Can Consumers Break Free of the Tech Industry's Hold on Their Messaging History? (msn.com) 54
The Washington Post reports on "a relatively young app called Beeper that pulls all your chats into one place." This is significant, the Post argues, because "we're better off if we have the freedom to pick up our digital lives and move on. Tech companies should feel terrified that you'll walk if they disappoint you..."
If different people send you messages in Apple's Messages (a.k.a., iMessage), WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Slack, you don't have to check multiple apps to read and reply. Maybe the best promise of Beeper is that you can ditch your iPhone or Samsung phone for another company's device and keep your text messages...
Eric Migicovsky, Beeper's co-founder, told me that if you're pulling Apple Messages into Beeper, you need a Mac computer to upload a digital file. All chat apps have different limits on how much history you can access in the app.
There's also a wait list of about 170,000 people for Beeper. (Add yourself to the list here.) The app is free, but Beeper says it will start charging for a version with extra features.
To put this all in context, the Post's reporter remembers the hassle of using a cable to transfer a long history of iPhone messages to a new Google Pixel phone, complaining that Apple makes it more difficult than other companies to switch to a different kind of system. "Many of you are happy to live in Apple's world. Great! But if you want the option to leave at some point, try to limit your use of Apple apps when possible..."
They look ahead to next year, when the EU "will require large tech companies to make their products compatible with those of competitors" — though it's not clear how much change that will bring. In the meantime, the existence of a small company like Beeper "gives me hope that we don't have to rely on the kindness of technology giants to make it easier to move to a different phone or computer system... You deserve the option of a no-hassle tech divorce at a moment's notice."
Eric Migicovsky, Beeper's co-founder, told me that if you're pulling Apple Messages into Beeper, you need a Mac computer to upload a digital file. All chat apps have different limits on how much history you can access in the app.
There's also a wait list of about 170,000 people for Beeper. (Add yourself to the list here.) The app is free, but Beeper says it will start charging for a version with extra features.
To put this all in context, the Post's reporter remembers the hassle of using a cable to transfer a long history of iPhone messages to a new Google Pixel phone, complaining that Apple makes it more difficult than other companies to switch to a different kind of system. "Many of you are happy to live in Apple's world. Great! But if you want the option to leave at some point, try to limit your use of Apple apps when possible..."
They look ahead to next year, when the EU "will require large tech companies to make their products compatible with those of competitors" — though it's not clear how much change that will bring. In the meantime, the existence of a small company like Beeper "gives me hope that we don't have to rely on the kindness of technology giants to make it easier to move to a different phone or computer system... You deserve the option of a no-hassle tech divorce at a moment's notice."
Sounds shady. (Score:3)
So just as all the messaging apps are fighting against weakening security, along comes this app which we have to hand over control to all our messaging apps to use?
Righto.
Re:Sounds shady. (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if they have perfect security, what is their privacy policy? If I don't pay them for my use of their app, who does pay them, and for what?
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Even if they have perfect security,
You really didn't need to go any further than that...
But yeah - here we have yet another group of leeches attempting to "helpfully" inject themselves right into the middle our personal stuff.
You're using it wrong (Score:3)
Sorry to come back with this old adage, but that's just it. Text messages are by definition a transient way of communicating. They're useful to convey a message, but they are by no means a sensible way of storing messages. Twice so because it's virtually impossible to organize them sensibly in most of these media.
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Text messages are by definition a transient way of communicating.
Yes and I routinely clear out my text messages, and phone log, after conversations are done, so my histories are always empty. Don't really understand keeping that stuff around.
On a related note, I see reports of people getting their phones seized by the FBI -- recently, many lawyers for a certain former President :-) -- so LEO can review all their messages and wonder what they keep on those phones. Mine would be, basically, empty. Perhaps lawyers are required to retain things, anyone know? I know t
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I'm retired now, and don't have to worry about that kind of thing. But if I were working at a job where having my phone/text/chat records seized was a possibility, I'd clean them out too, but not completely because that just tells the cops that you have something to hide. I'd clean them out selectively, nuking anything that mig
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I clear texts and call logs weekly, and emails after 90 days.
Why keep the clutter?
Work was a different matter, but even there I deleted routine emails monthly and archived them onto a DVD annually. I think once in 15 years I had to dig up an email more than a year old.
It's not how the young kids use it (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Apple already undermines it by the method I've mentioned in my earlier post. The only way to get a phone number associated with an Apple ID is by having that number active on an iPhone. It's basically the opposite problem that people were having back in the day when they'd switch to an Android phone and Apple's iMessage servers took their dear sweet time unregistering their phone number. In this case though, it's that all the iPhones in the wild have no idea that your number is capable of receiving iMess
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Basically, if you're a Mac and/or iDevice user and you don't own an iPhone, you'll have a sub-par iMessage experience since you'll only be able to receive iMessages sent to the e-mail address associated with your Apple ID. That's Apple's gentle nudge to convince you that you're missing out by not being fully immersed in their ecosystem.
No idea how true that is. (In the sense of: what actually the problem is)
However my phone number never was registered - as far as I remember.
Most people sending me iMessages
It's like Pidgin Chat (Score:5, Insightful)
Why have all AlM, ICQ, and MSN installed when you can just use Pidgin?
https://www.pidgin.im/ [pidgin.im]
Very revolutionary stuff going on here.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Why have all AlM, ICQ, and MSN installed when you can just use Pidgin?
https://www.pidgin.im/ [pidgin.im]
Very revolutionary stuff going on here.
AIM? ICQ? Did you hop out of a portal from 20 years ago?
I suspect you are being facetious, though, in which case I will at least acknowledge I appreciate the joke! Trillian did that once upon a time as well.
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Did Zaphod know about it?
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Indeed, that was the namesake back in the year 2000. Sadly I feel like those books are going out of style.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Whoosh
Hah, I guess so, though I'm still not sure what the joke is! Perhaps this is too subtle for me. The fact that people have been futilely trying to make the "one messaging app" since the beginning of messaging seems more sad than funny to me.
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In the old days, you didn't have a centralized notifications center. On modern smartphone OSes, it really doesn't matter whether a message comes in through iMessage, SMS, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Telegram, Signal, Whatsapp, etc. You tap on the notification and you're immediately taken to the appropriate app where you can respond. There also doesn't seem to be any performance penalty to having messaging platforms installed on a modern smartphone, either. We've come a long way from the days of where h
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We've come a long way from the days of where having AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! all hogging up system resources was a significant issue.
Depends on who you ask. Some people would love to delete those apps but cannot due to the manufacturer mandating the app's permanent inclusion on their storage. It's also kind of annoying to have an app you don't use on your device, so people wind up using them because they can't remove them. After all they are "just there", "just work", and "What do you mean you don't have X? Everyone has X. Just use it." It's Internet Explorer bundling all over again.
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The problem is that some people use several platforms same time.
And get a message on messenger A, see it in the notification screen, and an hour later open the phone. Messenger B is in front, and they hit the "other person" and answer.
So now you have a conversation with the same person spread over two different messengers.
The rest of your comment is obviously true.
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Because:
a) they do not know about Pidgin
b) they do not know how to set it up to integrate something like ICQ
I'm just trying to find a way (Score:2)
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Bluetooth keyboard?
Thanks for the reminder. (Score:2)
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Pretty much every device that supports iMessage is perfectly capable of working with a standard bluetooth keyboard...
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Break Free (Score:2)
"Can Consumers Break Free of the Tech Industry's Hold on Their Messaging History?"
It just sounds like, Can consumers give another tech company access to all their messages?
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"Can Consumers Break Free of the Tech Industry's Hold on Their Messaging History?"
It just sounds like, Can consumers give another tech company access to all their messages?
On the up side, it would mean people only have to beat you with one wrench [xkcd.com] to get access to everything, rather than several wrenches to get access to multiple accounts.
Don't expect teenage dating apps to be more (Score:5, Insightful)
Email is, by far, the best communications modality yet devised. I have never heard a remotely coherent argument against it but am inundated with endless marketing invective and paid articles decrying it and extolling the virtues of yet another short lived, idiotic alternative, inevitably proprietary and VC funded still in the burning OPM stage.
It is a transparently disingenuous hype machine desperately intent to lock up commercial ownership of private communications.
Don't breathe that crappy free air, try our UltraChat brand premium air! All the hip kids have switched, they all hate free air and get so much more done on UltraChat! If you were actually cool you'd already be breathing UltraChat Air, boomer. And your first 10,000 breaths are free*!!!
* $8/month after the first 10k up to 5 Gbreaths, contact your corporate sales executive to continue breathing after 5G.
Don't wait for your contact to "expire"
No seriously, you'll die. Pay up.
What makes a good text coms system:
Global interoperability
portability
adherence to open standards
Reliability
store & forward
Local storage and background sync
fast, indexed search
save draft and resume later
structured formatting
Organizational mechanisms like folders
centralized directory
What has all that and more? email. always has, always will. Chat is for children trying to hook up and well-suited to that level of complexity, but nothing more. I don't get how any company or team can be so flabbergastingly idiotic as to willingly cede control of their core intelligence to strategically misaligned scammers trying to lock it up for profit.
If you want a chat interface with the features of an email backend, try delta-chat. I'm not entirely happy with their PGP protocol, but there is some slow progress: https://support.delta.chat/t/a... [delta.chat]
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If you want a chat interface with the features of an email backend, try delta-chat.
Hey, that looks pretty cool.
Re:Don't expect teenage dating apps to be more (Score:4, Funny)
With email I can't
- create distinct named contextual groups
- create public and private named contextual groups
- edit a sent message
- time shred a message (e.g. quick password share)
- delete a message I changed my mind or sent to the wrong recipient
- move from typewritten conversation into a call or video meeting or share applications
Slack and its ilk are much better for those use cases.
I'm not saying email is all bad, but its utility has its limits. I dread the late 90s-2000s when email was the catch all for that stuff along with automated messages and the never ending thread where the indentation is reduced to a single column.
At work it's good for automated messages well, actually now Slack is better for that too. At this point, my personal email replaces physical email for the monthly bills. I'm trying to think what it's used for at my workplace except for automated messages and some general announcements. It's also a good general purpose last resort communication as modern collaborative apps still seem less stable than email.
Don't get me started on a Replyocalypse. I'm on a non profit board where my late middle age makes me the youngster. JFC, the emails to a group asking for dinner preferences etc. Reply to all - I'll have the salmon.
It's also better than group texting (God I wish people would stop doing that) but still other apps are better.
E-mails... (Score:2)
... I love e-mails, but many people hate and refuse to use them. :(
"Can consumer break free (Score:2, Troll)
of the tech industry's stranglehold on everything?"
There. FTFY.
On and yeah:
No. Not anymore. It's too late.
Who? (Score:3)
Maybe the best promise of Beeper is that you can ditch your iPhone or Samsung phone for another company's device and keep your text messages
Okay let's be honest here. Q2 '22 US Market share was: Apple: 48%, Samsung: 30%, and Motorola: 9%. With pretty much the rest being ~1% or less. No one is going to another phone maker because they're afraid they'll lose their text messages. And the reason? Did every one forget this? [slashdot.org] Does anyone think that a person who cares more about blue versus green bubbles actually has the rational thinking required to understand "portable messages"? This pitch is so far over these peoples collective head that it puts anything NASA has on the books to shame. There's likely a percent give or take of the population that would see any remote value in this and even then most already know the hoops to jump through to export [lifehacker.com] messages OR just don't give a fuck about text messages.
There's also a wait list of about 170,000 people for Beeper
Oh looks like all of them have already signed up.
The app is free, but Beeper says it will start charging for a version with extra features
Oh well then it's already doomed. You might get people with a 99 cent one time export everything charge but the number of folks wanting to pay a subscription for a function that comes default free on their phone is super small. Swapping between apps to read all your messages is absolutely not something that bugs enough people to keep something like this viable, especially if they're going the tech bro way of spending $100M/year on 30k subscribers/year.
complaining that Apple makes it more difficult than other companies to switch to a different kind of system
This is some post capitalism bullshit. When you don't enforce antitrust laws so much that you just have to keep creating bullshit over-hyped solutions to get around the bullshit your government won't fix.
Many of you are happy to live in Apple's world. Great! But if you want the option to leave at some point, try to limit your use of Apple apps when possible
That moment when they know they aren't going to have a ton of customers.
They look ahead to next year, when the EU "will require large tech companies to make their products compatible with those of competitors"
Just to circle back on the US antitrust. Why the hell is the EU taking the lead on this BS? Jeebus, this country has abdicated actually governing. Why are we even still paying those fuckers in DC?
"gives me hope that we don't have to rely on the kindness of technology giants to make it easier to move to a different phone or computer system... You deserve the option of a no-hassle tech divorce at a moment's notice."
I mean that's some false hope but cool. If they aren't a blackhole of money they'll just be bought out and shelved. Because you know. . .we don't stop shit like that happening, it's just a rubber stamp of approval from the FTC.
Not to be pedantic but... (Score:5, Insightful)
a relatively young app called Beeper that pulls all your chats into one place
Isn't Beeper technical part of the tech industry?
Also, from Beeper's website:
Our Business Model Is Simple
We are building the best chat app on Earth. No ads. No siphoning and selling personal data. No BS.
Call me a cynic, but in 2023, when a company proposes to unify all my messaging histories and promises not to misuse my data, somehow they sound even sketchier than if they didn't promise anything.
Cuz I'll tell you one thing: they can promise all they want, I'm not giving a single, unknown for-profit permission to access all my data. Hell no!
What's new is the money behind it (Score:4, Informative)
Beeper was started by a wealthy tech guy (previously of Pebble and Ycombinator), so that's why you're hearing about it.
There has already is a free, secure method of using iMessage on Android: Airmessage [airmessage.org] The catch is, just like Beeper's requirement, you need a machine running macOS. Because you're self-hosting a server with Airmessage, your home ISP also has to provide a routable public IP address, which isn't necessarily as common as it used to be (carrier grade NAT is a thing these days).
I actually ran this setup for my partner for several years when he preferred using Samsung phones. It does technically work, but (and there's always a but) your phone number isn't associated with your Apple ID since you're not using an iPhone. This means that when someone with an iPhone tries texting to your number rather than the e-mail address associated with your Apple ID, their iPhone will default to sending the message as SMS. I'd imagine Beeper hasn't solved this problem either, because the only way to tell Apple's iMessage servers that a phone number is capable of using iMessage is by having that number active on an iPhone. The end result is you have to tell your iPhone-owning friends/family members to use your e-mail address as the contact for texting, rather than your phone number.
Realistically, the only way we're ever going to see true interoperability is if Apple is forced to open up iMessage.
This has been tried before - and failed (Score:2)
You can trust me (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer, of course, is, whoever holds the encryption keys can read/see the data. So that is a bit of a dodge, I know, but it's true. I hold the keys.
I train my customers to use Veracrypt to do their own encryption, and if they can get their head around it, then they are satisfied. Also I recommend using XMPP based tools like "conversations app" with a Jabber backend, because the data is encrypted at all stages and states, for instance messages at rest on the server are encrypted, and it is open and extensible like email... so *I* cannot read your messages. I'm super happy about that scenario, because, if Law enforcement comes knocking, my hands are lemony fresh.
Beeper? Speaking of Switzerland, it reminds me of Proton Mail. Lots of people drank the kool-aid on that one. I'm not saying for sure one way or the other, but tinfoil hat types (like myself, but not ME, in this case) have suggested that it is a CIA honeypot. I don't know or care because I have my own private encrypted infrastructure, but the same answer applies: if you don't hold the keys someone else CAN read your data. Is "Beeper" REALLY and TRULY your new best friend?
Third OS? (Score:1)
"the best promise of Beeper is that you can ditch your iPhone or Samsung phone"
Why the hell would I want to get rid of my iPhone? Did a third mobile OS recently become available?
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It only applies if you want to get rid of garbage.
Trillian II: Electric Bugaloo (Score:2)
With screen real estate at a premium on 1024x768 resolution monitors, Trillian came to the rescue, uniting all your message apps into one client.
Then came texting.
So here we are again.
Beeper's privacy page is 404 (Score:2)
Possible! But Unlikely! (Score:2)
- Hotel California - (Score:2)
"complaining that Apple makes it more difficult than other companies to switch to a different kind of system."
Locking users in is is a somewhat universal corporate scam used by software makers, hardware makers of all sorts, communication systems, etc. But Apple is truly a master of the concept and certainly not limited to iMessage.
Feel free to upload your personal music files & photos to your friendly Mac apps, but understand that those files are gone forever. Want to edit your photos in a different app
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If you look in your hard drive for your music files you will find each one buried in layers of folders with names invented by the Apple software.
Nope.
The folders are:
Artist / Album title / song title
Always been like that.
A bit more complicated if it is a "various artists"/album ...
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If you look in your hard drive for your music files you will find each one buried in layers of folders with names invented by the Apple software. Nope.
The folders are: Artist / Album title / song title
Always been like that.
OP is correct if referring to the classic (meaning the 2000s) iPod filesystem layout: https://www.engadget.com/2005-10-21-terminal-tips-the-ipods-file-structure.html [engadget.com]
You would end up with Fnn folders and inside would be NNNN.(mp3|m4a|m4p) files after import. For instance, "(artist) - (album) - (track name).mp3" would end up as "Music/F18/SKJH.mp3" on the iPod. Good luck if you ever have to restore from the iPod_control folder...
iTunes for Mac/Windows during that timeframe was also known to screw up the fold
SMS (Score:2)
1st Red flag:Why is there a waitlist for an app ? (Score:2)