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Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority
(www.androidauthority.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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I don’t get it. iMessage is Apple’s service. Why are they obliged to open it up for everyone to use? Would it be nice? Yes, of course. Should Apple be legally required to open up access to their service?
The US Federal Trade Commission puts it this way:
It further explains that "market power" means:
Emphasis added. What the government might argue in this case is that Apple has market power in the online message space because it preloads its own messaging app on its smartphones, which I believe enjoy a majority market share in the USA. One remedy the government could seek is requiring Apple to allow third parties to develop clients for its messaging service.
They didn't, someone made an App to interface with it. Trying to shut that down is anti-competitive.
It's also a huge security hole
How? It's not a MitM or anything like that, it's connecting exactly how an Apple device would connect. Everything is still E2EE, just one of the ends can now be an Android device.
Businesses are naturally anticompetitive. It may or may not violate antitrust law. The two main categories are collusion with competitors to prevent new competition, or if they seek to gain or maintain a monopoly via shady methods (just a monopoly itself isn’t illegal though). I doubt if Apple conspired with Google here and it would be a stretch to say they have a monopoly, so it seems like a pointless case to me.
It's not a public API. Hacking someone's private API is already against law - charging $$ for it moreso.
Reverse engineering an API is not illegal
Ah, common misconception - hacking an API != creating a compatible program. ( reverse engineering)
Imagine a drill company has a special shape for its bits. Our law allows someone else to either.. make bits that can fit in that shape OR make their own drill that can accept those bits.
"BUT they copied!" - it doesn't have to be a copy to be compatible, and they don't even have to use the 'special shape' just be able to work with the special shape. The law does not allow for protections around that. Doing so would be by definition anti-competitive. Our anti competition laws or rather our IP protection laws are not intended in any way to 'ensure a monopoly'. The IP laws give a person a right to either keep something they do secret OR share that knowledge with the world so we all benefit, in exchange for a very limited monopoly.
Practically speaking, If I got the KFC Colonel to give me the list of 11 herbs and spices in a Poker game, and then started making my own delicious poultry that is totally cool. Likewise, If I figured out that all that was inside a Threadripper was blue smoke and started making my own blue smoke chips, the law is ok with that.
In this case roughly, Having a public facing endpoint. And then saying that the public can access that endpoint is cool Saying that only the public using the code I alone gave them -- well... that's not been litigated a lot, but all signs point to no.
It's like Bing saying its for Safari only, and suing people who accessed it using Chrome. It is a logical claim, but the law does not provide that kind of protection/enforcement.
tl;dr these concepts are old but being newly applied to fancy technology. The laws in place are clear in most cases. A car maker can not dictate what you put in the tank. FedEX and UPS can't charge you differently for shipping fiction books or medical journals or self published stories. And they'd probably get anti-trust scrutiny they even told you what brand/style of boxes you had to use.
They didn't hack it, they spoofed a device, they just tricked the systems around the api
That counts as unauthorized access in the eyes of the law. It's a private system and they did not have any agreements permitting them to use it as they wanted.
Quite literally the text of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act. Unauthorized access of computer systems can get you 20-years at club fed. Seems like some of these people need a history lesson.
Apple reverse-engineered Office to release iWork. So Apple isn't new to reverse-engineering others proprietary shit when it benefits them. something, something, history lesson, hmm…
I don't know laws in the US but my limited understanding in the case of Beeper is that its users are the ones that grant themselves unauthorized access to the Apple servers. Beeper is a tool that packages pypush to accomplish it. So Apple should sue all the Beeper users?
As an example, there are tons of tools to exploit vulnerable systems in Linux. Metasploit is a penetration testing software and can execute exploits on old unpatched systems. I don't think anyone is suing Metasploit developers for Computer Fraud and Abuse aCt. The users who use it are responsible for the access of unauthorized services and broken ToS.
If Apple thinks Beeper users are exploiting its servers, they should patch them (which they did).
Beeper did try to monetize it, so i'm not sure how it fairs but Beeper is not forcing anyone to gain unauthorized access. Beeper even welcomed Apple to audit Beeper mini code.
And I'm sure Beeper has a legal team that analyzed these scenarios better than anyone of us. And Apple has sued companies for less. They'd have done it the moment the app landed on appstore. They could have crushed it before gaining any attention.
Again, I have no idea how legal it is. I have both Apple and android devices and never use iMessage. But you gotta hand it to Beeper devs. That's some old school hacker shit and I'm here for it.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Genuinely curious, what's the law against reverse engineering an API? I can maybe see the argument for charging for the service, but beeper mini is planning to integrate other services as well so I don't know if that'll really hold water.
They can reverse engineer it and run it as their own service with their own infrastructure. But that doesn't mean they can then start accessing Apple's implementation and using Apple's resources without permission.
If they function identically to a normal client though what's the issue? As an example Google indexes pages all over the web without the explicit permission of those websites, that requires them to read the page and make requests to someone else's infrastructure.
What part exactly here is illegal?
The websites in question getting crawled and indexed are generally open and available for anyone to browse. There are parts of the web that are gated off and require authentication and authorization to access. Imagine now that Google found a way to authenticate as you with your bank's website and index your online banking portal. (It's not a perfect analogy to what's happening with Beeper, but I'm just using the one you laid out.)
In a similar way, iMessage as a service requires authentication and authorization to use. It is not open for anyone to use. Beeper is doing something to spoof or otherwise fool Apple into giving the client access. This is the part that's illegal. And potentially not just "file a lawsuit" illegal but criminally so.
It doesn't really matter why Apple doesn't want Beeper or anyone else to use it. The fact that they simply don't is all that matters.
Yes, they should be legally required to open up access to their service. No more walled gardens that hold a large number of users hostage.
You can argue that they're unfairly using monopoly power. Same reason why MS was forced to allow windows to switch browsers.
I think the problem is that it's unnecessarily hardware locked. They shouldn't have to "open it up" insofar as anyone can access it from whatever app like beeper is doing. But it's only fair that they support other operating systems. They can still control it or even charge a fee to access it from other OSes.
I wish this kind of thing was more spotlighted when Palm and Windows Phone developers were trying to use Google API’s to make apps for their OS’s and got shut down at every turn, eventually killing off the Palm and WP because of device lock-in on apps.
I still miss what Palm could have been before Google bent them over a barrel with their massively anti-competitive bs.
Palm terrified them.
Palm apps were tiny, took trivial resources, and could provide a lot of what was done with new apps on Android. Dictionaries, calculators, games (I played monopoly on a Treo, it looked great). I watched Mp4 movies on a Treo.
Imagine Android with a Palm Subsystem so all those old Palm apps could run. It would've majorly slowed Android app adoption, perhaps even giving enough support to allow PalmOS architecture to develop into a competitor to Android.
When imessage was announced they planned to bring it to other platforms. That died when they realized how much of a lock in it was
If they're going to default message service to it then yes.