Out of curiosity why is Whatsapp so popular outside the US? Are texting rates really high elsewhere? Or were they and it just caught on and stuck?
It's a combination. A lot of people here still have non-contract phones where they buy credit on a regular basis. So they wait until they reach places where there is wifi to send whatsapps rather than buying credit.
We had an activity today that was organized via a FB group. At the last minute this AM the location was changed from someone's house, to the beach. Thankfully the outage happened during our event and everyone saw about the location change. Ha!
Whatsapp is used by everyone in my social sphere so this is going to be hitting lots of people in the UK. Most of us never use text. Facebook too (international people use it often as it's just easy to keep in touch with family and friends).
I don’t know what to do without WhatsApp. All my communication is through there. The only person I iMessage is my H. Otherwise everyone is through WhatsApp. The rest is facebook messenger.
I communicate with my family in Colombia exclusively through WhatsApp. Before that, we would only communicate when I called, because them calling internationally was just way too much. Even then, I used calling cards because it was expensive for me too.
and now Kaiser's website is down. This worries me more since ether have private medical and identifying data on thousands and thousands of patients.
I would hope/think that they would have a high level of encryption on the PII & PHI data. But anything is possible because we're human and humans are stupid often.
and now Kaiser's website is down. This worries me more since ether have private medical and identifying data on thousands and thousands of patients.
I would hope/think that they would have a high level of encryption on the PII & PHI data. But anything is possible because we're human and humans are stupid often.
Anyone seen any updates on Kaiser? sonrisa? I'm curious because in 2016 they had a similar outtage.
As for PHI, etc. - some hospital systems have failsafe monitors so if there is a breach they immediately lock stuff down. I know we have a way to shut down external network access while maintaining internal server connectivity for those kinds of threats. Hopefully they do too.
Out of curiosity why is Whatsapp so popular outside the US? Are texting rates really high elsewhere? Or were they and it just caught on and stuck?
The other way to look at it is to imagine if we still had long-distance calling rates and there was a premium to text people in another state. We use Whatsapp for work-related texts because we have so many people in different countries. And particularly in the EU, where you have so much freedom to work and travel between countries, it makes sense for everyone to be on the same platform rather than this outdated system of different rates for different countries. (It was only in 2019 that rates were standardized there.)
Out of curiosity why is Whatsapp so popular outside the US? Are texting rates really high elsewhere? Or were they and it just caught on and stuck?
The other way to look at it is to imagine if we still had long-distance calling rates and there was a premium to text people in another state. We use Whatsapp for work-related texts because we have so many people in different countries. And particularly in the EU, where you have so much freedom to work and travel between countries, it makes sense for everyone to be on the same platform rather than this outdated system of different rates for different countries. (It was only in 2019 that rates were standardized there.)
I remember one of the first months that we lived in Europe we accidentally racked up a 400€ phone bill because of international data charges. Oops. That was an expensive lesson.
When you can drive to multiple other countries in a matter of minutes and cross international boundaries the way we cross state lines in the US you need a communication platform that can work with that, and, at least when we were there, phone plans hadn't really caught up yet.
I would hope/think that they would have a high level of encryption on the PII & PHI data. But anything is possible because we're human and humans are stupid often.
Anyone seen any updates on Kaiser? sonrisa ? I'm curious because in 2016 they had a similar outtage.
As for PHI, etc. - some hospital systems have failsafe monitors so if there is a breach they immediately lock stuff down. I know we have a way to shut down external network access while maintaining internal server connectivity for those kinds of threats. Hopefully they do too.
I hadn't - and when I did a quick google search I didn't see anything?
Anyone seen any updates on Kaiser? sonrisa ? I'm curious because in 2016 they had a similar outtage.
As for PHI, etc. - some hospital systems have failsafe monitors so if there is a breach they immediately lock stuff down. I know we have a way to shut down external network access while maintaining internal server connectivity for those kinds of threats. Hopefully they do too.
I hadn't - and when I did a quick google search I didn't see anything?
It might be a while before they do/say anything I guess...
If there is a breach they are required by law to report it so eventually that would come out.