8 ms·
It's not sms, it's mms, and it is in fact a technical limitation. Honestly we should just sunset MMS entirely. It's like using 56k dialup.
by mullingitover 3y ago
It's not sms, it's mms, and it is in fact a technical limitation.
Honestly we should just sunset MMS entirely. It's like using 56k dialup.
- gryn 3y agoyeah, but the one blocking its sun-setting is apple with their artificial barriers. if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a different name would've have replaced MMS by now.
- mullingitover 3y ago[flagged]
- rezonant 3y agoPlease don't conflate messaging apps with texting, it's disingenuous. Texting is the feature users expect of any smartphone to be able to send a message to any other user who has a smartphone, regardless of what apps they have installed.
- mullingitover 3y ago[flagged]
- throwway120385 3y agoThe legacy phone system has a lot of features that aren't present in its replacement, such as freedom to connect with anyone who has a phone number, the ability to move your phone number from carrier to carrier, and the knowledge that as an individual the phone company can't block me from contacting its subscribers entirely for free as long as I pay a fee to my own phone company. It's way better than being on Whatsapp or iMessage or Slack or Teams or whatever you're proposing to replace it because I have a lot of control over who can contact me and nobody is using my presence on the phone network as a means to drag all of my friends over to the same phone network.
- mullingitover 3y agoThe legacy phone system currently enables breathtaking amounts of abuse and fraud. I know all the benefits you're listing, and I would enthusiastically surrender them just to watch the legacy phone system be decommissioned. If we invented the legacy phone system today, it would be illegal to operate because it's so insecure. We certainly wouldn't dream of forcing everyone to use it.
- simfree 3y agoAny replacement would have the same fraudulent traffic migrate to it. You can already see this type of fraudulent traffic occur on Telegram with the constant crypto bots and on Signal with the romance scams. A PSTN sunset would force this fraudulent traffic to migrate to the over the top communications platforms, eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably, destroy reliable voice quality on cellular networks as there's no consistent way to prioritize third party voice and video traffic.
- mullingitover 3y ago> Any replacement would have the same fraudulent traffic migrate to it. We've had SSL on the web for 30 years now. We don't visit our bank's web site and wonder if we're really talking to our bank, but we casually accept that of course someone calling from our bank's phone number could be a fraudster. There might be some fraud that is able to migrate, but it wouldn't be the smorgasbord for fraudsters that the legacy phone system has created. > eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably This is like saying that we can't put out the dumpster fire because it provides some people with warmth. The 911 system (at least in the US) is already a travesty. Caller locations are a crapshoot for wireless calls. Call centers aren't centralized, standardized, or coordinated, and they're overloaded. The technology is outdated. Moving it off the phone network and onto a centralized digital platform would be a massive improvement.
- throwway120385 3y agoRight now it's easy for me to buy a look-alike domain name for a bank, host a page on that domain that looks like a bank's login page, and pass through to the real bank to take over someone's account in an automated fashion. TLS doesn't prevent me from doing that. What TLS does do is ensure that when I communicate with a third party on the internet, that communication can't be intercepted by any intervening switches or routers. TLS per se does not have any other properties. However, we've constructed a system of chains of trust using TLS certificates and trusted third parties. That system is not a technical system and TLS does not have the innate property of enabling you to trust or not to trust someone. It's an important distinction because the PSTN and our system of TLS Certificate Authorities is a social solution to a social problem. And so suggesting that TLS somehow magically has a property that it prevents fraud is hard for me to follow, because fraud is also a social problem and you can't use technology to solve social problems. Technology can be used to lubricate, to bring people together, and to ensure that conventions are followed and that peoples' solutions can interoperate. But the real innovation in TLS from a fraud perspective is actually the network of companies, nonprofits, third parties, and government agencies who have collectively established root Certificate Authorities and who have ensured that those CAs control who you trust. None of that is specified in any RFC. It's entirely something we humans made up after someone created an enabling technology. As for problems with PSTN, there are similar technical solutions, but largely PSTN fraud and spam are a social problem and require social interventions. This is why we have the FCC in the US, for example, because when the scope of an intervention becomes large enough it has to be administered by someone. When you say PSTN doesn't work because of fraud and spam, in my mind what you're saying is that the FCC does not do enough to prevent fraud and spam.
- dzhiurgis 3y agoUS should sue themselves for requiring a phone number for a person to exist to begin with.
- pdntspa 3y ago> holds us back from adopting modern technology. Where we're all captive subjects of some cloud asshole spoon-feeding us bits of infrastructure we used to be able to run ourselves
- astrange 3y agoMy vague understanding is nobody uses SMS outside America and the entire population is on WhatsApp.
- microtherion 3y agoIf only! My wife seems to juggle her friends between SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal.
- rezonant 3y agoSounds complicated. No wonder people in the US don't want to do that when texting is 100% free (with their phone plan) and universal.
- geraldwhen 3y agoYeah I’m not installing an app to send a message. I get video and gifs and all sorts of whatever I need with iMessage. Only android people fuss with third party apps because their phones can’t reasonably send messages by default.
- lucasban 3y agoAndroid devices can reasonably send messages between each other, by default. The whole issue here is that Apple has been intentionally holding back the cross-platform messaging experience in order to make competitors seem less appealing.
- ygjb 3y agoThat is a shockingly user hostile take, especially considering you call out the reason why so many people still use it: it is the only solution for most users that consistently works. The main reason people still use it is despite the issues with MMS (and SMS in general) the reality is that every vendor wants to own the messaging stack to build or strengthen moat, and the regulators who are in a position to enforce standard protocols have incentives in many or all countries to weaken the security of messaging protocols to meet surveillance objectives (whether those objectives are well scrutinized methods with judicial oversight, or blanket surveillance requirements). Blaming the user as lazy or incompetent completely overlooks the significant financial incentives that platform owners and network providers have to maintain the status quo, or force the new status quo to strengthen their moats.
- makapuf 3y agoMost people couldnt care less with sub par video message security for most (not all) uses. The fact that every vendor want anything but a good standard stack for keeping their users captive is imo a more powerful incentive.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoBoth your post and OP's are confident and emotionally forceful without any reasoning why. On one hand, in most of the world, especially countries less developed than the US, messaging apps are very popular and SMS is either not even provided in the plan or barely used. On the other I do think that at the very least phone manufacturers consider MMS/SMS to be a core functionality because it's built into most phones. As such it does feel user hostile to not care about MMS/SMS. I can see the merits of both but don't know why I'd believe one over the other. I'm curious where y'all's confidence comes from in user hostility or not and what indicators you have to tip your hand one way or the other. That might result in more elucidating conversation too.
- ygjb 3y agoSure, I consider calling users lazy and incompetent very hostile because I have spent nearly 22 years building, testing and securing systems starting with ecommerce apps in the early 2000s, through government, finance, browsers and supporting services (Mozilla), internet scale infrastructure at OpenDNS, Cisco, And Fastly, and now at Amazon. All along the way people routinely attack users for making poor decisions when they are simply using defaults, or the easiest to use and most compatible technologies. * Pffft... Of course they got hacked, they used IE * Of course they got hacked, they opened an email attachment * Of course they got hacked, they clicked that homoglyph In this particular case, SMS and MMS are baked into the phone, and delivered by the wireless provider, and for better or worse on the UX front, work with just a phone number and across all mobile OS. For anything other than that, if users have peers using other device or services, the alternative is to use multiple services to communicate with different groups based on which services they use. That means repeating messages across multiple providers, and/or missing folks because all the platform services have actively silo'd their platforms to prevent interoperability. Yeah, SMS and MMS suck, but they suck less for the simple use case of messaging folks with cell phones, because the barrier to messaging those folks is having their phone number. It's lazy and incompetent to attack users when users actually have very little control over the actual security or usability of the services and systems they use, especially as everything is hosted in cloud platforms.
- catlikesshrimp 3y agoTLDR: It has nothing to do with MMS But that didn't address GP's comment. Apple states that green bubbles are pariahs because messages can't be sent to androids so it breaks the system, or something like that [BS] Iphone users think that green bubbles are pariahs because they aren't part of their exclusive group, and because green bubbles turn chat groups into rubbish, because yada yada not iphone. (spoiler alert, apple does it on purpose) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/android-users-stigmatized-by-apple-as-doj-seeks-justice-for-green-bubbles/ar-BB1kjbhp https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/android-users-stig... For laughs: Tim Cook telling someone he has to buy her mom an iphone (1hr 0mins 17secs) https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=3615&v=sdvzYtgmIjs&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=3615&v=sdvzYtgmIjs&feature=you...
- inferiorhuman 3y agoif apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a different name would've have replaced MMS by now. The only reason there's any RCS interoperability right now is because most carriers have bought into the Google RCS stack. Before that you absolutely had to be aware of which carrier the recipient was using. If memory serves T-Mobile is running both a Google and non-Google RCS stack. RCS is and was a mess. Hell, if you've a rooted Android you can't access Google RCS and any RCS messages sent your way will disappear into the ether.
- simfree 3y agoThere are no third party RCS apps outside of hardware manufacturer skins on Google Messages as Google has shut them all out. If you want to interact with the RCS world as a non-wireless carrier, expect to pay upwards of 10 cents a message and have a minimum revenue commit of thousands of dollars a month. Carriers also don't get paid for inbound texts on RCS, creating a huge new cost center instead of symmetrical texting volume resulting in minimal costs like the current SMS/MMS ecosystem.
- throwaway-blaze 3y agoThis is untrue, the US carriers had a "cross-carrier" consortium that had built most of its own RCS stack, complete with animating dots when the other party was typing, and good image and video support. But Samsung refused to use it (not sure if Google was bribing them in the background) so it got killed in favor of supporting Google's flavor of RCS.
- Bud 3y ago[dead]
- throwaway-blaze 3y agoUm no, if the powers that be who control the LTE and 5G (and soon 6G) standards would improve or replace MMS, apple would be forced to improve their ability to send images/videos because they must comply with the standards to have their phone allowed on the carrier networks. This is a dumb complaint honestly. The carriers and Qualcomm closely control the standards bodies and could address this problem. Instead they focused on the bag-of-garbage that is RCS, which Apple has finally said they will support. But because RCS is a bag-of-garbage, Apple plans to support a different flavor (the basic standard) from Google's. $0.50 says Google will magically start supporting the basic standard too once Apple ships it.
- secondcoming 3y agoI can count on one hand the number of MMS messages I've ever received.
- starttoaster 3y agoMMS was much more common before data messaging apps like Discord or Facebook Messenger became some of the normalized places for cell phone chatter, which anecdotally I think that switch started happening (or at least I began recognizing that switch) around the early 2010's. So I'm guessing you're a very young person based on how little MMS you claim to have received. Which is fine, it's fair to point out that technologies us old folk use may differ slightly from what the whippersnappers are doing. And there are no wrong answers there, except that it's also fair to point out that when you purchase a cell phone, before you install any apps, you have some ingrained cell phone messaging features. One of which is a messenger app built on top of SMS and MMS. I've probably sent and received thousands of MMS messages over the years, because it was the primary method for a cell phone user to send a picture to your friends and family. Back in the day, at least, and still today for some. It was also the way that us old folk were able to send group texts at a time.
- secondcoming 3y agoI'm in my forties! It may depend on the region of the world you grew up in, but in the UK at least MMS was quite expensive for what it offered.
- techcode 3y agoUntil 2010 I worked for Route Messaging (now they are called Telesign) on internal systems as well as integrations with mobile operators and other "messaging brokers" around the world. MMS was indeed order of magnitude more expensive than SMS and several orders of magnitude less used. Reasoning for such high prices was more about mobile internet/data back then being really expensive "1G" - and MMS was (still is I guess) using mobile data to send/receive "multimedia messages". At this point I expect that cost of MMS is more about maintaining legacy systems/servers for that. Although in something like 2008/2009 integrating through legacy SMS protocols (those previously used by beepers/pagers) was cheaper than through modern protocols. Some operators had hardware boxes supporting those that were already paid off long time ago.
- inferiorhuman 3y agoit is in fact a technical limitation. No, it's not. Carriers limit the attachment sizes quite severely, but that's not an inherent limitation of MMS.
- simfree 3y agoThe file size limits on iOS for MMS are far below what most carriers permit, making photos and videos sent from iPhone look much worse when sent via MMS.
- inferiorhuman 3y agoDoubt that. AT&T still limits attachments to 1 megabyte for picture, video, and audio files. That's not an iOS limitation. I just sent an animated GIF to a Google Voice number and it was compressed to about 800 kilobytes. I suspect the people whining the most are communicating with folks that have "Low Quality Image Mode" enabled on their iPhone. https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1041906/ https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1041906/
- ipaddr 3y agoBelow are the limits per carrier. You are correct AT&T is 1m. The iphone has a limit of 200k which can be raised to 300k. Parent was correct. https://www.infobip.com/docs/mms/message-types https://www.infobip.com/docs/mms/message-types
- inferiorhuman 3y ago[flagged]
- pests 3y agoTheir link references MMS not iMessage. How does Apple get around that MMS limitation?
- LorenDB 3y agoI still want to see Matrix get adopted for messaging by default. Purism actually did it with their Librem 5 (probably one of the few good things about that company, but that's a rant for another day).
- c0pium 3y agoThat sounds like hell. If you think that carrier interop is bad now, wait till everyone is using a different matrix provider with different optional features turned on or off. At least today there are some barriers to SMS spam, matrix would open the floodgates while making blocking it exponentially worse.