12 ms·

Just think, if you hadn't used a proprietary messaging solution as your default contact method, you'd be able to easily control how you receive the messages. Ma

by RyanZAG 13y ago

Just think, if you hadn't used a proprietary messaging solution as your default contact method, you'd be able to easily control how you receive the messages. Maybe stuff like this happening is a good thing as it drills home the point the 'crazy free software lunatics' have been going on about for some time. Having this kind of thing happen to someone makes the stuff FSF+co says a bit more relevant and ultimately helps everyone.

sneak 13y ago
> Maybe stuff like this happening is a good thing as it drills home the point Ugh, thinking like this just may well be the biggest problem in our industry. Stop being user-hostile.
- wwweston 13y ago
  I don't know that RyanZAG is so much being user-hostile as reminding us that there are facts of non-free systems that are going translate to user-hostile for at least some subset of users. There's incentives for people who make closed systems to make the most common edges of them comfortable. There's also incentives for them to ignore other sharp edges or to even actively make other edges nearly untraversable.
  - josh2600 13y ago
    I came here to say exactly this. Source: I work in the guts of some of the biggest telecom networks on the planet. Federation is a problem because none of the standards interop. The closest thing we had was XMPP which became mega-bloatware as time went by and is now just not something anyone wants to implement (and it's becoming less of an issue as most of the players move away from open-ness). While the technical among us understand the ramifications of these decisions, the silent majority do not. I believe it was Elad Gil who said that services that eschew privacy have historically dominated their more private opponents. Users say they care about privacy but their explicit value systems (what they say versus what they do) says otherwise. The majority of consumers are happy to take iMessage and use it to the extreme and will attribute silent failures to the operators in most cases (which is not necessarily wrong). True federated identity is the death of the phone network and there are just too many billions of dollars tied up in the world for this to come to pass. A phone number is a ridiculously arbitrary identifier for a person, and yet it works and has worked for quite some time. Logically addressed networks are finally starting to break, and that's a good thing, but the catalyst that will move us away from these systems is one that subsumes existing infrastructure while adding new features. You cannot rip and replace our communications networks (or any infrastructure for that matter) and so the only logical solution is to subsume. It's not easy, but that's how this gets fixed.
    - tmzt 13y ago
      It's almost absurd the lack of fanfare surrounding AT&Ts proposed phase out of the PSTN in favor of IP networks. We got number portability and wireless number portability, but the carriers still act as if they own our e.164 addresses and make the transfers arbitrarily difficult. We use phone numbers of SMS, but really we use individual address books, stored in devices, or synchronized with central repositories. We use names to identify people and have to work hard to ensure that our address books are not filled up with duplicates created because we used a one-off email address, or phone number and the phone wasn't able to merge it with an existing contact automatically. We have identity providers that can only represent a small portion of our identity, real names on Facebook and Google+, but cannot resolve that back to our phone numbers or find the best way to contact us at any given time. Presence, which was the real promise of IM and XMPP (and SIMPLE if you must) is not integrated. I cannot determine before hand whether somebody is available to talk on the phone, would prefer a text message, or if I should leave a push voice message they can listen to at their leisure. Even calling a company with a well designed IVR is still a confusing waste of time, when the device I am calling that system from is smart enough to contain any identifier or proof of identity that the called party would need, the protocols are artificially limited to phone numbers as identifiers. There is also no out of band solution to this problem, or the the problem of selecting what department I would prefer to speak with about a problem without navigating a menu that the interface on my device is not really designed to use. Think DTMF on an Android device where the screen shuts off.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  Um. I'm not the one who made iMessage - you need to look at the guys making locked down messaging systems for the user-hostile actions causing problems like these and no doubt much more in the future. If I could help these people out and give them a script to run to fix their problem I would - but of course I can't, because everything is locked down by others who are putting their own vendor lock-in above user satisfaction. And I agree that it is the biggest problem in our industry.
  - rosser 13y ago
    You're focusing on lock-in at the client level. And while I agree that's a problem, it's not the biggest problem. Not by a long-shot.
    - RyanZAG 13y ago
      It is the biggest problem, it's just hard to see. Let's assume iMessage was OSS and freely uninstallable/re-installable on iOS devices. This would mean that an iMessage fork could be created that was able to talk to additional services and not only Apple ones. This would be done quickly as iOS users would want to use iMessage to talk to Android users also. The iMessage client itself would be duplicated for Android quickly as well if it was OSS. As most users would prefer the Android compatible version, the forked version would likely be installed by most users as most users would want to talk to Android. This problem would then be easily fixed: someone could just submit a pull request for a fix for this issue and create a way to easily stop receiving messages through iMessage. Even better, the author would not need to stop using iMessage - he could keep using it and receiving messages on Android. Ultimately removing the lock-in at the client level forces the problem to auto correct itself across the board by allowing users the option of migration and developers the option of improvement.
      - rosser 13y ago
        Thinking about it further, I don't even think it's appropriate to call this "lock-in". I very much doubt the Apple engineers who wrote iMessage were rubbing their hands together in maniacal glee, at the prospect of being able to prevent people from ever migrating away from iOS, if they but used the phone number in this specific way. It sounds like it's exactly what TFA's author assumes: a bug.
owenwil 13y ago
So, what's an open-source alternative to iMessage that lots of people use?
- shurcooL 13y ago
  The reason iMessage works well is because it's integrated tightly into the OS. So for an open-source alternative to be competitive, it would have to run on... an open mobile OS, which would in turn require open hardware.
  - Ar-Curunir 13y ago
    Heh? Have you tried solutions like Whatsapp, GroupMe, or Viber? They all work absolutely fine on both big mobile OSes, regardless of hardware. I don't see the need for absolutely open hardware for an alternative messaging system. Sure, they aren't FLOSS solutions, but they are much less closed than iMessage and are cross-platform.
    - sneak 13y ago
      WhatsApp does not work on tablets. Its stupid auth system requires a device with a phone number.
      - Ar-Curunir 13y ago
        Fine, but Viber does, right? There are open source, secure messaging systems on the way too. My point was that you do not need open hardware to have a relatively open messaging system. Just look at IRC as an example. It might be somewhat dead now, but it certainly runs on everything now.
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        Other than that, I find WhatsApp to be amazingly solid as both a one on one and group messaging app. Its why I ditched Hangouts completely. Note: Hangouts is an abomination.
    - msh 13y ago
maxerickson 13y ago
The problem is that the people sending the messages can't control how they are sent. The software I'm using can't solve that problem.
rosser 13y ago
Yeah, other peoples' misfortunes are totally "a good thing" if they help illustrate the motivations for one's own political agenda.
- judk 13y ago
  When's ones "political agenda" is to protect people from paying money to walk into the traps they are complaining about...
- pessimizer 13y ago
  If other peoples' misfortunes are influential in keeping others from making bad decisions that have an effect on us all, then yes. Even the 'good' behavior in this case is awful. Why would a text message fallback to MMS rather than SMS? I'm pretty sure it's because Apple wants non-iPhone users to think of their phones as broken.
swombat 13y ago
SMS is also a proprietary solution, as far as I know. If you don't think so, check the costs of integrating with SMS...
- stingraycharles 13y ago
  Still, the telco industry is regulated. It's a difference.
  - baddox 13y ago
    Apple is regulated.
- guelo 13y ago
  SMS is interoperable between every phone and phone company on the planet.
  - kruk 13y ago
    not in Japan
    - saltysugar 13y ago
      Used to be like that, but they fixed it a while ago. Though sending messages across carriers is rather expensive.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    Try switching companies and see how well it works. I have no idea what the actual porting process involves, but then neither did the 2 big telecoms I was dealing with. I had weeks of carrying 2 phones. One received calls, the other SMS. And the telecoms sat there blaming each other. Vodafone and Telecom. New Zealand.
    - blueskin_ 13y ago
      Sounds like carriers there are incompetent then. When I (UK) switched in the late 2000s, it took about an hour.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
> Just think, if you hadn't used a proprietary messaging solution as your default contact method, you'd be able to easily control how you receive the messages. Apparently blaming the victim is totally okay as long as the victim was using a brand you don't like.
- ElDiablo666 13y ago
  You've failed to understand on two levels. One, this is not a question of competing brands. That's a question of technology and not liberty, which is the point of the comment you replied to; if OP choose free software, it doesn't matter which "brand" he chose, there are a number of free application that do the same job. Two, calling this victim blaming is a bit of a stretch at best and ridiculous nonsense at worst. Yes, what happened to OP is unfortunate but it's just a moderate inconvenience. It's not like someone drove their car over him or smashed his face in with a bat (he'll get over this much easier). The person you replied to therefore is not wishing serious ill will on him. They are simply saying they hope this mild inconvenience is enough to wake him (and others) up to the necessity of free software.
  - hrabago 13y ago
    > They are simply saying they hope this mild inconvenience If you read the post, you would know this is not a "mild inconvenience" for him. If you truly believe that, then I would contend you haven't experienced what it's like to lose a significant amount of personal data. > is enough to wake him (and others) up to the necessity of free software. What free software was he and everyone he's communicated with in the past 5 years supposed to be aware of?
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >One, this is not a question of competing brands. That's a question of technology and not liberty, which is the point of the comment you replied to; if OP choose free software, it doesn't matter which "brand" he chose, there are a number of free application that do the same job. I call BS. If OP choose free software we could AS WELL have had the same exact problem. It's a software bug -- the client caching the remote method to use (data or standard SMS). A free program could just as well have the same issue. What "more control" you'd have? You could issue a bug fix request, which could just as well be ignored (I've several on FOSS projets). Or you could even have it fixed, but then you'd need to convince all the users you talk to to update to the latest version until you see any improvement.
coldtea 13y ago
>Just think, if you hadn't used a proprietary messaging solution as your default contact method, you'd be able to easily control how you receive the messages. He would also have lost other benefits, such as convenience, automatically using data instead over SMS for casual chatting, using the method he damn wanted, etc. What having a problem like this justifies is FIXING the problem, not not using the technology in the first place or some ideas about proprietary and OSS. Not to mention those are beside the point. Even if he DID use a proprietary messaging solution, he might very well have the same issue. It's not an issue that stems from being proprietary, it's an issue that stems from a stupid caching implementation. If some FOSS mobile chating app had the same bug, he would have been bitten by it just the same.
jheriko 13y ago
imessage is subtle - it happens by default and is easy to get lumped with. really its a shame that apple do that...
_ak 13y ago
Is the free software alternative you talk about hypothetical or do you have any concrete piece of software to refer to, preferably one that would interoperate with OP's peer group of 99% iOS users?
chrisBob 13y ago
The whole problem is that no one tries to use iMessage, the texts just get automatically converted and sent over that system when you are both on apple devices. I was a huge apple fan when they were the underdog, but they are getting a little too big now. iO$ is still the best target operating system for developers, I just wish I didn't like apple's products so much.

by RyanZAG 13y ago

sneak 13y ago

> Maybe stuff like this happening is a good thing as it drills home the point Ugh, thinking like this just may well be the biggest problem in our industry. Stop being user-hostile.

wwweston 13y ago
I don't know that RyanZAG is so much being user-hostile as reminding us that there are facts of non-free systems that are going translate to user-hostile for at least some subset of users. There's incentives for people who make closed systems to make the most common edges of them comfortable. There's also incentives for them to ignore other sharp edges or to even actively make other edges nearly untraversable.
- josh2600 13y ago
  I came here to say exactly this. Source: I work in the guts of some of the biggest telecom networks on the planet. Federation is a problem because none of the standards interop. The closest thing we had was XMPP which became mega-bloatware as time went by and is now just not something anyone wants to implement (and it's becoming less of an issue as most of the players move away from open-ness). While the technical among us understand the ramifications of these decisions, the silent majority do not. I believe it was Elad Gil who said that services that eschew privacy have historically dominated their more private opponents. Users say they care about privacy but their explicit value systems (what they say versus what they do) says otherwise. The majority of consumers are happy to take iMessage and use it to the extreme and will attribute silent failures to the operators in most cases (which is not necessarily wrong). True federated identity is the death of the phone network and there are just too many billions of dollars tied up in the world for this to come to pass. A phone number is a ridiculously arbitrary identifier for a person, and yet it works and has worked for quite some time. Logically addressed networks are finally starting to break, and that's a good thing, but the catalyst that will move us away from these systems is one that subsumes existing infrastructure while adding new features. You cannot rip and replace our communications networks (or any infrastructure for that matter) and so the only logical solution is to subsume. It's not easy, but that's how this gets fixed.
  - tmzt 13y ago
    It's almost absurd the lack of fanfare surrounding AT&Ts proposed phase out of the PSTN in favor of IP networks. We got number portability and wireless number portability, but the carriers still act as if they own our e.164 addresses and make the transfers arbitrarily difficult. We use phone numbers of SMS, but really we use individual address books, stored in devices, or synchronized with central repositories. We use names to identify people and have to work hard to ensure that our address books are not filled up with duplicates created because we used a one-off email address, or phone number and the phone wasn't able to merge it with an existing contact automatically. We have identity providers that can only represent a small portion of our identity, real names on Facebook and Google+, but cannot resolve that back to our phone numbers or find the best way to contact us at any given time. Presence, which was the real promise of IM and XMPP (and SIMPLE if you must) is not integrated. I cannot determine before hand whether somebody is available to talk on the phone, would prefer a text message, or if I should leave a push voice message they can listen to at their leisure. Even calling a company with a well designed IVR is still a confusing waste of time, when the device I am calling that system from is smart enough to contain any identifier or proof of identity that the called party would need, the protocols are artificially limited to phone numbers as identifiers. There is also no out of band solution to this problem, or the the problem of selecting what department I would prefer to speak with about a problem without navigating a menu that the interface on my device is not really designed to use. Think DTMF on an Android device where the screen shuts off.
RyanZAG 13y ago
Um. I'm not the one who made iMessage - you need to look at the guys making locked down messaging systems for the user-hostile actions causing problems like these and no doubt much more in the future. If I could help these people out and give them a script to run to fix their problem I would - but of course I can't, because everything is locked down by others who are putting their own vendor lock-in above user satisfaction. And I agree that it is the biggest problem in our industry.
- rosser 13y ago
  You're focusing on lock-in at the client level. And while I agree that's a problem, it's not the biggest problem. Not by a long-shot.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    It is the biggest problem, it's just hard to see. Let's assume iMessage was OSS and freely uninstallable/re-installable on iOS devices. This would mean that an iMessage fork could be created that was able to talk to additional services and not only Apple ones. This would be done quickly as iOS users would want to use iMessage to talk to Android users also. The iMessage client itself would be duplicated for Android quickly as well if it was OSS. As most users would prefer the Android compatible version, the forked version would likely be installed by most users as most users would want to talk to Android. This problem would then be easily fixed: someone could just submit a pull request for a fix for this issue and create a way to easily stop receiving messages through iMessage. Even better, the author would not need to stop using iMessage - he could keep using it and receiving messages on Android. Ultimately removing the lock-in at the client level forces the problem to auto correct itself across the board by allowing users the option of migration and developers the option of improvement.
    - rosser 13y ago
      Thinking about it further, I don't even think it's appropriate to call this "lock-in". I very much doubt the Apple engineers who wrote iMessage were rubbing their hands together in maniacal glee, at the prospect of being able to prevent people from ever migrating away from iOS, if they but used the phone number in this specific way. It sounds like it's exactly what TFA's author assumes: a bug.

owenwil 13y ago

So, what's an open-source alternative to iMessage that lots of people use?

shurcooL 13y ago
The reason iMessage works well is because it's integrated tightly into the OS. So for an open-source alternative to be competitive, it would have to run on... an open mobile OS, which would in turn require open hardware.
- Ar-Curunir 13y ago
  Heh? Have you tried solutions like Whatsapp, GroupMe, or Viber? They all work absolutely fine on both big mobile OSes, regardless of hardware. I don't see the need for absolutely open hardware for an alternative messaging system. Sure, they aren't FLOSS solutions, but they are much less closed than iMessage and are cross-platform.
  - sneak 13y ago
    WhatsApp does not work on tablets. Its stupid auth system requires a device with a phone number.
    - Ar-Curunir 13y ago
      Fine, but Viber does, right? There are open source, secure messaging systems on the way too. My point was that you do not need open hardware to have a relatively open messaging system. Just look at IRC as an example. It might be somewhat dead now, but it certainly runs on everything now.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Other than that, I find WhatsApp to be amazingly solid as both a one on one and group messaging app. Its why I ditched Hangouts completely. Note: Hangouts is an abomination.
  - msh 13y ago

maxerickson 13y ago

The problem is that the people sending the messages can't control how they are sent. The software I'm using can't solve that problem.

rosser 13y ago

Yeah, other peoples' misfortunes are totally "a good thing" if they help illustrate the motivations for one's own political agenda.

judk 13y ago
When's ones "political agenda" is to protect people from paying money to walk into the traps they are complaining about...
pessimizer 13y ago
If other peoples' misfortunes are influential in keeping others from making bad decisions that have an effect on us all, then yes. Even the 'good' behavior in this case is awful. Why would a text message fallback to MMS rather than SMS? I'm pretty sure it's because Apple wants non-iPhone users to think of their phones as broken.

swombat 13y ago

SMS is also a proprietary solution, as far as I know. If you don't think so, check the costs of integrating with SMS...

stingraycharles 13y ago
Still, the telco industry is regulated. It's a difference.
- baddox 13y ago
  Apple is regulated.
guelo 13y ago
SMS is interoperable between every phone and phone company on the planet.
- kruk 13y ago
  not in Japan
  - saltysugar 13y ago
    Used to be like that, but they fixed it a while ago. Though sending messages across carriers is rather expensive.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  Try switching companies and see how well it works. I have no idea what the actual porting process involves, but then neither did the 2 big telecoms I was dealing with. I had weeks of carrying 2 phones. One received calls, the other SMS. And the telecoms sat there blaming each other. Vodafone and Telecom. New Zealand.
  - blueskin_ 13y ago
    Sounds like carriers there are incompetent then. When I (UK) switched in the late 2000s, it took about an hour.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

> Just think, if you hadn't used a proprietary messaging solution as your default contact method, you'd be able to easily control how you receive the messages. Apparently blaming the victim is totally okay as long as the victim was using a brand you don't like.

ElDiablo666 13y ago
You've failed to understand on two levels. One, this is not a question of competing brands. That's a question of technology and not liberty, which is the point of the comment you replied to; if OP choose free software, it doesn't matter which "brand" he chose, there are a number of free application that do the same job. Two, calling this victim blaming is a bit of a stretch at best and ridiculous nonsense at worst. Yes, what happened to OP is unfortunate but it's just a moderate inconvenience. It's not like someone drove their car over him or smashed his face in with a bat (he'll get over this much easier). The person you replied to therefore is not wishing serious ill will on him. They are simply saying they hope this mild inconvenience is enough to wake him (and others) up to the necessity of free software.
- hrabago 13y ago
  > They are simply saying they hope this mild inconvenience If you read the post, you would know this is not a "mild inconvenience" for him. If you truly believe that, then I would contend you haven't experienced what it's like to lose a significant amount of personal data. > is enough to wake him (and others) up to the necessity of free software. What free software was he and everyone he's communicated with in the past 5 years supposed to be aware of?
- coldtea 13y ago
  >One, this is not a question of competing brands. That's a question of technology and not liberty, which is the point of the comment you replied to; if OP choose free software, it doesn't matter which "brand" he chose, there are a number of free application that do the same job. I call BS. If OP choose free software we could AS WELL have had the same exact problem. It's a software bug -- the client caching the remote method to use (data or standard SMS). A free program could just as well have the same issue. What "more control" you'd have? You could issue a bug fix request, which could just as well be ignored (I've several on FOSS projets). Or you could even have it fixed, but then you'd need to convince all the users you talk to to update to the latest version until you see any improvement.

coldtea 13y ago

>Just think, if you hadn't used a proprietary messaging solution as your default contact method, you'd be able to easily control how you receive the messages. He would also have lost other benefits, such as convenience, automatically using data instead over SMS for casual chatting, using the method he damn wanted, etc. What having a problem like this justifies is FIXING the problem, not not using the technology in the first place or some ideas about proprietary and OSS. Not to mention those are beside the point. Even if he DID use a proprietary messaging solution, he might very well have the same issue. It's not an issue that stems from being proprietary, it's an issue that stems from a stupid caching implementation. If some FOSS mobile chating app had the same bug, he would have been bitten by it just the same.

jheriko 13y ago

imessage is subtle - it happens by default and is easy to get lumped with. really its a shame that apple do that...

_ak 13y ago

Is the free software alternative you talk about hypothetical or do you have any concrete piece of software to refer to, preferably one that would interoperate with OP's peer group of 99% iOS users?

chrisBob 13y ago

The whole problem is that no one tries to use iMessage, the texts just get automatically converted and sent over that system when you are both on apple devices. I was a huge apple fan when they were the underdog, but they are getting a little too big now. iO$ is still the best target operating system for developers, I just wish I didn't like apple's products so much.