Hmm, there are lot of old laptops that still can play older or indie games, even with 4GB. An optimized Linux system for low hardware might work. Maybe they don't even play, and its just there to farm. I can imagine laptop farmers to get these Steam cards or to trade something, who knows what. Just speculation off course.

1080p going up maybe because rise of handhelds? Looking closer, its just going up +0.02%, which could be just statistical noise as different people were surveyed. Actually instead 800p and 1200p are going up, even 768p, which are typical handheld and laptop resolutions. And 1440p, which is the swee spot on desktop PC for quite some time now.

About the Intel share, don't forget that this survey is from last month (September) and the news are relatively new.

"Is any SMS/phone call coming out of your personal number something you should consider private from the government? Probably not."

Well your phone calls themselves -- the actual conversation -- shouldn't be accessible without a warrant for a wire tap, that's pretty longstanding precedent in the U.S. Cell phone location information is also protected by a warrant (Carpenter v. U.S.), but pen registers (logs of who you call) do not require a warrant (Smith v. Maryland). I'm not sure if governments are prevented from purchasing data from carriers, just as any data broker could do. Additionally, who knows if governments are secretly collecting phone call and cell phone data and storing it, but only accessing it once they have a warrant. It's impossible to know what's fully happening on the back end between big telco companies and the gov't.

Either way, at the end of the day, whether you have Cape or some other service, if you're at the level of the government getting a warrant for your data any legitimate company is going to comply. That's why the best thing is to have a company that can only turn over limited amounts of data because that's all they have.

The sheer volume of communication data is far too large to monitor everything.

By people, sure. Run it through a magical analytical algorithm that flags stuff for people to look? Or if that's still too much everywhere, they could focus it on a certain area's towers and process that data. Will it catch everything or not generate false positives? No, it's not perfect, but I could see it helping them and being done.

I doubt an agency like this would just hoard the info and not proactively use.

I saw this video on YouTube with a rep from the company and while there were some positive things put forward, the biggest red flag to me was when he wouldn't disclose what networks they partner with. They are a virtual network so they don't own the cell towers, and that means they're running off someone else's. Why can't you say who? Other virtual carriers have no problem saying that they run on Verizon or T-Mobile.

interview for Cape starts at about 30 minutes in. Ironically, the podcast is called "Snake Oilers" and it's a paid-promotion thing, sooooo take this with a grain of salt.

The feds have already pulled a similar stunt with another manufacturer+software combo. (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operat…)

The only thing that makes this smell legit is the fact that it is a provider and probably only eSIMs. But even then, this is not very good opsec to be deliberately using a marketed product that will likely have an identifier for their cell traffic. Graphene works as well as it does because it runs of pre-existing hardware to be more inconspicuous.

international police sting operation between 2018 and 2021

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That's always the concern with privacy-focused services, especially if they're not open source or audited.

But if we think about the practical application -- who needs a honeypot for cell phone services? Carriers already collect so much data (location, telemetry, payment, government-issued ID, etc) and sell it willingly to whoever wants to buy. How could Cape be any worse? lol. If they adhere to any of their stated policies it seems like a plus, no?

Additionally, at least to me, Cape is not marketing the way the Anom phone did, where it trying to gain adopting by nefarious users. That's my take - I'm not advocating for Cape since I don't really know much about them, but I'm trying to put things in context.

The way anti-fingerprinting techniques work is by making you as much of a background digital character as possible. A privacy conscious user spoofing location and network traffic data on AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile is going to be far less likely to be singled out compared to customers on some bespoke cell network.

You should try to fake your traffic on a standard phone network (Using something like GrapheneOS with more granular control) to simply appear like another faceless data point rather than a "paranoid privacy user who bought this subscription for the privacy people", because that traffic will raise eyebrows much quicker.

Something can't be both "100%" and vibes based lol

Unless you mean "I am 100% basing the following opinion on vibes".

You need evidence. Please don't respond with more vibes.

Because they literally operated it as a honeypot and gave police full access to chats while advertising to criminals that it was safe.

EncroChat first came to the attention of the media when it was revealed that high-profile criminals Mark Fellows and Steven Boyle had been using the encrypted devices to communicate during the May 2018 gangland murder of John Kinsella in Rainhill, England.[16][9][17] The service resurfaced in the media during the summer of 2020 after law enforcement agencies announced that they had infiltrated the encrypted network and investigative journalist Joseph Cox, who had been reviewing EncroChat for months, published an exposé in Vice Motherboard

magazine focused on international arts and culture

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