Under His Eye - Christian Phone network planned in US
The steady march towards living 'The Handmaids Tale'.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/01/1136739/a-new-t-mobile-network-for-christians-aims-to-block-porn-and-gender-related-content/Open linkView original on lemmy.ml
45 replies
If anyone cares to know, this is the actual meaning of taking the lord’s name in vain. It is taking the sacred and turning it into a gimmick
In this case, not simply a gimmick. It's a funds raiser. For which I take two skewed views. First, pure and simple, it funds hatred in exactly the same way that we are trained to fear Islamic extremists. Secondly, somebody gonna get rich, real quick.
Grifting and religion, name a more iconic pair.
Oh good bring #phreaking back.
Gotta fund the jets somehow.
Depending how they structure this, it’s an untaxed sales commission.
I remember finding out that Humble Games Bundle let me max out the charity option towards my church lmao
Wait until they figure out that Christians consume more porn than anyone else. They just tell other people not to consume porn.
That's the whole point of this... To try and reduce the latter
Yet another grift. Christians are so gullible.
If I didn't have ethics, I'd be doing it too.
I too wish I had the total lack of personal ethics necessary to grift gullible idiots.
Sadly, a feature of pretty much every religion. Shitty people can skew anything with the same grift.
No doubt. I'm just much more familiar with Christianity due to where I was born.
COO: Only those with a pure and unblemished past shall pass the bar to...well, that doesn't apply to our founder, of course...
I don't think that was what he was saying, I think the point he is making even the people who are generally seen as more "pious" struggle with pornography, to emphasise how big of an issue it is
this won't work. it's basically technologically impossible for a cell network provider to specifically block content based on keywords such as "trans" and "gender". that would require decrypting TLS communication and i don't think NSA is gonna give them the keys to that.
anyways, this proposal is a significant thing, not because of the real (physical) consequences it will have, but because of the psychological consequences. this signifies a push of people to regulate the internet more. which, i think is probably a bit similar to how russia and china each have their own internet which is almost detached from the rest of the world.
is this what the US is turning into?
The bleeding Ohio flag is sending me
Why would the NSA not do that? How do we know the NSA isn’t behind this provider?
gut feeling
but what if their phones are shaped like crosses and don't have much function outside of being crosss shaped
dat shit gonna sell well
we had a tool for that, it was called necklace
They'll just use a URL block list. It's an MVNO, they can do anything they want to block their network traffic.
Will it be commercially viable? Maybe. Probably not, but don't sleep on the power of deluded groupthink.
Decrypting TLS is easy, if the client trusts your reencryption certificate. Lots of companies do this every day.
Maybe also block all hate speech and inflammatory language. It's a loving God after all. If that blocks most information from the right that's too bad.
They can't do that, hate is their biggest motivator.
That, and being hypocritical.
Hate in the name of the Lord is most righteous!
must praise trump as Jesus/god incarnate.
Tell me again that the USA is a free country and not a theocratic dictatorship
https://www.theverge.com/tech/894762/trump-mobile-conservative-mvno-radiant-patriot-puretalk-charity-liberty
Patriot mobile
Radiant
Charity Mobile
Fuck I wish my people weren't so hated
Same.
Wait...You're a hermaphroditic herbivore lizard-sapien, too, right?
Who? Christians?
If so, there is sort of a reason...
Trans people
100% the outlier opinion here.
I think they found a market for the average person who is concerned about content online. I spent a lot of time trying to setup content filters to go cold turkey on a port addiction. I setup a pi.hole with some porn list and subscribe to a private DNS service for my phone. All of this is as an alternative to Covenant Eyes that took up to much resources and is very creepy to use.
For the average person, who doesn't know what DNS is, a network level filter on the internet is exactly what they want for their family. I think it's a good guardrail for a teenager. But it doesn't remove a parent's responsibility. I'm also ignoring the non-porn content filtering that is absolutely going to get caught be their filters, intentionally or not.
I agree and I think many people will tell themselves the same thing. Follows the line of think of the children. Meanwhile, you can keep your own provider and use something like NextDNS, RethinkDNS or similar. However, these only "protect" people connecting to that network. People, as we know, use mobile carriers for the majority of their browsing and reading.
I'm sorry, what?
You want to block porn from teenagers? And to do that you're ok with blocking lgbt, trans, and gender based websites/info.
I'm pointing out that this service would fulfill a need for people who want to block porn but don't know the technical solutions to do. The average person isn't willing to look into it.
The problem you have with the caricature of my comment is that this service would block all the LGBT sites as well. Another service that just provides porn content filtering at the network layer would be my suggestion.
It's quite common to have parental controls for this type of thing in the UK. It's not like you're forced to use it. If you don't like it, don't buy it?
I don't know how you're going to block transgender content anyway, surely it exists on Discord, Xitter and Reddit. It's not possible to intercept HTTPS encryption
You can block traffic from clients that don’t have an HTTPS cert installed which lets you look at their traffic and make installing that cert part of the ohone’s carrier activation process. This is still silly though
Surely that'll break many things that force https, and you'll be getting tonnes of browser warnings
Usually these kinds of services basically MITM HTTPS and re sign outgoing traffic with their own HTTPS cert.
Or you can simply block traffic to certain "ungodlike" web sites.
Yeah but everyone uses the same 5 websites anyway which have godly and ungodly content alike
Oh completely agree with you. This is self-select Handmaid's Tale.