Allowing devices to view and respond to messages is inherently lower risk than allowing them to freely communicate with anyone.
It's a tricky situation. Windows Vista tried to improve security and then was criticized for having too many UAC pop-ups, and for breaking legacy drivers.
I don't like Apple's syspolicyd, but it is also an attempt at improving security.
Phones, for better or worse, contain much more private and personal information about users than their computer I would bet on average.
So I understand the urge to make phones more secure by default and to help users avoid foot guns, even if it means restricting their choices.
You are likely not the average user, and I think it's a bit selfish to demand total freedom, that you can manage safely, when for most users they would be worse off.
In a perfect world we wouldn't need this but we certainly don't have one of those.
There's secure by default, and then there's stuff users can't override even with great effort. Android restricts some dangerous operations by default and makes users jump through a couple hoops to acknowledge the risk. iOS usually forbids them entirely.
The ability to build better things is the reason why you can now sit here, using technologies built on that "shit show" machine, and bloviate how new generations aren't allowed to build new things anymore because a megacorp needs to feed its greed.
In any case we are largely still learning when it comes to security and I don’t really want to make things less secure for the many just to satisfy the few.
The upshot of this is that Apple can unfairly compete in all sorts of verticals just by owning that platform. A lot of companies could make a good Airpod competitor, but without access to the same functions as Apple's they're hamstrung. Watches have this problem even worse.
Say what you want about Microsoft at their zenith, you COULD compete with their browser, in fact, people did. You just can't with iOS. That's more important than some users having poor security. (And really, how are we going to worry about phone security when there's a system as stupid as passwordless social security numbers being the key to your financial life?)
The natural duopoly needs to be regulated such that it doesn't spill over into every tangential market.
I do not in fact see that. PCs work pretty damn well, security-wise, even with clueless users. I'll grant you it isn't as secure as phones, but it's by no means horrible.
I actually disagree with you that things are good, security-wise, today.. They are still pretty bad.
Back then was extremely bad.. Back then, Windows was never designed to be a networked operating system and was just full of security problems like you wouldn't believe.
the average person doesn't even understand the basic concept of what the average HN reader considers system administration, and we're wrong anyway eh
The difference with computing is that since it's "new" and sometimes it has bugs, they will blame the hardware/OS any chance they get.
When asked about it, he doesn't have too many files. What do you do in that case? Isn't he a moron both for storing so much porn and at the same time (somehow) believing a tech support person wouldn't find the root of the problem. It was in a "hidden" folder, so not only he is a moron for the first offense, but doubly so for thinking a competent person wouldn't find something so obvious.
So, I reiterate, most people are morons, and technology just reveals their ineptitude in plain sight, it's simple as that.
You are free to believe in your idealized version of the world, but it doesn't match my experience at all.
I actually think your example illustrates this: people use their computers for porn. There's nothing wrong with that. If it's so large that he has no space left, I mean that's a pretty actionable thing to tell him. He's not an idiot for not figuring it out himself. That he "hid" the folder from you–I mean, people hide things from professionals all the time. Nobody volunteers to their doctor that they wipe in the wrong direction and thus have chronic UTIs. It's your job to work around the reasonable things people do that make your work harder and bring them to "oh, that makes sense, thanks" perspective.
You are just of bad faith, pretending to be outraged about what I said even though it only describes the reality of the world. Your newfound religion is so bad that you find offensive something that doesn't even have any moral implication to it and is factual proven by so many statistics that it is not even worth arguing about.
If you what you mean is "not every computer user is a moron" you need to work on reading comprehension because that's not what I said. I stand by my original statement and you are somewhat proving me right.
There's probably something important and complicated in the world you have to interact with regularly that you don't understand very well. Based on this comment, I think it might be people.
Pretending otherwise is nonsensical, since the richest economies in the world depend on it and surely not everyone is at a genius level.
There are some things important and complicated that I don't understand very well but they are not about basic operation of relatively simple things. It's like saying operating a washing machine or using a knife is something special.
And I do understand people very well; in fact, much more than I wish, by necessity. Your average person is frustratingly basic to the point of being extremely annoying on top of boring. I just choose to not pretend and "be nice" anymore, because it just hides reality and doesn't help anyone. The fact that we have some people designing complex computers or sending people to the moon while others are barely able to cook a meal is largely a testament to that.
You might want to get rid of your ideologies if you believe what I said is controversial or wrong. Most people, by statistical definition, are idiots. Technology just reveals that fact very clearly, it's as simple as that.
(But also, this kind of thing is exactly why the analogy doesn't even make sense.)
People should be free to do stupid things, so long as they don't hurt others (the antibiotics example that another poster gave us a much stronger argument)
I suspect Apple can significantly cut down on abuse prevention measures just by making it harder to automatically send iMessage spam.
If any random Bluetooth smartwatch was allowed to send those, there's no telling how that capability could be abused, we all know how IoT vendors are with device security.
Couldn't agree more: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=apple+watc...
You do realize that you're implying that Apple is insecure by design? Because I can easily (locally) root my iPhone and get raw access to iMessage.
Not all corporations make better choices, however, which motivates a regulatory role. Thus is civilisation identified.
Isn't the choice to use an android, then?
It is the responsibility of the systems designer to make sure the system is secure, not the end user.
And if you require instructions on how to secure your system, then you have already failed. A properly designed system is secure with zero knowledge.
Remember, it takes work to learn anything, and the goal of a tool is to reduce work, not to increase it.
Throw away customization. Throw away configuration. Both of those are bad design principles.
Make it work by default.
- Multiple replies
- Edits
- Scheduled send
- Voice message
- Tapbacks
- Message history
- Message order is reliant on notification order
- Delays in the notification system could be different than the messaging system
- Opaque nature of message going from notification system -> messaging system, difficult if message is lost/not sent with no indication of why
cap in the true/lie sense also has roots there, but more in a superlative sense and not guns
It's a decades old word that used to mean trying to one up someone with tough talk, exaggerating, topping someone. That talk would be so high above the others, it would be the cap on top.
Now to have a good story, to have that cap, people could be... flexible with the truth, so eventually, over the years, to cap started to mean that you were telling a tall tale, a lie.
So a bit of speculation, but it’s possible that the word cap has inverted twice over the years, from a toy/fake bullet, to a real bullet, and now back to being a synonym for fake, which it originally was.
(n.) A falsehood, exaggeration, or lie. "Saying you climbed a V10 after a month? That’s cap."
(v.) To lie, exaggerate, or be deceitful. "He said he coded the whole app in a day, but we know he capping."
For a hardware project I looked briefly at the MFi terms and they just don't make any sense. This is why any good lightning cable was always more expensive (at least before you get some from China with contraband auth chips)
Lightning is a major cash crab from Apple and revealed their actual playbook. Microsoft passed as a very bad players in the 90's but Apple is even worse. The only people not accepting that are deranged fans.
Tech stack has the customers. You pay for access to customers.
Some USB-C cables aren't data compliant. They just send power. There's all kinds of foibles with USB-C that have taken years to work on and this just isn't clear to tech folks, let alone non-tech consumers.
The Lightning port has never done this to me, the device just charges and that's it. It transfers files and that's it.
What I'm saying is that Apple didn't have to take a cut from every item sold by 3rd parties who wanted to use their specs. They could even have sold the spec at a fair price but instead they went on a full rent-seeking strategy.
This is why, when there is chatter about Qualcomm/Apple feud on licensing, I laugh my ass off because this is exactly the same behavior they impose on their partners. Can dish it out but can't take it. My complaint is mostly about the hypocrisy of Apple's behavior.
But the real motivator was making as much money as possible, the fact that their specifications had some desirable qualities is nice but not very relevant (since you don't get a choice if you wanted to make an iThing accessory anyway). Their previous port (30-pin) had the same problem and it was rather terrible. I had the first iPod with FW400 and they could have very well gone with mini-USB when they switched to their 30-pin to make it compatible with most PC who mostly had USB 2 and rarely FireWire. I used mini-USB for plenty of things from external hard-drive to digital cameras passing by digital mini-disc players and it was a fine port.
Yet they chose to make their completely proprietary 30-pin port, to rent-seek as much as possible on the accessory market. When they switched to Lightning, the goal was exactly the same, trying to pretend it's because it was better is disingenuous and very ignorant of Apple's history and behavior.
Plenty of corporations do things like that but the difference is that with Apple there is an army of zealots eating the bullcrap and justifying their behavior in a fanatical way.
Except all the profits from selling all those cables, connectors, and converters.
The 3rd party manufacturers didn't make profit because of Apple but because of their customers choosing their products.
The way you try to reverse the situation and try to pretend Apple is entitled to a percentage of revenue from other companies making things to work with their products is pure insanity.
Do you think the brand of your car should get a cut of every compatible thing you buy to use with it? Should they get a cut on brake pad, tires, cables to their entertainment system, carpet of the right size for the particular car, etc. The list can be almost infinite.
Do you realize how absurd what you are trying to defend is?
Other options available to Apple instead of Lightning:
* stick with the iPod connector for longer
* switch to micro-USB
* never invent the iPod connector in favor of staying with Firewire or going to mini-USB and then switch to micro-USB or something else later anyway
None of these are better. I'm EXTREMELY glad they didn't switch to micro-USB. I had no shortage of mini-USB and then micro-USB devices and the micro-USB ports/cables are pretty much the worst I've ever dealt with.
If not for the lightning connector, we wouldn't have usb-c as we know it today.
Its also a stretch to claim apple doesn't like usb-c given how hard they've been pushing it on their laptops. In 2016, they started shipping laptops that only had usb-c ports - which worked around the chicken-and-egg problem we would have had otherwise. Dongle-gate was a real thing that annoyed a lot of people. But my desk is covered in usb-c peripherals - and that might not have happened if not for apple's "brave" choice.
Without that, USB might have died.
All in all, Lightning was a net benefit that overstayed its welcome by a few years. Even once USB-C was introduced a few years later, it took a few more years than that to become as pervasive as it did.
As noted in other comments, Apple was part of the USB working group, contributed to USB-C, and introduced USB-C/Thunderbolt-only laptops in 2016. There was backlash against this so they have since backtracked and reintroduced MagSafe and HDMI ports. Personally I would have preferred more USB-C/Thunderbolt ports.
So many people complaining about a really robust connector that solved real problems and has proven to be pretty reliable for 13 years. I'm no huge Apple fanboi, and I'm happy to have all their stuff use USB-C now, but the hate for Lightning is way inflated IMO.
if the worst thing is someone else's code then someone else's hardware
Because they did that.
Also relevant: 19 engineers from Apple worked on the USB-C connector and cable specification[1].
«None of the chargers fit snuggly into socket. The connectors are flimsy and get damaged easily. Just rolling up the charger and putting it in my pocket can cause the tip to break off»[0]
«While on the whole, I am satisfied with the switch to USB Micro, my only major gripe is the less obvious keying. Inserting the plug with good lighting is no problem (if you can see), but trying to plug in your cell phone after you've crawled into bed with the lights off can be a trial. As somebody who works with people with disabilities and medical conditions, I have heard from clients with compromised motor control, those with low vision, and those with distal neuropathies that they do experience a harder time plugging in their devices nowadays»[0]
[0] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/18552/why-wa...
Apple was also part of the working group that developed USB-C.
yeah ok
Yeah you're an exception.
Thankfully people like you don't get to decide what EU rules as best for people.
This cannot be your actual stance.
You know there is a lot more to the Internet than that one website, right?
There are ads in algorithm apps like YouTube, tiktok, Instagram, mobile games, streaming service "poor" subscriptions, etc. And there are paywalls. But the vast majority of interesting websites don't have ads anymore.
I am not an American. I just have a different opinion on some things then you. Ever tried some empathy?
Pragmatically speaking, I prefer YouTube Premium because I hate their inability to filter out scammy ads, and I still feel like supporting creators at least a bit. As a customer, its not always my call how much of my money goes to creators. Thats why I refuse to use Apple Music and/or Spotify. I spend my money on BandCamp, which I consider an appropriate compensation for other "sins" I might commit on the net.
We’re lucky our computers aren’t walled gardens because if Apple knew it would work this well with iOS, MacOS would be the same.
Well, yeah. That's why I want walled gardens to "have options" without enforcing that people must/must-not use those options.
I will die on the hill that the Lightning plug is superior to the USB-C plug. Lightning could some day have supported USB-3.2+ speeds, if they'd chosen to work further on it.
Still, I have never once transferred data to my iPhone over a USB cable. I have used an iPhone since the first generation. For me, it has only ever been a means to charge the phone and to connect it to CarPlay. With wireless CarPlay and MagSafe charging, they could remove the port and I wouldn't miss it all that much (except for fast charging).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/26/iphone-us...
Apple was already well under way on their USB-C transition. They literally shipped the first all-USB-C laptop in 2015. The iPad Pro switched to USB-C from Lightning in 2018. Every year since, fewer and fewer devices released with Lightning and more and more with USB-C.
If you need more evidence, literally just consider that Apple never bothered to invest further in Lightning. There were no further speed bumps. No updates in the USB protocol version supported. Even charging, USB-A to Lightning has been capped at a pitiful 12W.
The iPhone would undoubtably have been USB-C in a generation or two even without the EU’s involvement.
It is not just technically wrong to say “the iPhone doesn’t support a thing” when it the statement only applies to a fraction of the product line and actual user experience.
You're using an iPhone, buddy. If NSO Group gets a chip on their shoulder, they can install a persistent backdoor on your phone by sending you a text message. Your security is nonexistent unless you disable iMessage and JS in Safari, even then Uncle Sam has Five Eyes watching your every move for any traces of "terrorist" support.
I'm not worried about the programs I install on F-Droid. I'm worried about the competitive harm being forced onto the iPhone community by protecting Apple from righteous competition and forcing their services as a de-facto monopoly. I'm worried about the security consequences of iCloud being backdoored in soverign countries, and the users who don't have honestly secure options because of sycophants with a superiority complex.
But a random developer can't exfiltrate my data, which is the WAY WAY more common scenario that the previous poster was worried about.
I agree with them. The Apple App Store prevents a lot more malware than the ability to install ANY software. I like the Mac App Store as well, its a large library of software that is virtually guaranteed to be safe from infecting your computer with a virus.
Now, I know how to sideload onto my iPhone, I have homebrew on my MBP, but my brother/sister doesn't, my aunt can't, my uncle assumed his phone was facebook, and they are safer (from viruses) for it. Make installing viruses harder!
I spent decades as the de facto IT person in my family, and when iPhone and Android came around, family members started buying MacBooks, my load got lightened a LOT.
It's great that you know how to sideload, I'm not saying everyone has to know how. I'm arguing that the option should exist regardless of if you pay for a $99/year subscription fee. It should be a part of owning the hardware you paid for and purchasing the right to control it as the user.
Your security is non-existed until you've established a realistic threat model. And if it includes targeted surveillance by nation-state actors, you've got bigger OPSEC problems than just your phone.
Over the years, third party cheap ones were risky. May damage port or device.
Has a stupid chip in the connector so people can't easily replicate it like a USB cable.
It was the purest example of proprietary capture in an age where the "The correct universal port" has been around for decades. The massive irony is not missed on me as they used USB mouses and keyboards to engineer a step backwards.
There's things I like about Apple, but I could never bring myself to defend the lightning cable.
Thanks Apple, for switching connectors on your mobile devices once in 25 years and enforcing standards on 3p peripheral and cable manufacturers, until a government forced you to change making me throw all my cables away.
This is not to say every aspect of their walled garden is good, but I’m more than happy to accept those problems in light of the benefits I personally value.
This is all to say: it’s not much of an argument to point out that one of their selling points is an aspect of their ecosystem! I don’t think you’ll get through to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
The Apple ios app store is positively chock full of spyware. You can’t download apps without a care in the world. This is why Apple put a privacy label on the apps (which is still woefully inadequate; it is self-reported).
> surely any "spyware" on the app store is going to include a ton of permissions alerts when it does anything?
Not really. Push notifications is enough. I can send you a push notification and get loads of details from your phone, including cross-app fingerprinting. Iirc Apple allows ~3 silent push notifications per hour so they can be completely hidden.
https://gizmodo.com/iphone-apps-can-harvest-data-from-notifi...
But really, your search is as good as mine. The entire digital economy is based on personal data collected from your devices, and yes, that includes the iPhone. How is this news? What’s your definition of spyware?
That's rich knowing that most of the money Apple gets from the Appstore is made from predatory casino-like games
You can have the walled garden, and also not restrict people's freedom — on Android I'm sure the number of people that use any other store than the play store or even side load apps are vanishingly small.
To even be able to do it you have to enable it deep in the settings. And even then, if a new app tries to install an apk you have to manually approve that app's ability to do that before reinitiating the entire process.
That's to say, the default experience is very wall gardened, and I do feel somewhat more protected when downloading something from the play store than not, and the vast majority of people will never leave the Google walled garden. But there exists a way to go around that walled garden when you need to, and that doesn't subtract from that walled garden mode in any way IMO.
I prefer the gatekeeper, in this case.
They did move to USB-C, but the lightning connector was actually a great product, far superior in usability to the Micro-USB, Mini-USB, and whatever other nonsense standards that existed. When Apple wanted to move to USB-C people complained about them "changing standards all the time". There really isn't a move that pleases everyone and even when they do the "right" thing people still complain lol.
> App Store too, for all the good it does everyone in the EU
The Apple App Store is pretty great. There's a large, vocal minority of folks that want changes there, but they also aren't the ones that have to deal with grandma and grandpa doing crazy stuff. If you want another App Store just by an Android phone since that's a feature they offer. Kind of like if I wanted a phone with a larger megapixel camera or something I'd buy something else.
> If you want another App Store just by an Android phone since that's a feature they offer.
Sorry, this is bullshit. Alternative sources for installing software will always exist, even current iPhone users have to accept Cydia as an option. You don't ever have to leave the Apple App Store, but your preference has no right to enforce an artificial limitation onto other users. The Mac as a product would not exist without third-party software distribution, the iPhone is undeniably stifled by Apple's stance on the matter.
USB-C development started in 2012 (I was not there!), but from wiki, the ever helpful source of truth: "The design for the USB-C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum. The Type-C Specification 1.0 was published by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) on August 11, 2014.[1] In July 2016, it was adopted by the IEC as "IEC 62680-1-3".[3]"
I not sure of the logic here, but Lightning solved a problem way before USB-C existed and I'm sure, led to support of USB-C standards such as reversible connectors etc...
So... just buy an Android? This is not an artificial limitation, it's an express preference that the vast majority of iOS users have voted for.
> The Mac as a product would not exist without third-party software distribution
The Mac is a completely different product servicing a completely different set of needs. Nobody is asking for the iPhone to be able to run Node or Vim so they can do their work, they want to scroll Instagram and reply to their iMessage
But they're not, so I'm continue to assume they know what they're doing. Again, go buy an Android if that's what you want
Almost every Apple lighting cable in my household frayed...
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Repair+a+Frayed+Apple+Li...
>Apple charging cables, such as the Lightning to USB Cable, are easily prone to fraying. Most commonly, this fraying occurs from device usage while charging.
The App Store was an absolute revolution for mobile app developers. It is hard to overstate how much of an improvement it was over the status quo. People are complaining about Apple taking a 30% cut; it used to be that the operators took a 70% cut. Not for hosting an app store, no, just for sending the reverse-billing SMS message with the install link. You had to host it yourself, there was no store so you had to advertise your app to make it discoverable. You had to arrange (and pay for) a shortcode and SMS provider for every single country you wanted to sell in. You had to write and host code to handle the incoming message on the shortcode and respond with a RB-SMS.
Next to that, the SDK’s were absolute dogshit, phone manufacturers didn’t give a shit about apps and the phones themselves were riddled with bugs (with the notable exception of SonyEricsson, their J2ME environment was excellent). Symbian was a PITA to develop for, BlackBerry was actively developer-hostile (unless you happened to be a Fortune-500 company). Samsung phones were an absolute disaster, every single phone model had a unique set of bugs you had to find workarounds for.
So in comes Apple, they charge only 30% and for that you get a nice SDK, an App Store that distributes your app, makes it discoverable and handles payments worldwide with zero extra effort. We were thrilled when they announced it, and rightfully so.
Google then followed suit with the Play Store, effectively matching what Apple was doing.
So yeah, Apple deserves some thanks for what they did with the App Store.
Not in the PC world, back when the App Store was released I was paying 4% to my e-commerce provider.
I couldn’t care less about Apple’s case, but the fact that this is being touted as the EU’s biggest achievement in decades says a lot about why Europeans don’t like the EU.
I do not want 3rd party hardware/software vendors to have unrestricted access to the messaging app on my phone that is the only option my bank and PayPal and a bunch of other critical services use for 2FA.
Especially not when the software they want to run is JavaScript, with all it's well known npm dependancy nightmares, _and_ from a founder and team that openly admit iPhones are a second class citizen in their development planning and resources.
And especially especially not when the founders have previously shown their colors when they rugpulled all their customers and effectively bricked all the devices they'd sold.
Even with the limited iMessage/SMS access they have now, I wonder how long it'll be before we see a supply chain attack against Pebble exploiting some 11th level deep npm dependancy on something dumb like leftpad.js, that exfiltrates SMS 2FA codes and first anybody knows about it will be when a bunch of CryptoBros start complaining about their exchange accounts being emptied...
As a Pebble user for a long time, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about here. If you're talking about Fitbit halting services, I can't exactly blame the founder of Pebble for that. Can I blame him for the poor business decisions that led to needing to sell to Fitbit? I guess, but I'm not a business person nor a CEO and have no idea what transpired to lead up to that. But I'm reasonably sure it wasn't malice as you seem to imply.
Apple should be able to lock down their ecosystem as a default -- plenty of people will be happy to use that default experience.
But Apple should absolutely be prohibited from not allowing users the choice of unlocking their own device, for additional functionality, if they choose.
It's also glaringly obvious that many of the "freedoms" Apple affords its users (freedom from iMessage spam!) help drive its revenue...
Also, I'm pretty sure you can just set up a click farm to spam from iPhone right now, so there's also that.
I do think that the state of AppleScript automation is the result of trying to break the mechanisms that were being used to generate SPAM. Could you agree that automation capable interfaces do increase the chances of bad actors taking advantage? Right now, with a lack of information, I don't know how I could make an iMessage automation interface "safe by design".
I do see a direct path from the mandated AT&I breakup and interoperability rules to SIP / VOIP services and the resulting levels of Phone spam and caller-id fraud. This has cost a lot of people, life changing amounts of money and much wasted effort and time.
Un-nuanced tech laws or mandates have a terrible track record for having bad side effects. Those effects often never get addressed, which makes me wonder a bit about the original motivation of why the laws came to be in the first place.
I also see a narrative that company X will automatically refuse to work with company Y or community Z and are de-facto always acting in bad faith. Even if company X was never approached or asked - yeah, companies do tend to isolate themselves making direct communication very, very difficult. I cannot deny that there are some company X's that do seem to behave very poorly. A counter example, in my opinion, is the recent Bambu labs API issue. As a tinkerer, a few minutes of looking at how people had built interactions with their printers strongly suggested to me that Bambu introducing an actual API endpoint was a really, really sane thing for them to do. (I did comment this way). Only time will tell if Bambu was actually trying to improve things or was acting in bad faith.
Yea I mean this isnt really hard to understand. 99.9% of users would rather have no iMessage spam and also not be able to publish messages from their 3rd party watch. This works in Apple's favor revenue wise because people value having clean and familiar experiences, and dont feel like they are leaving anything behind
Yes, I don't want apps accessing my messages surreptitiously. Points there.
However, what's wrong with allowing another app to post messages to my messages?
If I don't want it, let me turn them off. Maybe, as a UI expert company, it's easy "block app from sending me messages" when I get a message. Seems like something that should be fairly transparent to the (potentially misbehaving) app.
I use a Garmin, and Android, and I use it for messages all the time, it's great. I can't imagine not taking them. It's easy for me to block stuff I don't want, could it be easier, maybe...
But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.
As a general aside, it seems when I hear about Apple products anymore, they are locked down, unintuitive, and generally just unpleasant. I even tried an Apple device again recently...eugh.
Apple is only "nice" for a certain, narrow segment of the population.
> If I don't want it, let me turn them off.
Can you it off for anyone sending you messages too?
That's the issue; you not wanting to use it does not mean that spammers won't use it.
That's the problem. You can't have nice things if some people can use it to abuse the system; and there are a lot of people who will.
> But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.
This ignores the reality which is that doing it in a way that gives a nice user experience without an enormously painful security issue is really non trivial.
Maybe it's OK to have the choice?
...
If you love your android phone, don't care about iOS, don't like iphones.... why do you care? I mean, why does it upset android users when they see this sort of thing for people using iphones?
It mystifies me. If you love you phone, and you think it's better, then use it.
Nothing lost right?
EDIT: example script to run from a mac terminal:
osascript -e 'tell application "Messages" to send "$message" to buddy "+12345678" of (1st service whose service type = iMessage)'Because it affects my life, and can be fatal even, thats why.
That's exactly what spammers would use to send spam.
They might just as well beat you up and take your wallet.
I don't get this argument that Apple making it difficult for their paying customers to send and receive messages is somehow a good thing. It's also not like Apple is helpless, they managed to shut down Beeper.
If they are right next to you, there are many criminal activities more lucrative than sending an imessage...
...Which wouldn’t be possible anyway, because devices using ble to communicate typically require to be paired together by their owner.
If you 'opt-out' then it does not fix the problem of spammers having easier access to imessage.
I'll say that again: If you personally, either a) opt out, or b) dont have a watch at all, it makes no difference to spammers. They are not sending spam using your watch.
People are concerned about the result of allowing anyone to send messages in general.
...
The real argument to be made here is, as other people have pointed out, this isn't technically impossible; I mean, apple watch can do it right?
So there is a solution; but Apple isn't allowing other people to use it.
THAT is the issue here.
Pretending there is 'no issue' is flat out wrong. If that what you think, you're wrong and you haven't understood the problem.
The issue is why only Apple is, according to Apple, technically capable of implementing the controls required to do it in a secure manner.
That's a fair question to ask, and there really isn't a strong answer for it.
Certainly, making it easy for anyone to send messages would not be a solution. That would be stupid. That's why they haven't done that.
...but, you have to ask, is there really no certification process that would do the job? Really? None? Only Apple engineers are smart enough and diligent enough to do it without screwing it up? Hmmmmmmmmmm...
Imagine a world where they allow Pebble to go through certification process for it to get jailbroken half a year down the road opening the gateway to iMessage for all the spammers in the world. What then? Should Apple now play whac-a-moll with the spammers forever, or block the access to all Pebble watches creating another scandal? And what if this happens to next 10 different watch makers down the road?
They own Apple Watch and if it gets jailbroken its their mess to deal with, but if they open it to the world then they have zero control over it.
Apple doesn't get to be a major player in the market without playing fair.
If they further block it by default but allow Pebble users to bypass the block with some very scary warning message then My God there wouldn't be a scandal at all. People who know and accept the risks can use the thing they paid money for as they please then.
How can you not realize that you're being abused?
It would be one thing to acknowledge Apple's doing something bad here but still decide to use their products because you like their hardware. That would be a cost/benefit trade-off. But actually thanking them for the abuse itself? There's really, legitimately no better way that I can think of to characterize the situation than as Stockholm syndrome.
This example might be apples-and-oranges when it comes to the protecting Apple protecting iMessage, but they often rob the user of the choice that other manufacturers offer.
For example: Hotspot. Android hotspot can be perma-on. iPhone hotspot cannot. It will always switch itself off after some time of non-use. When I asked an Apple employee about this (This was not his dept), his understanding was that it was for not-clogging up Wifi at-scale, and for users who forget to turn it off. But what about the users who want it on always, who pay their cell provider for the biggest pacakge? My computer goes to sleep, and the hotspot turns off and I have to go manually switching it back on because "Apple knows better". I want those choices.
We're going to have to do insane things to get them working. Due to how ANCS works, we're considering developing an ANCS "doohicky" (either a BLE pop-socket, smart-ring, or mag-safe wallet) which gets notifications via BLE & relays them back to the iPhone, to then send to the glasses. That would just get us the raw notifications, though, and wouldn't solve the issue of replying. The other option is a Beeper-like system in the cloud to bypass iOS entirely, but that also has downsides.
It's a total mess, especially compared to Android where you can just easily listen for notifications & send them to the glasses without much pushback from the system.
I understand the benefit of an open ecosystem. Use your web browser, or a third-party app. The tech adopted by the masses needs guard rails and secure defaults.
I hated Apple’s ecosystem growing up, now I think it’s necessary. We can’t trust developers, or companies, that have competing interests to do the right thing.
Funny, because the overwhelming majority of people and systems exist outside of it and are doing just fine. This sounds like the sentiment of a crab in a bucket who's feeling quite safe from the sides since it was caught.
Do you think “the masses” should not use web browsers or third party apps?
I appreciate you sharing your experience, I just wish you could have done it without this bit.
Edit: or maybe I'm wrong. I do know one person who bought a phone because it sucked, because they didn't want to spend as much time glued to the device. It was an Android with a tiny tiny screen, though, because iOS would not be allowed to run on hardware of your choosing due to Apple's restrictions... Either way, I guess there is a market of people who do want to inflict pain upon themselves, but this really does seem like exceedingly niche argument to me. Saying that the restrictions are the reason why their demographic buys their device is just buying into Apple's lies that fund their bottom line
Is it? My iPhone replicates messages to my mac from where a process can extract that data, it can capture the screen etc. I can use a mac today to set up a relay that would then send those messages to a smart watch if one would do that.
That said, I don’t see why Apple can’t provide toolkit/certification that will make it safe to communicate over Bluetooth. They already have it in-place for Apple Watch.
I also worked on Android Wear's iOS app for working with iPhones.
The major problem I see now with these excuses, that I'd like to claim wasn't an issue when I was making them circa 2015-2017, is they're cargo cult (a la Apple likes making things that just work) or boogeymen (if they did anything different, a bluetooth connection would be used, unencrypted, sending all your data into the ether).
The watch has been out for 10 years.
Software is software. Where there's a will, there's a way.
It's very, very, very, hard to believe there's 0 way for Apple to ensure an encrypted connection.
Put another way, avoiding the global observations: If it's impossible, why allow watches to be paired at all?
Well, I wouldn't say that the standards for (software) security were anywhere near as high as they are now. It makes sense that our requirements for things change.
> It's very, very, very, hard to believe there's 0 way for Apple to ensure an encrypted connection.
Sure there are ways, but without regulation I struggle to see why should/would Apple ever bother. Nor do I think that a forced way would be held to the same standards as the rest.
> Put another way, avoiding the global observations: If it's impossible, why allow watches to be paired at all?
Because they can't do much, if anything at all?
But the Apple Watch can, and a lot of the same arguments apply to it as much as any third party watch.
(happy to detail more, like everyone, I love talking about myself :P but figured I'd start with the TL;DR, i.e. the App Store + subsequent boom happened at such a time that made it seems reasonable, years later, to dropout, and having 0 responsibility outside restaurant shifts gave me a fulcrum)
Encryption is optional, there are four security levels for BLE, multiple pairing methods, privacy extensions, there are so many ways to mess things up.
It seems like they're refusing unconditionally and claiming security instead of actually requiring security.
It's a whole another system outside of Apple's control and some mutually agreed upon Bluetooth LE elliptic key does nothing to protect it in its entirety. It still leaves cryptographic mistakes, side-channels and all other vulnerabilities.
Like, what does https:// or transport encryption in general really say about the website's security to you? Not much besides transport, does it?
Now we want to expose more than notification contents over Bluetooth (LE)? Are we sure? It has to be carefully designed.
Really Apple allows HTTPS connections but the same implementation concerns apply there. The web server could publish it's private and session keys to a "status" page and leak enough to make decryption trivial
I think it'd be more honest if they say "we don't want to give users options" (for better or worse) instead of claiming it's security
If it rejects messages with improper encryption, the watch won't get programmed to send them.
Apple can't (trivially) detect if there's a fatal flaw in the way the other side derives their secrets for example. They can't know if the device doesn't have a backdoor characteristic/API that gives access to the key material. They can't know if that proprietary stack can't be exploited in n+1 ways because it has been written by an underpaid intern.
But if Apple gave access to everything over BLE they would be expected to. At least by most Apple users. Be it a good or a bad thing. It's a rather enormous access vector, if they'd provide feature parity(-ish) with Watch.
Much more sensible would be to make such features available to apps (and by proxy, wearables) with entitlements. But even then it can be just as insecure, just by proxy.
https://www.theverge.com/news/632108/apple-ios-passwords-app...
>The lack of encryption meant an attacker on the same Wi-Fi network as you, like at an airport or coffee shop, could redirect your browser to a look-a-like phishing site to steal your login credentials.
Step 2: Have the iPhone pop up saying "do you want <Apple watch> to be able to send messages?" and don't just assume "yes"
Both steps would improve security, even if they harm Apple's profits.
Helps me know I’m alive and not a cog.
A set of four castors. Like the bottom of a shopping trolley. Yours for $699
Tell your friends! "Each castor costs one hundred and seventy five dollars. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to run this computer... for twelve seconds. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!" (https://youtu.be/jHgZh4GV9G0?t=19)
If they go to a different store, and buy a non-Apple product, that's insecure. What they need to do is return it and go to the Apple store and buy an Apple product. That's secure. Give the money to Apple.
Yes, I do trust the company that developed Secure Enclave more than I trust random BLE firmware in a $49 Alibaba watch.
More importantly -- my great-uncle can trust the same thing, because Apple has spent decades building that trust. Consumers generally should not trust random hardware. Apple is not random hardware.
If you don't want a future where you have to buy Apple milk to put in your Apple fridge (because the fridge stops refrigerating if you try putting any other brand of milk in it, citing "security issues") -- or worse, you can't get your Amazon fridge in your Apple house because it cites nebulous reasons and refuses to open the door - get out of the reality distortion field and accept that it is in people's interests for one item to work correctly with another, and to call venal vendors on their "oh but it wouldn't work or it wouldn't be secure" bullshit.
- requires immense development effort and expansion of security surface area
- STILL offloads trust to Samsung, Google, etc
The hyperbole here is a little hysterical. Apple doesn’t totally lock out third parties. In the smartwatch example, it is a very specific set of features which involved passing data (which users expect to be e2e encrypted!) back to Apple. That’s an extremely hostile security environment! Product tradeoffs would absolutely have to be made in order to support arbitrary third parties! I don’t think it’s fair to just demand that Apple make their product worse without at least exploring the balance.
Anywhere Apple wouldn't trust a third party is a place it should not trust itself either.
It doesn't even have to be arbitrary third parties, it can be Apple's chosen third parties. But they'll choose nobody, because they love lock-in too much, and they'll tell the rubes that it can't be done or it's too hard. That's just bullshit, and they know it. They do it to lock out competitors, so they alone can juice their existing users.
The only thing that can open up Apple is regulation -- and as we've seen in with Apple's spiteful attempts at compliance with EU DMA rulings, it makes up arbitrary criteria calculated to maximally lock out and frustrate business rivals. It's like it's trying to come up with a compliance solution that the EU might accept but would result in as few competitors as possible able to actually use it, ideally zero.
This quite literally could not be further from the truth, and to suggest that it is true reflects such a comprehensive misunderstanding of both the fundamental nature of computer security and the practical realities of the world in which we live that it's not really possible to continue the conversation productively
I don't trust any of those companies the way I trust Apple.
Really, how is Apple protecting you from clicking Allow on a webbrowser if it asks permissions for WebCam and Microphone? I am asking since I do not have a Mac and really want to know how well are Apple users protected compared to Linxu users from web and microphone on browsers.
Currently we seem stuck in a positive feedback loop where tech becomes more and more paternalistic which creates more and more tech illiterate users which is used to justify even more tech paternalism.
It is convenient that this tech paternalism also happens to align with the profit incentive: Easy to trap people in closed ecosystems this way.
You can put a button in your app that says "Tapping this will drain your bank account and give you cancer" but if it also enables functionality that the user wants, they will tap it.
Most users are not able to root their device due to the number of steps needed and will give up on an app that needs root access. Make it so that you have to do something other than just clicking a warning message to enable using your Pebble then.
Warning messages can be made idiot proof with some thought.
Imo, if this were to happen, it should happen by allowing devices like the pebble watch to sign into an Apple account and acquire permissions through that process rather than nagging on my phone on pairing.
Anyone can already screenshot iMessages and move them out of the "security boundary"... which btw doesn't exist much, as if you have any Mac connected to your iCloud account then those messages are being synced to an SQLite DB any process running under your user can access.
You will need to grant that app explicit Full Disk Access permissions in order for it to access that folder.
Most of which don’t allow users to waive rights based on a prompt.
So Apple would still have liability anyways for grandma getting scammed, regardless of how expertly worded the prompts are.
Which entails extra customer service costs, handling lawsuits, etc… that someone has to pay for.
There are easily hundreds of cases involving some alleged or actual liability that various groups claim Apple to have in relation to this or that feature/product/service/etc.
I just want to learn about a single such lawsuit, anywhere, that's actually succeeded. I can't find any.
This doesn’t even make sense in relation to my prior comments… as unsuccessful cases also cost Apple, and various other parties, real money. So it seems entirely irrelevant to the point.
Doesn't the boundary get broken asking messages be read to me into a BT audio device?
People’s phones got compromised by NSO sending images to them via whatsapp that used an exploit in one of the image libraries to run a malware payload. The security boundary isn’t about whether you can see your own messages, it’s whether bad people can root your phone by getting untrusted code to run. That’s a very different proposition if iMessage is a single codebase that they fully own end to end versus it has a plugin ecosystem. Having such a plugin system widens the security boundary by adding a much larger codebase that would require trust.
Personally, I think that it's really just a convenient third party lockout excuse, but the argument isn't quite as bad as it may seem at first glance.
Has this happened on iOS via WhatsApp?
I know Apple's had a view problems with this happening with iMessage, but always been unsure whether third party app sandbox does a good job of containing this?
That's exactly it.
You've always been able to use Applescript to send iMessages on a Mac.
This is just about sending.
My point is that it is good that they focus on making their own products work well together, it provides better value than being wide open and trying to work super well with everything. Windows tries to work well with any peripheral, and its a bad experience.
I hope to read this blog post in an antitrust case from the DOJ one day.
Turns out that (fairly applied) antitrust doesn't care how much it money it costs an incumbent company to begin allowing competitors
- Is this stifling competition?
- Is that harming consumers?
Per the contents of the blog post, yes this is absolutely stifling competition given that Pebble won't be able to provide the same features/experience as the Apple watch. This directly hurts Pebble which prevents them from competing.
As for how much that hurts consumers, the answer is not a clear "yes". The iOS market share is ~60% in the US and I don't think the majority of those folks wear or are interested in wearing any kind of watch, smart or not.
However, if Apple keeps this up they're absolutely going to go the way of Ma Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T_(1982) and the eventual Telecommunication Act of 1996 which forced incumbent providers to interconnect with folks who would ostensibly be their competition.
This is incredibly vaguely defined here. Saying that apple stifles smart watch competition by not actively working to make iphone more interoperable with non apple smart watches is ridiculous. You'd never say that a car company is stiffing competition by making it hard to install a new engine, or mount after market add-ons.
People have such a confusing hate-boner for apple. Just buy an android phone.
Any smart watch vendor should be able to call up Apple and make their own watch which is equally privileged to Apple's. And the requirements to the vendor to do so needs to be not so onerous as to be an effective ban.
You can. There are dozens (hundreds?) of phones you can buy that aren’t an iPhone. It’s been well known for nearly 20 years at this point that iPhones are more closed than the competition (of which, again, there is a lot). They are successful because of this, not in spite of it, contrary to internet belief.
However, apple devices have been just more reliable for me and retain better resale.
This is important because Apple could one day decide that caring about you no longer serves its interests. This has already happened with user experience, where even the Settings app now has built-in ads pushing Apple's services. It has also happened with security, where Apple uses its robust security infrastructure to prioritize media company DRM over users' interests.
> Apple uses its robust security infrastructure to prioritize media company DRM over users' interests
You mean they follow the law so that they don't get sued into the ground?
I expect corporations to be honest and sincere, and present the full argument for why they're doing what they're doing. I don't know if "people" in general expect this, but if they don't, then their expectations are too low.
I am quite sure there is no US law which says Apple must build out support for media company DRM. Linux doesn't support it and hasn't been declared illegal.
Mate, have I got bad news for you regarding literally the entirety of human commerce.
Android shows that you don't have to.
Truthfully there isn't much you can say to people in that mindset.
Closing your mind to the possibility that Apple is throughly rotton is probably soothing, but the possibility remains that we are right, you are wrong, and each time the conclusion is the same, and correct
Big Tech monopolies sniffle innovation and hord resources
Intellectual property laws is not some natural law of the universe. It only exists because the people (i.e. the general public) want it to exist. They could do away with it on a whim, but choose not to. Which isn't irrational as it may first seem. Their own careers probably rely on the status quo, and their retirement savings no doubt rest on companies like Apple being worth a fortune, so there is a lot of incentive to not rock the boat.
We have not tried, and it is not due to "we the people" it is due to "them our overlords"
Funny enough, the state of intellectual property tends to be much more relaxed where overlords are actually found (e.g. China). It's easy when one guy can make things so. Far less easy when you have millions upon millions of people afraid that any change will impact them personally.
That like saying "people want reliable cars" conveniently aligns with Toyota's interest and implying there's something wrong happening.
Apple deliberately makes this non-obvious, but it is disclosed here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
> Messages in iCloud is end-to-end encrypted when iCloud Backup is disabled. When iCloud Backup is enabled, your backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key to help you recover your data. If you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future Messages in iCloud. This key is end-to-end encrypted between your devices and isnʼt stored by Apple
And is the backup end-to-end encrypted? No, not by default, as disclosed on the same page. It is encrypted "In transit & on server" with keys stored by Apple, which means Apple can decrypt it. And they do, as mentioned earlier, for purposes other than "to help you recover your data". The non-default Advanced Data Protection feature is required to get end-to-end encryption of the backup.
Note that Google's equivalent Android backup feature has been end-to-end encrypted by default for many, many years. Plus, alternative backup solutions are allowed to exist on Android.
PebbleOS is asking for the ability to respond to messages with reply or user interactions. This is not a security breach. And it won't leak from encryption anymore than it is leaking now.
Fanboyism and blinded by brand loyalty.
Bluetooth devices on iOS that display notifications already are getting more information than normal by simply even reading all notifications. Normal apps on iOS can’t do that, they have no reason to. This api was added because smart watches kinda need that functionality to be useful. I think it’s still locked behind a “this device will see all your stuff” permissions box.
I do think they should add in more iMessage/sms/replying capabilities to smart watches though. I think they are extremely hesitant to make it even easier to automate iMessages. iMessage spam is definitely increasing, but it’s NOT as prevalent as normal sms spam for instance. The barriers are much higher, and Apple can basically blacklist devices/appleIDs that send out too much spam, partly because they’ve kept iMessage so locked down.
Apple doesn't need outside ecosystem builders here; what is the business reason for them to add process expense, risk, and possibly incorporate timelines from other vendors into their supply chain?
As the many comments in this thread indicate, lots of people seem to feel Apple "owes it" to the world to open up. Happily, there is a (more) open ecosystem available with Android for people who value that. I don't think the tradeoffs Apple makes are perfect for me as a consumer, but I prefer them to the Android tradeoffs, and I can always switch when I like.
Is this really true? I receive a lot of iMessage (not SMS) spam on iOS devices too. In fact for me I see more spam purely on iMessage than SMS. It wasn’t like that in the past, but my point is even closed systems can be abused.
I can understand if media poses concerns, but inbound and output text consisting entirely of UTF-8 characters?
Really? I'm not in the Apple ecosystem to confirm but it looks trivial to me, and you can always fall back to keyboard/mouse input type of automation.
https://medium.com/@jameskabbes/sending-imessages-with-pytho...
Regardless of the reason, there is substantially (many orders of magnitude) less spam on Apple’s networks, at least for me, when compared to SMS/RCS/telephony.
I showed that iMessage is trivial to automate and since you both claim that the amount of spam on the platform is very low, we can conclude that ease of automation isn't an important factor when it comes to iMessage spam.
Unless someone decides to move the goalposts we should therefore be in full agreement that Pebble being allowed to integrate with iMessage wouldn't have any appreciable effect on the amount of spam in the network.
In contrast you need to hook into Apple APIs / scripting / sqlite databases on trusted apple hardware in order to automate iMessage.
You imagine "Pebble" as one company and say "how hard can it be to turn this on?" As I said in the original comment, it's not that it's hard, it's that it can only be turned on for everyone and that will create a security issue that WILL have a substantial impact on the ecosystem. I didn't say, but believe it to be true that the alternative -- a vendor security assessment program covering software, hardware, architecture and cloud security is not worth Apple's time or money to do. I don't think they have any business reason to do so.
Relying on clients to stop spam would break just about every security design principle so that could never be the primary spam filtering mechanism. Indeed, if you search Github, you'll find evidence of this [3].
Allowing a third party gadget to talk to an iPhone to send messages isn't going to open the floodgates to spam any more than they already are, for what I think are pretty obvious reasons. Anyone who could exploit those integrations can already exploit current APIs with exactly the same limitations.
> In contrast you need to hook into Apple APIs / scripting / sqlite databases on trusted apple hardware in order to automate iMessage.
And that wouldn't change, you would still need to pair a real iPhone to your fake "spammer edition" Pebble, and then your Apple ID and iPhone would quickly get banned. Presumably just like it does now if you abuse [1][2], otherwise that's just bad design.
It's frankly ridiculous that this is even being suggested on a "hacker" forum with nothing but wishy-washy qualifiers about how easy or "hard" it would be.
[2] https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/765844/UV5RnfwM#0d8e0...
This is worlds away from twilio which will provide you with orders of magnitude more throughout and deliver it with SLAs.
And unless you imagine Apple will hardware certify pebbles, how does Apple determine the BLE endpoint is actually a Pebble? If you have a way to ensure that without a key registry and TEE controlled by Apple, congratulations — Turing award is incoming.
Upshot: You’re a hacker on a hacker forum - cool. Sending one to ten programmatic iMessages in a hack is easy for you. But you may not have all the experience necessary to opine on how that compares to accessing an enterprise grade hyperscale sms messaging solution: building those is challenging, the companies that do a good job are worth billions of dollars and they exist solely to allow bulk SMS. To think blue bubbles somehow dunks on the idea that these economies of scale don’t matter isn’t correct in my opinion.
We're discussing whether authorizing third party smart watches to send messages via your iPhone would make it easy for spammers to send iMessage spam. Not just easy, but easier than it is right now using Bluebubbles' approach. Both require physical hardware, an Apple ID, and both are subject to the same server-side spam protection.
That's a very specific claim which you made and you haven't provided any supporting evidence for it, nor a coherent explanation.
> Sending one to ten programmatic iMessages in a hack is easy for you. But you may not have all the experience necessary to opine on how that compares to accessing an enterprise grade hyperscale sms messaging solution
I think if you dig deeper into this train of thought you'll get to the point that I'm making. Having relatively restricted API access to send a handful of iMessages from a 3rd party watch via your own physical iPhone will not enable mass-spam like you claimed it would.
Scaling an iMessage spam operation would be hard not because the client side is completely locked down (which it can never be, see the concept of "analog hole" [1]), but because server-side rate limits and user spam reports are the primary mechanism that keeps spam under control.
[1] This could be an ESP32 pretending to be a keyboard/mouse device that automatically navigates through iMessage UI on an iPhone to send messages just like a user would.
You’re saying there a logical gap between opening up a radio based endpoint on an iPhone and allowing more spam in the system, or at least there’s no reason to think that it would be a different order of magnitude than blue bubbles.
I want badly to agree with you, at least enough to stop bike shedding about it. So let me try: Some possible implementations of opening up sms probably don’t add easier volume and programmatic sms options for developers. If you’re happy with that then we’re in agreement.
I think the main ‘easiest path’ implementation would increase spam though - turning on an iOS app’s ability to directly programmatically interact with messages on device and send and receive them over a radio would allow for simpler automates message parsing, creation and distribution; Apple is clearly not interested in this being a feature available to App Store developers. And Apple would then be in the position of having to do some sort of bound to fail static analysis to prove the messages aren’t being sent out to an IP endpoint at some point, or including requests from some endpoint. And this is both because of the extension of the hardware security circle and because of the necessary feature of having a human out of the loop in iMessage actions.
I propose that this would increase spam on iMessage in that case. It would allow an app maker to use sms without human in the loop, essentially, extending notification to sms without humans opting in.
Either way I think that’s probably what I need as imagining, admittedly a bit vaguely in my initial reference. Appreciate the back and forth.
It's not unique to Apple. And we should take security seriously. To people who are technically literate and think they can navigate security risks it's not a big deal but people's entire lives are frequently turned upside down by scams and security loopholes
An average user can't dive into the bluetooth driver code and figure out where in the 4000 page spec something deviates and is now a security issue. So we have to assume the worst.
Go look at the CVE's for iMessage, plurality of RCE's on apple devices in the last decade is Apple's iMessage implementation, and it's their own protocol! And almost all of the rest are apple's implementation of the open web standards!
Even with that (large) Apple security group, iMessage is difficult to lock down properly, as you note. However, I think that the cost of 0 day subscriptions for iOS vs Android tell a pretty good story: iOS zero day subscriptions sold to intelligence agencies/governments cost roughly $1mm / seat (phone compromised). Android -- $10k.
There are many many decisions along the way that end up with that raw 100x additional cost for iOS security breaches -- value Apple delivers to its customers when they purchase iOS products.
You cannot pick and choose from the outside and know which of your preferred opening-up implementations would impact that cost. My argument is that opening this up is one of likely hundreds of possible decisions that would contribute to lowering that cost of exploit.
SMS/MMS Full Chain Zero Click: from 7 to 9 M USD
Android Zero Click Full Chain: 5 M USD
iOS Zero Click Full Chain: from 5 to 7 M USD
iOS (RCE + SBX): 3,5 M USD
Chrome (RCE + LPE): from 2 to 3 M USDD
Safari (RCE + LPE): from 2,5 to 3,5 M USD
NSO leaked pricing has not historically differentiated Android or iPhone. I’m not sure where I heard those numbers, but thanks for the correction.
Tiny tiny nit - paying the same for an exploit doesn’t mean you’ll charge the same, but in this case it looks like the value and price structures are what you describe. Sorry!
Slightly less small nit - securing hardware, os and cloud inside some security perimeter model is a lot harder than securing, say, the bitcoin client. So point taken - and, it’s hard at scale, not easy.
This is the line of reasoning that has resulted in me being unable to sign up with a shocking amount of house rental companies, thanks to Play Integrity on the android side of the coin. Does it improve security for me? I would argue it doesn't, as it would force me to use unpatched versions of Android. If it's not serving the user, who is it for?
apple already does blue for in network and green for out of network
red can just be “this message was yolo’d, be aware”
They could implement something that works for other smartwatch vendors, they haven't because they don't want to.
I don't think that's the main reason. iMessage is available on macOS, so by definition isn't that tightly locked down. Anyone can automate/script the desktop app to try and fire off as many messages as you like.
But of course that won't really work because Apple has security algorithms in the network that detect unusual behaviour. Did that user/device suddenly start to fire off 1000 messages to users they've never contacted before? Activity flagged, user blocked.
There are also functions in the iMessage app itself to block and report unwanted/inappropriate/spam messages. So even low-volume spammers will not get away with it for long.
Besides, in the UK, SMS spam is almost non-existent in my experience. Unlike in some other countries I've visited where it's a huge problem. That's not because the ecosystem is any different - it's because there's strict rules that are actively enforced (see TPS: www.tpsonline.org.uk).
This is not my experience. Perhaps 3-5 years ago was the peak of SMS spam, but I still regularly (1/week minimum) get one of the various "package delivery" | "tax refund" | "diesel emissions" scam/spam texts.
Well, Apple will sure make sure the hard task is impossible. That's where the fault lies. It can be a bit tiring hearing security used as a smokescreen to maintain a monopolistic structure over uhh... green bubbles?
Hardware should be able to be interoperable. Apple chooses not to, it's in their best interest because they claim "security" and "privacy" for it's users. Security theater for the masses.
Would like to add my personal experience: I get way more spam iMessages coming from random Apple IDs than I do spam SMSes.
For the spam example, nothing prevents apple from offering a ble api with auth that ensures that only devices manually paired by the user access it.
As for automating spam... when we’re discussing ble, we’re talking about a device a few meters away from your phone. What are spammers going to do, send a jogger right behind you that spams you after somehow hacking apple’s auth system?!
That's the root of the problem right there. As a hardware vendor, how do you achieve a "trusted" status in their ecosystem?
If only Apple devices can do the Appley things, then it really isn't an ecosystem (at least not what I have in mind when applying that term).
As a hardware vendor, you'd achieve "trusted" status by having a decades-long track record of not doing these things.
Couldn't messages created externally to imessage be tagged as such and then just rate limited?
Perhaps SMS spam is a US thing?
My phone works, I'm glad it blocks others from integrating because I need it to always just work. That's why I still have an iPhone over all the often paper superior alternatives.
I do not believe average smartwatch users understand what they’d be doing if they got this. I do not believe vendors integrating with such a thing can do it safely, or even that all vendors integrating are good actors.
One reason iMessage is less of a total cesspit than SMS is that the ecosystem is closed, and makes automation difficult. It used to be impossible nearly, and in that era we had almost no iMessage spam. Now it’s difficult, and we have moderate iMessage spam. But adding hooks to make this automation easy, and worse, leave the trust environment as a feature is just wrong.