Adventures in trying to find a new way to talk to my Chinese board house continues.
Current options and their state:
* Email: old standby, always works, but slow and not suitable for realtime communication
* Skype: current preferred option, but backend will be shut down tomorrow
* WeChat: I have it working on a sandbox/dev phone, but there's no way in hell I'm allowing it on my real phone. Has web and PC clients, including Linux native, but I get errors trying to log into them ("this feature is not supported for your account" or similar) which I think means it might be exclusive to Chinese Weixin accounts and not available for WeChat users outside mainland China?? Attempts to install the APK in an x86 android emulator were unsuccessful and ARM emulator had some issues I need to investigate. Emulation is also not great vs a VM WRT ability to send files and such back and forth conveniently
* WhatsApp: need to test, current understanding is that it's mobile-first and you can't use it on PC without periodically reauthenticating on mobile?
* Teams: Microsoft's official replacement for skype. I think there's a native linux client but it's... teams.
What about Signal? signal-desktop doesn't need periodic reauthentication ttbomk.
@robryk I use signal desktop all the time.
But I don't think it's available in the PRC. Whatever I use has to be acceptable for a Chinese vendor to use.
@azonenberg Oh, I am surprised to see WhatsApp and Signal treated differently.
@robryk Signal is the only messaging app other than the native SMS utility that I allow on my "real" phone.
I assume all others are not just insecure, but actively datamining my conversations and every sensor that they can get access to.
This is also why on the rare occasions I have to actually use Facebook I do it via a browser in a VM, rather than with the app. So it doesn't get to see anything I don't explicitly give it.
@azonenberg I wonder whether people use custom clients that pretend to be WhatsApp on both ends to avoid the great firewall.
@robryk I assume that Meta has the ability to add clientside filtering / backdooring to whatsapp in the PRC.
And probably elsewhere. This is the same company that bought a proxy/VPN service for the express purpose of spying on instagram users or something to that effect. I would be extremely surprised if whatsapp doesn't funnel at *least* highly granular advertising keyword data to Meta.