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Comment by rixthefox | Hacker News Reader

Besides stating the obvious, SMS already been replaced by other messaging protocols. So what exactly are we paying the carriers to do at this point besides being glorified ISPs of their own that just happen to hold frequency licenses for the Cellular data bands our devices use to communicate on said network?

I already knew SMS was insecure and send in plain text, knowing it's now also being censored and blocked without any warning from the carrier is just the last nail in the coffin for me for SMS. So when will we be able to tell these carriers to no longer provision a phone number but instead just issue me an IP address? It's clear they will mess with anything going over their network so now let's just send everything over TLS and HTTPS and cut them out entirely.

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I'm an elementary school teacher, and I started at a new school this year. The official way to communicate is via email, but during the first week, my divisional head needed to get ahold of me more quickly. She tried calling, but I didn't pick up because I was with students. So she sent a text message.

My school is closed this week, so instead I'm giving private coding lessons to two sisters. Yesterday, I needed to get in touch with their father. I sent a text message.

What communication medium should have been used in these situations? Signal? Snikket? Either would have felt invasive. SMS is valuable for its social utility, not its technical merits.

P.S. Actually, both those anecdotes were lies. The girls' father and my divisional head were blue bubbles, so we were using iMessage. This is its own problem.

Another reason why encryption in RCS (not just google's flavor), or Apple opening up iMessage, can't come soon enough.

Why would Signal be invasive

...y'know, that's a good question. I feel strongly that it would have been invasive, but I'm not sure I can explain why.

SMS is universal. If you have a phone number, I know you have SMS. So sending a text message (or using Apple's stand-in) is a natural thing to do. I'm not looking you up on some external service.

Question: obviously you don't think it would have been invasive to reach out to the father on Signal. Would you have felt differently if I used any of: Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn Messenger, or Discord? (I only had his name and phone number, but I could have done some searching.)

I think it's not invasive at all if they already have the service. "Oh, we need to connect, are you on Snikket?" isn't any more invasive than "what is your number". Where it gets harder is when they do not have anything you have and then you start saying "please install..." which is much more invasive for a casual contact. For this kind of lowest common denominator you can't really beat SMS or email because almost everyone has both already.

I guess the added thing is, even if they have $service installed, they might not be actively using it. Not only does virtually everyone have an SMS installed, virtually everyone also has it in their daily app rotation (even if it's not their preferred platform). So using SMS feels more polite to me.

> I think it's not invasive at all if they already have the service.

But if they don't? The main problem I have with non-SMS protocols is that there are too many of them. Having messaging fragmented across many services is a real issue. SMS is universal.

> SMS already been replaced by other messaging protocols.

No, it absolutely has not across the board. It certainly has in some places and cultures, but there are tons of people who use SMS as their primary messaging tool.

> So when will we be able to tell these carriers to no longer provision a phone number but instead just issue me an IP address?

You can already, for example https://jmp.chat/sim is data only, and there are other providers like this as well.

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