Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Friday, March 14th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. The new RCS messaging

standard makes encryption universal, and even Apple is getting on the bandwagon. OpenAI calls for a U.S.

ban of DeepSeek. Is Apple about to turn your AirPods into the Universal Translator from Star Trek,

and of course, the week on Longreads suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

The GSM has announced the new RCS standard supports interoperable end-to-end encryption between platforms,

and Apple says it will add support for this standard in a future update.

Quoting the Verge, iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end encrypted E2E

RCS messages in the near future, thanks to newly updated RCS specifications.

The GSM Association said it had started working to enable E2E-E on messages sent between

Android and iPhone and September last year.

E2E is a privacy and security feature that prevents third parties such as messaging providers

or cell carriers from viewing the content of your texts.

The GSM says the new RCS standard was developed in collaboration with mobile operators,

device manufacturers, and technology providers, including Apple.

Apple introduced RCS support to iPhones as part of an iOS 18 update in September.

While Apple's proprietary iMessage system already supported E2E,

this wasn't extended to RCS messaging because the previous RCS standard didn't provide cross-platform support.

Google Messages also enabled E2E by default for RCS texts, but only conversations between

Google Messages users were E2EE and not those exchanged with

iMessage users or users of other RCS clients on Android, end quote.

And quoting Android Authority.

Note that Android-Android conversations don't support E2E by default either unless both

...