Blue chat bubbles for everyone
December 6, 2023 9:06 AM Subscribe
It is now possible to turn your phone number blue on Android. Unlike the recent Nothing iMessage MITM debacle, this is a fully end-to-end encrypted interoperable system thanks to the reverse engineering of the iMessage protocol by jjtech
iS tHiS sOmEtHiNg i'D hAvE tO cArE aBoUt iPhOnEs tO uNdErStAnD š§½š
posted by phunniemee at 9:19 AM on December 6, 2023 [11 favorites]
posted by phunniemee at 9:19 AM on December 6, 2023 [11 favorites]
Blue message bubbles mean that the chat is protected with iMessageās end-to-end encryption (e2e) so that neither the phone carriers nor Apple can read it. The green messages are exposed in clear text so every intelligence agency can read them without even trying hard.
posted by autopilot at 9:23 AM on December 6, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by autopilot at 9:23 AM on December 6, 2023 [10 favorites]
Goddamnit. After I went to all the trouble of overcoming my WASP upbringing, strangling it down until sneering at green bubble text was the final, lingering outlet for the classism goblins lurking in the darkest reaches of my soul. Who or what will I look down upon now, if not those with lower frequency chat bubble photons?
posted by Ryvar at 9:23 AM on December 6, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by Ryvar at 9:23 AM on December 6, 2023 [9 favorites]
*** obligatory "As a European we all just use WhatsApp anyway" comment ***
posted by grahamparks at 9:23 AM on December 6, 2023 [19 favorites]
posted by grahamparks at 9:23 AM on December 6, 2023 [19 favorites]
More seriously, Horace Rumpole, for the moment it is about something more than bubble color. Bubble color is extremely important to a large subset of (US) users as an indicator of status, but (maybe) more importantly Android users are currently locked out of features like encryption and receiving full resolution pictures and video in iMessage. Any Android user who has ever received a picture or video from an iPhone user has experienced this, as iMessage drops down to SMS and the media is compressed to something completely illegible. In theory, Beeper's hack should fix this, giving the benefits of iMessage to everyone, until Apple closes the loophole
In fact, Apple has agreed to implement (some of) the RCS standard on iMessage in 2024, which will NOT change bubble color (so it can retain the advantages of prestige lock-in) but should address the issues with security and file size that have been making life miserable for us filthy Android proles for years.
posted by The Bellman at 9:25 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
In fact, Apple has agreed to implement (some of) the RCS standard on iMessage in 2024, which will NOT change bubble color (so it can retain the advantages of prestige lock-in) but should address the issues with security and file size that have been making life miserable for us filthy Android proles for years.
posted by The Bellman at 9:25 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
*** obligatory "As a European we all just use WhatsApp anyway" comment ***
*** obligatory "As an American I don't trust Zuck" response ***
posted by The Bellman at 9:31 AM on December 6, 2023 [40 favorites]
*** obligatory "As an American I don't trust Zuck" response ***
posted by The Bellman at 9:31 AM on December 6, 2023 [40 favorites]
Thanks, I certainly see the importance of full encryption.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:33 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:33 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
It looks like some neat work and some fun reverse engineering efforts. Good luck to them, and to JJTech (very impressive for a high schooler!)
That said I haven't seen anything in the analysis so far that indicates if Apple can make changes or flip on additional analysis at their end such that it would stop working (may not be possible to tell yet I suppose). Or if Apple would get annoyed enough that some lawyers can be dispatched to disrupt them. Point being I can't imagine a use case where this is mission critical functionality for anyone (you'd just get an Apple device if it was...) but I wouldn't be surprised if it just stopped working tomorrow or Beeper ended up having to play whack-a-mole.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 9:35 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
That said I haven't seen anything in the analysis so far that indicates if Apple can make changes or flip on additional analysis at their end such that it would stop working (may not be possible to tell yet I suppose). Or if Apple would get annoyed enough that some lawyers can be dispatched to disrupt them. Point being I can't imagine a use case where this is mission critical functionality for anyone (you'd just get an Apple device if it was...) but I wouldn't be surprised if it just stopped working tomorrow or Beeper ended up having to play whack-a-mole.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 9:35 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
I strongly encourage everyone not to touch this, not for a while.
As the poster notes, the last people promising Android/iMessage unification were literally running a Mac mini server farm and mitmāing their own users to give people the illusion of seamless interop, and it was a disaster.
If you want that sort of thing, cool, but if you're any sort of security minded, just as a measure of basic precaution don't touch this for a few weeks. Let somebody else be the crumple zone for whatever chicanery is involved here.
posted by mhoye at 9:36 AM on December 6, 2023 [25 favorites]
As the poster notes, the last people promising Android/iMessage unification were literally running a Mac mini server farm and mitmāing their own users to give people the illusion of seamless interop, and it was a disaster.
If you want that sort of thing, cool, but if you're any sort of security minded, just as a measure of basic precaution don't touch this for a few weeks. Let somebody else be the crumple zone for whatever chicanery is involved here.
posted by mhoye at 9:36 AM on December 6, 2023 [25 favorites]
Further proof of Gods' own nihilism.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 9:36 AM on December 6, 2023
posted by MonsieurPEB at 9:36 AM on December 6, 2023
the RCS standard on iMessage in 2024, which will NOT change bubble color (so it can retain the advantages of prestige lock-in)
When I first heard Apple was going to implement RCS I assumed that meant Android would be getting blue text going forward, so my lurking classist goblins are delighted to learn of this.
Still, it canāt last forever; if any of my exalted fellow iPhone Eloi want to workshop new ways of insulting those filthy continental WhatsApp morlocks, message me (blue text only, natch).
posted by Ryvar at 9:36 AM on December 6, 2023
When I first heard Apple was going to implement RCS I assumed that meant Android would be getting blue text going forward, so my lurking classist goblins are delighted to learn of this.
Still, it canāt last forever; if any of my exalted fellow iPhone Eloi want to workshop new ways of insulting those filthy continental WhatsApp morlocks, message me (blue text only, natch).
posted by Ryvar at 9:36 AM on December 6, 2023
Every time I hear American Apple users talk about the prestige of blue bubbles I chuckle about the the iPhone's under 20% market share globally. And as grahamparks says, even folks in Apple's ecosystem often use alternatives to the proprietary iMessage system. WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, WeChat... iMessage is a distant niche product. I'm lucky that most of my friends and family seem to be using Signal.
iMessage was a nice innovation years ago. It's a shame Apple kept it proprietary and used it to keep customers locked in. It was so bad it took years of legal action to get Apple to create a method to free your phone number once they'd captured it. It's still awkward.
posted by Nelson at 9:41 AM on December 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
iMessage was a nice innovation years ago. It's a shame Apple kept it proprietary and used it to keep customers locked in. It was so bad it took years of legal action to get Apple to create a method to free your phone number once they'd captured it. It's still awkward.
posted by Nelson at 9:41 AM on December 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
This will do nothing to prevent my Apple iPhone friends from sneering at my Android, right?
posted by tafetta, darling! at 9:41 AM on December 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by tafetta, darling! at 9:41 AM on December 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
As an American living in Europe, I wish my neighbors would get off whatās app and switch to signal because I refuse to put a Facebook product on a device that goes everywhere I go.
posted by antinomia at 9:41 AM on December 6, 2023 [16 favorites]
posted by antinomia at 9:41 AM on December 6, 2023 [16 favorites]
*eyebrow kid looking confused meme*
You guys got iphones?
(but seriously I don't know that I've ever exchanged texts with someone who owns an iphone and had no idea there was any color difference or stigma or anything.)
My wife and I got new Verizon phones and they apparently have some new texting thing which behaves differently than straight-up texting but I have no idea what it means. *checks phone* It says "RCS Message" in the blank where I type, and you guys are talking about this, so I feel included!
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:42 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
You guys got iphones?
(but seriously I don't know that I've ever exchanged texts with someone who owns an iphone and had no idea there was any color difference or stigma or anything.)
My wife and I got new Verizon phones and they apparently have some new texting thing which behaves differently than straight-up texting but I have no idea what it means. *checks phone* It says "RCS Message" in the blank where I type, and you guys are talking about this, so I feel included!
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:42 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
mhoyhe ā JJTech and beeper have provided full source code and network logs, plus small versions of just the protocols for outside verification. So itās unlikely to be quite the same level of disaster as the Nothing MITM implementation.
Although I think inflatablewiki is right that itās premature to build anything mission critical on this sort of reverse engineered platform. Apple could find a dozen ways to shut down this sort of adversarial interoperable system. The only glimmer of hope is that Apple has pure software iMessage for older iPhones, iPads and laptops without secure elements (pre-T2 MacBooks for instance), so they canāt enforce hardware attestation without shutting those out too.
(my guess is that lawyers are more likely to be involved than technical measuresā¦)
posted by autopilot at 9:48 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
Although I think inflatablewiki is right that itās premature to build anything mission critical on this sort of reverse engineered platform. Apple could find a dozen ways to shut down this sort of adversarial interoperable system. The only glimmer of hope is that Apple has pure software iMessage for older iPhones, iPads and laptops without secure elements (pre-T2 MacBooks for instance), so they canāt enforce hardware attestation without shutting those out too.
(my guess is that lawyers are more likely to be involved than technical measuresā¦)
posted by autopilot at 9:48 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
So I watched a bit of a video about this earlier, and the important part seems to be that it spoofs some kind of number that says āIām a certified Apple product!ā, which is the same thing that hackentoshes do. Iām not sure that any technical fix would be in play as itās way easier to employ a lawyer.
posted by The River Ivel at 9:52 AM on December 6, 2023
posted by The River Ivel at 9:52 AM on December 6, 2023
Ryvar,
Please note that the eloi were raised to be food for the morlocks, so check your metaphor...
posted by njohnson23 at 10:00 AM on December 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
Please note that the eloi were raised to be food for the morlocks, so check your metaphor...
posted by njohnson23 at 10:00 AM on December 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
As an American, I was unaware that there was any sort of "prestige" or whatever associated with having an iPhone, at least among the general populace. If there is "prestige" it is misplaced and frankly juvenile.
But getting locked out of iMessage chats as an Android user is a real thing which sucks.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:01 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
But getting locked out of iMessage chats as an Android user is a real thing which sucks.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:01 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
The problem is that social gatekeeping is still going to exist. If someone is keeping you frozen out of the groupchat because your text bubbles are the wrong colour, then they're going to find a new excuse once you start using Beeper.
The answer is not to run an app that spoofs iMessenger. The answer is to find friends who don't act like they're middle school queen bees.
posted by thecjm at 10:03 AM on December 6, 2023 [11 favorites]
The answer is not to run an app that spoofs iMessenger. The answer is to find friends who don't act like they're middle school queen bees.
posted by thecjm at 10:03 AM on December 6, 2023 [11 favorites]
As an iPhone user, I'm not exactly happy that people are hacking and/or reverse engineering the iMessage protocol(s). I use an iPhone because I value my privacy and Apple is much better than Google in that regard (not that that's difficult.)
If Android users want the benefits of iMessage, then buy an iPhone.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:05 AM on December 6, 2023
If Android users want the benefits of iMessage, then buy an iPhone.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:05 AM on December 6, 2023
If you're baffled by the importance people seem to attach to the bubble color thing, you might (like me) receive an orientation from this part of this Benn Jordan video, which summarizes that situation quickly in order to use it as an example in the making of a bigger point.
It's not just about the color, but the color becomes a signal, a marker.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:07 AM on December 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
It's not just about the color, but the color becomes a signal, a marker.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:07 AM on December 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
iMessage is a distant niche product
Empirically youāre right. Subjectively - as an upper middle class software developer with 100% Republican family and 100% Democratic Socialist friends, itās straight 50/50 blue/green text in my messages, both overall and within those two groups with surprisingly little income correlation. In fact it doesnāt correlate to any variable I can discern. Even my parents were 50/50 until my mom got her first iPhone last year.
I was unaware that there was any sort of "prestige" or whatever associated with having an iPhone, at least among the general populace.
Every couple weeks one of the /r/Tinder posts where some dude complains about getting immediately unmatched for having green text bubbles up to /r/all. Wildly overblown, of course, but itās not zero.
If there is "prestige" it is misplaced and frankly juvenile.
Extremely. The pointlessness and inanity of it is why itās funny, itās a Seinfeld episode that arrived too late.
Please note that the eloi were raised to be food for the morlocks
Oh shit! Thanks, itās been like 30 years since I read that book.
posted by Ryvar at 10:08 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Empirically youāre right. Subjectively - as an upper middle class software developer with 100% Republican family and 100% Democratic Socialist friends, itās straight 50/50 blue/green text in my messages, both overall and within those two groups with surprisingly little income correlation. In fact it doesnāt correlate to any variable I can discern. Even my parents were 50/50 until my mom got her first iPhone last year.
I was unaware that there was any sort of "prestige" or whatever associated with having an iPhone, at least among the general populace.
Every couple weeks one of the /r/Tinder posts where some dude complains about getting immediately unmatched for having green text bubbles up to /r/all. Wildly overblown, of course, but itās not zero.
If there is "prestige" it is misplaced and frankly juvenile.
Extremely. The pointlessness and inanity of it is why itās funny, itās a Seinfeld episode that arrived too late.
Please note that the eloi were raised to be food for the morlocks
Oh shit! Thanks, itās been like 30 years since I read that book.
posted by Ryvar at 10:08 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
> JJTech and beeper have provided full source code and network logs
Note that some of that code downloads and runs a chunk of an Apple binary using an CPU emulator, to perform a crypto dance using a machine serial number of sorts taken from actual hardware. That serial number is shared by everyone who uses this, and Apple can console ban it at any time.
posted by Callisto Prime at 10:14 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Note that some of that code downloads and runs a chunk of an Apple binary using an CPU emulator, to perform a crypto dance using a machine serial number of sorts taken from actual hardware. That serial number is shared by everyone who uses this, and Apple can console ban it at any time.
posted by Callisto Prime at 10:14 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Every time I hear American Apple users talk about the prestige of blue bubbles I chuckle about the the iPhone's under 20% market share globally.
I mean, yeah, we get it, no one texts outside of the United States and Canada--so what does it matter to anyone else?
The dominance of SMS in anglo North America has everything to do with the fact that data was expensive and texting was cheap in the '00s, the exact opposite state of affairs most of the rest of the world had, and so while over-the-top texting solutions like WhatsApp took off in the rest of the world, it just wasn't seen as necessary here and so we didn't do it.
Now it's just network effects/cultural differences and I don't think it'll change. I use WhatsApp to talk to friends in Europe and Mexico and I use Messages on my iPhone to talk to everyone else. Just the way it is.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:14 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
I mean, yeah, we get it, no one texts outside of the United States and Canada--so what does it matter to anyone else?
The dominance of SMS in anglo North America has everything to do with the fact that data was expensive and texting was cheap in the '00s, the exact opposite state of affairs most of the rest of the world had, and so while over-the-top texting solutions like WhatsApp took off in the rest of the world, it just wasn't seen as necessary here and so we didn't do it.
Now it's just network effects/cultural differences and I don't think it'll change. I use WhatsApp to talk to friends in Europe and Mexico and I use Messages on my iPhone to talk to everyone else. Just the way it is.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:14 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
The people who are worked up about texting security are a small minority and have other options available for secure messaging platforms.
For the guys I see on TikTok complaining about green text, those girls you're texting aren't suddenly going to want to fuck you if your messages were blue. They'll just find something else to pick on you about instead. Move on.
posted by thecjm at 10:15 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
For the guys I see on TikTok complaining about green text, those girls you're texting aren't suddenly going to want to fuck you if your messages were blue. They'll just find something else to pick on you about instead. Move on.
posted by thecjm at 10:15 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
If someone is keeping you frozen out of the groupchat because your text bubbles are the wrong colour, then they're going to find a new excuse once you start using Beeper.
My past experience was not so much that I was being frozen out of group chat because my text bubbles were the wrong colour but that group chat literally did not work. People would send me messags in an iMessage group chat, but I would see them as individual messages from the individual user and reply back to only that person and they wouldn't go to the group chat. So I was essentially freezing myself out by being unable to respond to the group.
Does this fix that?
posted by jacquilynne at 10:16 AM on December 6, 2023 [11 favorites]
My past experience was not so much that I was being frozen out of group chat because my text bubbles were the wrong colour but that group chat literally did not work. People would send me messags in an iMessage group chat, but I would see them as individual messages from the individual user and reply back to only that person and they wouldn't go to the group chat. So I was essentially freezing myself out by being unable to respond to the group.
Does this fix that?
posted by jacquilynne at 10:16 AM on December 6, 2023 [11 favorites]
If you're baffled by the importance people seem to attach to the bubble color thing, you might (like me) receive an orientation from this part of this Benn Jordan video yt , which summarizes that situation quickly in order to use it as an example in the making of a bigger point.
Ugh, it is way worse than I thought, and it is 100% the case that the majority of the younger members of my running group have iPhones, and I am definitely not in the group chats because I have an Android. I do have an iPad, but, well, it isn't the same. I feel for kids who are getting left out because they have an Android.
And right here in this thread we have some iPhone chauvinism! It's so awesome.
I was just on vacation in Belize and the whole group used WhatsApp, it is fantastic.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:17 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
Bubble color is extremely important to a large subset of (US) users as an indicator of statusIt should be noted that this the position Google PR has spent millions publicizing and heavily promoted to journalists as part of their campaign asking governments force Apple to grant Google access to iMessage. Most of the stories youāll hear in the media trace back to that campaign or subsequent recirculating by the subset of the Android fan community which is palpably insecure about their choice. Most people donāt care because most people use things like WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Instagram, Snapchat, Signal, etc.
There are real drawbacks to SMS/MMS (length, image/video quality) so Appleās adoption of RCS will be of value as a last resort most of why weāre hearing about it is because Google destroyed their own messaging services, and any talk of openness should be considered in light of Googleās decision to close their previously open messaging service and deliberate deception around RCS as a standard versus the proprietary service Android users get. Google will talk about RCS having end to end encryption and carefully words their marketing materials to imply that itās a benefit for dropping SMS but does not mention that they implemented that as a proprietary extension which is restricted to Googleās own Message app and has refused to let other app developers use it. When Google opens up their services, Iāll be a lot less skeptical that their concern here is more than a lobbying play.
posted by adamsc at 10:21 AM on December 6, 2023 [15 favorites]
If someone is keeping you frozen out of the groupchat because your text bubbles are the wrong colour, then they're going to find a new excuse once you start using Beeper.
Wait...what? People are freezing people out of the groupchat? I thought it was just that the chats don't work well together in a groupchat. Like, the one groupchat I'm in has 2 android users and like 50% of their messages are like "that didn't work can you resend pls", and we don't get a good chunk of the things they send us.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:26 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Wait...what? People are freezing people out of the groupchat? I thought it was just that the chats don't work well together in a groupchat. Like, the one groupchat I'm in has 2 android users and like 50% of their messages are like "that didn't work can you resend pls", and we don't get a good chunk of the things they send us.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:26 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
I don't know about in my social circles because we're mostly old and it doesn't matter, but hearing from the perspective of the teachers in my life - it's a matter of social life/death for teenagers. But if it weren't phones, it would be something else for them like the sort of shoes you wear or how many straps you use on your backpack!
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:28 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:28 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
While I do love encryption, as someone forced on to an iPhone due to a medical implant that only has a control app on IOS, I would love to be able to turn my bubble green. I'm not exactly what you'd call an Apple fanboy.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 10:29 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 10:29 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
Wait...what? People are freezing people out of the groupchat? I thought it was just that the chats don't work well together in a groupchat. Like, the one groupchat I'm in has 2 android users and like 50% of their messages are like "that didn't work can you resend pls", and we don't get a good chunk of the things they send us..
The best are the screenshots (real or fake, that's up to the reader) of the interactions that happen as people transition off of an online dating app and onto text, where then one person rejects the other based on message color. Whether or not it actually happens a lot, it's definitely a trope.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:29 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
The best are the screenshots (real or fake, that's up to the reader) of the interactions that happen as people transition off of an online dating app and onto text, where then one person rejects the other based on message color. Whether or not it actually happens a lot, it's definitely a trope.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:29 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Does this fix that?
AFAIA the pending RCS standard implementation The_Bellman refers to upthread is supposed to fix group chat some time next year. Not an expert on this topic but my understanding was that it will address all of the major functionality issues.
And right here in this thread we have some iPhone chauvinism! It's so awesome.
Sincere apologies if it wasnāt clear to anyone that my comments were coming from a deep well of extreme sarcasm and total disbelief that anyone could ever take this seriously.
posted by Ryvar at 10:30 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
AFAIA the pending RCS standard implementation The_Bellman refers to upthread is supposed to fix group chat some time next year. Not an expert on this topic but my understanding was that it will address all of the major functionality issues.
And right here in this thread we have some iPhone chauvinism! It's so awesome.
Sincere apologies if it wasnāt clear to anyone that my comments were coming from a deep well of extreme sarcasm and total disbelief that anyone could ever take this seriously.
posted by Ryvar at 10:30 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
As an iPhone user, I'm not exactly happy that people are hacking and/or reverse engineering the iMessage protocol(s). I use an iPhone because I value my privacyThe only secure protocol is a fully understood protocol. Regardless of Apple's marketing.
posted by joeyh at 10:32 AM on December 6, 2023 [18 favorites]
The only secure protocol is a fully understood protocol. Regardless of Apple's marketing.
As an end user, what does it matter? I'm not a software engineer. I just trust Apple slightly more than Google on privacy, that's all (although I trust the CIA more on privacy than Google.)
posted by rhymedirective at 10:34 AM on December 6, 2023
As an end user, what does it matter? I'm not a software engineer. I just trust Apple slightly more than Google on privacy, that's all (although I trust the CIA more on privacy than Google.)
posted by rhymedirective at 10:34 AM on December 6, 2023
Getting back to the topic of the article, as mhoye suggested above there are potential concerns with this untested tech - and it maybe outmoded by RCS next year anyway.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:35 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:35 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
My phone has an e-ink display so I have no idea what these colored bubbles are that everyone keeps talking about.
posted by tmt at 10:41 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by tmt at 10:41 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
People will definitely freeze people out of the groupchat because of those issues. And it ranges from the pragmatic ("Hey John, could you show this to Susie since you'll see her and it probably won't work on her phone?") to high school mean kid and overtly classist stuff. Some people associate Android phones with poverty, or leading a messy life where you're always needing to get new cheap phones, which is what the Tinder memes are getting atānot every Android phone is cheap, but every cheap new smartphone runs Android.
But the interoperability is a real problem. I have a close friend I now mostly talk to through Instagram messages because I have an iPhone and she has an Android, and for some reason she stopped getting my texts a couple of months back. When I used to have an Android phone, the compression/legibility issue meant I would get work group texts with, say, a picture of a printed schedule and struggle to read it. Sometimes people also have issues where they switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, but their phone number is still linked to Apple's Messaging system, so messages from other iPhones are silently just going to an inbox they don't see. Some of these issues can take a while to even spot because you need someone who knows you well enough and is tech savvy enough to reach out on another channel and say "hey, are you not getting my texts?"
The original sin here was transparently mingling proprietary protocols with carrier SMS. "Texting" is such a core part of modern communication that nobody expects it to fail or behave badly, and I think people are almost instinctively repulsed in a body horror sort of way when it does.
posted by smelendez at 10:46 AM on December 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
But the interoperability is a real problem. I have a close friend I now mostly talk to through Instagram messages because I have an iPhone and she has an Android, and for some reason she stopped getting my texts a couple of months back. When I used to have an Android phone, the compression/legibility issue meant I would get work group texts with, say, a picture of a printed schedule and struggle to read it. Sometimes people also have issues where they switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, but their phone number is still linked to Apple's Messaging system, so messages from other iPhones are silently just going to an inbox they don't see. Some of these issues can take a while to even spot because you need someone who knows you well enough and is tech savvy enough to reach out on another channel and say "hey, are you not getting my texts?"
The original sin here was transparently mingling proprietary protocols with carrier SMS. "Texting" is such a core part of modern communication that nobody expects it to fail or behave badly, and I think people are almost instinctively repulsed in a body horror sort of way when it does.
posted by smelendez at 10:46 AM on December 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
My wife and I got new Verizon phones and they apparently have some new texting thing which behaves differently than straight-up texting but I have no idea what it means. *checks phone* It says "RCS Message" in the blank where I type, and you guys are talking about this, so I feel included!
RCS messaging support arrived with an Android update on my super cheap Chinese phone. I only noticed it because I missed a text message from somebody who didn't have it. I've turned it off now. It can stay off until it's actually most people's default.
VoLTE turned itself on when my carrier rolled it out. So far, no trouble with that.
WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, WeChat... iMessage is a distant niche product. I'm lucky that most of my friends and family seem to be using Signal.
I still prefer Keybase to all of the above because its multi-device support is very tidy, it doesn't require out-of-band faffing about with "safety" numbers to keep it properly secured, and it lets me set up and name my own user accounts instead of just glomming onto my phone number.
It's a great pity that Zoom seems to be letting Keybase wither on the vine; with any luck they'll just drop it entirely and somebody will figure out how to bring its server side to the Fediverse (all the client code is already open source). Because as far as quality of user experience and confidence in its privacy guarantees goes, Keybase is just better than any other encrypted chat app I've ever seen.
posted by flabdablet at 10:51 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
RCS messaging support arrived with an Android update on my super cheap Chinese phone. I only noticed it because I missed a text message from somebody who didn't have it. I've turned it off now. It can stay off until it's actually most people's default.
VoLTE turned itself on when my carrier rolled it out. So far, no trouble with that.
WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, WeChat... iMessage is a distant niche product. I'm lucky that most of my friends and family seem to be using Signal.
I still prefer Keybase to all of the above because its multi-device support is very tidy, it doesn't require out-of-band faffing about with "safety" numbers to keep it properly secured, and it lets me set up and name my own user accounts instead of just glomming onto my phone number.
It's a great pity that Zoom seems to be letting Keybase wither on the vine; with any luck they'll just drop it entirely and somebody will figure out how to bring its server side to the Fediverse (all the client code is already open source). Because as far as quality of user experience and confidence in its privacy guarantees goes, Keybase is just better than any other encrypted chat app I've ever seen.
posted by flabdablet at 10:51 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
The good thing about messaging standards is that there are so many to choose from, etc. Seem to remember back in the early-90's having a conversation with a friend at University that went something like Me: "Oh can you send me the address with a BBS message, or email". My friend: "I'm in the lab now, I'll just drop it in my .plan file and you can finger it there later ." (at the time you had to pay to send and receive SMS and certainly not everyone had a mobile)
I am looking forward to RCS coming to Apple next year so my Android using childcare can send video's of her adventures with my kids without it being the grainy low resolution mess that occurs over SMS now. So once we have that I'm pretty sure between email/SMS/iMessage with RCS/Teams/Whatsapp/Signal/Facebook messenger/Twitter DM's/IG Messages I'll never miss anything every again....oh you sent it to me on MeFi mail...well shit...let me add it to the list....
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:52 AM on December 6, 2023
I am looking forward to RCS coming to Apple next year so my Android using childcare can send video's of her adventures with my kids without it being the grainy low resolution mess that occurs over SMS now. So once we have that I'm pretty sure between email/SMS/iMessage with RCS/Teams/Whatsapp/Signal/Facebook messenger/Twitter DM's/IG Messages I'll never miss anything every again....oh you sent it to me on MeFi mail...well shit...let me add it to the list....
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:52 AM on December 6, 2023
Wait...what? People are freezing people out of the groupchat?
Way worse than that. In high school and college, having the correct color in iMessage is a very important indicator on whether or not that person is ever going to be willing to fuck you or not.
Lots of people like to pretend that's not true and they don't care (See all the "only 20% market share!", "I'd get new friends if that happened to me!", "People actually have iPhones??" comments in this post), and you can tell they definitely believe that by how many times they have to say it's not true and they don't care.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:55 AM on December 6, 2023 [7 favorites]
Way worse than that. In high school and college, having the correct color in iMessage is a very important indicator on whether or not that person is ever going to be willing to fuck you or not.
Lots of people like to pretend that's not true and they don't care (See all the "only 20% market share!", "I'd get new friends if that happened to me!", "People actually have iPhones??" comments in this post), and you can tell they definitely believe that by how many times they have to say it's not true and they don't care.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:55 AM on December 6, 2023 [7 favorites]
The one way that iMessage was better for my wife and I (before we switched to Signal) was that we don't have any cell service at our residence and iMessage only required internet access. Before Wifi calling was enabled we just didn't get text messages at all from people not using iMessage (until we drove toward town and got cell service)
I basically told my android using friends to email me if I didn't return texts...
posted by schyler523 at 10:55 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
I basically told my android using friends to email me if I didn't return texts...
posted by schyler523 at 10:55 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Yeah my friends and I mostly switched to Signal for mixed-phone group chats/regular messaging between kinds of phones because it was unreliable otherwise (after a brief WhatsApp detour that quickly ended when it became more Facebook-ified).
posted by jeweled accumulation at 10:57 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by jeweled accumulation at 10:57 AM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
Why is it that Android chat does not do end-to-end encryption in 2023?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:04 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:04 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
(Un)friendly reminder that RCS messaging is bound to your phone number and your account with your mobile phone provider. If you're a person who ever uses a second SIM for anything (say, when traveling abroad) then you will lose access to any RCS messaging tied to the number you're not using at the time. (FWIW iMessage may have the same problem if your primary contact field is a phone number, which is why it's useful to configure iMessage to "start new messages from" your email address and not your phone number.)
To recap: RCS is a carrier standard that was basically a non-starter until Google embraced and extended it. Google's grassroots marketing money is really pushing the "green bubble shaming" narrative as a way to put pressure on Apple, so it's difficult to know how bad the problem really is. Apple's RCS support will only go as far as the published standard, which doesn't include Google's extensions such as end-to-end encryption. WhatsApp is owned by Meta (Facebook's parent company). Of the three companies mentioned there, Apple is arguably the least untrustworthy, but this is an impossible conversation to have because of everybody's biases (Google vs. Apple, rest-of-world vs. USA, and so on).
posted by fedward at 11:07 AM on December 6, 2023 [9 favorites]
To recap: RCS is a carrier standard that was basically a non-starter until Google embraced and extended it. Google's grassroots marketing money is really pushing the "green bubble shaming" narrative as a way to put pressure on Apple, so it's difficult to know how bad the problem really is. Apple's RCS support will only go as far as the published standard, which doesn't include Google's extensions such as end-to-end encryption. WhatsApp is owned by Meta (Facebook's parent company). Of the three companies mentioned there, Apple is arguably the least untrustworthy, but this is an impossible conversation to have because of everybody's biases (Google vs. Apple, rest-of-world vs. USA, and so on).
posted by fedward at 11:07 AM on December 6, 2023 [9 favorites]
They sucked his brains out, what is "Android Chat"?
posted by sagc at 11:08 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by sagc at 11:08 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Why is it that Android chat does not do end-to-end encryption in 2023?
I could be incorrect, but I believe it does. I believe Android to Android messaging using supported clients uses RCS, which does end to end encryption.
Apple doesn't support RCS, so it's when Android to Apple communication flows happen that they need to fall back to the 'lowest common denominator.'
posted by kbanas at 11:09 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
I could be incorrect, but I believe it does. I believe Android to Android messaging using supported clients uses RCS, which does end to end encryption.
Apple doesn't support RCS, so it's when Android to Apple communication flows happen that they need to fall back to the 'lowest common denominator.'
posted by kbanas at 11:09 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Of the three companies mentioned there, Apple is arguably the least untrustworthy
I'd love to know why a company that makes all its money selling user data is more trustworthy than one that doesn't sell user data.
posted by rhymedirective at 11:19 AM on December 6, 2023
I'd love to know why a company that makes all its money selling user data is more trustworthy than one that doesn't sell user data.
posted by rhymedirective at 11:19 AM on December 6, 2023
> iMessage may have the same problem if your primary contact field is a phone number
Yes, sort of: activating iMessage for a phone number requires some sort of invisible SMS-layer interaction, that used to have trouble completing if you werenāt in your home region in cellular range of your carrierās tower, along with a SIM/eSIM on your device with the phone number in it.
posted by Callisto Prime at 11:19 AM on December 6, 2023
Yes, sort of: activating iMessage for a phone number requires some sort of invisible SMS-layer interaction, that used to have trouble completing if you werenāt in your home region in cellular range of your carrierās tower, along with a SIM/eSIM on your device with the phone number in it.
posted by Callisto Prime at 11:19 AM on December 6, 2023
TIL: some people really care about the colour of text bubbles.
I live in a city with a lot of international students and the majority of phones that I have seen them use are not iPhones, so it def lends credence that Apple isn't the universal smartphone standard.
posted by Kitteh at 11:21 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
I live in a city with a lot of international students and the majority of phones that I have seen them use are not iPhones, so it def lends credence that Apple isn't the universal smartphone standard.
posted by Kitteh at 11:21 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
"My phone has an e-ink display so I have no idea what these colored bubbles are that everyone keeps talking about."
Cell phones without a color display? Is that something I'd have to not own a TV to know about?
posted by jonathanhughes at 11:26 AM on December 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
Cell phones without a color display? Is that something I'd have to not own a TV to know about?
posted by jonathanhughes at 11:26 AM on December 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
As I understand it, having a non-iPhone in a group chat ends up messing up the group chat for everyone, because MMS group chats just behave different and worse than iMessage group chats, and if one user can't speak iMessage the group chat has to go through MMS. So the headache of having an Android user in the group chat is just not worth it.
As the poster notes, the last people promising Android/iMessage unification were literally running a Mac mini server farm and mitmāing their own users to give people the illusion of seamless interop, and it was a disaster.
That's also Beeper, but a different product (Beeper Cloud). This is an app running on your phone that manages to speak just enough iMessage that Apple (currently) thinks it's an iPhone. That doesn't mean it's perfect but it won't have the same concerns that trusting Beeper Cloud to decrypt all your communications.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:37 AM on December 6, 2023
As the poster notes, the last people promising Android/iMessage unification were literally running a Mac mini server farm and mitmāing their own users to give people the illusion of seamless interop, and it was a disaster.
That's also Beeper, but a different product (Beeper Cloud). This is an app running on your phone that manages to speak just enough iMessage that Apple (currently) thinks it's an iPhone. That doesn't mean it's perfect but it won't have the same concerns that trusting Beeper Cloud to decrypt all your communications.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:37 AM on December 6, 2023
I don't know if this is worth paying 2 dollars a month for.
posted by weewooweewoo at 11:42 AM on December 6, 2023
posted by weewooweewoo at 11:42 AM on December 6, 2023
Sylvester McMonkey McBean vibes intensify
posted by scruss at 11:43 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by scruss at 11:43 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
Apple isn't the universal smartphone standard.
Apple has less than 30% global smartphone market share -- BUT they capture 85% of the profit.
...so that's why Google cares, and is desperate to convince everyone else to care; they've been curb-stomped for YEARS.
posted by aramaic at 11:47 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
Apple has less than 30% global smartphone market share -- BUT they capture 85% of the profit.
...so that's why Google cares, and is desperate to convince everyone else to care; they've been curb-stomped for YEARS.
posted by aramaic at 11:47 AM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
Wow, I somehow never noticed that the pixelly photos I get via text are all from iPhone users. I thought it was just something wrong with my phone. But on further reflection, yep, I believe all those people have iPhones.
posted by dusty potato at 11:47 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by dusty potato at 11:47 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
tl;dr First World Problems :)
Use whatever you want, I ain't paying for your phone. ;)
posted by luckynerd at 11:56 AM on December 6, 2023
Use whatever you want, I ain't paying for your phone. ;)
posted by luckynerd at 11:56 AM on December 6, 2023
Does this fix that?
I do group chat with my parents (who use Android chat) and my brother (who uses iOS). Our connection is almost certainly downgraded to unencrypted, but unless my dad's hottest updates on Liverpool FC are secret code for something else, we have been communicating okay (so far).
While I'd like to send nice photos from my phone, the low-quality versions are fine āĀ and probably better, because my parents' Android plan doesn't have a lot of data and their phone isn't a fancy Samsung that would allow viewing nice pics, anyway. If I have photos or video to share, I send the files via email or sneakernet on a memory stick. Works fine.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:08 PM on December 6, 2023
I do group chat with my parents (who use Android chat) and my brother (who uses iOS). Our connection is almost certainly downgraded to unencrypted, but unless my dad's hottest updates on Liverpool FC are secret code for something else, we have been communicating okay (so far).
While I'd like to send nice photos from my phone, the low-quality versions are fine āĀ and probably better, because my parents' Android plan doesn't have a lot of data and their phone isn't a fancy Samsung that would allow viewing nice pics, anyway. If I have photos or video to share, I send the files via email or sneakernet on a memory stick. Works fine.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:08 PM on December 6, 2023
I am curious how Apple is going to respond to this. No doubt declare it a security vulnerability and break the interoperability.
There was a similar situation thing back in the late 90s with instant messengers. Back then there was ICQ and AIM and MSN Messenger (and others) and they did not interoperate. There were also a few hack clients that could talk to multiple services but they were never popular enough to be a market threat.
Microsoft decided that was silly and built a system so their users could chat with AIM users. AOL was upset and changed their servers to break Microsoft's code. So Microsoft updated and it worked again, for a day. Back and forth for weeks until....
Later AOL agreed in court to allow messaging interoperability, as part of the anti-trust examination of the AOL / Time Warner acquisition. But AOL never got around to implementing it and just ignored the legal requirement. Thanks presumably to the Bush Administration not being nearly as interested in enforcing anti-trust rulings.
posted by Nelson at 12:18 PM on December 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
There was a similar situation thing back in the late 90s with instant messengers. Back then there was ICQ and AIM and MSN Messenger (and others) and they did not interoperate. There were also a few hack clients that could talk to multiple services but they were never popular enough to be a market threat.
Microsoft decided that was silly and built a system so their users could chat with AIM users. AOL was upset and changed their servers to break Microsoft's code. So Microsoft updated and it worked again, for a day. Back and forth for weeks until....
The battle resulted in AOL using a security bug in its own AIM software to prevent Microsoft from accessing its AIM service, a move that forced Auerbach and his coworkers to give up on any dreams of interoperability between AIM and MSN MessengerYes, AOL resorted to exploiting a buffer overflow in their own client code to enforce its lock-in on its users. Microsoft gave up at that point.
Later AOL agreed in court to allow messaging interoperability, as part of the anti-trust examination of the AOL / Time Warner acquisition. But AOL never got around to implementing it and just ignored the legal requirement. Thanks presumably to the Bush Administration not being nearly as interested in enforcing anti-trust rulings.
posted by Nelson at 12:18 PM on December 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
The original sin here was transparently mingling proprietary protocols with carrier SMS.
Twitter and emergency announcements too, yeah? Is there a third example to make it an Official Thing?
posted by clew at 12:20 PM on December 6, 2023
Twitter and emergency announcements too, yeah? Is there a third example to make it an Official Thing?
posted by clew at 12:20 PM on December 6, 2023
For years I've used various messaging apps on Android as well as Google Messages (with RCS enabled, for the past year or two) and I've never had trouble exchanging reasonably high-res images with my iPhone-using friends. And because we're all over 40, the majority of any group messaging that needs to happen is done via email - which still works same as it ever did despite apparently having fallen from favor with The Kids.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:28 PM on December 6, 2023
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:28 PM on December 6, 2023
Wow, I somehow never noticed that the pixelly photos I get via text are all from iPhone users.
Apple iPhone: If you text a photo to Android, they'll think iPhones have a shitty camera! Who cares, they're in a green bubble!
posted by AzraelBrown at 12:37 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Apple iPhone: If you text a photo to Android, they'll think iPhones have a shitty camera! Who cares, they're in a green bubble!
posted by AzraelBrown at 12:37 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
IMO, the larger technical problem to solve with the chat apps is not interoperability, but how to block spam.
Companies are now asking for phone numbers for 2FA and those phone numbers are sold to third-parties or even to other subdivisions within the same company, used to bypass email spam filtering and send advertising texts directly to the individual.
When I gave Google my phone number for 2FA a couple years back, for instance, soon after I started getting a lot of Google Business division spam, basically asking me to buy ads on their search engine product. Except that's not what I gave them the phone number for.
It would be great if they did not do that ā by force of law, really, because unlike email, cellular phone users pay for receiving messages. The spam is also a nuisance because it gets pushed to your phone in the middle of whatever you are doing; email is often set to be less intrusive about status and new messages.
I don't have an Android phone so I don't need Beeper, but I might pay a buck or two a month to block spam texts. I'd even contribute to a political fund to bribe legislators to go after the companies responsible for the spam, and to set up laws restricting how phone numbers may be collected and used wrt texting.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:47 PM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
Companies are now asking for phone numbers for 2FA and those phone numbers are sold to third-parties or even to other subdivisions within the same company, used to bypass email spam filtering and send advertising texts directly to the individual.
When I gave Google my phone number for 2FA a couple years back, for instance, soon after I started getting a lot of Google Business division spam, basically asking me to buy ads on their search engine product. Except that's not what I gave them the phone number for.
It would be great if they did not do that ā by force of law, really, because unlike email, cellular phone users pay for receiving messages. The spam is also a nuisance because it gets pushed to your phone in the middle of whatever you are doing; email is often set to be less intrusive about status and new messages.
I don't have an Android phone so I don't need Beeper, but I might pay a buck or two a month to block spam texts. I'd even contribute to a political fund to bribe legislators to go after the companies responsible for the spam, and to set up laws restricting how phone numbers may be collected and used wrt texting.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:47 PM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
I'd love to know why a company that makes all its money selling user data is more trustworthy than one that doesn't sell user data.
Did you miss the "un" in "least untrustworthy," or are you saying that Apple makes all its money selling user data? I'll admit I was trying to damn Apple with faint praise in the comparison, but compared to Meta (social experiments on users, problems with teen addiction, failure to act against genocide, etc), or Google (steamrolling anything that gets in the way of its advertising profits), I certainly think that using iMessage's capabilities as a competitive selling point instead of opening up the protocol is not on the same level as the others.
posted by fedward at 12:55 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Did you miss the "un" in "least untrustworthy," or are you saying that Apple makes all its money selling user data? I'll admit I was trying to damn Apple with faint praise in the comparison, but compared to Meta (social experiments on users, problems with teen addiction, failure to act against genocide, etc), or Google (steamrolling anything that gets in the way of its advertising profits), I certainly think that using iMessage's capabilities as a competitive selling point instead of opening up the protocol is not on the same level as the others.
posted by fedward at 12:55 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Did you miss the "un" in "least untrustworthy,"
Uh... yes, yes I did, but to be fair, I've only been speaking English for 40+ years.
I also think the overwhelming amount of reflexive Apple-hate in this thread was blinding me.
posted by rhymedirective at 1:14 PM on December 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
Uh... yes, yes I did, but to be fair, I've only been speaking English for 40+ years.
I also think the overwhelming amount of reflexive Apple-hate in this thread was blinding me.
posted by rhymedirective at 1:14 PM on December 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
the low-quality versions are fine
Depending on carrier, MMS size limits can be excruciatingly small. You can cram a sort-of okay photo into 1 megabyte (a common size limit) but video? impossible. MMS video always comes out postage-stamp sized messes. It's like texting circa 2010 again. And unlike app-based texting, you can't leverage WiFi to get the full-sized image and sidestep your data plan.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:37 PM on December 6, 2023
Depending on carrier, MMS size limits can be excruciatingly small. You can cram a sort-of okay photo into 1 megabyte (a common size limit) but video? impossible. MMS video always comes out postage-stamp sized messes. It's like texting circa 2010 again. And unlike app-based texting, you can't leverage WiFi to get the full-sized image and sidestep your data plan.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:37 PM on December 6, 2023
I can't be arsed to care enough to pay for iPhone, much less any of this shit. I haven't had any photo issues while being a dreaded Android user. The only issue I've had is being confused by "Loved an image" texts.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:56 PM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:56 PM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
I have an iPhone I don't love - can I turn my phone number green?
posted by theora55 at 2:05 PM on December 6, 2023
posted by theora55 at 2:05 PM on December 6, 2023
While I do love encryption, as someone forced on to an iPhone due to a medical implant that only has a control app on IOS, I would love to be able to turn my bubble green.
---
I have an iPhone I don't love - can I turn my phone number green?
If y'all are really serious, you can absolutely disable iMessage by going into Settings, scrolling down to Messages, and untoggling "iMessage". All your messages will now be SMS, with all that entails. You will lose encryption and a lot of other functionality, but go nuts.
posted by Roommate at 2:19 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
As an iPhone user, I'm not exactly happy that people are hacking and/or reverse engineering the iMessage protocol(s). I use an iPhone because I value my privacy and Apple is much better than Google in that regard (not that that's difficult.)
If Android users want the benefits of iMessage, then buy an iPhone.
...how does this affect you in any way? Like, other than not getting a worse experience when interacting with Android users, which seems like an advantage?
posted by Dysk at 2:20 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
If Android users want the benefits of iMessage, then buy an iPhone.
...how does this affect you in any way? Like, other than not getting a worse experience when interacting with Android users, which seems like an advantage?
posted by Dysk at 2:20 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
...how does this affect you in any way? Like, other than not getting a worse experience when interacting with Android users, which seems like an advantage?
Because a primary communication method I use has been reverse engineered by unknown and untrusted parties and if someone I text with uses this, the trust I have built when using iMessage is completely thrown out the window because my messages are being intercepted by a third party that I have not consented to and have no way of knowing what theyāre doing with the data? Like this doesnāt seem that difficult to understand.
posted by rhymedirective at 2:33 PM on December 6, 2023
Because a primary communication method I use has been reverse engineered by unknown and untrusted parties and if someone I text with uses this, the trust I have built when using iMessage is completely thrown out the window because my messages are being intercepted by a third party that I have not consented to and have no way of knowing what theyāre doing with the data? Like this doesnāt seem that difficult to understand.
posted by rhymedirective at 2:33 PM on December 6, 2023
I remember going to coffee shops in SF with my Vaio and everyone there had Macs and I felt like a weird outsider. Apple's greatest strength has been to forge a perception of not only technological but moral superiority. That's quite an achievement on their part.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:37 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:37 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm not exactly happy that people are hacking and/or reverse engineering the iMessage protocol(s).
If I were an Apple user, I'd be super pleased to see those protocols reverse engineered and published. Not as pleased as if Apple had published them itself, but close.
I too value my privacy, which is why I use end-to-end encrypted messaging for anything even remotely sensitive.
End-to-end encryption, properly implemented, means that the key required to decrypt any message exists only inside the device to which the message is sent. Nobody, including the message carrier, ever has access to decryption keys and this means that the privacy of the messaging remains assured even when the full details of the protocols in use are completely public.
If iMessage is a properly implemented end-to-end encryption protocol, then the details of how it works becoming public knowledge do not weaken the privacy guarantees that it offers to its users.
If iMessage is not a properly implemented end-to-end encryption protocol, then I would want to know that so that I can stop entrusting my privacy to it and pick something else instead that is, at least until Apple responds to that discovery by fixing it and making the fix available for public inspection.
posted by flabdablet at 2:39 PM on December 6, 2023 [12 favorites]
If I were an Apple user, I'd be super pleased to see those protocols reverse engineered and published. Not as pleased as if Apple had published them itself, but close.
I too value my privacy, which is why I use end-to-end encrypted messaging for anything even remotely sensitive.
End-to-end encryption, properly implemented, means that the key required to decrypt any message exists only inside the device to which the message is sent. Nobody, including the message carrier, ever has access to decryption keys and this means that the privacy of the messaging remains assured even when the full details of the protocols in use are completely public.
If iMessage is a properly implemented end-to-end encryption protocol, then the details of how it works becoming public knowledge do not weaken the privacy guarantees that it offers to its users.
If iMessage is not a properly implemented end-to-end encryption protocol, then I would want to know that so that I can stop entrusting my privacy to it and pick something else instead that is, at least until Apple responds to that discovery by fixing it and making the fix available for public inspection.
posted by flabdablet at 2:39 PM on December 6, 2023 [12 favorites]
If iMessage is a properly implemented end-to-end encryption protocol, then the details of how it works becoming public knowledge do not weaken the privacy guarantees that it offers to its users in any way.
Thatās not what Iām concerned with, though?
Whatever, Iām done with this thread.
posted by rhymedirective at 2:42 PM on December 6, 2023
Thatās not what Iām concerned with, though?
Whatever, Iām done with this thread.
posted by rhymedirective at 2:42 PM on December 6, 2023
Because a primary communication method I use has been reverse engineered by unknown and untrusted parties
Given how big a target iMessage is, it's pretty safe to assume these aren't the first guys to do so. They're just the first to do so with pure intentions. Security through obscurity is a myth.
and if someone I text with uses this, the trust I have built when using iMessage is completely thrown out the window because my messages are being intercepted by a third party that I have not consented to and have no way of knowing what theyāre doing with the data? Like this doesnāt seem that difficult to understand.
The messages are not being intercepted by a third party. You seem to be labouring under a misapprehension of his this works.
posted by Dysk at 2:46 PM on December 6, 2023 [14 favorites]
Given how big a target iMessage is, it's pretty safe to assume these aren't the first guys to do so. They're just the first to do so with pure intentions. Security through obscurity is a myth.
and if someone I text with uses this, the trust I have built when using iMessage is completely thrown out the window because my messages are being intercepted by a third party that I have not consented to and have no way of knowing what theyāre doing with the data? Like this doesnāt seem that difficult to understand.
The messages are not being intercepted by a third party. You seem to be labouring under a misapprehension of his this works.
posted by Dysk at 2:46 PM on December 6, 2023 [14 favorites]
if someone I text with uses this, the trust I have built when using iMessage is completely thrown out the window
It needn't and shouldn't be. See also: Kerckhoff's Principle.
because my messages are being intercepted by a third party that I have not consented to and have no way of knowing what theyāre doing with the data?
Assuming only that iMessage does indeed implement end-to-end encryption correctly, this is simply not the case. To a very good first approximation, the only entity that ever was or ever will be capable of "intercepting" your encrypted messages is a device belonging to the person to whom you sent them, and having the protocol details made public (as opposed to having the decryption keys leaked) doesn't affect the quality of that approximation.
If your concern is that your messages will be held after delivery and decryption on a device that wasn't made by Apple and which you might therefore suspect of being incapable of retaining them securely, then again I think your threat models could use a little recalibration. The chance of your secrets being spilled by the person to whom you sent them will, in general, make any difference in difficulty between breaking into an iPhone vs an Android phone vs even a web browser on a laptop look like minor rounding errors.
posted by flabdablet at 3:09 PM on December 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
It needn't and shouldn't be. See also: Kerckhoff's Principle.
because my messages are being intercepted by a third party that I have not consented to and have no way of knowing what theyāre doing with the data?
Assuming only that iMessage does indeed implement end-to-end encryption correctly, this is simply not the case. To a very good first approximation, the only entity that ever was or ever will be capable of "intercepting" your encrypted messages is a device belonging to the person to whom you sent them, and having the protocol details made public (as opposed to having the decryption keys leaked) doesn't affect the quality of that approximation.
If your concern is that your messages will be held after delivery and decryption on a device that wasn't made by Apple and which you might therefore suspect of being incapable of retaining them securely, then again I think your threat models could use a little recalibration. The chance of your secrets being spilled by the person to whom you sent them will, in general, make any difference in difficulty between breaking into an iPhone vs an Android phone vs even a web browser on a laptop look like minor rounding errors.
posted by flabdablet at 3:09 PM on December 6, 2023 [6 favorites]
If you are really concerned with privacy and security, itās going to be better to use something like Signal (or whatever the currently favored equivalent is) that focuses on privacy and security, anyway.
posted by atoxyl at 4:09 PM on December 6, 2023
posted by atoxyl at 4:09 PM on December 6, 2023
Iām an Apple guy myself but I certainly donāt have extraordinary privacy expectations of iMessage. Itās just a nice improvement on SMS for general, low-stakes, messaging purposes.
posted by atoxyl at 4:11 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by atoxyl at 4:11 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
I had never heard the name for Kerckhoff's Principle before, only the concept.
I hope that red teamers take advantage of the open source nature of this project to stab it with as many pointy things and try to poke as many holes in it as possible. Including Apple!
In general I believe that more encryption being used by more people is better. Granted, this seems like something that a pretty small subset of big-nerd type Android users will use, most of whom probably use other E2E protocols or apps.
It kind of makes one think, maybe having two companies compete forever for the least interoperable system... is a bad thing.
posted by shenkerism at 4:19 PM on December 6, 2023
I hope that red teamers take advantage of the open source nature of this project to stab it with as many pointy things and try to poke as many holes in it as possible. Including Apple!
In general I believe that more encryption being used by more people is better. Granted, this seems like something that a pretty small subset of big-nerd type Android users will use, most of whom probably use other E2E protocols or apps.
It kind of makes one think, maybe having two companies compete forever for the least interoperable system... is a bad thing.
posted by shenkerism at 4:19 PM on December 6, 2023
If your concern is that your messages will be held after delivery and decryption on a device that wasn't made by Apple and which you might therefore suspect of being incapable of retaining them securely...
Texts to Android users are going to Android phones already. This just makes it more secure by having the messages encrypted in transit.
posted by Dysk at 5:24 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
Texts to Android users are going to Android phones already. This just makes it more secure by having the messages encrypted in transit.
posted by Dysk at 5:24 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
TIL, again, that people will find just about any reason to exclude and be horrible to others for no other reason than colour. Human beings are so fucked up.
I truly had no idea that this is a thing or that people may not be seeing the same picture that Iām sending, or that mixed group chats donāt always include the whole group. I mean, I get that competition breeds innovation but standards help breed safety and commonality. Thereās got to be a place in the middle that works for both. Or perhaps Iām just a naive dreamer who should be living on a commune
posted by ashbury at 5:33 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
I truly had no idea that this is a thing or that people may not be seeing the same picture that Iām sending, or that mixed group chats donāt always include the whole group. I mean, I get that competition breeds innovation but standards help breed safety and commonality. Thereās got to be a place in the middle that works for both. Or perhaps Iām just a naive dreamer who should be living on a commune
posted by ashbury at 5:33 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
man, this is such a cool project overall, especially given that in the US, reverse-engineering like this for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly legal
given the combination of that, and the EU breathing down Apple's neck, I wouldn't be surprised if this trick never actually winds up getting blocked on Apple's backend
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:12 PM on December 6, 2023
given the combination of that, and the EU breathing down Apple's neck, I wouldn't be surprised if this trick never actually winds up getting blocked on Apple's backend
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:12 PM on December 6, 2023
does seem like a lot of comments in the thread think this is a reverse-engineering of the service itself that somehow undoes end-to-end encryption, when it is instead just a reverse-engineering of how to create an account and log into the backend on a non-Apple device
like seriously I think this does not actually represent a direct threat to anyone who isn't involved in strategic decisions at Apple corporate
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:19 PM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
like seriously I think this does not actually represent a direct threat to anyone who isn't involved in strategic decisions at Apple corporate
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:19 PM on December 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
The people excluding Android users probably already know what brand of phone the users they are excluding have, so the excluded heathens won't be any better off for a while.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 7:02 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 7:02 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
JustSayNoDawg: yes, thatās why Iām deeply skeptical of Googleās messaging to regulators. Middle school students can be terrible, but they were doing that before smartphones existed - to the extent that anyone is being shamed for having an Android phone, Iād be shocked if the reaction to Apple changing the bubble colors wouldnāt be an immediate pivot to something else. Anyone turning down a date (assuming thatās even real) over it is 100% also judging clothes, shoes, etc. ā and the other party is lucky not to have wasted more time on them.
posted by adamsc at 7:45 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by adamsc at 7:45 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
I agree with Google that they need access to somr messaging system that they donāt have any control over because thatās the only way it will last more than a few years without getting discontinued. Might as well be iMessage.
posted by aubilenon at 8:34 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by aubilenon at 8:34 PM on December 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
the overwhelming amount of reflexive Apple-hate in this thread
Unironically interspersed with comments on the juvenility of consumer tribalism.
posted by fairmettle at 10:57 PM on December 6, 2023
Unironically interspersed with comments on the juvenility of consumer tribalism.
posted by fairmettle at 10:57 PM on December 6, 2023
I just re-read this entire thread twice, and if there's reflexive Apple hate in here, I can't see it.
There is what looks to me like reflexive Apple boosterism - "If Android users want the benefits of iMessage, then buy an iPhone" - and there is failure to respond to that boosterism with affirmation. But simple failure to be less impressed by Apple and all its works than an apparently satisfied Apple device owner seems to be, and the simple expectation that Apple will behave like the corporate behemoth that it demonstrably is, does not amount to hate.
Just to make my own position perfectly clear: I don't hate Apple. I do object strongly enough to vendor lock-in that I will go out of my way to avoid using non-standard and/or closed-source apps and services where those come bundled with whatever hardware I might happen to buy. This principle has consistently guided my choices in technology for decades at this point and it works well for me: such tech as I genuinely rely on gives me very little trouble, and when any piece of it does fail in irritating ways, I can almost always replace that piece without cascading consequences.
I do hate the horseshit that marketing departments everywhere have saturated the planet with, and especially hate seeing that horseshit nudge so many people toward treating their consumer choices as central to their identities.
Watching people defend and display loyalty to corporations with an established record of treating their customers with absolute contempt, as so many of today's large corporations do to an ever increasing extent, just makes me sad. As does the demonstrated success of slick marketing in convincing otherwise completely sensible people that issues as inherently nuanced as security and privacy can be adequately dealt with simply by choosing and then displaying fealty to the "correct" vendor.
And if you're reading that last paragraph and interpreting it as "reflexive Apple hate", I can only suggest that you might benefit from giving more consideration to the question of in whom the actual reflex is occurring and why.
posted by flabdablet at 12:19 AM on December 7, 2023 [6 favorites]
There is what looks to me like reflexive Apple boosterism - "If Android users want the benefits of iMessage, then buy an iPhone" - and there is failure to respond to that boosterism with affirmation. But simple failure to be less impressed by Apple and all its works than an apparently satisfied Apple device owner seems to be, and the simple expectation that Apple will behave like the corporate behemoth that it demonstrably is, does not amount to hate.
Just to make my own position perfectly clear: I don't hate Apple. I do object strongly enough to vendor lock-in that I will go out of my way to avoid using non-standard and/or closed-source apps and services where those come bundled with whatever hardware I might happen to buy. This principle has consistently guided my choices in technology for decades at this point and it works well for me: such tech as I genuinely rely on gives me very little trouble, and when any piece of it does fail in irritating ways, I can almost always replace that piece without cascading consequences.
I do hate the horseshit that marketing departments everywhere have saturated the planet with, and especially hate seeing that horseshit nudge so many people toward treating their consumer choices as central to their identities.
Watching people defend and display loyalty to corporations with an established record of treating their customers with absolute contempt, as so many of today's large corporations do to an ever increasing extent, just makes me sad. As does the demonstrated success of slick marketing in convincing otherwise completely sensible people that issues as inherently nuanced as security and privacy can be adequately dealt with simply by choosing and then displaying fealty to the "correct" vendor.
And if you're reading that last paragraph and interpreting it as "reflexive Apple hate", I can only suggest that you might benefit from giving more consideration to the question of in whom the actual reflex is occurring and why.
posted by flabdablet at 12:19 AM on December 7, 2023 [6 favorites]
When people act as if the most interesting thing about themselves are their consumer choices, believe them.
posted by signal at 3:30 AM on December 7, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by signal at 3:30 AM on December 7, 2023 [8 favorites]
When I had an Amiga, I was an Amiga Person. I would defend it against the Mac and the Atari ST, wore Amiga clothing and totally hated on PC clones (though I had a lot of envy re: TheDraw, the best ANSI editor available, which was PC only). This Amiga Personality lasted through junior year of college, when my A2000 finally kicked the bucket due to an excess of upgrades and potentially cheese on the circuit board. At that point, I said to myself, "is it worth defining myself by my computer choice?" and quickly answered "No, it is not." At that point I ordered a Gateway PC and forevermore looked at technology choices from a practical rather than ideological perspective. It made my life simpler and me less insufferable.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:35 AM on December 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:35 AM on December 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
I think iPhones are like NYC - those who think they can't live without it think no one is really living without it - the rest of us, however, really don't care, and definitely aren't thinking of you.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:28 AM on December 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:28 AM on December 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
I do object strongly enough to vendor lock-in that I will go out of my way to avoid using non-standard and/or closed-source apps and services
Technological politics makes for strange bedfellows, though. If you're in favor of (something called) RCS, you're either in favor of lock-in with mobile phone providers (who kind of hate the thing they created) or you're maybe buying into what Google is selling (proprietary extensions to RCS, conveniently left out of their marketing push, plus a history of failure to grab and keep market share). If you argue for WhatsApp (which, when I looked up the statistics in 2021, was the most commonly used messaging platform with two billion users worldwide) then you're propping up Meta (who don't need the help). Same for Facebook Messenger, which (as of 2021) was the most popular cross-platform messaging system in the US.
And since the press loves the narrative of "two big sides fighting" it's hard to separate actual teen cruelty (entirely believable, because teens are awful) from credulous coverage of Google press releases and grassroots marketing (also entirely believable, because of what Google has become). As much as I believe that teens can be cruel, I also believe that press coverage is chosen to feed a narrative. And I do think that if teens want to be cruel to each other, text bubbles aren't going to stop them.
posted by fedward at 8:31 AM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
Technological politics makes for strange bedfellows, though. If you're in favor of (something called) RCS, you're either in favor of lock-in with mobile phone providers (who kind of hate the thing they created) or you're maybe buying into what Google is selling (proprietary extensions to RCS, conveniently left out of their marketing push, plus a history of failure to grab and keep market share). If you argue for WhatsApp (which, when I looked up the statistics in 2021, was the most commonly used messaging platform with two billion users worldwide) then you're propping up Meta (who don't need the help). Same for Facebook Messenger, which (as of 2021) was the most popular cross-platform messaging system in the US.
And since the press loves the narrative of "two big sides fighting" it's hard to separate actual teen cruelty (entirely believable, because teens are awful) from credulous coverage of Google press releases and grassroots marketing (also entirely believable, because of what Google has become). As much as I believe that teens can be cruel, I also believe that press coverage is chosen to feed a narrative. And I do think that if teens want to be cruel to each other, text bubbles aren't going to stop them.
posted by fedward at 8:31 AM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
When I had an Amiga, I was an Amiga Person.
I started out as an Apple ][+ Person, but pretty rapidly widened that out to becoming a 6502 Person, mostly as a reaction to the insufferable Z80 People who could not be stopped from banging on about how their processor ran at twice the clock speed of mine and had more registers.
I loved the audacious, minimalist elegance of the Apple ][+ design, and I loved the machine's complete openness. But the 6502 was in fact far better suited to running a washing machine than a personal computer, and when I saw my first 6809-based machine running OS-9, I succumbed to the siren call of its twin 16-bit stack pointers and its loadable and unloadable device drivers.
By then I'd also started to get a bit familiar with DEC's PDP-11 minicomputer architecture, and really liked it. So when the 68000 first appeared, which also featured numerous orthogonal telescoping registers, I liked that too. The first 68000 machine I actually cut code for belonged to a friend who had one in a Cromemco S-100 box running Cromix, and gave me a user account on it that I'd get at from my now 80 column card equipped Apple ][+ by wedging the handset of my landline phone into a 300 baud acoustic coupler and tying his phone line up for hours.
Meanwhile, Intel had released the 8086. I did not like the 8086 and still don't. The architecture was all warts on the side of a bag on the side of an 8080 and yet didn't even manage the kind of backward compatibility with the 8080 that the Z80 had long had, and I thought the segmented memory architecture was just ludicrously awful compared to the much more straightforward flat 32 bit address space defined by the 68000 architecture.
Then IBM plopped out its PC, featuring the hamstrung 8-bit version of the 8086 and a dismally slow video architecture. I was pleased to see that the user manual included schematics and a description of the BIOS API, but OMG the contrast between that utterly pedestrian, utterly uninspired design and my beloved Apple ][+. The IBM PC gave the distinct impression of having been cobbled together in an enormous hurry from a pile of Intel application notes, it was beige and it was heavy and it was tedious beyond bearing and PC-DOS was just foul and I resolved to ignore all of it to the greatest extent possible.
Which ended up being not very; spent quite a while being paid to write device drivers for the bastard thing. And later optimizing the hell out of them to make them work on the PCjr, a cut-to-the-bone built-down-to-a-price piece of irredeemable shit that achieved levels of hardware underperformance that scarcely seemed credible.
I'd never been attracted to Apple's line of 68000 machines (the Lisa and the original tombstone Mac). Too closed, too tightly clipped together, no expansion bus, piss-poor documentation compared to their Apple II line. But when the Amiga 1000 first appeared, I was sold. Here was a box with astonishing graphics capability for its time, and a 68000, and a proper pre-emptive multitasking OS, and floppy drives that read whole tracks in a single revolution and packed 880K on a disk, and really good documentation and a bus expansion port. Oh yes.
In the end, the only thing of note that I did with my Amiga was put a 68010 in it and build a little adaptor board so that instead of the expensive 3.5" floppy disks that its inbuilt drive used, I could use ordinary 5.25" floppies in a pair of external drives and achieve exactly the same capacity and speed using exactly the same track formats and timings. The external drive port on the Amiga 1000 case was a weird-ass 23-pin D socket for which matching plugs were completely unavailable, but I found that after extracting the two outermost pins from a standard DB-25 plug and denting the sides of the shell a little, I could make it fit in the socket upside down.
So yeah, for a while there I was a bit of an Amiga Person and definitely looked down on any pleb who would settle for an IBM PC or any of its increasingly ubiquitous clones.
But cool as AmigaDOS was, it was no Unix. And after the GPL appeared, closely followed by Linux, the prospect of being part of a genuinely workable free-as-in-speech software community centred on those things was exciting enough that I put hardware prejudice aside and bought a Pentium laptop to run Red Hat 9 on. And it was a beast. 512 megabytes of RAM! 60 gigabytes of disk! A 1600x1200 Ultrasharp display panel driven by an nVidia GeForce2 Go 100 graphics controller with 32 megabytes of video RAM! Cost me a fucking fortune. Worth it, though. And I still own it, though it's no longer my daily driver; it's out there in the cabin, keeping my A1000, my Apple ][+ and my Apple //e company. All of them still work.
These days I'm a Debian GNU/Linux Person. I don't look down on people who choose to subject themselves to the whims of their proprietary OS overlords, but I absolutely do feel sad for them.
And I still don't like x86, even though AMD has since bolted enough new bags on the sides of the warts on the sides of its bags on the sides of the 8080 so as to be able to hollow the thing out entirely and not actually need an 8086 inside it any more. ARM is much tidier, though still unfortunately proprietary. I have a little fleet of ARM-based single-board machines doing various useful things around the house, all of them running Linux, mostly running Debian.
Looking forward to the day when I can run my ever-evolving Debian desktop environment on an upgradeable RISC V laptop that blows the doors off its contemporary M2 Macbook descendants at a fifth of their price with five times their reliability and ten times their repairability and expandability. Not sure who will do it first - could be Framework, could be some commodity AliExpress vendor - but I'm pretty sure it's coming. Interoperability and openness is the name of the long game.
posted by flabdablet at 8:43 AM on December 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
I started out as an Apple ][+ Person, but pretty rapidly widened that out to becoming a 6502 Person, mostly as a reaction to the insufferable Z80 People who could not be stopped from banging on about how their processor ran at twice the clock speed of mine and had more registers.
I loved the audacious, minimalist elegance of the Apple ][+ design, and I loved the machine's complete openness. But the 6502 was in fact far better suited to running a washing machine than a personal computer, and when I saw my first 6809-based machine running OS-9, I succumbed to the siren call of its twin 16-bit stack pointers and its loadable and unloadable device drivers.
By then I'd also started to get a bit familiar with DEC's PDP-11 minicomputer architecture, and really liked it. So when the 68000 first appeared, which also featured numerous orthogonal telescoping registers, I liked that too. The first 68000 machine I actually cut code for belonged to a friend who had one in a Cromemco S-100 box running Cromix, and gave me a user account on it that I'd get at from my now 80 column card equipped Apple ][+ by wedging the handset of my landline phone into a 300 baud acoustic coupler and tying his phone line up for hours.
Meanwhile, Intel had released the 8086. I did not like the 8086 and still don't. The architecture was all warts on the side of a bag on the side of an 8080 and yet didn't even manage the kind of backward compatibility with the 8080 that the Z80 had long had, and I thought the segmented memory architecture was just ludicrously awful compared to the much more straightforward flat 32 bit address space defined by the 68000 architecture.
Then IBM plopped out its PC, featuring the hamstrung 8-bit version of the 8086 and a dismally slow video architecture. I was pleased to see that the user manual included schematics and a description of the BIOS API, but OMG the contrast between that utterly pedestrian, utterly uninspired design and my beloved Apple ][+. The IBM PC gave the distinct impression of having been cobbled together in an enormous hurry from a pile of Intel application notes, it was beige and it was heavy and it was tedious beyond bearing and PC-DOS was just foul and I resolved to ignore all of it to the greatest extent possible.
Which ended up being not very; spent quite a while being paid to write device drivers for the bastard thing. And later optimizing the hell out of them to make them work on the PCjr, a cut-to-the-bone built-down-to-a-price piece of irredeemable shit that achieved levels of hardware underperformance that scarcely seemed credible.
I'd never been attracted to Apple's line of 68000 machines (the Lisa and the original tombstone Mac). Too closed, too tightly clipped together, no expansion bus, piss-poor documentation compared to their Apple II line. But when the Amiga 1000 first appeared, I was sold. Here was a box with astonishing graphics capability for its time, and a 68000, and a proper pre-emptive multitasking OS, and floppy drives that read whole tracks in a single revolution and packed 880K on a disk, and really good documentation and a bus expansion port. Oh yes.
In the end, the only thing of note that I did with my Amiga was put a 68010 in it and build a little adaptor board so that instead of the expensive 3.5" floppy disks that its inbuilt drive used, I could use ordinary 5.25" floppies in a pair of external drives and achieve exactly the same capacity and speed using exactly the same track formats and timings. The external drive port on the Amiga 1000 case was a weird-ass 23-pin D socket for which matching plugs were completely unavailable, but I found that after extracting the two outermost pins from a standard DB-25 plug and denting the sides of the shell a little, I could make it fit in the socket upside down.
So yeah, for a while there I was a bit of an Amiga Person and definitely looked down on any pleb who would settle for an IBM PC or any of its increasingly ubiquitous clones.
But cool as AmigaDOS was, it was no Unix. And after the GPL appeared, closely followed by Linux, the prospect of being part of a genuinely workable free-as-in-speech software community centred on those things was exciting enough that I put hardware prejudice aside and bought a Pentium laptop to run Red Hat 9 on. And it was a beast. 512 megabytes of RAM! 60 gigabytes of disk! A 1600x1200 Ultrasharp display panel driven by an nVidia GeForce2 Go 100 graphics controller with 32 megabytes of video RAM! Cost me a fucking fortune. Worth it, though. And I still own it, though it's no longer my daily driver; it's out there in the cabin, keeping my A1000, my Apple ][+ and my Apple //e company. All of them still work.
These days I'm a Debian GNU/Linux Person. I don't look down on people who choose to subject themselves to the whims of their proprietary OS overlords, but I absolutely do feel sad for them.
And I still don't like x86, even though AMD has since bolted enough new bags on the sides of the warts on the sides of its bags on the sides of the 8080 so as to be able to hollow the thing out entirely and not actually need an 8086 inside it any more. ARM is much tidier, though still unfortunately proprietary. I have a little fleet of ARM-based single-board machines doing various useful things around the house, all of them running Linux, mostly running Debian.
Looking forward to the day when I can run my ever-evolving Debian desktop environment on an upgradeable RISC V laptop that blows the doors off its contemporary M2 Macbook descendants at a fifth of their price with five times their reliability and ten times their repairability and expandability. Not sure who will do it first - could be Framework, could be some commodity AliExpress vendor - but I'm pretty sure it's coming. Interoperability and openness is the name of the long game.
posted by flabdablet at 8:43 AM on December 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
And later optimizing the hell out of them to make them work on the PCjr, a cut-to-the-bone down-to-a-price piece of crap that achieved levels of hardware underperformance that scarcely seemed credible
OMG we had a PCjr, I think it maybe ran Print Shop. It was fabulously underwhelming. I think the most common thing I did with it was run the demo screen.
My progression went Atari 400 (with the awful flat keyboard) -> C64 -> Amiga 2000 (upgraded to a 68030 w/ 7mb of ram, a fat Agnes, Workbench 3.0 and two hard drives) -> PC Pentium desktop. None of them are with me anymore. I don't remember what happened to the Atari. I sold the 64 after I got the Amiga. The Amiga, as noted, died a death. And the Gateway desktop lasted me a good long while, from late college to I want to say maybe 2005 or 2006, when I bought a Music Computer. These days I have two Lenovo Thinkpads, which I love.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:55 AM on December 7, 2023
OMG we had a PCjr, I think it maybe ran Print Shop. It was fabulously underwhelming. I think the most common thing I did with it was run the demo screen.
My progression went Atari 400 (with the awful flat keyboard) -> C64 -> Amiga 2000 (upgraded to a 68030 w/ 7mb of ram, a fat Agnes, Workbench 3.0 and two hard drives) -> PC Pentium desktop. None of them are with me anymore. I don't remember what happened to the Atari. I sold the 64 after I got the Amiga. The Amiga, as noted, died a death. And the Gateway desktop lasted me a good long while, from late college to I want to say maybe 2005 or 2006, when I bought a Music Computer. These days I have two Lenovo Thinkpads, which I love.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:55 AM on December 7, 2023
If this blue bubble stuff is truly just about encryption and security and being done out of the goodness of Apple's hearts, then wouldn't Apple just make an iMessage app that can work on non-iPhones?
Let's review some of the court filings from the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit:
- In a deposition Eddy Cue (SVP of Services at Apple) testified that Apple ācould have made a version on Android that worked with iOSā such that there would āhave been cross-compatibility with the iOS platform so that users of both platforms would have been able to exchange messages with one another seamlesslyā but as early as 2013, they decided against this.
- Craig Federighi (SVP of Software Engineering at Apple) feared that āiMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phonesā.
- In a 2016 conversation with Phil Schiller (Apple executive in charge of the App Store), an unnamed Apple employee commented that āthe #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage [...] iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.ā Schiller agreed, saying that "moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us."
Look, obviously Apple is a business, so it's not surprising that they're going to try and get any kind of edge they can. They are in no way uniquely nefarious for these kinds of tactics compared to other corporations. But it's also extremely clear that the primary concern for Apple with regard to iMessage is not security, it's increasing ecosystem lock-in, and I'm tired of people pretending it's not.
Disclosure: I am a married (and not dating) mid-30s female Android user who has been excluded from multiple groupchats, including my own family's groupchat, as a result of not having an iPhone. Providing this as a counterpoint to the narrative that the only people who care about this are teens and sweaty male incels.
posted by cultanthropologist at 1:09 PM on December 7, 2023 [7 favorites]
Let's review some of the court filings from the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit:
- In a deposition Eddy Cue (SVP of Services at Apple) testified that Apple ācould have made a version on Android that worked with iOSā such that there would āhave been cross-compatibility with the iOS platform so that users of both platforms would have been able to exchange messages with one another seamlesslyā but as early as 2013, they decided against this.
- Craig Federighi (SVP of Software Engineering at Apple) feared that āiMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phonesā.
- In a 2016 conversation with Phil Schiller (Apple executive in charge of the App Store), an unnamed Apple employee commented that āthe #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage [...] iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.ā Schiller agreed, saying that "moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us."
Look, obviously Apple is a business, so it's not surprising that they're going to try and get any kind of edge they can. They are in no way uniquely nefarious for these kinds of tactics compared to other corporations. But it's also extremely clear that the primary concern for Apple with regard to iMessage is not security, it's increasing ecosystem lock-in, and I'm tired of people pretending it's not.
Disclosure: I am a married (and not dating) mid-30s female Android user who has been excluded from multiple groupchats, including my own family's groupchat, as a result of not having an iPhone. Providing this as a counterpoint to the narrative that the only people who care about this are teens and sweaty male incels.
posted by cultanthropologist at 1:09 PM on December 7, 2023 [7 favorites]
The people excluding Android users probably already know what brand of phone the users they are excluding have, so the excluded heathens won't be any better off for a while.
Some of the exclusion might be based on that kind of snobbery, but I reckon it's a small percentage. The rest is based on practicality - Apple's group chat implementation basically breaks if one member of the group isn't on iMessage. People that don't care about your brand of phone, but care about the bubble colour because of what it means for functionality are likely the majority, and this is aimed squarely at them.
posted by Dysk at 10:10 PM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
Some of the exclusion might be based on that kind of snobbery, but I reckon it's a small percentage. The rest is based on practicality - Apple's group chat implementation basically breaks if one member of the group isn't on iMessage. People that don't care about your brand of phone, but care about the bubble colour because of what it means for functionality are likely the majority, and this is aimed squarely at them.
posted by Dysk at 10:10 PM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
Apple's group chat implementation basically breaks
(Android user here.) How does it break? I mean, beyond producing a bunch of messages like:
posted by The Tensor at 11:01 PM on December 7, 2023
(Android user here.) How does it break? I mean, beyond producing a bunch of messages like:
š to "The text of some message upthread, quoted in its entirety so an iPhone user's very important reaction could be recorded."But the iPhone users don't see those, right? (Right?)
posted by The Tensor at 11:01 PM on December 7, 2023
People have cited examples in the thread:
People would send me messags in an iMessage group chat, but I would see them as individual messages from the individual user and reply back to only that person and they wouldn't go to the group chat. So I was essentially freezing myself out by being unable to respond to the group.
Like, the one groupchat I'm in has 2 android users and like 50% of their messages are like "that didn't work can you resend pls", and we don't get a good chunk of the things they send us.
Sometimes people also have issues where they switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, but their phone number is still linked to Apple's Messaging system, so messages from other iPhones are silently just going to an inbox they don't see.
Yeah my friends and I mostly switched to Signal for mixed-phone group chats/regular messaging between kinds of phones because it was unreliable otherwise
posted by Dysk at 11:21 PM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
People would send me messags in an iMessage group chat, but I would see them as individual messages from the individual user and reply back to only that person and they wouldn't go to the group chat. So I was essentially freezing myself out by being unable to respond to the group.
Like, the one groupchat I'm in has 2 android users and like 50% of their messages are like "that didn't work can you resend pls", and we don't get a good chunk of the things they send us.
Sometimes people also have issues where they switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, but their phone number is still linked to Apple's Messaging system, so messages from other iPhones are silently just going to an inbox they don't see.
Yeah my friends and I mostly switched to Signal for mixed-phone group chats/regular messaging between kinds of phones because it was unreliable otherwise
posted by Dysk at 11:21 PM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
The rest of the planet, where I happen to live, uses WhatsApp not because we want to "support Meta ", but because it works, it's free, in many places it doesn't count towards your data usage, and it allows you to not give a fuck what brand of phone the other person has.
posted by signal at 4:02 AM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by signal at 4:02 AM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
Apple's group chat implementation basically breaks
And yet it's the plebians using non-Apple devices that get mocked and excluded.
posted by Nelson at 6:48 AM on December 8, 2023
And yet it's the plebians using non-Apple devices that get mocked and excluded.
posted by Nelson at 6:48 AM on December 8, 2023
Apple cuts off Beeper Miniās access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android
posted by Nelson at 2:40 PM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 2:40 PM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
it allows you to not give a fuck what brand of phone the other person has
That's quite enough reflexive Apple hate out of you, thanks.
posted by flabdablet at 5:39 PM on December 8, 2023
That's quite enough reflexive Apple hate out of you, thanks.
posted by flabdablet at 5:39 PM on December 8, 2023
(Android user here.) How does it break? I mean, beyond producing a bunch of messages like:Android users stopped seeing those in March 2022 when Google Messages updated. iOS users stopped seeing those in September 2022.
š to "The text of some message upthread, quoted in its entirety so an iPhone user's very important reaction could be recorded."
But the iPhone users don't see those, right? (Right?)
There are some reports that SMS/MMS messages aren't seen by other people in the group but those problems are also endemic to SMS, MMS, and RCS because those services depend on the carriers to run servers competently and that's just not how American phone carriers are. The same delays or lost messages happen to group chats using nothing but Android and RCS, iPhone users using SMS or MMS to other iPhone users, and it's been like that since the 90s (a large part of why iMessage exists and why it's so popular is that you no longer needed to care about AT&T or Verizon skimping on IT).
This is also one of the reasons why Google is pushing RCS so hard: they needed allies for the political fight but they also see a business opportunity for their RCS SaaS service since they know the carriers aren't serious about running servers and are likely to throw money at Google to make that problem go away. It raises some questions about compatibility ā notice how heavily the marketing for an ostensible open standard is all about the proprietary Android Messages app ā but I can't help but think it's worth it because for all Google's flaws they are good at the technical work of running servers, and in this case it'd be politically challenging for them to lose interest and cancel the service.
posted by adamsc at 5:56 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
iOS users stopped seeing those in September 2022.
I got a "š to "xyz"" message as recently as Wednesday. At least on my phone, that is not a fixed issue. It's not a problem, more of a charming quirk, but it has been persistent for as long as I've had an iphone.
But also, to the minimal extent that I use group texts (generally just with two to five coworkers for coordination or chatting, not some big ongoing thing with a large group), they seem to work fine regardless of who is using whatever brand of phone. I don't disbelieve that people are having those issues, just that it isn't a universal problem in all cases.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:26 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
I got a "š to "xyz"" message as recently as Wednesday. At least on my phone, that is not a fixed issue. It's not a problem, more of a charming quirk, but it has been persistent for as long as I've had an iphone.
But also, to the minimal extent that I use group texts (generally just with two to five coworkers for coordination or chatting, not some big ongoing thing with a large group), they seem to work fine regardless of who is using whatever brand of phone. I don't disbelieve that people are having those issues, just that it isn't a universal problem in all cases.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:26 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
Android users stopped seeing those in March 2022 when Google Messages updated.
Uh... no we didn't? I'd think it was just me but multiple acquaintances have also complained (like within the past month) about the same "X liked 'blah blah'" pseudomessages generated by iPhones.
posted by Not A Thing at 6:29 PM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
Uh... no we didn't? I'd think it was just me but multiple acquaintances have also complained (like within the past month) about the same "X liked 'blah blah'" pseudomessages generated by iPhones.
posted by Not A Thing at 6:29 PM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
Messages themselves are end-to-end encrypted, but the iCloud backup of a phone is not end-to-end encrypted unless you turn on "Advanced Data Protection for iCloud." There's also an "iCloud for Messages" feature. The pages on that feature don't specify whether e2ee is intact if that feature is on.
Also, even if you secure your end, your correspondents might not have. In a group text planning a protest that could turn into a police riot, all it takes is one misconfigured endpoint.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 8:02 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
Also, even if you secure your end, your correspondents might not have. In a group text planning a protest that could turn into a police riot, all it takes is one misconfigured endpoint.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 8:02 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
Android users stopped seeing those in March 2022 when Google Messages updated. iOS users stopped seeing those in September 2022.
I literally today saw, in a group chat from one of my (I believe) iPhone-using friends:
ā¤ļø to "Replied to a message:"
...where that "Replied to a message:" comes from another iPhone-synthesized message further upstream:
Replied to a message: <ENTIRE TEXT OF A PREVIOUS MESSAGE>
I mean, I have no doubt that iPhone users aren't seeing them. As best I can tell, iPhones are polluting group chats with a bunch of "why won't you use my protocol" chaff, but hiding it from their users, so when us green-bubble proles speak up to ask if they can knock if off, they kick us out of the chat because "Android phones are broken".
posted by The Tensor at 11:44 PM on December 8, 2023
I literally today saw, in a group chat from one of my (I believe) iPhone-using friends:
ā¤ļø to "Replied to a message:"
...where that "Replied to a message:" comes from another iPhone-synthesized message further upstream:
Replied to a message: <ENTIRE TEXT OF A PREVIOUS MESSAGE>
I mean, I have no doubt that iPhone users aren't seeing them. As best I can tell, iPhones are polluting group chats with a bunch of "why won't you use my protocol" chaff, but hiding it from their users, so when us green-bubble proles speak up to ask if they can knock if off, they kick us out of the chat because "Android phones are broken".
posted by The Tensor at 11:44 PM on December 8, 2023
I mean, I have no doubt that iPhone users aren't seeing them. As best I can tell, iPhones are polluting group chats with a bunch of "why won't you use my protocol" chaff, but hiding it from their users, so when us green-bubble proles speak up to ask if they can knock if off, they kick us out of the chat because "Android phones are broken".
I'm on an iphone, and like I said just above, I get those same emoji-plus-quoted-message texts from Android phones both in one on one and group texts. Whatever the incompatibility issue is, it seems to cut both ways.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:17 AM on December 9, 2023
I'm on an iphone, and like I said just above, I get those same emoji-plus-quoted-message texts from Android phones both in one on one and group texts. Whatever the incompatibility issue is, it seems to cut both ways.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:17 AM on December 9, 2023
...and it's gone.
(edit: I see this is posted upthread, sorry.)
posted by Catblack at 9:58 AM on December 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
(edit: I see this is posted upthread, sorry.)
posted by Catblack at 9:58 AM on December 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'd think it was just me but multiple acquaintances have also complained (like within the past month) about the same "X liked 'blah blah'" pseudomessages generated by iPhones.
Interesting- I wonder if thereās a connection to the carrier. All of my group chats like that were basically people saying āfinallyā and never mentioning it again; the Android users got it first so there was some gentle teasing about catching up when it arrived on iOS a few months later. Nobody has mentioned seeing it since.
posted by adamsc at 12:50 PM on December 9, 2023
Beeper said they were back up and some people say it is working for them, some say it isn't. For now. Beeper is now in a running fight with Apple, one they will lose. If not on technical grounds than on legal. It is very unlikely Apple will allow anyone to force their proprietary message platform to interoperate openly.
posted by Nelson at 1:46 PM on December 9, 2023
posted by Nelson at 1:46 PM on December 9, 2023
Four days ago I said: I am curious how Apple is going to respond to this. No doubt declare it a security vulnerability and break the interoperability. In today's news:
Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: āWe took steps to protect our usersā
Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: āWe took steps to protect our usersā
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.posted by Nelson at 6:25 AM on December 10, 2023
Senator Warren calls out Apple for shutting down Beeperās āiMessage to Androidā solution. A tweet.
Green bubble texts are less secure. So why would Apple block a new app allowing Android users to chat with iPhone users on iMessage? Big Tech executives are protecting profits by squashing competitors.posted by Nelson at 8:19 AM on December 11, 2023
Chatting between different platforms should be easy and secure.
Beeper Mini Is Back. For now. They are still absolutely going to lose this back and forth eventually.
posted by Nelson at 11:25 AM on December 11, 2023
posted by Nelson at 11:25 AM on December 11, 2023
And a right cross from Apple: Apple partly halts Beeperās iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead. This will keep going on for weeks. I'm surprised the legal action hasn't visibly started yet.
posted by Nelson at 4:28 PM on December 14, 2023
posted by Nelson at 4:28 PM on December 14, 2023
honestly, the more I think about it, the more I feel like this is the sort of thing that makes a neat white hat tech demo and a profoundly irresponsible business model
like the business model was initially "pay us for the unauthorized access we provide to a service built and maintained by another company, that has no particular motivation nor desire to let us provide access to it," as though the only thing stopping Apple from rolling out iMessage on Android was that they just didn't have the resources and were waiting for someone else to do it for them ā at its core, the Beeper business model was effectively built on "another company will do the work of actually maintaining the servers and stuff that we're selling unauthorized access to, but also surely they won't mind" as a long-term strategy
which is to say, likeā¦Ā it's kind of going the exact way I'd expect if they'd said they'd reverse-engineered a way to log in to WhatsApp or Kik or Line, and then sold access to those platforms via means unintended by the platform owners
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:37 PM on December 14, 2023
like the business model was initially "pay us for the unauthorized access we provide to a service built and maintained by another company, that has no particular motivation nor desire to let us provide access to it," as though the only thing stopping Apple from rolling out iMessage on Android was that they just didn't have the resources and were waiting for someone else to do it for them ā at its core, the Beeper business model was effectively built on "another company will do the work of actually maintaining the servers and stuff that we're selling unauthorized access to, but also surely they won't mind" as a long-term strategy
which is to say, likeā¦Ā it's kind of going the exact way I'd expect if they'd said they'd reverse-engineered a way to log in to WhatsApp or Kik or Line, and then sold access to those platforms via means unintended by the platform owners
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:37 PM on December 14, 2023
AKA the ISP business model. Somebody else is running all the servers and services you actually want, we're just selling access!
posted by Dysk at 3:34 AM on December 15, 2023
posted by Dysk at 3:34 AM on December 15, 2023
We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.Yeah, that's horseshit. Anybody, Apple product owner or not, can get an Apple Account just by signing up for one, and for as long as that remains the case, calling the resulting credentials "fake" is a flat lie.
posted by flabdablet at 8:54 PM on December 15, 2023
Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation.
āIn December 2015, Beeperās Chief Executive Officer, Eric Migicovsky, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committeeās Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights. He expressed concern that dominant messaging services would use their position to impose barriers to interoperability and prevent Beeper entering and delivering services that consumers want. Given Appleās recent actions, that concern appears prescient,ā the lawmakers state in their letter to the DOJ.posted by Nelson at 9:33 AM on December 18, 2023
āWe are therefore concerned that Appleās recent actions to disable Beeper Mini harm competition, eliminate choices for consumers, and will discourage future innovation and investment in interoperable messaging services,ā they added.ā
I stopped posting all the back and forth because I doubt anyone cares, but there seems to be a dismal conclusion. Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream
Beeper is throwing in the towel in its fight to bring iMessage to Android ā mostly. Although it just announced yet another fix to let Android users send iMessages from its messaging apps, Beeper announced that itās going to stop finding workarounds and instead focus on its ālong-term goal of building the best chat app on earth.āposted by Nelson at 8:55 AM on December 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
āEach time that Beeper Mini goes ādownā or is made to be unreliable due to interference by Apple, Beeperās credibility takes a hit. Itās unsustainable,ā Beeper writes. āAs much as we want to fight for what we believe is a fantastic product that really should exist, the truth is that we canāt win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth.ā
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posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:18 AM on December 6, 2023 [4 favorites]