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  27. <title>Will my mother leave Verizon? &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/08-August/21.xhtml&gt;</title>
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  65. <header>
  66. <h1>Will my mother leave Verizon?</h1>
  67. <p>Day 00533: Sunday, 2016 August 21</p>
  68. </header>
  69. <p>
  70. I contacted my carrier to see if they had any ideas on how to resolve the Google account situation.
  71. They aren&apos;t affiliated with Google or anything,but they do sell a lot of Androids and they assume that Androids aren&apos;t usable without a Google account.
  72. With that in mind, they have many Goggle-using customers and had perhaps encountered this type of situation before.
  73. They said to telephone <a href="tel:+18558363987">Google</a> about the problem.
  74. I really hate telephone calls though, and besides, I don&apos;t have access to my mobile right now.
  75. My mother has it to use to connect their desktop computer to the Internet.
  76. </p>
  77. <p>
  78. I spent the day yard saling with my mother.
  79. While we were out, my mother asked if there was a reason that the Internet connection through my mobile is proxied.
  80. So my mother does understand that a proxy is involved after all! I explained two valid reasons why the proxy is needed.
  81. First of all, my carrier doesn&apos;t allow me to tether.
  82. While this isn&apos;t technically tethering, the carrier wouldn&apos;t see it that way, so they&apos;d shut me down if they knew what I was doing.
  83. The <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> proxy keeps all the traffic hidden beneath three layers of encryption, so the carrier can&apos;t tell the difference.
  84. Second, we&apos;re not doing this with a decent device any more.
  85. Simply put, this stupid carrier device refuses to use real tethering.
  86. Instead, we have to use port forwarding from the desktop to the mobile.
  87. That means that something on the mobile <strong>*must*</strong> accept traffic and redirect it to the Web.
  88. What does that? A proxy! The Orbot client has a built-in <abbr title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol">HTTP</abbr> proxy, which helps with the fact that my mother&apos;s blasted Windows machine only seems to accept <abbr title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol">HTTP</abbr> proxies, but even if it was <abbr title="Socket Secure">SOCKS</abbr>-compatible, <abbr title="Socket Secure">SOCKS</abbr> is still a type of proxy.
  89. I didn&apos;t explain the third reason for the proxy though, as my mother wouldn&apos;t understand.
  90. We need privacy.
  91. My mother has no right to expose my mobile&apos;s <abbr title="Internet Protocol">IP</abbr> address just because they don&apos;t want to use a proxy.
  92. Furthermore, my mother has no right to expose that they&apos;re on my mobile to my carrier, regardless of if my carrier allowed tethering or not.
  93. To expose their presence on my mobile is to expose something about myself; I must be associated with the person generating that traffic.
  94. Furthermore, my mother&apos;s uploading resumes, giving their full legal name and address.
  95. There is no need for the carrier to have that information; all it serves to do is reduce my own privacy.
  96. </p>
  97. <p>
  98. It sounds like my mother and I will be running errands tomorrow.
  99. I might not have time to walk the GT-i9100G to the post office.
  100. If this happens, I will need to wait until Tuesday.
  101. I&apos;ve got to be present for these errands, as one of them involves talking to and trying to haggle with Verizon.
  102. There&apos;s no way that the haggling will actually work.
  103. Either Verizon will not budge or they&apos;ll make a tiny gesture that mother interprets as giving in but really isn&apos;t.
  104. I need to be present to attempt to tip the scales in favor of leaving Verizon.
  105. Besides Verizon being the most evil of the main four United States carriers and the fact that they&apos;re on a stupid <abbr title="code division multiple access">CDMA</abbr> network, Verizon has been ripping my mother off for years.
  106. I pay a smaller monthly bill and get unlimited data with, and I&apos;ve been doing this and having this since I first signed up for mobile service.
  107. Why? Because I actually shopped around.
  108. (For the record, there was a period in which I cut my bill in half, but in doing so, had limited data and had to watch what I used, but when I&apos;m paying full price, my bill is still only $30 or $35 <abbr title="United States Dollars">USD</abbr>.) Mother&apos;s highly-expensive, data-limited, overage-charging plan needs to be replaced.
  109. </p>
  110. <p>
  111. My program advisor wrote back about the school&apos;s social network.
  112. It appears that I&apos;ll receive an invitation once my first term has started.
  113. The orientation really ought to mention that if it is going to mention the social network at all.
  114. Otherwise, the information is incomplete and leaves people wondering.
  115. </p>
  116. <p>
  117. I asked to borrow Vanessa&apos;s telephone later for Google account verification, explaining exactly why I wanted it and what the drawbacks of allowing me to do so were.
  118. They agreed to let me use it, though there wasn&apos;t time to actually do that tonight.
  119. </p>
  120. <p>
  121. Vanessa, our mother, and I went out on our nightly walk; Vanessa and our mother were engaged in a conversation.
  122. Vanessa said something that our mother disagreed with, and our mother just happened to tell Vanessa to stop talking right then because an idea was on the tip of their brain.
  123. Vanessa misheard part of the sentence, believing our mother to have said <q>then stop taking</q> in response to what Vanessa had said.
  124. Vanessa of course started to backtrack, taking back their opinion to appease our mother, so our mother freaked out at Vanessa.
  125. Our mother had wanted Vanessa to be quiet for a bit because there was a though on the tip of our mother&apos;s brain, and it had now been lost.
  126. Our mother claims that they would never tell us to stop talking just because they disagree with us, but they have done just that countless times in the past.
  127. They tend to do it only when angry, but Vanessa was perfectly justified in believing that this is what had been said.
  128. Our mother also swore at Vanessa for not following the actual instruction, despite the fact that they hadn&apos;t heard what was really said! And of course, our mother had to be their usual condescending self, telling Vanessa to pull their head out of their butt, despite this being just a simple case of mishearing what had been said.
  129. </p>
  130. <p>
  131. It appeared that the Debian team is trying to integrate their websites with <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> better.
  132. They have <a href="http://4ypuji3wwrg5zoxm.onion/2016/08/debian-and-tor-services-available-as-onion-services.html">added onion addresses for several of their websites</a>.
  133. A list of <a href="http://5nca3wxl33tzlzj5.onion/">Debian hidden services</a> has also been made available, both on one of the hidden services and over the clearnet.
  134. The one catch to these hidden services though is that they use <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr>&apos;s onion encryption <strong>*in place of*</strong> <abbr title="Transport Layer Security">TLS</abbr>.
  135. It&apos;s my understanding that onion encryption is no replacement for <abbr title="Transport Layer Security">TLS</abbr> and is actually a <strong>*weaker*</strong> form of encryption due to the fact that it was first implemented at a time when encryption technology wasn&apos;t as good, then never got updated.
  136. Speaking of Debian, it seems that Debian has Long Term Support versions! An article on <a href="http://4ypuji3wwrg5zoxm.onion/2016/06/wheezy-now-supporting-armel-and-armhf.html">new architecture support in Debian 7 <abbr title="long-term support">LTS</abbr></a> mentions that all Debian versions have a shelf life of at least five years because of the long-term support project.
  137. I thought that the main Debian release cycle was slow enough, but if you need a system to be super stable, the <abbr title="long-term support">LTS</abbr> versions are for you.
  138. </p>
  139. <p>
  140. I am seriously running out of clean laundry here.
  141. It sucks not having a washing machine.
  142. We have a working dryer, but because the washing machine is leaking all over the place, we didn&apos;t even hook up the dryer.
  143. Tonight, I tried hand-washing three shirts and three pairs of socks in the bath tub.
  144. I&apos;ve hung them up to dry, so I&apos;ll see how well those came out tomorrow.
  145. </p>
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