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Posted Jan 27, 2025 23:43 UTC (Mon) by willy (subscriber, #9762)In reply to: Flee from Meta by Klaasjan
Parent article: Linux-related discussion as a cybersecurity threat
Posted Jan 27, 2025 23:49 UTC (Mon)
by Klaasjan (subscriber, #4951)
[Link] (11 responses)
Posted Jan 28, 2025 6:28 UTC (Tue)
by Nemo_bis (guest, #88187)
[Link]
Posted Jan 28, 2025 10:10 UTC (Tue)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (5 responses)
Recent events have made a lot of people reconsider WhatsApp who wouldn't have before, which is impressive. It's pervasive in Europe, mainly because SMS was/is fricking expensive and doesn't work great across borders (of which we have many).
Posted Jan 28, 2025 16:50 UTC (Tue)
by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
[Link]
Posted Jan 29, 2025 10:41 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (3 responses)
IFF you're on contract, SMS is almost invariably free in the UK now - has been for a while. MMS, on the other hand, is still pricey.
So of course, Google decided to drop messenger, replace it with some other messaging app, and default it to using WiFi not SMS. And uncapped data plans are frigging expensive ...
Mind you, I've got one of the cheapest plans you can get, and careful monitoring of upgrade offers means I now normally start each month with (I think) 50GB of data allowance - 25GB per month plus the previous month rolled over.
Cheers.
Posted Jan 30, 2025 10:01 UTC (Thu)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (2 responses)
Within the UK it may be free, and now if you're in the EU then within the EU it will be within your bundle. But when WhatsApp started you paid through the nose if you happened to be outside the country and you wanted to SMS your friends at home. This was the killer feature that made WhatsApp popular. Skype could have captured this space, but it didn't. The fact you can send images for zero extra cost is just bonus. And the fact it works even if you have only Wifi.
And even today, sending SMSes to other countries is notoriously flaky. We often communicate with customers in other countries using Signal because SMSes just vanish (the lack to receipts doesn't help).
Posted Jan 30, 2025 13:27 UTC (Thu)
by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
[Link]
Posted Jan 30, 2025 14:38 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
Posted Jan 30, 2025 18:16 UTC (Thu)
by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962)
[Link] (3 responses)
Signal does not have the ability to store received media files in the phone gallery or any other storage media easily backed up incrementally, you just have the option to back up the gigantic blob file created once per day as "backup". The ability to store media outside the Signal container has been requested repeatedly and denied repeatedly, usually with arguments along the lines of "you don't know if the sender would allow you to back up the media" and "you can export media files individually to phone storage, just not in bulk".
If you want to share pictures/videos in a way the receiver can benefit from automated off-device backups to avoid data loss, pretty much any non-Signal messenger is better. Signal-JW exists and claims to be Signal-compatible while allowing phone-managed storage of media, but that won't help your conversation partner recover their valuable family pictures.
If you're recommending a messenger to friends and family, be ready to explain why their data disappeared after a phone was stolen or damaged if the messenger doesn't support user-friendly automatic backups.
Posted Jan 31, 2025 8:29 UTC (Fri)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (2 responses)
When you recieve an image you can select it and ask to save to local storage (aka your phone gallery). Since most images I receive via Signal are memes anyway I don't mind this, I just need to remember to save the few photos that are interesting.
For the same reason I don't have every image in WhatsApp backed up to the cloud, that just wastes a ridiculous amount of space.
Posted Jan 31, 2025 10:20 UTC (Fri)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (1 responses)
Signal doesn't offer the choice - it insists that everyone has to work the way you do, not the way I do.
Posted Jan 31, 2025 12:43 UTC (Fri)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
What I would personally like is the ability to explicitly archive (and subsequently delete) some subset of the overall Signal message store.
There are conversations that _must_ be kept for various reasons but I don't want to waste a couple of GB of precious handheld space on them all the time.
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Re: Getting off WhatsApp
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I made prediction market contracts on which of the big services that are currently end-to-end encrypted will give in:
So far Signal looks the strongest, at 14% compared to 56% for WhatsApp, which makes sense because the Signal Foundation doesn't have other businesses that a government could have easy leverage over.
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Wol
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The other influence that led to WhatsApp being popular is that the EU in general had more of a bias towards pre-paid plans than the USA. This led to two interacting things that biased people towards messaging apps (BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp etc): first, you tended to pay less for your messaging if you bought data and used a separate service for messaging than if you bought SMS. Second, telcos offer pre-paid customers the opportunity to buy cheap bundles of service - 500 MB data to use up in 30 days, or 200 SMS to use in 60 days, for example - and because data is fungible between messaging, e-mail, web browsing etc, being able to push everything into a data bundle is easier than having to balance data bundles and SMS bundles separately.
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This becomes a user-by-user thing; I back up all images I'm sent via WhatsApp, since virtually all of them are family pictures I want to keep. It's simpler to remove the 1% of images that are memes than to manually back up the 99% that are things I want.
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