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> They already reverse engineered the Whatsapp protocol. I see little reason why it can't live in the client? I don't really follow why they move the bridge to
by miguelrochefort 5y ago
> They already reverse engineered the Whatsapp protocol. I see little reason why it can't live in the client? I don't really follow why they move the bridge to the homeserver.
Matrix bridges are rather complex. They rely on a combination of private APIs (WhatsApp), Chrome extension scraping (LINE), bots (Telegram), mobile clients (Android SMS), and jailbroken iPhones (iMessage).
- have_faith 5y agoThis is all very interesting from a technological perspective but it sounds incredible brittle. Do I break any terms with these 3rd parties by paying Matrix to scrape them?
- miguelrochefort 5y agoI've been using Beeper.com for a while and it's surprisingly stable despite how brittle one would expect these bridges to be. Given that puppeteering should be indistinguishable from real application usage and that $5/month/user should be more than enough to diversify IP addresses, I suspect the model can actually be sustainable in the long term.
- ev1 5y agoI'm kind of curious how Beeper will handle some of these - they claim to soon support WeChat, and emulating WeChat is a bit insane, because it collects so much data that it's a walking GDPR violation, there's no way to stop it, and we are talking things like "please repeat the numbers in chinese, then english, while looking straight into your phone" at login.
- spurgu 5y agoUff, that sounds insane. I suppose they released those "features" gradually and people just went along.
- ev1 5y agoIt's a Chinese chat app (that is also used for payments, thus linked to bank accounts). Getting an account more or less requires ID or similar. They go to extraordinary lengths, similar to Tiktok, to block automation, bot accounts, etc.
- ev1 5y agoNo one knows about detection or enforcement, but almost certainly yes.