Australian Telco Dislikes Whonix?

General Discussion
1

Hello Forum. I first installed Qubes in early 2018, and it’s really great that Qubes has its own forum at last. There are a lot of things I wished I could have discussed over the past seven years, but it is only really possible to write one topic at a time, so I thought I best start with the most seriously concerning matter.

This is the Australian telco that goes by the name of Boost, which is a subsidiary of Telstra, using the Telstra mobile network and Telstra ‘customer service’ over the phone or using their Android software application programme. Basically Boost is Telstra for paupers.

Over the years I’ve occasionally resorted to Whonix and the Tor browser whenever it was appropriate to be incognito, and that’s been fine and dandy until recently, since April or May 2025.

As paupers will tend to do, I keep accurate records of the data usage every morning, and normal daily usage is usually between half a gigabyte to a gigabyte, depending on what I might have decided to have a look at on youtube. This has been very predictable for many years.

Imagine my surprise when one morning a few months ago, I checked the data balance on the obligatory Boost Android software application programme and to discover that 30 gigabytes or around half my prepaid data balance had suddenly disappeared!

So I got on the phone and eventually spoke to a human being in The Philippines who told me she had no idea what might have used such a huge amount of gigabytes, but gave me an extra 10 gigabytes to try and make me feel grateful for her kindness.

Oh well, not knowing what it might have been I carried on carefully with the additional 10 Gb (actually a loss of 20Gb) to the end of the 28 day expiry deadline and ‘recharged’ (paid more money for another 28 days and more gigabytes), to start all over again.

Things went smoothly as expected for the next 28 days, and then another ‘recharge’, and then towards the end of June, I had another mysterious loss of 10 Gb in less than a day. Again around 50% of the remaining data balance.

So again I got on the phone and went through the rigmarole to communicate with a Filipino human being, and was given 5Gb to soothe my disgruntledness, which saw me through to the end of financial year. It was only then that I started to suspect that some kind of coincidence was occurring between my occasional usage of the anon-whonix VM / Tor browser, and the apparently punitive loss of half my data balance.

I have not used the anon-whonix VM for over two months now, and the daily data consumption is always within the predictable 0.n to 1.n Gb, depending on whether there might be anything worth watching on youtube.

What I would like to know is, has anyone else in Australia, or maybe in other countries, (although Australia is the dictatorial regime currently transforming our Internet into some Digital ID police state), had any similar experience with using Whonix / Tor and having lost large unexplained quotients of data allowance?

Sorry for such a long, tedious saga.

1 Like
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Depending on how many template vms you have, updates might be ‘expensive’ on traffic size.
Like ‘good’ update can easily consume 1-2 GB of traffic. If you have 5-6 or even 10 different VMs + HVM for different purposes(like maintaining and developing aps for all king of linux distros + android). You update can be very taxy on traffic.

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Thanks for taking the time to make an effort to reply to a terribly written and long-winded opening post. The way things are going with websites lately, I’m so nervous that some advanced AI 'bot’s going to log me out and wipe my text if I take longer than 30 seconds to write a thread, it makes it hard to think clearly.

There’s always a possibility of some extraordinary drain on the data usage, and updates or downloads might do it, even maybe sometimes a bit more than the size of the download if there’s disruptions, although I wouldn’t suspect anything much more than 5%, but thesedays you never know what the latest developments might conjure up for the unsuspecting and trusting user.

Do you reckon there might be anyone from Australia who likes Qubes OS? What about Australians who are financially challenged enough to have to resort to prepaid services? That’s who I am hoping to connect with, and it might take a while.

What I’m trying to find out, and I really made a terrible effort with the incoherent chronology of what happened rather than writing an understandable explanation, but what I hope to achieve by writing this thread, is to find out whether other users of Qubes-OS and Whonix and Tor Browser have had substantial data losses with Australian telcos, namely Boost or Telstra, in the past six months or so.

One thing I have learned over the years is that poor people make the best economists, because we’re not just playing around with other peoples’ money. When there was that loss of around 30Gb or half my data balance, and when there was that second loss of around 10Gb, or again half my data balance, there was nothing unusual about my usage besides online access with the Tor Browser using the anon-whonix VM that is standard with Qubes 4.2.4. I get the feeling that it was the minions at Boost/Telstra that were just doing what they were told and punishing Whonix / Tor users for doing what is still legal (for now) but not appreciated by The Authorities.

How many Australians have you met here recently?

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You can install some network traffic monitor tool and run it in your sys-net that will log your traffic usage and you’ll be able to check how much traffic did Qubes OS actually consumed.
For example, you can use vnstat tool.

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Thank you. vnstat is on my jobs list. Still. being such a creature of habit, the daily usage is very predictable to somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5 Gb, depending on whether there’s anything on youtube worth watching. To suddenly have 30Gb wiped out in a day is absolutely inexplicable any other way. There were no Qubes updates, no downloads, no streaming videos nor audios, just Tor using anon-whonix VM for minor download sized websites. That’s it. Nothing else.

Still, this vnstat might come in handy, and since I am using a Debian XFCE sys-net, it ought to be worth adding to the system. I ought to test it out on a new installation on another machine just to see how it works and what does before I mess around with my ‘daily driver’, as such.