631–640 of 1001 posts
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Hate to be the bearer of bad news but that’s because Signal is teeny tiny. If Signal makes it to a billion users I guarantee it will happen to them.
SMS is bigger than even iMessage, so if you can spam everyone with iMessage and more by using SMS, why would anyone bother with iMessage?
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I'd rather live in a world with spam than a world where corporations get to decide what I run on my devices, and cripple a bunch of critical applications if I decide I want to, y'know, actually do whatever I want with the hardware I own. I'm not unsympathetic to Apple's difficulties and goals here (assuming this spam problem is actually the reason, though I'm skeptical that there aren't also self-serving reasons that…
> rather live in a world with spam than a world where corporations get to decide what I run on my devices So use Android! I have friends with Android. We use WhatsApp abroad and SMS at home. The messages are green and I can't tapback. That's it!
Yes, I use Android, but would like to also be able to interoperate with iMessage. But I don't want to be stuck in a (for now hypothetical) state where I have to choose between using iMessage and being able to do what I want with my phone.
> We use WhatsApp abroad and SMS at home. The messages are green and I can't tapback. That's it!
SMS has ordering, latency, and delivery issues. You also cannot send media over SMS, and MMS has size limits for media that were set decades ago. Any video you send over MMS will be recompressed to the point where it'll be unwatchable. SMS also does not support group chats. MMS does, but delivery and message ordering issues are even worse there, and group chats are inflexible; for example you can't add new people to an existing group chat, or remove existing people.
I do use WhatsApp, grudgingly, for some people who refuse to switch to something else, but I'd like to reduce my reliance on things owned by Meta/Facebook.
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> but having bureaucrats decide is the worst idea ever I agree wholeheartedly, but what's the alternative? The so-called "free market" (not that such a thing actually exists) clearly has not solved this problem for us.
It's a problem for you only because you want to use iMessage. iMessage is about as far from a monopoly as you can get.
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> Apple is using device serial numbers for anti-spam, supported by a fully-authenticated hardware and software stack that does not allow user modification. This can't be true. It is trivial to get iMessage working in a macOS VM with randomly generated hardware IDs.
If it was as simple as that, we would all endlessly be plagued by iMessage spam. It isn’t.
Most businesses, consumers, and developers universally continue to ignore the primary reason that iMessage is a closed platform, rather than an app on every platform as iTunes is: Apple is using device serial numbers for anti-spam, supported by a fully-authenticated hardware and software stack that does not allow user modification. This permits Apple to simply “console ban” any Apple device that spams on iMessage. Th…
Yes, and that is absolutely fine. Computer freedom is more important than the ability to prevent spam. It should be illegal to prevent the rooting of devices or even put up any roadblocks for the user. It doesn't really matter how much this freedom impacts their networks. The freedom to run whatever software we want and interoperate with everything without being discriminated against should be our inviolable right.
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MMS existed long before phones that had chat apps.
MMS was (is?) spectacularly expensive, I recall sending an MMS and it costing in the realm of £1.50 -> £2.00 per message, furthermore there was a maximum size to the attachment you could send with it (100k-200k?). These two alone made it a non-starter. Sure it was exciting at first when the first 3G colour display phones with cameras were a thing, but the cost and size limits were prohibitive when proper smartphones…
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I'd rather live in a world with spam than a world where corporations get to decide what I run on my devices, and cripple a bunch of critical applications if I decide I want to, y'know, actually do whatever I want with the hardware I own. I'm not unsympathetic to Apple's difficulties and goals here (assuming this spam problem is actually the reason, though I'm skeptical that there aren't also self-serving reasons that…
> I'd rather live in a world with spam […] That is a personal choice, and I choose to not have spam on my phone. Several months ago I was subjected to a floodgate of good ol' fashioned SMS spam that lasted several weeks. There was no way to stop the spam because the phone was receiving it through the legacy SMS channel coming specifically from Android devices infected with Flubot; the bulk of spam now comes from unpa…
The problem here is that we are talking about a (possible, hypothetical) measure that blocks spam, but requires phones to be 100% locked down and unmodified from the factory. I categorically refuse to accept that sort of thing. If you will accept that, then you are a part of the problem.
In reality, though, there are plenty of ways to combat spam that do not require us to have locked-down phones and move closer and closer to a corporate nanny state. Your shitty telco is actually fully capable of blocking spam like what you've received, but they have chosen not to.
> Corporations, such as Google, make decisions for users without getting their consent nor without informing the users.
Sure, but at present I can wipe my phone and install GrapheneOS or CalyxOS or whatever, and Google will not be able to make any decisions as to what I do on my phone.
I get that they make other random decisions for us. Sure, that's inevitable. If I want to use Google Docs or whatever, they will make decisions about how my data is used, and what features are present in the product, etc. I accept that, and am ok with that. But if I'm sold a piece of general-purpose hardware, I expect to be able to do whatever I want with it.
> If you sign into a Google account in a web browser on your phone, for instance, the sign-in will also silently and non-consentually sign you into your Google account across all Google apps installed on the device without informing you.
Maybe if you use Chrome, but... I don't. So that doesn't happen to me.
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> Because it doesn’t affect everyone and aesthetics are not equal to accessibility? The thing with accessibility is that it does affect everyone. If you get woken up by a call and open iMessage in the middle of the night, being able to read the message accurately while blinking away eye gunk matters. Better contrast helps you read your text message if your phone is on a table across from you lying flat. There's going…
If you get woken up by a call and open iMessage in the middle of the night, being able to read the message accurately while blinking away eye gunk matters. The only green text bubbles are for text you send via SMS. Incoming text is styled the same regardless of protocol.