Who brought Trump into this comparison?

You can “win” this argument if you want to. I don’t really care. My issue was with Gates being described as a good hearted oligarch. I’m not trying to rank them or say that Gates is the worst or anything. Rewriting history so that Gates is a good guy is a bit much though.

I’m not going to give you a list, because I have other things to do, but you can read for yourself under Controversies here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates.

I was mostly thinking of the decades of anti-trust and “embrace, extend, extinguish”, as well as his sexual harassment of his employees. But I had forgotten that he was besties with Epstein and his wife divorced him after the extent of his endeavors there came out. So I guess child-raping may be on his list too.

Pretty swell guy.

Gates was (and arguably still is) an enormous asshole and has only recently started spending money on “charity” and PR to improve his public image (similar to Carnegie). That you’re willing to let him off the hook for all of his past evils only shows that spending a tiny fraction of their ill-earned gains on PR will wipe their slate clean and people like you will let them off the hook.

If you let Gates, Carnegie, etc off the hook for their rotten past, expect future generations to let Musk et al. off the hook once they buy back their reputation when they get old.

But they’re also having to fight for more limited funding among a crowd of chatbot “researchers”. The funding agencies are enamored with LLMs right now.

With even email clients and web browsers running arbitrary and untrusted remote code on a regular basis, that model needs serious reconsideration.

This xkcd shouldn’t still be insightful. https://xkcd.com/1200/

E2EE is not part of the standard and only exists as a proprietary Google extension, using Google’s servers. Implying that implementing RCS would get everyone cross-platform E2EE is misinformation.

This actually looks like an improvement in policing overall.

• Shooting an unarmed man isn’t any worse than what we have today and to be fair the guy actually had a gun and not a phone or something.

• More impressively, it shoots him dozens of times and every bullet connects with the intended target. Not even the window behind him breaks. Cops these days dump their magazines without any regard to the surroundings and hit bystanders or just lose most of the bullets somewhere down range.

This scene may not be dystopian after all.

RCS, as adopted by GSMA , is zero encryption text messaging. RCS with encryption is a proprietary Google product and relies on Google servers.

On my phone, so links may come later. It’s hard to find solid documentation on it, since their encryption extension is proprietary, but it’s been referenced as being based on the Signal Protocol. The Signal Protocol, or every implementation of it that I’ve seen, uses a central “trusted” repository of public keys to tell message originators query to encrypt the message to. For Signal, and I assume Google RCS, that central repository is Google. The protocol doesn’t allow for federation, so any system that is interoperable with Google RCS will rely on Google as the trusted authority.

The private key part I’m much less sure of, since both the Signal and Google RCS clients are closed source. Signal makes you jump through hoops to add a new client, involving one of your currently installed clients. This suggests that Signal isn’t in possession of your private keys. On the other hand, all you need to set up a new Google client is your account password. This suggests that either your keys are held by Google (perhaps encrypted by your account password) or that new keys can be added without needing explicit involvement from current keys.

Of course this is all speculation because the implementations aren’t available for inspection.

So is this going to be standard RCS, which has no encryption and the telcos need to support, or the Googlified version that does E2E encryption but requires storing keys on Google’s servers?

RCS has interoperability issues itself and Google hasn’t been making the situation better.

Yes. I’m a man of few words.