An important step towards secure and interoperable messaging | Hacker News Reader

An important step towards secure and interoperable messaging

security.googleblog.com

15 pointstrulyrandom5 comments

At a first glance, this looks like a variation of the Signal protocol to me, which seems great as a message-layer solution (i.e. a successor to OTR) – as long as the idea is not to bolt it onto RCS, like OTR was bolted on to various non-interoperable messaging protocols.

I’m quite happy to be mostly independent from telcos and phone numbers for my instant messaging; I really don’t want to go back to the bad old days of messengers supporting only one device per account and my account and address being tightly coupled to a phone plan/number.

“Google builds another messenger” is a joke at this point, but the reality of “Google delegates messaging to telcos” might just be worse.

Yes, iOS/iMessage and Android/RCS don’t interoperate and it’s very annoying, but not even Android (RCS) and Android (SMS, because there’s seemingly still uncountable edge cases disqualifying RCS in many given setups) interoperating is honestly unforgivable.

> This is why we intend to build MLS into Google Messages and support its wide deployment across the industry by open sourcing our implementation in the Android codebase.

Weeeell…

Let's just say that this might also be a very smart move on Google's part, a classic "using Open as a weapon" strategy that sidesteps their historic issues with "yet another (cancelled) messaging app" by baking the functionality into a lower level of their platform:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cau...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/04/03/be-wary-o...

https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/12/open-source-as-weapon.h...

Whether this ultimately solves the "blue vs. green bubbles" issue is an open question, but I suspect they'll (eventually) at least gain some leverage by introducing an equivalent UI affordance that legitimately indicates something like more-/less-/insecure.

> > This is why we intend to build MLS into Google Messages and support its wide deployment across the industry by open sourcing our implementation in the Android codebase.

Are they talking about open-sourcing the whole messaging app, or only the MLS library used within it?

It’s not even a matter of open-sourcing the messaging app: Without a viable backend implementation (supporting federation etc.), there is no way to communicate!

Google seems to be stubbornly pushing RCS, but it’s clearly not working at least internationally.

Some of us still remember Google Chat using XMPP a few years back, because "interoperable messaging", and then not.

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