The steady march towards living ‘The Handmaids Tale’.
there’s a rich history of smaller networks trying to make their money from patriots, Christians, and Republican voters.
Patriot mobile
Texas-based Patriot Mobile bills itself as “America’s ONLY Christian conservative wireless provider,” which I’m afraid to say is blatantly untrue.
Patriot Mobile sells Charlie Kirk hoodies and phone cases with the thin blue line or Israeli flag graphics, and runs an affiliate marketing scheme specifically for churches.
The company says it “contributes millions of dollars every year to those on the front lines,” by which it means organizations including Turning Point USA, CPAC, and the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, while funding conservative candidates in elections across Texas.
Radiant
Radiant hasn’t actually launched yet, but it promises a grand debut on Easter Sunday. It claims to be the “first Christian wireless service in the world,” our second outright lie of the day.
Nothing about Radiant’s marketing is explicitly political — instead it calls itself “a groundbreaking fusion of faith, technology, and entertainment.” It’s partnered with Israeli security company Allot to provide “network-level content filtering” that blocks out pornography, gambling, and “harmful digital influences.”
As for the entertainment part, it offers AI-generated retellings of biblical stories, some for adults, some for kids, some inexplicably narrated by AI Snow White. These appear to be part of a gamified app that promises — as if it’s a good thing — “more screen time.” AI Snow White Bible bedtime stories, what could be more Christian?
Charity Mobile
Charity… that sounds good, right? Unless… there was such a thing as a bad charity? That can’t be right. And Charity Mobile lets you decide which charity it donates to, so you’re in control anyway. Oh wait, let me look again. It donates 5 percent of your payment to “the Pro-Life, Pro-Family charity of your choice.” Ah.
In fairness, this isn’t exactly hidden in the small print. Charity Mobile proudly declares itself to be “the Pro-Life phone company,” and it wants to make sure you know it: Land on the homepage and you’ll be met by a screen-filling fetus and told to “choose life.” You can probably guess what the company’s Instagram looks like.
Yet another grift. Christians are so gullible.
If I didn’t have ethics, I’d be doing it too.
Sadly, a feature of pretty much every religion. Shitty people can skew anything with the same grift.
I too wish I had the total lack of personal ethics necessary to grift gullible idiots.
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.
Tell me again that the USA is a free country and not a theocratic dictatorship
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
Fisher says he’s […] also done outreach to thousands of churches around the country, offering a way to have Radiant donate a portion of congregants’ $30-per-month subscription fee to their church.
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
Chris Klimis, a minister in Orlando who was recruited to be the company’s chief operating officer, says part of the reason he got involved was to offer Christians a real way to “do something” about what he sees as a pornography crisis in the faith. He was appalled by a recent survey showing that 67% of pastors have a “personal history” with porn use.
Radiant Mobile’s founder, Paul Fisher
Managing website block lists is a professional pivot for Fisher, who spent his career not in telecoms but in fashion; he was an agent for supermodels like Naomi Campbell and members of the Hilton and Getty families, and he later hosted a reality show in which he found people in rehab facilities and homeless shelters and tried to turn them into models. He ultimately left the industry and now says he regrets the role he played in it: “Am I proud that I spent 35 years creating star models or star influencers? Not at all.”
COO: Only those with a pure and unblemished past shall pass the bar to…well, that doesn’t apply to our founder, of course…
COO: Only those with a pure and unblemished past shall pass the bar
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
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
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?
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.
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
Decrypting TLS is easy, if the client trusts your reencryption certificate. Lots of companies do this every day.
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
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.
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
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.
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’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.
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.
