4 ms·

I feel like phones should just have a "scrub anything that isn't ASCII text" option for paranoid folks. No unicode, no emoji, no media. I mean, I guess they cou

I feel like phones should just have a "scrub anything that isn't ASCII text" option for paranoid folks. No unicode, no emoji, no media. I mean, I guess they could still f*ck that up, and maybe it'd be admitting defeat, but still.

marcan_42 5y ago
AIUI part of the problem is that iMessage is a poor legacy design and relies on generic macOS serialization primitives. It's not like HTML where you can just scrub all the tags out. This can't be changed without breaking compatibility due to end to end encryption (the server can't adapt between versions). So there is a big attack surface inherent to the design, and Apple are stuck with it.
- zrm 5y ago
  There is a known solution to this. You version the protocol. New endpoints talk to each other with the new version, old endpoints that only understand the old version use that. After a period of time there are few enough people who still have the old version and it gets disabled.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  > Apple are stuck with it. Are they? They have an enormous level of control over their deployed software. It seems like they could push out the required changes and nearly all clients would support it in no time. For the remaining clients it seems consistent with the feature to simply block incoming messages in the wrong format. Now, whether they'd want to implement a feature that essentially advertises that they have a security problem is another thing. (the answer is quite obviously no, regardless of what's best for their users)
saagarjha 5y ago
This necessarily excludes people whose primary language for communication does not fit in a Latin alphabet.
- jancsika 5y ago
  Terribly inconvenient and a bad idea-- yes. Necessarily excludes-- no. I don't know anything about cuneiform, but if a secure, ubiquitous messenger only accepted that as input I would be counted as one of its users. Hell, GPG isn't fit for any human users. Yet Debian is still able to hand-crank a extant web-of-trust off of it.
- vadfa 5y ago
  Most of those, in my experience, effortlessly transliterate what they say into the Latin alphabet when they need to use a medium that requires it.

marcan_42 5y ago

AIUI part of the problem is that iMessage is a poor legacy design and relies on generic macOS serialization primitives. It's not like HTML where you can just scrub all the tags out. This can't be changed without breaking compatibility due to end to end encryption (the server can't adapt between versions). So there is a big attack surface inherent to the design, and Apple are stuck with it.

zrm 5y ago
There is a known solution to this. You version the protocol. New endpoints talk to each other with the new version, old endpoints that only understand the old version use that. After a period of time there are few enough people who still have the old version and it gets disabled.
Griffinsauce 5y ago
> Apple are stuck with it. Are they? They have an enormous level of control over their deployed software. It seems like they could push out the required changes and nearly all clients would support it in no time. For the remaining clients it seems consistent with the feature to simply block incoming messages in the wrong format. Now, whether they'd want to implement a feature that essentially advertises that they have a security problem is another thing. (the answer is quite obviously no, regardless of what's best for their users)

saagarjha 5y ago

This necessarily excludes people whose primary language for communication does not fit in a Latin alphabet.

jancsika 5y ago
Terribly inconvenient and a bad idea-- yes. Necessarily excludes-- no. I don't know anything about cuneiform, but if a secure, ubiquitous messenger only accepted that as input I would be counted as one of its users. Hell, GPG isn't fit for any human users. Yet Debian is still able to hand-crank a extant web-of-trust off of it.
vadfa 5y ago
Most of those, in my experience, effortlessly transliterate what they say into the Latin alphabet when they need to use a medium that requires it.