At least with the 360 you’re sure which one you’re talking about.

It’s like how they made the Xbox, then the Xbox one, then the Xbox one X, then the Xbox series X. (Yeah there were other options between/simultaneous, but this sequence is a nice clean illustration.)

Most of the stuff people think are RCS aren’t though. They’re proprietary extensions to RCS that only work on Google’s text message apps, transmitted through Google’s servers, with RCS junk as fallback for other services.

It’s not actually meaningfully different than Apple doing iMessage with fallback to RCS now.

Intercommunication is still going to be bad because the standard that carriers support isn’t where all the features are.

Photos without extremely well backed provenance are not and have not been credible evidence for a long time.

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You realize that your article says it’s a pipe dream right? Because even Google, pushing it, has no interest in actually supporting it in its tools, and neither does anyone else?

Advertising tracking is the primary space your privacy is invaded online. The fact that what phone you use is one of the most valuable data points they have that isn’t “you actively being signed in somewhere that shares it” is the evidence that telling people what phone you have to share a photo is a massive privacy issue. Because what phone you have is a lot of information.

What device you use is one of the biggest data points advertisers and trackers use to fingerprint you across the internet. No, “I use a Google Pixel 9” does not, by itself, de-anonymize you, but it does make a big dent when combined with other information.

You keep talking about “proving the authenticity of an image” with something that does not even move you .00000001% towards an image being legitimate. It is literally zero information about that question in every possible context. It is, eventually, if you throw out every camera on the planet and use heavy cryptography, theoretically possible to eventually, in the future, provide some evidence that some future picture came from some specific camera, but it will still not be proof that what that camera processed wasn’t manipulated.

You very clearly have no idea whatsoever what you’re talking about. This is all complete nonsense.

Anyone can write exif data to say anything they want it to. You “showing an image with earlier metadata” is completely arbitrary and doesn’t tell anyone literally anything about which one is more likely to be “real”. Again, it’s not “weak” or “bad” evidence. It is literally not capable of being evidence.

RCS still sucks. It’s a marginal improvement over MMS, and not more.

Basically all the stuff people actually care about are proprietary Google features because they had to use proprietary extensions and send everything through their own servers to make it work.

It’s really not different than iMessage. It’s no more open to any other messaging app or any other OS than iMessage is, and it isn’t really capable of being so unless the standard improves.

No, you cannot use metadata as even extremely weak evidence that an image is real. It is less than trivial to fake, and the second anyone even hints at making it a standard approach, it will be on every photo anyone uses to mislead anyone.

Most photos on the internet are camera phones, and you absolutely are not entitled to know what phone someone has. Knowing someone’s phone has infinitely more value to fingerprinting a user than including metadata could ever theoretically have to demonstrate whether a photo is legitimate or not.

Photos without a specific, on record provenance from a credible source are no longer useful for evidence of anything. You cannot go back from that.

A. It’s not even the weakest of weak evidence of whether a photo is legitimate. It tells you literally zero.

B. Even if it was concrete proof, that would still be a truly disgusting reason to think you were entitled to that information.

The device is no more anyone else’s business than anything else.

It should absolutely not be shared by default.

No, the default should be removing everything but maybe the date because of privacy implications.

They desperately need to do something about car software before China starts being really relevant here in EVs too.

I absolutely support massively restricting what anyone can gather, not just China, (and the same for social media/ad networks/retailers), but it’s fundamentally not the same threat as data vacuums controlled by an enemy state.

Teach them how to evaluate sources on the internet.

Seriously, all the hardware/OS whatever is cool, but if you want to really make a difference that will affect everyone, teach them how to find information, how to evaluate it, and how to use internet reference material.

And if they want to make a lot of babies?

The issue seems to be how the money is designated, not the amount of money. Even if you have a million bucks budgeted for typewriters for one facility, it’s not automatically fungible.

I’m not saying there are no enthusiast spaces. I’m just explaining some of the tradeoffs that come with too low of a barrier entry when forming a community.

You want to be welcoming and accessible, not intimidating, etc, and I’m not saying any of that is bad. But you lose some of the magic where the whole community is relatively enthusiastic and has a shared vision for what it is when it’s easy for anyone to join and pull their own way.

The point isn’t “it’s their fault”. But it changes the dynamic.

An enthusiast community can, for good and bad, largely self regulate. It’s easier to keep corporate interests either out, or engaging on your terms.

Once the community grows to include a high enough proportion of casual participants, that ability goes away, because manipulations that don’t work on inquisitive expert audiences do work on less informed ones, and less willing to question. It’s harder to establish who actually knows what they’re talking about by reputation, it’s harder to weed out the trolls from the naive, and it’s just generally harder to keep the focus of the community where you want it to be.

Corporations are one of the groups of bad actors manipulating that difference in dynamics, but the dynamics are different because of the large influx of people who don’t understand as much and aren’t trying to.

At most I could see it being a kind of novelty for stuff like movie theaters to add to the immersion. And the obvious ads bullshit.