Panel: RCS-Based Verification vs Insecure SMS OTPs

Here’s a number that should bother you: SMS-based one-time passwords remain the default second factor for the vast majority of consumer authentication flows. Banks, healthcare portals, government services, e-commerce platforms. Most still send a six-digit code over a protocol designed in the 1980s. No encryption. None.

NIST formally classified SMS OTP as a “restricted authenticator” in SP 800-63B Revision 4. That’s bureaucratic language for “we don’t trust this anymore, and neither should you.”

Panel: Infrastructure for AI Agents in Messaging

I moderated a panel last week on infrastructure for AI agents in messaging, and one observation kept coming up: the chatbot era taught us almost nothing useful about what’s coming next.

Those early bots — the “type 1 for billing, type 2 for support” kind — were basically IVR menus in a text box. Rigid decision trees. No real state management. No tool orchestration. No fallback beyond “I didn’t understand that, please try again.” You know the drill.

Python Sample Upgrade for RCS Business Messaging

The rbm-api-examples repository on GitHub doesn’t get a lot of fanfare. No launch events, no blog posts from the comms team, no tweets from product managers. It just sits there—quietly being the first thing most developers touch when they start building an RCS Business Messaging agent.

I know this because I watched it happen for almost two years at Google. A developer would find the RBM documentation, click through to the samples, clone the repo, and—within about fifteen minutes—either succeed or give up. The Python sample was often the deciding factor.

Google Messages: New Connection Features for Android

If you’ve ever received a text from an iPhone user that reads “Laughed at ‘hey are you coming tonight?’” instead of just showing a laughing emoji — you know the pain. That little text description of a reaction is one of the most annoying artifacts of the Android-iPhone messaging divide.

Google just fixed it.

Yesterday, Google announced a set of updates to Google Messages that target exactly this kind of friction. They’re not flashy. They won’t make headlines the way a new Pixel launch would. But they’re the kind of quality-of-life improvements that make cross-platform texting — something most of us do dozens of times daily — significantly less awful.