Now Messenger is a separate app and Facebook owns WhatsApp too, people with older devices have been cut off from both these services.
My Blackberry Priv is currently being mended and I have lost a day just trying to access Twitter, Facebook and Google on my older Torch. It’s hard to even find how to do this, while the device simply tells me my login details are wrong.
I am trying to find out which Blackberry handsets will stop being supported by WhatsApp on 30 June 2017. My old Torch won’t allow Facebook Messenger and Twitter is an elusive mystery. It just says my login has been understood but refused. That’s it. What is the point of 2 step verification if I can’t verify myself? A hacker would have more chance.
This follows a conversation with my mobile provider, who said that my phone bills are a result of texts and calls with my only surviving immediate family member, who doesn’t live in the UK. 35p per text and £1.50 a minute to a mobile overseas.
However I think we need to keep an eye on what is going on in the world of social media, apps, technology and software to ensure that we keep our choices and do not lose our means to communicate to freely.
Taking an older handset on a beach holiday or to a festival is already not an option.
After searching for hours, I found how I could enter a 16 digit password to activate my Gmail. I still got asked for a verification codes which was texted to me. When I went to memorise the code, the window to enter it had gone and an email from 2 step verification said they had blocked me.
Facebook own What’s App and they have already cut millions of users off from Facebook messenger, including a iPhone 4 belonging to a friend. This Cosmopolitan article asks if this is right.
It’s only when you try to login do you find that various apps and other technology is no longer available and the news is delivered quietly.
The Daily Express simply used this news to sell more advertising to mobile phone companies to get people to upgrade.
What does the update to the new Internet Certificate SHA-2 mean for people across the globe. The older encryption certificate SHA-1 has been declared unsafe by researchers, however many devices are not compatible with the new algorithm.
“Although 98.31 percent of the browsers are compatible with the update, the 1.69 percent that are not represent tens of millions of people” wrote Zach for the Epoch Times in December 2015.
“…the problem is that people across the world, most of them in the developing world, use old phones or desktops that don’t update themselves, and they won’t be able to access the internet,” Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, told BuzzFeed.
This message disappears on reading so hard to find on Google Images, except in Italian
In terms of security and personal safety in the age of the Internet, i find it amazing that I cannot get What’s App or Facebook messenger on a 2010 mobile handset, while I can be asked by social media to provide opening times for a venue before I’ve even had time to buy a drink.
While trying to find images for this blog via Google, interestingly, no one has put the following Facebook message they receive (which disappears from notifications on reading) saying:
“Thank you for choosing to use Messenger. We regret to inform you that since the end of March, the app version you’re using is no longer supported and you can no longer send and receive messages.”
Dairy of A Nonny Moose 