New year, new shiny
Sep. 9th, 2013 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI have a new phone, so I shall babble about it, because I'm procrastinating.
My contract with Orange/EE came to an end this month. I have been itching to leave Orange for a while because they over-charge and offer only mediocre service. I considered getting out of the usurious system of phone contracts altogether, and buying myself a phone (front-loading the cost instead of spreading it over monthly payments) plus a cheap sim from somewhere like Giffgaff. In the end I decided that Three could offer me good enough value that it was worth having the perks of a full-featured provider.
Leaving Orange was, um, interesting. Having been with them for four years on a medium-cost contract, I'm now apparently worth the effort of the loyalty team. In case anyone is interested, EE were prepared to offer me £12.50 / month off the advertised price of a fairly decent monthly contract, and waive the non Direct Debit fee which is one of my major bugbears. I was almost tempted, because with that much of a discount it would have been pretty good value. But I said no because I am sick of Orange, at least in part because their pricing isn't transparent and they hard sell (I was pretty short with the fourth person who called me to ask if I couldn't be convinced to stay with Orange after I'd already said no to the previous three.) And also because I am in fact willing to pay a bit more for a better phone (EE offered me the HTC Mini) and unlimited included data, because much of the point of having a smartphone is lost if you have to browse the internet in text-only mode because of data caps. Here's the text of the email I sent to the saleswoman rejecting her offer:
I'm a bit annoyed about needing a new phone, to tell the truth; I liked my HTC Desire Z with its slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but I managed to break the battery cover which means that the battery keeps falling out, and none of the little mobile phone repair places can fix that problem, though they can fix what seems like much more technically challenging issues like cracked screens. Also built-in obsolescence means it's not worth putting serious effort or money into fixing the hardware; the phone is increasingly struggling to run modern programs, with the hardware being too slow and the non-upgradable Android version being several major releases out of date. I feel pretty rotten about the social and environmental impact of "needing" a new phone every couple of years, but my phone isn't just a phone any more, it's a handheld computer which I use pretty much constantly for a range of really useful tasks.
I considered the Fairphone which does go a good way to addressing my ethical concerns. Problem is that the thing looks pretty much like vapourware at the moment, and I don't love its values enough to drop over €300 on a phone that may or may not ever exist. Phones with slide-out QWERTY keyboards simply aren't being sold any more, because everybody except me prefers touch screens. I dislike the Blackberry range for several reasons, and most of them apart from the really high end ones compromise on screen size to be able to offer a physical keyboard. So with that option off the table I decided to shop for the best value multi-purpose handheld computer available, with the perk that it happens to be able to use twentieth century style voice phone technology in addition to all the stuff I'm actually going to be using it for.
I was pretty much ready to go for the Xperia T, which as last year's cool thing Three were offering with a reasonably good £23/month deal. After pondering for a while and playing with lots of comparison websites, I decided that it was worth and extra £3/month to go for the Galaxy Note II, which I've been kind of coveting ever since some of my friends started bringing them out at geek gatherings. The camera and music playing hardware are less good, but I really don't need a 13 MP camera in my mobile phone; the Galaxy Note one at 8 MP is still higher resolution than my "real" camera and I think we're well past the point where cameras are limited by the quality of the optics more than the resolution of the sensor. Against that, the Note has a considerably bigger screen, 5½'' diagonal was pretty much a killer feature for me. And twice the RAM; as a child of the 80s I'm still a bit scared by the idea that I'm rejecting a piece of kit on the grounds that it "only" has a Gigabyte of RAM. But I'm glad I made that decision because my new shiny Galaxy Note is burning about 0.9 GB just sitting there existing and running its OS and background processes...
So, based on a few days using this new toy, my opinions: I am not completely sure I made the right decision, it may be that the Galaxy Note is a bad compromise between a phone and a tablet. But honestly, I would really like not to have to carry around three or four different electronic devices, let alone increasing my contribution to heavy metal pollution, resource consumption and labour exploitation that would entail. The Note certainly approaches the ideal of a single, completely general purpose device, small enough for my handbag if not for my pocket. The big screen is really nice. It's big enough and high res enough to read several hundred words without scrolling, which is major plus for me, I read fast and my short-sighted eyes definitely prefer big blocks of small text. And it's big enough to look at photos and watch videos, which (however much it may annoy me) comprise more and more of the content on the web these days. When I first picked up the much-anticipated stylus I found it unbearably annoying, but I'm getting used to it, and it is certainly better for reading long texts or long Twitter / Tumblr feeds than scrolling with my finger.
And I installed Swype, which is just as good as everybody says it is; you can use it for finger-typing or handwriting recognition or voice recognition or its own special method of text input where you drag your finger across the virtual keyboard. The killer feature is that it has really good, and trainable, predictive text, based I believe on technology designed for people using assistive tech. Seriously, this 70p app has transformed my £300 phone from feeling annoyingly inferior to my old phone which for all its faults had a real keyboard, to feeling like the advantages offered by a fast processor and a big screen are worth giving up the keyboard. Thing is, I have been touch-typing since the days when a computer was little more than a glorified word-processor, I can type almost as fast as I think and the physical motion of typing is good for the ways my brain prefers kinaesthetic and verbal modes. However, thumb typing on a teeny phone keyboard doesn't have the advantages of real touch-typing, and I can't argue that the Swype thing works better on a touch screen. And the predictive text makes it fast, I can input about 60 wpm, which is slower than my keyboard speed but good enough for writing comments, texts and short emails, and I can see it getting even better as I train it into my idiosyncratic vocabulary choices and it trains me into the input mode of draw a squiggle on the keyboard and pick the best option. It's a little scary, actually; I feel slightly redundant if a Markov chain can guess what I'm trying to say before I have a chance to type it.
Software-wise, I miss some features of Android 2.x which seem to have been dropped in Android 4.x, notably the ability to switch between programs by pulling down the bar at the top of the screen. Jelly Bean has a multi-window option, which is sort of equivalent, but only some apps support it. So in order to move from Twitter to the internet to FB to DW to the note function, I have to go via the homescreen, and it sometimes loses my "place" when I return to an earlier program. I also dislike the way that the menu and back buttons require tapping part of the frame; the buttons only become visible when you press them, and furthermore they don't respond to the stylus. The default utilities such as browser, email client etc seem less suited to me than those on my older phone, but that's partly a matter of getting used to them and partly irrelevant because I can always install other apps I prefer. Talking of, does anyone have recs for Android browsers and mail clients?
And now that I have a new, fast, up-to-date phone and unlimited data, what apps are worth looking at? I am thinking some kind of videophone app; since I have only 100 minutes / month voice calls, I might as well go for video chat which is free and unlimited. I'll default to Skype if nobody has any better ideas, since most people seem to have Skype accounts, and the prices for calling voice phones are cheaper than what Three charges for calls beyond your allowance. And I probably want a fitness app, one with cardio and strength training plans and videos of the exercises. I positively don't want a weight loss focus and I'm negative-to-indifferent about social networking capabilities. Also are there any high-tech games that are worth having now I have a phone that can handle them?
OK, so what about privacy / security? After all my efforts to escape from the clutches of Google, I'm kind of shooting myself in the foot by getting an Android phone which pretty much offers up my entire life on a plate to the corporation. The issue is that I have managed to get myself locked in to the Android ecosystem; there are apps I rely on, and I have no doubt I'll find more that I'll want to improve on the vendor defaults. And really most of the alternatives to Android are proprietary OSes which are going to have equally many problems. The solution to this is probably that I should jailbreak the phone and install CyanogenMod, but I'm a little scared to do that. I'll probably read up on it and convince myself I can do this without irreparably wrecking my phone or losing access to useful Android apps.
It does seem like there's a more serious problem than Google's intrusiveness, though, which is active spying by US intelligence. Lots of my liberty- and privacy-minded friends are reacting with understandable horror to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance and their ability to get round many types of cryptography. I find Schneier's analysis credible: it seems a lot more likely that the NSA are attacking various weak points in information transfer, such as insufficiently secret keys or insufficiently random random numbers, than that they have some quasi-magical, hitherto unknown mathematical tools allowing them to break strong cryptography directly. So many of my set are stepping up the degree of encryption they want to use in their communications; OTR for instant messengers is all the rage, for example. Schneier himself recommends running everything through Tor, but I've also heard rumours from people who don't appear to be paranoid conspiracy theorists that the US government basically owns most of the Tor nodes.
I have to say, I feel completely fatalistic about these revelations from Snowden and others. I doubt I have the technical know-how to hide effectively from the NSA. And even if I did, I can't expect that everybody I interact with has the know-how or cares enough to encrypt everything. I mean, hey, there are enough people in the less geeky parts of my social circles who haven't learned better than to pass on chain forwards or sign up for fake "social networking sites" that harvest the emails from their address books and spam all their contacts. And even if I could implement sound cryptographic practices and convince everybody I interact with to do so too, that itself would look pretty suspicious to the NSA and would likely just result in intensified efforts to keep tabs on me. I can't fight a state-backed intelligence agency; I'm just going to assume that every aspect of my life is completely transparent to the US government and likely a whole bunch of even shadier actors, I'm just hoping that I'm too boring for them to care about.
This is not a case of "if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear". It's almost the opposite: if a governmental agency is evil enough to prospectively survey all internet traffic and electronic communication, without waiting for probable cause or any kind of transparent judicial process such as obtaining a warrant, they're probably also evil enough to act against me if they feel like it, without waiting until they actually find any evidence to pin on me with their intrusive surveillance methods. I mean, I'll continue to vote for options that seem to be the most privacy protecting available, for whatever good that does. But in my personal habits, efforts to hide my internet traces seem entirely futile.
That said, I do try not to be gratuitously careless, particularly with other people's privacy. It turns out that it's no longer possible to import contacts from old phone to new phone by a direct Bluetooth connection between phones. Instead, the only way to import my old address book is to add all the contacts to my Google account so that both devices have access to them in the Cloud. Well, screw that; I have given up a considerable amount of convenience so that Google doesn't have a complete list of everyone I ever interact with, because they've abused that information in the past. So I'm having to transfer over all my phone numbers manually. Which maybe doesn't help, because I don't know how much of the data Google can just slurp out of my phone anyway, even if it's not officially attached to my Google account, but there you go. Anyway, if you do contact me by phone, and would like to send me a signed text so I don't have to type in your phone number into my new address book, that would be a big help.
My contract with Orange/EE came to an end this month. I have been itching to leave Orange for a while because they over-charge and offer only mediocre service. I considered getting out of the usurious system of phone contracts altogether, and buying myself a phone (front-loading the cost instead of spreading it over monthly payments) plus a cheap sim from somewhere like Giffgaff. In the end I decided that Three could offer me good enough value that it was worth having the perks of a full-featured provider.
Leaving Orange was, um, interesting. Having been with them for four years on a medium-cost contract, I'm now apparently worth the effort of the loyalty team. In case anyone is interested, EE were prepared to offer me £12.50 / month off the advertised price of a fairly decent monthly contract, and waive the non Direct Debit fee which is one of my major bugbears. I was almost tempted, because with that much of a discount it would have been pretty good value. But I said no because I am sick of Orange, at least in part because their pricing isn't transparent and they hard sell (I was pretty short with the fourth person who called me to ask if I couldn't be convinced to stay with Orange after I'd already said no to the previous three.) And also because I am in fact willing to pay a bit more for a better phone (EE offered me the HTC Mini) and unlimited included data, because much of the point of having a smartphone is lost if you have to browse the internet in text-only mode because of data caps. Here's the text of the email I sent to the saleswoman rejecting her offer:
Dear Ms T____,Anyway, I'm just mentioning this to spread the word that if your contract with Orange / EE is coming to an end, and you don't mind staying with them, it may be worth your haggling a bit, their reps are empowered to give at least 50% off advertised prices plus other perks. And also to put some of my bad experiences with Orange out there on the internet, in case that's useful info to anyone.
My name is R____ B____. You contacted me recently in the context of my closing my Orange account, phone number 078xx xxxxxx. After I'd told you that I am leaving Orange because you keep adding on hidden costs, you sent me a text offering me 400 mins / 750 MB with the HTC One mini, for £13.50 / month. Although this sounds like a reasonably good offer, I have been burned before by Orange reps who tell me "no hidden costs", but forget to mention the VAT, or a supplement for a particular model of phone, or the administrative fee each month I pay my bill, or the fact that the special price expires three months into a 24-month contract, or offering "free" add-ons which actually add to my monthly subscription, or including Wifi in my data usage so that I unknowingly exceed my data limit. Based on past experience, a supposed £13.50 a month deal is actually going to work out at about £20 per month, which does not compare favourably to the competition.
Please do not come back to me with an "even better" offer; I have been an Orange customer for four years and in this time I have been repeatedly hit with unexpected extra charges after accepting what looks like a good value deal. I'm not saying this to haggle you into offering me a hidden deal as an incentive to stay with Orange. At this point, if you lower the price or offer me a better data allowance or a better model of phone, I'm just going to assume it's too good to be true.
Please close my Orange account with 30 days notice from yesterday, 3rd September. Please also send me a final bill for the remaining weeks of my contract with Orange. I would appreciate if you could send the bill by email or on paper to my home address if preferred, because having closed the account I will no longer have access to the Orange website in order to clear the final payment. I have already received a PAC code to transfer my number to a new provider; please take whatever actions are needed from your end to finalize this transfer.
Many thanks for your assistance,
Dr R___ B____
I'm a bit annoyed about needing a new phone, to tell the truth; I liked my HTC Desire Z with its slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but I managed to break the battery cover which means that the battery keeps falling out, and none of the little mobile phone repair places can fix that problem, though they can fix what seems like much more technically challenging issues like cracked screens. Also built-in obsolescence means it's not worth putting serious effort or money into fixing the hardware; the phone is increasingly struggling to run modern programs, with the hardware being too slow and the non-upgradable Android version being several major releases out of date. I feel pretty rotten about the social and environmental impact of "needing" a new phone every couple of years, but my phone isn't just a phone any more, it's a handheld computer which I use pretty much constantly for a range of really useful tasks.
I considered the Fairphone which does go a good way to addressing my ethical concerns. Problem is that the thing looks pretty much like vapourware at the moment, and I don't love its values enough to drop over €300 on a phone that may or may not ever exist. Phones with slide-out QWERTY keyboards simply aren't being sold any more, because everybody except me prefers touch screens. I dislike the Blackberry range for several reasons, and most of them apart from the really high end ones compromise on screen size to be able to offer a physical keyboard. So with that option off the table I decided to shop for the best value multi-purpose handheld computer available, with the perk that it happens to be able to use twentieth century style voice phone technology in addition to all the stuff I'm actually going to be using it for.
I was pretty much ready to go for the Xperia T, which as last year's cool thing Three were offering with a reasonably good £23/month deal. After pondering for a while and playing with lots of comparison websites, I decided that it was worth and extra £3/month to go for the Galaxy Note II, which I've been kind of coveting ever since some of my friends started bringing them out at geek gatherings. The camera and music playing hardware are less good, but I really don't need a 13 MP camera in my mobile phone; the Galaxy Note one at 8 MP is still higher resolution than my "real" camera and I think we're well past the point where cameras are limited by the quality of the optics more than the resolution of the sensor. Against that, the Note has a considerably bigger screen, 5½'' diagonal was pretty much a killer feature for me. And twice the RAM; as a child of the 80s I'm still a bit scared by the idea that I'm rejecting a piece of kit on the grounds that it "only" has a Gigabyte of RAM. But I'm glad I made that decision because my new shiny Galaxy Note is burning about 0.9 GB just sitting there existing and running its OS and background processes...
So, based on a few days using this new toy, my opinions: I am not completely sure I made the right decision, it may be that the Galaxy Note is a bad compromise between a phone and a tablet. But honestly, I would really like not to have to carry around three or four different electronic devices, let alone increasing my contribution to heavy metal pollution, resource consumption and labour exploitation that would entail. The Note certainly approaches the ideal of a single, completely general purpose device, small enough for my handbag if not for my pocket. The big screen is really nice. It's big enough and high res enough to read several hundred words without scrolling, which is major plus for me, I read fast and my short-sighted eyes definitely prefer big blocks of small text. And it's big enough to look at photos and watch videos, which (however much it may annoy me) comprise more and more of the content on the web these days. When I first picked up the much-anticipated stylus I found it unbearably annoying, but I'm getting used to it, and it is certainly better for reading long texts or long Twitter / Tumblr feeds than scrolling with my finger.
And I installed Swype, which is just as good as everybody says it is; you can use it for finger-typing or handwriting recognition or voice recognition or its own special method of text input where you drag your finger across the virtual keyboard. The killer feature is that it has really good, and trainable, predictive text, based I believe on technology designed for people using assistive tech. Seriously, this 70p app has transformed my £300 phone from feeling annoyingly inferior to my old phone which for all its faults had a real keyboard, to feeling like the advantages offered by a fast processor and a big screen are worth giving up the keyboard. Thing is, I have been touch-typing since the days when a computer was little more than a glorified word-processor, I can type almost as fast as I think and the physical motion of typing is good for the ways my brain prefers kinaesthetic and verbal modes. However, thumb typing on a teeny phone keyboard doesn't have the advantages of real touch-typing, and I can't argue that the Swype thing works better on a touch screen. And the predictive text makes it fast, I can input about 60 wpm, which is slower than my keyboard speed but good enough for writing comments, texts and short emails, and I can see it getting even better as I train it into my idiosyncratic vocabulary choices and it trains me into the input mode of draw a squiggle on the keyboard and pick the best option. It's a little scary, actually; I feel slightly redundant if a Markov chain can guess what I'm trying to say before I have a chance to type it.
Software-wise, I miss some features of Android 2.x which seem to have been dropped in Android 4.x, notably the ability to switch between programs by pulling down the bar at the top of the screen. Jelly Bean has a multi-window option, which is sort of equivalent, but only some apps support it. So in order to move from Twitter to the internet to FB to DW to the note function, I have to go via the homescreen, and it sometimes loses my "place" when I return to an earlier program. I also dislike the way that the menu and back buttons require tapping part of the frame; the buttons only become visible when you press them, and furthermore they don't respond to the stylus. The default utilities such as browser, email client etc seem less suited to me than those on my older phone, but that's partly a matter of getting used to them and partly irrelevant because I can always install other apps I prefer. Talking of, does anyone have recs for Android browsers and mail clients?
And now that I have a new, fast, up-to-date phone and unlimited data, what apps are worth looking at? I am thinking some kind of videophone app; since I have only 100 minutes / month voice calls, I might as well go for video chat which is free and unlimited. I'll default to Skype if nobody has any better ideas, since most people seem to have Skype accounts, and the prices for calling voice phones are cheaper than what Three charges for calls beyond your allowance. And I probably want a fitness app, one with cardio and strength training plans and videos of the exercises. I positively don't want a weight loss focus and I'm negative-to-indifferent about social networking capabilities. Also are there any high-tech games that are worth having now I have a phone that can handle them?
OK, so what about privacy / security? After all my efforts to escape from the clutches of Google, I'm kind of shooting myself in the foot by getting an Android phone which pretty much offers up my entire life on a plate to the corporation. The issue is that I have managed to get myself locked in to the Android ecosystem; there are apps I rely on, and I have no doubt I'll find more that I'll want to improve on the vendor defaults. And really most of the alternatives to Android are proprietary OSes which are going to have equally many problems. The solution to this is probably that I should jailbreak the phone and install CyanogenMod, but I'm a little scared to do that. I'll probably read up on it and convince myself I can do this without irreparably wrecking my phone or losing access to useful Android apps.
It does seem like there's a more serious problem than Google's intrusiveness, though, which is active spying by US intelligence. Lots of my liberty- and privacy-minded friends are reacting with understandable horror to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance and their ability to get round many types of cryptography. I find Schneier's analysis credible: it seems a lot more likely that the NSA are attacking various weak points in information transfer, such as insufficiently secret keys or insufficiently random random numbers, than that they have some quasi-magical, hitherto unknown mathematical tools allowing them to break strong cryptography directly. So many of my set are stepping up the degree of encryption they want to use in their communications; OTR for instant messengers is all the rage, for example. Schneier himself recommends running everything through Tor, but I've also heard rumours from people who don't appear to be paranoid conspiracy theorists that the US government basically owns most of the Tor nodes.
I have to say, I feel completely fatalistic about these revelations from Snowden and others. I doubt I have the technical know-how to hide effectively from the NSA. And even if I did, I can't expect that everybody I interact with has the know-how or cares enough to encrypt everything. I mean, hey, there are enough people in the less geeky parts of my social circles who haven't learned better than to pass on chain forwards or sign up for fake "social networking sites" that harvest the emails from their address books and spam all their contacts. And even if I could implement sound cryptographic practices and convince everybody I interact with to do so too, that itself would look pretty suspicious to the NSA and would likely just result in intensified efforts to keep tabs on me. I can't fight a state-backed intelligence agency; I'm just going to assume that every aspect of my life is completely transparent to the US government and likely a whole bunch of even shadier actors, I'm just hoping that I'm too boring for them to care about.
This is not a case of "if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear". It's almost the opposite: if a governmental agency is evil enough to prospectively survey all internet traffic and electronic communication, without waiting for probable cause or any kind of transparent judicial process such as obtaining a warrant, they're probably also evil enough to act against me if they feel like it, without waiting until they actually find any evidence to pin on me with their intrusive surveillance methods. I mean, I'll continue to vote for options that seem to be the most privacy protecting available, for whatever good that does. But in my personal habits, efforts to hide my internet traces seem entirely futile.
That said, I do try not to be gratuitously careless, particularly with other people's privacy. It turns out that it's no longer possible to import contacts from old phone to new phone by a direct Bluetooth connection between phones. Instead, the only way to import my old address book is to add all the contacts to my Google account so that both devices have access to them in the Cloud. Well, screw that; I have given up a considerable amount of convenience so that Google doesn't have a complete list of everyone I ever interact with, because they've abused that information in the past. So I'm having to transfer over all my phone numbers manually. Which maybe doesn't help, because I don't know how much of the data Google can just slurp out of my phone anyway, even if it's not officially attached to my Google account, but there you go. Anyway, if you do contact me by phone, and would like to send me a signed text so I don't have to type in your phone number into my new address book, that would be a big help.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 03:27 pm (UTC)I went from Orange PAYG to EE contract (I live in the depths of the countryside and Orange/Tmobile/EE are the only provider with coverage here so I don't have a choice) and it took a ridiculous amount of time to get my number transferred even though technically they are the same company. The shop said it would happen automatically but it didn't. Then I phoned and they said I needed a PAC code. The shop said I didn't because I wasn't changing provider. The call centre still said I did. Then the man in the shop decided the only solution was to phone Orange and tell them I wanted to switch providers (even though I didn't) and said they would make lots of offers to get me to "stay" but to ignore them and demand my PAC code. I ended up standing in the shop going "I am leaving Orange. I would like my PAC code" until they gave in. Man in shop agreed this was ridiculous and that Orange/Tmobile/EE are not entirely convinced that they are one company yet. So more evidence for them a) not knowing what on earth they are doing and b) being desperate to keep people.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 04:30 pm (UTC)Your experiences "moving" from Orange to EE sound absolutely typical! One of the salesfolk I spoke to was trying to do that hard selling technique where they ask you why you're dissatisfied, not because they actually want to know, but so they can argue against your reasons. I said my main reason was that Orange lie about prices, but I also mentioned the problem that Orange and T-Mobile haven't integrated well, either in terms of their infrastructure or in terms of their staff. I got a lot of guff about how that's totally not true and EE is definitely all one company now, but your report isn't the only one I've heard that contradicts that rosy picture.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 04:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 04:32 pm (UTC)You're also one of the people who prodded me to look into OTR for IM; the other is my brother (known here as Screwy) who hangs out with anarchists and other radicals and has been getting nervous about communication privacy recently.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 04:35 pm (UTC)Gibberbot is a Free Software OTR-supporting XMPP client for android.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 04:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 04:59 pm (UTC)Most of the apps that are most useful to me are essentially gateways to online utilities, Twitter and Tumblr and other social networks, but also things like Runkeeper and Pocket which run partly in-phone and partly in the cloud. And most communication functions do need to have some way of talking to other people who might be less concerned about Google than I am. I've installed Gibberbot precisely because it does generic XMPP so I can still use it to talk to friends who are on GTalk or Facebook or non-encrypted Jabber. In lots of ways the problem goes way beyond Google, it's everybody using their own proprietary stuff instead of having common protocols, but that seems to be the way the world is.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-10 10:31 am (UTC)Also: you might want to look at http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for-android if your phone supports it.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-10 01:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-10 01:26 pm (UTC)Yes, I'm rather hoping that a decent ecosystem of linux programmes optimized for phones/tablets emerges.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 05:35 pm (UTC)The NSA: I thought something was up when there was an aside about decrypting VPN traffic in a previous story from Snowden, but the scope of it is pretty mind blowing. Yeah, we're doomed.
Partly because if you're dealing with an organisation with a massive budget there's no telling just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Reflections on trusting trust is getting a lot of linkage at the moment for a reason. ISTR if you want an export licence, you show GCHQ your code, so, yeah...
Partly because fixing it with the current Internet is hard and most people (including me) can't be bothered. I got briefly enthusiastic about PGP during the Crypto Wars in the 90s, but soon realised that the number of people you can talk to with it is limited. Even back then, there wasn't a good way to do it when your email lives on a central server (as it did for students back then, and as it does for everyone using webmail now).
Schneier's manifesto for taking back the Net looks good and is the only way it can actually work: privacy needs to be designed in, not layered on top. Much like all those "let's replace Facebook with a distributed system" projects, though, I suspect network effects will doom it.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 06:07 pm (UTC)I do definitely think we're doomed in terms of electronic communications security, yup. The fix isn't technological at this point, the fix would require a massive shift in political attitudes, a US public who would care enough about surveillance to vote against governments that do that, plus US that cares enough about legal rights everywhere else in the world to even notice if people complain about the NSA. Frankly I can't see that happening.
I do also agree about network effects; it's no use my setting up hard crypto if the only people I can talk to are my political dissident brother and a couple of my friends who are serious geeks about communication security. Even if I were prepared to give up direct contact with everybody else, the things that less security-conscious people say about me on the open internet, or on sites owned by NSA-infiltrated or craven corporations would give anyone who wanted it plenty of dirt on me. So I'm fatalistic, much as I respect Schneier and the EFF and everybody who's squealing about the Snowden affair.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 08:10 pm (UTC)I use Firefox Mobile for browsing. I like that it had add-ons, which mobile Chrome doesn't. And I also have become fatalistic and taking refuge in being too boring to take an interest in.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 08:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-10 12:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-10 01:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-12 12:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-10 09:53 am (UTC)Yeah, this is my feeling as well (also, sorry on behalf of my country's government, everybody :/) - basically not a lot that can be done about it, except for being (a) dull and (b) one of billions, as
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-10 01:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-11 01:48 pm (UTC)I did use GiffGaff for my (original model) Desire for a while, but I found the data very slow - if I put a different SIM in, the speed at least doubled. When GG stopped being very cheap, I used T-Mobile on the Desire (six month's data plus effectively two month's calls for £20) and my Virgin PAYG SIM in a cheap phone (average monthly bill £1).
I've now got the Virgin SIM in the Desire for £7/month.
My solution to phone envy was to keep the Desire and get a s/h Nexus 7 for the things that actually need a bigger screen / faster processor. It was much cheaper than getting a new phone too. Had I waited until now, I would have grabbed one of the Nook HDs being sold off now instead.
It's worth looking on XDA-Developers to see what ROM options you have. I was running CM7.1 on the Desire, but while development on that has stopped for CM, some other ROMs give vastly more memory space (by moving much, much more to the microSD card).
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-11 04:19 pm (UTC)There is certainly a lot to be said for a dumbphone (or older smartphone) with a very cheap or PAYG sim for calls, and a tablet with a decent data plan for portable computing. Almost certainly does work out better financially, but I was balancing that against trying to minimize the proliferation of gadgets I'm carrying around. I'm also by inclination annoyed with the practice of selling powerful computers deliberately limited so that they're only effective for one specialist purpose, such as an e-reader or an exercise monitor. My Galaxy Note I intentionally picked up as a Swiss army knife device, I want it to be able to perform lots of tasks acceptably, not to be the best possible tool for one specialist task. But I realize that's not always the best approach.