I don’t disagree but don’t let perfection get in the way of good enough. SMS and standard email etc are all unencrypted. WhatsApp is encrypted end to end. You may not trust meta, or like them. But that’s millions time better than SMS or email.

Getting your parents on WhatsApp is a huge awesome step. Getting them to telegram or Signal or whatever else is a minor step comparatively.

I’m currently in a former USSR country on holiday and everything is WhatsApp and Telegram. Delivery drivers to government services.

Japan is still on floppy disks attached to carrier pigeons.

China is WhatsApp for every non Chinese even with the ban. Wechat for everything else but you need a Chinese mobile.

Korea surprisingly is using WhatsApp more than even prepandemic. Almost all my Korean friends are now WhatsApp versus like 1 just 5 years ago. Telegram is also popping up there.

But point taken. A few bubbles of differences but WhatsApp really does rule supreme.

Pretty much the entire world, except the US and Canada, is WhatsApp based. Every job chat, every message you send, it’s all WhatsApp. Heck to pay for parking or to get immigration visa services from the government, it’s mostly WhatsApp. And yes you can send stickers.

Sometimes Lemmy loses perspective that the way 300ish million people do something is not that relevant to the other 7500 million.

The US has the same rules, and are a driving force for this. They will enforce the rules the same as they do now for 10k payments. If you want clean money in a bank or if you want to travel with the money, or if you’re just randomly stopped and have the money on you, you will be forced to prove its provenance or it will be seized.

This is already how it works in the EU, UK, Canada, and of course the USA.

The cash itself isn’t the problem, it’s getting that cash into a “clean” system where it can be used to buy anything that isn’t cash. And with everything being non-cash on purpose because of these Nazi laws, you essentially have worthless paper you can’t do anything with.

You cannot stop the collection. It ALWAYS collects. It may not transmit, even if connected. For example the black box in many cars is really an assortment of ECUs that contain fine grained historical data. It does eventually roll over and get replaced but the data is there.

For example there are public cases you can find where the police, not even needing a warrant, were allowed to dump this data off of a rental vehicle that a suspect, not convicted just suspected, was thought to have been in. Of course the copaganda story showed that they the used this data which was mostly location by gps and speed by the wheel sensors and gps to get a track of everywhere that vehicle had been in the last 6 months. Every person who rented it and drove it somewhere had their privacy violated. But I guess that’s normal now.

The infotainment systems are the biggest jerks for data storage as they’re just mini generic computers today with lots of storage.

To stop wireless transmission you can remove the sim card from the modem. Many vehicles won’t work or even start if the modem is disconnected (unplugged or unfused). A Nissan for example will drain its 12v battery overnight trying to find the modem if it is unplugged. But if the sim is bad or disabled, it will try and fail to communicate, then retry later which won’t kill the battery.

You lose a lot of convenience and the data is still there. So the answer is basically you can’t drive a new vehicle without it violating your privacy with collection. You can only make the wireless transmission more private or disabled. I suppose you could buy a scanner yourself and before you leave the vehicle, factory wipe all ECUs. But even then you’ll need to enable them for emissions testing and such if that’s in your area.

Their hardware is just poor. They can charge whatever they like, I’m fortunate enough to not look at prices for that type of kit. Objectively, their hardware sucks compared to many other brands, especially at the same price point.

Their OS sucks for 90% of my use cases. If your “work” involves you just using a browser then yes you can use a big phone to get your work done. Slap an arm in a big case with a keyboard as a “pc” or a big screened arm for a tablet, or a small screen for a phone. But if you do anything where you use a computer, you need an x86 architecture and you need certain hardware capabilities. Over the time, they have all been lacking in performance even at the highest tier, and the price has been high end. Overall makes zero sense. The locked down *nix systems hide everything useful to make it pretty. Isn’t compatible with real software. And isn’t backwards compatible. I can install windows and my software from the mid 90s or 2000s or today and it just f’cking works. That’s why Windows is king. Bloated absolutely. But it just works.

That doesn’t make me hate the company. That just makes me sad for the uninformed people that get fooled into spending their hard earned money on sub optimal pieces of kit.

What makes me hate them is this game of “we just invented this new feature from 10 years ago!” and then all their fan bois go apeshit over it like they just stepped into the future. And they’re too stupid to know they’re being lied to and manipulated for profits. But they are also vocal and arrogant about their stupidity and ignorance, so I don’t like them either.

My phone has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster charging by an order of magnitude (120W wired, 50W wireless…), more radio transceivers for global connectivity, better battery life, and honestly looks better. There is not a single thing I prefer about an iPhone and there is not a single qualitative metric an iPhone beats my phone on.

My laptop has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster and more charging, more ports, upgradability, and is a BEAST that will eat even mid range desktop computers. There is no equivalent Apple product. Not even close. And when you factor in the best and beefiest new macs can’t even run my software, it’s not even an option. Now my battery life sucks and it looks like a zombie movie prop, but it is actually functional. I can run a simulation or a LLM/ML algo that stresses the CPU at 100%, the Quadro RTX5000 at 100%, and gobbles up 120GB of system RAM plus the 16GB of VRAM writing TBs of data to the 5 internal M2 drives. And I can do so indefinitely with the temps peaking to 100C and limiting to about 300W of power draw. It blasts air out of 3 sides that I could probably cook an egg in. But it doesn’t thermal limit after 5 mins of web browsing like the Macbooks or the Airs. It’s a beast that is made to beast and it does. Apple can’t even compete in the class.

For a tablet, I don’t have a need. My phone gives me a giant screen and my tiny auxiliary laptop does everything I need. My aux laptop is beefier than most, but it would be slower than a top of the line mac doing basic tablet things of web browsing. If I did need a tablet I’d just get a Xiaomi Pad. But in general I feel that the entire tablet market is a solution looking for a problem that only exists because Apple and fan bois are idiots again. I’ve been taking notes on TabletPCs for 20 years now. Seriously, Windows XP had a tablet mode. As did every one after. My laptops have touch input. My laptops in university the screen swiveled and then laid flat on the keyboard with a stylus to write on the screen. All of those fancy new Apple pen features? I had them in 2005. Pressure sensitive, gyro enabled for brush strokes/widths. Eraser on the other end. It was capacitive and needed a proprietary pen which was evil to say then. Now that’s Apple motto and they stole the idea and people are believing it’s new.

If they release a good product, I’ll try it. I’m not brand loyal. If they keep releasing shit, I’m going to keep calling them out.

Lol that piece paper is not a god. It’s useless jibberish written by traitors starting a now failed nation.

You have no rights in the USA. Everything you’re granted as a right, you are also denied as a right by other laws. It’s the playbook of a tyrannical society. Name ANY law that you have a right to, and then look up to find another law taking that exact right away from you.

Just like a tyrannical society, you’re guaranteed nothing. But you can fly under the radar if you agree with the political powers that be. Which is no different than any country at any point in history.

And what is the justification for the US attacking human rights?

What I said doesn’t disagree with what you said.

Same reason why Teslas are banned on Chinese military bases. Data goes back to US servers that are accessible by the US government at any time.

There is substantiated proof of Cisco and Juniper switches having US government backdoors through the management ports. They also have the capability of decrypting everything that passes through them and mirroring to an external host.

I cannot say any more other than you will find that the NSA continuously denied all the backdoors that global security researchers were finding and Cisco denied putting them in. You will also find in leaked Snowden documents absolute proof that the NSA was behind it and did implement the backdoors and they do exist and work.

I at the time being a lowly semiconductor designer with access to unreleased networking gear from the big guys, cannot say anything about what I know those spying piece of shit devices do. But I will say, go look up the Snowden documents. They speak louder than any random on the internet.

And China has made a stink. It’s one reason their great fire wall is setup. It does somewhat prevent citizens from using western tools, but they know they do and really don’t care much. What it really is, is a way to monitor everything in and out. All the edge is Chinese hardware, no backdoors for the five eyes. Those prevent the backdoors, that are known or theorized, to be used. So essentially they are backdoored equipment inside a security fence that disallows the backdoor to establish a connection. Bad actors from within could make this bad for China. Or very very tricky phone home algorithms, but you have to be careful how it’s implemented in unfriendly territory.

Most of the other countries just don’t give a crap. If the Ivory Coasts data is being spied on by the 5 eyes or China, they don’t care. Nobody cares about them either. It’s just the sad state of world power. Those that care, have a side.

Very true. But nobody cares or believes it. When you start saying that US made hardware like network switches, cryptographic algorithms, telecom radios, etc all have backdoors to the 3 letter agencies in 5 eyes plus the internet distribution over cloudfare or “the cloud” in Google, Amazon, Microsoft, then people just think you’re a tin foil hat conspiracist.

The people are too stupid and ignorant to care enough to demand change. Why did the US lobby so hard to get Huawei off market? Because of course there are backdoors into the Chinese intelligence agencies. JUST LIKE US DEVICES! But nobody seems to make that correlation. China bad, China hardware spying bad, is the only thing they can get in their heads.

Good to bring it up, but nothing will change. 99.9% of people don’t know what DNS or proxiing or caching is let alone Cloudfare. It’s just “the internet”. Some are aware of some agencies the US and five eyes have, but most don’t believe what they actually do and are capable of. The US is the best producer of propaganda in the world. Hollywood is amazing at it, as are US media sources. The FISA bill that just came up for reauthorization and passed had a whole PR campaign about catching terrorists and stopping Russia and China and Hamas. Nobody stopped to think how and why they even have any of that info in the first place and how it’s collected.

Keep being the crazy uncle ranting about government spying because the world needs it.