Thank you.
Thank you.
This is a promotional, inexpensive, and multicultural live radio with Sidney Smith.
Alternate Sunday night, Monday morning from 1 to 3 a.m.
I'll be seeing you, won't I?
On Friday at midnight, January 8th, the Midnight Ravers presents Sam Cooke and the Gospel Truth.
Jesus was passing by, so she joined the gathering throng.
Prior to his success in pop music, Sam Cooke sang with the Soul Stirrers, one of America's foremost gospel groups.
From 1951 through 1957, he recorded some of the finest gospel music the black world had to offer.
Described as soulfully sweet, the unique voice of Sam Cooke has influenced generations of R&B artists and gospel musicians alike.
Sam Cooke, the Gospel Truth, on the Midnight Ravers, Friday, January 8th at midnight.
The Midnight Ravers, where every show is a special.
For the song that they sang was so touchy, they were singing, nearer my heart to thee.
Whoa!
And this is WBAI New York.
The time is 10 o'clock.
Time for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
It couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
Bum-Dilly-Bum, for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum-Dilly-Bum!
And a good evening to one and all.
The program is Off the Hook.
This is Emanuel Goldstein.
We're together until 11 o'clock, talking about the latest advances and regressions in high technology, the phone system, computers, privacy, and whatnot.
It's another week in the year 1993, and all kinds of fun things are happening.
We've got a special guest who will be joining us in a little while, some interesting demonstrations, and some important announcements.
Let's start off by looking at some of the fun things that have been going on in the world.
Around 7 p.m. on December 27th, the new San Joaquin County Jail in California, while their computer system automatically unlocked all of the cell doors in the high-risk area,
with a highly audible series of loud clicks, releasing about 120 potentially dangerous inmates who are being held in an administrative segregation pod.
All 120 recently landed in New York, and they're at large.
No, I'm only kidding, but it could happen.
I'm not kidding about 120 people being released.
That happened, too.
I just didn't take a plane to New York, at least not that I know of.
Fortunately, the pod was itself isolated by other doors that remained locked.
The glitch was attributed to a spurious signal from the encoder card, whose responsibilities include opening those doors in emergencies.
And all kinds of things like that have been happening.
It reminds me of the book Jurassic Park.
I don't know if anyone's, obviously someone's read it, but I don't know if anyone listening has read it.
It's a book about dinosaurs being cloned, I guess, out of their DNA, which has been preserved in fossils.
It's kind of a long, involved story.
But the point is, people come to depend on certain technologies, and invariably, invariably something goes wrong.
It's sort of a chaos theory of sorts.
And one of the things in the book which impressed me was a flaw, or perhaps it was a feature of the computer program that ran the whole thing.
And whenever main power was lost, the security system was simply disabled.
So you had all these doors that had security cards, little red lights.
You had to put the right card in to get through the right door.
But when main power was lost, you just had to push the door open.
There was no backup whatsoever.
Sounds like the same thing that happened out at San Joaquin.
Incredible.
Speaking of foul-ups, well, in the first half of 1992, the chemical factory Sindu of Holland exploded, causing several deaths and chaos.
It has recently been confirmed that a simple typing error led to this tragic accident.
Apparently, the computerized chemical processing installation was fed with data in which a comma was placed at a wrong digit, causing the wrong amount of chemicals to be mixed in the installation.
This led to an enormous explosion and the closure of the factory.
The Dutch News has said that the responsible person has been found and he will be charged with negligent conduct causing death.
Now, this provoked a response on the Risk's Digest from Nancy Leveson, saying,
It is just this type of oversimplified explanation that encourages misunderstandings about accidents and how to prevent them, and maybe leads to more and unnecessary accidents in the future.
She quotes what we just said.
The Dutch News said that the responsible person has been found and he will be charged with negligent conduct causing death.
She says,
I certainly hope it is not the poor schnook that was typing and made a perfectly predictable and inevitable error.
We should not be blaming accidents on people who do human things and make errors that are inevitable.
Who are they going to put in jail?
The programmer who wrote code that allowed such a predictable input error to cause a dangerous output?
The person who wrote the requirements and neglected this?
The chemical engineers who built a plant that could blow up with one error like this?
The managers who allowed all this to happen?
What about the regulatory authorities who gave a license for such a dangerous design?
Actually, everything I've said above could be completely wrong.
Without a complete investigation, nobody should be talking about the cause of an accident.
Were there interlocks?
If so, why didn't they work?
If not, why weren't there any?
Et cetera, et cetera.
Yes, as we move, as we advance into the 21st century,
it's possible to make things happen with a single keystroke
that would ordinarily take a lot of effort and coordination.
And as it becomes easier to make things happen than sometimes make negative things happen,
it's kind of hard to put the same kind of responsibility.
I mean, somebody typed a comma in the wrong place and people died because of that.
Now, is that negligence or is that just being human and making a mistake?
And I see a parallel here with the world of hackers where hackers get into a computer system
and everybody says, well, if they had done this, they could have destroyed the world.
They could have brought down all the phone systems.
Of course, they didn't, but the fact is they were one keystroke away from doing it.
Well, why are there systems that allow it to be so easy?
Here's another story out of Massachusetts.
A woman who was murdered by her ex-husband or something like that in Boston.
It seems she dialed 911 when she heard him at the door,
but unfortunately her exchange was a Brookline exchange.
Brookline is a neighboring township a few blocks away, but not really part of Boston.
So the 911 call went to the Brookline police.
On hearing her address, the Brookline police informed her she needed to call the Boston police.
The contributor says,
I am not certain of the exact details of what ensued.
I'm not sure anyone outside the police department is certain yet.
The Brookline police claim the delay would not have made any difference in the outcome,
which was her murder.
But, of course, that's a fairly convenient position for them to take.
This has been a front-page story in the Boston Globe these last few days.
It makes one want to pick up the phone and dial 911 and see exactly who you get
and ask whether they would actually come, should you need them.
Now, this is most interesting.
We talk about Big Brother a lot, but there's also some talk of Little Brother.
And it's something that probably most of us should be more concerned with.
Listen to this.
In the past, we have tried to control information collected by Big Brother or the federal government.
I believe that this has, for the most part, been accomplished.
What has not been done and what seriously needs to be addressed
is the collection and dissemination of information by numerous Little Brothers.
Yes.
Specifically, additional guidance is needed to protect information maintained by credit reporting agencies,
state government agencies, retail stores,
and other entities which routinely collect information that can be linked to an individual by name
or other unique identifier.
Now, this person teaches a computer security class at a local college.
Local to him, obviously.
I'm not quite sure what part of the country he's in.
The issue of privacy seems even more important
once you know how many ways the information can be compromised.
After a lecture on privacy, one of my students mentioned that he worked with some private investigators,
and he mentioned that they routinely had access to all kinds of information on people
and that agencies such as the State Department of Motor Vehicles routinely sold access to their records
to just about anyone.
To illustrate the problem, I asked the student to initiate an inquiry
and to see what he could find out with only my name as information.
Only a name.
Well, the next class, he brought me the results of his spending about 30 minutes at a computer terminal.
Here was a partial list of what he provided me in printed form.
My current address, the addresses of all my previous residences,
a list of all the automobiles I have ever owned,
my social security number,
my driver's license number,
a list of all the credit cards I have ever owned, including cancelled cards,
their credit limits, the credit card numbers, and the current balance,
the name and address of my employer,
my father and brother's name and address,
the name of my wife,
the name, address, and phone numbers of all of my neighbors,
their date of residence, and the type of home they had,
my criminal record, which was blank, along with any pending cases,
my traffic record, which was not blank,
my race, my income, the amount of my mortgage, my credit rating, etc.
I imagine most people have no idea that such information about them is so easily accessible.
Imagine the potential for coming up with a detailed profile of a person
once you begin associating individuals to the groceries they buy
if the current trend of using check-cashing cards or bank cards to pay for groceries really catches on.
For example, could you imagine who might want to have access to lists of customers
who bought specific products?
Giant supermarkets already have the computer printing out coupons
based on the purchases you have made.
What would they do with this information if they could associate you with the groceries you bought?
One could imagine the following phone call after purchasing a bladder control product.
Yes, Mr. Seaborg, this is the office of Dr. Nosy, urologist.
We are offering $5 off your initial consultation.
When can we schedule you for your first appointment?
Or worse, you could have someone inferring some personal profile
based on your patterns of consumption.
Far-fetched, maybe, but I bet you may think before you use that bank card
or check-cashing card next time at the grocery store.
That contribution comes from Brian Seaborg off the Risks Digest,
and very good points brought up there,
things that we've been trying to drive home for, well, for years here now.
Your credit rating is your life in today's society.
That's who you are.
And you can be generalized, you can be categorized, profiled,
however they see fit.
And finally, a new credit card scam.
This is from Jerry Lecter,
also off the Risks Digest on the internet,
which you can subscribe to by getting internet access, first of all,
and then subscribing to the Usenet news group, comp.risks.
As I was paying for some magazines at a local bookstore today,
I happened to notice two interesting bulletins to store owners
passed on to the people minding the cash registers
about the latest in credit card fraud.
There are two closely related frauds involved.
Number one, credit cards with their magnetic strips,
re-recorded with a different but valid account number.
Since these days, pretty much the entire system runs on what is read off the magnetic strip,
or stripe, whichever you prefer,
with a complete receipt printed for you,
without a need to emboss anything from the original card,
this is a great way to charge things to someone else.
Their recommendation, cross-check the information embossed on the card
with the information printed on the receipt.
There's a reward offered to anyone who finds a magnetically forged card this way.
In practice, don't bet the ranch.
It's hard enough to find anyone who bothers to check the signature anymore.
How many people will bother to check long strings of digits?
It's worth keeping in mind that unless the card is checked,
there is no good way to prove or even reliably detect the fraud later.
The only information in the system is what came off the magnetic strip.
Well, not very many people do check this signature.
You know, I never sign my credit cards.
I'll admit that right here on the air.
I don't do it.
And my rationale is rather simple.
If I sign my credit cards and I lose a credit card,
then the person who finds my credit card also knows what my signature looks like.
So then he can go and practice my signature
and for the rest of my life be able to imitate my signature.
And that's just something that I never really liked the idea of.
But, you know, I've been caught a couple of times
buying things at stores.
Not often, but a couple of times.
They look at the card and they say,
Hey, this isn't signed. Sign it.
What is the logic
behind signing something in front of the cashier
and then signing something else next to it
to prove that you're the person
and that your signatures match?
Obviously, you're the same person.
You just signed the card in front of them.
I don't understand that mentality at all.
All right.
The second credit card scam.
Someone has apparently gone into business
creating fake credit cards
with valid, stolen credit card numbers on them.
They are currently easily detectable
because they all bear the name of some particular non-existent bank.
If the creator had thought about this a bit,
he would have created fake Citibank or AT&T cards,
even if it were hard to get them to look exactly like the real ones.
They'd still be much, much harder to detect
than cards issued by a specific First Federal of Oshkosh,
which, since it doesn't exist, has issued no real cards.
The contributor hopes he hasn't given anyone any new ideas.
Okay, so much for that.
Last week, we talked about the kidnapping out on Long Island.
And, interesting, we were talking about how
it really shouldn't be that difficult to find the phone number.
Basically, if you don't know what we're talking about,
a girl called her relative saying that she had been kidnapped,
but nobody knew where she had called from.
I maintain that with the new calling services,
such as Call Return,
it would have been possible to simply dial star 69
and ring the phone number that way.
Nobody seemed to mention this.
It's also quite possible to check the phone company records
and find out where the phone number came from.
And that's eventually what they did,
but it took them about five days.
Five days to do this while somebody is missing.
Now, Fiber Optics here, we talked about this last week.
Wake up?
Yeah.
Now, you think five days is a reasonable time to find a phone number?
Not exactly, no.
In fact, I think that's a pretty horrible track record
if it takes them five days to search through message accounting
for a couple of neighboring towns.
But the thing that I think that they've done,
since, of course, we mentioned last week also,
that it was rumored that this call to her grandmother,
or whoever it was,
that the call was recorded of her screaming
and saying that there is a man with a knife.
And I was watching the news the other night,
and it seemed like they were mentioning this for the first time now,
like it's some brand new piece of evidence that,
wow, we just found out.
It didn't really happen at that payphone.
It was played back.
I think they've pretty much accumulated a certain amount of facts that they have,
and they're just going to release them every few weeks.
So it seems like they're actually doing something.
This is an incredible example of how law enforcement
and the people running the phone company,
and obviously the journalists and all the average people involved in this case,
don't really know anything about technology,
and they're being victimized by that lack of knowledge.
I mean, any good hacker or phone freak would have known right away
how to find the number.
Any good phone freak or hacker would have known the difference
between something that is a tape being played on your answering machine
and something that is live.
You can tell by the noises.
You can tell by the sound quality.
It's not that difficult, at least not for some people.
But, you know, they've got a psychic working on this case.
They've hired somebody to go around and forage in the trees
and say all kinds of verses out of books and things like that,
but they won't find people that know anything about technology.
Instead, they're blundering along, taking five days to find a phone number,
and someone's life could be in the balance.
What amazes me is that they'd spend taxpayers' money
on some bumbling idiot psychic, some fraud,
rather than hiring some engineer or some...
Well, I wouldn't say that.
They might cast a spell on you.
Oh, I'm afraid.
You better be careful with that kind of thing.
Rather than hiring some hacker or some computer engineer
who knows something about technology involved,
at least with the phone system.
Well, you see, a hacker wouldn't be hired.
A hacker would do this kind of thing out of the goodness of his heart,
I would hope.
I mean, anybody would.
I hope the psychic isn't getting paid for this.
That they'd seek out someone who is, you know, some, you know, magician
with some smoke and mirrors is going to, you know, produce a murder weapon.
It's just really silly.
I think our point is that hackers and phone freaks
and people like that that are looked upon in such a disparaging way
in the newspapers are actually quite capable of helping out
when the need arises.
And here is a case, a perfect example, where the need has arisen,
and, you know, nobody looks to the people that have the answers.
They just simply go about it in the textbook way
and they take five days to find phone numbers
and they, you know, can't figure out if something's a recording
or if it's live.
That's sad.
It really is.
I just hope things work out okay in this case.
I think it's particularly sad that they'd rather go to some cheap two-bit magician.
I mean, that's, you know, that's the point that it's at right now.
Well, I don't know.
I can't discount psychics completely.
I mean, some of them are pretty on the mark, but I don't know.
I think it's the right way to investigate a kidnapping.
Okay, let's move on.
We have 2,600 meetings this Friday taking place all over the place.
You may say, what, this Friday?
This Friday is the second Friday of the month.
Usually 2,600 meetings are on the first Friday of the month.
But if you look at your calendar,
you will have seen that the first Friday of this month was January 1st,
which coincided with New Year's Day and was a big holiday
and lots of people weren't in any shape to go to meetings,
and plus things were closed.
So most meetings are rescheduled for this coming Friday, 5 to 8 p.m. local time.
The one in New York City takes place at CityCorp Center in the library.
I'm sorry, in the lobby.
Boy, that's a Freudian slip there.
In the lobby, yes, we're by the pay phones.
CityCorp Center, 153 East 53rd Street.
You can actually see what hackers look like and talk to them,
and they might even answer.
We also have meetings in Washington, D.C., in the Pentagon City Mall,
complete with the Secret Service and all their friends.
Chicago, Century Mall, 2828 Clark Street,
the lower level by the pay phones.
St. Louis and the Galleria, Highway 40 and Brentwood,
lower level food court area by the theaters.
Los Angeles, Union Station, corner of Macy and Alameda,
inside the main entrance by the Bank of Phones,
San Francisco, number 4, Embarcadero Plaza on the inside.
Philadelphia, 30th Street Amtrak Station, 30th Street and Market,
under the Stairwell 7 sign.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Square, inside the garage.
It's the name of the place.
It's not really a garage.
By the Pizza Pad on the second floor.
And our newest addition, Austin, Texas, North Cross Mall,
outside the skating rink from the food court,
next to Pipe World.
And that gives you an idea of how hackers are growing and spreading.
It used to be just New York,
and now it's nine cities around the country.
And I understand there's also meetings going on in a couple other cities
that haven't really told us where they are yet.
There's rumors of meetings in Munich, Germany,
and other places as well.
Boise, Idaho, that's another place.
So we'll just have to keep our eyes open for that.
Okay, we've got some interesting things.
We've got a special guest on the line that will be joining us in a moment.
But first I wanted to play you some interesting things
that occurred on the telephone.
Interesting things are always occurring on the telephone.
You just have to know when to catch them.
Now, here's a kind of informative,
kind of amusing recording that you'll get
if you try calling a number in Brighton, England.
And if you try calling an old number in Brighton, England,
you see, all around the world they're running out of space.
Yeah, we have 917 here.
A few years ago we didn't have 718.
You know, we keep adding area codes
because we're running out of numbers.
The same thing is happening all over the world.
The numbering plan is a little bit different,
and they handle things a little bit differently.
For instance, in Brighton,
phone numbers used to be five digits long.
Well, let's know what happens if you dial the old five-digit number.
This is a BT announcement.
All Brighton telephone numbers have been changed to six figures
by prefixing the old five-figure number with a 3.
For example, Brighton 21090 has become Brighton 3 2 1 0 9 0.
The national code remains 0273.
Please redial using the national code 0273,
followed by the new six-figure number.
If you have any further difficulty,
please dial 100 and ask for assistance.
BT has not charged you for this call.
This is a BT announcement.
All Brighton telephone numbers have been changed to six figures
by prefixing the old five-figure number with a 3.
For example, Brighton 21090 has become Brighton 3 2 1 0 9 0.
The national code remains 0273.
Please redial using the national code 0273,
followed by the new six-figure number.
If you have any further difficulty,
please dial 100 and ask for assistance.
BT has not charged you for this call.
Yeah, well, BT might not have charged us.
It's possible AT&T charged us.
We don't know yet.
We'll find out.
But the national code 0273 is actually the city code,
and, of course, you leave off the zero when you're calling from overseas.
So the city code would be 273,
and then you add that extra digit or figure, as they call it.
Kind of interesting how you come across these native recordings.
For instance, there's no way we can dial 100 to ask for information,
but that's what you dial over in England to get the operator.
Okay, now, something even more exciting to me, anyway,
and most people think I'm crazy for being excited by this,
but I happened to dial a number in Sweden a couple of days ago,
and I was amazed.
I was absolutely shocked.
I was put into a coma, practically,
by the speed with which this particular call went through.
Now, out at the 2600 office on Long Island,
in the Stony Brook area,
the office has recently, within the last six months,
been cut over to a number 5 ESS.
Number 5 ESS, pretty much a state-of-the-art switching system,
digital exchange and all that.
Things go through a lot faster sometimes, most of the time.
So, this is a call.
You'll hear the dialing going through to Sweden,
which is a country on the other side of the Earth,
and you'll hear a busy signal.
Now, listen carefully to the dialing.
Listen to the last digit of the dialing,
and notice the speed with which we get their particular busy signal.
That's a busy signal over there,
and if you notice, that went through almost immediately.
Now, I want to contrast that to something,
okay, to sort of prove a point here
as to how some of us are moving forwards
and some of us are moving backwards.
I mentioned the call was placed from Stony Brook.
Now, a call from the same area in Stony Brook
to the State University at Stony Brook.
All right, we're going to dial a busy signal over there,
an American busy signal.
Listen to the dialing.
Listen to how long the call takes to go through.
Yeah, it's true.
This tape has not been altered at all.
This is exactly how it happened.
Now, just to demonstrate it one more time,
let's call from Stony Brook to Stony Brook one more time
to something that picks up, say, a modem.
Okay, this is a local call in the same town,
less than a mile away.
Okay, and now let's go a bit further.
Let's go back to Sweden.
We're going to call something that picks up.
It's a fax machine.
And note the difference in speed.
Okay, now that's a fake ring.
The machine is picked up,
and it's generating its own little ring here.
It'll do that about four times
and then pick up a fax machine.
You may find machines like that in this country, too.
They kind of double up as answering machines and fax machines and whatnot.
But this demonstrates something.
This demonstrates how if you use a particular kind of phone system,
in this case, we're dialing into a Rome system,
CBX 9000 at the State University at Stony Brook,
and it just adds so much time to the call.
It adds about seven or eight seconds to the call to get through there.
Now, while the rest of the world is linking up
and making things so incredibly fast
where you can actually place a call to Sweden
and have it go through with the speed of a local call,
in fact, it's faster than some local calls,
it's sad to think that some of us are moving backwards.
And this goes to show we need some sort of standard technology, I guess.
All right, enough of that.
But that's our little demonstration for today.
The program is off the hook.
This is Emmanuel Goldstein.
We're together until 11 o'clock.
And on the line with us from Texas
is a phone freak that we had on once before,
except he was on tape then.
He's live tonight.
And his name is Mr. French.
This is somebody that I met on a voicemail system.
The two of us were hackers hacking in our own special world,
and we kind of collided and we met in that way.
But that's the only way we've ever met on the phone.
Mr. French, are you there?
Are you there?
I'm here. Are you there?
Yeah, I didn't know if I had been taking off hold or not.
Well, actually, you're never on hold at this station.
You're either connected or not.
Oh, okay.
Well, you caught me. I was a little bit busy.
Ah, now that's an interesting sound.
Okay, I'm not busy anymore.
Okay, now you have some interesting things to show us, don't you?
Yes.
None of what I have to show you has anything to do
with the modern things that you were talking about.
You know, the automatic callback and the caller ID and all that stuff.
All that stuff is junk compared to what they used to have.
I actually speak romantically about the old step-by-step and crossbar equipment.
Well, I know there's a lot of our listeners that herald back to those old days
and can probably remember all the sounds that you're about to play for them
and can talk intelligently about the various types of switching systems.
What are some of those systems?
Well, some of the earlier switching was known as jack and panel,
or some people just called it panel switching,
where you had a very large, well, it was referred to as an elevator.
It was a big, long set of contacts that went up, up, up, up, up, up,
as you use a rotary dial phone.
And I'm not too familiar with jack and panel,
so I'm not going to speak too intelligently on it,
except for the fact that it was a failure, needless to say,
and they got rid of it and replaced it with what we later know
and became known to us as crossbars, is what I'm saying.
Uh-huh.
And that worked a whole lot better.
It was the ESS of the past.
I mean, you know, oh, it was fast.
You know, you dialed something and it went through in about a second.
Uh-huh.
And that was wonderful.
And we also had step-by-step, which was another type of thing
where the contacts brushed up against other contacts,
similar to the old-style TV tuner when you'd change channels
from, like, channel 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, et cetera.
Step-by-step worked that way as well.
Okay.
Now, you said something rather disturbing before the program to me
about a fact about New York.
What was that fact again?
I can't seem to find any, and another friend of mine
cannot seem to find any of the old electromechanical crossbar-type switching
in New York State.
We searched high and searched low, and Yonkers, the old, let's see,
what was it, 914-423, cut over about a week or maybe two weeks ago now,
and it's gone.
Oh, I hadn't heard about that.
That is distressing.
So, nowhere in New York State, huh?
Not that I've been able to find.
Of course, I haven't just sat down.
There's too many exchanges involved to sit there and comb through each and everything,
but I've, you know, gone through a lot of them that I knew existed,
and they're all just gone.
Yeah, even Fisher's Island cut over a couple of years ago, or a year ago, I guess.
Mm-hmm.
They were a step system out on, way on the east end.
It was practically in Connecticut.
That's how far out it is.
Ah, yeah.
And Stony Brook, of course, is gone.
Mm-hmm.
And not the city of Stony Brook, but I want to take that area out there.
Yeah.
Um, I remember a 2-1-2-9-4-2.
It's now some modern piece of garbage that they now use that you,
some of you people say, oh, this is wonderful,
but there was a lot more wonderful things that you could do with step and crossbar
that you can't do.
Like, if we're ever nuked, I think the United States is in trouble.
Let's put it this way.
The computers will bite the dust.
Well, yeah, but that's probably the least of our worries in that situation.
But back in the old days, you could tell in exchange just by the sound.
You could say, this is being routed through this particular exchange,
this particular area.
Busy signals sounded different.
There's a busy signal...
Now, just by the ring, and even to a lot of trained ears,
if somebody had called me and hung up,
I could tell you what city you were calling from,
I could tell you what type of telephone exchange it was that you were calling me from.
That's incredible, but no more, huh?
No more.
No more do you hear a ring...
That sounds like this.
With the busy signal kind of filtering through in between rings,
that's the step-by-step sound.
Now, why do you hear that fast, busy?
Well, it's all generated by a ringing plant.
It's a great big, round...
Picture a washing machine turned over on its side.
It's a great, big, round cylindrical object with many different windings and connectors.
It all just comes from the same source,
and it's hard to keep that many different types of tones and things separate.
It just kind of filters through.
You know, they didn't have good ways of filtering it back then.
It's all electromechanically done.
Uh-huh.
And that's why you would hear bursts of static, too, because the contacts were dirty?
The contacts were dirty, and you'd hear, you know, sort of a white noise.
Uh-huh.
And those days are gone.
Each exchange sounded different.
I'll say now.
Are things very much different down where you are in Texas?
Everything's pretty much ESS-5 and things like that.
You know, 1A ESS and TMS-100s and 100-200s and things like that.
Uh-huh.
They all sound alike.
Why do they all sound the same?
I mean, isn't it possible to make them sound different?
Well, sure.
I'm sure somebody could rewrite the program or something
and make the ringing plant sound a little bit different.
There is one Swedish-made electronic switch that they're putting in in different places.
I have found, and the ring is just a little bit lower.
I don't know whether anybody out there has ever dialed up their pager
and heard that funny-sounding ring.
Yeah.
It's just a little bit off pitch from the normal ESS ring.
This new Swedish-made thing is kind of this way.
Well, maybe that's a sign of the future where things will once again have individual style.
So do you have any other demonstrations for us?
Well, let me see here.
Here's another type of ring.
We were discussing it.
With the crackling noise in the background.
That sounded a little higher pitched than the other one.
Oh, you noticed that?
Yeah.
Now, what's this here?
What was that?
We're hearing a dial tone there?
Yeah, I'm just queuing up a tape.
The old step-by-step and crossbar dial tone sounded something like this.
And each one of them had a distinct, you know, there was no two exactly alike.
Yeah, they all were there.
I remember a dial tone like that from my childhood.
Yeah, I do, too.
Same here.
Wow.
And, like I said, it's all gone.
And the carrier equipment that connected the different central offices, it seemed like
they were all different.
I could always tell from which part of town you were calling me from.
I couldn't tell you what the phone number was, but I could say, oh, you're in this part
of town.
Yeah, but the thing is, you'd be able to tell, and it wasn't a machine telling you.
It was actually you being able to tell the difference between areas like that.
Right.
For example, the thing that you were discussing earlier about the call that came from the
telephone booth, I could probably tell you where it was really coming from.
Right.
And once again, you mentioned that a phone freak or hacker-type person would,
indeed, be able to tell you if it's a cheap recording or not, or if it's a real thing.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think you've got a very good ear for these kind of things.
I've tested you many times.
In fact, I'm about to test you again, because you're one of these people that, without fail,
can tell a touchtone just by ear.
Right.
So are you ready to be tested?
Go for it.
Okay.
We're going to hit a random touchtone.
We can't hit the other four keys, the A, B, C, D keys, but we can't hit one, two,
three, pound, star, all those kind of things.
So I'm about to hit a key here.
Is anyone out there that thinks they know this kind of thing?
See if you get it right, too.
I'm about to hit one.
Here I go.
That was a seven.
That was a seven.
Mm-hmm.
That's very good.
You know what I'm going to do?
You don't know our phone number here.
No, I have no idea.
So what I'm going to do, how many can you retain in your head?
Seven.
Okay.
Well, you know what the area code is, right?
Oh, yeah.
I think I know what your area code is.
Yeah, that's it.
Okay.
Now let's give you the phone number and you read it back to us.
You've never heard this phone number before.
Everybody out there knows it, so they'll know if you're right or wrong.
Here we go.
279-3400 in the 212 area code.
That is incredible.
Well, that's Mr. French for you here on Off the Hook, phone freak extraordinaire.
And we'll be taking phone calls at that number, 212-279-3400.
For anybody that has any questions or would like to reminisce about phone systems of the past,
anything else that we should know about that has changed or is never going to come back?
I think once it's gone, it's gone.
I do remember when Touchstone was considered a custom calling feature.
Well, you know, to some of our companies up here, it still is considered a custom calling feature.
Even though we know better.
But you're talking about back in the real old days when it was first introduced.
When it first came out, it was a special, special deal.
And once again, they're finally doing away with the extra charges for Touchstone in a lot of places.
Well, not here.
They've reduced it a little bit, but they have not gotten rid of it.
And you still get threatening letters saying,
you better pay us or we're going to turn off your Touchstones.
Of course, they're not turning off your Touchstones.
They're simply programming their computers to ignore your Touchstones,
which I would think involves extra work.
Yeah, you would think.
You know, they have to pay somebody to do that.
I do know of a case where this friend of mine,
her little 10-year-old daughter visited their grandma,
and she says, I didn't know how to call you.
I couldn't figure out how to work grandma's telephone.
She goes, what do you mean?
She goes, it's a big round thing with a bunch of little holes in it.
Oh, boy.
I had never seen a rotary dial phone, which blows me away.
That's as good as somebody not being able to find the 11 key
when they had to dial 9-11.
I've heard that.
I've heard that.
Okay, let's take some phone calls.
212-279-3400.
We have Mr. French on the line from Texas.
What's your local company down there?
United Telephone Company.
Now, that's not a Bell company, is it?
No, it's a terrible telephone company.
Tell us something about it.
What do you need to know?
Well, they don't know what call waiting, they do have call waiting, three-way calling, etc.
That's about all they have, call forwarding, but you have to beg and plead for it,
and you have to explain to them why you would want call waiting.
They just don't understand what it is.
I'm probably the only person around here that has it, and it's just a very backward, rural community.
Now, you know, it's interesting.
The kind of phone company you're describing brings to mind, tell me if I'm right about
this, the kind of lady you see drawn in the far side with the flower dresses and the bun
hair, they all seem to work for phone companies like that.
Is that true?
Well, there's a few of those in there.
Yeah, they have a very harsh voice and very crabby most of the time.
Yeah, they have a tendency, well, why do you want that far?
That's the way they talk around here.
Of course, we have our minorities working there, too.
Young, 23-year-old person, and they grew up in a place where they didn't have any call
waiting or call forwarding, and three-way calling, they don't understand what that's
for at all.
So, you know, you run into these problems.
You also run into it with cable companies around here, too, unfortunately.
Interesting.
Well, it's a whole other way of life, I guess, which we know little about up here.
Okay, let's take a phone call.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi.
I have sort of a basic historical question.
How long have we had seven digits in our phone number, and why is it that the United
States and Canada have a unified system, but Mexico is considered a foreign country?
Oh, as far as telephones work, that's a good question, and I may not be able to answer it
entirely, but let's start with your first question first.
I believe we started getting seven-digit numbers in the early 1950s, depending on how you were
calling area where you were in.
In fact, a community about 80 miles to the northeast of where I am had five-digit numbers
until just real recently.
And the people there were told that they were going to get much greater phone service, and
they were mad because they had to dial the first two digits.
And they said it just really upset their whole day.
Well, when you say they had five-digit phone numbers, to the rest of us, they had seven
digits, right?
Yeah.
If you called outside of that area, you had to dial the complete da-da-da-da-da-da-da,
the complete seven digits.
Uh-huh.
But these people, their third digit was a nine, so they would dial nine, and then the last
four digits of the number.
I see.
Consequently, they didn't have any 911 until recently, also, because of that.
Okay.
And 950, and that type of thing.
But that came around in 1952, and it spread.
52 and 53, more and more people.
I would figure you could still find five-digit phone numbers across America in certain little,
tiny little places.
Well, to bring up Fisher's Island again, I know they have four-digit numbers there.
You just dial the last four digits of the number.
At least it was that way before they cut over.
I imagine it's still the same.
Maybe in Canada, two sparsely populated areas, would you think?
Yeah, yeah.
It is.
In fact, I had listened to a radio station on satellite.
I also have a satellite receiver, and it's in a community known as Whitehorse.
And until about a year ago, they used to have five-digit numbers, and now they have to give
a complete seven-digit number whenever they're giving out a phone number.
And I'm sure it upset their way of life up there.
It's up in the Northern Territory.
Whitehorse is actually pretty big.
Yeah, but I wouldn't mean to tell you, Canada.
Yeah, Whitehorse is actually one of the bigger towns, I think.
Well, yeah, I guess.
It's got two or three prefixes in it, so it must be a huge place.
Yeah, well, up there it probably is.
Okay, let's go on to another phone call.
Good evening.
Hi.
I just wanted to ask a question about MF tones and silver box tones.
Go ahead.
What do you want to ask?
Okay.
A couple of weeks ago, FiberOptic, actually it was a little more than that, said that MF
tones were used for one thing.
And I feel a little ignorant, but I don't know what that one thing is, and I was wondering
if you could elaborate.
Well, at one time, MF tones were used to generate switching signaling.
Like, say, if you called from Brooklyn to Manhattan, you might get an eight- or nine-digit
switching tone.
It was one central office talking to another.
Like, say, you would dial 555-1212, we'll just use the generic, in the area code 718, and
it's not in your calling area, so it has to use this, the equipment would talk to the
other equipment across the water, so to speak, to, you know, ring up the other offices, just
signaling.
And now everything's computerized, and they've pretty much put everybody on the same database,
and you'll notice a lot of calls will go through pretty much instantaneous now, because
they've done away with the MF signaling.
Okay, I'm going to ask FiberOptic to respond, too, since his name was brought up.
Yeah, I don't recall saying it was for one thing, but concerning North America, which
is the R1 standard for multi-frequency signaling, it's still used all over.
In fact, every office has to be equipped to signal in multi-frequency tones, because
anyone who's not on the new digital signaling system 7 locally is going to signal calls using
MF tones, and so is any long-distance company, any long-distance carrier uses multi-frequency
signaling, except for AT&T, which has used signaling system 6, and now 7, since 1976.
And now AT&T is completely SS7, so they no longer have any need for using MF tones, except
to signal internationally, in which they're used quite commonly, although it's numerous
varying tone sequences overseas.
And a couple of MF tones are used for coin collect and coin return.
Yeah, that's true as well.
KP is coin return, and an MF2 is coin collect, and that's used to signal long-distance calls
on pay phones.
But MF tones are used quite frequently, even today, in the local bell operating companies,
because of the mere fact that not everyone is on the new digital network yet.
But even when they are, there'll always be a need for signaling MF, whether it's for an
international call, or whether it's to signal to an older long-distance company.
When do you think there'll be 100% integration with the phone network?
Well, it's pretty hard to say.
I mean, internationally, it'll never happen.
At least, I don't see it happening for at least a couple of decades.
I meant domestically.
Oh, domestically?
We'll probably do away with MF signaling, at least within local bell operating companies,
fairly soon.
I mean, there'll be no need for it within New York City once everyone's on the digital
SS7 network.
But as I say, it'll always be needed in order to signal equal access calls to an older carrier,
an older long-distance carrier that's not using any form of digital signaling, and of
course, for your international signaling.
Mr. French, how about you?
How long do you think we have for total integration in this country?
Oh, I don't know.
Oh, and just you mean here in the U.S. and Canada?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I imagine probably in the next five years, it'll reach saturation point totally.
Well, it's moved pretty fast up until now, with increasing speed, it seems.
So, I don't know.
I think maybe even less than that, but we'll just have to see.
Oh, and I never did get a chance to answer the fellow's question earlier about Mexico.
Right.
It's just their equipment is unstandard.
You have three-digit phone numbers and seven-digit phone numbers and six-digit, and they are
improving their equipment as we speak.
Southwestern Bell Telephone of Texas has purchased the Mexican telephone company, Telmex, and they're
sending people over there left and right to convert everything over to ESS-5-type standardized
seven-digit equipment, and you may look for them to appear on our regular NPA, and they
may have a standard area code.
Really?
Yes.
That would be...
Well, they had some pseudo-area codes a couple of years ago, 903, 905, 706, but that's...
One of those area codes I now have.
That's my own.
It was reassigned to and taken back by the United States, I guess.
But what most countries have, I'd say 90% of the countries in the world, they have a different
system than the United States.
In fact, the United States and Canada, I believe, are the only ones that are apart from the world
standard, where it's...
I understand it's a lot easier to expand.
For instance, we play the Brighton recording, where they simply add a number to a particular
exchange.
City codes can be one, two, three digits, even longer.
And the way it seems to be, the main metropolis areas have short city codes and long phone numbers,
whereas the outlying areas have long city codes and short numbers, which makes it easier to
dial the number within the city, and when you have to add numbers, you just add a single
digit in that city only.
Yes, but it just seems so non-standard.
I wish they would standardize everything to make them either eight digits or something.
I know France went to eight digits, did they not?
Except for Paris.
I believe Paris is the only city that has a city code, which is one, and everything else
is eight digits.
Ah, okay.
Okay, let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
Good evening.
A couple of quick things for you.
There's a mobile telephone switch down in your area.
Cellular One has that funny Swedish company.
Oh, yes.
Well, you may want to try them and see if the ring is a little bit different.
What city is this in?
New York City.
I didn't hear you?
New York City.
Oh, okay.
Didn't you say it was down by...
He's in Texas.
Oh, I'm sorry.
New York City.
Okay, that's not quite in my area.
Right, right.
I'm not from New York City, so I sort of think of that down there.
They have it down there.
Okay.
Anything else?
You might explain how SS7 works.
It's coming along.
I work for a small phone company, and we're going to be...
I work on a DMS, and we're going to be upgrading to a super node, which we need for SS7.
And I'm kind of curious.
Okay.
I'm going to let FiberOptik take that one, then.
Yeah.
Well, firstly, about what you said about this...
We shouldn't call them the funny Swedish company.
It's LM Ericsson.
The Ericsson switch has been around in the United States.
Yeah, there's a couple in New York City, although they're being used for specialized things like
cellular and dial-it services and things like that.
The most dominant one is the AXE10, is a dominant Ericsson digital switch.
And as far as how SS7 works, I mean, there's books written on the subject, but I could probably
give a brief on it anyway.
The way it works is that packets are signaled over 64-kilobit data channels for a call setup
and teardown and various special functions.
And bear in mind that SS7 is simply a signaling system.
It has nothing to do with the way that your voice is carried.
Your voice can be carried on normal analog wire pair the way it always was.
The thing is that the signaling information is fully disassociated from the path that your
voice takes.
And this data for routing calls is sent over separate data paths.
And basically packets of data, which is called a message transfer part, is broken down into
various pieces.
And it assigns offices, it totally de-hierarchicized, is that such a word?
Well, you just made one.
Yeah.
They completely drop the whole original CCITT hierarchy of offices and just simply assign
each office a point code.
And you have a new piece of signaling equipment is added into the picture called a signal transfer
point, which is basically a message relay station, which relays the packets on to the next
office.
And I'm sure I could elaborate.
And perhaps there's been a lot of questions about it lately.
There's been some talk.
Maybe I'll write some article for 2600 in the near future, just so I could elaborate a lot
more on the inner workings of SS7.
Well, I believe next week we're on for two hours, so we might be able to give you an extra
time.
I can even do that.
Yeah.
Okay.
We're going to make a couple more phone calls here, get a couple more phone calls.
But we do want to go into SS7 a little more because it's going to be affecting each and
every one of us very intimately.
So be forewarned.
Good evening.
Hi.
Do you have any information on Hacking Novell Netware?
Hacking Novell Netware.
Well, a lot of people have been doing things like that.
In fact, there's been all kinds of strange things showing up.
I think there was a virus with Novell Netware recently or I don't know, something strange
was going on.
We don't have anything planned for the magazine with that in the immediate future, but if
somebody writes an article for us, we'll certainly print it and if somebody talks about it on
the radio, we'll certainly let them have the airtime.
Okay, thanks.
The other thing is, what's the resolution of star 66 and star 69 where it checks to see
if the line isn't busy yet?
Is that continuous?
Well, it's an interesting question.
It's supposed to be tied into the network so that you would get it almost instantly.
You know, it's supposed to know immediately when the line is free, but it doesn't always
work that way.
I've tested it a couple of times myself.
I've dialed star 66 to keep repeat dialing somebody who's busy and, you know, they hang
up the phone because we're sitting in the same room watching, testing this, and it doesn't
ring.
And then they pick up the phone again and, of course, the phone is busy by the time the
thing tells me that it's not busy.
It's not instantaneous.
No, it can be, though.
I've seen it on certain PBXs.
That same Rome PBX that we criticized so harshly before, it does that very well.
I'll say that.
It calls you immediately when the line is free.
So it can be done.
It just hasn't been done in this particular case.
Good evening.
Anybody there?
Well, I guess there's nobody there.
Let's try this one over here.
Hey, if I might make a comment, I just happen to think, in light of what's going on in the
news, did you realize the American people came close to electing a hacker for a president?
You know, I heard words to that effect.
Well, I don't really like that definition of hacker.
You're referring to Ross Perot as a hacker because he may have gotten into people's credit
files.
Is that what you mean?
Well, they said that he used illegal authorization codes.
Apparently, him or some of his underlings scanned out the codes.
Well, we'll have to do some investigating on that.
We have a new caller on.
Good evening.
Hello.
Yes, go ahead.
Regarding the alleged psychic, John Monte, on the Internet, on PsySkeptic, they list predictions
that he and other alleged psychics made early last year, and you can see how, you know,
none of the predictions came through.
For people who are not, who don't have access to the Internet, his predictions and those of
Gene Dixon are on the invention factory where everyone can call up even if they don't have
a subscription.
And on the conference, J5.
And I'd like to mention something about Touchstone.
About a month ago, I got a free offer from New York Telephone saying we'll give it to
you for free to try it out.
I think the offer was for one month.
Today, they're offering me two months.
Really?
Yeah, I don't know when they're going to give up.
I sent back the card a month ago saying, hell no.
And now here I get another offer.
Do you have a Touchstone phone?
I'm sorry, not to, I mean, call waiting.
I'm sorry.
Oh, okay.
I'm sorry, I mean, call waiting.
Call waiting.
Yeah, I don't want call waiting.
Well, I'll tell you, sir, and this may shock you, but they will never give up.
They will keep after you, long after you give up your phone, they'll keep trying to get
you to subscribe to call waiting because it's a lot of revenue for them.
$5 a month for just an annoying little beep, you know?
Yeah.
Well, I, you know, call up computers, and the last thing I want is call waiting.
Right.
Well, you'd have to dial star 7-0, and I can't understand why they don't tell you about that,
star 7-0 to disable call waiting.
Star 7-0 doesn't even exist here.
Well, I guess there's some places where it hasn't quite seen the light of day yet, but
that's one of the many things that we have to keep people informed about.
All right, we're out of time, and this time went really fast.
Mr. French, I want to thank you very much for joining us.
Glad to be on your show, Emmanuel.
Okay, and good to have you live on here.
We'll have to have you back up sometime, maybe in person sometime.
Who knows?
It sounds like a fun deal.
Okay, and this is Emmanuel Goldstein.
We'll be back again next week for fundraising and all kinds of fun things like that.
FiberOptics will probably be around, giving long, extended lectures on SS7.
Stay tuned next for a rebroadcast of the evening's news.
This is WBAI, New York.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
It couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum Diddly Bum, but the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum Diddly Bum!
As U.S. Marines spread throughout the Somalian countryside from their bases in Mogadishu
and Baidoa, questions emerge ever more sharply.
What is their mission?
Who ordered them there, and under whose command?
Just why was the pre-Marine United Nations deployment a failure,
and why did the U.N. accept Washington's conditions for sending its own troops?
Will the U.S. Marines confront Somali gunmen and forcibly disarm them?
Why are the Marines being greeted with cheers?
And what happens when the cheering stops?
Hear daily special reports on WBAI's Somalia Watch
with Samori Marksman, Barbara Nimri-Aziz, Jim Dingman, Dallas Galvin,
Paul DiRienzo, Laura Flanders, and myself, Phyllis Bennis.
Every night, 6.45, after the news.
Somalia Watch, WBAI 99.5 FM, New York.
Good evening.
In the news tonight, Ron Brown, Clinton's most controversial cabinet pick,
seems a virtual shoe-in.
A new threat to retaliate against Iraq in the final chapter of Bush v. Saddam Hussein,
the tobacco industry takes a hit in EPA findings on second-hand smoking,
and in New York, a new drug to treat a major killer of people with AIDS is ready to go on the market.
With these and other stories, I'm David Sears in New York with Verna Avery-Brown in Washington,
and this is the news for Wednesday, January 6, 1993.
First to Susan Carter with news headlines.
The Bush administration is preparing to issue an ultimatum to Iraq, that according to press reports.
The ultimatum will tell Iraq to remove surface-to-air missiles from the no-fly zone in southern Iraq or face military retaliation.
Diplomats from the U.S., France, Britain, and Russia are expected to deliver the warning to the Iraqi ambassador to the U.N.
either today or tomorrow.
State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher refused to comment directly on the reports today,
but he again warned Iraq not to violate the no-fly zone.
When the no-fly zone was declared in August,
we and our coalition partners made clear to Iraq that we would not tolerate actions which put our air crews at risk.
We made clear that we meant this on December 27th,
when coalition aircraft destroyed an Iraqi MiG below the 32nd parallel after it showed hostile intent.
At that time, we reminded Iraq that it should scrupulously respect the no-fly zone
and avoid actions which could put our personnel at risk.
Iraq should take these warnings very seriously.
A cleanup effort is underway off the coast of the Shetland Islands in northern Scotland.
An oil tanker that ran aground there yesterday is underwater, but it appears to be holding together.
Phil Edwards has more from Aberdeen, Scotland.
A slick seven miles long and a mile wide is now being sprayed with detergent from the air,
but the oil continues to spread.
Nevertheless, the Pollution Control Unit's chief scientist, Dave Bedbra,
is quietly confident of a successful clear-up operation, weather permitting.
We've got people, we've got the resources, and we can, within those constraints, I'm sure,
mount a good operation.
But it's a race against time.
Already 50 dead seabirds have been recovered,
poisoned fish are being washed up on the beaches,
and it's clear that the full extent of this disaster has yet to be realized.
Phil Edwards, the Shetland Islands.
More evidence released today of war crimes against Muslims in Bosnia.
The French medical group Doctors Without Borders today released a study of 60 former detainees in Bosnia.
Their spokesperson, Francois Souzet, says it details crimes against humanity committed by Bosnian Serbs.
A systematic campaign to incite racial hatred before the assault is launched in a city.
Then the systematic killing of further educated people.
Then the deportation and detention of all other group of people under human condition.
Execution and indiscriminate massacre in detention camp.
Then, violence against and deportation of women, children, and whole people under horrific conditions.
Suze warned the atrocities detailed in the report are just the tip of the iceberg.
Rival clan leaders in Somalia achieved a breakthrough today.
They have agreed in principle to hold a national reconciliation conference in April.
Clan leaders reached the agreement in their third day of peace talks in neighboring Ethiopia.
They also discussed the possibility of a ceasefire.
President Bush released his final budget today.
The latest estimate of the budget deficit for 1994 is more than $292 billion.
That's up more than $18 billion from the last estimate.
Economist Mark Breslow, an editor of Dollars and Cents magazine, says the increase is relatively minor,
but he says it underscores the problems President-elect Clinton will have trying to reduce the budget deficit.
Either it means you get no increase in social programs.
Another way of cutting the deficit is to take it out of other places, such as taking it out of military spending
and through making up the revenue in other ways, which would mean progressive tax reform.
Doing either of those things, though, requires some hard political battles.
And the federal government has released its first report on hate crimes nationwide,
but federal officials and civil rights activists say the report is virtually useless.
That's because fewer than 20 percent of local police agencies provided data for the report.
Reporting hate crime statistics is voluntary,
and an FBI official said many agencies were either unable or unwilling to collect data.
Those are the news headlines. I'm Susan Carter.
And you're listening to the news on WBAI New York.
I'm David Sears in New York.
Now to Verna Avery-Brown in Washington with international news.
In what's likely to be his final foreign policy directive,
President Bush today is threatening to retaliate against Saddam Hussein
for moving missiles into the U.N.-declared no-fly zone.
Correspondent Linda Fasulo at the U.N. has more on the story.
Diplomats say the U.S., Britain, and France are expected to call in Iraq's U.N. ambassador
to give him a letter containing an ultimatum to his government.
It would demand that Iraq pull out all its surface-to-air missiles recently deployed in southern Iraq
or face possible military action.
And Baghdad is expected to be warned to stop locking its radar onto allied aircraft as well.
The ultimatum would be based on Security Council measures adopted after the Persian Gulf War
that allow member states to use all necessary means to make sure that Saddam Hussein does not repress
or attack the Kurds in northern Iraq or the Shiite Muslims in the south.
In Washington today, President Bush's spokesman, Marlon Fitzwater, made it clear
that the U.S. is not going to tolerate Iraq's continued violation of U.N. resolutions.
But he would not say what kind of...