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.

Probably a bucket hat to keep the sun out of my face while reading in the backyard.

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.

Is it really unreasonable to explain that nothing you do on a work computer is private, though?

Obviously you don’t want to do any of that. But if you have a reasonable set up, you can when you need to, and telling people not to do shit they shouldn’t on company hardware is a good thing.

That’s ugly as hell too.

I could pretty easily see how such a bug could happen if the description in the article is accurate.

The right way to do it is to have the entire transaction in some pending state, and nothing is permanently saved anywhere until the transaction is completed. (This is called an atomic operation. It usually applies to distributed databases, but the same concept applies here, where the transaction takes a long time to succeed or fail.)

If, instead, you add it to the “reimbursement list” while putting the actual “make the pill” and billing part in the pending state, then forget to remove it when the transaction isn’t completed, you get the outcome described in the article.

I think the assertion is that it’s intended for actual low volume low value trade, and that a retailer operating in the US but packaging the shipments in China (to bypass the normal import laws that apply to companies operating traditionally and importing in bulk, then packaging here) is not how the exception is intended to be used.

There have been games that showed hints of stuff you could get to, but I think BOTW was the first major open world game that actually universally followed that rule and didn’t have invisible walls all over the place.

Like Skyrim there was a lot you could “climb” by abusing the mechanics and spamming jumps until you got lucky, and everything existed in that sense. But it was glitches, not part of the mechanics. BOTW having points of interest almost entirely discovered visually was unique.

I would say the defining characteristic that sets Breath of the Wild apart from its contemporaries is its “chemistry engine”, as they call it.

It’s traversal. The interactions were cool, but mostly about the puzzles.

What BOTW changed was how exploration works. You see a landmark in the distance, start moving towards it, and figure out how to get there. There’s nothing you see that isn’t part of the traversal system. There are no invisible walls. Some things are absurdly high to climb, some things are slippery, etc, but everything you struggle to traverse is clearly a product of the systems the game uses and makes sense.

(The problem was none of that exploration got you anywhere interesting, but the core element of “everything you see is a destination” is the thing about BOTW that was groundbreaking.)

That’s what they actually did if you read the article. They don’t pass through the eyes the same when you’re on a keyboard now.