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Comment by namdnay | Hacker News Reader

However bad their Signal fork was, at least it was legal. What's crazy is that this very company was also selling a cracked WhatsApp, which is a whole different kettle of fish... and people were buying it! real corporations and governments were buying this crap - it's insane

https://smarsh.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#30000001FgxH/a/Pb000...

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Why would that be illegal? In the Beeper case, the DOJ has not been sympathetic to companies attempting to ban third-party messaging clients of proprietary protocols [0] — is WhatsApp different?

The WhatsApp archiver, from what I can tell, seems to install a patch on the user's WhatsApp installation. Probably a security nightmare, sure, but I don't think it would be illegal.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/21/doj-calls-out-apple-for-br...

They are actually distributing a rebuilt client binary, complete with the Meta branding. That’s a clear breach of both the licensing of the software (I’m pretty sure it’s not open source) as well as the trademarks of Meta

It’s not the same thing as providing a compatible app with their own branding

> and people were buying it! real corporations and governments were buying this crap - it's insane

Anedote: in Wall Street, Global Relay and TeleMessage are the major players when it comes to achieving communication for compliance.

before that wallstreet ran on yahoo messenger! they only stopped because new yahoo brand owners didn't understood the value of this and shut it down because there weren't enough teens signing up.

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