6 ms·

Please 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

Please 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      Any 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 ago
        Right 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.
  - Detrytus 3y ago
    > freedom to connect with anyone who has a phone number This is actually a bug, not a feature, as it enables all kind of robocalls and sms spam. That's why I love the iPhone feature that allows me to block all the calls from numbers not in my contact list. It does not allow this for SMS though...
    - rezonant 3y ago
      It does allow it for SMS apparently, but the UI is easy to misunderstand. In the "Unknown & Spam" settings where you picked "Filter Unknown Senders" there is an option below it marked "SMS Filtering" and you need to set that to... "SMS Filter". https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-block-text-messages-from-unknown-numbers-on-iphone-and-android/ https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-block-text-messages-from-... Even if it couldn't do this, that would just bolster the case that Apple is making SMS worse than it has to be on their platform to promote iMessage and its network effects. EDIT: I booted up my iPhone 14 on the latest iOS and I guess this has changed? There isn't a "SMS Filtering" option near the Filter Unknown Senders option which has moved to the top level Messages settings page versus when the guide was written. I'm not sure if that means it always filters SMS or it never does, but again if it doesn't filter SMS at all that's an Apple choice, it doesn't mean you can't do it on SMS.
    - throwway120385 3y ago
      When I was on Android it did allow me to do this for SMS.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    All you would need to replace this is a messaging app that uses email addresses as identifiers and then falls back to sending messages via email if the recipient doesn't have the app.
    - throwway120385 3y ago
      What organization runs the messaging app? Do we have some kind of consortium of companies? And how do we add or remove companies from that list? There are actually a lot of social problems around this that are already solved by the network of arrangements between the companies that run our phone system and the users of the phone system and so on. You'd likely end up recreating that and at the end of the day you'd have rebuilt the phone system. The technical problems are a very small part of this.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        No organization runs the messaging app, it's a protocol that anyone can implement. Publish an RFC. The first time you contact someone who uses a different provider, their messaging app or service sends you an email asking you to confirm that you sent the message, after which your app is associated with your email address on their provider. A combined messaging+email app could handle this automatically. At that point you can make calls, video chats, group chats, E2E encrypted direct messaging etc., using an email address as an identifier. In general, solve problems in the same way that email does but add protocol support for realtime direct communications and end-to-end encryption.
        throwway120385 3y ago
        Somebody has to pay for the infrastructure. You can either have a very loose federation of a lot of individuals running their own infrastructure like in the early Internet on one end of the spectrum or a couple of big companies that essentially run everything like we have now with Google and Meta. But someone has to run it. If you rely on a single company to stand up everyone's instance of the application, then you're right back where we are right now. And how do you manage all of the configuration data for all of the users? There are a lot of practicalities here that I worry you don't appreciate when you say "It's a protocol that anyone can implement." Well, so is PSTN. It just so happens that you need a certain amount of infrastructure to implement it, which is true of everything, even email. I'm not convinced that a new protocol gets us anywhere because it doesn't solve the underlying very human tendency to want to pay someone to deal with all the unsightly stuff so you can get on with your life, which is incidentally also the problem we have with email vis a vis Google.
  - theshackleford 3y ago
    > I have a lot of control over who can contact me This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s literally legal in my country to spam me on my phone number and there is ZERO I can do to change that. Ergo I have fuck all control over who can contact me.
- dzhiurgis 3y ago
  US 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 ago
My vague understanding is nobody uses SMS outside America and the entire population is on WhatsApp.
- microtherion 3y ago
  If only! My wife seems to juggle her friends between SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    Sounds 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 ago
      Yeah 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 ago
        Android 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.
        lynx23 3y ago
        I can easily send SMS to any Android phone from my iPhone. I really dont understand your reasoning. IOW, SMS is cross-platform. Whats the issue?
        lucasban 3y ago

mullingitover 3y ago

[flagged]

throwway120385 3y ago
The 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Any 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 ago
        Right 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.
- Detrytus 3y ago
  > freedom to connect with anyone who has a phone number This is actually a bug, not a feature, as it enables all kind of robocalls and sms spam. That's why I love the iPhone feature that allows me to block all the calls from numbers not in my contact list. It does not allow this for SMS though...
  - rezonant 3y ago
    It does allow it for SMS apparently, but the UI is easy to misunderstand. In the "Unknown & Spam" settings where you picked "Filter Unknown Senders" there is an option below it marked "SMS Filtering" and you need to set that to... "SMS Filter". https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-block-text-messages-from-unknown-numbers-on-iphone-and-android/ https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-block-text-messages-from-... Even if it couldn't do this, that would just bolster the case that Apple is making SMS worse than it has to be on their platform to promote iMessage and its network effects. EDIT: I booted up my iPhone 14 on the latest iOS and I guess this has changed? There isn't a "SMS Filtering" option near the Filter Unknown Senders option which has moved to the top level Messages settings page versus when the guide was written. I'm not sure if that means it always filters SMS or it never does, but again if it doesn't filter SMS at all that's an Apple choice, it doesn't mean you can't do it on SMS.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    When I was on Android it did allow me to do this for SMS.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  All you would need to replace this is a messaging app that uses email addresses as identifiers and then falls back to sending messages via email if the recipient doesn't have the app.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    What organization runs the messaging app? Do we have some kind of consortium of companies? And how do we add or remove companies from that list? There are actually a lot of social problems around this that are already solved by the network of arrangements between the companies that run our phone system and the users of the phone system and so on. You'd likely end up recreating that and at the end of the day you'd have rebuilt the phone system. The technical problems are a very small part of this.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      No organization runs the messaging app, it's a protocol that anyone can implement. Publish an RFC. The first time you contact someone who uses a different provider, their messaging app or service sends you an email asking you to confirm that you sent the message, after which your app is associated with your email address on their provider. A combined messaging+email app could handle this automatically. At that point you can make calls, video chats, group chats, E2E encrypted direct messaging etc., using an email address as an identifier. In general, solve problems in the same way that email does but add protocol support for realtime direct communications and end-to-end encryption.
      - throwway120385 3y ago
        Somebody has to pay for the infrastructure. You can either have a very loose federation of a lot of individuals running their own infrastructure like in the early Internet on one end of the spectrum or a couple of big companies that essentially run everything like we have now with Google and Meta. But someone has to run it. If you rely on a single company to stand up everyone's instance of the application, then you're right back where we are right now. And how do you manage all of the configuration data for all of the users? There are a lot of practicalities here that I worry you don't appreciate when you say "It's a protocol that anyone can implement." Well, so is PSTN. It just so happens that you need a certain amount of infrastructure to implement it, which is true of everything, even email. I'm not convinced that a new protocol gets us anywhere because it doesn't solve the underlying very human tendency to want to pay someone to deal with all the unsightly stuff so you can get on with your life, which is incidentally also the problem we have with email vis a vis Google.
- theshackleford 3y ago
  > I have a lot of control over who can contact me This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s literally legal in my country to spam me on my phone number and there is ZERO I can do to change that. Ergo I have fuck all control over who can contact me.
dzhiurgis 3y ago
US 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 ago

My vague understanding is nobody uses SMS outside America and the entire population is on WhatsApp.

microtherion 3y ago
If only! My wife seems to juggle her friends between SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal.
- rezonant 3y ago
  Sounds 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 ago
    Yeah 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 ago
      Android 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.
      - lynx23 3y ago
        I can easily send SMS to any Android phone from my iPhone. I really dont understand your reasoning. IOW, SMS is cross-platform. Whats the issue?
        lucasban 3y ago