[purpleidea]

> RCS is the future

It's really not. It's a step up from SMS, but the real future is true end-to-end encrypted communications. Signal is the next step up, and then hopefully we'll eventually get really secure messaging where the core OS doesn't help leak out your information.

[Andrex]

> > RCS is the future

> It's really not. It's a step up from SMS, but the real future is true end-to-end encrypted communications.

I thought this was a board filled with futurists? Can we really imagine no future scenario where the RCS spec gets E2EE?

At least Apple seems to think it's worth trying. And I think they'll succeed.

This kind of annoying defeatism is why SMS took so long to upgrade to RCS in the first place. "Eh it sucks right now and there's no use working together to make it better, lets just lock everyone into our own app and move on." If this mentality never changed we would not be enjoying RCS's benefits at all.

And to be clear, over 1 billion monthly active users are benefiting from RCS features _right now_ (and a good chunk of them are enjoying Google's proprietary E2EE). Look at a line chart of RCS adoption and tell me again it's not the future.

[rezonant]

> I thought this was a board filled with futurists? Can we really imagine no future scenario where the RCS spec gets E2EE?

The quality of posts on this site notably declines when Apple needs to be defended. You get posts lacking intellectual curiosity abundant, seemingly not putting in the work to think critically about policy implications, what's best for the industry, or even how technologies work. You'd be forgiven for thinking you were on Reddit on these threads, as the typical respondent fails to read the other threads, fails to learn from each other, fails to be deep and thoughtful about their position, their arguments and the positions and arguments of their fellow chatters.

You see the same misconceptions and the same falsehoods long debunked on every previous thread discussing these matters regurgitated with confidence. And it's another struggle to try to educate on these issues.

Thanks for approaching this with curiosity and a desire to improve these standards, it's so unfortunate so many who would claim themselves technologists would embrace the status quo and ignore what's possible in the future.

Google implemented E2E four years ago. While they could have got started (and announced that they had gotten started) on the path to standardization of standard E2E on day one, it takes a lot of time for this stuff to be developed. It goes a lot faster though when Apple and Google work together, because the usual stakeholders (GSMA) are forced to move faster.

What Google's approach proves is that it is perfectly possible to layer E2E encryption on top of RCS in a way that does not require a carrier to add their own support, which is something I am sure Apple is interested in. For details on that here is Google's white paper: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

[initplus]

The reason it took so longe is because carriers are still involved with RCS, and carriers suck.

Every successful messaging protocol aside from SMS does so by routing around the carrier and sending messages over data. iMessage, WhatsApp, telegram, signal etc.

[emayljames]

Yeah, although I do like RCS, for instance my network dragged their heals in updating to latest specs and was always broken and patchy at best, until they just gave up and handed all their RCS infrastructure over to Google to run directly. Networks are surprisingly bad at implimenting tech.

[throw10920]

> I thought this was a board filled with futurists? Can we really imagine no future scenario where the RCS spec gets E2EE?

"Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[RadiozRadioz]

Why is E2EE the argument people keep jumping to with RCS? The bigger problem is the reliance on carriers, that's far worse. Far fewer people are talking about that issue (thankfully there are some in the comments below, I've never seen anyone on Reddit mention it)

[tcfhgj]

Signal isn't a step up, because it centralizes communication.

(linearized) Matrix would be a step up.

[anticensor]

Matrix is strongly persistent, thin client; Signal is ephemeral, thin server. They cannot replace each other.

[tcfhgj]

It doesn't really matter, because you can replace SMS with linearized Matrix. Signal can't, because it's centralized

[anticensor]

Signal the protocol can be and is implemented by third parties. Signal the platform, is different. Keep in mind Signal's only centralised part is thin server that acts as a relay. Matrix is a thin client protocol that relies on server to enforce soundness rules.

[tcfhgj]

IDK what's your point. A encryption protocol isn't enough to replace SMS. Linearized Matrix is, and uses the Signal Protocol, though MLS probably would be a more future proof solution