Apple’s most valuable intangible asset isn’t its patents or copyrights - it’s an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple’s shareholders.
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones
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But there are billions of Apple customers and only a small (but vocal and obnoxious!) minority of those customers are actual cult members, which means that there are billions of people who’d prefer to have private, secure communications with everyone in their lives, not just their fellow Apple customers.
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That’s where #BeeperMini comes in: it’s a third-party Android version of iMessage that builds on the work of a teenager who reverse-engineered iMessage and found a way to let Android users receive secure messages sent by Apple customers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor
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This was an immense service to Apple customers, correcting a gaping security vulnerability in Apple’s flagship product, that had been deliberately introduced, putting the company’s profits ahead of its customers’ safety and privacy.
Apple immediately rolled out a series of countermeasures to block Beeper Mini. When The @verge@mastodon.social’s @davidpierce@mastodon.social asked them why, Apple said they did it to protect their customers’ security (!!):
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/9/23995150/beeper-imessage-android-apple-statement
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The company claimed that there was some nonspecific way in which Beeper Mini weakened the security of Apple customers, though they offered no evidence in support of that claim. Remember, the gold standard for security claims is #ProofOfConcept code, not hand-waving:
https://nostarch.com/gtfo
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For its part, #Beeper engaged in a brief but intense cat-and-mouse game with Apple, taking countermeasures and countercountermeasures to preserve Apple customers’ access to secure communications with Android users:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/without-interoperability-apple-customers-will-never-be-secure
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Apple used its $3 trillion megaphone to condemn Beeper Mini even after Beeper published source code for Beeper Mini so anyone could verify that nothing nefarious was going on:
https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-moving-forward
Meanwhile, Apple’s cultists rallied behind the company. Not only would No True Apple Customer ever want to have secure communications with an Android user, but it was unfair for Beeper to profit by accessing Apple’s messaging infrastructure, which Apple has to pay to maintain.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr
Stupid anecdote but…
I’m on a pickup soccer group iMessge. They wouldn’t let me join due to the bubble colors going blue/green (I wouldn’t know or notice as I never use Apple stuff). I had someone volunteer to be my intermediary and let me know when when who was in for 8 months.
Eventually I found an iPhone someone was willing to give me and I only use it for that group text now.
This is some serious upside-down cult logic. Beeper isn’t accessing Apple’s infrastructure: Apple’s customers are accessing Apple’s infrastructure. If there were no Apple customers trying to talk to Android users, there would be no load on Apple’s servers.
But those customers don’t count. They aren’t real Apple customers, because they want to do things that benefit them, not Apple’s shareholders. In other words: they’re holding it wrong.
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I’m Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
http://thebezzle.org
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr It is very difficult to make a giant corporation understand something when they make billions of dollars not understanding it.
Apple did fine up to 2007 without setting up an HOA for their platform’s software. Actual market forces —consumers voting with their $ and pressuring software makers— did a decent job of keeping software standards high.
There’s e-mail conversations between jobs and other senior Apple VPs mentioning how the whole app store setup is the way it is because they didn’t know what they were doing so they would just set it up like the iTunes music store and see what happens. The expectation was that the 30% cut would eventually go down, maybe even go away.
The closed app store model also was chosen in part to placate carriers who were worried about rampant network overuse by uncontrolled software.
All the arguments these days for the status quo are basically self serving. They may actually believe them, but see first paragraph of this comment.
@pluralistic@mamot.fr I seem to recall one passionate pro-Apple commenter specifically argue that Beeper Mini somehow hacked/trespassed on Apple’s infrastructure/IP, thus the weakened security of iMessage.
They’re not necessarily wrong in the claim that Beeper Mini is a hack. It is, in the sense it subverts the assumption that only Apple devices can use Apple services. It’s also quite ironic:
@pluralistic@mamot.fr IIRC, I think that the argument was that Beeper was a literal man-in-the-middle. Ergo, the blue bubble which means it’s encrypted was now silently decrypted by a party (Beeper) that users didn’t choose and couldn’t opt out of. Beeper literally made it work by running iMessage on their own Macs and relaying the messages to the app, right? That architecture undermine iMessage security for anyone unknowingly routing messages through that, no?