[Spivak]

That's not really the issue at play here, it's at what point does forbidding 3rd party clients to your service become anticompetitive. Right now the answer is basically "never" but I think the technological landscape would be healthier if the bar was significantly lower.

[giantrobot]

Why won't you let my SSH into your systems and do what I want? Blocking access to them is anti-competitive.

[Spivak]

That's not the same and you know it.

The real situation is that you've granted me SSH access to your server but block anything than the OpenSSH client and I would like to use Go's crypto/ssh.

And it's one thing when they're two OSS implementations but when those alternative clients are your competitors it starts looking anticompetitive.

[giantrobot]

You giving me SSH access to your machine gives me the ability to use your infrastructure and resources for my purposes. Make the example instead you giving me access to an internal API.

You're focusing on the mechanism of my example rather than the effect. Apple hasn't given Beeper (or me or you) free access to their infrastructure. Shutting down Beeper using an exploit is well within their rights.

[i5-2520M]

Do you have the same opinion about yt-dlp and ad free patches of common android apps?

[giantrobot]

Oh shit, a wild nuance appears. The yt-dlp (and all alternative YouTube clients) are accessing open endpoints into YouTube. While YouTube can choose to block these things the clients are not accessing some non-public API. Having been following various yt-dl forks for the past few years, YouTube blocking them is annoying but within their rights as the hosts of the service. If yt-dlp was charging money or whining to regulators about YouTube's actions around their own service I'd feel differently towards them.

Apple does not offer any sort of public access to iMessage, Beeper has to not just reverse engineer the iMessage protocol but also spoof their client identity. Beeper can keep up their cat and mouse game but whining to regulators and pretending they are doing something noble is ridiculous. They're trying to grab headlines to get either bought out or investment dollars.

If they want to reverse engineer iMessage they can take their licks and keep up with Apple's efforts to lock them out.

[i5-2520M]

> The yt-dlp (and all alternative YouTube clients) are accessing open endpoints into YouTube

Kind of, but I can't completely agree to this. There is circumvention work that went into these projects. Youtube has public, but "protected" endpoints, not exactly just open video streams.

> If yt-dlp was charging money or whining to regulators about YouTube's actions around their own service I'd feel differently towards them.

So your main issue is not Beeper Mini, but the surrounding situation and "activism" they are attempting to do? Based on your SSH comment it seemed like your main issue was unauthorized access.

> Beeper has to not just reverse engineer the iMessage protocol but also spoof their client identity.

If this is the main issue, then I think Aurora Store or microG are better exemples of currently existing similar apps. Revanced (and other unofficial yt clients that offer sign-in) I think should also qualify for this, and reddit clients with hacked in private API keys.