Thanks for the links! I enjoyed reading about how iMessage is built on top of APN. That probably explains why I can reply to messages in arbitrary apps on my Apple Watch. :-)

However, that doesn’t change my argument. Beeper is not a trusted party in this exchange. When they show my messages to their users, they are decrypting my messages and user activity in a way that is outside my zone of trust. They can then be nice and show it to their users in their app, or they can be nefarious and send that data to any other 3rd party for whatever purposes they want.

This is a major security hole at the application layer, despite the network layer security that you’ve linked to.

The beeper application is not trusted by anyone except Beeper. As an Apple user, I trust Apple by buying their devices and participating in their services. I have no trust relationship with Beeper whatsoever. They have the the ability to decrypt my messages unbeknownst to me, and do whatever they want with them. Maybe they’ll display them to users nicely in the app. Maybe they’ll do something nefarious with them.

Having user activity flow into 3rd parties is a major security problem. Maybe you don’t see it, but it’s real and it’s there. We’re still trying to clean up the adtech mess on the web after how many years?

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.

A non-trusted 3rd party that has the capability to decrypt messages? It’s a big problem.

It’s also a huge security hole

It’s not a public API. Hacking someone’s private API is already against law - charging $$ for it moreso.

I feel like conversatives just learn first principals and stop there. It’s kinda sad. The FCC, FTC, etc exist in order to keep our markets fair and consumer friendly.

This weird, free-trade utopia that they dream about does not exist, has never existed, and cannot exist. Instead when you remove all the regulation, you get anarchy like we see today in many 3rd world countries.

I would love to see our government get more efficient and targetted with its regulation, but to simply argue against it is extremely naive.