Google Attacks User-Installed Apps and Promotes Their Own Spyware in Bizarre Misuse of the Word “Security”.

Google Attacks User-Installed Apps and Promotes Their Own Spyware in Bizarre Misuse of the Word “Security”.

Google has announced that it plans to start interfering with the user’s ability to install APK packages locally. To get other application repositories, such as F-Droid, means installing one of these APK packages.

F-Droid contains no spyware. It’s a Free and Open Source Software repository.

There wouldn’t be any reason to put spyware in software like this because everyone can see it, someone would take it out and make a version that doesn’t do that, and then if the F-Droid repository hosted it, people would quit using that and replace it too.

The Google Play Store, on the other hand, contains very little other than spyware.

See, Google is an ad company, and as an ad company, it peddles spyware libraries that are bundles with the majority of the “apps”, which are actually adware, and monitor what the user does with their entire phone, because almost all adware is also spyware.

The user, by installing things from Google Play, agrees to this, often for some functionality that is minor compared to the dozens and dozens of unnecessary (for the stated purpose of the “app”) permissions, which are intended to let it do things like monitor your use of the phone, figure out where you’re at on Earth to within 3 feet (1 meter), even when the “app” seems to be closed, monitor your phone calls and texts, and uploading your contacts list.

There are actually many more permissions in the Android permission model, and these are just some of the creepier ones.

“Apps” like these can be anything, from McDonald’s, a car insurance company, or even just a program that says it has wallpaper images.

If you try to sign into a particular “app” called Grindr, which is an app for gay people to find sex partners, you may not see everything it does in most countries, but if you have an IP address in the European Union, you will get a “consent” screen about several hundred other “partner companies” they may share your data with.

And if you have a Facebook account, you can go to your “off Facebook Activity” screen, which is hidden rather well, and see that Grindr has been talking to them.

In America, they don’t even ask before they do this.

They’re telling Facebook and Google your HIV status and when the last time you were tested were, and they (allegedly) keep logs of who you are having sex with, and all of your nude photos, even after you delete your account. Seriously!

This was according to a high ranking executive named Ron DeJesus, who was let go recently.

Ron DeJesus claims that he was responsible for trying to keep Grindr compliant with multi-jurisdictional privacy laws, and Grindr basically flouted them all and fired him so that it could continue. He is suing them.

Almost everything in Google Play is some form of malware.

It’s so much worse than what we used to call “spyware” back in the Windows 98/XP era, when it was just something like Bonzi Buddy or Conducent, or New dot Net.

Almost everyone walking around with a cell phone in their pocket has “apps” like this, because they use the Apple App Store or Google Play.

But now Google is saying that the malware problem exists “outside” of their malware store. Which is quite clever.

Soon, according to the plans already revealed by Google, there will be no way to “sideload” (install something yourself) without letting Google “Play Protect”, which is rapidly turning into malicious software pretending to be an antivirus program, like Windows Defender is.

The choices listed are “allow scan” or “don’t install”. That’s it.

And I say “malware pretending to be antivirus” because when you click “allow scan”, it sends Google bits and pieces of the program, to a remote server.

So they know everything that’s on your phone, and they can block modified APKs that you get where someone has removed the spyware libraries from things that are in Google Play.

They can block anything they want and say “malware”, and who are you to stop them? Peasant!

Make no mistake about this, the timing is impeccable.

Right after Google apparently came down hard on people for using ad blockers (I haven’t seen the demand to turn off my ad blocker because I use Brave and they just bump it to deal with f***ing Google for me.), we get this announcement about “sideloading”.

“You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. […] It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.”

-George Carlin

There’s no telling what all is in store for Android.

Like I said in my article about Samsung falling apart, Android was designed to gain marketshare. To do this, part of the deal was that it was somewhat less bogus than iOS about not letting you use it as a real computer.

They let all the other OEMs fight each other over crumbs building up the marketshare, and then Google came in and cleaned everything up and makes the “best” Android phones now.

Well, “sideloading” is the same. They needed it, to gain marketshare, and now they’ll be wanting that back.

I suspect that within five years, the practical benefits of owning an Android phone instead of an iPhone, such as local music playing and the option to use F-Droid, will be gone.

And, basically, Apple gimps the iPhone so bad, that if you have one you might as well just get the cheapest because it doesn’t really do much of anything anyway. It can’t even play music without the network. Without the network, it’s an expensive brick.

The iPhone calls people and has an “app” that makes fart sounds for $1,800.

Google probably won’t take such action until they defeat this fake Anti-Trust Trial in the federal court (the judge is a corrupt stooge who is working with them to hide almost everything from the public) but they will do it.

The media is so bad that instead of criticizing this and calling it what it is, they repeat Google’s press statement. However, there is much more going on than we are being shown.

F-Droid Spotlight: AirGuard (See devices that track you, like AirTags.)

Apple is a creepy company.

From admitting that they plan to put device scanning that automatically turns their users over to the police into their phones (and claiming anyone who wants privacy from THAT is a sex offender, which is a classic example of DARVO), to creating devices which spy, like AirTags, nothing they do is ethical.

When they released the AirTags, it provided stalkers with an excellent tool to help commit violence and rape (mostly against women, of course) that is so easy to use that even an Appletard can figure it out.

Apple demurred that there were already similar devices on the market (which cost less, much less, but what else is new?) than theirs which don’t go “beep beep beep” (creating an aftermarket for AirTags with the speakers destroyed) and alert the phones nearby that they’re being tracked (after three days, and only if you use an iMonster).

For Android users, they eventually released a broken “Tracker Detect” app into Google Play that hardly works at all and is sitting at a 2/5 star rating just to avoid the inevitable lawsuits or at least give them the defense that they provided us with “something” to rectify the problem that they created.

But as usual, the F-Droid store comes to the rescue with AirGuard.

I’ve been trying it out for the past couple of days and it can monitor all kinds of devices that are nearby, including Airpods, my watch, my stereo (LOL), Airtags, and other devices, and it can tell you where they’ve been following you at, using OpenSteetMaps.

5/5

F-Droid Download Link: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.seemoo.at_tracking_detection/

License: Apache License 2.0

T-Mobile Google Play problems: Part 3

This evening I called T-Mobile support and eventually got fielded around to someone who knows what’s going on.

He confirmed that the Google Play problems are related to their tower upgrades and shutting down the last of the Sprint network.

Internally, T-Mobile uses a VPN to route certain traffic, including the Play Store, even if you’re not using one of their devices, and something in that setup got messed up. They said they are aware of it and it should eventually go away, but to “keep using the VPN app” to get Google Play to work until it’s fixed.

By using NordVPN, it forces it to tunnel over the internet instead of internally at T-Mobile, through NordVPN’s server, and reach the Google Play store over the Internet, through NordVPN.

While he had me on the phone, he found me a cheaper T-Mobile plan than my Sprint account which they don’t advertise. They have a plan for senior citizens and we agreed that I was over 55 😉 and now my bill for the month should go down by about 30% vs. what I was paying for my spouse and I on the legacy Sprint plans.

To save the $445 a year on the phone bill, I had to give up a Hulu with commercials plan I didn’t even use, and a AAA membership worth about $70. Sprint just made my latest payment, so there’s no AAA bill due until next year.

It’s nice to know that something’s going down, because it sure isn’t the groceries and gas.

Edit: Here’s a quote from a customer who said he finally found someone who knew how to fix it.

“I was having the same problem and spent hours on the phone with a 2 different tech support people at T-Mobile. The second guy I spoke to tonight seems to have fixed the issue. He used a program called Grand Central and said he ran through a process that “cancelled my location and updated network features”. I don’t know what that means exactly but it worked. If you talk to T-Mo tech support, ask them to do this same process. Good luck!”

–Jack Monkey (T-Mobile Forume)

T-Mobile customer “service” feigns ignorance of the ongoing Google Play blockade in Chicago as many customers take notice.

As the T-Mobile blockade of the Google Play Store in the Chicago region of the US, and apparently others now, continues for the second week for some people….T-Mobile “support” pretends not to know anything about it.

Status of Google Play outage as of Wednesday, March 9th at 7:30 AM CST. According to DownDetector.

I dropped by T-Mobile yesterday and they told me that other customers have had the same issue and that doing a RMA (replacement) on the phone didn’t fix it.

They said that one guy even went through three Motorola phones in the store and the Play Store was inaccessible on all of them and that their boss called a staff meeting on the issue recently.

But they insist that they “don’t know” what to tell customers about it.

Along the way, he mentioned that they would be “shutting down Sprint’s network” as of March 10th.

I called T-Mobile customer service and they told me it was a “problem with the local towers”.

The problem with reaching Google on a T-Mobile Internet (Cellular or Home) connections appears to have been bad in the Chicago area for many T-Mobile customers (based on my conversations with them), since as far back as Saturday the 26th of February. The affected area was confirmed to include parts of Wisconsin and Indiana.

But as of March 9th, the day leading up to the Sprint network shutdown, the DownDetector map is lit up like Skynet taking over the Internet in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

At issue is the fact that very few apps in Play will install if you use T-Mobile or T-Mobile Home Internet. In fact, my spouse has a Samsung Galaxy Tablet that displays the same problems my Pixel 6 does right now, but they both only do it on T-Mobile. Unfortunately, we have T-Mobile for our Home Internet too.

That may have to change soon.

The apps that did install for me included Facebook and Microsoft Authenticator which were just two that happened to pop up while I was randomly tapping “install” on apps in the store to see what was going on. (I uninstalled both immediately.)

About 99% of apps stay stuck on “Pending” or freeze at a certain percentage along the way and then never install.

To slap a band-aid on it, I had to get an APK package for NordVPN from APKMirror and then sideload it into my phone and connect to NordVPN in order to update my Play Store apps and get basic security updates for my phone.

Other users claim that the same problem affecting Play is affecting various Google apps like YouTube, and won’t let them post on Instagram or Reddit until they get on their VPN. This is based on chatter I’ve heard around the Web.

So what is going on? Well, T-Mobile and Google know and just won’t tell customers unless they come in going “This stupid phone won’t work and I already know it’s your network, because when I connect it to something else, the Play Store works again!”.

At Techrights on IRC, Roy and various others figure that US ISPs and Google are gearing up for finer grained censorship to muzzle Americans on the Internet and control what we can read, because the domestic situation here continues to deteriorate rapidly, with so many people out of work, broke, and now facing record high gas prices and an ongoing epidemic of COVID-19 that the media has stopped reporting on at all.

The COVID-19 situation has fallen to the back burner in the mainstream media. They’re trying to make it go away, and now the wall-to-wall reporting is all about the Ukraine crisis.

75% of CNN is the usual junk about rappers getting their butthole waxed and then the 25% in the big letters is disaster porn about the Ukraine situation.

Anyway, back to the T-Mobile problems.

Store employees obviously know there’s a problem going on with Android phones right now on T-Mobile’s network and just continue selling them anyway.

I mean, sure you can’t update anything on the phone, and you can’t even download the data that you need in order to use the Google Assistant on any T-Mobile network.

The guy at the store told me they have to use a VPN now, at the store, to make the phone work at all in order to set it up.

He told me it was “funny” that I thought of using NordVPN to make the Play Store work again on my phone.

What is likely, according to Roy Schestowitz, who adds that many US ISPs block his sites quietly, is that T-Mobile is already censoring the Web and that they fumbled their blacklist and accidentally took out Google out of some sort of incompetence.

(It was AT&T and BellSouth that were blocking Roy. I joked, “Bill”South. As in “Creepy Uncle Bill” Gates.)

I agree that, having viewed how they operate their network, this is a distinct possibility.

Since changing DNS servers on the phone doesn’t fix the Google Play issues, it’s obvious that they’re probably doing some sort of Deep Packet Inspection and that this took out Google Play and god only knows what else.

In Russia, when Putin made ISPs install Deep Packet Inspection, there were big service disruptions. As “apps” do things, you know not what, it’s very plausible that the entire Play Store and anything from it has been configured to allow Man In The Middle (MITM) attacks by the carrier.

That is, you go to use an “app” and they silently decrypt the traffic, log it, and then send it on its way, and you have no idea it happened.

It’s also reasonable to speculate that as big tech companies circle the wagons and give the boot to independent news sites so you can read CNN’s wall-to-wall panic and butthole bleaching, there’s some sort of hard block on the sites they don’t want you to read coming soon, and this could be a harbinger of things to come.

Maybe for a while, tools like VPNs and Tor Browser will work, but for how long? Google has total control of Android, and can make it more like the iPhone, and then take away your ability to use F-Droid, Tor, and any VPN who won’t censor and log.

There’s something called “Onion Browser” for iPhones, but it’s almost certainly not private at all. For starters, Apple can put anything they want to inside it, and even if they don’t, it’s running on a hostile OS where they admit they want to place a “scanner”, if they haven’t already.

In any event, you should never trust anything running on an iPhone for many reasons. Some of which also apply to Android, but at least the app itself can be proven “clean” if it comes from F-Droid.

Like I said previously, people in the United States are not happy, and specifically they’re not happy with Joe “Bligh”den.

They think that they can subdue or redirect the anger people are feeling, which is palpable, by trotting out the same tactics that have worked so far.

Race war, bread and circuses, give them something stupid to panic over. It really distracts from gas that’s $5 a gallon and grocery bills that have doubled and rents that have gone up 30-40% in the past two years. And all of the other failures of the administration.

It’s only fitting that the government and the tech companies (oligarchs and oligarch media) close the ranks around each other and start adopting a posture to the Internet not unlike Putin or Xi’s.

My mom just eats the distractions up. She’s like her mom. She goes and buys thousands of dollars worth of groceries at the store and then shoves it under a bed to go bad. Or leaves it in the garage. Ten years later, you have sugar that turned into cement, and swelling vegetable cans.

One year, my brother went to Grandma’s and found a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti that expired in 1978.

Grandma thought everything Pat Robertson talked about was the end of the world, including Y2K. Mom’s second husband, “Gonad the Barbarian”, was over there moving furniture 7 years later and broke his toe on some sugar under Grandma’s bed that had solidified.

It’s not the end of the world until it is, and obviously it’s usually not, but they get in your brain and warp your sense of reality so you’re always seeing things incorrectly and won’t plan for what they’re really doing to you.

When strange things start happening at your ISPs around the time of the suppression of media due to whatever crisis it is this week, it does make you wonder.

Then again, of course it could also just be T-Mobile bungling the shutdown of the Sprint network, but that doesn’t make it so. I struggle to find any reason why this would affect Google Play, especially for customers using T-Mobile phones, whose accounts had nothing to do with Sprint, ever. (Mine will be Sprint plans and branding for a while, but on the T-Mobile network.)

The guy in the T-Mobile store asked why I only noticed this problem recently.

I explained that I don’t use the Play Store very much because of F-Droid, and that most of the stuff in the Play Store is like Apple’s App Store, where you have to crawl through an open sewer of freemium junk to find your banking apps and stuff and then a smart person won’t use it again, so it was reasonable for me to assume that it was working and keeping my apps updated, until I noticed it wasn’t.

I also explained open source software, and that apps in the F-Droid store had the “20 or 30 tracking libraries, which are malware that the author or Google Play store puts into apps” removed or neutered, and that “In the case of Telegram, it removes those, as well as the proprietary Google Play services libraries and replaces location mapping with OpenStreetMaps….nothing in F-Droid uses Google Play services at all. They’re designed to work even on phones that don’t have Google Play because the user has custom firmware or because the manufacturer, like Huawei, faced US sanctions and had to remove Google apps.”.

To see apps like “Telegram FOSS” or “Frost for Facebook” or “Infinity for Reddit” in the F-Droid store, you need to enable “anti-feature” apps.

That’s because they’re a Free and Open Source app that uses a non-Free network service. (Which is better than using them with a proprietary app. Facebook’s official apps are some of the most abusive apps even by mobile phone standards.)

I’m a heavy F-Droid users because I simply don’t find the Play Store to be a very valuable source of applications (mostly just iPhone-style junk and crapplications that spy and drain your bank account while people stare into the phone like a f–king braindead moron), but since parts of the Android operating system and apps you can’t remove from the phone get updated there, it’s crucial that it functions properly.

T-Mobile is being super sketchy about their bungling and meddling, which has left it impossible to update apps like Google Chrome. Which is “only” the Web browser, which “only” has about 50 security holes patched each version.

Mine was stuck 7 versions behind when I noticed and used my NordVPN connection to bump it. I don’t even use Chrome, but it’s a Google app, so no getting rid of it. But having it on the phone and not updated can open the door for malicious software to end up on the phone using some vulnerability. Same for the system Webview, which is based on Chromium.

Then at the mall last night, I was on their WiFi to bring in a train wreck full of operating system updates and security patches that had backlogged on me.

There’s no telling how many thousands of CVEs the average user has right now that have been patched, but they are on T-Mobile so no way that they know of to get the patches.

This situation is clearly unacceptable, and T-Mobile remains completely silent as more users are wondering what the Hell is going on.

Google Play doesn’t work properly on T-Mobile lately, unless you’re using a VPN.

Recently, all my Android devices stopped updating apps from Google Play.

I checked Down Detector, and someone complained that it happened to them when they were connected to their T-Mobile Home Internet WiFi.

I have T-Mobile for Home Internet and for cell data, so I decided to try connecting to NordVPN, and the updates work again.

So something involving T-Mobile’s network is preventing Google Play from working. Apps either won’t download at all “Pending” or they’ll partially download and then stop, but connecting to a VPN allows it to work.

Edit: I went to the T-Mobile store and they confirmed that it has happened to several other customers. They said they tried three Motorola phones for one guy and it was still doing it, but when they put his phone on a VPN at their store, Play worked.

So that’s proof it’s happened to at least Motorola, Google Pixel, and some Samsung devices.

There’s a post on T-Mobile forums here with more people having the issue:

https://community.t-mobile.com/network-coverage-5/t-mobile-internet-cell-service-will-not-allow-google-play-store-apps-to-download-or-update-42053

Roy Schestowitz asks why I paid for NordVPN with the Google Play Store.

Roy Schestowitz asks why I pay for VPNs with the Google Play Store.

My answer: It’s basically a payment condom.

People complain they give NordVPN their credit card and can’t stop them from billing them again every month after they cancel.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but canceling a Play Store subscription is easy and they can’t stop me.

Try getting a refund from a company in Panama.