about time?

Anyone following anyone interesting on Nostr? Tried it for a while and while the tech is cool I felt it was missing a good collection of people. All I ever saw was crypto scams and self referential memes/discussions about how cool Nostr is - which I agree - but that's not what I'm interested in.

Image for the lazy (and yes, of course, Apple's breaking their own accessibility guideline of having text at least 3:1 contrast ratio for text to be readable and instead making it 2:1 by picking the lightest shade of green possible).

It’s a terrible move, especially to make it default.

Subjective, but lets see what you bring to the table.

It’s just as bad a protocol as SMS in its own way: It’s still tied to a phone number/sim, so you can’t just login to the service via a browser or an app.

That's how text (SMS/RCS) messaging works. Did you expect something different? Did you expect the SMS replacement to not require a phone number?

It has lots of failures, worst of all, SILENT FAILURES, where you don’t even know your messages aren’t being sent - just look at the communities around here discussing it.

I've been using it without issue for quite a while now, but that's just one data point. If you have stats to back up your claim, I would love to see that.

There’s no common protocol here really, ...

"The GSMA’s Universal Profile is a single, industry-agreed set of features and technical enablers developed to simplify the product development and global operator deployment of RCS" Source: https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/networks/rcs/universal-profile/

lots of parts work only by decree of each host (e.g. iOS won’t have E2EE with anyone not on iOS, because that requires every cell provider to agree to the config they’re going to use.

This is how distributed/federated systems work and this is one of their cons. They won't always be 100% compatible as each component is independent but the goal is to eventually reach feature parity. See Matrix chat clients that didn't all have encryption (or other features) on day 1 or XMPP which has lots of clients, none of which support all features.

This is the 21st century, and this is the best they can do - a protocol that fails with no notice? Without standardized encryption? That’s tied to hardware?

Please post evidence of this. Again, I've had zero issues and every Android user is using RCS by default now - have heard zero complaints.

I had a better experience in 2009 running Pidgin on my phone and my laptop using XMPP. That didn’t require a phone number - I could login and see my messages in both places simultaneously… 15 years ago.

Correct! XMPP is not an SMS replacement and thus it doesn't need a phone number. In fact, you can't "text" an XMPP user, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about here?

No, RCS is a way to make the plebes think they’ve got a new and better system while still delivering garbage.

RCS vastly improves over SMS with the following features:

• High Quality Multimedia Messaging: Unlike SMS/MMS, which is limited to text and potato sized image/videos, RCS allows sending and receiving photos, videos, and other files at significantly higher quality.
• Rich Content Sharing: RCS supports sharing richer content formats like GIFs, location sharing, and contact cards.
• Improved Group Chatting: RCS provides a more feature-rich group chat experience with features like group chat names, adding/removing participants, and seeing who has read messages (with read receipts).
• Typing Indicators: Similar to many messaging apps, RCS lets you see when someone is typing a message.
• Improved Message Reliability: RCS messages are sent over data networks, so unlike SMS, they shouldn't get lost due to network congestion.
• End-to-End Encryption: RCS can offer end-to-end encryption for chats, providing an extra layer of security for your messages (availability varies by carrier).

But keep spreading FUD and hating on something that actually moves the needle forward.

Love you downvoters that don’t know enough to argue, just drive by and downvote.

I think they're downvoting you because you're wrong - plainly wrong - and in this day and age its much easier to bury (downvote) blatantly wrong information than to reply to it. So I'm replying for everyone else but I will not be downvoting you. FUD should be fought back with evidence, but MAAN is it tiring.

ONE person had the guts to say why he disagreed with me.

It's not about guts, its about wasting time, effort, not giving a shit. I slightly give a shit and want people who are less educated on the subject to see the other side of it.

Nevermind that BorgDrone explained what’s wrong with RCS better than I care to. You drive-by downvoters can’t even be bothered to learn about RCS.

Nothing to comment on here.

RCS is garbage. Plain and simple. I will never allow it on my devices, ...

At the end of the day RCS is objectively better than what exists today in the world of carrier messenger services (SMS/MMS). Is it better than iMessage? I don't think anyone would agree, especially not if you only message other iPhone users. Is it a better out-of-the-box experience for interoperability? Absolutely! And you're being disingenuous if you disagree, but I'm happy to hear you out.

just like with Whatsapp, Facecrap, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

We can agree to these being garbage ✊

All that said, am I actively going to ask people to use RCS? Never! The same way I wouldn't ask someone to use iMessage if I had an iPhone. They're both products developed ultimately to push users into their respective ecosystem to the benefit of Google/Apple/Carriers.

I'll stick to Signal and Matrix until something better comes along.

As well as losing the ability to send money from person to person. People will have to find another solution for that - Zelle, PayPal, Cashapp, etc.

1. Firefox doesn't "collect absolutely everything".
2. DO donate to Mozilla as without them the Firefox, Tor, Mullvad, Floorp, Mull, Waterfox AND Librewolf browsers wouldn't exist.
3. Librewolf disables SafeBrowsing, which is a security must-have for anyone installing a browser for friends/family - and in many cases even for yourself.
4. Even the Librewolf developers say "Safe Browsing is still a good security tool and Mozilla's implementation is privacy respecting."
5. Yes, if you know what you're doing use Librewolf. For everyone else, Firefox is a great move.

That's the one. How'd you find it? I always struggle. Is it linked anywhere on their official site?

Link to source on the fediverse/mastodon: https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/112513905401989149

Looks like at least one type can take flight from the ground, although with some difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIl_bYFMr8o

Thank you. not all *@lemmy.ml users are ignorant science deniers.

Fair, that's an actual useful feature that will benefit many.

that's fair, I can see how some wouldn't value 90Hz.

60Hz refresh rate in 2024? This might be a phone you buy for your parents but with other options available out there, it's going to come down to whatever specific niche this phone fills and whether that's enough compared to the competition.

Serious question, because I get a similar "TIL" on my mastodon thread and saw this and had a similar thought - would you prefer to see no "TIL" content posted by bots? I don't have any stake, but they do provide 3 benefits that I personally enjoy, as much as I'd prefer it was "organically" generated content:

1. Some posts are insightful, others I can just ignore/move on.
2. It provides a way to interact with the broader "fediverse" community about certain topics.
3. Helps avoid visiting sites like Reddit by virtue of having less content here and looking elsewhere.

More on topic - here's a pic of the couple, for anyone interested:

I thought you were kidding 🤷

I'm gonna need some evidence before I believe Google isn't analyzing all the data that passes through it unencrypted.

Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. Apple's build process makes reproducible builds near-impossible.
   • All the effort Telegram went through and it doesn't completely validate the entire build - there are components that are not fully reproducible [0] and as we saw with the recent XZ backdoor, these could potentially be leveraged to hide a backdoor while claiming to be secure - so was anything gained other than "these things are validated but this black box, which could contain malware, was not validated because we can't check them"?
2. Developing Signal is difficult.
   • Signal is developed by a small team and has to prioritize and coordinate efforts to deliver results - look at how long usernames took or even private contact discovery [1] - nearly 3 years (as a preview) after Signal was created.
   • Signal has no built-in telemetry, any issues are not automatically logged and reported. The end user has to manually submit debug logs and provide an adequate description of the issue for the devs to even attempt to understand what the issue is and how to fix it. Telegram may also have this issue in their very limited private chats, but as most chats aren't E2EE, they can already see all your traffic anyways, making things significantly easier in terms of development speed.

Considering the two points above, it's not irrational to come to state the following:

1. Signal has been prioritizing a fully end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) platform that shares zero data with anyone but the intended recipient and this decision has slowed down their development speed. Non-E2EE chat solutions have existed for decades and can iterate and progress significantly faster as they don't have to work on difficult privacy/security/encryption related issues.
2. Telegram has not been prioritizing a fully E2EE platform and by default do collect most of their user's data. This makes it much easier to develop Telegram and is why E2EE group messages don't even exist on the platform - the Telegram devs have spent more time talking about privacy and security than actually implementing it

Given the two statements above, assuming both projects need to balance resource constraints, it's safe to conclude, :

• Signal has spent zero effort working on reproducible builds on iOS because its impossible to completely reproduce a build and would take development resources working on enhancing the platform for minimal gains, as Telegram has proven [0]. Signal has instead placed their efforts on reproducible builds on a platform where it is possible [2].
• Telegram, instead of working towards implementing security and privacy by default, have decided to work on security theater by working on reproducible builds for iOS that are not even completely reproducible.

Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community.

It was closed because they use Github for bug reports, not feature requests [4]. The dev even pointed them to the right place. That said, I do agree it would be great if there was some progress made on this front for Signal, but realize its a huge effort and may be best avoided for now as the iOS client still needs some "catching up" to do, compared to the Android version.

And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤

Agreed.

Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪

Telegram collects all your data by default in a way that's accessible to anyone with enough privileges to their infrastructure.

[0] https://core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds#step-6-comparing-the-appstore-build-and-the-version-built-in-the

[1] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

[2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/main/reproducible-builds

[3] https://github.com/ali-fareed/darwin-containers/commits/main/

[4] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/641#issuecomment-1276308990

100% agree. Would be nice to be able to just "dock" into a USB-C cable and have a working "PC" at my disposal. Appreciate the response.

genuine question, what do you expect out of a mobile OS that you can't do now?

Even without a source I can see how ICE vehicles are cheaper to repair (assuming you don't have some high-end expensive car. I had a relatively "new"-ish engine replaced in my ICE vehicle (I'll let you guess the make/model) for just under $2,200, this is including labor.

ICE vehicles are "old tech" and everyone knows how they work and where to source cheaper (new or rebuilt) parts. All bets are off if you're working directly with a dealer when trying to save money.

I'm looking forward to owning an EV at some point, but will definitely need to find someone who's competent whenever any major issues appear. Hopefully by then they're significantly more common and the industry has more people that are competent at that type of work.