Fidonet127

AutigerMark said:

If you have an iPhone 11 or older I’d stay with iOS15.  I currently have an XS and should not have upgraded to iOS 15 last year.  That marked the end of it being a fast, “snappy” phone.  Still usable but the overall experience went down the toilet.  Crashing apps, lagging keyboard and “jitter” throughout the animations of the operating system.

I have an iPhone14 Pro on order and will not be upgrading it beyond iOS18 based on the above experience.

22july2013 said:

tht said:

22july2013 said:

dutchlord said:

22july2013 said:

The satellite texting feature is easy enough to deploy across North America because the US and Canada have no restrictions on free speech, but I doubt that it will ever be deployed across Asia or the Middle East because it's outside the reach of the "Great IT Wall" that many countries have built. It would bypass government control on communications. Since satellites cannot pinpoint which side of a border you are on, they can't respect the wishes of dictators to block data from their countries. And since Apple is paying for the service, it is Apple who would get in trouble with the dictatorships.

Unless perhaps the satellite texting capability does not support iMessage, and the satellite data is all unencrypted for the world to see. Then maybe dictatorships won't object. But if so, then Apple seems to be contradicting its oft-stated belief that "privacy is a fundamental human right." This will get harder to defend as the size of the satellite text messages increase over the next ten years, because Apple will find itself under pressure to encrypt those messages.

I don’t think text messaging like
in imessage is possible. Only contacting emergency response people. 

And its only available in the US/Canada.

Your statement that text messaging is not possible seems incorrect, because in the Apple keynote, the satellite app displays the phrase "opening Messages" (the app) and then you can see text bubbles that look (and sound!) exactly like the Messages app in iOS. Except that the outgoing chat bubbles are grey. So I infer from the video that text messages are allowed. But I don't know how it works yet.

Apple's livestream announcement said that it uses custom text compression along with canned responses. If the phone has good line of sight to a satellite, a text message will take on order minutes. If the phone doesn't have good line of sight, it could take on order tens of minutes to hours.

The canned messages obviously doesn't send the actual message, like sound and the actual text. It's just some minimum bit-depth number, the code, and when a phone receives it, it will play the canned response for that code that's already on the receiver phone.

And, it will also send GPS coordinates as one of those canned responses. That's just 3 numbers, possibly 4: time, latitude, longitude, and maybe altitude.

As for why it is in USA and Canada first, it's likely because Apple has gotten approvals for this type of functionality from these countries first, including the relay stations for the signal, and Apple can advertise the full service, like rescue crews. This is pretty standard operating procedure for an USA company. It will make it to other countries eventually assuming they have the relay stations and rescue crews, including China, and even Russia if the sanctions are lifted, which looks to be no time soon. I don't know what those countries are going to do about it though. It's satellite. The only thing lacking would be the rescue response and the accordant local relays, but the data transmission should work. Apple and the satellite company would have to have a GPS, feo-fence filter on it to prevent it from working.

Each GPS number will require about 7-8 decimal digits, right? Eg, "123.4567,234.5678,345.6789,456.7890". That's an awful lot of data, which you can't compress bitwise because it's random/real number data. Are you saying that this service won't function at all if your iPhone doesn't have your GPS location, such as what might happen if you are stuck between two big rocks? Or are you saying that GPS is optional? It would be a horrible shame if GPS was mandatory, because sometimes the location of the victim is already known from other sources, and adding that much unneeded data to a message before it can be sent could block the message.

You seemed to have no comment on my main concern, which is that the service bypasses the Great Firewalls of many countries, and therefore it would be prohibited. As we can see from the Apple keynote, users can type messages in a free format, which is exactly what dictatorships don't want to see.