I’m not getting this, at least not yet.

Maybe it’s because I run Pi-hole; I know it filters out a TON of Roku’s telemetry and other traffic. Might be worth setting up Pi-hole on your network and see if stuff like that goes away?

Mozilla’s “least to most creepy” ranking is the best resource I’ve found so far:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/

I also feel many don’t understand the full extent, either. They’re used to using fairly secure devices in their everyday life (often not realizing how much the software they install is also spying on them), so why wouldn’t these IoT things also be secure?

In my experience, it’s all very vague and ethereal until the risks are highlighted for them. “So what if Google can read all of my emails? What could they possibly do with that information, anyway; why should I care?” is an example of a portion of a real conversation I’ve had.

Hey, that’s totally fair and I am definitely of a similar mindset when it comes to reducing e-waste.

Do you have any significant coding or hardware skills?

To add, I found a thread of someone attempting to find use in the same router. They seemed to have made some minimal progress over the last year, but it doesn’t appear they have anything functional yet. Seems the processor has little known about it, and there is precious little storage onboard.

I guess my first question would be: do you have a need that device can fill, or are you looking to take on a project for some other reason (education, boredom, etc.)?

I honestly don’t see to what great use a router (and modem) that was discontinued a decade ago can be put that couldn’t be accomplished with less complication and less power draw by using a modern device. I’m not trying to rain on your parade, but knowing nothing else about your situation I don’t know that I can see any utility in a device like that anymore.

That was a fun read, thank you.

I honestly wasn’t super familiar with WebView until you asked!

It looks like WebView is a stripped-down browser, more than anything else. It can leverage different rendering engines depending on the platform, and on Android it looks like it leverages Blink just like Chrome.

Technically, WebKit is Apple’s rendering engine (Safari).

Google uses Blink, which is a fork of WebKit, but is its own thing now.

So, you can still use Safari without directly contributing to Google’s de facto rendering engine monopoly.

I hear you, and fair enough, but I think the fact that none of these gaming-specific phones has physical controls like you described built in speaks to how impractical that ask is.

And I think it’s important to note: there’s weren’t just powerful phones (in fact, many of them seemed to get bested by other phones in more benchmarks than they won), they were specifically marketed and sold as gaming phones; that was the specific niche that Asus, Lenovo, Razer, and others all sought to fill. Despite that, and despite basically all those companies having a ton of general experience building gaming hardware of one sort or another, none of them thought it was a good idea to include physical input methods on-device. They pretty much all have accessories that turn it into something looking akin to a Switch or DS, but none had them baked into the actual phone.

And I honestly think that makes a lot of sense. Thumb sticks aren’t super pocket-able, and I feel like even if they could be made to fit into a pocket, sliding them in and out of bags and pants over and over would make them fail faster. And while A/B/X/Y buttons might be more reasonable on that pocket-ability metric, do you want to smush them (or thumb sticks, for that matter) against your face while you take a call?

While current controller-esque buttons and thumb sticks remain the primary input method for games, I really don’t see gaming phones including those input methods within their physical form factor. It might be a limitation of my imagination, but I just can’t envision how one would make that work (and it seems I am not alone in that).

I mean, Asus and nubia have been making a gaming-specific phone for many generations now. Razer even gave it a try back in 2018, but I don’t think they released any follow up devices.

Lenovo also made a couple devices, but announced earlier this year that they’d be discontinuing their gaming phone business.

There seems to be a fan base and market for gaming-specific phones, but given Lenovo and Razer got out of the game and the fact that you haven’t seemed to have heard of any of these devices/product lines: my guess is that they are super niche.

Sorry for not replying in some time.

You may be happy to know that you convinced me to at least give Matrix a try. So, you won? lol

I stood it up on one of my public servers via Docker with Traefik, and I am able to connect with a client. I cannot, however, for the life of me figure out how to get the federation side of things working in Traefik, so if you know anything about that I would sincerely appreciate the help. At least with it running and accepting client connections, I can have chats with the people I allow to set up an account on my server. It also gives me a chance to play with the bridges.

I still REALLY don’t like all the data Element (and Element X) collect on iOS, and I refuse to use it. FluffyChat sems ok, though…

My turn for a wall of text, sorry!

I do appreciate your preface, and I can certainly empathize with your frustration. Like you, I think that secure, private communications is generally a good thing and I am happy that there are awesome FOSS devs and groups devoting their time and skill to try and bring stuff like that to life. It is inspiring and I really do appreciate it. I, too, have had many a similar conversation :)

That said, I cannot disagree with your “it’s not that hard” statement. At best it’s well meaning but wrong, and at worst it is dismissive and counterproductive. Every change of any kind has a cost, as you pointed out (correctly): there is always some friction. When it comes to something that most non-tech enthusiast users view as pretty insignificant as messaging platform’s privacy policies, any entrant is going to need to have a lot going for it to overcome the existing market inertia of the current players.

Honestly speaking, most people settled on their chat platforms of choice out of convenience a long time ago. Their friends used WhatsApp, so they hopped on. Meta bought them, but did that drive anyone away? Not really. They changed their privacy policy in ways that raised all sorts of alarm bells, but did it really change anything with their general user base? The fact that they still have somewhere between 2 and 3 billion people on the platform would seem to suggest it didn’t have much, if any, effect either.

And it is important to highlight that that sort of inertia - a single platform being used by somewhere between a quarter and a third of every human being on this planet - is what needs to be overcome. Even Signal, arguably the current most mainstream FOSS app designed for private (though not anonymous) communication, which has been operating for around half a decade and has millions of dollars behind its development, has only managed to capture a measly 50 million or so users.

Then there’s the reality that these standards keep changing which leads to new apps and protocols coming out. Again, I don’t view this as a bad thing as a techie, but it could lead a reasonable user to ask: “why bother switching to this platform when I just switched to that other platform a year or two ago?”.

I don’t think the argument you are trying to make is that the overwhelming majority of people should be onboard with chasing after a new, more secure/private/anonymous/whatever platform every few years, but that’s what it honestly amounts to at this point. No platform has everything, and even if something were written today that does have the everything of today, there’s nothing to stop someone else from developing something new to entice people away yet again especially when you factor in profit motive to do stuff like that (case in point could be Meta’s entering, and planned expansion within, the fediverse).

None of the above should be seen as arguments to accept the status quo or that people shouldn’t be looking to move to something better. I wrote the above only to illustrate that moving platforms, especially for non-technical users, really is hard. It’s frustrating for me because I, like you, would love to see users move to privacy-respecting and secure platforms. The reality, though, is that most people genuinely just don’t care; nothing can make that more clear to me than WhatsApp. That is why having bridges (that wouldn’t break native security and privacy features and wouldn’t potentially get your account banned) would have been a gigantic feature that maybe could have enticed the average user. Unfortunately, that is not what the Matrix bridges do so I am left without a strong reason for even me, as a technical individual, to move off my current platforms.

Matrix doesn’t provide better encryption than Signal (or even WhatsApp, ignoring the privacy side), it still requires trust someone just like Signal (your own paid, or someone else’s, server vs Signal’s servers), and even if I do adopt it I don’t know that I would feel comfortable trying to convince the few members of my social groups to move as well given they are entrenched in their platforms and don’t value the few additional benefits Matrix would seem to bring over something like Signal (which most of them didn’t switch to, either).

I would love something like Matrix to “win” if it is as good as you say it is, but if its biggest (maybe only) selling point is privacy and security then I really don’t think most users will move. Given Signal’s security and seeming lack of a profit motive to sell my metadata, I am also ok (though not necessarily screaming with joy) with what they offer as well.

If you feel I missed or got anything wrong, I am open to hearing it! I feel we agree on way, way more than we do not.

Ok, seems I was on the right track. Thanks for clarifying!

Same to you regarding the politeness, I’m appreciating the conversation!

I’m with you regarding Facebook Messenger and even (to a more limited extent) WhatsApp Messenger. Their motivation is to provide the cheapest ways possible to keep you engaged with their platform so they can collect as much data about you as possible to sell. That is their reason for existence, essentially. Whether that trade off is worth it to the individual user is up to them, and I have decided it is not worth it for me.

Where I’m getting confused is with your characterization of Signal. It is neither closed source, nor is it a for-profit company. It is a non-profit organization whose mission is “to develop open-source privacy technology that protects free expression and enables secure global communication.”. The app they built leverages end-to-end encryption, and you can find their source code here.

I will be honest, I feel Signal is the closest I’ve found to a FOSS, E2EE messaging solution that has a chance at some adoption by people who aren’t technology enthusiasts. It makes some compromises to achieve that - the fact that your account must be associated with a valid phone number is a point of frustration for privacy advocates, and it isn’t perfect when it comes to anonymity in some ways - but it is encrypted. It seems to favor security over anonymity, which is something with which I have seen the average user be able to get onboard.

Given the ease of use and security of Signal, it leaves me even more confused as to where some of the competitors differentiate themselves in ways that would make most people are likely to adopt them.

Thanks for replying!

There are lots of services using E2EE, so I’m really not sure this is a unique benefit of Matrix and would not convince me to use Matrix by itself. It is a fair point in favor of Matrix, though!

I already use enough platforms as it is given what the individuals with whom I speak are already using. I’ve convinced some to standardize on platforms using E2EE, but the overwhelming majority of people who are not technology enthusiasts cannot be bothered to mess with something more complicated than what comes with their phone or the services that they’re already using (and fair enough, this isn’t a knock on them).

For that reason, the bridges Matrix offers are the only feature I’ve heard of so far that might make me switch. Unifying the services I already have to use due to what is used by my friends, family, and colleagues would be killer, but if they don’t at least leverage the E2EE supported by those services’ native apps, it negates pretty much all benefits for me. Yes, using stuff that isn’t encrypted in the first place isn’t ideal, but the answer to that for me is not “well, it’s already visible to some people so trusting the admins for this other third party service isn’t a big deal”. Additionally, integrating with services that do natively support E2EE in a way that breaks that E2EE is a huge step backward. I don’t blame Matrix for this, but it also doesn’t win any points for it in my mind.

Thank you for dispelling my misconception about the data replication!

To gain widespread adoption, any protocol will have to have friction-free sign up and usage, which is a tough nut to crack given how sharded chat already is and has always been. Email, which Matrix strives to emulate, was an established standard that predated most users’ access to the internet by a decade and a half or more. Conversely, chat has basically always been fragmented and siloed.

Unification would be a killer feature that would even have a chance of convincing non tech enthusiasts to switch, which could then lead them to start switching more of their communications over to native Matrix traffic as more of their friends also switch (relying less on the bridges over time). Given doing what I’ve described above requires compromises on security, though, I can’t see a path to wide adoption for this protocol (which really makes me sad). Since I don’t see a path for it pulling in non tech enthusiasts, and the bridges can break other platforms’ existing security, I don’t see myself adopting another platform for chat.

Please let me know if I’m still getting anything wrong!

Hey, thanks for taking the time to reply!

I’m still not sure that moving our trust from a megacorp (as you put it) to some random person or organization running a Matrix server is an improvement. Even assuming the Matrix server admins aren’t selling your data out the back door, there’s no guarantee their admin accounts, or the server itself, isn’t compromised by those same corporations or others, allowing them to harvest all your data (and potentially more of your data than would be possible if you were using at least some of these services natively).

I respect that you have your opinion, but I’m not sure it makes sense to move trust from one organization/corporation to another is guaranteed to be an improvement.

From a security perspective, Signal seems to be brought up the most in these conversations, so I am surprised that you called it out between WhatsApp and Discord. Do you have any evidence that the Signal foundation is spying on its users, selling their data, or that the E2EE they natively employ is compromised?

I’m a fairly technical guy, but I genuinely cannot figure out why I’d want to use Matrix at this point.

My understanding, which may be wrong, is that it can communicate on its own encrypted standard, and that there are bridges that allow it to communicate with other services like Signal and WhatsApp. You have to register for a home server, which essentially means trusting the individual(s) running that home server not to abuse that privilege, especially considering that not all features are supported by the bridges to other protocols at this point (including end-to-end encryption in some cases), so they may have access to your unencrypted content. Not only that, but your data is then replicated on other servers where the other participants in your conversations are registered, which means you essentially need to trust all those other admins as well.

Then there are the clients, which (at least on iOS) seem to be few and far between. The (seemingly) most popular, Element, appears to collect a crap-ton of personal information - including user content!

I was a big fan of Trillian back in the day, which sought to unify AIM/MSN/ICQ/etc. into one place; am I correct in thinking Matrix seeks to do something similar today?

Given the seemingly large amount of trust you need to put in potentially numerous individuals and organizations, is the convenience of a unifying protocol that may or may not bring your various chat and calling services under one roof with varying levels of compatibility and security (not to mention the apps, some of which appear to collect everything under the sun about you) worth it?

Could not agree more!

That said, I did call out one legit problem with widespread EV adoption in apartment dwellers. I really hope something is done soon, either governmentally or through the market, to make EVs a more viable option for renters.

Ha, we posted around the same time and said basically the same thing. Nice!