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On a bit of a tangent, I'd love to see a fully reverse engineered iMessage client - along with Skype, Hangouts, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and all the other mobile mes
by comex 12y ago
On a bit of a tangent, I'd love to see a fully reverse engineered iMessage client - along with Skype, Hangouts, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and all the other mobile messaging apps du jour. What happened to the old days when you could get a single open source client, for Linux if you wanted (today, perhaps the equivalent would be the likes of Firefox OS and Tizen), with reverse engineered implementations for all major IM protocols?
Okay, that's partly a rhetorical question. I know that iMessage and Skype are both powered by highly obfuscated code - the latter for more than a decade! Skype seems it's been decently reverse engineered in the last few years, though, and there are or were some iMessage clients for Android, although I think they were using Macs on the backend (maybe some day I will help with properly reverse engineering it). But never mind those two; I've heard many of the other messengers are no better protected than the ones of the 90s, yet I haven't seen any attempts to write unified clients. Why is that?
- notduncansmith 12y agoWhip out an HTTP debugging proxy and I'd imagine you could get pretty close to unpacking Skype's API in less than a day. It uses the Bond protocol, which is easy enough to deserialize, and some tricks to verify that the message being sent is really the one that should come after the last one that was sent. I didn't get as much time as I would've liked to play with it so they may have more tricks waiting, but it looked simple enough from an hour or so of tinkering.
- camhenlin 12y agoYeah I'm in the exact same boat as you, I would love to see everyone move back towards open IM protocols and I think working on projects like this is the first step towards making that happen.