They are more dangerous. They contain significant amounts of lithium metal, the thing that bursts into flames when in contact with water. There are similar restrictions on them for air travel.
NAT may go away, but stateful firewalls won't. There will still be many environments where you can't easily get a point to point connection even though the IP is addressable and there is a route.
If you use org-mode, you can just set up a git repo which auto-commits with gitwatch. And run magit-blame when you want the timestamps. With the advantage that it doesn't distract you when you don't need to see them, but super useful when you want to check when a note is written.
Yeah, I do something similar with org-node (org-roam alternative) where every capture templates has an inactive timestamp at the end before the tags.
i.e. Idea: Build minesweeper in the terminal with Ratatui @ [2025-02-05 Wed 18:01] :@someday:
And then I capture it in a daily note (or very rarely refile it) that has an org-id. Then everything gets connected with links and backlinks.
I keep the usual CREATED in the properties drawer empty in case I want to turn that heading into a node for linking at some point.
Though I'm still figuring out some things about my approach as I go. One thing is clear, org-mode can be adapted to quite a lot of workflows regardless of their weirdness or efficacy.
Git gives you a full history of changes which is convenient for many other reasons. I also do sometimes put dated and less often timestamped entries when desired.
I wish sites offered a way to opt out of 2FA if your password has enough entropy (128 bit random string). These are not getting cracked anytime soon. I store my TOTPs in keepassxc with the other passwords anyway. The keepassxc database is the "something you have" and its password is "something you know", and the random string is a testament to that. Also stop forcing SMS 2FA please. I don't want to need to have a phone.
I agree although sites still might concerned about password re-use they could just have an option to generate what is basically a key. Instead of a password and some sort 2fa "token" which is basicallly a key. Accept for that 2fa token only a low amount the entropy is capable of generating is used.
I wish browsers had better support for local web apps. If local files can access persistent storage easily, this can open it up a lot of opportunities for quick and easy GUI apps. Basically the opposite of electron.
Unfortunately, RCS on Android requires google apps, so this isn't really a solution to anyone who doesn't want to be tracked by Google everywhere they go.
I'm still a little confused as to what problem RCS is supposed to solve. It is just as centralized as any other chat app, and is a bit more invasive (often requiring device attestation). Is it really worth all this hassle just to not have to install, let's say, Signal?
Defaults matter. While I've gotten some of my friends and family members to install and use Signal, I still have more chats via SMS/MMS (and more recently RCS, since Apple finally started supporting it) than I do on all other messaging apps combined.
This is likely to differ greatly by demographic. I don’t know literally anyone who uses SMS/MMS. The only SMS message I’ve received in years are automated services/spam.
That's not necessarily true. For full compatibility you'd need a pre-installed app on Android, but vendors like Samsung and Sony and OnePlus can build their own RCS messengers for those devices should they choose to. Same with custom ROM developers for an open source implementation.
For non-ROM developers, it depends on what RCS activation technique your carrier uses.
RCS isn't a Google spec, or an Apple spec, or even an IETF/IEEE/ISO spec. It's part of the core mobile networking specifications. It was created by the people who designed the MMS spec after 4G switched mobile networks to everything-over-IP. Unfortunately, the 4G spec didn't require RCS, it was just an optional side feature, so carriers never bothered with it.
RCS solves the problem that most of the US uses iMessage or SMS/MMS, but the SMS/MMS part of that equation is absolutely dreadful. File size limits are stuck in the mid 2000s, messages are split over multiple SMS packets if you send more than one sentence, the entire thing is unencrypted. Sometimes people like to send photos to each other and the 150KiB or so file size limit on MMS isn't enough for that anymore.
As for why not have people install Signal: why would they, because everyone is already using something else? I live in a country where everyone uses chat apps and all but one of my contacts are on WhatsApp. In other places, that'll be Telegram, and in some North American countries, that'll be iMessage/MMS, the texting app that comes with the phone for sending texts.
I don't believe this FUD. I think overal the market has moved from from charging for messages. I fully believe carriers would love to rip off everyone as much as they can, but I think carriers know customers would just use facebook messenger if they tried charging per-message.
Carriers charging too much is exactly why WhatsApp became so popular in so many countries. It was optimised for very little data usage, so was dramatically cheaper than SMS.
Don't forget you could also send photos with it, which is more than what can be said about MMS.
Funny enough, I think I was charged once for a MMS in the past 5 years. No idea how I managed to do it, but it seems to still exist and still be charged per message even on my unlimited everything else plan.
No, it's worse than a standard centralized chat app: It's ostensibly federated, with network operators running the servers.
But practically, only Google actually knows how to do that (the specifications are absurdly complicated!), and so they do it for all operators as a service.
It's a fig leaf of an open protocol and service even for telco industry standards.
RCS seems to be mainly designed as a successor for SMS.
For interpersonal communication, SMS is dead in the majority of the world, so a successor is entirely irrelevant.
For for the 1 or 2 countries where people still send SMS, RCS seems like a major improvement with a bunch of feature that have been available on other platforms for many years now.
It also requires a Google account as far as I know. I have Google apps but no account signed in. And when I tap on the connect RCS option it asks me to sign in.
Anyway iMessage (and iOS for that matter) is irrelevant where I live so I don't expect this to change anything. I'm not going to be on RCS. The main apps here are WhatsApp and Telegram (the latter more for groups)
I have a very minimal Android phone with no Google account ever added/used on the device, and it says my chats with other Android users are using RCS ...
The phone number is associated in the other direction though (way back when Google didn't be evil and GMail required invites, I dared to trust them with it, I forget for what).
It shouldn't. The only reason Google Messages sometimes asks for an account is to support remote access via messages.google.com without scanning a QR code, as far as I know.
While it's largely openness/federation theater (Google runs most servers in the background, either on behalf of or instead of the mobile networks), they at least got that part right (as in conforming to the specification, not as in doing the long-term right thing for users) and exclusively use the phone number as an identifier.
Ah ok strange. It is a Samsung phone though. Samsung has been forcing a Google login in more and more places unfortunately. I think they made some deal with them about the AI features. Just like they now promote OneDrive instead of their own cloud. Maybe that's why or I didn't understand the popup.
I don't really want it if I can't access my messages online anyway. The whole reason I love telegram and WhatsApp is that I don't need my phone when I'm on the computer (which is 90% of the time). But a Google account is out of the question.
Right now I even bridge WhatsApp and Telegram through matrix because I don't trust those either, though I don't think I trust any company less than Google. But I don't know if you can do that for RCS.
But tbh I'm not looking for any other chat app unless it's federated and I can run my own server. RCS is technically federated but limited to a group of big companies so that's pretty useless to me.
I think I'll just block it just like I do SMS. I turn off all the notifications for the relevant apps.
No chance for bridging RCS to Matrix, as far as I know. That’s what I find so concerning about it: It’s theoretically more open, but practically much more locked down than both SMS and proprietary alternatives.
Yeah me too. It doesn't help at all to take control away from big tech (really, meta or google is the same difference). And it loops in the phone carriers. You know, those guys that charged us 1 euro for 180 bytes just because they could get away with it. I never ever want those guys in the middle again, just as a raw bit pipe only.
The only thing that's open is the standard, but in practice you need to be on google's radar to be connected. So it's just as closed to us as everything else.
this is so true for networks that don't implement RCS servers,
not even Android - iOS interop present!
one thing i would like to see happen is deprecating SMS message with Labels rather than numbers, phishing has got far far too common in my jurisdiction RCS + some sort of DNS validation like atproto of sender would go a long long way
> RCS + some sort of DNS validation like atproto of sender would go a long long way
Now this would be a messaging protocol I could get behind. Phone networks could even provide a phone number registry for people that insist on using that for whatever reason.
But there's absolutely no chance it'll happen – neither the telecommunications industry nor Google have any interest in making federation for others than "trusted partners" possible.
SMS is already a goldmine for carriers (thanks to the widespread use of SMS for OTPs and authentication), so why not make the next logical step and replace email for as many remaining B2C use cases as possible and collect some rent there as well?
Your point about Google's central role is spot-on, and without an open, Google-independent implementation, RCS does remain problematic for anyone avoiding that ecosystem.
Yes. Not everyone is going to install Signal (which isn’t end to end encrypted btw), everyone has a cell phone that can support either iMessage/RCS/MMS/SMS and when you send a message to someone else’s number, you have graceful (sic) degradation.
Liquid nitrogen (boiling at -196 C) is a semi-common substance that people would have heard of, though not everyone would have seen or interacted with it.
I've seen liquid nitrogen, briefly, as it was sprayed out of a hose. It immediately boiled into a (quite cold) gas, of course. I was told not to play with it too much because they would have to evacuate the building. Oh the joys of "bring your kid to work" days in manufacturing facilities
That's the example Copilot used when asked to make a list of temperatures in 50 C steps with an example or two of something around that temperature that people might have heard of. Also cryogenic freezing of biological samples.
Any claim of fees for hosting a distribution platform is nullified by the lack of alternatives. I don't get to kidnap you can then charge you rent and food costs.
The main thing that reduces the value of hosting is that it's become cheaper over the years. Back when the App Store was new, privately hosting shareware games on my own domain was a substantial cost, IIRC around 10% of my total income from those games.
But it's somewhat hyperbolic to compare a mandatory cost that you have to pay to someone regardless, to being kidnapped.
> In fact, the DMA doesn't even explicitly require that gatekeepers allow third party app stores; they can only allow direct distribution (e.g. via web sites) instead, if they want.
Is Apple actually complying with the DMA then? They are still requiring notarization, which means apps still have to be approved by them.
The DMA allows Apple to take "strictly necessary and proportionate" measures to ensure that alternative apps do not "endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system". IMO iOS notarization (which is a different and more involved process with many more rules than notarization on macOS) goes well beyond that, but it's up to the EU to decide.
