Not only for its time! While flawed, I still see it as probably the best middle ground for messaging. It has evolved since then, its servers are easy to host and it has a variety of clients that support e2e.
It's worse than that. Carriers have a say as well. For example, Samsung messages works with RCS in some markets but US providers currently lock it out. They only allow Google messages for RCS. Absolutely infuriating.
Same, I had to ad-block some custom elements on YouTube ages ago because they kept covering the screen with "related videos" whenever I paused to read something.
You can make a good case for breaking up Facebook. Twitter is just twitter and is slowly eating itself. Eventually, the advertisers will see just how much of the userbase are bots and either pull or negotiate for lower rates.
Normies genuinely turn on their Smart TV, watch start menu ads, open the YouTube app, wait 90 seconds for the shitty cpu to load the web view, scroll through hundreds of Spider-Man Elsa brainwashing videos and thinly disguised ads, open a video, watch 3 minutes of ads, straight into a 3 minute sponsor segment. All before seeing any actual content.
And they see no problem with this at all, the thought that you can make ads go away literally does not even occur to them as a possibility.
Humanity deserves extinction, I’m gonna go release some refrigerant real quick
I was always an Android but broke down after the thousandth idiot friend told me I wouldn’t have problems if tried iPhone. Let’s be honest though. Android folks don’t have privacy or are tech savvy either. It’s the ones using graphineOS and the other stripped down android OSs that do
@empireOfLove2 I don't get it, how can they use the internet without an ad blocker? The first thing that I do is download Firefox + uBlock Origin on any device before of using it.
I honestly don't know. far too many people are just conditioned or browbeaten into just dealing with the cancer of ads that the modern internet is. feels a lot like it's a bit of a "frog in boiling water" situation where most people don't even realize how bad it's gotten over so many years.
RCS is just stupid. When I was still building phones a decade ago we had some operators ask for it - but after reading the standards decided to just ignore it and hope it passes. Pretty much everybody did that, until google got interested - presumably because they figured it'd be a good way to get control of messaging on a lower level. As that's exactly what RCS is: control of messaging, and ideally the option to charge for it, just like SMS and MMS before that.
What's really bizarre is that Google had the chance to be a dominant player in messaging when they made Hangouts the default SMS client on Android. Instead, they backpedaled and let Hangouts wither into obscurity. I'm mostly glad they screwed that up, but also puzzled.
The hostility towards custom ROM in general, is what forced me to root. Initially I used LineageOs without root. However, that got me in to issues with various apps, due to not passing safety net. So now I use magisk to hide that I use a custom ROM. So, they basically forced me to root.
Google is probably trying to get around the cardinal rule of network security: you can't trust the client.
Their RCS client probably doesn't make sending a huge volume of messages (i.e. spam) easy, and more automation is possible with root. Yes, it's stupid, but it's not completely without purpose.
This is really it. Plus not everyone who roots (or, rather, everyone with a rooted phone) fully understands the security implications of running as root. I’d assume that since their implementation of end to end encryption must require a device-side key pair, and I’d wager that it’s pretty trivial to obtain private keys once you’ve obtained control of a rooted phone. For an adversary, this is a serious threat to the users privacy and security.
This is just one example. I’m sure it’s incredibly difficult to make a platform that you market as secure and private when your users have full control of the system that the application is running on. It’s a never ending cat and mouse game where the device user (whether “intended use” or not) has the upper-hand most of the time.
Not being a total Google apologist here though. They should have made it quite clear that they were blocking messages, and why. Not doing at least that, is inexcusable.
I'm a hardliner when it comes to user control of their own devices, so I'm not going to agree with Google's behavior here even if it, on average results in a benefit to users.
I don't think it provides a net benefit to users though. I think Google wants to be lazy about building spam-mitigation solutions, and wouldn't be sad if it results in fewer users blocking ads and tracking. If Google was positioning its RCS client as a hardcore security product, maybe it should warn both sides of the conversations that there's a risk of compromise, but even Signal, which is far more dedicated to security doesn't do that.
Zero-click exploits are a more common attack vector than modified operating systems in the real world, and I'd be willing to wager my up-to-date LineageOS install is less vulnerable to them than the average person's phone.
Well here we are sharing textual communication on fedi. It's only a slight stretch. Like maybe I will share space by "liking" a video. Or maybe you have to explicitly click a "serve" or "seed" button. It's not pie in the sky and it would eliminate all ads and other shit videos...you like a video ? Ok share it or download it if you want.
Just to add, image hosting for lemmy servers is also an issue already. Afaik they aren’t federated because even the occasional image will significantly increase the amount of storage required on instances.
Most people have asymmetric connections, can download faster than upload.
It's cheaper to provide bandwidth to a datacenter connected to the backbone than it is to someone's house.
Like, from a purely-financial standpoint, if one wants to pay for access with bandwidth and storage, it'd make more sense to have a structure where people somehow contribute to running PeerTube instances in datacenters, as you get more bang for your buck.
It's been tried, somewhat.
BitTorrent uses tit-for-tat high-priority bandwidth resource provision. Some BitTorrent trackers have (or had; I haven't looked recently) a longer-lived, albeit crude, credit system for maintaining ratios.
Mojo Nation, which is what Bram Cohen did before BitTorrent, had a longer-lived credit-tracking system.
But the larger problem there is that they were basically exploiting a quirk in ISP billing. ISPs normally have flat-rate billing -- you can use as much bandwidth as you want, and only pay a flat rate. ISPs just average out costs across users. Light users subsidize heavier users. But...that creates a misincentive for people to figure out how to monetize, even if it's very inefficient, their bandwidth, and saturate it constantly, which basically makes light users pay for things above-and-beyond the heavy users' regular bandwidth. It's economically inefficient, leans on the fact that the billing system has that subsidy built into it. Like, it's not the system that you'd want if everyone were doing it, as you'd want to have content in datacenters, one way or another.
I do kind of wonder how practical it would be for it to be the norm for people to have some kind of VPS of their own. That'd let them do some things that aren't really economical or practical today, and provide some more-privacy-friendly options for one person to provide services (well, privacy-friendly as long as you trust your VPS provider).
That's PeerTube. The problem is that hosting video is a lot more expensive than hosting text, so finding the funds to pay for hosting is a lot harder than with Mastodon or the Threadiverse.
Also, some content creators on YouTube are there because they want to be paid by YouTube.
YouTube makes you watch ads as part of the "come up with the funds" solution.
The problem is that hosting video is a lot more expensive than hosting text,
Which is why there aren't any effective competitors to youtube.
Several have tried to directly compete, and they ran out of money.
In addition to the costs of the infrastructure, there are other issues.
In order to get to the scale where youtube would even care, you would need to have a lot of content that viewers want to watch. And to attract enough good video creators to post exclusively on your platform, you need a way for them to earn some money from their effort.
Yes, Odysee and Vimeo exist, but they're pretty niche, and each has major limitations.
Odysee has a tiny audience, and they "pay" in their own crypto, which is very hard to convert into actual money that you can buy food with.
And Vimeo has some odd rules about what they want on their site. And creators have to pay to upload at any useful scale. Plus their search and suggestion system is almost useless.
It might be possible to compete in an area where YouTube (presently) has content restrictions. I assume that YouTube doesn't allow outright porn, and that that's how PornTube and friends can exist.
Dangerous business to enter, though, because if one day YouTube decides to enter the market (or decides to create a differently-branded service that shares infrastructure) that does do porn, I assume that that's gonna put those smaller competitors in danger of getting wiped out. An investor in such a venture is at risk of losing their investment then.
Those content restrictions aren't because youtube itself has any moral objections, it's a combination of what the law allows (see COPA related fines changing content rules) and what (most) big budget advertisers are willing to appear beside.
The previous "adpocalypse"s have shaped a large portion of youtube's content policies.
Any other platform hoping to take market share from youtube will have to deal with the same pressures if they expect to pay their bills once the VC money runs out.
I've not really used it except for the SLS because it's streamed exclusively there. No major issues except one time long videos (sls streams can last 6 hours) would take a lifetime to load.
IMO they should have just made any roaming on non-EU-terms strictly opt-in. It’s madness that you can get billed ridiculous amounts of money just for being too close to a border or ship.
If you don't have a deal with the carrier, don't automatically connect to it. That is so dumb, (and it also smells illegal to some degree) cause in some cases it can happen on accident, and paying for things you specifically don't want is a really shakey basis in law.
This time last year I stayed on Bardsey Island, off the Welsh Coast. There's hardly any phone signal on the island, but they warned everyone to turn off roaming on their phones anyway. It turns out that because of the mountain on the island blocking the signal from the UK, lots of phones automatically connect to Irish providers, and cost more than people expect
The island is tiny, and only has about half a dozen houses on it. The visitors are there because it's a nature reserve, so generally don't want to be on their phones anyway. It's not worth setting up a relay station over just telling everyone before they get there.
I've always been sent a text when I connect to the network of a different country. It happened immediately when I crossed over from France to Monaco, for example.
I'm always cautious about comparing the US to the EU too closely, but in this case it fits, as both are continent-wide common markets. If you "live and travel within the EU," it barely counts as international travel for economic concerns.
AFAIK, most of the pan-European plans cover the whole Schengen Area (including Switzerland), and the most of the former USSR boarders aren't all that porous, unlike the NAFTA boarders.
Let's look at landmass - the US is equivalent in landmass to 16 Western OECD countries.
I haven't seen roaming fees in the US for over 20 years. So you could travel 2500 miles and not once pay a roaming fee. Same with SMS - all messages have been included in my plan since at least 2005.
It's hard to compare EU to US with something like roaming. Very few Americans travel outside the US regularly, so we'd need to look at something like hours outside home area per year, or something, to be any kind of useful - and there's zero roaming within the US.
Yeah I find it hilarious when Europeans make all the jokes about Americans not traveling abroad when traveling through several countries for them is just driving from Miami to Disney World for us. And if that comparison is big to them, they'll lose their minds when they realize how big Africa is.
the travel distance is not the point in that criticism.
the "having to actually interact with different cultures" is the point. You can experience pretty much all climate and vacation hotspots without leaving the US. Which is cool an all. But that way people from the US are never really forced to interact with cultures that are not the US. Which is the reason for the "uncultured US tourists are never traveling abroad" stereotype
I do want to stipulate, that the US is full of different cultures. I don't want to make it seem like we don't have tons of shared culture here, but I feel its a disservice to ignore how many different cultures make the US
If you don't include American Indians, the cultural differences in the US are miniscule compared to the cultural differences within Europe.
For starters, most countries in Europe speak different languages.
Even, say, the cultural difference between Louisiana and California is less than the cultural difference between France and England (even though those countries are neighbhours), IMHO.
What you're probably seing as different cultures are probably just regional differences, same thing all of us think about our own countries, even people from small countries: it's basically the same effect as the one that leads Eskimos to have a lot more words for different kinds of ice and snow than anybody else - when you know something really well you can spot all the little differences which in your eyes are very clear and obvious yet for others are miniscule or even invisible - it looks a lot different to you because you're an expert in American English accents, the subtle indications of origin (not just regionals but also socio-economic) in the ways people dress, talk and interact in the US and so on.
Some decades ago I actually left my home country and went to live elsewhere in Europe (and ended up being over 2 decades abroad, in a couple of different countries) and one of my early realisations was how all those "differences" between people in my own country (which is Portugal, so quite small) that I found so important before having lived anywhere else were miniscule compared to the differences to people in another country.
I mean even native american nations within the US have cultural differences.
I wish I had a metric to go by, like number of shared common past times, language, legal structures, life goals, etc.
Like China Town vs a minnonite community vs the bayou vs rual Midwest vs New York vs Atlanta vs Islanders vs Indians on the Res vs Inuits vs Cuban Americans vs Mexican Americans is just a awesome variety to me. I've had the pleasure working with people in all those places and it really destroys the notion of "common sense" because depending how you are raised it really changes what you think is common.
You do have the melting pot effect multiplied by living in the era of mass communication and rapid transport too. So one person maybe surprised that you having handled a rattle snake or wrestled a gator or shot a machine gun or gone surfing, but you can talk about what just happened on game of thrones or the news.
I was really just talking about the dominant culture of a place, since once you include immigrant communities you do get a lot more variety but that's outside the vast majority of people's life experience in that country (there is a tendedency to self-segregate, to hide from the locals behaviours which would be seen by them as weird and to adapt the outside visible facets of that culture to the local environment - such as how Chinese food outside China isn't actually like in China or even the same in different countries) plus that kind of cultural breadth applies just the same in all reasonably wealthy nation that attract immigrants from all over.
(Mind you, it's really nice you appreciate the cultural variety that comes that way, just beware you're only seeing a reduced, locally-adjusted, set of it unless you actually know well - to the level of having been to their place and met their family - somebody from that cultural background).
Cultural differences are a lot more than those surface things, they're about stuff like expected behaviours (say, how people in Britain naturally form queues and are massivelly averse to giving criticism or how dutch people tend to arrange themselves in a circle when in a small get together at somebody's home and are direct to the point of sounding insulting to the previously mentioned Britons), shared sports preferences, business and political culture (adversarial, compromise, confrontation avoidance), even things like what TV shows one grew up with.
In my experience moving to another country, we have a ton of expectations we are totally unaware off when it comes to contact to others (even stupid stuff like how people behave whilst walking on the sidewalk and somebody else comes) and which we are totally unware that they are unwritten conventions because everybody around us is operating under the same conventions.
Mind you, as a turist one doesn't really notice the vast majority of those things when visiting a country.
If you're travelling to another country, you also get a different culture, architecture, cuisine,... even if it's "close by". That's the real criticism here that people don't get, if you're only travelling within the US, everything's pretty much the same, and you'll never expand your horizon much
Although the EU has some similarities to the US at the federal level, every country is its own sovereign nation with distinct rules and regulations, pricing, culture, language, cell phone providers, etc. It's very different than traveling between states in the US.
Yup. My wife went to Canada for a few days, so I bought a roaming plan. $20 and we were set. Yeah, that kinda sucks, but I've only needed to do that once.
If we go on a long trip somewhere, we'll probably get a SIM, but it just doesn't come up often.
It's bundled with Google One, so if you pay for more Google Drive storage you get it for free. tbf it's a shit VPN that doesn't even let you choose your country. I could see it used when on public wifi, but other than that I don't see the point.
I knew it! I had the sneaking suspicion that this was the case. About a month ago I updated my phone to Android 14 (custom rom) and noticed I started having trouble with RCS after a couple days since the update. I knew I was going to lose the play integrity but whatever. RCS was nice but I will not bend... just pushing me a step further to de-googling my phone. Lol it's funny how they cry to Apple about supporting RCS but yet refuse to allow third party apps or phones that don't meet their requirements, pathetic. There should be an encrypted text communication standard that isn't controlled by one company who can lock you out because you don't have approved software, that is ridiculous. That being said, I wish Signal was still a SMS app.
There should be an encrypted text communication standard that isn’t controlled by one company who can lock you out because you don’t have approved software
That too, but it is more resource-hungry to host (my biggest problem is that I have very limited storage and haven't quite figured out how to disable media downloads from all rooms). But yea, indeed still an option.
Yea, Synapse was out of the question for my low-power VPS, so I was going to try either this one or Dendrite. Just that last time I looked, I did not resolve the storage concerns. Ideally, I would like to not save any media and text that comes from federated servers.
I agree but there's 2 apps there is no good alternative for and they are paid, at least one of them I am learning Android studio + Kotlin to recreate it. The other I have found Wx which is OK but besides that there is no good advanced weather radar.
Yea tried that already, one won't work at all and one will stop working after sometime. I assume it still has something to do with google services. I have not tried with microg. Either way.. I'll get there to google-free land eventually its a work in progress. Sometimes I do consider just ripping off the band-aid and installing raw lineage os then learn to deal with it from there.
This is one of those shitty products that you can see being shitty from a mile away, yet all the coverage and discussion around it gives it a life it otherwise wouldn't have had.
They have so much quality audio equipment, it's understandable why people would stump for this because of the Teenage Engineering (TE) involvement alone.
Funnily enough, despite being a TE enthusiast, this is my first time hearing that they had anything to do with this joke of a product.
...which kind of does make me sort look at TE like... wtf were you thinking? ...and sort of definitely makes me question future endeavors from TE. Because this thing is a fucking joke.
Imo TE has always been a shady company in terms of business decisions. I still for the life of me cannot understand why the OP-1 is over 2 grand. It's a music making machine with a cruddy keybed that's not even volocity sensitive that's also intentionally limited in terms of how you can use it.
Now, don't get me wrong. I definitely think it's a cool little device capable of doing cool things. But there's no way in hell this tiny thing is worth 2k. You can spend 1/4th of the price on something like an elektron Digitakt or a polyend play and get very similar functionality in an arguably better more robust package.
TE are a boutique company that intentionally releases overpriced products so they can have this reputation of being a "premium" company. Just like Apple. If it weren't for their pocket operators (which are arguably closer to being toys than actual audio equipment) I wouldn't think they'd have anything remotely worth buying.
Side note: the playdate looks adorable. But, similarly to the OP-1, is very overpriced for what it does.
Yeah I do genuinely think the pocket operators are cool. At least I did when I thought they were cheap. Had no idea they got that expensive. Though that's obviously not at all expensive when you're talking about audio gear. So I'm willing to give them a modicum of leeway there.
Hopes were set unreasonably high because the hardware designer has a great reputation. And the hardware seems well made (for the price) and certainly tries out some interesting new ideas. I love how the camera is physically blocked while not in use for example.
The software team has let this product down. Not surprising, but dissapointing.
Automatic physical camera shutters? Only ones I can think of on phones are pop-up selfie cameras like the LG Wing and OnePlus 7. LG doesn't make phones any more and OnePlus dropped the pop-up camera in their next phone, and haven't brought it back.
The hardware team made a device that just couldn't be turned into a good product no matter what the software team did. None of those AI-in-a-box devices are good products because they simply don't have a reason to exist. Everything they can do, phones can do. If you have a phone, you don't need one of those AI boxes, however if you buy one of those AI assistant things, you'll still need a phone (which, again, can completely replace the AI box with no loss in functionality).
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