hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3778.txt

Episode: 3778
Title: HPR3778: A Squirrel Beeing on Google Products and Google Security
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3778/hpr3778.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:15:42

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,778 for Wednesday, the 25th of January, 2023.
Today's show is entitled, A Squirrel Being on Google Products and Google Security.
It is hosted by Zen Floder 2, and is about 20 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is I made a being podcast about Google Products Interpreability and their
lousy security.
Well, let me tell you about my Google World.
I've got these Chromebooks.
I'm recording this on the Samsung 310 Chromebook, which is a really nice little Chromebook
that reminds me of the Dell Mini-Tan.
It's so small and tiny and it's got a battery life over 10 hours.
Anyway, I love the Chromebooks.
Anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about Android phones for a second.
I can use an Android phones Wi-Fi hotspot with T-Mobile to get on the internet and post shows like this.
Well, I'm out and about visiting relatives.
Anyway, I was down in Texas and my phone started acting kind of funny.
So I decided I'd erase it.
You know, like you erase a Chromebook, I basically did a factory reset on it.
Prop Ms. Squirrel didn't remember that they have to factor authentication with Google
and it all goes right back to your stupid phone.
So I couldn't log into or create any new instances of Chrome, you know,
install them on Linux or log into Gmail, let's say on Firefox.
Couldn't do that without the phone.
I did manage to turn off the two-factor authentication on at least the Chrome side
to allow me to, you know, install Linux distributions on this one laptop
and install Chrome or log into Google, you know, with Firefox that way.
But it wouldn't allow me to just enter my password because he's the time that asked.
I need to verify your who you were at and we're going to do that through your phone.
So I asked it to send me a text message that it wouldn't even do that.
It wouldn't do anything. It locked me out of my account.
And as I was locked out, I became angry with two-factor authentication
because I started thinking about it.
You know, I realized that this isn't so much about security as it is about just then
making sure that you always have an Android phone.
And you don't get rid of that Android phone.
That Android presence is always with you.
And it started to piss me off.
Anyway, the way Google's got stuff set up is you can turn off two-factor authentication on the Chrome side,
but that's separate from turning it off on the Android cell phone side.
It's like two separate switches.
So anyway, I traveled the day after to another Texas town.
And sometime around 10 or 11 in the morning, I tried to log back into my Android phone again.
You get my Google account activated and let me do it.
Surprisingly, without a text message, no verification or any silly nonsense.
And I thought, well, this is just crazy. What kind of security is that?
So basically what they did was they locked me out of my account for a day
because I factor reset my phone as punishment for doing it, I guess.
I don't know.
It certainly wasn't security the way they let me back in again, but I'm happy I got my phone back.
But in the two-factor authentication, just flat pisses me off.
And I realized that, you know, the security aspects of it are important.
But, you know, the way it was handled, you know, I was reading a website about it the day I actually reset the phone
and realized I screwed up that it would work if I went home and got on my Wi-Fi with the phone
because it realized that that phone had been through my home Wi-Fi to receive updates to staff.
And so it would let me log back in and they said that right on the website.
But they didn't mention of me going to some town like Conroe, Texas the next day from the Dallas area
and all of a sudden being able to log in from whatever cell tower it is they have down there.
Isn't that weird?
And, you know, I've never been there before.
So how does it know it was me?
I don't know.
Maybe it was the fact that I had the Samsung 310 Chromebook with me
and I was using it through the hotspot that it detected that, oh, this must be the same guy
because the Chrome authentication is just as strong as the Android.
Anyway, it pissed me off that Google decided that they weren't going to provide a switch or button that would pop up on your Chromebook
saying, hey, would you like to log back into your cell phone?
You know, it's always one way from a Chrome browser or a Chrome netbook, Chromebook.
You have to authenticate against the Android phone.
But it's never, you on an Android phone having to authenticate with a Chromebook.
You see what I'm saying?
In other words, they could send this authorization code to my Chromebook as well as they could the Android phone
and have them both covered, don't you think?
I mean, wouldn't that just be common sense?
But they don't have any option to do that apparently.
They have no option to do that.
And it really freaked me out when they wouldn't send me a text message with their six digit code on it.
You know, I can understand why you don't get a pop up, say, did you log in on a phone that's not logged in itself.
You know, it's been erased.
But you can send a damn text message.
Anyway, it wouldn't do that.
So the whole thing pretty much pissed me off.
I was rather impressed with the security.
And I felt like two-factor authentication is basically just another way of them forcing their market handle with Android phones.
The other way that I see them forcing the hand with Android phones is the QR codes that are popping up all over in grocery stores and government offices and places like Pepsi and Coca-Cola and whatnot.
You walk into a building and you need to know what to do.
There's a QR thing that you can scan.
In fact, I saw a rental card that had a QR code stuck to the windshield of the inside that you can scan with your phone.
It would tell you about the car you just rented, you know, your budget car or whatever.
Anyway, that plus of my doctor's office just recently went with a software company called Helio, H-E-L-H-E-A-L-I-O and they've got an electron app that is in the Play Store.
And that's how I get my doctor's diagnosis and orders and communicate with the pharmacy now.
So I mean, they're really getting to a point where the next thing you know, I'll be voting for Bush or Biden.
I mean, excuse me, Trump or Biden using some damn app from Google, you know.
It's going to be just that freaking crazy.
So I guess they're going to get to a point where if you lost your phone or your phone became disabled, basically you were a dead man walking.
So anyway, I'll get off that subject.
I'm just today is Rambling Squirrel Day and I will post the highlights of my complaint session.
You know, humans get to complain all the time.
Squirrels should have the right to complain as well, don't you think? Don't you agree?
So anyway, let's talk about Easy Tether and using Easy Tether to access your cell phone,
to use all millenics or Fedora or Ubuda-based product or Debian.
You know, one of the major distributions to use an Easy Tether driver, even FreeBSD has an Easy Tether driver where you can get.
Cell phone speed to, you know, like grab an ISO through R-torque, you know, a torrent phone.
Or watch a movie, for instance, or a video that has a higher bandwidth than they offer on your stupid Android hotspot phone.
You know, it's funny, but they try to, if I use SSH to go back into my Open BSD server, all of a sudden we don't get this five to six megabit per second bandwidth that we do through Google services.
They show great favor over the cell towers to Google servers.
But apparently the cell companies, they won't let you communicate with your own private server much past two or three hundred kilobots per second.
You know, it's deadly slow, even with Easy Tether, they throttle it.
In fact, if you're using a Tor, I notice they do the same thing. They'll throttle it down to about 300 kilobots per second, even with Easy Tether.
And of course, I've said the Wi-Fi hotspot of Team Rebels is pathetic. It's like 80 kilobots per second.
There's a lot of videos you can't even play using a Wi-Fi hotspot.
You can play a lot of YouTube stuff and a little bit of Bitsheet, but not much else if anything.
And I was just sitting here thinking with this bandwidth hungry, as these Chromebooks are, it's funny.
But when I started doing some major transfers to and from Google Drive using one of my Chromebooks through a relay that I'd set up with a Fedora and an Easy Tether driver and made my own Wi-Fi hotspot,
I found that these Chromebooks could really throw files up to and down from Google Drive.
I mean, if they see you're communicating with Google Drive, oh, you can get 10, 11 megabits per second bandwidth.
I mean, it's just, it's jog-dropping app. You can get the whole Slackware CD in like three minutes or less.
You know, that I've got stored out on Google Drive.
It's jog-dropping, the performance that you have.
If you're going to Google as opposed to anyone else, you know, even Bitsheet or Rumble or any of the other sites, they get throttled compared to YouTube and Google.
And it's such a lot of sighted thing.
And you think that Google had so much power over our cell phone companies.
And I'm going to just call them this the silly bastards because I'm angry at them.
And I'm getting angry at the whole Chromebook thing.
I'm angry that they have these Android phones, but they don't have a way to allow a Google Chromebook to obtain that sort of bandwidth through the phone.
We have to go through this slew of modem.
And that's just a pile of crap. You know, it blows me away.
I can sit there and watch it, suck down five and six megabits per second watching an HD video on YouTube through the Android phone.
But yet, obviously, they've got a throttle and complain and bitch about me doing SSH over a server that has only one megabit per second connection uploader.
No, actually, it's two and a half. I'm sorry, 2.6 something like that megabit per second up and down on the up and BSD server.
Hell, let's got to cut that down to 250 kilobits per second.
You know, no, why why doesn't Google have their own easy tether that'll work through the USB or work through the Bluetooth or even the Wi-Fi of their own damn Android phone.
That allows Chromebooks to obtain the bandwidth that one gets when you're using Android on these cell towers, the cell frequencies.
Doesn't that make you wonder? And I understand with the new 5G phones, it's no different.
I mean, they have the basically the same policies they're going to institute, even though you'll be on 5G and it's got like 100 megabit per second bandwidth in some areas.
You're still only going to get 80 or 90 kilobits per second through the stupid Wi-Fi hotspot.
Isn't that just a pain issue and stupid? And it is. It's how they're going to do it.
Because obviously they want everybody in the planet to communicate with Google servers through their cell phone networks.
And only using an Android phone. You can't use Chrome OS, you can't use DevWon or Debian or Almolenics or anything else.
OpenBSD can't use anything to communicate through that network other than a damn Android phone or iOS phone and to Google properties.
That's it. That's the only time you're going to get that sort of bandwidth.
Folks, it's utterly insane. In fact, it got to a point I had to transfer 20 video files about OpenBSD. I wanted them on my laptop.
And here's what I did. I logged into my...
I did an SSH to the OpenBSD server that I have at the house while I was out in the room.
And I found the 20 videos I wanted. Put them in a file folder. And then I had RClone upload those to the Google Drive that I have.
Which it did in, you know, five or six minutes.
And then from Google Drive, I took my Android phone and downloaded all 20 of these videos.
One at a time. Because you can't do file folders on the stupid Android app, you know, in Google Drive.
It's one freaking video at a time. Got it at a good bandwidth. You know, each one of them transferred down in a minute or so.
And they were pretty good sized video files. Then I just tethered the Android phone to a Linux-powered laptop.
And I turned, I said, okay, to, you know, file transfer for the MTP file transfer.
And I transferred them off of the phone onto the hard drive of the Linux laptop.
I couldn't do it directly for the damn server, which would be more efficient, of course, than going through Google Drive.
But it was the only way I could get the bandwidth to get all those files and say less than a day.
I mean, their policies are crazy. And, you know, I'm surprised that we as a nation are allowing them to basically take over our airwaves.
You know, we grant them a license to run these cell towers. They don't own the damn airwaves.
We grant them privileges to use those airwaves to put their cell towers up.
We should be telling them how they're going to run it and manage it, period.
And to have it all biased toward one company for just Android services alone, it's like when I look at Google,
when I look at this Chromebook or a Chrome installation on, say, DevWon or something of the Chrome web browser, I see one company.
Okay. When I look at Android, which is also Google product, it's like I'm looking at another company.
And the two don't get along with each other. They don't cross communicate. They don't interoperate at all.
I can't get the bandwidth on the Chromebook that you get on the Android phone because it's not allowed.
I mean, they keep effing it up.
And I can't authorize a login on an Android phone from a known established Chromebook with good credentials with Google, which is insane.
That's insane. They don't even have an option to do it.
Every two-factor thing that they've got points right back at the Android phone that was affected, that was reset.
Isn't that just insane, boys and girls?
Anyway, I'm just in a tizzy about this. I thought I'd make a video about it.
Other than that, I just wanted to tell you I've been goofing around with various Linux distributions.
And I don't want to trash geeks, but I just tried the Geeks 1.4 install CD on it to achieve a laptop.
It got about halfway through and just died.
So I restarted it, tried it again. Same thing, halfway through and died.
That's with picking the known desktop.
So I guess I'll try again today or tomorrow with the XSE desktop and see if I can get geeks installed.
But their install DVD is really buggy, but I didn't want to try it and see how they're doing.
I haven't used it in over a year.
And I also thought I might try downloading Magia and installing that and see what Magia is up to.
Magia is almost like Fedora in that.
They'll have the latest most modern kernel in there in software.
And Magia is almost like a rolling release where their actual release cycles like when they go from Magia 8 to 9, which will happen soon.
They're just changing their little control center where they allow you to set up sandwich servers and stuff like that.
Your time zone and all that MTP step.
You know, just their control interface.
But to run Magia, as I recall, is like running a rolling release.
By the way, you can't get an easy tether driver from Magia at all.
The last one they made was from Magia 6, and that was quite some time ago.
It doesn't seem to work with the Magia 8 at all.
So there's probably some fix for that.
Anyway, that's all I had. I just wanted to touch base.
You know, the seasons, the holiday seasons.
Hope everybody's had a good holiday season.
And that their hibernation has been going well for the winter.
I haven't been doing much hibernating. I've been traveling a little bit.
The weather here in the Gulf Coast states, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, New Mexico has been warm.
It's been in the 60s.
On a couple days, it's practically got up to almost 80 degrees.
There's no sign of winter.
I can't remember the last day. It was below freezing even in the early morning.
Back this morning, when I woke up, it was, I think it was in the 40s somewhere.
So anyway, we're certainly not going to have any snow arrives this winter.
If we do, it's going to be a free.
Anyway, I thought I'd just post this to you as my squirrel beating session.
You know, I can't use the real words, the real human words.
So I'll use my beating session, which is, you know, like bumblebee, of course,
for squirrel complaining.
Bye for now. Everyone have a pleasant day.
Love to everyone from St. Flutter this winter.
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