• [telecom] help?! problems sending cellular "texts"

    From danny burstein@21:1/5 to All on Sat Dec 21 05:50:30 2024
    "texts" in quotes because... read on...

    Earlier this year I had to "upgrade" my cell phone
    to, in my case, a Motorola, umm, something, running
    the Android software.

    Aside from the spybot nature (and that's just the
    admitted ones...) of far too many of the applications
    (which I've mostly locked off - at least as they
    report to me..) it's mostly good. And I have to
    say I'm impressed at the photo quality which, except
    for two uses, surpasses my DSLRs [a].

    The problem: while most of the time I can send and receive [b]
    "text" messages, periodically I run into the following problem.

    Earlier today I was sending out to a dozen or so people
    (individual, direct messages). Most went through ok
    but two of them stayed on my phone with "unable to send"
    flags.

    They were kind enough to say something like (I forget
    the exact wording) "unable to establish encrypted connection.
    Try again in plain text?".

    I told the phone to go ahead. Still no good.

    Any suggestions? Note I've sent these people
    prior and later messages a-ok.

    Thanks.

    My phone, being an Android unit, tries to hook up
    via the "Rich Communication Services" (RCS) protocol.

    This is pretty ubiquitous in the Android world and
    is making inroads to iPhones.

    If my phone doesn't get the proper RCS handshake
    from the recipient, it's supposed to drop back
    to cleartext SMS (the older arrangement).

    One of the people I was sending to has a pretty
    new Samsung Android with RCS, the other has an iPhone
    which might or might not...

    Again, though, I've had earlier and later material
    go right through.

    Any suggestions? Thanks mucly

    [a] the two key exceptions are using extreme telephoto
    settings - as the lenses on my DSLRs are the real
    optical deal as opposed to digital cropping, and
    the ability to use polarizing filters.

    Oh, one more: being able to set the shutter speed
    down to 1/10th or so of a second so I can take
    pictures of LED signs. With the phone, the picture
    is snapped too quickly and often the LED image
    is only partly captured.

    [b] well, I don't "really" know if I've received all
    the messages since if I don't get them, and the
    sender doesn't follow up, etc., etc., etc.

    _____________________________________________________
    Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
    dannyb@panix.com
    [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

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  • From Lars Poulsen@21:1/5 to danny burstein on Mon Dec 23 18:36:30 2024
    On 12/20/2024 21:50, danny burstein wrote:
    The problem: while most of the time I can send and receive [b]
    "text" messages, periodically I run into the following problem.

    Earlier today I was sending out to a dozen or so people
    (individual, direct messages).  Most went through ok
    but two of them stayed on my phone with "unable to send"
    flags.
    ...
    One of the people I was sending to has a pretty
    new Samsung Android with RCS, the other has an iPhone
    which might or might not...

    While RCS messages from iPhone to iPhone or from Android to Android are end-to-end encrypted, messages between iPhones and Androids are not.

    This is one reason, the recommendation is now to use Signal for secure messaging to thwart both the Chinese spies in our telcom systems and Zuckerberg's spyware in WhatsApp.

    Also, some cheap mobile carriers will randomly drop RCS messages without falling back to SMS.

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  • From John Levine@21:1/5 to All on Tue Dec 24 18:50:20 2024
    According to Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com>:
    On 12/20/2024 21:50, danny burstein wrote:
    This is one reason, the recommendation is now to use Signal for secure >messaging to thwart both the Chinese spies in our telcom systems and >Zuckerberg's spyware in WhatsApp.

    I agree that Signal is a good choice, but WhatsApp is not bad. It uses the same internal protocol as Signal, so they can't see the contents of messages. They can see the metadata, who you're sending messages to, but not what they say.

    If you are communicating with people outside North America, WhatsApp is what everyone uses.

    There has been spyware in WhatsApp, but it's malware planted by NSO's Pegasus product. Meta has spent a great deal of time and money successfully taking them to court to make it stop.

    https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/23/whatsapp-scores-historic-victory-against-nso-group-in-long-running-spyware-hacking-case/

    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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