Ah, common misconception - hacking an API != creating a compatible program. ( reverse engineering)
Imagine a drill company has a special shape for its bits.
Our law allows someone else to either… make bits that can fit in that shape
OR make their own drill that can accept those bits.
“BUT they copied!” - it doesn’t have to be a copy to be compatible, and they don’t even have to use the ‘special shape’ just be able to work with the special shape. The law does not allow for protections around that. Doing so would be by definition anti-competitive. Our anti competition laws or rather our IP protection laws are not intended in any way to ‘ensure a monopoly’. The IP laws give a person a right to either keep something they do secret OR share that knowledge with the world so we all benefit, in exchange for a very limited monopoly.
Practically speaking, If I got the KFC Colonel to give me the list of 11 herbs and spices in a Poker game, and then started making my own delicious poultry that is totally cool. Likewise, If I figured out that all that was inside a Threadripper was blue smoke and started making my own blue smoke chips, the law is ok with that.
In this case roughly, Having a public facing endpoint. And then saying that the public can access that endpoint is cool
Saying that only the public using the code I alone gave them – well… that’s not been litigated a lot, but all signs point to no.
It’s like Bing saying its for Safari only, and suing people who accessed it using Chrome. It is a logical claim, but the law does not provide that kind of protection/enforcement.
tl;dr these concepts are old but being newly applied to fancy technology. The laws in place are clear in most cases. A car maker can not dictate what you put in the tank. FedEX and UPS can’t charge you differently for shipping fiction books or medical journals or self published stories. And they’d probably get anti-trust scrutiny they even told you what brand/style of boxes you had to use.
That counts as unauthorized access in the eyes of the law. It’s a private system and they did not have any agreements permitting them to use it as they wanted.
Quite literally the text of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act. Unauthorized access of computer systems can get you 20-years at club fed. Seems like some of these people need a history lesson.
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.
These are separate issues and it’s a very complex set of issues. Reverse engineering is generally “okay” as long as you aren’t directly copying code, because you’ll run afoul of copyright laws. That doesn’t grant them the rights to access anyone else’s computer systems without authorization.
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. You keep mentioning “suing” but this is not a civil issue, violating the CFAA is a crime.
Aaron Swartz got supremely fucked for writing a script that downloaded files he legally could access but technically was unauthorized because he accessed them in a way the corporation didn’t like.
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.
.
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.
Genuinely curious, what’s the law against reverse engineering an API? I can maybe see the argument for charging for the service, but beeper mini is planning to integrate other services as well so I don’t know if that’ll really hold water.
It’s not a public API. Hacking someone’s private API is already against law - charging $$ for it moreso.
Reverse engineering an API is not illegal
Ah, common misconception - hacking an API != creating a compatible program. ( reverse engineering)
Imagine a drill company has a special shape for its bits. Our law allows someone else to either… make bits that can fit in that shape OR make their own drill that can accept those bits.
“BUT they copied!” - it doesn’t have to be a copy to be compatible, and they don’t even have to use the ‘special shape’ just be able to work with the special shape. The law does not allow for protections around that. Doing so would be by definition anti-competitive. Our anti competition laws or rather our IP protection laws are not intended in any way to ‘ensure a monopoly’. The IP laws give a person a right to either keep something they do secret OR share that knowledge with the world so we all benefit, in exchange for a very limited monopoly.
Practically speaking, If I got the KFC Colonel to give me the list of 11 herbs and spices in a Poker game, and then started making my own delicious poultry that is totally cool. Likewise, If I figured out that all that was inside a Threadripper was blue smoke and started making my own blue smoke chips, the law is ok with that.
In this case roughly, Having a public facing endpoint. And then saying that the public can access that endpoint is cool Saying that only the public using the code I alone gave them – well… that’s not been litigated a lot, but all signs point to no.
It’s like Bing saying its for Safari only, and suing people who accessed it using Chrome. It is a logical claim, but the law does not provide that kind of protection/enforcement.
tl;dr these concepts are old but being newly applied to fancy technology. The laws in place are clear in most cases. A car maker can not dictate what you put in the tank. FedEX and UPS can’t charge you differently for shipping fiction books or medical journals or self published stories. And they’d probably get anti-trust scrutiny they even told you what brand/style of boxes you had to use.
They didn’t hack it, they spoofed a device, they just tricked the systems around the api
That counts as unauthorized access in the eyes of the law. It’s a private system and they did not have any agreements permitting them to use it as they wanted.
Quite literally the text of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act. Unauthorized access of computer systems can get you 20-years at club fed. Seems like some of these people need a history lesson.
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.
These are separate issues and it’s a very complex set of issues. Reverse engineering is generally “okay” as long as you aren’t directly copying code, because you’ll run afoul of copyright laws. That doesn’t grant them the rights to access anyone else’s computer systems without authorization.
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. You keep mentioning “suing” but this is not a civil issue, violating the CFAA is a crime.
Aaron Swartz got supremely fucked for writing a script that downloaded files he legally could access but technically was unauthorized because he accessed them in a way the corporation didn’t like.
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:
.
As I said before, Beeper users are gaining unauthorized access, not Beeper. It is E2EE, they’re not the middleman.
What this guy said https://lemmy.world/comment/6119756
Genuinely curious, what’s the law against reverse engineering an API? I can maybe see the argument for charging for the service, but beeper mini is planning to integrate other services as well so I don’t know if that’ll really hold water.