dai
@dai@lemmy.world
- Comment on I Tried Pre-Ordering the Trump Phone. The Page Failed and It Charged My Credit Card the Wrong Amount 2 weeks ago:
www.404media.co I Tried Pre-Ordering the Trump Phone. The Page Failed and It Charged My Credit Card the Wrong Amount Joseph Cox 4 - 5 minutes
On Monday the Trump Organization announced its own mobile service plan and the “T1 Phone,” a customized all-gold mobile phone that its creators say will be made in America.
I tried to pre-order the phone and pay the $100 downpayment, hoping to test the phone to see what apps come pre-installed, how secure it really is, and what components it includes when it comes out. The website failed, went to an error page, and then charged my credit card the wrong amount of $64.70. I received a confirmation email saying I’ll receive a confirmation when my order has been shipped, but I haven’t provided a shipping address or paid the full $499 price tag. It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone.
“Trump Mobile is going to change the game, we’re building on the movement to put America first, and we will deliver the highest levels of quality and service. Our company is based right here in the United States because we know it’s what our customers want and deserve,” Donald Trump Jr., EVP of the Trump Organization, and obviously one of President Trump’s sons, said in a press release announcing Trump Mobile.
The announcement describes the T1 Phone as a “sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier.”
💡
Do you know anything else about this phone? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
On the Benny Show podcast Trump Jr. said the phone is for people who want a phone made in America that without the potential of a “backdoor made into the hardware that some of our adversaries may have installed in there.” Trump Jr. also said call centers for Trump Mobile will be in St. Louis, “so we’re keeping our data on shore.”
Various phone companies and projects have pushed the “made in America” aspect of their phones. One is the Liberty Phone from Purism. Building a device in America or ensuring the integrity of a phone’s supply chain can be exceptionally difficult for a smaller company, because many components may be made in China or other countries even if the device itself is assembled in the U.S. And ultimately, a company with no telecom or hardware experience selling a device like the T1 Phone is probably not going to have the expertise to build a more secure device than, say, Apple or Google with its own Pixel devices, which have massive teams updating the hardware and operating system and constantly hunting for threats against their devices and users.
The mobile carrier part of Trump Mobile appears to be a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which is essentially a carrier that piggybacks off the technical infrastructure of the country’s other fully-fledged carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. The Trump Organization’s announcement says that “Trump Mobile will offer 5G service through all three major cellular carriers.”
The Trump family and organization continue to make lucrative deals based on the Trump name while President Trump is in power. Bloomberg found that since Trump’s reelection campaign, the name has powered more than $10 billion of real estate projects, $500 million in sales from one of his crypto ventures, and millions from stakes in other companies.
The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After maybe pre-ordering my T1 Phone, the confirmation email said I could log into TrumpMobile.com to make changes to my account. I did that, changed my password as prompted, and then hit another error page. I have not been able to log into the site.
About the author
Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.
Joseph Cox
- Comment on Got any security advice for setting up a locally hosted website/external service? 3 weeks ago:
Cloudflared is such a nice feature, have seperate tunnels for different services hosted on the one machine.
- Comment on Got any security advice for setting up a locally hosted website/external service? 3 weeks ago:
Depends on your ISP and where in the world you live.
- Comment on Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform 4 weeks ago:
Yeah sorry should have listed that, they do require a NixOS installation.
Pick a DE for the installer, and if you want to change DE the installer will guide you through the process.
Then it will leave you with a config file and some man pages, it’s a bit much at first but spend some time with it. In my eyes easily one of the better distros out there.
- Comment on Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform 4 weeks ago:
Is your model covered by a NixOS module?
github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/tree/…/legion
Could give one of these a twirl and see if it fixes the issues you’ve been seeing.
- Comment on Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings 1 month ago:
Microsoft Windows be like
- Comment on Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts 1 month ago:
NM has been a marketing gimmick since Intel launched their long-standing 14nm node. Actual transistor density depending on which fab you compare to is shambles.
It’s now a title / name of a process and not representative of how small the transistors are.
I’ve not paid for a CPU upgrade since 2020, and before that I was using a 22nm CPU from 2014. The market isn’t exciting (to me anymore), I don’t even want to talk about the GPUs.
Back in the late 90s or early 2000s upgrades felt substantial and exciting, now it’s all same-same with some minor power efficiency gains.
- Comment on What webapps do you selfhost that aren't media/game servers? 1 month ago:
I believe that functionality exists already if you are using Plex; via RSS sync.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of the company's code was written by AI | TechCrunch 2 months ago:
Man, chill. Break the word down.
En - Into / Become Shit - Da poo poo Fication - The process of becoming
- Comment on To whom it may concern 2 months ago:
Aaaah pink eye!
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 2 months ago:
In love with Syncthing. Does my keepass database across my servers / laptop / phone. Was using Bitwarden for that a while back but decided I’d rather self host and run my own backups, with blackjack and hookers.
Great for hosting roms on my server and pulling over to whatever device needs them.
- Comment on Synology could bring “certified drive” requirements to more NAS devices 2 months ago:
Really depends on what you want out of the system, what you can spend and how much time you want to spend on it.
My old z390 itx system has a 16x PCIE to 4x m.2 card - leveraging an m.2 to 5x SATA adaptor with the built in SATA adaptors has given it plenty of space.
Considering I can grab m.2 to 6 SATA adaptors and fill the remainder of the slots that’s a decent chunk of drives from a single PCIE x16 slot.
Software is another kettle of fish and a good way to timesink, I’d rather not give too much of my personal experience as there are so many ways to skin that cat.
- Comment on How to secure Jellyfin hosted over the internet? 2 months ago:
- Comment on Plex is increasing Plex Pass prices and paywalling remote playback for personal media at $1.99/month or $19.99/year. 3 months ago:
For Plex just unpin the default channels, and leave your local media libraries pinned.
- Comment on Which game is it? 3 months ago:
PlanetSide 2 for me, easily 8k hours into that game. Around 5k on my steam account alone.
So sad to see it’s still slowly collapsing, but I’ve not been on since the AU servers shut down years ago and the hackers took over the Asia server.
- Comment on Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content 3 months ago:
- Comment on The internet is bad ux, everybody. There's too many choices. 4 months ago:
Christ, I knew Australian ISP pricings were exy but that’s absurd.
I’m looking at going to a 500 / 250? (Might be 100 up) Plan for around 140 AUD per month, I’d much rather have symmetrical Gbit but that’s well put of my price range.
$200 USD is around $315 AUD currently, that’s a whole ballpark of fucked up.
- Comment on Fucking Optus doesn't provide ipv6 over cell. And starlink has cgnat. 5 months ago:
Starlink isn’t our infrastructure.
- Comment on Hundreds complain about failing mobile phone service since 3G switched off 5 months ago:
Yeah I was one of the 3G / NextG subcontractors between Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Broken Hill.
Amps gear was tossed outside the huts and would be collected at an undetermined date.
The original 3G cabinets were not up to spec, so our crew after installing at many locations needed to revisit sites and install amplifiers. What a waste of resources.
Was bad enough having to visit some sites due to their location, but twice was a nightmare. Not to mention every time we made changes on the towers we needed to get in each antennas zone, call 000, confirm molly & scrambling codes. To imagine how many of these “Telstra test calls” they would have been receiving during the rollout, poor bastards.
- Comment on PS1 Games Now Playable on GameCube 5 months ago:
yes.
It’s a pad and always has been.
- Comment on Big, beige ’80s PC case started out as a joke, but it’s becoming real in Japan 7 months ago:
I’d much prefer to have beige painted steel and some rail mounts on the side. Would totally swap one of my servers into that chassis.
- Comment on 🧿👄🧿 y'all need to step up ur game 8 months ago:
- Comment on Disposable vapes to be banned in England and Wales from June 8 months ago:
Oh free lithium batteries. I’ve got a decent sized stash of cells salvaged from disposables. Some of their cases I want to use as project boxes for esp devices.
Will be sad once the supply dries up for us electronics folks.
- Comment on REPORT: Arm is sensationally canceling the license that allowed Qualcomm to make Snapdragon chips which power everything from Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs to Samsung's Galaxy smartphones and tablets 8 months ago:
They better stay away from .mom domains
