I meant the ~300 mile ranges common in electric cars. That’s a long trip. Plus if the car rolls to a stop by the side of the road you just gotta have it towed or charge it up in the field somehow, electric bikes have pedals.
It sucks to pedal a heavy ass ebike but you can do it in a pinch to get where you need to go.
It’s just as well, rcs in America only has guarantees of features if you’re on the same servers as the other people, so there’s a big split between the Samsung and google rcses with all kinds of weird mixed media stuff if you’re both on gchat or the Samsung fork and nothing but maybe higher resolution pictures if you’re not.
It’s part of why I’m so willing to recommend imessage because for better or worse in America it’s the defacto standard.
Yeah and even if you’re on an ios with rcs plenty of old android devices just scale the videos down to postage stamp size anyway by default so you get bad looking pictures no matter what.
Yeah per text charges are really uncommon in the anglosphere, although the pay as you go carriers and plans have data limits.
If you’re on contract or renewing contract with an American carrier they’ll usually take literally any phone you have in trade for their lowest cost ios or android device, your choice. I took them up on it several years ago because the gimmie device was the only physically small iphone at the time. Sometimes it adds a couple of bucks to your monthly bill if you pick one with a little more storage or whatever but that amounts to them selling you the phone for fifty bucks or so over two years.
Hell, usually if you’re signing up for a new account they’ll offer some android and ios phones for free to get you on contract.
Half of each person is getting them to use encrypted chat with you one on one and half is getting the group chats to use it. If you can knock out half the battle most of the time then you should do it.
In my experience ios and android users are equally open/resistant to using some new thing.
I recognize that for a particular type of threat model or ideology all proprietary software amounts to the same level of vulnerability. The op only asked about encrypted chat. The implication that I picked up on and responded to was that the op is in America or concerned about American cell network compromises and wanted to address that.
That’s a real simple threat to get past, just go to whatever is encrypted that the most people use.
Most people use imessage, so that’s what I suggested.
It seems like I’m not being clear. The goal is to get 100% on to encrypted chat.
Right now in America, about sixty percent of the phones are running ios. ios has imessage by default. The application which those people use to do imessage is called messages (very unconfusing!) and also does texts. When you’re using imessage in messages the text bubbles are blue, rcs and sms are green. Imessage is an encrypted chat.
If a person running android wants to use imessage they need to bridge it to their phone from a mac (messages and imessage are available on mac) using the bluebubbles application.
So three out of five of the people you know are already using encrypted chat. If you, the op, can get on their level then you only have to convince the other two to use some other chat thing that they can do. Maybe signal or something.
So the cost of running a mac computer as a bridge so you can use imessage through the bluebubbles android app is for you, the op, to get on the encrypted chat application those three out of five people are already on. You’d still need to use xmpp or something for everyone else but now you only need to worry about two out of five people.
I’m pretty poor and a hundred bucks isn’t a terrible price to pay for being sixty percent there. If I could have done that with pgp back in the day (when a hundred bucks was worth something!) I would have jumped at the chance.
Just avoiding having to explain to people that email was transmitted in plaintext and what that meant and not either have to talk them down from taking a pickaxe to their computer or convince them that it doesn’t matter that they have nothing to hide would have been worth it back then.
It’s also a completely hypothetical cost that assumes you don’t just stumble into an old mac and won’t trade your phone in for one running ios to save that cash.
As I said, use signal for everything else.
If immediately getting sixty percent of your chats encrypted isn’t worth a hundred bucks to you I don’t know what to say. We’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m trying to meet a goal to solve a problem and you’re trying to find the fair solution.
It’s good to try to find the fair solution.
If you’re in america almost sixty percent of phones are ios.
If you’re choosing an encrypted chat and sixty percent of people are already using it then that’s the one you choose. The hardest thing is compliance and you’re almost two thirds of the way there if you just pay a hundred bucks (or scrounge up an old mac) and run the bridge app. Then you use signal for everything else.
I think we’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m not worried about a universal solution because I know I’m not getting to 100% compliance with any solution so I suggested the one that immediately fixes the majority of the problem. Having had to convince people to exchange pgp keys twenty five years ago, I’d pay a hundred bucks to not have to deal with that for two thirds of the people I know.
Think about it this way: if you were starting from scratch would you rather have to convince all your contacts to move their chats with you to signal or matrix or whatever or would you rather have to convince four out of ten to do that?
Obviously you’d pick the easier thing because no matter how committed you may be to not using proprietary software or big corporate apps or fragmented ecosystems you actually have to accomplish the goal of chatting with people using encryption and all the process compliance and wheedling and convincing and tech support for family members is time you could be spending talking about gardening, sharing baby pictures, plotting to overthrow the government or whatever you would normally be doing.
That’s awesome! I didn’t know there was an option for android users.
That will* work.
*actually figure out what you’re trying to maintain privacy from and set up your icloud account appropriately.
I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with you, my comment was intended to add the context that might help English readers understand how the natural conclusion they would reach after learning that the app name directly translates to “little red book” isn’t necessarily true.
For me, as an American English speaker the natural conclusion would be that it’s an application designed by maoists in order to discuss Maoism when it’s actually designed for integrated ecommerce.
When you use mullvad you create a sixteen digit id. You don’t tie an account or email to it, just your secret code.
If I wanted to answer your question I’d make an account, put five bucks on it using whatever means are functional and quick (a credit card or something) and see how it works. Mullvad is €5 no matter how many months you buy in advance so it’s not a huge deal or commitment to find out.
Once you’ve bought a month using the least privacy respecting (this is debatable) method you can figure out if it will work for you.
You may find out that you need to use mullvads encrypted dns service and/or their browser proxy setup. Using the encrypted DNS doesn’t require the use of mullvads vpn servers so you might be able to resolve the isp blocking tor that way without needing to buy mullvad.
If you find out in that month that everything is working right, re-up another month in your low privacy way then make a new account and select the use cash option. They’ll give you a code to write down. Send a big bill with that use cash code to Switzerland and in a few weeks you’ll have relatively private vpn access.
E: since the barrier to entry of €5 and some way to transfer it might be too high, you can also try to contact mullvads servers. Make an account and don’t fund it, but create a device profile and a configuration (or install their software). If your error is that the account isn’t funded as opposed to that the servers are unreachable then you’re probably fine.
China has very developed bicycle infrastructure and massive public transportation compared to almost anywhere else. There are fewer car owners per capita than other countries. It’s still a smart play to use the hand of state to take steps to allocate the more energy dense batteries to applications that require them.
As I said before: Maybe these better chemistries that will replace lithium are just around the corner. I certainly don’t count unhatched chickens.