I have a burner phone app on my Android phone.
It’s not Free and Open Source Software, obviously. It’s called TextNow.
It’s loaded with ads and basically it gives me a second cell phone number that can piggyback on top of my actual data plan (so it works even when I’m away from WiFi.
TrackerControl from F-Droid has been extremely helpful with numerous Android applications such as this. I can’t really afford to pay for another phone with another plan just to give a number out to someone I don’t want to know my real contact information.
This way people can call me and I can call them anywhere I’m at and it looks like a Chicago phone number, but I don’t have full screen ads for Kroger or something popping up and monopolizing my phone’s screen while I’m trying to use the program.
So I would like to thank the author of this program…..AGAIN.
Memory Lane Time
This Android adware garbage reminds me of the kind of stuff I used to tell people to do on Windows when I first ran into adware. There was a version of PKZip For Windows I needed, and the options were something like send us $40 USD in the mail for a code or use the ad-sponsored version.
The ad-sponsored version was a full version that did the same thing the $40 one did, but it came with some adware. Conducent Timesink I believe.
The idea was that this thing called “TSAdBot.exe” would load in Windows and display ads in the sponsored programs. It sort of creeped me out, so I installed a program that monitored application installs and watched what they added to the file system and Windows Registry, and then after it was done I terminated TSAdBot.exe, removed its registry keys, deleted the startup entries buried around the place (where the user wasn’t supposed to see them), and then finally deleted the exe and dll files that appeared to be Conducent.
There was a Web site that provided a dummy dll that would appear to load and then just exit, and it pretended to be the TSAdBot dll, so you just dropped this thing in the directory and then you had a free copy of PKZip for Windows.
I had no idea that Phil Katz died about a year later of a bleeding pancreas with a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps found in his hand in a cheap hotel room with several outstanding arrest warrants. (I’m sure that my $40 didn’t have anything to do with the incident.)
I ended up accumulating a lot of knowledge like this that helped me save hundreds of dollars. Including using free ISPs with no ads. When they finally got wise to people like me and said “Okay, but only 30 hours a month!” or something I just installed them all (most of them had the same local access numbers), futzed around the EXEs to make the ad bar crash (or had Banner Catcher terminate it), and then I found a program called “DialGuard” that monitored outgoing phone calls and told you the Dial Up Networking credentials that were being used, which ended up being your hashed username and password, and then you didn’t even need the software because you just went over to Windows DUN and pasted the hashed values and dialed ‘er up.
So as you can imagine, I was sitting there, like 14, with Windows all carved up like a roast (no IE and a bunch of hotfixes, backports, hacks, so on) doing all this crap, and my parents were like, “If you have a computer question, just ask him.”.
I made a ton of “E-Royalties on Epinions” too, and there are stories about that.
Finally I just got so sick and tired of Windows because there was no more fun to be had.
The DotCom Bubble was fun while it lasted. ⬆