Do you believe that Beeper should be allowed to reverse engineer iMessage without legal consequences?

#Technology #Apple #Google #iOS #Android (mobile OS)

195

resolved Feb 21

✅ - yes

❌ - no

🤷🏻‍♂️ - don’t know

I am not asking for your interpretation of existing laws. I am asking what you think.

According to what I was able to gather: Beeper allowed android users to use iMessage. Apple doesn’t provide official API so the team reverse engineered iMessage to build that feature into their products. Apple then changed the backend of iMessage effectively putting a stop to their “hack”. Their account just posted that iMessage is back.

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9 Comments

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I think there's a strong NO argument that what beeper is doing is indistinguishable from what a spammer would do, and that in order to prevent spammers technologically you also need to prevent what beeper's doing.

@jacksonpolack I can’t make the connection between reverse engineering and spamming in my head. Can you elaborate a bit?

Isn't betting on your beliefs supposed to increase the prevalence of saying "I don't know"? We're not even hardly at the lizardman constant yet :P

@RobertCousineau hahahahahaha

Should be allowed to reverse-engineer: yes, absolutely. Doesn't necessarily mean that Apple is obligated to not continue breaking them, and they almost certainly will. But reverse-engineering (for compatibility or other reasons) should always be allowed.

Some things reverse-engineering has brought us: IBM PC "compatibles" (AKA the entire PC industry), phones (and other devices attached to phone lines) sold by anyone other than AT&T, game modding, Linux on Apple silicon, Wine (which among many other things made the Steam Deck possible), a substantial number of Open Source drivers...

Anyone who is ever debugging a piece of software that needs to interoperate with another piece of software they don't have the source code for often ends up doing some form of reverse engineering.

Also see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability .

@josh you make very good arguments - I think I am convinced

It's against their ToS to reverse engineer the platform and essentially compromise their security. They deserve whatever happens to them.

@quantizor I actually agree with you on this and I am surprised by the rest of the votes but maybe there is something we are both missing here.

very interesting that people here believe that it should be allowed - can someone explain please? I am leaning towards it should not be allowed and Beeper should face legal consequenes