@hier This is just your opinion. For the others, GNOME is the de facto standard desktop environment for linux and is one of the few DE’s which is not overwhelming the user with to many features. Feel free to use KDE mobile instead.
I really dislike GNOME on desktop, but from what ive been both seeing and trying, Phosh is the
nicest and most complete experience. Plasma Mobile is nice too but not as complete. UBPorts, i have yet to try, but also looks good, just not as complete as Phosh. My opinions though, of course.
It is MY IMPRESSION, that KDE is much more popular in Europe where I live then in the USA. KDE is a system for people, who like to explore their system and adapt it for their needs. GNOME tries to be convenient for their user, which makes ME feeling unfree.
But when I can use Plasma Mobile in such an easy way as Plasma/KDE-Desktop of my librem 13, then everything is o.k.
Thanks! I was sure we had a ticket like that
Possibly this should go off to its own topic but …
Voice calls work in a certain way. They work in only that way, as defined by the spec. They work well to do what they can do but they are not flexible or general.
Data calls work in a different way. They are flexible and general.
So if voice calls can do what you want then use voice calls, otherwise use data calls.
One thing that someone might want is end-to-end encryption. Voice calls don’t do that.
As @epinez noted, on a voice call, you don’t even have an IP address or an IP stack. So you can forget about using any conventional internet applications.
As @johan-bjareholt noted, there is VoLTE, which is an exception to what I said. I deliberately ignored VoLTE in order to simplify things.
True but it wasn’t possible to make mobile calls before the internet was created.
OK, I think I understood. Then calls app should include a way to do an encrypted call using matrix. Until then the “this call is not encrypted” is just a reminder and nothing more.
About Gnome, although I strongly dislike it on the desktop it is OK for a phone. I think that Gnome IS for a phone, not for a desktop. It removes my freedom on the desktop and I just dislike it on it. I will prefer to use even the (gpl’d) CDE on the desktop than to use Gnome.
I’m not old enough to remember this, but according to Wikipedia the first consumer cellular phones were available in the early 80’s which is before the internet was a thing and carphones have been available for much longer. However I do remember dial-up connections which is also a good example of how the IP protocol is run on top of a phone line rather than the opposite as you can even listen to the sounds of the digital transmissions over the phone line as they are received.
If you retreated to wikipedia for history of mobile communication it will be a bit unfair if you didn’t do similar research for the internet
Let me do that for you though - according to the same source internet in its current form was established during 70’s by merging all the predcessors (usenet, arpanet, x.25, etc.) into TCP/IP stack. We can even look at the primary record and see that the wide adoption has stabilized by the end of 70’s with adoption it into final IETF standard.
P.S. To avoid accusation into promoting offtopic let me add some words on the subject.
Technically one can use high complexity codec (which could be as narrow as 8kb) and then encrypt payload and serialize it into lower complexity codec - which may perhaps pass majority of the modern PSTN infrastructure. The first problem though is obvious - there need to be someone on the other side to reverse it and receive original payload. That would mean - you can only speak to another L5 phone via encrypted voice channel. The main problem though is KEX or key exchange. For any more or less meaningful cryptography there should be enough keying material transferred between peers. Libsignal (and derivatives) solved that by offloading KEX to the side channel (out of band) but there is no side channel in PSTN.
That may well be true. It could be argued that the app that places calls should be generic and agnostic as to how you “call” your “contact” - supporting conventional voice calling and supporting a range of internet-based calling mechanisms (including but not limited to those that are end-to-end encrypted).
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
One of my Day 1 mandatory functions for the L5 was conventional voice calling. If I have to wait a bit longer for internet-based calling then I would still be happy.
I think that only works because the PSTN is not compressed.
Mobile voice calls use compression codecs that are optimised for sending intelligible voice at low bandwidth. That makes them unsuited to sending data at all (low bandwidth) and unsuited to encoding data in sound.
Having said that, I am referring here to digital mobile technology, not the previous analog mobile technology (which is hopefully no longer in use anywhere in the world, and hence not relevant to the original suggestion of end-to-end encrypted voice calls today).
I didn’t because I was already knew that. I was at first about to mention some anecdotes about how my mom got a carphone in the mid 80’s, we didn’t get internet until the late 90’s and didn’t get cellular internet until the late 00’s but realized that such a anecdotal information was pointless so I instead wanted it backed up by a proper source.
My point is that mentioning “retreating to Wikipedia” is just trash talk.
Large scale computer communication: Invented in the 60’s, realized in the 70’s, for consumers in the 90’s
Large scale cellular telephony: Invented in the 40’s, realized in the 50’s, for consumers in the 80’s (carphones mid 80’s, brick cellphones late 80’s)
So my previous point still stands, technological breakthroughs for cellular telephony was in most cases about a decade before computer networking at the same scale (and here we are talking non-mobile computer networking, add that and it’s a decade more)
And now we’re back to my first comment on this thread
Why spend time on making cellular phone calls encrypted when we could do the same thing over the internet more easily and with better security?
Please, don’t It wasn’t mobile communication, it was operator-switched radio-POTS extender - if you look at it from current perspective. It’s the same as if you call telegraph to be first digital encoding (internet communication protocol!)
For sure. I was just attempting to highlight for the user who originally asked why things are done the way they are done.
Of course it was operator-switched radio, they did not have sophisticated computers enough to switch them automatically! If the definition of cellular telephony is not bi-directional real-time audio over radio waves I don’t know what is. Yes it was primitive and expensive, but it worked the same way it does today.
The telegraph is different as we are discussing computer networking, the telegraph has nothing to do with it except for that it’s a digital rather than a analog system electrically.
When people started connecting computers together was in the 60’s/70’s. In the 60’s they had dedicated lines with low capacity just as the radio had dedicated radio channels with low capacity when it was first invented.
I think my comparison was fair.
remember the coins you would insert into public phones ? back then the gestapo wouldn’t have a reason to suspect you if you didn’t CARRY a phone with you …
"excuse me sir but you can’t be on the street without your ankle bracelet "
Oh I love discussing old tech, so I can’t help being pedantic on this topic!
The first paper describing a cellular telephone network was written in 1947 by an engineer at Bell Labs, but it was two decades later before Bell Labs worked on implementing anything, so it doesn’t really count as being “invented” in my opinion.
Maybe you can call MTA (Mobiltelefonisystem A) a “cellular network”, but it wasn’t “wide-spread”. It was developed by Ericsson starting in 1950, and entered commercial use in 1956 with 26 subscribers in Sweden. It operated until 1967 and never had more than 125 subscribers in two Swedish cities. The receiver equipment weighed 40 kilos and it used the car battery to power it. Yes, it had multiple cells, but an operator had to manually select the closest base station to connect incoming calls and you couldn’t switch a call from one cell area to another.
The first automatic “call handover” system was invented in 1970 by a Bell Labs engineer which allowed mobile phones to move through several cell areas during a single conversation without loss of conversation, but this wasn’t commercialized until December 1979 in Tokyo by NTT. The technology used by NTT was developed by Motorola in the early 1970s.
Most people would say that the first “wide-spread cellular network” was ARP (Autoradiopuhelin), which started service in 1971 in Finland, but it required operators to manually connect calls and there was no call handover between cell areas. The ARP network had 10,800 users in 1977 and it had 140 base stations in 1978. ARP was not fully automated until 1990.
In comparison, the first computer network was the military radar system Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) that started operation in 1958 in Canada and the US and would connect 56 computers when completed. SAGE had its origins in tests in April 1951 that transmitted data from radar over telephone lines to a computer. A “Summer Study Group” of scientists in 1952 recommended the creation of “computerized air direction centers.”
The first commercial network was an airline reservation system, called Semi-automatic Business Research Environment (SABRE) in 1960 that connected mainframes. The first commercial modems were the Bell 103 by AT&T with full duplex transmission and a speed of 300 bits per second.
The first wide-spread computer network was ARPANET, which started its development in 1966 and it had a 4 node network functioning on the West Coast in December 1969. By March 1970, it had connected to Cambridge, Massachusetts on the East Coast. ARPANET was fully automated in late 1969 and had a directory. By the mid-1970s, ARPANET was a nation-wide network. In 1974, the TCP specification was created and that spec coined the term the “internet”.
I can’t find a good description of how the SAGE network operated so I’m not sure how advanced it was, but ARPANET in 1969 was a decade ahead of the first commercial fully-automated cellular network, which was owned by NTT and only covered Tokyo in 1979.