Goodbye Skype - hello, maybe, Facetime?

Yes. Everything back to the model 11 can run iOS 18 (also the XS & XR models). Back when I used an android phone, it went 'obsolete' (i.e. no further updates available for it) after quite a short timescale. Apple seem better in that regard.

Nick Odell snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.ca wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Yeah, with you on that but despite some bad press t'gram is a nice way to avoid the big boys plus no ads and no tracking. A nice light, inobtrusive application. Maybe punt it to your contacts although I know many might say, 'not another app!'.

If a desktop is ok, the M4 Mac Mini at £599 (£499 if you know anyone who can get the education discount) is a very good deal. You only get 256GB of storage in the base model but there are upgrades (or external SSDs). 16GB of RAM should mean it lasts a good long while, and being new you get the longest support lifetime.

Theo

Fairy snuff... worth noting that whatsapp was not originally a meta product, they bought it.

You could try Signal - developed by the original developer of whatsapp as a privacy focussed messaging app:

I too won't use any Meta apps. I use Signal, it works fine.

I need to start looking at Signal too. It seems ridiculous that there's no interoperable standard for video calling as there is for phone calls, email, or even "snail" mail.

Giggle begs to differ:

RFC 3551: This RFC defines the RTP profile for audio and video conferences with minimal control, which is a foundational document for real-time multimedia conferencing.

RFC 7742: This RFC outlines WebRTC video processing and codec requirements, providing guidance for implementing video functionality in web browsers and applications.

RFC 4353: This RFC describes a framework for conferencing with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is a signaling protocol used to set up and manage multimedia sessions.

RFC 7478: This RFC describes Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) use cases and requirements, which is a project for real-time communication over the web.

and others.

Whether any of these are actually used, I know not.

WebRTC is what powers most web-based video chat, and why there are so many different video chat apps because it's easy to spin up a new one. (also app-based ones may use WebRTC in the backend for compatibility with their web versions)

What it doesn't do is make an interoperable network.

By analogy, webRTC is like standardising how to put a letter in an envelope but you need a General Post Office type organisation to decide on addresses and stamps to allow people to communicate. Effectively what's happened here is every startup builds their own GPO and you need to be registered with each one to send or receive letters on their platform. It's not in their business interest to collaborate with other providers with competing platforms.

Theo

Yes. I suppose the difference with snail mail is that there is a monopoly (more or less) of that in each country. So those organisations can agree to interoperate.

Denmark is halting letter delivery by the end of the year ...

"While it will still be possible to send letters with other companies in future, the options at the current time are narrow. There is currently no option outside of PostNord for sending letters internationally."

Once everyone is VOIP, the monopoly vanishes. You could set up free SIP servers in a sort of Internet way to act as DNS servers do today. To indicate where a given telephone number is to be found this minute...

The PSTN network becomes completely redundant

In a way that's where Whatsapp is right now. The problem is someone owns it

IPV6 could in theory give every telephone in the world a unique IP address : to make a call you look up a global IPV6 dns system that tells you what IP address is is.

Only because they are unable to adapt to the 90% drop in letter usage in the last 25 years.

In message <KDzxP.311502$ snipped-for-privacy@fx07.ams, fred snipped-for-privacy@for.mail writes

I used cuseeme back in the 90s. I've still got it here and it still seems to run . The video settings don't work and all the reflectors have gone, but peer to peer is still possible.

In message <vqcru0$33ndr$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, The Natural Philosopher snipped-for-privacy@invalid.invalid writes

I mentioned cuseeme. I had a fixed IP in the 90's and my pals/relatives on cuseeme had it in their directories. Dynamic IPs were a pain, but there's ways round that.

Brian

I've just installed Viber as a Skype replacement. I haven't tried it out yet.

Today I have been mostly trying to register an Apple account and get Facetime working on an old iPhone my son has lent me to try this out.

It's working mostly - I still have a lot to learn.

Viber looks interesting. As far as I can tell from what I read, it won't let me make video calls from Viber to people on other VoiP services (I think it's only Viber to Viber) but it will let me make cheap paid-for calls to regular phone numbers. So a combination of Viber and Facetime ought to replace the services that I have been using from Skype

Thanks,

Nick