Submitted 1 year ago by hop@rabbitea.rs to technology@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: kbin.projectsegfau.lt/m/tech@kbin.social/t/26889
Google just announced that all RCS conversations in Messages are now fully end-to-end encrypted, even in group chats. RCS stands for Rich Communication Services and is replacing traditional text and picture messaging, providing you with more dynamic and secure features. With RCS enabled, you can share high-res photos and videos, see typing indicators for your…
Reminds me how much I hate Apple.
Thanks Google for making Android.
Now please turn the evil knob down a notch and go back being the awesome company you once where.
The fuck does this have to do with Apple?
Apple purposely will not integrate this to keep a walled garden around their ecosystem and make messaging between apole/Android a shit experience.
In a perfect world everyone would just adopt rcs, it’s better for consumers but Apple only gives a shit about branding/$$$.
I feel like Google has everything to gain and apple has more to lose by implementing this. It’s not good guy Google, bad guy Apple. It’s a business decision. I say this as an Apple hater.
If the shoe was on the other foot Google would be doing the same thing.
Google tracks you everywhere you go all over the internet. Like 90% of websites have a script that calls home to Google to let them know you visited. That’s their business model.
Now, open up RCS to third party texting apps… Like you said you would many years ago
Yes! I’d love to go back to using Signal as my main messaging app.
Using Signal since a few years. Don’t know anything about security but from a user perspective, I can highly recommend it. Takes some time converting your friends but after that it does its thing.
In my experience some friends are unconvertable, and at that point group chats with those friends just end up in the same place as before.
Yeah, that’s entirely possible; I have some friends unwilling to convert (or that I haven’t bothered with). I do however note an increase in use in Sweden, so I’m still hopeful. Best converter would of course be major screw up from WhatsApp etc. which may or may not happen, but then I’ll be ready to bang the drums again :)
I have some friends like that, but am currently in the process of making the switch over to signal from Snapchat. The key is once you have a critical mass of people in the group they switch over lmao
Also whenever you make a new gc, for example to plan something, you make it in signal and send them the invite link lol
To my knowledge, Signal is the only verifiably secure encrypted messaging app that’s market ready. Signal is fully open source, including its encryption algorithm which has been tested numerous times and even gotten government agencies like the FBI all butthurt that can’t break it or get a backdoor from the devs. I have a friend whose cryptography professor contributed to the project.
It was only in recent years that Signal upped their game enough with the user experience for me to start recommending it to friends and family. In 2013, when I first recall trying it out, Signal was more clunky and always wanted to be your default SMS app. I didn’t like that, because at the time they didn’t have a client to send messages from your computer.
Nowadays they have an desktop app that syncs with your phone, video calling, and even stories – which some people find weird but I’m all for non-Zuccubus owned private and secure alternatives to social media. I’m pretty sure anyone on Lemmy would love to pull more power away from these surveillance based ad companies and stop being data cows.
Tl;dr: Fuck the Zuck, keep promoting Signal, democratize the internet
What’s wrong with Matrix? I use both, just wondering
Why not Wire?
But that doesn’t help with sms or rcs. I wish there was an rcs client that was not made by Google
As far as I know Google doesn’t allow third party apps to plug into RCS.
This is why them bashing Apple for this particular issue always seemed hypocritical to me, they want this to be their own closed ecosystem, with Apple being the exception because they have enough clout to actually go it alone or even take users away from Android.
Ideally you’d have apps like Signal plugging into the same end-to-end encryption for interoperability, but Google won’t allow that because they just want people to use Google Messages for RCS, and nothing else.
Ah okay. Tbh I don’t know much about the subject …
Best thing about RCS is when random strangers text me, or friends friends, our conversations are E2EE because RCS isn’t something you need to download.
I’ll be honest, the UX/UI is kinda my one big gripe with it. It feels so amateurish. More so because the desktop app is very clearly just a website that requires me to run a Chromium to display it, which makes it look pretty bad, more so side-by-side with Unigram, a pretty damn impressive Telegram app.
But even the Android app barely checks the bare-minimum. Yeah it’s a messenger. Feels kinda laggy compared to Telegram and Messages, lacks any cool animations of neat UI design, lacks cool themes, nothing really. Now of course messengers don’t need any of that, but it just shows to highlight that it isn’t exactly a stellar product except in its austerity, and if it were about that I’d expect it to run significantly better and with less resource hunger than it does on either mobile or desktop.
I see your point. I like that the UI is quite simple, reminds me of the UI in iMessage. I was choosing between telegram and signal but mostly went with signal due to positive things I read online, in addition to being recommended on Privacytools.io which felt good.
I always have issues with people not receiving messages on it 😭
I have one friend who does not receive messages when he’s at his work Wi-Fi. My guess is that it’s some firewall protection or something.
That could be battery optimisation of the recipients phone.
Kinda wary to switch in case it turns up in the Google Graveyard.
Fortunately I think this is one of the ones that will stay around.
Definitely happy that this is happening, good on them. However in practice since most of my friends are on iOS I’m still reduced to SMS/MMS and a terrible user experience
My entire universe uses whatsapp exclusively 🤮 and I refuse.
There’s an app currently in beta called Beeper that aggregates a bunch of chat apps into one and also lets Android users connect to iMessage using an Apple ID. Highly recommend getting on the wait-list for it, the app has been great and the team working on it are very responsive and transparent.
Unfortunately RCS support is still in active development so anyone using it may not want to connect their number yet (unless they’re cool with SMS’ing with other Androids).
Oh yeah I heard about that! Do you use it? How’s the iMessage support on Android? Ideally I’d love if my chats with Android users go over RCS but chats with Apple users go over iMessage.
That all said relaying my chats through a 3rd party doesn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside…
Get better friends /s
but ya, the only person I text who is on iPhone is my “influencer” sister. Everyone else uses Android, and I can use RCS.
But everything still kept in their cloud right?
I think it’s a good move. Carriers are decentralized by design, af if they were not greedy and stupid, they could come up with at least one decent messaging. RCS is good by they did not make e2e mandatory in the protocol.
The fuck is google messages? Is this what replaced hangouts?
Hilarious assumption, but nope. It’s just the default sms app on google phones.
Google Chat replaced hangouts and is not E2E.
Google Messages is the Android default SMS App, at least on Pixel phones.
It’s the default SMS application on Pixel devices.
On many devices, actually. I believe TCL, Motorola, and others use it by default. Even Samsung outside the US uses it by default.
As an Apple owner I hope Apple will implement this too. I live in a country where everybody communicates through WhatsApp unfortunately.
What do you mean? iMessage is fully end to end encrypted.
As far as google messages RCS goes, that’s googles proprietary version of RCS.
I think they might mean they wish Apple would support RCS in general (which Apple has been refusing to do)
iMessage is not fully E2E encrypted unless you have advanced data protection turned on. If you don’t, the keys to your conversations still rest on Apple’s servers.
WhatsApp is already E2E encrypted, it always has been. There’s a circlejerk around here about “not true E2E!”, but that’s just straight up nonsense.
You bet it’s end and encrypted My key your key are friends key the CIA’s key… Wait, what?
/s… I hope
Still won’t be using it. Sworry!
More like, sworry not sworry. Am I right?
I think this is the first feature RCS provides which I want.
Do you know what RCS all provides? because it provides a LOT of great features. I mean the biggest one is 105MB file sizes. I guess you can stick with your carrier limited MMS, which is usually set to 300KB. Or maybe you can pay for Discord Nitro to send more than 8MB files? How about Snapchat which is limited to 60 seconds video files? Perhaps Telegram, that limits your upload speed to a snail pace unless you buy Telegram Premium?
I haven’t attempted to send a file via txt in almost 20 years. They’re txt messages… you know, for text. I also don’t use discord nitro, snapchat, or telegram.
Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 1 year ago
Fun fact, a group I knew in uni made an end to end encryption program that sent messages through Google more than a decade ago and Google got really, really mad at them threatening to shut down all Google accounts associated with all IP addresses they used.
Guarantee it's not fully E2E.
echo64@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s E2E, E2E isn’t really something you can be sneaky about unless you roll your own encryption and then make claims about it totally being safe bro
They, however, run the app you are using to type everything, the keyboard you are using to type everything and the os you are using to type everything. If they want something, they don’t need to look at your in flight messages.
TheHobbyist@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
The trust doesn’t even have to be in the encryption, they could very well use the same signal protocol. They would only need a copy of the keys you are using and you wouldn’t even know… That’s the problem with closed source programs, there is no certainty that its not happening (and I’m not saying it is, I can’t prove it, obviously, but the doubt remains, we need to trust these companies not to screw us over and they don’t really have the best track record in that…)
Rooki@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They can… everything is closed there. It can just be “encrypted” for your eyes
GigglyBobble@kbin.social 1 year ago
With a closed source app? Of course you can. How is anyone supposed to know what keys you use for encryption? Doesn't even need to be a remote one - just the key generation be reproducible by the developer.
art@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I know they unencrypted versions from my phone because my tablet and desktop version of messages seamlessly connects to the chat. So it’s probably be E2E in transit alone.
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 1 year ago
Sent messages "through Google"? Like Chat? Email? That's such an ambiguous statement.
E2EE has been a available approaching three years now. I'd imagine if they were lying and defrauding the population, someone would have found out by now. This announcement is just that it's on by default for everyone.
Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 1 year ago
Hangouts.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 year ago
It doesn’t matter if it’s E2E or not when Google can spy on you directly on the phones at either end.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Pretty much
You can use whatever chat clients you want. Multi-billion dollar companies control your OS. They don’t need to sneak in a rootkit: The OS is their rootkit.
E2E encryption is theoretically nice in the event there is a man in the middle at the cell tower or company. It is of arguable (zero?) value in sim spoof situations. But it is better than not
But still, don’t trust it for anything that google/apple might care about. Because transmitting and processing voice is hard. Effectively grepping a screen for such dangerous words as “terorrism” and “union” is almost zero cost. Like, I don’t expect google to give a shit about if you like hookers or buy drugs or whatever. But if you are involved in anything that could impact their bottom line…