4 ms·

It works as long as your phone is turned on and within range of at least one cell tower. Whether you have data turned on is irrelevant, along with phone type,

It works as long as your phone is turned on and within range of at least one cell tower. Whether you have data turned on is irrelevant, along with phone type, OS, smart or dumb - This affects all cell users.

bigiain 8y ago
So what if we had a pool of "shared" 3/4G wifi hotspots with burner SIMs - kind of like bookcrossing - where you use one for a while then send it on to another member - a "sharing economy" of hotspots, "like Uber, but for cellular data". Then you use them with a non-cellular equipped device (iPod Touch?) or perhaps trust airplane mode with Wi-Fi turned on - and use Signal/iMessage/Facetime/whatever... I wonder how hard it'd be to route incoming calls to my phone (as in, the one with a SIM registered in my name) to a vpn-ed non-cellular device? You could probably make a very plausible looking "Gets up, goes to work, stops at a bar on the way home some days, gets back home, goes to sleep." routine while still being connected while you phone is on the desk at work of the coffee table at home. (or perhaps on the Roomba at home, so it still moves around a little...)
- beagle3 8y ago
  One of two things: 1) Someone uses it for nefarious purposes, everyone involved gets implicated and investigated (in no small part in an attempt to drive people away from this model), no one wants to use these things anymore. 2) It works reasonably well, becomes a business, and big business provides for a small fee (perhaps free except for watching ads and your location data....) those hotspots and decimate the critical mass needed for this into unusefulness. If you think that's far fetched, this has already happened: consider email - it used to be distributed. There is now a copy of ~90% of emails on a Google/Microsoft server because at least one of the senders/recipients uses a hosted account. You can't really win an infrastructure game against established player using their own infrastructure; And the barrier to entry is so huge it's unlikely you'll be able to set up your own.
- watt 8y ago
  It is not productive to think up technological solutions where a political one is required. Legislate for stronger privacy. Disallow companies to collect/store this data.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    You're probably right, and the EU are trying at least - but there's also an argument that once "the genie is out of the bottle", there's no way to stuff it back in. A friend of mine makes a very persuasive argument that Facebook has demonstrated how to manipulate vast numbers of people at mass scale - so much so that shutting Facebook down would no longer make any difference - now that it's known to be possible, it's much easier for anybody else to copy what's public and work out how to make the "private" algorithms work. A long-ish read, but a lot of that argument is here: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-last-days-of-reality/ https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-last-days-of-reality/ and here: https://ukvid.net/video/mark-pesce-on-the-end-of-reality-fPA9g7y2F2w.html https://ukvid.net/video/mark-pesce-on-the-end-of-reality-fPA...
tunap 8y ago
I always assumed on or off, as long as battery was in & had charge. Hence, the proliferation of SoC(exclusively) & non-removable batts(aka elegant design).

bigiain 8y ago

So what if we had a pool of "shared" 3/4G wifi hotspots with burner SIMs - kind of like bookcrossing - where you use one for a while then send it on to another member - a "sharing economy" of hotspots, "like Uber, but for cellular data". Then you use them with a non-cellular equipped device (iPod Touch?) or perhaps trust airplane mode with Wi-Fi turned on - and use Signal/iMessage/Facetime/whatever... I wonder how hard it'd be to route incoming calls to my phone (as in, the one with a SIM registered in my name) to a vpn-ed non-cellular device? You could probably make a very plausible looking "Gets up, goes to work, stops at a bar on the way home some days, gets back home, goes to sleep." routine while still being connected while you phone is on the desk at work of the coffee table at home. (or perhaps on the Roomba at home, so it still moves around a little...)

beagle3 8y ago
One of two things: 1) Someone uses it for nefarious purposes, everyone involved gets implicated and investigated (in no small part in an attempt to drive people away from this model), no one wants to use these things anymore. 2) It works reasonably well, becomes a business, and big business provides for a small fee (perhaps free except for watching ads and your location data....) those hotspots and decimate the critical mass needed for this into unusefulness. If you think that's far fetched, this has already happened: consider email - it used to be distributed. There is now a copy of ~90% of emails on a Google/Microsoft server because at least one of the senders/recipients uses a hosted account. You can't really win an infrastructure game against established player using their own infrastructure; And the barrier to entry is so huge it's unlikely you'll be able to set up your own.
watt 8y ago
It is not productive to think up technological solutions where a political one is required. Legislate for stronger privacy. Disallow companies to collect/store this data.
- bigiain 8y ago
  You're probably right, and the EU are trying at least - but there's also an argument that once "the genie is out of the bottle", there's no way to stuff it back in. A friend of mine makes a very persuasive argument that Facebook has demonstrated how to manipulate vast numbers of people at mass scale - so much so that shutting Facebook down would no longer make any difference - now that it's known to be possible, it's much easier for anybody else to copy what's public and work out how to make the "private" algorithms work. A long-ish read, but a lot of that argument is here: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-last-days-of-reality/ https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-last-days-of-reality/ and here: https://ukvid.net/video/mark-pesce-on-the-end-of-reality-fPA9g7y2F2w.html https://ukvid.net/video/mark-pesce-on-the-end-of-reality-fPA...

tunap 8y ago

I always assumed on or off, as long as battery was in & had charge. Hence, the proliferation of SoC(exclusively) & non-removable batts(aka elegant design).