I'm not surprised they could. I've worked on things that send SMS messages and I'm aware that carriers filter for spam and scams (perhaps not as effectively as one might hope).

I'm surprised to hear of messages being blocked for mere profanity.

Anyway, SMS sucks, default to something else and fall back to SMS as a last resort. Gently encourage your contacts to use Signal.

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That's correct; the omicron variant that became dominant a bit over two years ago was more contagious and less deadly than those that preceded it. Current variants are similar to omicron in those respects.

The rate of long-term disability is still high.

I'm not immunocompromised or any other kind of high-risk and I wear an N95 mask in most indoor public settings.

I plan on doing it until something changes. That could mean any of:

• SARS-CoV-2 mutates into a dominant strain with a low risk of long-term disability
• A new vaccine is developed that reduces the risk of long-term disability following COVID, or probability of infection to virtually nil
• Monitoring programs, such as CDC wastewater testing show a low risk of infection

It seems to me people collectively decided to stop caring about COVID even though most of the risks that were present two years ago still exist. I would therefore ask the inverse: why stop protecting yourself before the danger is over?

The article has a weirdly alarmist tone to it.

Yes, there are a bunch of people claiming to know loopholes in the law through which they don't need a license to drive and the county sheriff (who will absolutely arrest them for driving without a license) is the supreme authority. A few of them will resist the police with violence. People unsuccessfully advancing crackpot legal theories and a few isolated incidents of fighting the police are not a threat to the rule of law.

SMS fallback. A feature which you can use with any app on Android

SMS fallback is not a common feature of internet-based messaging apps on Android. Signal used to do it, but does not now. I don't think WhatsApp or Telegram ever did.

I have no doubt about the part where iPhone fans waste no opportunity to tell someone else they should get an iPhone. It's the other side of the argument that falls flat: Alice receives video from Charlie that's perfectly fine, but Bob's iPhone sends a pixelated mess, and Bob says the iPhone is better?

Interest in RCS is recent - newer than iMessage, which launched in 2011. RCS with Google's proprietary extensions is just another proprietary messaging app, and I am not particularly excited about it.

even so far as “patch” a fix that was created to make it possible for their customers to communicate securely with Android users.

There's no shortage of options for doing that. What Apple wants is tight control over all of its walled gardens, which should be no surprise given the company's history. They're very good at making it appear as if decisions made to increase their profits are aligned with the interests of users. It's probably even true that someone would have exploited the technique Beeper Mini was using to send spam if Apple hadn't closed it.

Just doesn't seem plausible to me. If Alice gets low-quality images from Bob and higher-quality images from Charlie, her most likely assumption if she's not sophisticated enough to be aware of the cause is that Bob's phone has a bad camera.

It seems unlikely to have that effect when the recipient presumably communicates with people who have other brands of phone, from whom they receive better looking media.

It seems like an odd decision to me, as it would make the iPhone look like it has a substandard camera to someone receiving media from one by MMS.

MMS does have size limits that can hurt image quality, but I have the impression iOS applies limits of its own that are considerably lower. I'm not sure why anybody in 2024 wouldn't have at least a couple modern messaging apps, but it seems a lot of people don't.

Android doesn’t support iMessage

I think it's the inverse: iMessage doesn't support Android.

Those aren't equivalent statements; the first implies that something about Android makes it impossible for Apple to produce an iMessage client for it when that is purely a business decision on Apple's part.

Major privacy issues that come to mind include:

• App store lock-in on iOS combined with terms incompatible with the GPL mean that some of the most privacy-respecting software cannot be distributed for Apple's mobile devices.
• Apple proposed, but ultimately did not implement client-side scanning for end-to-end encrypted cloud storage. That such a thing even made it to the public proposal stage shows either incompetence (unlikely) or a lack of serious commitment to privacy (more likely). Apple's proposal may have emboldened EU regulators who are trying to mandate client-side scanning for encrypted chat apps.
• Browser engine lock-in on iOS means hardened third-party browsers are unavailable.
• The popularity of Apple's platform-exclusive iMessage service in the USA may be hindering adoption of cross-platform encrypted messaging. On the other hand, without it perhaps most of its current users would use SMS, which is obviously worse.

would the government be able to find out that I own the anonymous e-sim on it if my other sim in my phone is another provider not silent-link

Yes. They can almost certainly tie the hardware ID (IMEI) of your phone to your identity through your non-anonymous service provider, and probably do through mass surveillance programs. Whether that's a security problem for you depends on what you're doing with it; surely you aren't using SMS, standard phone calls, or unencrypted messaging services for anything you really want to keep private.

If you want phone service that will resist targeted surveillance by local authorities, even routinely turning on the cellular modem where you live, work, or study is a risk. This article detailing one person's approach to securing a phone was posted to Lemmy today and should give you a clue about the possible threat models.

one with ads and the same vids without for premium user

If it worked that way, which others have already explained it doesn't, that would break their business model of showing each person individually targeted ads.

How democratic of them.

I am drinking port as I type this.

A sober teacher who is negligent in some other way resulting in an unreasonable danger to the children in their care also commits a crime.

TikTok is really popular operating on essentially the same principle. I, for one want nothing to do with that.

If a dangerous situation arose and the teacher failed to respond appropriately due to drunkenness, I'm sure that charge would be appropriate.