Facetime is not an open standard.

XMPP/jabber is, but even google whose Talk was originally based on Jabber, is moving away from it with Hangouts.

How do these devices connect to a phone network? Do they have service plans while being refurbished?

Thanks. That was exactly what i suspected that their throttled 3g is not the same speed i get when i switch 4g/lte off on my iphone (which is pretty usable). I get up to 4 mbit/s on 3g.

But at least in Europe (gsm), we used edge before anyone was even talking about 3g. And i know that from time to time i still get both logos on my iphone information bar when i go into the woods - and while internet is totally snappy with 3g logo, its near unusable when EDGE is displayed.

I am not talking about roaming. I was thinking of buying a prepaid sim for the month i spend in US.

3g (at least in Europe) meant 2mbit and up. Edge was 256kbit/s.

Have you actually tried it?

Is their "unlimited 3g tethering" actually at 3g speeds or more like 2g/edge? I will be travelling to the US and need a month of internet.

What do you do with few hundred megabytes of *tethering*? Any computer with a modern OS will consume that in the first nanosecond of discovering an internet connection is available.

We are not even talking about encryption as such.
We are talking about a phone which consists of encryption plus hardware plus software that makes use of said encryption. I would bet a fortune that this combination will be broken into sooner rather than later.

Well, it might come as a surprise to you, but in real world breaking an encryption does not work by guessing the pin on the third try like in movies. It does not matter if there are 10 digits or 76. Someone will find a way around it given money and time.

Well, yeah. Unbreakable for me and you.
But give someone enough time and money and they aren't. Some government agency with enough funds and talent (and motivation). If history has taught us anything - all encryption systems will be broken in due time.

It is in the article. They asked for the code 10 months later.

My point was that NO system is unbreakable. Its just the matter of price. In San Bernardino case government also argued with Apple that it is impossible to decrypt - until it suddenly wasn't. I guess someone decided that court case with Apple would be less cost effective.

As we know from the San Bernardino case, it is not an "unbreakable lock". The government just finds it cheaper to throw a man in jail than pay someone to open the iphone.

Yes, true. My iot things talk with my own OpenHAB installation and therefore I do not have that issue. But a generic out of the box behaviour on most of the iot stuff is to phone home as it simply cannot be connected by an app in your phone without forwarding ports etc (which is beyond a normal user's abilities).

TFA is a a question by a person who has no idea how ip networks and client/server/app communication works.

My only point was that we do not need a special IOT isolating appliance, this can all be done with standard firewalls built in most wifi or broadband routers.