prefer to see 3rd party clients as I appreciate the integration those can bring. But the hardware lock-in is particularly egregious.)
Creating barrier to entry for spam definitely reduces it but we know for a fact that's not a very effective spam fighting strategy.
I also think modern anti-spam tech is really good. My Samsung phone here is really good at blocking robo calls here in Thailand. In fact I handn't received one since my upgrade to S22. If Samsung can block robo calls and open protocols like federation and email can stop spam through simple tech and volunteer work then multibillion company with some of the best engineers surely can't find this that challenging right? So I find the spam argument for closing off iMessages not very convincing to say the least.
Sentiment at the time was that we wished AOL would welcome third party clients but it was not their duty or obligation to do so. Likewise most people believed the third party clients were free to adapt to the changes. Both had the right to play cat/mouse as long as they wished.
Beeper is making a very different argument: that the courts and/or law should force anyone exposing an endpoint to the internet to bend over backwards so third parties can use the endpoint too (for free) because that would be convenient for end users. That Beeper can decide, at its own discretion, what is or is not allowable for something that was never intended to allow third party access.
Every company is almost by definition a monopolist with regard to its own products and services because even mostly equivalent things are still different in some way that could matter to a customer. It is all about where you draw the lines.
Several other comment mention "piggybacking", but there are plenty of services piggybacking on tech giants: SearX, Nitter, Invidious, Teddit, Libreddit. One can even argue that LineageOS and GrapheneOS are piggybacking on Google's efforts.
Beeper is requesting money for illegally distributing Apples copyrighted code which they then use in a questionable way. Cry me a river.
The primary difference is that in one case it’s a closed proprietary protocol and in the other an open protocol. But who pays for what is not the main concern. Apple would still disagree even if Beeper would be willing to share an appropriate part of their revenue.
Similarly, with plain SMS, the cellular provider owns (some of) the infrastructure, but the user is a customer.
With Beeper, the customer is paying Beeper, but Beeper is using Apple's infrastructure (without paying for it).
No. They don't work the same way. Your email provider has to maintain a mail server to send and receive emails on your behalf. Your email client connects to that email server to do all its work. Beeper Mini directly connects to Apple's Push Notifications servers to do all send/receive.
People arguing for an open iMessage system like email are completely forgetting how much spam and bad actors have ruined the openness of email. It use to be the case that you could run your own email server, but due to spam, many major email providers like Gmail will reject emails from untrusted IP addresses, for example.
Edit: grammar.
And as far as I know, you have to use the official WhatsApp app to chat on WhatsApp, same for Telegram, etc. etc. So apart from iMessage not being a monopoly, they are also not more restrictive than their competition.
So besides not matching with our "open" ideology for communication, what exactly has Apple done wrong here?
I've arrived at this position because I'm not able to use any of those platforms because they don't provide accessibility tools that I need. Beeper does, and most matrix clients do also.
I recognize that the open source "everything should be open" view is not remotely mainstream, but the only way forward is to demand better.
Because it's the replacement for SMS for Apple phones and doesn't require an account in the same way those other services do. It just uses the Apple account iPhone owners already need to have.
Apple: We do not restrict who you can talk to on iPhone
Prosecutor: but the bubble is green and my friends won't talk to me :(
Also, Apple knows this. They know they'd lose that's why they are already ahead of this by announcing adoption of RCS in 2024.
How can anyone presume that Apple would stand some sort of ideological ground here? We literally have emails where Apple c-suits say that iMessages mistreating android benefits them and they don't want to fix this. This is such a clear case I don't understand how anyone can defend this.
All I've heard is Apple "shut down" Beeper.
Previously, they did this by effectively having you sign-in to iCloud on a Mac system running in their datacenter. Handing over your iCloud password to a third-party obviously has security implications, even if you trust Beeper wont intentionally abuse it.
Recently, they had a new Beeper-Mini, that instead reversed-engineered the iMessage protocol and spoofed your Android phonenumber as being an Apple device. This allowed you to use iMessage without ever handing over your password to some remote server (although, still handing it over to a third-party application, and trusting it doesn't do something shady).
Beeper, for its part, has claimed this reverse-engineering falls under the protection of allowed exceptions for the purpose of interoperability. Apple has not yet made any legal claim one way or another, and instead just shutdown the method being used to gain access to iMessage from non-Apple devices.
Get the regulators to force Apple to open the front door for them.
I thought what Beeper did was fun at first, but now I consider their work dangerous, since it rationalizes a push for remote attestation, which is what Apple has been meaning to do for a long time. Now they have a valid reason to fully utilize it, after which Google may try to follow suit and probably face less backlashes.
No it doesn't. By this logic, Apple should have gone through with plans to implement CSAM scanning on iCloud. Except customers complained and they abandoned it. Then they debuted e2e encrypted iCloud storage 2 years later; completely antithetical to the school of thought used by CSAM scanning advocates.
Then they choked on the cake.
> "If it hadn't been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I'm 100% sure of that." -Steve Jobs
For your Apple collection:
https://www.bonhams.com/auction/24495/lot/109/wozniak-steve-...
Their Blue Box efforts were very cool! So is the coding that let Beeper do this.
But it is mystifying to me that people are arguing it is illegitimate (under our current system) for Apple to try to secure its system.
Apparently AOL eventually "beat" MSN trying to reverse engineer their protocol by exploiting a known buffer overflow in their own implementation, and then MSN fumbled by trying to leak the security issue to put pressure on AOL but being too transparent in their manipulations and losing the PR battle that ensued.
> If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users.
I want a premium messaging experience on my iPhone, regardless of what the other party has. I do not want compressed images and videos, and as an end-user, it's bullisht that I have to figure out how to do that using 3rd party apps.
Apple should bundle iMessage access for Android into iCloud's subscription and release an official Android app. Maybe some eyes from the DOJ will get that on Apple's roadmap (I can dream, right?).
This entire society us upside down! Just because apple is big bad corp doesn't mean any issue against them is right!
Kudos to beeper but don't make this a legal thing against apple.
I mean, it even makes sense, Youtube is more closer to a monopoly than iMessage is.
:-/
