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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

I assume it's tied somehow to SMS character limits, where somebody decided a couple extra letters of content was worth it somehow.

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You know what? If someone shows me a shortcode on my feature phone, or on someone else's device, or it's printed on a leaf of paper, or if I'm in a library using library computers, a shortened URL like that is way easier to type in, or write it down by hand.

However you slice it, even after we conquer character limits and font rendering and storage space for every electronic device, human beings will still be using "the analog hole" to copy code like that.

It's interesting to imagine how different the entire security landscape would be, if every human was natively capable of easily transcribing many more bytes of data and noticing when two sequences don't match.

I agree, but I'd also challenge you to find a cellphone that a normal person carries that doesn't just concatonate multiple messages and turn them into MMS. My Pinephone and Librem 5 did that, but that reinforces my point: this is not something a normal person will see

Wait, multiple messages get concatenated to MMS? In early 2010s I remember in my country it's still concatenated as regular text (so if one part is somehow missing or comes in very late, some phones will only show the surviving parts as one, others dump each parts separately), I guess they remove that functionality? Back then each part cost roughly one cent and plenty of phones in use still don't support MMS, then people just jump into WhatsApp entirely when Nokia support it in their feature phone.

> Wait, multiple messages get concatenated to MMS?

SMS is a single packet over GSM with maximum payload size of 140 bytes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Message_size

my android phone still sends multiple SMS instead of an MMS.

it might make sense if you're on a plan where an MMS costs less than 2xSMS

MMS costs more on the backend.

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