Was it too good to be true? Beeper, the startup that reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users, is experiencing an outage,
I honestly have to hand it to the kid who discovered this in the first place.
Man’s still in high school, yet managed to find a high profile iMessage exploit while doing something he clearly enjoyed doing, knew the full value of what he’s discovered, sold it off to a company he likely surmised was frothing at the mouth for technology like this, and walked away with a huge wad of cash at the end of the day. He’s easily going places.
It wasn’t really a hack though so much as it manipulated the way it identifies itself to Apples servers. Apple obviously changed something there in retaliation so it’s not working now, but depending on the severity of the change they could get around this.
Honestly though it won’t last long. Eric has a history of being overly ambitious and it’s why Pebble failed.
I detailed it in a previous comment of mine, but it spoofs an identity request by pretending to be an early M1 MacBook whilst providing fake validation data from an old Intel-era macOS library. Apple servers then believed it was a real MacBook and handed over all encryption keys needed to establish E2EE communication over iMessage.
Hack or not a hack, it most definitely is a weird edge case scenario (the specific combination of new MacBook model with old validation data) which is probably why it all worked to begin with.
Good. Beeper Mini was a gross hack based on an edge case trick that they shouldn’t have been charging for.
I honestly have to hand it to the kid who discovered this in the first place.
Man’s still in high school, yet managed to find a high profile iMessage exploit while doing something he clearly enjoyed doing, knew the full value of what he’s discovered, sold it off to a company he likely surmised was frothing at the mouth for technology like this, and walked away with a huge wad of cash at the end of the day. He’s easily going places.
It wasn’t really a hack though so much as it manipulated the way it identifies itself to Apples servers. Apple obviously changed something there in retaliation so it’s not working now, but depending on the severity of the change they could get around this.
Honestly though it won’t last long. Eric has a history of being overly ambitious and it’s why Pebble failed.
I detailed it in a previous comment of mine, but it spoofs an identity request by pretending to be an early M1 MacBook whilst providing fake validation data from an old Intel-era macOS library. Apple servers then believed it was a real MacBook and handed over all encryption keys needed to establish E2EE communication over iMessage.
Hack or not a hack, it most definitely is a weird edge case scenario (the specific combination of new MacBook model with old validation data) which is probably why it all worked to begin with.