Tag Archives: T-Mobile

No Anti-Trust Case in the United States Has Ended Well for Consumers. Judge in Google Case Doesn’t Know if Firefox is a Browser or Search Engine.

No Anti-Trust Case in the United States Has Ended Well for Consumers. Judge in Google Case Doesn’t Know if Firefox is a Browser or Search Engine.

The United States Government does not have a good track record for responding to anti-trust problems in time, or resolving the cases to any meaningful effect when it finally does respond at all.

In the case of Standard Oil or AT&T, the monopolies pretty much just re-assembled themselves again. In the AT&T case, the government split them into over 50 different phone companies, called “Baby Bells”, which would each service its own US State or territory, ~40 years in and we’re back to only 3 real phone companies in the entire country.

AT&T is one of them and simply bought the fragments of itself except Verizon, which bought other fragments of AT&T.

The Crooked Trump Administration allowed T-Mobile to buy Sprint and raise our phone bills, and ignored the problem of having less choice in the marketplace, after T-Mobile rented $250,000 of empty hotel rooms at Trump’s failing D.C. hotel.

In the case of Standard Oil in the early 20th Century, the competing oil companies got back together and began operating as a cartel instead of a monopoly, so the effects on the market are essentially almost as if Standard Oil were still here.

(They “compete” only in the sense that there are minor deviations in their detergency formulations for gasoline and oil. General Motors dexos 1 gen3 has made a uniform standard for motor oil which is actually quite good. Anyone who licenses has to meet the same benchmarks but is free to arrive at the results almost anyway it sees fit, although the base oils and detergents are so minimally different that as long as they meet the standard, you’re basically buying the same stuff.)

But then they got to Microsoft. They were going to punish the crap out of them and split them into as many as seven different software companies, but in the end they got tapped on the wrist so lightly that the damage to the competition in the Web browser, OS, and office suite markets was done and Microsoft got a bargain, and consumers still didn’t have many real options.

The Google case threatens computer users because while Chrome OS is not an ideal choice of OS, it is FAR better than Windows for most users (especially with Linux and Android program compatibility).

From the point-of-view that the thing maintains itself and doesn’t get viruses, or stuffed up with bad updates nearly every month, or perform hideously on low end laptops like Windows does, Chrome OS is an outstanding operating system.

The downside to this anti-trust case against Google, for consumers, is that no matter what happens, Microsoft, a far bigger monster, threatens to win, in markets where it has not done well because consumers have a choice and almost nobody chose Microsoft.

Microsoft Bing is almost inconsequential because the quality has never been good.

Without fundamentally fixing anything, Microsoft has attempted to get users by rebranding it several times, stealing Google’s index by spying on Microsoft browser users and what Google links they clicked on, and using a “branding condom” called DuckDuckGo, which is really just a skin for Bing.

(Hosted on Microsoft Azure, almost all results come from Bing, and DuckDuckGo’s anti-tracking products exempt Microsoft’s ad network.)

Microsoft has been vexed by Google for over a decade now. Losing millions of Windows users to Chrome OS and Android, and they want it to stop.

That’s quite possibly where the impetus for the Google anti-trust case really came from, and in irony, consumers really do have a choice and most of them just don’t bother to switch from Google, which is easy to do.

In the case of Bing, anyone could switch to it by changing one setting. It’s probably already in their browser, so they don’t even have to add it. The fact that nobody does speaks for itself.

I mean, it’s not like trying to get rid of Windows where there is malicious firmware and “Security Theater Boot” in your way and you have to format a drive and start over with a new OS. Nope. Flip a switch, use Bing (you shouldn’t). And nobody does.

The fact that we end up with old judges who are so tech illiterate that they do not even understand as much about computers as my 66 year old mother with an iPhone, who has to ask teenagers at a store about it, who don’t want to help her because she’s not in there buying the latest model, says that this case might not end well either.

The government botching anti-trust was the reason why we ended up with crappy Windows operating systems instead of powerful UNIX systems for many years in the first place. AT&T had UNIX, they were just forbidden from selling it directly, so we ended up with toys like DOS and Windows, which someone at Microsoft added “a bad lip reading of some of the things we saw in UNIX” to, but were not great operating systems.

The only part of Google’s business that should be at issue here are how they’ve abused users of Chrome, but I doubt that will get much trial time.

Chrome used to have better extensions.

When they had to kill Firefox, they implemented a decent extensions system.

Now that they HAVE killed Firefox, they make (especially privacy extensions) the system weaker, and add DRM and tracking to the core of the browser program.

I also doubt we’ll hear about the increasing number of Web sites that aren’t even made with Web technologies anymore, but are rather Chrome applications that mainly exist to pop up a QR code for your phone, like New New Reddit.

These are the important issues that the court needs to stop Google from continuing with, but I think we’ll mostly just hear about Search, which is very boring and has lots of choice already.

I use Searx Belgium. Privacy Browser on Android defaults to Mojeek.

It’s not Google’s fault if people don’t want to educate themselves in a market full of options.

T-Mobile Says Get Ready to Lose Your AutoPay Discount if You Use a Credit Card. Bonus: Automated Super Depressing McDonalds

T-Mobile Says Get Ready to Lose Your AutoPay Discount if You Use a Credit Card

T-Mobile has had like eight data breaches in the past 5 years, and recently a banner popped up on my account stating that if I continue paying with a credit card, which has strong fraud protection, then I will lose my AutoPay discount for not switching to bank drafts or debit cards, which have weak fraud protection.

I’m extremely leery about giving a company with such awful security practices direct access to my bank account, and I’ve noticed from reading Reddit posts that this is exactly what other customers say about them too.

T-Mobile is obviously sick of paying for people’s credit card rewards, but thieves have made off with so much data about their customers, that do you want your bank account exposed too? Just try fixing that!

To make things worse, you have to not only log in to the T-Mobile account to see the alert. You have to navigate to “Manage AutoPay” to see the warning, so for millions of customers, T-Mobile will just start raising their bill $10 a month and they’ll never notice, but T-Mobile can say “It was posted that Earth was going to be blown up to make room for a hyperspace bypass. It’s not our fault you didn’t see that!”

I’m seriously considering just canceling, paying what’s left on our phones (which has mostly been taken care of by bill credits), and popping some MVNO SIM cards from Walmart in them to get rid of T-Mobile at this point.

Literally the only nice thing about T-Mobile is that their customer service people in the Philippines are friendly enough. My spouse tried speaking to one of them in Tagalog, though, and the guy said they’re only allowed to speak English via corporate policy.

They’re probably being spied on or something. Who knows? Everyone on Earth gets to live in an increasingly shitty boring Corporate Dystopia.

On an unrelated note, today Fox News posted about an automated McDonalds.

It looked super depressing. There was nobody eating in the restaurant, there was no interaction with employees. It’s turned into some sort of rat puzzle where people come in, tap tap tap a screen, slide a card, and literally food comes out of a conveyor belt.

The restaurant was just so sterile and dark and robotic. Man, fuck this.

I told Roy about this and he said cook and stay home. Fair enough. I don’t like where this is going. It’s already hard enough to stay employed out there, for blue collar and white collar alike. They’re shitting on all of us lately.

McDonalds told its corporate employees to stay home this week so they can’t sabotage anything or have “incidents” while the bean counters go over who to fire, by e-mail.

I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell them, as a customer, that this isn’t a good look on them, and I’m not going to participate in “rat in a maze” puzzles for a goddamned cheeseburger.

Anyway, maybe they’ll get on the GPT bandwagon at McDonalds and I won’t even have to order anymore because the “AI” can just decide what I want and being wrong 90% of the time, as usual, is just acceptable if it means firing a person.

T-Mobile joins growing number of sites blocking Firefox in Private Browsing Mode.

T-Mobile joins growing number of sites blocking Firefox in Private Browsing Mode.

When you attempt to log in to the T-Mobile Web site using Firefox in Private Browsing Mode, you’ll now be greeted by this message.

Firefox is no longer supported in private mode

The Firefox browser is no longer supported in private mode on our site. To continue, please take Firefox out of private mode or choose another browser. We recommend Chrome, Safari or Edge.

It turns out that what’s going on is there’s a way to detect Firefox is in Private Browsing Mode and Mozilla is not fixing it. Apparently, a number of news sites, including the New York Times, use this to determine if you’re trying to use the Private Browsing Mode to avoid their paywall, which counts how many articles you’re reading using cookies and local storage, and then demands that you pay to continue reading.

They do it by looking to see if Indexed Database API is available, and if it’s not, blocking your browser.

Fortunately, there’s a Firefox extension called Hide Private Mode that fakes support for this. I tested this (by installing it and giving it permission to work in Private Browsing Mode, of course), and found that T-Mobile is no longer able to detect the Private Browsing session, and allows me to log in.

Mozilla has apparently known about the problem since at least ten years ago, but two years ago, they closed this bug to replace it with another bug that describes the same problem and still isn’t fixed.

Too busy adding “Colorways” that expire on January 16th?

I saw the release notes for Firefox 106, and it’s no wonder people are leaving. There’s been pretty much no work on the browser at all, and in this 6 week release, the only improvements have been an updated PDF reader. There weren’t even any Web Platform changes for developers in those notes.

So much for Mozilla.

Comcast tells couple they’ll need to pay $27,119 to get Home Internet even though the rest of their block is wired for it.

In the United States, high speed Internet service providers are like drug dealers that agree not to operate in each other’s territory.

That way they can set prices as high as they want.

Comcast is getting even fatter off of the FCC’s “Emergency Broadband Benefit” which gives out “free” (taxpayer-subsidized) Internet to people on government benefits or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Line.

They also cut their Customer Support to the bone, making people spend hours dealing with “chat robots” and Interactive Voice Response systems before they can get through to an agent, which is often in another country, and can’t do anything except schedule a lineman.

Every time they do that, no matter how much they insist they won’t bill for it, I have never NOT had them try to add $100 to my next bill, which I again had to spend about two or three hours getting them to take back off.

Comcast has been losing their butts on people canceling pay TV because the only thing on cable is commercials and crap programming so they can move everything else over to Pay Per View. Why would anyone spend money on equipment rentals and “packages” like that unless they’re some sort of “sports fan” with lots of money.

So the result is that Comcast has been steadily jacking up the cost of their broadband service and equipment fees. It’s not even worth renting a modem from them unless you’re on the EBB and don’t pay for it, because in 5-6 months you could have bought your own.

But even I was shocked when I read about this couple in Seattle that Comcast said would have to pay $27,119 for wiring even though their entire block is wired for Comcast anyway.

Ars Technica: Couple bought home in Seattle, then learned Comcast Internet would cost $27,000

Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle) / “WebWaffle”

Comcast makes so much money off of monopolies, shaking down streaming companies, and government contracts and welfare programs, and yet they still get to jerk people around like this and the Democrats set this EBB thing up that turned into “Affordable Community Broadband” without demanding Title II regulation (as a utility) back in exchange for ISPs taking the money.

The couple is limping by on a “4G Hotspot”. I don’t know what that means.

I tried to escape Comcast for a while with T-Mobile 5G Home Internet and that was amazingly shittier. About the only upside was that the landlord couldn’t run over anything with a lawnmower while I was on vacation and knock me offline again.

The downside was that T-Mobile’s Home Internet modems can hardly ever lock on to a decent signal and mostly just overheat and crash and die completely every few months and make you perform effort to send one back to the T-Mobile shit bin like it was a launch XBOX 360.

Maybe this couple can file some sort of complaint with the state Attorney General simply due to how egregious this is, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Bad customer service was one of the reasons why Comcast changed their name to XFinity. Bad companies change their names to get away from scandals and bad press and stuff, but in Comcast’s case they just got worse and worse as “XFinity” and they still brand stuff under both names like they gave up halfway through.

Sounds like this couple had better get used to the 4G unless they want to pay Comcast half of a house in Indiana for 186 feet of coaxial cable.

Mostly the reason why the federal government wants everyone to access the Web somehow, especially on “smart” phones, preferably on “smart” phones, and why they waited so long to do that, is because they had to turn it into a centralized Corporate Sewer full of DRM and spyware first.

Thanks to “modern” Web browsers like Firefox and Chrome, they even get to see what’s on your mind if you change your mind before you finish typing it. “Awesome” bars and “Omni” boxes and “Firefox Suggest”.

It’s literally the thought police unless you opt out for a browser that’s still Free Software, such as LibreWolf, SeaMonkey, or GNOME Web. Or use Tor for more privacy.

Then, they know most people will dive right in to “social media” and tell them openly what’s on their mind. They like that too.

Apps are, of course, much worse. At the bottom of it all, they have Comcast and Cloudflare logging stuff and helping them compile dossiers about citizens.

They waited for things to finally get this bad and then declared the Internet to be “essential” to daily life. That was not a mistake.

Some people will push back a little, most people won’t.

According to Wikipedia, AAA has a bad record of supporting measures that harm motorists and car owners.

According to Wikipedia, AAA has a bad record of supporting measures that harm motorists and car owners.

This includes:

  • Virginia‘s now-repealed traffic citation tax because of its revenue generation potential.
  • The federal 55 mph speed limit.
  • Opposing a 70 mph speed limit on Illinois rural freeways even though the roads can safely accommodate that speed.
  • Supporting red light cameras.
  • Lobbied in favor of speed cameras in Maryland in 2002, several years before they were actually authorized. Provisionally supporting the expansion of speed cameras in Maryland in 2009, and opposing the repeal of speed cameras in Maryland in 2013.
  • Lobbied in favor of authorizing speed cameras in Indiana.
  • Supporting an increase in the federal gas tax, and supporting gas tax increases at the state level such as in Virginia in 2012.
  • Opposing Illinois increasing its rural speed limit from 65 to 70 mph.
  • Proposing the creation of a vehicle miles traveled tax in Idaho

It’s always nice to find out that an organization you pay membership dues to every year is lobbying to foist reduced speed limits that rack up more fines from the state, speed trap and red light cameras that were the center of another Illinois bribery and corruption scandal, which increase car accidents but are kept as a license to rip off the public, a federal 55 mph speed limit that existed in my lifetime that nobody paid attention to and went mostly unenforced in many states because even the cops thought it was so stupid, and billing people a VMT tax on top of the gas tax on top of the registration fees.

AAA is a menace.

I blogged yesterday about how their AAA Car Care Plus shops are an absolute scam that tricks people who use roadside claims into getting a tow down there and then rips them off even after a “20%” member discount.

You may as well just go to the dealer. At least they’re familiar with your vehicle and not a “jack of all trades, master of none” that service “all makes, all models”.

Don’t get me wrong, independent mechanics can be great and they can save you a lot of money, and even some of the chain shops like Car-X can be totally decent, but with AAA Car Care Plus you get the worst of both worlds. Insane dealer prices, and random parts on your car put on by a guy who is not an expert on your car’s brand.

The fact that AAA lobbies against motorist rights and for unconstitutional and corrupt traffic camera schemes and ridiculously low speed limits that nobody pays attention to is like finding out your donations to Planned Parenthood are actually funding Female Genital Mutilation (and as far as I know, THAT isn’t happening, but AAA is the car owner’s version of that).

If Sprint ever stops paying for my AAA, which I only use for roadside, and they may soon now that T-Mobile owns them, I’m going to find some other roadside plan.

Although I hesitate to use my car insurance because claims end up on your CLUE report as an excuse to jack up your insurance rates.

The man from GEICO was trying to sell me their roadside plan on the Buick, and AGAIN when I added the Impala to my policy, and I keep saying “No. I have AAA because if I ever use your roadside, you’ll turn around and put it in CLUE and then rip me off at my next policy renewal, which insurance companies always do anyway and then say ‘Well, things are just getting more expensive out there!’, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give them another excuse for doing it.”.

AAA doesn’t support any of my values, and frankly if I wasn’t getting it for free I wouldn’t be a member. I’ve had faster roadside assistance from buying a set of cheap tires at PEP BOYS.

Ditched T-Mobile Home Internet for Comcast.

T-Mobile Home Internet has been getting worse in my area, to the point it was intolerable. I finally applied for the Affordable Community Broadband program and was approved.

The ACB credit qualified me for free 60 Mbps down / 11 Mbps up on Comcast, and free is good, so I ditched the T-Mobile.

The T-Mobile Home Internet Nokia modem is absolute garbage. It could almost never reliably lock on to a 5G signal, and when it could, it usually didn’t even perform at the minimum speed that they guarantee in an area. They say they won’t sell service in an area unless you can get 25 Mbps, but routinely I was left with half or two thirds of that, and that was in between modem crashes. Sometimes six or seven per day.

I finally realized why it would crash so much. It’s because the thing is so full of bugs and they roll out new firmware constantly and it’s never any better than it was before, but also this modem is a portable space heater and eventually it will just fry itself. Before it konks out totally, it will just become unstable because of heat buildup, so you have to set it on top of a fan just so it won’t crash so much.

Anyway, with the free broadband from Comcast and the ACB program, I finally have a stable Internet connection again for the first time in a while and I’m not fighting with my spouse over the “worse than DSL in 2005” experience that T-Mobile Home Internet brings with it.

When I called to cancel T-Mobile, they got it canceled, but they made me figure out how to print off a shipping label, which means I had to forward it to FedEx near where my spouse works as a print job (because I hate printers), and I’ll pick it up on Monday (my birthday) along with a Buick that I’m closing a deal on. It’s going to be a very good day.

Just out of spite, I added “Super Crappy T-Mobile Home Internet Pod Enclosed. May it toast in the fires of Silicon Hell.” to the bottom of the shipping return label.

It is eye opening what having lousy Internet service for 6 months is like. The only actual reason I could see for buying this product is if you live in the middle of a cornfield and it’s this or satellite Internet.

The one upside is that the customer support people in the Philippines are always so nice to talk to.

I don’t blame them at all for this shitfest that T-Mobile calls an ISP, because they’re obviously not running the company. I just don’t think T-Mobile Home Internet is going to be a thing for much longer if it can’t do better than COMCAST.

While I can’t knock free, I also mistakenly called into the regular Comcast line before realizing that Internet Essentials is operated like another company. I noticed their paying customers don’t get a lot of support anymore.

Comcast has started closing customer service at night (used to be 24 hours a day) and forcing people to deal with a lot of menus and prompts and a chat robot on their website or SMS text messaging system and it takes 30 minutes of poking around telling it none of this applies before it will hand you off to a real person who can actually solve a problem. The rest is just this dumb “Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in or do you want to pay your bill now?” 500 times along the way.

ZDNet says that McDonalds will be like this pretty soon too.

I wonder what ordering a hamburger will be like when the machine can’t understand you and there’s nobody to help and customers start driving away in frustration. McDonalds is big, but they don’t have a monopoly on hamburgers and fries, so what works for Comcast won’t necessarily work for them.

Sam Walton’s management books should be a required reading everywhere.

My favorite quote was “There is only one boss, and that’s the customer, and he can fire everyone in the company from the CEO to the person stocking the shelves by taking his money elsewhere.”.

Unfortunately, we’re to the point where even Walmart is acting like that’s not true when, if they were a little smarter, they could kick Amazon in the nuts and walk away with all of that lost revenue.

The overall trend here is that big companies that already effectively have a money printing press and are more profitable than ever thanks to fake inflation (raising prices because they can and blaming it on the President or something) are also cutting customer service to the bone.

This mentality is a diseased way of thinking about customer service. They consider it a “department” instead of a way of running their business. An expense to be trimmed.

You’ll probably hang up the phone before you talk to a person after being filibustered by chat robots for so long that it puts Strom Thurmond’s action against the Civil Rights Act in a distant second place.

The whole scheme is to send you to a human as a last resort so that everyone who is too busy to deal with an issue goes away. If you’re calling to cancel something, you’re also not a priority even though good customer service means taking care of the customer when they don’t want to be your customer anymore.

In a free market, or at least one with some competition, this could never work. People could tell their friends, “Don’t use that business. It sucks. Can you believe how much it sucks?”, but when you have a monopoly on cable internet or have traditionally been a monopolist and public menace like Microsoft, you can get away with lousy customer service at that point, because you don’t have to please customers if you make it hard to run away.

Linus Torvalds once joked that if you manage to crash the Linux kernel with a program, it gets investigated, but if you tell someone you’ve crashed the Windows kernel, they just stare at you and say “I’ve got programs like that and they came with Windows.”.

It’s very clear why Comcast doesn’t fight Internet Essentials.

They have no reason to. Even at $10 a month they at least break even on you, and the ACB program even pays them for that.

The alternative is to draw serious regulatory attention to themselves and maybe get broken apart by the Sherman Antitrust Act.

To actually get to the “free Internet”, you have to sign up for three different things. Internet Essentials, which kicks you out to the FCC website for Lifeline, then you fill out an application with the National Verifier, and once approved, you get a code. You take it back to Comcast, they approve you for Internet Essentials, you activate your Internet account, and maybe pay your first bill of $9.95, and then you go back, apply for Comcast’s ACB program, and paste in the same National Verifier code, and then hopefully it takes you down to $0 a month for a while.

They don’t want that to be easy. If it was extremely easy, everyone would just click a button and go “$100 a month to Comcast for Internet? Click click, BULLSHIT!”.

In fact, they used to have a cool down period where you couldn’t have been a regular Comcast subscriber in the past 6 months, so that people wouldn’t cancel their paid service even if they qualified for Internet Essentials. Nasty.

I also noticed that Comcast is offering “low cost” PCs.

The Windows 11 model has slightly higher specs than the Chromebook. I’d suggest the Windows 11 model if Windows can be wiped off of a Dell Latitude 3120. They call it an educational laptop and their marketing page says “lesson learned”.

The only lesson with a $150 Windows computer is how poorly Windows runs on a $150 computer. It doesn’t run well on a good computer. How well do you think a “Celery” processor and 4 GB of RAM are going to hold up?

Fedora, on the other hand, could actually work out fine in this case.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about Fedora 36, which I’m using right now. The GNOME 42 and KDE spins have both come a long way towards being less bloated and far less notorious for memory leaks and more performant. KDE is even used on Pinebooks now.

Add in the fact that Fedora is also using ZRAM and Early-OOM, and it should hold up okay on 4 GB RAM. Windows 11 won’t.

One of the truly awful things about Windows 11 isn’t just that it’s a big rusty pig of the operating system world, it’s that the compressed memory setup isn’t even using an algorithm that is optimized for speed, so it slows you down so your OEM can screw you on RAM.

Fedora uses ZSTD compression for ZRAM and the BtrFS file system (which also reduces disk writes).

I think it would work fine on the Dell Latitude 3120, and it could turn a miserable experience the government is propping up Microsoft with into an enjoyable little computer that may even in fact run some old console emulators and Free Software games (including GZDOOM, obviously).

If the government is in the business of supporting low and lower-middle income people with computers, it ought not be spamming those people with malicious proprietary software like Windows 11, and then the other malicious software, such as ransomware, which inevitably ends up setting up camp in Windows 11, but as long as the user can at least fix it (which I don’t know if you can, so you’ll need to research this) by turning off “Secure Boot” and installing a Free and Open Source operating system, then they may want to take advantage of the super cheap hardware.

The Comcast xFI gateway wanted me to use an app to activate it, so I had the lineman take care of that for me before he left. Comcast could easily make it so your modem worked without installing spyware on your Android or iPhone, but they don’t.

Remember when they demanded to run a Windows program and then carpet bombed you with browser toolbars and trialware?

Luckily, I could just call an agent back then and say “Look, I don’t have Windows. Can you activate it on your end?”.

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

How T-Mobile took over Sprint, destroyed 30,000 American jobs, and raised phone bills with the help of Donald Trump.

I wrote this on IRC.

For several months, T-Mobile said you had to switch to a T-Mobile Magenta plan that would have cost us $130 before tax and taken away my AAA membership in order to get the full phone upgrade subsidy from “Sprint Select”.

Then when enough people didn’t bite, they did the same offer, but you could keep your existing two Sprint lines for $80 and keep AAA.

So they were throwing out the stipulation of giving up your Sprint account to rope in anyone who would agree to that. Then they went after the people who held out with a better offer.

The new offer says that everything on your Sprint account stays the same for at least two years. Then if they demand we move over to T-Mobile, I’ll probably put some discount MVNO SIM cards in the phones since they have to unlock them at that point.

Google Fi can lease time on T-Mobile’s network for Google Fi and still charge less for it because of a few reasons, including no “free” phone subsidies.

You have to buy something and put their SIM in it, but at the end of the two years, T-Mobile has to unlock these phones we just got because it’s considered purchased with a subsidy that takes two years to pay the phones off.

That probably gives me about 4 years before I have to worry about plan rate hikes and getting new phones again.

I try to do everything I can to keep a lid on bills going up every time you look around. It’s not easy lately.

T-Mobile is running leaner than ever, but they raise prices anyway.

They absorbed Sprint, teetering on bankruptcy, for barely more than the outstanding cost of Sprint’s debt, ruined a competitor, got all of their customers, and then shut down Sprint’s towers and fired the “redundant” people causing 30,000 job losses in America.

They’ve been doing it piecemeal to avoid any big headlines, so I’d have to link to a bunch of stories if I cited it.

But even just the opening salvo of job cuts took out 6,000.

Now, according to The Layoff, people are being disposed of “for not getting COVID vaccines” and nobody is being hired to replace them, or the work is outsourced to India.

This makes it possible to avoid calling it a layoff and pay unemployment stipends as would normally be required by law, and it probably helps them skirt state WARN Acts as well.

Many people are twitchy due to “hiring freezes” in their departments.

They do layoffs like Microsoft and IBM. A piece at a time and perpetual fear of losing your job to get you to work harder, then you may just lose it anyway.

And according to this site, 17% of T-Mobile’s employees say they took a pay cut in exchange for escaping that particular round of layoffs.

I don’t mean to imply that people in India and the Philippines shouldn’t have jobs. They deserve a GOOD job as much as anyone does (and my spouse is from the Philippines), but what T-Mobile is doing to get out of paying unemployment claims is sleazy and should be criminal.

And when the dust settles, there will be fewer total jobs, because Sprint is gone. And the customers won’t benefit, because T-Mobile gouges for “lines”. Sprint was always a budget carrier and never charged as much as the others.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration looked the other way on antitrust in the Sprint deal even though American consumers are obviously harmed when we go from four phone companies to three, in exchange for Deutche Telekom (T-Mobile) booking at least $195,000 of empty rooms at his hotel.

(Although I’ve read other claims of as much as $250,000.)

Turning Sprint around under Chapter 11 would have been better for American consumers, but Trump is an oligarch who was profiting off his office, like Vladimir Putin. It’s also coming to light that Trump helped Russians launder money and hide real estate assets in shell companies. Ruh roh.