ashray
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
Bought a new phone. Now, to transfer my eSIM from the old phone to the new phone, I needed the carrier to approve. But I was away from my home country and on roaming. So I tried to call them. They needed me to use a verification PIN they would send via SMS on the old phone, to verify the transfer to the new one. Impossible since the old phone is unusable.
Back in the day, I'd have just taken out the sim from the old phone and moved it to the new one. Easy peasy.
The only other option in this case now was to visit one of their stores thousands of miles away. Eventually just ended up doing that when I returned weeks later but during this time I could not access several services due to lack of access to my number plus 2 factor codes being sent there.
Moving a sim from phone to phone was seamless. Now the carrier needs to approve this swap. Even with two working phones sometimes it's a hassle and there will be delays while carriers decide to approve the move. There is a new feature that allows you to transfer eSIMs easily between phones but carriers seem to be holding onto their power in this regard and not every carrier will let their sims move so easily. This possibly requires regulators to step in and solve the issue - make it up to the user to move eSIMs. I would count on the EU to make this easier at some point.
On the plus side, eSIMs are nice to be able to signup and provision them through an app. Helps with travel and roaming. So there's that too.
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-08/25_0826_cbp_...
I can't address your other concerns about economic impact etc. I'm not sure if there is a negative economic impact from this.
https://bkpk.me/peru-visa-for-indians/
The San Francisco consulate of India refused to process my spouse’s Indian visa because she was not resident in the US.
https://bkpk.me/how-we-finally-got-zaras-visa-to-india/
Several more examples but in this day and age you can just ask chat gpt to summarize for you. But if you check visa application requirements for many embassies, they will often say: proof of residence if not a national of the country of application. So that’s the requirement often.
I will add though that I’ve always maintained that this is a soft policy and they will make exceptions in some cases. It is mostly consulates wanting to do as little work as humanly possible. So there can be ways to get around it if you can talk to someone in charge. But usually that’s very difficult with consulates.
I’m pretty sure though in the US’ case now it’s a hard no. So there will be no working around it.
So oddly, the US was far more permissive than other locales in this one aspect. All this change does is bring it in line with security practices that other nations already had in place.
Honestly am quite surprised that the US didn’t already have this restriction considering overall it’s one of the toughest countries to get a visa for or even enter with a valid visa.
The US visa vetting procedure is known to be so strict even for tourists that many nations give visa free access to nationals who would otherwise require a visa - just because they hold a valid (or sometimes even expired!) US visa. It’s a highly regarded sticker if you can get one in your passport and seriously ups the power of your passport if it’s a weaker one to start with.
What’s the reason this is happening? I’m yet to understand this..
Zug in Switzerland accepts crypto for taxes.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/switzerlands-crypto-valley-h...
The gist of it is that it depends a lot on your citizenship, the kind of work you do, and how it is all setup. Normally, taxes are to be paid where the work is done if you are a tax resident in that country. Interpretations vary so most nomads are on tourist visas and just fly under the radar. There is no proper framework for this kind of work yet. Even if you wanted to pay taxes in a country you're visiting it would be impossible in many cases because they wouldn't even issue a tax number without proper residence papers. You should be most concerned about your home country and speak to an accountant about that.
A local script injecting an ad is not the same kind of MITM attack and is no way mitigated by enabling TLS.
The discussion here is not about whether encryption is bad. My aim was to ask about whether no encryption = no HTTP/2 for you and why this is the case. I understand that the technical reason at the protocol level is because of obsolete proxies often sitting on port 80 and also the protocol negotiation that needs to take place.
In my experience the times that I've had users complain about "injected" information or weird ads, it's usually come from malware that resides ON their system. There's no MITM required for this. The injection happens client side through a browser plugin or some other resource that gets loaded up along with the page. TLS wouldn't fix this in any way as far as I am aware.