Universal Chat Application, Beeper, Will Be Available To Everyone (For Free) In A Matter Of Weeks.

Chris Remington@beehaw.org to

Technology@beehaw.org – 301 points – 1 years ago

blog.beeper.com

I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.

The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.

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Apparently it's based on matrix bridges, and you can self-host it if you want. Sounds intriguing imo.

It’s not all bad, you’re right. It’s just that this

To use Beeper, you must give the app permission to send and receive messages through other chat networks using your account credentials. By definition, this may be less secure than using other chat apps alone, especially encrypted chat apps like Signal.

Makes me lose interest. I understand the motivation behind it, yes they encrypt e2e but it’s still sacrificing security (or maybe I should say increasing risk)

Self hosting is a good alternative option!

The bridges need to decrypt your messages before encrypting them again to send them to you. This is done in memory, so it's not impossible for your messages to be read by beeper, but quite difficult.

That said, self hosting will always be a safer option. It's just not for everyone

How is it difficult for Beeper to read unencrypted messages from memory?

Super easy. Especially since this is all under their control. So they could simply write those messages elsewhere if they wanted to. I’m not saying they do, but it’s technically possible and a walk in the park.

I would generally trust such a company to do it right. But that doesn’t save you when law enforcement and such get involved.

Memory is not storage, so you would need to be logging what's in memory, I guess. Not impossible, but also not trivial either.

Honestly I'm not sure how it could be done, but I'm sure it's possible

You mean you don't want to go back to the Blackberry model?