Cell tracking is external to the phone. It’s done by the towers - they know signal strength, and by using known tables of that data, cell providers know pretty accurately where your phone is.

To block this you’d need a device that lacks any cellular technology whatsoever. Wifi only.

And that has the same issues, especially with companies like Comcast/Xfiniti using their cable modems to track all the devices around them, even if you don’t connect to them.

Texting uses http over the data channel for MMS.

Snikket seems to be it for iOS. But it does work pretty well, I haven’t run into any issues with it.

For Windows well, nothing does voice as far as I know.

Tailscale has the Funnel feature, which can funnel traffic into your Tailscale net for you.

Ubiquiti?

You can’t give me that garbage. I despise it, after setting up a single access point (plus also watching friends deal with it at client sites).

Besides the discovery issues and slow performance when trying to manage it, I had a random open network on it after setup. This network didn’t appear anywhere in the control panel. I could turn off the access point and the network disappeared.

It didn’t show up in the guest network config (which was turned off anyway). It had the same name as the WPA-protected network, it was just open - no security at all.

I had to reset the access point to get rid of this weird random open network.

What kind of garbage product does that?

Now let’s look at cloud keys. One has a hard drive in it. Just one drive, 3.5", which besides storing data also stores the OS. What? Why is the OS not on some firmware or at least an M2, since the drive is really for storing surveillance data (did I mention it’s a single drive?), what a joke. Why would I bother with such an expensive device that has zero fault tolerance, when I could simply buy a cheaper real machine, run multiple drives, and host the software there?

I lack the vocabulary to describe how bad Unifi is.

It still exists! (Or did about a year ago).

When I got my first Android (2009 ish), I searched high and low for a way to run Hamachi on it. There have been solutions, but always clumsy and difficult to implement.

I miss Hamachi, it was so simple to use.

Tailscale is wireguard (it uses the wireguard protocols, even says so on the box), just with a centralized resolver to make things easier to setup and manage.

I’m not sure what you’re saying with the rest of your comment, as Tailscale is a mesh network, not a VPN as most people think of it.

It encrypts your traffic, but only into the network of which your device is a member. You can’t even see any devices, or networking, outside the Tailscale network, unless a device is configured as a Subnet router. Then you can see devices in the network which the Subnet Router links together.

For example, you have 3 machines, a laptop on mobile data, and 2 desktops on your home LAN. One desktop and the laptop have Tailscale, they can communicate over Tailscale to each other, but the laptop cannot connect to the second desktop because it’s on a different network, since there’s no routing between Tailscale and your home LAN.

You then configure Subnet Routing on the desktop that has Tailscale, now your laptop can connect o any device on the home LAN, so long as the desktop is running and Tailscale is up.

Think of mesh networks as Virtual LANs in software, configurable on each device (mostly, sort of). Twenty years ago Hamachi was the go-to for this, it was brilliant, and much easier to use than today’s mesh networks, just far less capable/manageable/configurable.

I’d consider 5% to be trivial, for what it does.

My battery consumption really depends on how much traffic I send over it.

It definitely gets better once it’s all caught up.

But it’s still much harder on battery than ST when folders have changes.

It’s kind of not Foldersync’s fault, it’s really because of the protocols - it’s all connection-based, and FS has to compare each file at sync time.

Syncthing keeps an index so it knows what files have changed. Very different tools with different use-cases and approaches.

I used FS for years until I found ST, and had to do a lot more tweaking to get sync to work the way I wanted with FS. FS doesn’t have sync conditions like ST, so I had to use Macrodroid to trigger it when on WiFi, for example.

FS can be a solution, it’s just a lot more work for anything beyond basics.

It’s stupid easy to setup, even has a built-in photo backup job.

I use Syncthing-Fork because it moves all the sync conditions into each job.

So my photos sync regardless of charging state or network (I’m willing to pay for the data to ensure photos are instantly synced). While other things only sync while on WiFi and charging (e.g. Neobackup).

Only one I can think of is Resilio, but it’s hard on RAM and battery for large folders.

That takes a lot more effort.

With Syncthing, I don’t have to setup a server, poke holes in my firewall/expose ports, etc.

Plus Foldersync is way harder on battery, I’ve experimented a lot.

And I’ve used Foldersync since at least 2010 - it’s great, really has it’s uses.

Maybe I’m misremembering, but I thought they used Syncthing as part of a business not directly related to Möbius - as a vendor supplying data management solutions to other companies. I suspect Möbius came out of need for their clients.

I can picture the vendor website in my head, just wish I could remember who it was for sure.

I would eagerly pay for syncthing, it’s that important to me. I keep hundreds of gigs moving around using it. It’s on my annual donate list already, but clearly that’s insufficient.

Maybe the Syncthing-Fork dev will keep it going.

iOS is already more restricted on app sandboxes, and Möbius can handle it in the paid version.

On Android, Resilio somehow has more file access than Syncthing, even without root (it can read/write to either SD card root, while Syncthing can only write to a subfolder of SD0, and can’t write anywhere of an external SD). So there’s something going on.

I can only hope the company makes the iOS client (Möbius) decides they need syncthing to continue and decide to get behind it.

As I recall, they use Syncthing as a solution in their business, this would be a big-break for them.

mobiussync.com

And yet Resilio can access a lot more than ST, even without root.

It can do sync jobs in a very similar way as syncthing.

But I find Resilio to use more RAM because it stores the file DB in RAM. This kills a phone, but isn’t a big issue for a desktop.

It’s already all virtualized, so from customer perspective, advantages of virtualization aren’t there (single box, maximizing use of local resources, etc).

Wouldn’t you be able to do containers in a Linux VPS though? To the host, it’s just a virtualized Linux, from Linux’ perspective, those containers are local resources.

Have you solved the issues Syncthing has with Android? Seems Android v9 and later networking blocks the LAN access for finding local relays. Even manually configuring relay IPs in Syncthing doesn’t resolve the issue.

You buy as much space as you’ll need in the next few years and make a plan for proper duplication/backup, such as 3-2-1 Backups.

Your family isn’t dumber than average.

Uu tech folks tend to forget/overlook that most people are clueless as to how mobile devices work. I have IT friends who know practically nothing about the Android file system, or how apps store (but don’t sync) data, for example. And these are people designing/implementing/supporting complex systems.

Most people can’t be bothered if there’s more than one or two steps. I can’t walk my “70 year old uncle” through configuring an app on his phone, over the phone. The stuff he says he sees make no sense at all. I’m like “no, that’s not what you should see, what did you click on”?.