I was wondering how they would be able to run such an expensive service based on just one person's ad revenue:
Microsoft is also currently testing a limit of one hour for sessions, with up to five hours free a month
I just don't understand how Microsoft thinks someone is going to sit through minutes of ads and be okay with only 5 hours per month in return.
Dumbphones are ridiculously insecure, and they only support SMS communications which don't have any end-to-end encryption.
Proton's Lumo is also built to almost always recommend Proton services when asked about secure email, VPNs, cloud storage, etc., so that probably contributed to it hallucinating a "Proton Call".
To be fair, it is $100/mo, so there is a premium for their privacy benefits.
No, seriously, what's up with those messages 😭
The thundermail domains are thundermail.com and tb.pro. I'm curious to see how they will compare to the top privacy-respecting email providers today, and how they think they will "provid[e] a better service than the other providers out there," which would include Protonmail, Tutanota, etc.
The issue of centralization can be a problem, but in regards to metadata, sealed sender does a lot to prevent Signal's servers from knowing who messages who, which makes Signal a lot more private than described here.
I use it, although not with people who are new to encrypted messaging or who I really need to keep contact with.
SimpleX has great features for the separation of pseudonyms, which is part of why I think it's the best concept for an encrypted messaging app so far. But it's not only for-profit, but funded by venture capital. I don't think it's going to last for the long term, and if it does, it'll probably experience a similar enshitification that other services have. Supposedly they're going to profit by allowing businesses to pay for their service, but I doubt that they'll actually make much money from that.