Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream

Re:Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream by ethanbond on Thursday December 21, 2023 @01:41PM (#38724782)

There is no judge on the planet who will take the position that a 3rd party is allowed to circumvent a service’s security controls and TOS to build a monetized product using a backend that neither they nor their users pay for.

Absolutely zero chance.

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Re:Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream by madeofpalk on Thursday December 21, 2023 @02:12PM (#38725250)

Imagine reverse engineering AWS keys, using AWS services for free, reselling them, and then trying to sue AWS when they fix the security hole.

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Re:Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream by smashah on Friday December 22, 2023 @03:06AM (#38732050)

Maybe lack of imagination?

There are handsomely VC funded successful startups that do exactly this in banking, for example Teller:

https://jobs.lever.co/teller/ebf503af-bb82-49fb-97bd-6d9bcbb...

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Re:Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream by ethanbond on Friday December 22, 2023 @07:27AM (#38733489)

This is not “exactly this.”

Teller is giving users additional access modalities to services they’re already separately “paying for.” The directly analogous format would be if Teller was allowing you to store your money at Bank of America but Teller was preventing BOA from collecting revenue from you.

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Re:Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream by smashah on Friday December 22, 2023 @08:42AM (#38734030)

No. It's like if teller allowed you to make a boa account as well. As if this one small feature makes it some egregious criminal activity.

Many beeper mini users already have apple devices + Eric in his post said he's willing to pay some reasonable fee.

Nobody pays for iMessage directly.

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Re:Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream by ethanbond on Friday December 22, 2023 @09:09AM (#38734252)

Nobody pays for bank accounts directly either.

Oh Eric said he’s willing to pay? Guess that counts as a deal then!

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Re:Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream by GeekyBear on Thursday December 21, 2023 @02:30PM (#38725525)

However, there is every chance that circumventing a service's security controls is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

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Re:Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream by rootusrootus on Thursday December 21, 2023 @09:11PM (#38730099)

That's something I've been wondering about myself. People have run afoul of the CFAA with less egregious actions than these. I guess the Beeper guys talked to their lawyer at least, before taking this course of action.

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Re:Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream by smashah on Friday December 22, 2023 @03:07AM (#38732053)

This type of project is protected from CFAA by Van Buren. AFAIK the only untested precedent is ToS violation.

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