> That seems incredibly reasonable to me. Beeper’s statements seem almost like parody to me. >> “I know I broke into your house, but someone else figured out t

> That seems incredibly reasonable to me. Beeper’s statements seem almost like parody to me. >> “I know I broke into your house, but someone else figured out the key. Now I’m here I should be able to rent out your couch! The renters deserve it, you’re discriminating. I’ll give you a cut!” Beeper's arguments are about the benefit of encryption to phone users, not about who reverse-engineered the iMessage service. The main benefit is giving agency to Android users to send and receive encrypted messages from iMessage users, and the secondary benefit is letting iMessage users send and receive encrypted messages from those Android users. (Why don't both parties use a cross-platform E2EE messaging app? Beeper Mini requires only the Android user to alter their own messaging setup.) Beeper Mini tricks Apple into giving the Android user a private key on the Android user's behalf. In order to achieve this setup, Beeper Mini needs to stand in for the Android user and pretend to have an Apple device (requires a fake serial number - fake credentials - if MuffinFlavored is correct). That's the only fake part. There are two overarching security issues at play. 1. Apple doesn't reliably distinguish between real and fake devices. That's an important problem but has no impact on iMessage encryption. Apple may have a right to shut out Beeper Mini, but Beeper Mini isn't in the wrong solely for utilizing a bug Apple missed. Otherwise, the acts and applications of reverse-engineering in general would be wrong, and that seems to be the opposite of the hacker spirit to me. 2. Beeper Mini supposedly doesn't give Beeper access to the private key for decrypting iMessage messages. Supposedly. The code isn't free software, so an Android user has to choose between trusting Beeper Mini's code or not using Beeper Mini. If you don't trust Beeper to give only you the encryption key then Beeper is a bad idea. (In that case, you can inspect the source-available iMessage implementation proof of concept called pypush by JJTech0130, or you could install a Signal/Matrix app instead.)