Steve Troughton-SmithNonsense; Apple's Messages app already has an unencrypted pathway — using SMS. And unencrypted RCS, as of next year. A bridge to a competing service could also be unencrypted in the same form. If you really need to message somebody not using an encrypted service, you should get a warning in the app, but it should still be possible. It *will* be possible, and unencrypted, if other services interoperate with RCS directly
John Gruber@stroughtonsmith RCS can’t be the interop between messaging platforms. The platforms all allow for client devices that aren’t cellular, and RCS only works with cellular devices.
@gruber WhatsApp until recently has required a single device with a cell number, even if it had a bridge that worked on the desktop using a pairing process. What is WhatsApp meant to interoperate with in the first place, under these laws? The only interop that matters is between Messages and WhatsApp users
@stroughtonsmith So what protocol are you proposing would be used to send messages between, say, WhatsApp and iMessage?
@gruber that's the kind of implementation detail that laws don't need to specify, as long as both parties are compelled to interoperate. If you only compel one party, nobody's going to make a compatible protocol. Apple could be leading an E2EE initiative here on a shared protocol; the alternative is that something lesser is going to be forced upon them some years down the line that they could have completely avoided if they did the right thing from the start.
…like ALL of this regulation 😅
@stroughtonsmith No, I think they'd just pull iMessage from the EU.
@gruber that sure sounds like the petty and vindictive Apple we all know! If they did try that, I’d leave the platform and change careers for sure
@stroughtonsmith I don't think it's petty or vindictive to object to a dumb law.
@gruber that's not an objection, that's collective punishment. It would be an egregious betrayal of every user who has invested in, and been locked in to, iMessage for over a decade, for completely self-serving purposes on Apple's part. There is a clear user benefit to interoperability. And today's news re push notifications underscores that Apple's ‘E2EE’ means nothing in the real world because they have secret deals for governments to do an end-run around it anyway
Leon Cowle@stroughtonsmith @gruber Maybe I'm wrong, but the push notification news wasn't that secret deals meant govts could READ encrypted push notification contents, which ARE E2EE. It's just that govts could see who got push notifications for which apps, and using that *meta* data, could deduce things. An example I saw: US reporter breaks a China scandal. China govt sees many WhatsApp notifications at the same time the day before to that reporter & to one of their govt employees. Busted!
@leoncowle @gruber there are precious few non-messaging apps that use E2EE for their push notifications, and there's a whole lot of information you can deduce from notification payloads and metadata
@stroughtonsmith @gruber Agreed. I think I was more typing out my own understanding, hoping you'll tell me “no, read here, govts can read ALL your notifications' contents”, afterwhich I would of course be outraged, too. Seems it's somewhere in the middle, though. Mild outrage warranted. :)