7 ms·

What a horrible headline, but Wired being the source is enough of a warning. Google is doing nothing nefarious here, SMS needs to go the way of 9600bps modems

• ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  There's definitely some nefarious parts here. Namely, that most RCS compatible carriers are using Google's cloud service to operate it, as far as I am aware, and its likely Google rolling out RCS without carriers in some instances is a bid to pressure them into it. Furthermore, the strategy of implementing messaging through carriers came after all of their repeated failures to convince the public to use their chat apps, and having the carriers push the feature instead removes user agency. It's a way to force us to message with Google after we've repeatedly rejected them. As per usual, Google is claiming to develop something in the open as a standard, but it's designed chiefly to bring everything under their roof. RCS is kinda like AMP for text messaging.
  • sverige 7y ago
    "Those who have adopted the system most fervently, such as Vodafone in the UK, have done so because they see the opportunity to monetise smarter messaging" Everything I need to know about why I don't want RCS is contained in this simple statement.
  • kyrra 7y ago
    (googler, opinions are my own) Disagree. RCS is most definitely an open standard that Google has bought onto in the last few years. The standard itself is 20 years old at this point I think. The problem was that carriers could not agree on a set of features to implement, which made all of the various implementations non-compatible. Google bought Jibe that was working on a standard implementation that carriers could roll out. The biggest thing really that Google has been pushing for with the GSMA is the universal profile, which defined a set of features that all carriers would implement. We are now at the spot where universal profile has mostly been agreed upon. Carriers can implement their own version, get a self-hosted version of Jibe, or let Google host the RCS system. The last option is the easiest for carriers to do, but obviously puts Google in the middle. The nice thing about RCS is that it is a standard. Google could totally walk away from it, and all the carriers and phone makers could still use it. You can't say that about any other chat app out there (maybe matrix would be the only one).
    • ulfw 7y ago
      > Google could totally walk away from it, and all the carriers and phone makers could still use it. Not exactly unlikely...
      • hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
        This is getting boring. Which products that Google has given an SLA on have they dropped without transitioning users and against SLA? Not prototypes or random free experiments but actual products?
        • reaperducer 7y ago
          Why the SLA qualifier? That's like saying, "Go ahead and name one Google product with an owl in its logo that got randomly dropped. You can't. That means Google is stable."
          • hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
            Because otherwise it is deeply pointless to complain about a company dropping prototypes. The SLA tells you they are planning to support it. Anything else is just you using a free prototype.
            • TeMPOraL 7y ago
              Sure. So the take-away is still, whatever you don't sign an SLA for with Google is liable to disappear on short notice. Including Google's interest in RCS.
        • littlestymaar 7y ago
          Google reader wasn't an experiment, it was an 8 years old product with millions if users, and it was closed with just a little bit more than 3 months notice. Which is a ridiculously short notice…
          • 7y ago
  • darkerside 7y ago
    Google is basically the new Microsoft but with better PR
    • jacquesm 7y ago
      It's worse because the damage that MS could do was to some extent limited. Google can do a great deal of damage and in fact is already doing so on an individual level.
    • krzyk 7y ago
      ... and worse (legendary bad) customer support. On a scale from bad to good customer support, Google is on the far left and Amazon on far right - from my (paying) customer point of view.
      • yowlingcat 7y ago
        In my experience with AWS Amazon's paid support isn't always great, but they at least try to give you something to pay for so you can get what you pay for. This is in stark contrast to Google.
• IgorPartola 7y ago
  Correction: iMessage is one of the best technologies overall, with the main flaw being its total lack of interoperability. It works and it works well. I do wish something similar existed for everyone, but as far as the actual technology of it from the end user’s point of view, it is fucking great.
• david_draco 7y ago
  RCS is still not encrypted.
  • izacus 7y ago
    And it's not encrypted because governments and carriers which were there at standardization demanded for it to not be encrypted. Your local government and your local carrier demand your communication isn't encrypted. A for-profit corporation will not fix that - Apple gave over encryption keys to China as well when the push came to shove. Not voting for governments breaking human rights will.
    • danShumway 7y ago
      > A for-profit corporation will not fix that This seems incorrect, given that there are multiple E2E apps on the market today. Unless you're implying that Signal has also given encryption keys to China. Regardless of why RCS isn't encrypted, it's not encrypted. I can vote in a government that supports encryption. But if I do that after RCS is standarized, the standard still won't be encrypted. If what you're arguing here is true, this seems like a good reason not to implement RCS until after we get the government sorted out, or to abandon RCS and try to build a standard without government inputs. I mean, what's the timeline for getting China to support encryption? 5 years? 10? Should I be throwing my support behind unencrypted messaging standards in the meantime?
      • thekyle 7y ago
        I would assume that Signal has not cooperated with China since they are banned there.
        • danShumway 7y ago
          That means my choice is, "use an encrypted standard that's banned in China", or "use an unencrypted standard that's insecure everywhere". If China isn't going to approve an encrypted standard, then that sounds like a pretty strong argument that standards processes like RCS that have to play nicely with the Chinese government are the wrong way to build a messaging protocol. The preferable way to do this is probably to support a strongly encrypted protocol, and then build a bridge or a fallback for Chinese messaging since they won't adopt the standard. But then why not just use SMS as the fallback?
• Barrin92 7y ago
  odd to see that they're starting to roll it out in Europe though where internet based messaging (i.e. whatsapp) has already largely replaced sms, I've rarely seen use sms in years. Given that RCS does not appear to be encrypted by default it's actually a step back over what most people are already using.
  • jsty 7y ago
    Given that one of the few things I still get text messages for is two-factor authentication codes from people who should know better (looking at you financial institutions ...), SMS can't die soon enough from my POV. Although replacing it with an un-encrypted protocol in 2019 seems a tad silly, and one can only hope they choose to move to better 2FA methods rather than RCS.
    • criddell 7y ago
      > replacing it with an un-encrypted protocol in 2019 seems a tad silly I don't think it's just silly, it's irresponsible. I wonder if software engineers were actual licensed engineers, would any make an unencrypted-by-default service today?
• jethro_tell 7y ago
  Google had quite a number of opportunities to level the playing field here by making an actual cross platform, distributed chat app with protocol plugins. Why they've been making bad chat apps and demolishing each Eco system it creates is beyond me. It's been years since a Google chat app could be used by itself. Usually you need two, and no one needs another unecrypted sms replacement. The world moved on and Google missed the boat here.
  • izacus 7y ago
    And this is literaly what they're doing with RCS - it's a carrier standardized protocol to upgrade the existing SMS functionality. I wish you'd read up on it before you fell into this complete rant. RCS also beautifully demostrates the problem with these open protocols - carriers simply refused to support it and federate between themselves, so you couldn't even send a message to a non-carrier branded phone, even if your exact carrier supported it. They (with push from governments) even demanded it's unencrypted. This is Google basically stopping to wait for carriers to stop screwing their users and allowing some users to get this messaging protocol without waiting for their carrier to stop being incompetent. Unfortunately they're also going about it in the typical Google way with insane rollout rules.
    • jethro_tell 7y ago
      Who uses sms for anything but authenticating WhatsApp/signal/telegram? No need to wait for carriers just try making something people want to use. I'm caught up on rcs, I suppose it's an improvement over sms, but what isn't? It's not an improvement over email, or what's app or signal.
      • izacus 7y ago
        > Who uses sms for anything but authenticating WhatsApp/signal/telegram? According to any kind of statistics - 100s of millions of people on the world. Yes, still. Please do look outside the bubble.
      • thekyle 7y ago
• ubercow13 7y ago
  RCS isn’t encrypted though, whereas WhatsApp is. I can use WhatsApp with anyone in the world, it’s compatible with basically any carrier network in any country and any phone. It’s not clear what benefit you’re saying RCS will have over it?
  • frosted-flakes 7y ago
    You can't use WhatsApp with people who don't have WhatsApp. Which is the entire point of having a Standard Messaging Service. But SMS is very basic and limited in functionality, which is where RCS comes in. I still use SMS almost exclusively for the simple reason that it is standard—except for group messages, for which I use Signal.
    • ubercow13 7y ago
      Despite being a standard, you can’t really use SMS with people outside your country because it is astronomically expensive
      • reaperducer 7y ago
        Depends on your country and your plan. I can only speak as an American, but sending an SMS to Europe costs 20¢ on my plan. Hardly astronomical, especially considering that when SMS was new, it cost 50¢-$1.00 per message.
        • why-oh-why 7y ago
          You don’t think 20¢ is astronomical? A person does not simply send one message. A teenager will send a hundred micro messages as day as short as “lol” I wouldn’t dream of communicating the same way if messages weren’t “free” (i.e. part of your internet fee) I say this as someone with “most of my friends” living in other countries at any given time.
        • esotericn 7y ago
          In the UK SMS was about 5p prepaid. Even that was expensive. It's ~100 bytes.
• danShumway 7y ago
  From the article: > At the moment, RCS is not end-to-encrypted – this has been one of SMS's biggest criticisms. It doesn't mention whether there are efforts to get RCS encrypted; maybe Wired left that part out. A cursory Duckduckgo search didn't turn anything up, just more people complaining that there's no point in switching off of iMessage (which is end-to-end encrypted) to a protocol that's worse. Maybe I missed something. This is the first time I'm hearing about RCS, so I don't want to dismiss it out-of-hand. But it's difficult for me to imagine why I would want to jump to a new protocol in the future that's not E2E encrypted and that is going to have to fall back to SMS for old phones anyway, when I could just skip all of this and encourage my smartphone-owning friends to use Signal. By the time RCS finally gets standardized, it's even possible Matrix will have finally gotten its act together on security, which will get rid of Signal's centralization problems and will allow me to message any internet-connected device, regardless of whether or not it has a phone number.
  • xenocyon 7y ago
    "encourage my smartphone-owning friends to use Signal" is precisely the problem, though. I like Signal, but there should be a way to message people that doesn't necessitate sender and recipient having to use the same client app.
    • danShumway 7y ago
      That's a good point, but I'm not sure it changes anything. Signal will fall back to SMS today if the target number isn't using Signal. That's one of the big reasons I use it, I don't need a separate app for my contacts that use dumb-phones. Given that RCS will also need to fall back to SMS for phones that don't support it, the only distinction I see here is whether it's easier to get all of my friends to move to a new phone that supports RCS, or if it's easier to get all of my friends to switch apps. Either way, my friends that refuse to change will need to get SMS messages, as they already do today. On the Matrix side of things, this is theoretically solved by making the protocol separate from the client. This allows any company or phone to have their own Matrix client, and allows users to swap out their clients if they have other preferences. For existing clients that don't support the protocol, you use bridges. There is already a Matrix to iMessage bridge, although it's really not practical for most people to use because Apple locks down iMessage so hard. But the same question applies -- will it be easier to get Apple to switch to a brand-new protocol, or will it be easier to get Apple to support a bridge to their existing protocol? Of course, in the worst case a Matrix client could fall back to SMS for unsupported contacts, which (again) RCS is already going to need to do. The problem with Matrix pretty much comes down to security. I keep hearing people say that they're going to turn on E2E encryption by default any day now, and as far as I know it still hasn't happened. My impression is the technology is still a little immature to rely on for security-critical tasks, although when the alternative is SMS, that may not matter.
• sametmax 7y ago
  Will RCS work on dumb phones and phones without data or wifi ? Asking for real, I've never heard of the tech. SMS for me are a godsend. They work with every phones, every carriers. They work on terrible networks. They work in the mountains, in the country side, in the trains and cars when going fast, in many tunnels and metros. They work in crazily lost places when I travel. Once I sent a text to my father from the Dogon country, a northern part of Mali where there is only sand and a few goats. Lost your phone ? If you can remember/find the phone number, get a cheap sim, send a text, you are back in business. No permission scheme, no auth, no friends to add or certificate. 1 SIM = 1 ID is also very convenient. SMS is the email of phone. Limited. Primitive. Efficient. Reliable. So if you want to replace it with something else, you need a very good story.
  • msh 7y ago
    It will auto downgrade to sms/mms if the recipient does not support rcs.
    • NullPrefix 7y ago
      This implies no encryption
      • floatboth 7y ago
        according to the article, RCS does not do e2e encryption
        • tgragnato 7y ago
          RCS traffic is essentially SIP over TLS ... Which means that it is "compliant with government regulations", and with all the ensuing vulnerabilities.
    • jolmg 7y ago
      And if the sender does not support RCS? Would there be a way for an old or cheap phone to contact a new smartphone after SMS is supposedly replaced with RCS?