[Cryptography] Signal planning to support for plaintext SMS

John Levine johnl at iecc.com
Mon Oct 31 19:17:23 EDT 2022


It appears that Kevin W. Wall <kevin.w.wall at gmail.com> said:
>-=-=-=-=-=-
>
>On Sun, Oct 30, 2022 at 7:30 PM John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>messaging app, they might have stuck with it, but since only my wife and I
>were the only ones who they knew who were currently using Signal, they
>decided to drop it because they had a very limited data plan (one of them,
>something like 2GB/month data cap).

That makes no sense. Text messages, even encrypted ones, are tiny. I
used to have a 1GB/mo plan and Signal's use was insignificant. If each
message uses 1K, which I doubt they do, you'd need to exchange a
million of them to use a gigabyte.

It's hard to burn through a lot of data unless you are streaming video
or downloading very large apps. Signal does have an option to do video
calls, but I wouldn't expect their video to use more data than zoom or
whatsapp or any other video system. It's quite clear when you are
sending a text message vs. starting a video call.

I think the note about Google's RCS is the most likely.

R's,
John


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