Comment on Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority

• DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Reverse engineering an API is not illegal

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  • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Reverse engineering it is not, sure. And Beeper could do that and run their own messaging service with their own infrastructure running their reverse engineered version.

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    • LinuxSBC@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And that’s what they’re doing.

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      • btmoo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That’s not what they’re doing. They’re using Apple’s version for free. They’re also encouring their users to violate their terms of service agreements with Apple en-masse.

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• Lutra@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ah, common misconception - hacking an API != creating a compatible program. ( reverse engineering)

  Imagine a drill company has a special shape for its bits. Our law allows someone else to either… make bits that can fit in that shape OR make their own drill that can accept those bits.

  “BUT they copied!” - it doesn’t have to be a copy to be compatible, and they don’t even have to use the ‘special shape’ just be able to work with the special shape. The law does not allow for protections around that. Doing so would be by definition anti-competitive. Our anti competition laws or rather our IP protection laws are not intended in any way to ‘ensure a monopoly’. The IP laws give a person a right to either keep something they do secret OR share that knowledge with the world so we all benefit, in exchange for a very limited monopoly.

  Practically speaking, If I got the KFC Colonel to give me list the 11 herbs and spices in a Poker game, and then started making my own delicious poultry that is totally cool. Likewise, If I figured out that all that was inside a Threadr-ripper was blue smoke and started making my own blue smoke chips, the law is ok with that.

  In this case roughly, Having a public facing endpoint. And then saying that the public can access that endpoint is cool Saying that only the public using the code I alone gave them – well… that’s not been litigated a lot, but all signs point to no.

  It’s like Bing saying its for Safari only, and suing people who accessed it using Chrome. It is a logical claim, but the law does not provide that kind of protection/enforcement.

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  tl;dr these concepts are old but being newly applied to fancy technology. The laws in place are clear in most cases. A car maker can not dictate what you put in the tank. FedEX and UPS can’t charge you differently for shipping fiction books or medical journals or self published stories. And they’d probably get anti-trust scrutiny they even told you what brand/style of boxes you had to use.

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• candyman337@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They didn’t hack it, they spoofed a device, they just tricked the systems around the api

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  • jon@lemmy.tf ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That counts as unauthorized access in the eyes of the law. It’s a private system and they did not have any agreements permitting them to use it as they wanted.

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    • mark3748@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Quite literally the text of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act. Unauthorized access of computer systems can get you 20-years at club fed. Seems like some of these people need a history lesson.

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    • candyman337@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What this guy said lemmy.world/comment/6119756

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• darkevilmac@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Genuinely curious, what’s the law against reverse engineering an API? I can maybe see the argument for charging for the service, but beeper mini is planning to integrate other services as well so I don’t know if that’ll really hold water.

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  • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They can reverse engineer it and run it as their own service with their own infrastructure. But that doesn’t mean they can then start accessing Apple’s implementation and using Apple’s resources without permission.

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    • LinuxSBC@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What do you think an API is? They have reverse engineered the iMessage API and are using that to connect to the iMessage servers. It is literally impossible to do as you suggest (use entirely their own resources) because iMessage is centralized and cannot federate with any other server, even if one did exist.

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    • darkevilmac@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If they function identically to a normal client though what’s the issue? As an example Google indexes pages all over the web without the explicit permission of those websites, that requires them to read the page and make requests to someone else’s infrastructure.

      What part exactly here is illegal?

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      • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        The websites in question getting crawled and indexed are generally open and available for anyone to browse. There are parts of the web that are gated off and require authentication and authorization to access. Imagine now that Google found a way to authenticate with your bank’s website and index your online banking portal. (It’s not a perfect analogy to what’s happening with Beeper, but I’m just using the one you laid out.)

        In a similar way, iMessage as a service requires authentication and authorization to use. It is not open for anyone to use. Beeper is doing something to spoof or otherwise fool Apple into giving the client access. This is the part that’s illegal. And potentially not just “file a lawsuit” illegal but criminally so.

        It doesn’t really matter why Apple doesn’t want Beeper or anyone else to use it. The fact that they simply don’t is all that matters.

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• ripcord@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Hacking someone’s private API is already against law

  "Hacking" is the wrong word here. But in general, no, this is not true.

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