It’s just as well, rcs in America only has guarantees of features if you’re on the same servers as the other people, so there’s a big split between the Samsung and google rcses with all kinds of weird mixed media stuff if you’re both on gchat or the Samsung fork and nothing but maybe higher resolution pictures if you’re not.
It’s part of why I’m so willing to recommend imessage because for better or worse in America it’s the defacto standard.
Yeah and even if you’re on an ios with rcs plenty of old android devices just scale the videos down to postage stamp size anyway by default so you get bad looking pictures no matter what.
Yeah per text charges are really uncommon in the anglosphere, although the pay as you go carriers and plans have data limits.
If you’re on contract or renewing contract with an American carrier they’ll usually take literally any phone you have in trade for their lowest cost ios or android device, your choice. I took them up on it several years ago because the gimmie device was the only physically small iphone at the time. Sometimes it adds a couple of bucks to your monthly bill if you pick one with a little more storage or whatever but that amounts to them selling you the phone for fifty bucks or so over two years.
Hell, usually if you’re signing up for a new account they’ll offer some android and ios phones for free to get you on contract.
Half of each person is getting them to use encrypted chat with you one on one and half is getting the group chats to use it. If you can knock out half the battle most of the time then you should do it.
In my experience ios and android users are equally open/resistant to using some new thing.
I recognize that for a particular type of threat model or ideology all proprietary software amounts to the same level of vulnerability. The op only asked about encrypted chat. The implication that I picked up on and responded to was that the op is in America or concerned about American cell network compromises and wanted to address that.
That’s a real simple threat to get past, just go to whatever is encrypted that the most people use.
Most people use imessage, so that’s what I suggested.
It seems like I’m not being clear. The goal is to get 100% on to encrypted chat.
Right now in America, about sixty percent of the phones are running ios. ios has imessage by default. The application which those people use to do imessage is called messages (very unconfusing!) and also does texts. When you’re using imessage in messages the text bubbles are blue, rcs and sms are green. Imessage is an encrypted chat.
If a person running android wants to use imessage they need to bridge it to their phone from a mac (messages and imessage are available on mac) using the bluebubbles application.
So three out of five of the people you know are already using encrypted chat. If you, the op, can get on their level then you only have to convince the other two to use some other chat thing that they can do. Maybe signal or something.
So the cost of running a mac computer as a bridge so you can use imessage through the bluebubbles android app is for you, the op, to get on the encrypted chat application those three out of five people are already on. You’d still need to use xmpp or something for everyone else but now you only need to worry about two out of five people.
I’m pretty poor and a hundred bucks isn’t a terrible price to pay for being sixty percent there. If I could have done that with pgp back in the day (when a hundred bucks was worth something!) I would have jumped at the chance.
Just avoiding having to explain to people that email was transmitted in plaintext and what that meant and not either have to talk them down from taking a pickaxe to their computer or convince them that it doesn’t matter that they have nothing to hide would have been worth it back then.
It’s also a completely hypothetical cost that assumes you don’t just stumble into an old mac and won’t trade your phone in for one running ios to save that cash.
As I said, use signal for everything else.
If immediately getting sixty percent of your chats encrypted isn’t worth a hundred bucks to you I don’t know what to say. We’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m trying to meet a goal to solve a problem and you’re trying to find the fair solution.
It’s good to try to find the fair solution.
If you’re in america almost sixty percent of phones are ios.
If you’re choosing an encrypted chat and sixty percent of people are already using it then that’s the one you choose. The hardest thing is compliance and you’re almost two thirds of the way there if you just pay a hundred bucks (or scrounge up an old mac) and run the bridge app. Then you use signal for everything else.
I think we’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m not worried about a universal solution because I know I’m not getting to 100% compliance with any solution so I suggested the one that immediately fixes the majority of the problem. Having had to convince people to exchange pgp keys twenty five years ago, I’d pay a hundred bucks to not have to deal with that for two thirds of the people I know.
Think about it this way: if you were starting from scratch would you rather have to convince all your contacts to move their chats with you to signal or matrix or whatever or would you rather have to convince four out of ten to do that?
Obviously you’d pick the easier thing because no matter how committed you may be to not using proprietary software or big corporate apps or fragmented ecosystems you actually have to accomplish the goal of chatting with people using encryption and all the process compliance and wheedling and convincing and tech support for family members is time you could be spending talking about gardening, sharing baby pictures, plotting to overthrow the government or whatever you would normally be doing.
The barrier to entry was intended to refer to others since it’s already installed on over half their phones to start with and most people are gonna be using a messaging program on their phone.
When there’s above a 50% chance the person you’re talking to is already using a particular encrypted messaging program that’s the lowest barrier to entry.
The barrier to entry always refers to other people because the hardest part of establishing private communications has always been convincing other people to actually do it.
If you really wanted to get on imessage for the least amount of cash out of pocket possible, the bluebubble bridge application random letters person mentioned is ~$100 for an old mac, and tbh that’s a high estimate in my experience. People are just giving those things away nowadays.
That’s awesome! I didn’t know there was an option for android users.
People will dislike this:
The most basic one with little barrier to entry is imessage. Theres a good chance your friends and family already have it and with a few setting changes (no sms fallback, set icloud recovery key, probably some stuff I forgot) you’re damn near at parity with signal.
All without dad having to download a new app onto his phone and make a new identity!
Of course you’ll need signal or something for people who don’t use it.
I use that combination and it’s excellent. If you can be on imessage with someone you’re good and everything works, if not you do signal.
There will be people you gotta use sms with. They just won’t be able or willing to do something new. Sometimes there’s an equipment problem, their super old provider version of android can’t get an app you both agree on. Sometimes they’re using a Nokia.
Interacting with sms often may help keep you on your toes about it. I know I’m more careful over text now.
That combination, imessage and signal, also has a benefit of reducing the chances that you’ll broadcast an awareness of and desire for privacy and security to the whole world all the time.
In the us, there’s a 50% chance you just look like a normal person and that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Make sure it meets your needs of course
As of the time I’m writing this comment literally none of the suggestions made actually matter for the ambiguous goal of “general security and privacy” more than building in a neighborhood or community that meets the occupants desires.
Pick a place with people you want to be around who you trust to look out for you.
Hexbear was right about downvotes.
Some food for thought:
Absence of information is its own sort of information. You may find it worthwhile in your search for an acceptable compromise to place some kind of value on “looking normal”.
That will* work.
*actually figure out what you’re trying to maintain privacy from and set up your icloud account appropriately.
So go ahead and take a look at your journalctl output. The left hand side should be timestamps, so you can immediately figure out if it’s starting a million years in the past or sometime you know you had the problem.
If it is a million years in the past, use the —since flag and specify the time you want to start at as enumerated in the manual file (man journalctl).
Once you’re looking at the logs in journalctl from a day you know the problem happened, go ahead and use arrow keys and pgup/pgdn to find a reboot. You’ll know when you find a reboot because it’ll look different. The messages will be about figuring out what hardware is attached and changing runlevels and whatnot.
Once you found where the reboot is, go backwards to find something weird happening in the logs.
E: By default the parser (program used to handle text) of journalctls output is “less”. If you want to get out of it, press “q”, and if you want to know more “man less”.
Someone already linked to journalctl, but if you just quickly want to look, the command journalctl and the flag —since <your time here> will get you going.
Journalctls output can be piped, so if you know what you’re looking for you can grep it easily.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/(your drive)
You can do status=progress if you want like someone else posted and if you pick a block size go with either the physical block size reported by the disk in smartcontrol or some multiple of it that coincides with a big even division of your controllers memory. The drives physical block size will be “easy” for the drive, bigger blocks are faster.
People saying physical destruction are operating in a different world than you and people saying urandom or shred are operating off old (>30 years) information. The same technology that makes ssds unrecoverable black boxes was originally developed and deployed in spinning drives to eek out speed gains because the disk itself can be expected to know better than the operating system where to put shit and makes techniques (which were postulated but never actually implemented successfully in the wild) to recover overwritten data infeasible.
Alternately just reformat it and don’t worry. No one doing drive rmas cares about your data. They’re already on the razors edge with feedback and customer trust, you think they’re gonna burn their above board bread and butter to run a harvesting operation for a few bucks on the side? That’s usually the purview of your local pc repair shop…
When you use mullvad you create a sixteen digit id. You don’t tie an account or email to it, just your secret code.
If I wanted to answer your question I’d make an account, put five bucks on it using whatever means are functional and quick (a credit card or something) and see how it works. Mullvad is €5 no matter how many months you buy in advance so it’s not a huge deal or commitment to find out.
Once you’ve bought a month using the least privacy respecting (this is debatable) method you can figure out if it will work for you.
You may find out that you need to use mullvads encrypted dns service and/or their browser proxy setup. Using the encrypted DNS doesn’t require the use of mullvads vpn servers so you might be able to resolve the isp blocking tor that way without needing to buy mullvad.
If you find out in that month that everything is working right, re-up another month in your low privacy way then make a new account and select the use cash option. They’ll give you a code to write down. Send a big bill with that use cash code to Switzerland and in a few weeks you’ll have relatively private vpn access.
E: since the barrier to entry of €5 and some way to transfer it might be too high, you can also try to contact mullvads servers. Make an account and don’t fund it, but create a device profile and a configuration (or install their software). If your error is that the account isn’t funded as opposed to that the servers are unreachable then you’re probably fine.
It’s 孟子 for anyone wondering