Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

eSIM Adapter

This month we’re pleased to announce the existence of the JMP eSIM Adapter. This is a device that acts exactly like a SIM card and will work in any device that accepts a SIM card (phone, tablet, hotspot, Rocket Stick), but the credentials it offers come from eSIMs provided by the user. With the adapter, you can use eSIMs from any provider in any device, regardless of whether the device or OS support eSIM. It also means you can move all your eSIMs between devices easily and conveniently. It’s the best of both worlds: the convenience of downloading eSIMs along with the flexibility of moving them between devices and using them on any device.

So how are eSIMs downloaded and written to the device in order to use them? The easiest and most convenient way will be the official Android app, which will of course be freedomware and available in F-droid soon. The app is developed by PeterCxy of OpenEUICC fame. If you have an OS that bundles OpenEUICC, it will also work for writing eSIMs to the adapter. The app is not required to use the adapter, and swapping the adapter into another device will work fine. What if you want to switch eSIMs without putting the card back into an Android device? No problem; as long as your other device supports the standard SIM Toolkit menus, you will be able to switch eSIMs on the fly.

What if you don’t have an Android device at all? No problem, there are a few other options for writing eSIMs to the adapter. You can get a PC/SC reader device (about $20 on Amazon for example) and then use a tool such as lpac to download and write eSIMs to the adapter from your PC. Some other cell modems may also be supported by lpac directly. Finally, there is work in progress on an optional tool that will be able to use a server (optionally self-hosted) to facilitate downloading eSIMs with just the SIM Toolkit menus.

There is a very limited supply of these devices available for testing now, so if you’re interested, or just have questions, swing by the chatroom (below) and let us know. We expect full retail roll-out to happen in Q2.

Cheogram Android

Cheogram Android saw a major new release this month, 2.13.4-1 includes a visual refresh, many fixes, and some features including:

• Allow locally muting channel participants
• Allow setting subject on messages and threads
• Display list of recent threads in channel details
• Support full channel configuration form for owners
• Register with channel when joining, deregister when leaving (where supported)
• Expert setting to choose voice message codec

Is My Contact List Uploaded?

Cheogram Android has always included optional features for integrating with your local Android contacts (if you give permission). If you add a Jabber ID to an Android contact, their name and image are displayed in the app. Additionally, if you use a PSTN gateway (such as cheogram.com, which JMP acts as a plugin for) all your contacts with phone numbers are displayed in the app, making it easy to message or call them via the gateway. This is all done locally and no information is uploaded anywhere as part of this feature.

Unfortunately, Google does not believe us. From speaking with developers of similar apps, it seems Google no longer believe anyone who has access to the device contacts is not uploading them somewhere. So, starting with this release, Cheogram Android from the Play Store says when asking for contact permission that contacts are uploaded. Not because they are, but because Google requires that we say so. The app’s privacy policy also says contacts are uploaded; again, only because Google requires that it say this without regard for whether it is true.

Can any of your contacts be exposed to your server? Of course. If you choose to send a message or make a call, part of the message or call’s metadata will transit your server, so the server could become aware of that one contact. Similarly, if you view the contact’s details, the server may be asked whether it knows anything about this contact. And finally, if you tap the “Add Contact” button in the app to save this contact to your server-side list, that one contact is saved server-side. Unfortunately, spelling out all these different cases did not appease Google, who insisted we must say that we “upload the contact list to the server” in exactly those words. So, those words now appear.

Thanks for Reading

The team is growing! This month we welcome SavagePeanut to the team to help out with development.

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community. You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.
• The blog, where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim.
• The Lemmy Community
• The Subreddit
• On ATprotocol
• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

Enlarge / Ish is on fire, yo. (credit: Tim Macpherson / Getty Images )

Since 2017, in what spare time I have (ha!), I help my colleague Eric Berger host his Houston-area weather forecasting site, Space City Weather . It’s an interesting hosting challenge—on a typical day, SCW does maybe 20,000–30,000 page views to 10,000–15,000 unique visitors, which is a relatively easy load to handle with minimal work. But when severe weather events happen—especially in the summer, when hurricanes lurk in the Gulf of Mexico—the site’s traffic can spike to more than a million page views in 12 hours. That level of traffic requires a bit more prep to handle.

Hey, it's Space City Weather ! (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

For a very long time, I ran SCW on a backend stack made up of HAProxy for SSL termination, Varnish Cache for on-box caching, and Nginx for the actual web server application—all fronted by Cloudflare to absorb the majority of the load. ( I wrote about this setup at length on Ars a few years ago for folks who want some more in-depth details.) This stack was fully battle-tested and ready to devour whatever traffic we threw at it, but it was also annoyingly complex, with multiple cache layers to contend with, and that complexity made troubleshooting issues more difficult than I would have liked.

So during some winter downtime two years ago, I took the opportunity to jettison some complexity and reduce the hosting stack down to a single monolithic web server application: OpenLiteSpeed .

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Every so often, you live through a year that you know you're going to remember. Sometimes it's because of a personal milestone. Other times it's because of noteworthy events that affected all of us in one way or another. And in some years, it's because we were all surprised by unanticipated and rapid technological advances.

2023 definitely will be a year that will be remembered. On the tech side, the biggest story was AI, due in no small part to rapid advances in large language models. We had news about space flight, hackers, operating systems, and even music players.

Read on to find out which stories resonated the most with our readers throughout the year.

Enlarge / Behold, a collection of apps we love. (credit: Oscar Wong / Getty Images)

Senior Reviews Editor Samuel Axon

Todoist basically runs my life—but that's OK, because it's a very well-designed app. There are a ton of to-do apps on the iPhone, but I went with this one because it's very flexible.

For example, yeah, you can see a top-to-bottom to-do list like with many others, but you can view that same data as a Trello-like Kanban board, too.

I've also found that Todoist is better at understanding natural language settings for projects, times, and so on than a lot of other to-do apps, so, for example, I can type "Edit next article at 2 pm on Tuesday #ArsTechnica" to add a to-do within the Ars Technica project with a due time of 2 pm on the following Tuesday. A lot of to-do apps support that, but I feel Todoist does it best.

Enlarge / Space Center Houston's Shuttle Independence sits atop one of the two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft 747s. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

Are you an Ars Technica reader? (I hope so, because otherwise, how are you reading these words?) Are you somewhere in or around the greater Houston area, or maybe even somewhere reasonably Houston-adjacent, like Austin or San Antonio? Are you free on the afternoon of November 1, from about 2pm to about 6pm? And, if so, would you like to hang out?

If the answers to these questions are mostly "yes," then you could do much worse with your time than attending the event we're hosting on November 1! Ars Technica has partnered up with IBM to bring you guys a set of panel discussions lasting a half-day, titled "Harnessing Big Data: Resiliency, AI, and the future of IT." On the menu for the day is a talk about modern strategies of fighting ransomware and other disasters; a discussion of managing machine learning data flows; and a talk about what the future of big distributed hybrid app development might look like.

Because this is Houston, we opted for just about the most location-specific event venue that we could find: Space Center Houston , right next door to NASA's Johnson Space Center and the headquarters of Mission Control. Holding the event at SCH gives us access to some really cool stuff!

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The world has been flooded with misinformation. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories bubble up on everything from the weather to vaccines to the shape of the Earth. Purveyors of this garbage may be motivated by attention, money, or simply the appeal of sticking it to the educated elite. For people who try to keep both feet planted in the real world, it's enough to make you want to scream. Even if you spend 24 hours a day pushing back against the wrongness on the Internet , it seems impossible to make a dent in it.

I've been pondering this, and I've decided that we need a way to target the worst sources of misinformation—a way to identify the people who are both the most wrong and the most dangerous. So, as a bit of a thought experiment, I started playing with a simplified scoring system for misinformation merchants.

I'm calling it the 10-point Ladapo scale in honor of the surgeon general of Florida, for reasons I hope are obvious . Any person can be given a score of zero or one (fractions are discouraged) for each of the following questions; scores are then totaled to provide a composite picture of just how bad any source is. To help you understand how to use it, we'll go through the questions and provide a sense of how each should be scored. We'll then apply the Ladapo scale to a couple of real-world examples.

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

Since our launch at the beginning of the summer, we’ve kept busy.  We saw some of you at the first FOSSY, which took place in July.  For those of you who missed it, the videos are out now.

Automatic refill for users of the data plan is in testing now.  That should be fully automated a bit later this month and will pave the way for the end of the waiting list, at least for existing JMP customers.

This summer also saw the addition of two new team members: welcome to Gnafu the Great who will be helping out with support, and Amolith, who will be helping out on the technical side.

There have also been several releases of the Cheogram Android app (latest is 2.12.8-2) with new features including:

• Support for animated avatars
• Show “hats” in the list of channel participants
• An option to show related channels from the channel details area
• Emoji and sticker autocomplete by typing ‘:’ (allows sending custom emoji)
• Tweaks to thread UI, including no more auto-follow by default in channels
• Optionally allow notifications for replies to your messages in channels
• Allow selecting text and quoting the selection
• Allow requesting voice when you are muted in a channel
• Send link previews
• Support for SVG images, avatars, etc.
• Long press send button for media options
• WebXDC importFiles and sendToChat support, allowing, for example, import and export of calendars from the calendar app
• Fix Command UI in tablet mode
• Manage permissions for channel participants with a dialog instead of a submenu
• Ask if you want to moderate all recent messages by a user when banning them from a channel
• Show a long streak of moderated messages as just one indicator

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.
• The blog, where you may be reading this. It can also be followed in a client like Movim.
• The Lemmy Community
• The Subreddit
• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

(credit: Kevin Purdy)

If you're like our staff, you'll understand that good cup of brewed coffee is a requirement every morning. Whether it's a simple French-pressed brew or an espresso-based drink with complex flavors and aromas, coffee has not only provided the fuel to get the Ars Technica stuff through our daily tasks but it's become a ritual that helps us start the day anew and grounds us—pun intended—amid the chaos of the world.

We asked the Ars staff to show off their coffee-making setups and tips below—they range from low to high tech, from hand-cranked grinders to automatic machines and all points in between, but all these methods have one thing in common: They make awesome coffee.

John Timmer's setup: Flavorful French press method

What I want from coffee-making equipment is purely a function of what I'm looking for from coffee. And that is as much flavor as you can possibly extract from beans that are roasted so dark that they risk absorbing all light and becoming a black hole. I want a thin sheen of random organic molecules floating on top of an explosion of bitter, complex flavors.

It's Frontiers Day at Ars Technica! Between the hours of 13:30 and 17:00 (all times US Eastern Daylight, UTC-4:00), we'll be carrying our livestreamed discussion with a half-dozen expert-packed panels on topics that range from IT to health care to space innovation. Each session will last approximately 30 minutes, with the last 10 minutes reserved for questions and answers from the audience. If you want to weigh in, leave your questions as comments on the YouTube stream . (You can also leave questions in the comments of this article, but YouTube is the preferred place because the moderators gathering questions will be focusing their efforts there.)

Schedule and sessions

The event kicks off at 13:30 EDT, with a quick intro from Ars Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and me. Even though this is a virtual event, Ken and I will be at the Ars studio at the Condé Nast Manhattan office to act as hosts. Ken will welcome everyone in and say some opening remarks, and we'll roll from there directly into the sessions. Each session will also be bookended by a short recap by Ken and me.

Session 1: TikTok—banned or not, it's probably here to stay (13:30 EDT)

Ars senior policy reporter Ashley Belanger gets to be up first with an especially relevant topic : While Congress and various states are vowing action against TikTok, will "banning" the app (whatever "banning" actually means) really come to anything? What are the policy implications around this kind of regulation, and how did we get here? We'll feature EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry among the panel's guests, along with Columbia University's Ioana Literat and former White House lawyer and CPRI Executive Director Bryan Cunningham .