Beeper Mini users find Macs banned from iMessage network

My take on this whole thing is that this is basically an elaborate plan to eventually use this in court against Apple to prove its anti-competitive practices.<p>If not for court, then at the least this is a press strategy orchestrated by someone with an interest in opening up the iMessage monopoly.<p>I’m sure the founder realized early on that the prospects of this becoming a valuable company on its own merits were slim - the vulnerability to Apple shutting them down was obvious. Which leads me to conclude he saw value to be created in just basically messing with Apple and forcing them to ban him.

Went from &quot;Here&#x27;s to the crazy ones&quot; to &quot;we&#x27;ll punish our customers for not jumping how we say&quot; in 30 years.

Yeah this isn’t surprising, I’ve had this happen to hackintoshes over the years. Apple has always had the ability to ban serials from iMessage afaict, and it also (seemed) to be some automated process.<p>It was frankly pretty risky to tell people to use their real machines for this.

Everyone thinks it’s personal when anti-abuse automation detects token reuse and blocks the hardware ID that issued it. It’s not. It’s just an HSM-secured communications network, same as Xbox consoles use for their player messaging network, complete with the anti-abuse automation that can lead to hardware bans.<p>It’ll be interesting to see how hard Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony fight against any attempt to open up iMessage. They each depend critically on the right to block devices by device identifier using automation, and if a ruling is found against Apple in this matter, <i>all</i> hardware identifier enforcement is now voidable, which will destroy some of the value of their paid subscription services and worsen the safety of those services.

Calling this “retaliation” is rather dramatic. There are a number of communication platforms that don’t allow 3rd party apps to access their networks and will ban people who attempt it.

I don&#x27;t understand the obsession with imessage, what is so special about it?

This further undermines the &quot;are they supposed to let Android users use iMessage for free?&quot; defense, given that these users already bought a Mac. And now those paying customers eat hardware bans for using their own hardware in a way Apple doesn&#x27;t like.

Never would have happened if instead users relied on Briar&#x2F;Jami&#x2F;Session&#x2F;Tox on a Google Pixel running GrapheneOS.<p>This is an important lesson, take it to heart!

The other day I found myself logged out of iMessage for Mac and had to reboot to get it to work; wonder if it was related to this. (Never used Beeper)

I bet if you sign out of iCloud then reinstall the Mac and sign in again it&#x27;ll work again. This is probably the machine signing key being shot down for using it with an unauthorised client rather than the mac being completely banned itself.

I got similar issues even with Beeper proper.