#AdversarialInteroperability is one of the most reliable ways to protect users from predatory corporations: it's when someone reverse-engineers a product to reconfigure or mod it (interoperability) in ways its users like, but which its manufacturer objects to (adversarial):

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

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor

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Adversarial Interoperability

“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.But interoperability is just the...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

"Adversarial interop" is a *mouthful*, so at @eff, we coined the term #CompetitiveCompatibility, or #comcom, which is a lot easier to say and to spell.

Scratch any tech success and you'll find a comcom story. After all, when a company turns its screws on its users, it's good business to offer an aftermarket mod that loosens them again.

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HP's $10,000/gallon inkjet ink is like a bat-signal for third-party ink companies. When Mercedes announces that it's going to sell you access to your car's accelerator pedal as a subscription service, that's like an engraved invitation to clever independent mechanics who'll charge you a single fee to permanently unlock that "feature":

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/05/carmakers-push-forward-with-plans-to-make-basic-features-subscription-services-despite-widespread-backlash/

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Carmakers Push Forward With Plans To Make Basic Features Subscription Services, Despite Widespread Backlash

Automakers are increasingly obsessed with turning everything into a subscription service in a bid to boost quarterly returns. We’ve noted how BMW has embraced making heated seats and other fea…

Techdirt

Comcom saved tech giants like #Apple. #Microsoft tried to kill the Mac by rolling out a truly cursèd version of MS Office for MacOS. Mac users (5% of the market) who tried to send Word, Excel or Powerpoint files to Windows users (95% of the market) were stymied: their files wouldn't open, or they'd go corrupt. Tech managers like me started throwing the graphic designer's Mac and replacing it with a Windows box with a big graphics card and Windows versions of Adobe's tools.

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Comcom saved Apple's bacon. Apple reverse-engineered MS's flagship software suite and made a comcom version, #iWork, whose #Pages, #Numbers and #Keynote could flawlessly read and write MS's #Word, #Excel and #Powerpoint files:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

It's tempting to think of iWork as benefiting Apple users, and certainly the people who installed and used it benefited from it. But *Windows* users *also* benefited from iWork.

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Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies

Today, Apple is one of the largest, most profitable companies on Earth, but in the early 2000s, the company was fighting for its life. Microsoft's Windows operating system was ascendant, and Microsoft leveraged its dominance to ensure that every Windows user relied on its Microsoft Office suite (...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

The existence of iWork meant that Windows users could seamlessly collaborate on and share files with their Mac colleagues. IWork didn't just add a new feature to the Mac ("read and write files that originated with Windows users") - it also added a feature to *Windows*: "collaborate with Mac users."

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Every pirate wants to be an admiral. Though comcom rescued Apple from a monopolist's sneaky attempt to drive it out of business, Apple - now a three trillion dollar company - has repeatedly attacked comcom when it was applied to *Apple's* products. When Apple did comcom, that was progress. When someone does comcom *to Apple*, that's piracy.

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Apple has many tools at its disposal that Microsoft lacked in the early 2000s. Radical new interpretations of existing copyright, contract, patent and trademark law allows Apple - and other tech giants - to threaten rivals who engage in comcom with both criminal and civil penalties. That's right, you can go to *prison* for comcom these days. No wonder calls this #FelonyContemptOfBusinessModel:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

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Pluralistic: The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot (09 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Take #iMessage, Apple's #EndToEndEncrypted (#E2EE) instant messaging tool. Apple customers can use iMessage to send each other private messages that can't be read or altered by third parties - not cops, not crooks, not even Apple. That's important, because when private messaging systems get hacked, bad things happen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak

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2014 celebrity nude photo leak - Wikipedia

But Apple has steadfastly refused to offer an iMessage app for non-Apple systems. If you're an Apple customer holding a sensitive discussion with an Android user, Apple refuses to offer you a tool to maintain your privacy. *Those* messages are sent "in the clear," over the 38-year-old SMS protocol, which is trivial to spy on and disrupt.

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Apple sacrifices its users' security and integrity in the hopes that they will put pressure on their friends to move into Apple's walled garden. As CEO Tim Cook told a reporter: if you want to have secure communications with your mother, buy her an iPhone:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tim-cook-says-buy-mom-210347694.html

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Tim Cook Says 'Buy Your Mom An iPhone' If You Want To Communicate With Android Users — Compatibility Not A Priority For Apple

Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook typically upholds a professional image, but during Vox Media Inc.’s 2022 Code Conference to unveil the iPhone 14 lineup last year, he...

Yahoo Finance

Last September, a 16-year old high school student calling himself #JJTech published a technical teardown of iMessage, showing how any device could send and receive encrypted messages with iMessage users, even without an #AppleID:

https://jjtech.dev/reverse-engineering/imessage-explained/

JJTech even published code to do this, in an open source library called #Pypush:

https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush

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iMessage, explained

This blog post is going to be a cursory overview of the internals iMessage, as I’ve discovered during my work on pypush, an open source project that reimplements iMessage.

JJTech

In the weeks since, #Beeper has been working to productize JJTech's code, and this week, they announced #BeeperMini, an Android-based iMessage client that is end-to-end encrypted:

https://beeper.notion.site/How-Beeper-Mini-Works-966cb11019f8444f90baa314d2f43a54

Beeper is known for a multiprotocol chat client built on #Matrix, allowing you to manage several kinds of chat from a single app.

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How Beeper Mini Works | Built with Notion

Content Calendar » @Untitled

Beeper on Notion

These multiprotocol chats have been around forever. Indeed, iMessage started out as one - when it was called "iChat," it supported Google Talk *and* Jabber, another multiprotocol tool. Other tools like #Pidgin have kept the flame alive for decades, and have millions of devoted users:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/tower-babel-how-public-interest-internet-trying-save-messaging-and-banish-big

But iMessage support has remained elusive.

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The Tower of Babel: How Public Interest Internet is Trying to Save Messaging and Banish Big Social Media

This blog post is part of a series, looking at the public interest internet—the parts of the internet that don’t garner the headlines of Facebook or Google, but quietly provide public goods and useful services without requiring the scale or the business practices of the tech giants. Read our...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Last month, #Nothing launched #Sunchoice, a disastrous attempt to bring iMessage to Android, which used Macs in a data-center to intercept and forward messages to Android users, breaking E2EE and introducing massive surveillance risks:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/21/23970740/sunbird-imessage-app-shut-down-privacy-nothing-chats-phone-2

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Sunbird is shutting down its iMessage app for Android

Sunbird shuts down its iMessage app while it looks into privacy issues discovered after the release of Nothing Chats.

The Verge

Beeper Mini does *not* have these defects. The system encrypts and decrypts messages on the Android device itself, and directly communicates with Apple's servers. It gathers some telemetry for debugging, and this can be turned off in preferences. It sends a single SMS to Apple's servers during setup, which changes your device's bubble from green to blue, so that Apple users now correctly see your device as a secure endpoint for iMessage communications.

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Beeper Mini is now available in Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeper.ima&hl=en_US

Now, this is a companieshigh-stakes business. Apple has a long history of threatening companies like Beeper over conduct like this. And Google has a long history deferring to those threats - as it did with #OGApp, a superior third-party Instagram app that it summarily yanked after Meta complained:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

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Beeper Mini: Chat With iPhones - Apps on Google Play

Finally, get blue bubbles on Android!

But while iMessage for Android is good for Android users, it's also *very* good for *Apple* customers, who can now get the privacy and security guarantees of iMessage for *all* their contacts, not just the ones who bought the same kind of phone as they did. The stakes for communications breaches have never been higher, and #antitrust scrutiny on Big Tech companies has never been so intense.

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Apple recently announced that it would add #RCS support to iOS devices (RCS is a secure successor to SMS):

https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-iphone/

Early word from developers suggests that this support will have all kinds of boobytraps. That's par for the course with Apple, who love to announce splashy reversals of their worst policies - like their opposition to #RightToRepair - while finding sneaky ways to go on abusing its customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

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Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year - 9to5Mac

In a surprising move, Apple has announced today that it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard. The...

9to5Mac

The ball is in Apple's court, and, to a lesser extent, in Google's. As part of the mobile duopoly, Google has joined with Apple in facilitating the removal of comcom tools from its app store. But Google has also spent millions on an ad campaign shaming Apple for exposing its users to privacy risks when talking to Android users:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23883609/google-rcs-message-apple-iphone-ipager-ad

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Google is teasing Apple again over its lack of RCS messaging support

Google has released a cheesy video advertising a fake “iPager” gadget in a jab at Apple for reverting iMessages texted to Android devices to old-fashioned SMS and MMS.

The Verge

While we all wait for the other shoe to drop, Android users can get set up on Beeper Mini, and technologists can kick the tires on its code libraries and privacy guarantees.

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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman meets with Tim Cook at Apple Park to discuss app development, education opportunities, more - 9to5Mac

Apple CEO Tim Cook and several other members of Apple leadership visited yesterday with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin...

9to5Mac