No it's a bit complex. The transmissions are sent constantly at regular intervals and are a very specific size and are then combined later. So it's not "instant" messaging. It's closer to email.

I hate that this is turning out to be an issue that the lawyers are just not doing their jobs in multiple court cases across the industry rather than solving the legal issue. I don't know if it's ignorance or corruption, but big corporations getting away with stealing from artists is not a new thing. Sad that it's now come to a point where they can produce so much garbage that it drowns out the work of the original artists. Soon there will be so little content for the LLMs to steal from that everything will be derivative and we'll end up in a new dark age.

Heliboard works well for me. But SMS is a problem because RCS isn't very well standardized, so you're pretty much stuck with only Google Messages on Android. I've been trying to instead get as many contacts onto Signal or other secure messaging apps since SMS is so out of date and insecure.

Uggghhh, I bet this means there will be even more people walking around wearing fragrances using the crappy industrial ingredients that give me headaches. They already got into the cosmetic products, now high-end perfumes, too?

I rarely consider anything "too far" unless you're doing something totally ineffective or duplicating effort, and not talking about redundancy. I think most people who say this are either the people who we need to be secure from or people who are ignorant to the threats. I'm not saying the same threats affect us all, but there's always a possibility you could become a target through whistleblowing, protest, being attractive, pissing off a random stranger, etc. And usually by the time you are a target, it's too late. Your information is already out there and it's difficult to stop broadcasting more with all of the tracking systems in place all over.

It's often not clinical paranoia that causes people to worry about security and/or privacy, primarily it's a desire for a minimal amount of privacy, hiding from predators, and/or basic protection from fascist regimes of various strengths that have taken over most governments. Often keeping a little privacy also is the best way to prevent becoming a target in the first place.

Not only that, but every app will constantly appear to be sending messages, so real messages are greatly obfuscated. That's honestly the real innovative part of the product IMHO.

That's not what I understood from the post, but could you point to the specifics of what you're talking about in regards to the identifier being encrypted in transit? It seems the ID is sometimes obfuscated, but that is trivial to remove and not meant for security as mentioned.

Not lock-in in the traditional sense where you're locked to a particular technology, but effectively lock-in by making a commonly used feature for migration not available for free. This wasn't discussing uncommon cases like having your own domain in front of a free email service since that's not then fully free.

The most common use of free email services is to use the service's domain and if you need to switch, then needing to change your email at tons of different places. I am still stuck on gmail for a couple of accounts because changing the email with those services means creating an entirely new account and thus losing all history, etc. Example is the Shop app. Without forwarding I'd end up having to keep the gmail app on my phone to get notification of new emails which is problematic since those apps come with additional tracking services which is the whole reason for migrating from gmail.

I alias traditional stuff to better, usually drop-in versions of that thing on computers that have the better thing. I often forget which systems have the better thing, so this helps me get the better experience if I was able to install it at some point. For example I alias cat to bat, or top to htop, or dig to drill, etc.

Better than no drag allowed. But I mean gotta stick to tradition I guess. I mean just look at all the women that Shakespeare had in his plays...oh wait...........

Not a new thing, and I can definitely see good uses for this information. What they should have done is made it so that the one being tracked gets a log and real time notification any time someone is tracking them. This would alleviate some of the toxic spying behavior simply by making it transparent rather than covert.

Problem is this means that things we were hoping to get like having hormone replacement therapy actually approved by the FDA for use for transgender care will not happen and any enforcement of anti-discrimination or laws against hate speech at the federal level will no longer apply to trans and non-binary people. This will allow, for example, insurance companies to not have to cover transgender care. There is already a huge waiting list for people who are seeking care in the US due to the lack of specialists (myself included), so that list is likely to get longer. And likely any doctors who might have been planning to take up transgender care specialties may have their programs lose their funding. It's a huge impact to a lot of areas of government and many industries to have the federal government not recognize transgender care as valid and not recognize non-binary people like me as people at all.

Also, I'm fortunate enough to live in a state that is friendly to transgender and non-binary people, but my employer is not based here, so the insurance I have doesn't have to obey local laws that don't allow for blanket policies banning coverage of transgender care. So, the federal laws do matter.