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Sunbird / ‘Nothing Chats’ is Not Secure. (texts.blog)

submitted 7 months ago by Denatured@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Nothing Chats has already been pulled from Google Play over privacy issues / Nothing pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Google Play store “until further notice” after reports that Sunbird sends messages in plain text.

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[-] emptyfish@beehaw.org 14 points 7 months ago

If I understood correctly the Sunbird solution is basically setting up an account on a virtual computer and then relaying imessages? That has all kinds of red flags associated if true.

The obsession with blue bubbles is really silly from all sides of it. Ironically I think Apple intended it to allow people to understand when a message was secure or not, I don’t think they thought it would become a social status marker. Don’t get me wrong, they could have put effort in to better integrate once this all started and clearly they’re leveraging the situation to retain customers - I’m one of them, I gave up and went to iOS because 99% of my family is there and I can’t convince them to adopt Signal, etc.

Having said all of that, trying to build third party middleware at the expense of user security just to fake having an iPhone app is equally silly.

[-] rubythulhu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 7 months ago

I think Apple intended it to allow people to understand when a message was secure or not

I don’t even think it’s security; It meant the messages are free. A large part of the early marketing for iMessage was that it bypasses the sms network entirely and that you could text as much as you want even if you didn’t have unlimited texting on your plan, as long as you were talking in blue bubbles.

[-] emptyfish@beehaw.org 2 points 7 months ago

That’s interesting, as a late comer to the Apple ecosystem I will admit I was just speculating. Thanks for sharing that!

[-] Skimmer@lemmy.zip 5 points 7 months ago

Yeah, its just stupid on all angles. Nearly all security benefits of using iMessage over something like SMS go out the window entirely when using middleware like this. The only thing you gain is the color of your bubble and maybe some extra features. Overall its useless. If someone seriously thinks lower of a person or their social status of whatever because of the COLOR OF THEIR MESSAGE... that person has issues and I could care less about what they think of me, some self reflection could be nice.

this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023

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