This is just a little PSA about the current state of texting for me; I live in America and my cell phone plan is through T-Mobile.
A few months ago when I made this website, I wanted to share the link with my friends. First I tried texting it to my relative and her friend who have iPhones so that they could browse it on their phones. I sent the link (just "persrex.xyz") in a text, and the texts never reached either of them. Wait, what? There was nothing else in the text but my website address. Weird; maybe it's an Apple iMessage censoring thing. So I thought nothing of it and I opened the website on their devices for them and bookmarked it so they could look at it in their free time. No problem.
Then, I was talking to a friend from work and I tried to send the link to him. It didn't work again. That's odd. Maybe he also has an iPhone? So I tried texting the link to my mom while she was standing directly next to me (we both have Android phones). I sent her a text "ping" - went through. I send my website - nothing. Then I sent the text "ping" again - went through. So, on some end, somewhere with my cell phone provider, the domain of my website which has never been associated with any kinds of scams or malicious behavior (for most of its history it's been a dormant domain) is being censored from being shared with other people. That's completely insane! Is there a whitelist somewhere that has every legitimate site in history - except mine? Is it a problem just with T-Mobile? Does T-Mobile think all .xyz domains are extremist content because of Epik? Is it Google censoring my domain when I send the text? (I doubt it's the latter - I'm using Android and I tried a libre software texting app from F-Droid and it still won't send). This is ridiculous. The dumbest thing is that the filtering is completely idiotic because I can just send "persrex dot xyz" instead of "persrex.xyz" and it works fine. The modern world is complete nonsense.
Then, just a few days ago, I was texting with a relative when she sent me a text that didn't really make sense; I realized it was the second half of a two-text message to me. I told them I didn't get the first one, and they resent it to me; I didn't receive it again. So, I told them, "Take a screenshot of the text on your screen and send it to me." Sure enough, this one sends immediately. The text was talking about a cannabis dispensary and this person's experiences eating THC chocolate (cannabis is legal where they live). So again, a text sent to me was censored for no reason.
Am I in particular being targeted, or is this happening to everybody? Am I just the only one to notice? How many texts were blocked that I don't know about? The scariest part of this is that there's no message on either end that a text was blocked, no way to resend it, nothing saying what was wrong about it, absolutely no feedback whatsoever. To the person who sent the text, it actually looks like it sent fine (it doesn't have the "Error: text didn't send" and the exclamation point or anything). To the person who was supposed to receive the text, there's no indication a text was blocked. It's complete and utter nonsense.
And the funniest part is, every week or two I get a fake Wells Fargo or Chase text to my phone with a clickable link that would immediately try and steal my information, hack my device, collect my metadata, etc. and this blocking never does anything about those. What about a filter that blocks texts that say "Wells Fargo" instead of some dude's personal blog site? I'd rather just have a way on my own personal device to install text filtering or a spam list, so those texts can go to a spam box like the way email works and I can browse them and configure it myself. (I guess the only negative of this is people with text limits would be charged for more texts, but texts shouldn't even have a cap anyways, they're like 1kb of data.) The way it works now is not just anti-consumer, it's anti-society. I'm not endorsing any extremist right wing views here, but it's stuff like this that happens and then everyone is looking around like, "Why do all these people believe in conspiracy theories?" It's because random people are having texts censored on their phones! Of course they're going to freak out!
If you're reading this, I would be interested to here if you're able to text my website's url to people and have it filtered or not. You can send results if you feel like trying it to my email: xerxes@persrex.xyz
July 18, 2022