SMS uses cellular, WhatsApp uses internet. Internet connects you anywhere with one flat rate, cellular may charge extra per message or for international communication.
Signal is better, but everyone’s grandmother is already on WhatsApp and good luck getting them to switch
I keep hoping with this anti-American Big Tech push that Europe and other places are doing they’ll get off Meta products. But I’m also not holding my breath.
I work at a company that I strongly suspect had a very serious security breach because of Whatsapp.
During the outage, we were back to SMS and direct phone calling only. After the system was restored, back to how everything was before, caution be damned, lessons not learned.
It’s not bad enough to have that invasive application as the default means of passing information around (messages, photos, video and even audio, of all things!) on work phones, office personel has it paired to their computers, where highly sensitive programs and data is stored.
Which is crazy because it literally uses spare bandwidth they didn’t use (other than for the clock updates and other housekeeping) and the amount of data used is infinitesimal compared to voice or other data.
This is why it was free at first as it didn’t cost the carrier anything more. This changed quickly when they figured they could charge for it with rates going as high as 20 cents per message in the US. This lead to crazy bills like $5,000.
I remember having only 200 SMS per month and having to ration them carefully because the plans were structured in a way where ordering more resulted in a big price jump.
Their clients are open source, unless you are worried about the NSA being better at decryption than is currently thought possible, the only information you are giving is encrypted traffic, who you are, who you sent a message to, and if their press release are anything to go by, they are trying to muddy the waters of the identification part with moving away from phone # account creation. I’m also a proponent of xmpp for a similar reason, and I think that xmpp is the better protocol, but signal has more concessions to non techies
There’s also Matrix, but it kinda sucks. (We have both it and XMPP.) It handles encryption key management infinitely better than XMPP though.
(Haven’t used Deltachat.)
(If you’re selfhosting or trust your server, and the people you’re talking with are selfhosting or trust their server and you trust their server, you probably don’t need end to end encryption and XMPP without E2EE will work fine.)
SMS uses cellular, WhatsApp uses internet. Internet connects you anywhere with one flat rate, cellular may charge extra per message or for international communication.
Signal is better, but everyone’s grandmother is already on WhatsApp and good luck getting them to switch
I keep hoping with this anti-American Big Tech push that Europe and other places are doing they’ll get off Meta products. But I’m also not holding my breath.
I work at a company that I strongly suspect had a very serious security breach because of Whatsapp.
During the outage, we were back to SMS and direct phone calling only. After the system was restored, back to how everything was before, caution be damned, lessons not learned.
It’s not bad enough to have that invasive application as the default means of passing information around (messages, photos, video and even audio, of all things!) on work phones, office personel has it paired to their computers, where highly sensitive programs and data is stored.
Back at the turn of the century text messages were exorbitantly priced
Which is crazy because it literally uses spare bandwidth they didn’t use (other than for the clock updates and other housekeeping) and the amount of data used is infinitesimal compared to voice or other data.
This is why it was free at first as it didn’t cost the carrier anything more. This changed quickly when they figured they could charge for it with rates going as high as 20 cents per message in the US. This lead to crazy bills like $5,000.
https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/they-say-talk-is-cheapbut-a-teenagers-cell-phone-bill-is-almost-5000/83-402630313
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS
I remember having only 200 SMS per month and having to ration them carefully because the plans were structured in a way where ordering more resulted in a big price jump.
Signal always sounded too good to be true. I won’t be shocked to learn it’s an NSA front I promise.
Their clients are open source, unless you are worried about the NSA being better at decryption than is currently thought possible, the only information you are giving is encrypted traffic, who you are, who you sent a message to, and if their press release are anything to go by, they are trying to muddy the waters of the identification part with moving away from phone # account creation. I’m also a proponent of xmpp for a similar reason, and I think that xmpp is the better protocol, but signal has more concessions to non techies
Deltachat and Jabber/XMPP are good decentralized/federated alternatives to Signal.
There’s also Matrix, but it kinda sucks. (We have both it and XMPP.) It handles encryption key management infinitely better than XMPP though.
(Haven’t used Deltachat.)
(If you’re selfhosting or trust your server, and the people you’re talking with are selfhosting or trust their server and you trust their server, you probably don’t need end to end encryption and XMPP without E2EE will work fine.)
– Frost