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I love open source and open protocols as much as anyone on HN, but honestly, secretly, I love the tied-down nature of iMessage because that keeps it (mostly) fr

I love open source and open protocols as much as anyone on HN, but honestly, secretly, I love the tied-down nature of iMessage because that keeps it (mostly) free from spam and abuse. If you want something more open, that exists too, which is great. It doesn't make sense to complain that iMessage isn't what you want it to be. Choice means that open and closed solutions exist in the market.

BeefySwain 10y ago
Choice means interoperability, not picking between walled gardens.
- eridius 10y ago
  Choice can mean both things.
- benliong78 10y ago
  Choice means companies can choose to be walled gardens, and open source aficionado can choose to implement things with openness in mind.
- api 10y ago
  How do you open something without spam and abuse? This is a massive unsolved problem.
  - dave2000 10y ago
    With signed content. Assuming you have a side channel for a one time joining process (email, SMS, real life etc) where you get a single use token/password etc you swap public keys and sign/encrypt all messages using it.
    - api 10y ago
      Too hard to use. Poor UX. Something like chat has to work instantly or its broken.
- hoorayimhelping 10y ago
  >Choice means interoperability "This word that doesn't mean this other word means this other word." What?
- sjwright 10y ago
  Choice means choice, not interoperability. Choice means I get to choose a walled garden or an open protocol.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Except in quite a lot of cases - like communication tools or social media platforms - you didn't choose anything. Your friends did, as an aggregate - as individuals they didn't chose anything either. Somehow people recognize that illusion of choice when talking about Facebook, but fail to recognize it here? Weird.
    - bendiksolheim 10y ago
      Facebook is quite different from this case. If you friends use Facebook to communicate, you need to as well. There is, as far as I know, no alternative. But if your friends use iMessage to communicate, you can easily communicate with them through SMS. Just turn off iMessage, and Apple will recognize this and fallback to SMS. You are not forced to use iMessage just because your friends does.
      - nmcfarl 10y ago
        You wish Apple would recognize this. But in fact my sister did this, and filled out their web form and did everything else they suggest. And Apple still does not recognize it. (On the inbound side. ) She can text me, but when I or anybody else On an iPhone try to text her it goes to iMessage and she never receives it. Yes this is "just a bug", but it also seriously promotes lock-in. It's a very strategic bug, and if she hadn't bought a new phone she would probably be back on iMessage. iMessage is not always a choice, sometimes it's for life whether you wanted it to be or not.
parennoob 10y ago
> It doesn't make sense to complain that iMessage isn't what you want it to be. Why not? I don't know the specifics of this case, but if you are a user as well as developer that is going to release apps on the App Store and give x% of your revenue to Apple, it might make a lot of sense for Apple to listen carefully when you complain that iMessage is horrible and a pain to script around. You really love iMessage because it is free from spam and abuse, not because it is tied-down. It is Apple's job to make it the former and avoid the latter.
- sjwright 10y ago
  > Why not? Because alternatives exist that satisfy your needs. > You really love iMessage because it is free from spam and abuse, not because it is tied-down. It is free from spam and abuse because it is tied-down. This isn't a controversial statement; it's one of the famously difficult problems in computer networks. Nobody has solved it.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Because alternatives exist that satisfy your needs. This argument makes sense only in applications that can be substituted for one another. With IMs, like with social networks, you'd have to replace not just the app, but also your friends. Since you are in a way being forced to use that particular communications app, it makes sense to ask it to complain about it getting worse.
  - nilved 10y ago
    For one, other commenters in this thread (including the #1) post about receiving spam on iMessage. For two, you can't say that you receive less spam on iMessage for any particular reason, or that that reason can't apply to other messaging apps.
dzhiurgis 10y ago
Absence of spam is nice, but I can't stop to think how well you could improve customer support. You can essentially eliminate apps and web interfaces.
nv-vn 10y ago
I don't know, I think you can have an open platform and keep spam low. I have yet to encounter any spam on Telegram for the past 8 or so months I've been using it. I think that might partly be a result of the openness of the platform -- since they provide an official API for bots, nobody is going to go to great lengths to reimplement that functionality through an unofficial API (especially for positive reasons... most Skype spam bots likely rely on some well-intended library somebody wrote for legitimate purposes). And since they're able to apply rate-limiting to the bots and let users report them, it makes it much easier to control those bots (as they're not even "real users" and have many more limitations on what they're able to do). I think that because of that, people with a legitimate reason to use bots are the only ones who actually put effort into making bots, which caused the apparent lack of spam bots.
- cstejerean 10y ago
  Spam is probably low because it's not yet a platform that spammers are interested in. That may very well change. From what I can tell most of the big networks have found that the only way to cut down on spam is to be aggressive abou securing the protocol.
  - q3k 10y ago
    It's not security. It's obfuscation. If you can use a client program to send messages, you can implement your own client code - if you put in enough effort.
- duskwuff 10y ago
  As far as I can tell, Telegram keeps spam at bay through: 1. Requiring a unique phone number for signup, and heavily restricting accounts which appear to have used a VOIP phone number for signup (including Google Voice numbers). Restricted accounts can't initiate conversations, so they can't really send spam. 2. Allowing users to report spammers that get past #1, and limiting the accounts of users that get reported. For details, see: https://telegram.org/faq_spam https://telegram.org/faq_spam
  - 10y ago
kriro 10y ago
I think that's mostly a function of handling identification of the sending party. iMessage tied to an AppleID can still be controlled pretty well when it comes to spam even if it would use a completely open protocol and was open sourced. Similarly if you'd only accept cryptographically signed mail by default the spam problem would go away as a bye product.
Tepix 10y ago
Yes it does. The alternatives will not be preinstalled and thus not have many of your friends using them.
naasking 10y ago
> I love the tied-down nature of iMessage because that keeps it (mostly) free from spam and abuse. Security problems aren't solved through closed protocols, and open protocols don't have to have security problems.
- sjwright 10y ago
  I didn't say anything about security.
  - naasking 10y ago
    All abuse problems are security problems. Abuse is by definition a misuse of authority.
    - sjwright 10y ago
      What authority is being abused in email?
      - naasking 10y ago
        The authority to send to your mailbox is ambient, meaning anyone can send to it at anytime, and ambient authority is trivially abused. Abuse can only be prevented by doling out least authority, not ambient authority. In this case, at the very least a mailbox address would be a cryptographically unguessable identifier. Ideally, each person to whom you are introduced would get their own unguessable mailbox address that acts as a proxy for your real mailbox, and you can delete that proxy anytime you wish to stop receiving e-mail from that person (and anyone with whom they shared your address). This completely eliminates the viability of selling your personal information to advertisers and spammers. Obviously this process has to be simple and semi-automatic, preferably transparent, or people won't be able to use it (like the web of trust), but the idea is sound, and based on capability security. People already do something like this manually with subaddressing, and it seems the general concept I presented above has an official name as "disposable e-mail addresses" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_email_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_email_address
hobarrera 10y ago
> I love open source and open protocols as much as anyone on HN, but honestly, secretly, I love the tied-down nature of iMessage because that keeps it (mostly) free from spam and abuse. Spam on IM? I've honestly only seen this on skype. Is this actually an issue on other networks/countries?
- emdd 10y ago
  I've heard it is in China.
  - tluyben2 10y ago
    It definitely is on Wechat but I am not really bothered by it: I have the people I need in a list and the rest I just ignore. It does not really interrupt but then again there might be people getting 1000s of these spam contacts per month and that would be painful...
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  It definitely is on Yahoo! Messenger these days too.

BeefySwain 10y ago

Choice means interoperability, not picking between walled gardens.

eridius 10y ago
Choice can mean both things.
benliong78 10y ago
Choice means companies can choose to be walled gardens, and open source aficionado can choose to implement things with openness in mind.
api 10y ago
How do you open something without spam and abuse? This is a massive unsolved problem.
- dave2000 10y ago
  With signed content. Assuming you have a side channel for a one time joining process (email, SMS, real life etc) where you get a single use token/password etc you swap public keys and sign/encrypt all messages using it.
  - api 10y ago
    Too hard to use. Poor UX. Something like chat has to work instantly or its broken.
hoorayimhelping 10y ago
>Choice means interoperability "This word that doesn't mean this other word means this other word." What?
sjwright 10y ago
Choice means choice, not interoperability. Choice means I get to choose a walled garden or an open protocol.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Except in quite a lot of cases - like communication tools or social media platforms - you didn't choose anything. Your friends did, as an aggregate - as individuals they didn't chose anything either. Somehow people recognize that illusion of choice when talking about Facebook, but fail to recognize it here? Weird.
  - bendiksolheim 10y ago
    Facebook is quite different from this case. If you friends use Facebook to communicate, you need to as well. There is, as far as I know, no alternative. But if your friends use iMessage to communicate, you can easily communicate with them through SMS. Just turn off iMessage, and Apple will recognize this and fallback to SMS. You are not forced to use iMessage just because your friends does.
    - nmcfarl 10y ago
      You wish Apple would recognize this. But in fact my sister did this, and filled out their web form and did everything else they suggest. And Apple still does not recognize it. (On the inbound side. ) She can text me, but when I or anybody else On an iPhone try to text her it goes to iMessage and she never receives it. Yes this is "just a bug", but it also seriously promotes lock-in. It's a very strategic bug, and if she hadn't bought a new phone she would probably be back on iMessage. iMessage is not always a choice, sometimes it's for life whether you wanted it to be or not.

parennoob 10y ago

> It doesn't make sense to complain that iMessage isn't what you want it to be. Why not? I don't know the specifics of this case, but if you are a user as well as developer that is going to release apps on the App Store and give x% of your revenue to Apple, it might make a lot of sense for Apple to listen carefully when you complain that iMessage is horrible and a pain to script around. You really love iMessage because it is free from spam and abuse, not because it is tied-down. It is Apple's job to make it the former and avoid the latter.

sjwright 10y ago
> Why not? Because alternatives exist that satisfy your needs. > You really love iMessage because it is free from spam and abuse, not because it is tied-down. It is free from spam and abuse because it is tied-down. This isn't a controversial statement; it's one of the famously difficult problems in computer networks. Nobody has solved it.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Because alternatives exist that satisfy your needs. This argument makes sense only in applications that can be substituted for one another. With IMs, like with social networks, you'd have to replace not just the app, but also your friends. Since you are in a way being forced to use that particular communications app, it makes sense to ask it to complain about it getting worse.
- nilved 10y ago
  For one, other commenters in this thread (including the #1) post about receiving spam on iMessage. For two, you can't say that you receive less spam on iMessage for any particular reason, or that that reason can't apply to other messaging apps.

dzhiurgis 10y ago

Absence of spam is nice, but I can't stop to think how well you could improve customer support. You can essentially eliminate apps and web interfaces.

nv-vn 10y ago

I don't know, I think you can have an open platform and keep spam low. I have yet to encounter any spam on Telegram for the past 8 or so months I've been using it. I think that might partly be a result of the openness of the platform -- since they provide an official API for bots, nobody is going to go to great lengths to reimplement that functionality through an unofficial API (especially for positive reasons... most Skype spam bots likely rely on some well-intended library somebody wrote for legitimate purposes). And since they're able to apply rate-limiting to the bots and let users report them, it makes it much easier to control those bots (as they're not even "real users" and have many more limitations on what they're able to do). I think that because of that, people with a legitimate reason to use bots are the only ones who actually put effort into making bots, which caused the apparent lack of spam bots.

cstejerean 10y ago
Spam is probably low because it's not yet a platform that spammers are interested in. That may very well change. From what I can tell most of the big networks have found that the only way to cut down on spam is to be aggressive abou securing the protocol.
- q3k 10y ago
  It's not security. It's obfuscation. If you can use a client program to send messages, you can implement your own client code - if you put in enough effort.
duskwuff 10y ago
As far as I can tell, Telegram keeps spam at bay through: 1. Requiring a unique phone number for signup, and heavily restricting accounts which appear to have used a VOIP phone number for signup (including Google Voice numbers). Restricted accounts can't initiate conversations, so they can't really send spam. 2. Allowing users to report spammers that get past #1, and limiting the accounts of users that get reported. For details, see: https://telegram.org/faq_spam https://telegram.org/faq_spam
- 10y ago

kriro 10y ago

I think that's mostly a function of handling identification of the sending party. iMessage tied to an AppleID can still be controlled pretty well when it comes to spam even if it would use a completely open protocol and was open sourced. Similarly if you'd only accept cryptographically signed mail by default the spam problem would go away as a bye product.

Tepix 10y ago

Yes it does. The alternatives will not be preinstalled and thus not have many of your friends using them.

naasking 10y ago

> I love the tied-down nature of iMessage because that keeps it (mostly) free from spam and abuse. Security problems aren't solved through closed protocols, and open protocols don't have to have security problems.

sjwright 10y ago
I didn't say anything about security.
- naasking 10y ago
  All abuse problems are security problems. Abuse is by definition a misuse of authority.
  - sjwright 10y ago
    What authority is being abused in email?
    - naasking 10y ago
      The authority to send to your mailbox is ambient, meaning anyone can send to it at anytime, and ambient authority is trivially abused. Abuse can only be prevented by doling out least authority, not ambient authority. In this case, at the very least a mailbox address would be a cryptographically unguessable identifier. Ideally, each person to whom you are introduced would get their own unguessable mailbox address that acts as a proxy for your real mailbox, and you can delete that proxy anytime you wish to stop receiving e-mail from that person (and anyone with whom they shared your address). This completely eliminates the viability of selling your personal information to advertisers and spammers. Obviously this process has to be simple and semi-automatic, preferably transparent, or people won't be able to use it (like the web of trust), but the idea is sound, and based on capability security. People already do something like this manually with subaddressing, and it seems the general concept I presented above has an official name as "disposable e-mail addresses" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_email_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_email_address

hobarrera 10y ago

> I love open source and open protocols as much as anyone on HN, but honestly, secretly, I love the tied-down nature of iMessage because that keeps it (mostly) free from spam and abuse. Spam on IM? I've honestly only seen this on skype. Is this actually an issue on other networks/countries?

emdd 10y ago
I've heard it is in China.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  It definitely is on Wechat but I am not really bothered by it: I have the people I need in a list and the rest I just ignore. It does not really interrupt but then again there might be people getting 1000s of these spam contacts per month and that would be painful...
jsjohnst 10y ago
It definitely is on Yahoo! Messenger these days too.