New Beeper Android app – Open beta test(blog.beeper.com) |
New Beeper Android app – Open beta test(blog.beeper.com) |
I'm big on unified messaging from the libpurple days, but now 99% of my chats are in Signal so perhaps I am just not the target demographic for this.
You don't have to use our hosted bridges, we've made it ridiculously easy to self host: https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager
Having the features and polish of the first party app, but with a user-controlled backend (like how Bitwarden does it) would be great.
BTW, I have a Pebble on my wrist right now :)
Is there still plans for supporting multiple G Apps accounts?
If they ever chose to implement remote attestation for bridges, and you chose to use an open source matrix client to control your local keys, there is at least a potential path for you to prove they can't look at messages so you don't have to trust them.
You also have the option to self host bridges and take your ball and go home at any time, given that Matrix is an open protocol. Minimal lock-in.
Texts.com by contrast is completely proprietary as far as I can tell, with no path to self host, so it is strictly worse than Beeper in every way in terms of transparency.
> On-Device Signal Bridge
Haven't tried it yet.
It was a good illustration of how an open source app could surpass all the proprietary alternatives because it wasn't subject to the same incentives as a commercial company. Although obviously all those companies wised up and killed XMPP...
Completely defining your own secure perimeter by self hosting everything possible makes for extremely perfunctory audits by regulatory bodies for the industries (finance, mainly) we support.
Miss those days when companies didn't invest into building walled gardens.
I was talking about https://pidgin.im/
Wasn't this the reason to use beeper on android?
Their ability to bridge other networks may be useful to you. It’s what they did before the iMessage thing.
I agree though a ton of their possible demand is gone now due to that. Add in RCS later this year, and even if iMessage came back I’m not sure it would be worth it to many.
But hey. I didn’t know they existed before that. I do now. That’s something. I also distrust their judgement based on their actions. But I’m sure that not true for everyone who now knows they exist.
I currently use through it: Telegram, WhatsApp, RCS (Android Messages), Signal.
Beeper is built on Matrix and their client is based on Element but I would say the experience is slightly better than native; for example I prefer how client verification works in Beeper over vanilla Element.
Congrats on the open beta!
How long will it remain free to use?
Beeper isn't in a business that's every going to make them significant money. Their core value proposition is, ironically, that reverse engineering iMessage is "just hard enough". If it becomes too hard, they fail.
But if it becomes too easy, they fail too because everyone will launch Apple-compatible chat apps! In fact the worst case is that the protocols end up standardized, in which case they'll have to compete with genuine open source implementations.
Basically, I'm absolutely in their corner in this fight, but I'd never bet on Beeper as a product.
I found my Xperia z3 Compact in a drawer the other day. It was immediately such a pleasure to hold, I love the concept of having something as powerful as a smartphone in such a small package.
I'm happy to pay it forward, the only caveat is that I think the referral code has to be sent via a chat method that beeper supports. Feel free to email me (HN username @ big G's mail service) with a GChat/WhatsApp/SMS address.
But I don't want to depend on Google on my phone.
We only use Pidgin for native XMPP intra-org chat via self-hosted, AD-integrated private servers, a role which it has served remarkably well up to our largest client site of about 300 users or so. For phones, we support Xabber or Conversations but all BYOD usage comes with mandatory wireguard wrapping. We don't have much occasion to experiment with Pidgin's multi-protocol functionality, as our clients typically have little incentive to facilitate and support internet-facing chat capabilities.
I’ve found iOS 17 to be amazing so far on my 15 pro max. My only persistent irk is with the notification management. If a notification pops up that I don’t care to interact with, I’d like the option to swipe it away and have it actually go away. Instead, that initial banner can only be swiped up to make it go to the Notification Center, where it has to be swiped away or opened.
Everything else about the device is phenomenal for me. Battery life (even capped at 80%), 1Password integration, Focus Modes, and Shortcuts.
A court order or someone holding a rubber hose could instruct that release engineer to ship tweaked code to any number of devices that sets "42" as the random seed for private keys, allowing anyone with that knowledge to decrypt all messages in transit covertly.
It would be in the best interest of your shareholders to lie if this was ever to happen.
Without the code being open source, everyone should assume this is the case.
Messengers are a massive target, and a target of that size on one person is certain to be exploited.
One of core areas of my research is supply chain attacks, and you have no hope of providing strong defense against them without open source reproducible builds.
Texts connects directly to the platform, from your device, without using any Texts servers having any access to your messages (even in encrypted form) and without breaking the E2EE the platform provides (for platforms that support that), similar to Beeper’s new Signal integration.
A major benefit of this is you can verify what requests are made and what responses are received. You can also use Texts, not upgrade, and would run the same WhatsApp code for example until you upgrade. Same can’t be said for WhatsApp Web for example. It might also be easier to compromise the platform themselves for a government entity, if that’s our threat factor.
It should go without saying we take user privacy and security very seriously, and have restrictions around who can build, sign and distribute our binaries.
Until then at least hearing if you are willing to to be transparent about your supply chain security strategy would be a great start.
Some of the supply chain integrity tactics I find most companies skip:
1. Are all commits signed with personal engineer HSMs (yubikey, nitrokeys etc)?
2. Are all reviews similarly signed by someone other the author?
3. Does tamper-evident CI/CD (that no single engineer can manipulate) verify these signatures?
4. Is the code for release binaries reproducible?
5. Does more than one system controlled by different employees (or ideally a third party audit firm) build the code at least a second time and get the same hash?
6. Are the app signing keys managed with multi-party custody? (Threshold signing, multiple-in-person witnesses to airgapped signing, or managed in a remotely attestable secure enclave running reproducible firmware?)
7. Does the signing system verify multiple reproducible build signatures before issuing app-store signing keys?
8. Do you provide standalone signed binaries for users to side-load on de-googled devices so users can remove google (and their many partners) from their supply chain attack surface?
9. Do you review any/all of your third party dependencies, and every update to them?
10. Do you build exclusively with multi-signed reproducible OS and system packages?
11. Do you have published audits from reputable third party security firms attesting all your security claims, and all of the above? (Ideally with the exact hashes of the binaries whose sources they audited)
My team and I help companies with most of the above regularly for highly targeted orgs, but it takes a lot of engineering hours to get this stuff right. Failing to do any of the above would put a massive target on a single human or system, and in my experience this always results in a compromise one way or the other for a highly targeted service such as yours.
It is honestly much cheaper to just open source reproducible code, and let the community help check some of supply chain security and accountability boxes for you.
I highly doubt Beeper gets much of the above right either, but by allowing you to self host open source bridges, they grant users with higher risk profiles the option to not trust them a bit less. Granted, if you are self hosting bridges with an open source client, then there is no reason to pay Beeper.
IMO the only reasonable move in this space is to provide turn-key remotely attestable open source bridges paired with an open client to save users work without asking for trust.
Full disclosure, I did do some security and infrastructure consulting work for Beeper a few years ago.