This is essentially some good PR to lower the bad PR they’re getting. The damage is already done, whatever narrative they were pushing worked. Now they get to say “We did bad things and we’re aware of it. We have an oversight board and we have a system in place. We pinky promise we will continue to improve how we handle these things in future.”

Until next time it happens again.

Sorry about what happened to your friend.

I don’t think you see the difference, Aaron was downloading the data off of MIT servers himself, he was not facing charges for writing the scripts.

From your link:

The Justice Department’s press release announcing Aaron’s indictment suggests the true motivation for pursuing the case was that Aaron downloaded academic literature from JSTOR and planned to make it available to the public for free as a political statement about access to knowledge.

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Tools that can be used maliciously are generally allowed because they have legitimate uses, using them to gain access or otherwise harm a computer system or network without authorization is criminal.

As I said before, Beeper users are gaining unauthorized access, not Beeper. It is E2EE, they’re not the middleman.

Apple reverse-engineered Office to release iWork. So Apple isn’t new to reverse-engineering others proprietary shit when it benefits them. something, something, history lesson, hmm…

I don’t know laws in the US but my limited understanding in the case of Beeper is that its users are the ones that grant themselves unauthorized access to the Apple servers. Beeper is a tool that packages pypush to accomplish it. So Apple should sue all the Beeper users?

As an example, there are tons of tools to exploit vulnerable systems in Linux. Metasploit is a penetration testing software and can execute exploits on old unpatched systems. I don’t think anyone is suing Metasploit developers for Computer Fraud and Abuse aCt. The users who use it are responsible for the access of unauthorized services and broken ToS.

If Apple thinks Beeper users are exploiting its servers, they should patch them (which they did).

Beeper did try to monetize it, so i’m not sure how it fairs but Beeper is not forcing anyone to gain unauthorized access. Beeper even welcomed Apple to audit Beeper mini code.

And I’m sure Beeper has a legal team that analyzed these scenarios better than anyone of us. And Apple has sued companies for less. They’d have done it the moment the app landed on appstore. They could have crushed it before gaining any attention.

Again, I have no idea how legal it is. I have both Apple and android devices and never use iMessage. But you gotta hand it to Beeper devs. That’s some old school hacker shit and I’m here for it.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

That is even worse, they knew they were compromising privacy and still boasts about being privacy centric. It’s like Saudi Arabia claiming to be a utopia while actively using modern slavery in the background.

Apple and Google are both guilty of this. Frankly, however, neither of them are particularly “guilty”,

Google doesn’t claim to be a herald of digital privacy, nor its users claim Google is a saint.

Elizabeth Warren sends terse letter

“We’re getting a bad reputation for facilitating the war against civilians, time for some positive PR. someone pass this on to the guardian”

In fact I don’t have a better news source to offer you

Have you taken a look at lobste.rs? Not saying it’s better, but there are alternatives.

feeling edgy today, aren’t we?

it comes at zero cost to Portugal, as a country, thus not having to import it

i’m always confused by this. does this include traditional fuel or just the electric grid?

I can’t find any information about their search engine crawler. Isn’t it standard for search engines to label their crawlers or something?