It's instant and much simpler than logging into your bank. Many EU countries already have their own alternatives like swish and vipps. Can pay with just knowing the phone number, scan qr code, even quite common in stores. No fee at all for private use, small merchants just need an app, no additional hardware.
Jolla mishandled the funds they got for the tablets, it went bankrupt and bought up by a company connected to the Russian state. Jolla lied a lot during these events and tried to hide what happened, and I don't think that's an acceptable thing to do when the main selling point of your product is privacy and trust. AFAIK they recently got bankrupted again and bought by the original owners, but it's hard to rebuild trust.
I don't think this is about the current situation in the US.
Big US tech companies are infamous for not following the EU's data protection rules, and they wouldn't even able to, because some US regulations (I think PRISM, FISA and others) are incompatible with the requirements of EU GDPR.
This dates back at lest to Snowden leaks and the invalidation of EU-US data protection agreements by Schrems judgments.
> The major advantage is now that the expensive and time-consuming part of provisioning a new mobile service (sending out a physical SIM card)
I don't know, choosing service package, signing paperwork, identifying and other KYC stuff (tens of minutes) for me was always much more time-consuming than the few seconds of reading the barcode(?) from a new SIM card and giving it to the customer (or putting it into an automatically addressed envelope).
I can't see any advantage of eSIMs except that it makes harder to change providers what they of course really like.
(Anyways the security of the whole PTSN is a joke and publications about cracking cell networks, why SIM cards are even a thing? I would suspect an customer-id@service-provider.country and a password would work, too. Maybe with a zero-knowledge password proof.)
They are incredibly handy when you are traveling abroad, you don't speak the local language fluently, you want cheap data, you don't want to study 100 different prepaid plans from 10 different local primary and MVNO carriers to figure out the best offer, you don't want to wait for the shops to open because your flight landed late at night, and you don't want to scan your passport and send it to the carrier for verification and wait for hours for approval (yes, in many countries, KYC is required even for prepaid SIMs). I've lived that experience and I can't say I miss it.
Yeah, basically people here think that their experience is the only experience there is with phones. I wager not that many people are actually physically going to stores in many markets anymore like this commenter, and definitely next to nobody is switching their SIM cards literally every month like a sibling commenter is doing, but for people like me who live and travel abroad, eSIMs have been great.
shoutout to airalo for the esim experience on travelling. A great marketplace. Great choices. I can book an esim from home country and activate the esim on arrival at the destination when over wifi.
Really? I live in Japan, eSIMs made it very easy for me to switch carriers 3 times when I was shopping. Just had to click the “agree” checkbox in the ts and cs for each carrier when I switched, provide the transfer code (which is always in an easy to find place in their management dashboards), and then plug that into the form when signing up for the new carrier. Then my butt did not have to budge from my couch as the eSIM was provisioned and my old service was cancelled automatically. Definitely beat schlepping it to the physical stores of each carrier in ye olde times.
I believe it was a longwave broadcast so probably WWVB which would apparently imply a 60mm antenna, but it was a standard old school "GE digital clock radio" form factor so size wasn't at a premium.
I don't think civilian clock synchronization was an issue since a long time ago.
DCF77 and WWVB has been around for more than 50 years. You could use some cheap electronics and get well below millisecond accuracy. GPS has been fully operational for 30 years, but it needs more expensive device.
I suspect you could even get below 1 sec accuracy using a watch with a hacking movement and listening to radio broadcast of time beeps / pips.
Both of the WWVB clocks I've owned have been very fickle about how they're placed because RF be that way sometimes, and Colorado isn't exactly nearby to my location in Ohio.
The first manufactured GPS clock I owned (as in: switch it on and time is shown on a dedicated display) was in a 2007 Honda.
And even after it began displaying the right time again, it had the wrong date. It was offset by years and years, which was OK-ish, but also by several months.
Having the date offset by months caused the HVAC to behave in strange incurable ways because it expected the sun to be in positions where it was not.
But NTP? NTP has never been fickle for me, even in the intermittently-connected dialup days I experienced ~30 years ago: If I can get to the network occasionally, then I can connect to a few NTP servers and keep a local clock reasonably-accurate.
The WWVB clocks are around the AM band, which means they carry a great distance despite their lower transmission power, but only at nighttime. Ohio is nothing; the signal needs to make it to the southern reaches of Florida.
Yeah, I "know" how it is supposed to work. I "knew" that back then when I bought my first WWVB-receiving clock, too.
And the placement was still fickle.
It's simple to observe:
A) Purchase and install clock. Wait (days). Observe failure to chooch.
B) Move clock. Wait (hours). Observe correct operation.
My world is ultimately bounded by reality, not theory: When it works in one position but not another, then that's the only reality I have to work with.
On the one hand, some sloppy GPS units fail on a 20 year schedule. On the other hand, a bunch of things using NTP are going to fail in about ten years. (2036 rather than 2038 because reasons)
If I ever get the chance, I'll try to remember to tell the 1995 version of me to watch out for that pesky overflow bug that they might experience with NTP -- two score and 1 year in their future.
Not just the lack of transparency, they went bankrupt after the tablet fiasco (never refunded most of the people) and bought by some investment firm connections to the Russian state (not the thing you want from a privacy-friendly product / system) what they tried to keep secret.
AFAIK they have bought by some other company (again) since then, but they have basically nothing. Most of their Sailfish OS is actually closed source (like AOSP vs all the apps from Google), they don't have any hardware, they just re-flash some phone from Sony.
I had high hopes for them, but now wouldn't even touch them with a stick. Pixel with GrapheneOS seems to be a much better choice and maybe even closer to their original ideologies.
And yet Sailfish is a mature mobile OS, sufficient in many cases to be a daily driver, and an essential EU-based alternative to the Apple/Google monopoly. So there's that...
On a more superficial front, the UI is far ahead of both iOS and Android. Complaining about it being closed-source misses the point: the platform is Linux, and other than the proprietary front-end, everything else in Sailfish is wide open to hacking and independent development. So there's that too...
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