Google tweaks Android Messages app to auto-classify or auto-delete messages Google has announced SMS-grooming tech that it will only offer in India. Natalie Naruns, the ad giant’s Product Manager for the Android Messages app, wrote that the company’s Indian users say they get too many messages to manage. The Messages app will therefore classify them automatically into categories including “personal …
If your phone can run Android 8, it can run the authenticator app of your choice. It's one of the rare cases where the more secure option is also more convenient. Not as good as a hardware token or some other options of course, but it should be far easier to persuade people to actually use. Maybe Google could spend a bit more effort encouraging people to use a better solution rather than developing automated ways to try to cope with the mess created by a worse one.
That reluctance has nothing to do with google, as the phone provider.
Banks and other such entities would have a much more expensive, and possibly even confusing to many, provisioning workflow if they moved away from SMS.
If you're wondering why TOTP would be confusing, I can only say you're extrapolating from the audience of *this* site.
Also, SMS is not so bad here. There's a rule (law? not sure) that all incoming and outgoing SMSs are blocked for 24 hours on any new SIM activation. Raises the bar quite a bit for SIM jacking attacks.
but asking pre-2017 hardware to do the filtering might a stretch.
I doubt that very much. It would have to be an awful lot of text (> 10 MB) for it to really matter and this would probably be a one-off exercise. The restriction is probably due something like a change in the storage API that would otherwise require more branching in the code.
Well, it's not the processing of texts per se, where the SMS-Cs will start struggling long before the phones do, but the analysis of individual texts: scanning, stemming, indexing, filtering, etc. But with each text being about 0.2 kB you'd need around 50,000 before for 10 MB (IO might be more of an issue especially if they're read from the SIM). But the phone has probably become unusable with that volume and storage will be overflowing! And imagine having to click them all away! I remember phones where storage was limited to about 100 texts.
In the old days one would concoct messages with all the options listed, the pros and cons of each, and a recommendation. Humans seem to have regressed to goldfish-sized brains. When people communicate now they can seem to only handle one fact at a time. Spell out a range of options and it will involve a barrage of emails back-and-forth which, stitched together give an accurate reconstruction of the original email. And, at the final stage, you get an email asking you to summarise things in one email as the thread is so bloated (yep, had to do one of those today, as it happens).
I think Twitter is to blame.
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