Level1 News October 29 2019: Every Phone Is A Burner Phone If You're Rich Enough | Level One Techs

Level1Techs
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https://www.one-tab.com/page/FX_WOTEOQgWm1QAJvlBIDw

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://level1techs.com/video/level1-news-october-29-2019-every-phone-burner-phone-if-youre-rich-enough
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Regarding the social media interoperability discussion

at 14:24

This sounds somewhat like what Diaspora/Friendica/Hubzilla are trying to do; Hubzilla especially seems like an experiment around something like this. For simple message sending though, this already exists and is used amongst the federated microblogging servers like GNU Social, Mastodon, and even now Gab if I’m not mistaken.

Regarding interoperability of iMessage, that is not as quite as far fetched as it sounds; for a while there iOS actually had parts visible of an API for handling third-party FaceTime clients:

one of the only references to “FaceTime” in Apple’s documentation is for the iOS Core Audio AUVoiceProcessingIO audio unit, which is used for VoIP and in-game chat. The kVoiceIOFarEndAUVersion_ThirdParty parameter has the following documentation:

Set the farEndAUVersion field of the VoiceIOFarEndVersionInfo struct to this value if the remote end is a 3rd-party device following open FaceTime standards.

Moreover, it was added in iOS 4.2, which came out in November, 2010. So up to at least that date, third-party FaceTime clients were being planned for.

https://subfurther.com/blog/2011/05/10/long-past-time-to-open-facetime/

Certainly now, FaceTime or iMessage is not going to be opened up to third parties in the future, but I think the defeatist attitude towards interoperability in general is a bit unwarranted.

Also, I must remark that is a wonderful title for the video.

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Also, e-mail has always been interoperable.

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Aye, but email is a bit of a mess at times; what is supposed to be a coherent chain of email will vary in font/color and basic formatting in general from sender to sender. Even with plain text email, styles of quoting (above/below, indented/not) vary and can be irritating to read. I suspect that is part of why many people prefer Facebook/Twiiter/etc. over email.

Even invisibly, if you look at SMTP headers, many clients add multiple different headers to convey the same information to a mail client. Different mail clients may even thread messages together differently, or not at all.

Maybe if there were better standards adherence, and email limited itself to only minimal formatting (Markdown under the hood perhaps) many might see it a convincing alternative to “social media” platforms.