T-Mobile Offers Free Starlink Satellite Texting Beta Until July #1798

T Mobile is rolling out a Starlink satellite texting feature in beta free until July. Compatible iPhone and Android users even on rival networks can apply. After July, premium T Mobile plans will include it while others can subscribe for 10 to $20 for a month. Limited spots are available. Welcome to episode 1,798 coming to you this Monday, February 10. I'm your host, Todd Cochran, ready to deliver your tech news and information fix. A quick shout out to our incredible sponsor, GoDaddy.

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back this independent team of creators. Share my deals with your friends and family because every time you use a code, it's just like writing a check. Thank you for keeping Geek News Central online and keeping us rocking and rolling here. Definitely appreciate it. Again, get over to geeknewcentral.com/godaddy. So how's everyone doing? Hope you're doing well. Back in the saddle here in this money on the on the count to 1,800. So a week from today, we'll we'll cross the threshold.

We'll we'll hit to 1,800. So I haven't got anything special planned yet, but we'll figure out what we're gonna do, do something special for 1,800. But I spent Saturday, grinding away at, the tax man taxes. But I tell you, I I don't know about you, but I don't know if I wanna give uncle Sam anymore my money. If I could get away with not paying taxes and not go to jail, you know, all these grifters

and everything that we're seeing coming out of DC and all these, people that are getting money, it it's just amazing. And then watching the establishment lose its everlasting mind on, trying to cut expenditures. I'm just I'm just blown away. You know? I I've never seen a bigger bunch of crybabies in my whole life. And,

of course, they're going to court. They don't they don't wanna cut they don't wanna cut because the grift the grift the grift of free money of, filling their, you know, special use cases with cash. You know, as I said in the last show, we we've been missing out, ladies and gentlemen. We should have figured out how to, had someone done a grant for this show, and we could've got a couple million dollars. And, you know, that had been that had been wonderful. Instead, I do it the hard way here.

You know? I no one's paying for subscription to this show from the government. I can tell you that much. But it's one thing, you know, if if we think about it, I work hard to bring this show to you. We got a great sponsor. They've been here supporting the show. You've continued to support the show. We've done it the right way. The content that is written on geeknewscentral.com is unbiased. Even sometimes my writers will write something that I'm kind of like, but I let it go. I don't I

don't moderate my writers. I don't provide stick and rudder. I let them write as they feel. So, you know, we I feel we have well balanced tech news on the website. And, it does irritate me when I see obviously blatant articles that is just so so biased, and the tech there's no need for this in tech. Why do we need biased tech news? I if you're a political site, that's, you know, that's your gig. But tech, you know, come on. Let's just stick to the story.

And, obviously, every once in a while, there's a government interaction with the FCC, FAA, or someone like that. So the there will be some drift there. But,

you know, all in all, you guys got quite a bit of a kick out of the last show. I did get a bunch of comments. People say, hey. Please don't. And a whole bunch of you are are still a little, antsy on wanting me to, to say your names, talk about what we're talking about. So, I think we just need to be fully fully, willing to express our opinions one way or another here. I I I don't think anybody should be should be worried about that, especially on a tech show. Come on. But, anyway, taxes.

Yeah. Yummy. Super Bowl. Yeah. That was that was something. It got boring really quick. I really had no dog in the fight, to be honest with you. Although, I kinda did privately, root for the Eagles, although I really didn't kind of even express that, at all. So I don't know about you. Did you, did your team win or lose? You have a dog in a fight? But definitely Kansas City got got took to court for sure. Hey. Let's talk about our lead story here

today. T Mobile is offering a Starlink satellite texting features free until July. Again, anyone anyone in The United States with a compatible iPhone or Android device can sign up. There are limited number of folks. The service will be available free until July. And, but only in after July, listen to this. Customers of T Mobile's high end offerings like the hundred and $80 Go five Next plan and receive the feature at no cost. I don't know what my yeah. I kinda do know what my

T Mobile phone is. It's a little more than it should be, but I'm not on the Go five Go five g plan. Reason I like it is when I'm overseas, my phone works. Data works. Texting works. Although I try to not use a lot of the T Mobile data because I've been going so much because they will start to throttle you after a bit. But usually for the first four or five days, there's no issue, or ten days. Never had them really throttle me, but I just try to be careful about it.

But, anyway, this is a heck of a thing for for T Mobile to basically, give this offering to anyone. I think it's a pretty big deal for those of you that, would like to try it, especially if you live in an area where the cell signal is is not great. You know, Doge Dogebake backed halt at CFPD. Again, there's a lot of articles. None of them coming from anyone that is talking positively about any of the things they're doing.

So I'm I'm having a hard time, especially when it has a, political twist here in covering this. The twist is that, in what Bloomberg is saying, is because Doge backhaul at CFPB, it comes amidst plans for x digital wallet. They're saying, hey. You're, you know, you you you can't, you you you're launching a digital wallet, but then you're interfering with CFPB. You know, it's it's hard for me to make these connections. This is about washing out.

When people are when people are paying on line items that expired sixty and seventy years ago and still sending checks to people and multiple Social Security numbers, you know, there's something wrong. But, they're all they're all complaining about how these Doge folks have access to all these databases. I think transparency is good. Let's let's see where all the dirt lies, and then we can kinda make a decision as taxpayers, at least here in The United

States where we're gonna go. Hey. Tech unemployment jumps even as job openings increase. The unemployment rate for tech workers rose 2% to 2.9 according to IT Industry Association CompTIA. Even though tech firms boosted employment by 6,700 positions in January, Overall hiring has slowed. Now what sectors are getting cut? PC semiconductor component manufacturing, minus 4,300. Telecommunications, minus 7,900. Cloud infrastructure, plus 1,900.

IT and customer software service service plus 13,000, tech posting activity, again, all up, but PC semiconductor component. Well, is this because Intel has gotten hammered or, you know, where are these, where are these losses at? So largely, in the telecommunication and PC semiconductor industries where the majority of the, the negative growth is happening. So, you know, January versus December. So, link will be up in the show notes for you to take a look at. Alright?

If you're watching the stream live today, please check-in. An Indiana man has been sentenced to twenty years in prison for hacking a $37,000,000 crypto account. So according to court documents, Evan Frederick Light used stolen used and stolen identity of a client of an investment holding company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to access the servers and exfiltrate personally identifiable information of hundreds of clients.

Next, he used stolen information, still cryptocurrency from the 571 clients who held their assets with the investment holding company. To conceal the origin of funds in Heidez and Denny, he then transferred the stolen cryptocurrency to various locations worldwide, including mixing services and gambling websites. The intrusion occurred in '22, and Light was arrested approximately one year later. He was indicted in 2023 and plead guilty in September 2024.

In his guilty plea, he admitted to working with coconspirators to orchestrate the intrusion.

Court testimony show that Light and his coconspirator used a false report of a kidnapping to have the investment holding companies employees evacuated so they could perpetrate the intrusion. Wow. He's also believed to stolen millions of dollars from cryptocurrency in a previous intrusion, bringing the total amount to roughly $80,000,000 in today's value.

So in addition to the twenty year prison sentence, he was ordered to pay $200 and oh, $200 special assessment, and he also ordered to pay restitution of at least 37,000,000. So from his mother's basement even in in Indiana, he stole those millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, destroying the retirement savings and hardworking, honest Americans. So, this is one of the biggest this is one of the biggest sentences that have been handed, down, to date for sure.

TikTok is offering a workaround for Android users to download the app. The sideloading is not something that's often encouraged, but TikTok may still be unavailable for download in US app stores, but the company is providing a workaround for Android users. The company announced in a tweet that it has developed Android download kits for TikTok and TikTok Lite. TikTok Lite is a string version of the popular features, fewer tools to optimize performance. So, sideloading.

The you can get it via sideloading at TikTok.com forward slash download. Excuse me.

CISA election disinformation officials placed on administrative leave. Sources say the move happened last Thursday and Friday of last week. Some more house cleaning is going on. The moves in the move includes four employees currently working on or assigned to the team two more that left the team the past four years to hold positions, department homeland security, and another two that work on elections, misinformation, or disinformation.

Extend the teams impacted by decrease, unclear. Third source told Cyber Scoop that a CISA employee set to attend an event in Florida on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence had to cancel last minute because he was told to go home and put on leave. So,

again, we're gonna hear a lot of this. And if you're a government employee that had been affected by this, any of these moves, let me know. Obviously, Elon is free since Judd shuts down Doge access to treasury payment system even though they only had read only access. So, this is all going to end up, at the Supreme Court at some point, and, we'll see where it leads. Although it is being negotiated, some sort of access deal,

time will tell. Samsung's latest tech innovation is a giant five k e paper display. So when I see e paper display, I don't understand what a five k e paper display is. I'm looking at this screen, and it looks like a high resolution TV. It's a 75 inch display, now the world's largest color e color e paper screen. It's fifty one twenty by twenty eight eighty and a 16.9 aspect ratio. The higher resolution allows for improved visibility in outdoor spaces. So I don't know a lot about e

paper display. The hardware wise, the e paper displays features eight gigs of storage, a built in rechargeable battery, 5,000 milliamps. So it must be just, is e paper just display art? Is that all they show is products and that kind of stuff as it's shown in this image? I'm assuming so. So, not designed to be a regular TV, I guess.

A new Facebook phishing campaign looks to trick you with emails sent from Salesforce. No. Your Facebook account is not under review. I may have gotten one of those now that I think about it, over the past couple of days. Cybercriminals have observed views abusing legitimate Salesforce services to attack peoples and businesses with Facebook phishing emails.

Researcher Checkmate warned about ongoing campaign and its blog describing acronyms using an automated mailing service that belongs to Salesforce as a marketing tool. In other words, they don't breach any term any terms of service or the Salesforce security system, Whether they use the service normally and choose not to change the sender ID. That way, the email is branded with the email address [email protected]. This is nothing new. It is usually your Facebook account is under view threat.

So just be care. The landing page comes with a poor attempt and a Facebook logo. And, so just be aware of this stuff out there that, only use the official Facebook website that you go to manually and or your phone app. The OnePlus Watch three arrives on February 18. Pricing hasn't been confirmed, but you can save $30 by signing up for updates. So again, this is OnePlus, the OnePlus watch, and I don't know a lot about this watch.

It claims that the watch three can run for up to sixteen days in a power save mode and five days in smart mode, which will be twenty longers twenty hours longer than a watch two. My Apple Watch, barely makes it twenty four hours now. It's getting pretty old. I can get about get about 20 out of it. It it dies. But, you know, this is a little different watch than a than a than an Apple Watch for sure. Webcams. Webcams are all over the place. You'll have one on your computer. I have one

on my computer. They're incredibly useful, but you need to be careful. They should be secured properly, and they can be a gateway to privacy beaches breaches. So they have six webcam privacy tips. One of them is very simple. Get a cover for it to cover it up. And, again, cover for privacy. A lot of, computers now include that with the computer. Disconnect or disable your webcam when idle. And this is largely for Windows users. Lock suspicious apps and websites from accessing your webcam.

Don't allow this. Just don't automatically arbitrarily approve it. And, most of the settings can be you can see what has access to the camera, which apps do. So when, anyway, link is up in the show notes. You can review that on your own. RCS on Android soon to gain a much awaited message feature. A new APK reveals delete for everyone is in the works. So, you know, RCS message have been the convenience of every Android phone ever since Google messaging app started pushing it.

The search engine has been constantly adding new features. I do like the delete for everyone. That, you know, was something that if you send a message, that's WhatsApp allows you to do that, to delete a message for everyone. And, you know, they may have seen it, but you still can delete it, or you send something to the wrong person, etcetera.

So we'll wait for that to pop pop out. Not surprisingly, a top US health provider tells eight hundred and eighty two thousand patients they were hit in August 22 August '20 '2 excuse me, August 2023 breach. Hospital Sisters Health System is sending this out. It's a nonprofit Catholic health care system. Had a cyberattack one and a half years ago. So the firm has just now filed a report with the main office of the attorney general in which it detailed the attack.

Wow. So it took a little bit of time for them to report that. I wonder why. Lyft is eyeing a robotaxi a robot taxi launch in 2026. Lyft is working with Mobileye and Japanese conglomerate to manage the fleet. So Lyft says it will launch this fleet of robotaxis in Dallas with plans to scale a thousand vehicles in additional markets in the months to follow.

So, again, a Japanese conglomerate is gonna run the fleet in America. Lyft's news comes after Uber dropped news detail about its plan to feature the Waymo Robotaxis on its platform on its platform in Austin, Atlanta later this year. So what do you feel about getting in a a Uber or Lyft that has no driver. What do you feel about that? Are you ready to risk it all? That's the question. Poly Market bettors punted 1,100,000,000.0 on Super Bowl. That's crazy. $1,100,000,000

in bets. You guys are some gambling fools out there. You know, I get asked to play, like,

the square thing where you pick a square and put $10 in. I don't even do that. I mean, first of all, I don't even know how those things work. It's well, someone that was over yesterday said, well, I got six and zero, and I'm like, I don't know what that even means. So, Polymarket. I mean, these folks haven't even been regulated yet. PolyMark has become the go to avenue of placing on chain bets, which has brought in

scrutiny from regulators. Some countries have outright banned PolyMarket, while the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission wants to gain access access to the platform and customers' data. Uh-huh. So, anyway, link will be up in the show notes, and you all can check it out. A huge cyber attack is underway. 2,800,000 IPs are being used to target VPN devices. So this is not good. So wide range of virtual private network and other networking devices are currently under attack by threat actors.

Threat monitoring platform, the Shadow Server Foundation warned about an ongoing attack on x noting someone's currently using 2,800,000 different IP ingest and trying to grasp the password for VPNs and several devices built by Pult Alto Networks, Ivante, and SonicWall. Besides VPNs, the threat actors are going for

gateway security appliances and other edge devices connected to the public network. To conduct the attack, the threat actors are using, Huawei, Cisco, BOA, and ZTE routers and other interconnected devices likely compromised with malware. So a majority of these are located in Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Argentina, Morocco, and Mexico. So, again, brute force going after devices, guessing username, passwords. Rivian has an exclusive deal with Amazon excuse

me. Rivian's exclusive deal with Amazon is over, and the company is now open to new partners, but only commercial businesses. So they are willing to sell you an electric van if you are a commercial business. I don't understand that. So what do these things cost?

They're gonna buy a hundred thousand of it at a billion dollars, and Amazon only acquired 20,000 of them. So the vans come in two sizes, RCV 500 at $80,000 and RV RCV 700 starting at $84,000. So, I think the US Postal Service needs some vans. Maybe they can sell some to them considering that, the company that they contracted with hasn't been able to deliver anything. So Trump's pick for acting NASA administrator is Janet Petro. And, Janet Petro is the agency's first woman to lead it

and already making changes to the agency. So I have not read here what she is changing. The appointment come as a surprise. Petra was born in Michigan nineteen sixty. So what is she what is she changing? She graduated from West Point, so she's prior army with a bachelor of science in engineering before entering flying helicopter assignment. Germany, after five years of service, she moved into engineering management positions in private sector.

So one of her first acts at NASA's administer was to email staff to inform them that the agents stay of course, taving stuff to close the all DEI. That's already going on everywhere in federal. Though urge through urging the state of policy in recent, she has early publicly know the struggle women's face. Petro since

appointed a Michael Alton Hoffman, a long time technical executive SpaceX, as a senior adviser to the acting NASA administrator. And people are concerned Elon Musk will have growing influence at the agency. Well, people move around all the time. People don't worry about someone that was were you know, what have they been worried if someone from Boeing went to work there? Probably not. Just because it's a ex Trump employee, everyone gets excited.

No one talks about all these other officials that move around. So she's we'll continue as NASA's acting administrator and responsible for directing agents including budget programs until Isaacman. Oh, so Isaacman is coming in to be, succeed by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire, philanthropist, and private astronaut who's flown on SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. So, again, we're gonna have more you know, again, people are gonna complain. God, there either people are loving Elon

or hating Elon. So you got everyone that's probably on the left that has a Tesla that wants to sell their Tesla. Now everyone on the right who didn't like electric vehicles is probably buying Teslas. It's just a bizarre world. Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkeys unplugged zenation. Well, a monkey came into contact with our grid transformer causing an imbalance in the power system.

The monkey left the population of 22,000,000 sweltering temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit while engineers attempted to restore power. Now I bet you, that monkey had his life lit up in a big way. They said there was enough, enough of a short out to kill the power for 22,000 people. So, anyway, Sri Lanka is partly lights out right now. This is news. US newspaper publisher, Lee Enterprise, is one week in then tackling a nondescript cybersecurity event.

The publisher confirmed the incident statement issued late evening in February 7. He said they notified law enforcement, but publications across 25 states either producing smaller issues or very delayed ones. So they're they're a conglomerate to print newspapers.

They're a publicly traded company, publishes more than 70 daily newspapers and nearly 350 weekly and special interest publications. NamUs daily and newspaper repaired, reported various degrees of disruption. Some like Virginia Daily Progress were unable to produce print or e edition journalists. It couldn't print in the e edition? Why does the print company have control of the e edition? So Buffalo News, Saint Louis Dispatch, Upstate New York Post, The La Crosse Tribune, The Daily Progress. So,

yeah. Cyberattack took their printing platform offline for sure.

Elon Musk led a group bid of 97,400,000,000.0 to control OpenAI. That that story is on the front page of of Geek and Essential right now. And, basically, there was a little tit and tat back and forth between Altman and Musk, said no. Thank you. And then, Elon insulted him in return. And, you know, Altman basically didn't insult him, but Elon did. So the so the war the war between those twos continue. And, so, anyway, kind of a short show, short news day.

It's just the tech news has been has been sucked up by everything going on in Washington DC. Not a lot other stuff being reported or it's very, very, very quiet right now, which is very interesting to say the least. So what say you? What say you on all the grifting going on? You say audit, audit, audit. My opinion is there should be an accounting. We should be able to, as US citizens, even if that list is a hundred thousand or million lines long, we should be able to see every

line of where our money goes. We should be able to see we should be at the it this should be in a database. And anything except for, like, super highly classified projects, we should be able to see contract, amount, money sent. You know, there should be we this should

all be available to all of us. We should be able to go in and look at every and and I'm not gonna go look, but everyone should be able to see every financial transaction the US government makes that doesn't go into something that is, like, super classified, then it is have a section that shows that stuff, but don't list what the project is. All this stuff should be public. All this data should be public. We should know where our money is going.

I think it's become very, very clear at this point that that's what needs to happen.

Why not? Why not? You know? Because then groups could take sections of it and go through it and review, and it'd be very easy to figure out where the shenanigans are going on. Who's connected to who? You know? I saw one chart that showed just using EINs. It showed money went from this EIN to this EIN to this EIN to this EIN to this EIN. Then another set of money went from this EIN to this EIN to this EIN to

this EIN to the same final EIN. It was this all this big shell game tracked by tax numbers to show where the money ended up. And the amounts, the transferred between, it's a big shell game. I we could balance a budget. No problem. No problem we could balance a budget. I'm not saying that we shut down payments for everything. Or the world's gotta, you know, there's a lot of stuff out there that needs money, but we shouldn't be able to see where it goes. That's all I'm saying. Just let us see

where it all goes. Full disclosure. Don't give it to us in 60,000,000, 50 8 million, 2 point 3 million form. Show us all of it. Do you think the government would allow that to happen? I I doubt it. And if we see how much money we're paying on just like we get our credit card bill. You get your credit card bill, you say, oh my god. I paid x number of dollars in interest. Oh, I better pay more on that. We'd all see what the financials look like. And believe me, it's not good. It's not good.

So anyone that's trying to stop any of this, you pay the extra taxes later to make up the difference. If you're against all this examination, then you pony up double the amount of taxes you're paying. I I think we need full disclosure. So, anyway, I'll get off my rant here. I'm sorry.

But, everyone have a great week. We'll see you on Thursday. [email protected]. Geek news at g mail dot com at don't forget of our sponsor, GoDaddy, because, yes, I need money too. So share my codes with your friends and family members. I should have wrote a grant. And, at geek news on x, if you're still on there. I'm not I'm still on Mastodon. I'm not going anywhere else at [email protected]. So, you all see you on Thursday.

And, hopefully, you have more tech news. I think this intertwined political shit's gonna be in here more as we go forward. Alright, all. We'll see you next time. Take care. Bye bye.