Regret, one main regret this year that I was not able to make the case clearly enough.
Don't feel sorry for me. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.
As I leave you, I want you to know...
Tonya, what happened with your skate?
My lace broke right on the warm-up, so...
The waiting is over! The New York Rangers and the Stanley Cup...
Ladies and gentlemen, now the moment you've all been waiting for...
I'm going to take a short nap.
Within a drift of time...
It's all a fantasy.
Right, but I mean...
We're living ahead of the time that it actually is.
Exactly. Very heavy, Father. Thank you.
You sing?
I'm going to sing it for someone in the future.
Is there some song, some short, easy song that you'd like to sing?
Some gay little song that you're in love with?
My fellow Americans...
Tune in for a shortcut through 1994.
It was a nightmare.
Yeah, 94 was, yeah, it was a good sort of...
A horrifying nightmare.
11 p.m. New Year's Eve, right here on WBAI-FM.
All right, we're here.
Let's never speak of a shortcut again.
Just think how much you're going to be missed.
You don't have next year to kick around.
Talk about your entertainment.
And it's just about 10 o'clock here on a Wednesday night.
It's 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
Bumbley bumble the best, expect the worst
I hope that's understood
Bumbley boo!
Bumbley boo!
Good evening, everybody.
This is Emanuel Goldstein.
The program is Off the Hook,
where we talk about the latest in high tech and the Internet
and what's going on in the information superhighway
who got run over this week and various things like that.
You know, I think a lot of us got run over this week
because of some of the things that are happening.
We're going to get right into that.
And we have, and this is not an exaggeration here,
we have what I believe could be
the biggest, the biggest hacker story ever.
That's right, ever in the past
and for a good while into the future.
And I'll bet a lot of you haven't even heard about it.
I wonder why.
Well, that's going to end tonight if you stay with us.
We'll be taking phone calls
and doing all kinds of other fun things as well.
So keep your dial tuned to WBAI for the next hour.
And you'll hear that and a lot more.
Okay, let's begin with some news off today's newspaper
which announces that Cellular One has pulled the plug
on roaming for people coming into New York.
That's right, Cellular One has temporarily suspended a service
that allows out-of-town visitors to use their phones
in the New York City area.
Do you know why?
Because cellular bandits have been stealing their phone numbers.
That's right, stealing phone numbers.
It's gotten so bad that even the mayor had his number stolen
and the police commissioner.
No respect whatsoever.
Officials at Cellular One said the shutdown is needed
to help the company investigate a surprisingly high number
of New York-based phone calls that appear to have been made
from phones cloned by thieves.
Well, Cellular One customers who live in the Washington area
will be unable to receive calls on their cellular phones
while in New York City and in parts of northern New Jersey.
Calls will either be automatically forwarded
to subscribers' voicemail or, if they don't have voicemail,
they'll be forwarded to a recording which will tell the caller
that the recipient is no longer in Cellular One's coverage area.
But fear not, because subscribers will be able to place calls
from and within the New York City area,
but they'll be operator-assisted
and they'll be nearly three times more expensive.
So let us all join with Cellular One and their misfortune here
and forced to charge three times more because of all this.
Because there's a few bad apples out there that ruin it for everybody.
Same old story.
All right. Almost ready for the major scandal here. Almost.
But before we get into the major scandal,
how about something that might affect everybody out there on the net
in some way that we don't quite know yet?
And that has to do with America Online.
That's right. Shares of America Online,
the computer online services provider based in Vienna, Virginia,
rose again yesterday after it said on Monday
that it planned to buy Advanced Network and Services, ANS,
a major architect of the Internet.
The acquisition is part of America Online's strategy
to expand its access to the Internet, the global web of computer networks.
What do you think? What do you think that's going to mean?
Having America Online potentially owning a major part of the backbone of the Internet?
It's too early to say what it's going to amount to,
but it could be something really kind of bad.
What do you think?
And now for the scandal.
This made the front page of The Independent,
which in case you don't know,
The Independent is one of the major dailies coming out of London.
And that's where this story is centered.
Now, it didn't just make the front page of the paper.
It made the front few pages of the paper.
That's how big.
It was headquartered, headline, sub-headline, the BT Hacker Scandal.
You know, it's kind of like when we go to war with somebody.
It's the Gulf War, page one, page two, page three.
Well, this is the BT Hacker Scandal.
And it's really quite a story.
It appeared last Thursday, Thursday, November 24th.
And I have yet to see anything about it in this country in our newspapers here.
Some of the country's most sensitive intelligence networks,
and of course that's not our country, that's their country,
have been penetrated by a computer hacker
who broke into British Telecom's main database
in one of the most serious breaches of national security in recent years.
Telephone numbers and addresses for MI6, MI5.
By the way, MI is military intelligence.
Military intelligence 6 is for external military intelligence,
you know, spies and things like that.
MI5, military intelligence 5, is for internal,
you know, like FBI bugging of headquarters of weird political parties and things like that.
Anyway, telephone numbers and addresses for MI6, MI5,
many secret Ministry of Defense installations
and other very sensitive information
were copied from the computer by the hacker
without any special technical expertise.
Wow.
He's still called a hacker even without any technical expertise.
That's kind of interesting.
The material was then sent on to the Internet,
which, in case you don't know, is a global network of computers
to which any one of 35 million users could potentially have access.
Thousands of pages of highly confidential BT records
were sent across the Internet to a young Scottish journalist,
Steve Fleming, in July.
Now, Mr. Fleming doesn't know the identity of his informant.
The hacker was also able to retrieve, undetected by BT,
records of the top secret government communications center,
which is also known as Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, in Cheltenham.
Other information included home addresses of senior military personnel,
details of phone installations for the secret U.S. communications station
at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire,
information about the bunker in Wiltshire,
where the government would go in the event of a nuclear war,
and telephone installations on Downing Street and in Buckingham Palace.
Imagine your worst possible nightmare if you worked for the British government.
Just about everything was revealed here.
The data gives the location of a number of intelligence service buildings in London.
Some of these are clumsily disguised on BT records.
For instance, one MI5 location is described as shoe shops,
and another as textile warehouse.
Various MI6 locations are also identified.
Its training establishment, the School for Spies,
sits next to a pub in a nondescript building on a busy street in South London.
The independent has been able to verify the authenticity of the information,
which runs to hundreds of thousands of words and numbers,
and appears as internal BT records taken straight off the computer.
The hacker would not have been able to alter the records, simply to read them.
It is thought he was able to access the material with astonishing ease.
Secure passwords giving access to the system were left lying around BT computer offices.
Mr. Fleming, the Scottish journalist, verified that this was possible
by working on a short-term contract for BT through an employment agency
and gaining access to the computer.
In fact, this journalist actually went so far as to get a job himself with BT
to verify that part of the story, and he was able to find the exact same information
that the anonymous hacker was able to get.
One of Britain's leading computer security experts, Ian James,
who was for ten years a senior officer in the Fraud Squad,
the Fraud Squad, wow,
and now gives advice to some of Britain's biggest companies,
said last week,
if you are telling me that that computer has been hacked into,
it is the most serious breach of security I have ever heard of.
There is no way that sort of information should get out.
No computer that contains such sensitive information has ever been hacked in the UK
on such a scale before, according to Mr. James.
It's not known if the BT hacker sent the information he collected to anybody
other than Mr. Fleming.
He stopped communicating with Mr. Fleming in August,
and it is not known if he remains active, or even alive.
It is also apparent that some of the numbers billed to the intelligence services
are, in fact, operated by apparently private businesses.
Two numbers chosen at random were answered with company names.
It also appears, or it emerged,
that the MI5 phone bills are being paid not by the Home Office,
as they're supposed to be, but by the Ministry of Defense.
Interesting.
Other information taken from the computer includes the location of missile bases
and military command and control centers in the UK,
the private line numbers of John Major and his wife Norma at Downing Street,
and private lines for Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace.
Fun for everybody.
It would be extremely difficult to tap any of the unlisted lines
identified in the documents.
However, telecommunications specialists have confirmed that it is possible,
if the identity of a telephone exchange is known,
to eavesdrop undetected on a telephone line by hacking into BT's fault detection system.
Most of the telephone numbers are classified and unlisted,
but, of course, I didn't really do them much good now, did I?
The hacker systematically exploited lax security precautions on the BT system
over several weeks to gather a wide range of information.
It is understood that he obtained access to the computer
while working as a temporary employee with BT.
He was given passwords by permanent members of staff
and discovered that these passwords gave them access
to the full range of information on the computer.
The computer database, known as the Customer Services System,
was designed by the American company Cincinnati Bell.
It is supposed to contain internal safeguards against unlawful hacking.
BT has previously maintained that the computer is carefully protected
from this kind of abuse and that only authorized personnel
are given access to sensitive information.
This is an amazing story, and we will be in touch with some of the people
that played a part in it, whether they be journalists, hackers, what have you.
This is something that I think is kind of like a model hacker story.
This is what hackers are all about, discovering things like this
and letting the right people know about it, going to a newspaper
and actually having a story like this printed really embarrasses the hell
out of the people in charge, but they deserve it.
I mean, can anybody deny that they deserve to be embarrassed
in a situation like this?
Telephone directories for MI5, MI6, the government's top secret eavesdropping center,
GCHQ, among the most sensitive numbers.
The hacker also found information on secret United States military listening posts
in the United Kingdom.
MI5's telephone network has its center on the 17th floor of Euston Tower
in central London.
In the BT documents, this is identified as the base of MI5's communications manager.
The billing lists dozens of lines run from the tower,
and the network extends across the country.
All the telephone bills charged to MI5, which is attached to the Home Office
and for which the Home Secretary is answerable to Parliament,
are paid by the Ministry of Defense.
Now, that's obviously something that's not supposed to be happening,
and that in itself is bound to result in a major scandal
that the Ministry of Defense is paying their phone bills.
Many of the numbers listed appear to belong to external companies.
As we mentioned before, the Independent called a few numbers at random,
which were answered as private businesses.
Many others are believed to belong to similar front companies.
Apart from giving information about active telephone numbers,
the bills also detail the kinds of telecommunications equipment
and the exchanges from which the telephones are run.
This would enable experienced hackers to access the line and listen to conversations.
The telephone bills reveal the location of a number of security service buildings
in London which had not previously been identified.
It is not just the telecommunications network of MI5 that has been compromised.
Confidential details concerning both the Secret Intelligence Service,
known as MI6, and GCHQ have also been taken from the BT computer.
MI6 communications centers, and there are dozens in central London,
are listed as government communications bureaus in the records.
Unlike MI5, it appears that MI6 has its own telephone budget,
and it pays its own bills.
Many numbers are identified and addresses supplied.
Some go into the new MI6 headquarters building at 85 Albert Embankment,
but many do not.
The records appear to identify MI6 locations outside this building.
MI6 is also paying for a number of telephones in a busy street in south London
which has been identified as the spy training center.
What is thought to have been MI6's former City of London office
is in an office block in the Square Mile.
Some of the telephone numbers, such as those listed under MI5,
appear to be used by private companies.
As far as GCHQ, it gives computer access numbers
as well as classified telephone numbers within the organization.
It also provides the location of key transmission facilities
and identifies exchanges used.
The records on GCHQ include conversations between BT customer services staff
and Cheltenham staff in which they argue about the size of the telephone tariff.
BT supplies equipment to the U.S. Department of Defense listening station
at Menwith Hill on the North Yorkshire Moors,
which is the largest American communications base in Europe.
And it is said to be able to listen to all transatlantic telephone fax
and data transmissions from Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean.
There are numbers for the site's computer rooms, even for voicemail messages,
which would enable hackers to listen to messages left for staff.
Locations of secret missile and radar stations,
military communications centers, and not only that,
the home addresses of senior officers, all of whom could be terrorist targets.
It just goes on and on.
There's basically about four pages of stories about this.
There's an article going into detail about how No. 10 Downing Street
and Buckingham Palace are going to have to change all their telephone numbers.
All their telephone numbers will have to be changed
because the hacker was able to get full details of numbers, addresses,
and all kinds of equipment that they're renting.
The hacker also accessed numbers belonging to government departments,
including the Department of the Environment and the Home Office,
prison telephone numbers, information relating to a prison service computer system,
all of which has gone out over the Internet.
Now, we have fiber-optic. Are you there?
Yes, I am.
What are you doing on the phone again? Are you back in prison?
No.
What's going on? Why aren't you here live?
I'm at a special presentation at TS-122 in the East Village
called the Virtual Culture Series.
Well, I guess that's a good excuse then for not being here live.
But you've heard about this story.
Yeah, I have. I'm pretty shocked by the whole thing.
It's incredible.
What I think is really amazing is the fact that no one has heard anything about this in this country.
At least I haven't seen anything. Maybe I'm just out of it.
But I haven't seen major stories about this particular item that happened.
But it strikes me that what you went to prison for for ten months
is surprisingly similar to the kinds of things that this hacker has done.
And I was just thinking to myself,
would we be better served if they got to this hacker and sent him to prison for ten months
and left all those gaping security holes there?
Or are we better off now that this has been revealed?
And, yeah, a lot of high-level people are embarrassed.
I think he's done them a tremendous service.
Imagine if this information had gotten into the hands of some organization with an agenda of sorts.
And to think that all someone had to do was get a temp job at British Telecom,
there wasn't any technical know-how used or anything like that.
He simply got the job and looked it up himself.
And to verify that, the journalist actually...
Well, he got the job himself.
Now, listen to this.
Okay, he got the information from the hacker first.
And he decided to try to find out if this was actually as easy as he said it was.
So what he did was he applied for a job at a British Telecom temp.
He applied to an employment agency in the late summer for a job involving computers at BT.
Forty-eight hours later, he says, I was offered a temporary position.
I was given a security pass into the BT offices and taken upstairs to a terminal.
I was worried that they would find out and I would be discovered trying to view the information.
But to my amazement, I found that as the source had described, passwords were openly distributed.
I sat down at the terminal, and having been given a series of passwords, I gained access to the computer.
I viewed some of the same information I had received over the Internet.
It was like being in a film with some of the country's most secret information opening up before my eyes.
And he left BT after only three days without accepting any payment.
He just kind of ran out of there and started investigating this story.
But that is an incredible story that something like this could actually happen.
And of course, they say, you know, Cincinnati Bell designed this system.
And they say that the system handbook, according to them, states that there are security systems designed to prevent unauthorized access to forbidden areas.
Now, Fiber, what do you think that means?
Well, it sounds like a really, really simple database software package.
Just the only thing that makes it different is that Cincinnati Bell designed it,
which people should bear in mind is not part of the original Bell system and is not part of any of the seven regional Bell companies.
That is true.
Yeah, this is completely independent inside of Ohio.
And it's just ironic that obviously I can't speak on behalf of the software,
but the idea that I got from reading the report was that while these mechanisms might be available,
British Telecom simply didn't want to have to deal with them and just gave out the same system-wide access to everyone.
The system is called the Customer Services System, known as CSS.
That's what the British Telecom computer is named.
Have you ever heard of that, Mark?
By name, no. I can't say I have.
According to this newspaper, finding information on CSS once online is easy.
Simple commands give access to the national system.
If one searches for the word government, among the items retrieved is Government Communications Bureau,
which is the BT billing name for MI6.
Incredibly easy.
And you have to wonder if this has been done before and not revealed to the press.
What do you think the people in the government over there are going to do if they ever find this hacker?
I suspect they just might kill him.
Yeah, I'm wondering about that.
I mean, this guy has probably made some pretty high-level enemies,
but at the same time, imagine if someone else had gotten to this before he did.
And, you know, this is kind of what hackers should be doing,
discovering things like this and revealing it to the right people when they do.
But it's kind of hard to encourage people to do that when,
if they're even caught attempting something like that, they're sent to prison.
But, you know, imagine...
Well, I just hope that they don't find him.
Yeah.
Imagine what happens, though, if people are too scared to do this kind of thing
and only the people that have intent do this kind of thing.
I don't know.
Okay, one other update.
You might have seen something about this in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.
There's a group going around.
Some computer hackers have infiltrated General Electric computers connected to the Internet,
according to the local NBC TV station here in New York,
owned by General Electric, which is Channel 4, of course.
The computer breach, which was confirmed by a GE spokeswoman,
gave the hackers access to research and proprietary information on GE computers in two cities.
The intruders who managed to penetrate robust security barriers, known as firewalls,
also looked at files pertaining to NBC.
Would you say that's an accurate description of a firewall, robust security barrier?
I guess in really, really simple terms, that about sums it up.
I don't know. I think it instills some false confidence.
Yeah, this is true.
The hackers also obtained the passwords of workers who were using General Electric computers
to connect to more than a dozen other Internet computers,
including at least one other company and several universities, according to the broadcast.
The GE spokeswoman said she didn't know details about the computer break-in, but added,
We just know that the system was compromised.
She confirmed that after the breach was detected more than a week ago,
GE pulled its computers off the Internet and revamped its security measures.
GE reinstated its Internet connection Friday night.
GE, like many companies, has stepped up its efforts to make use of the global network
to take part in the burgeoning electronic marketplace.
Last month, the company publicized an informational resource sponsored by its plastics division,
supplying Internet users with pricing and product information.
The break-in, however, underscores the potential vulnerabilities of connecting to the Internet,
which roughly 25,000 companies have registered to use.
Now, they say that this is an apparently separate incident that happened last week
of an unauthorized user breaking into pipeline services here in New York,
forcing the service to take its computers offline for five to six hours.
System administrators said they caught the intruder in progress
and stopped him from causing major damage, which they believe he intended.
Pipeline administrators didn't stop the culprit, however,
before he had a chance to post a message on one of the Internet's many electronic bulletin boards.
The message, signed by a group of hackers identifying themselves as the Internet Liberation Front,
warned corporate America against commercializing the Internet into a cesspool of greed.
The message also maintained that the hackers could break into any computer connected to the network.
According to James Gleick, who founded the pipeline service, he said,
it's pure malicious vandalism.
This is just self-indulgent, self-diluting cover for the same kind of impulse
that leads vandals to snap antennas off cars.
Okay, we happen to have the message that they sent out.
This message came from root at pipeline.com
and obviously was not intended to come from that particular address.
Greetings from the Internet Liberation Front.
Once upon a time, there was a wide area network called the Internet.
A network unscathed by capitalistic Fortune 500 companies and the like.
Then, someone decided to deregulate the Internet
and hand it over to the big boys in the telecommunications industry.
Big boys like SprintNet, MCI, AT&T, and the like.
Now, we all know how this story ends.
Capitalist pig corporation takes control of a good thing,
and in the ever-so-important money-making general scheme of things,
the good thing turns into another overflowing cesspool of greed.
So, we got pissed.
The ILF is a small underground organization of computer security experts.
We are capable of penetrating virtually any network linked to the Internet.
Any network.
So, read this very carefully.
The ILF has now declared war on any company suspected of contributing
to the final demise of the Internet.
If you fit into any of the above-mentioned categories I've discussed,
fear us.
Better yet, take an axe to your petty blank firewall machine before we do.
Just a friendly warning, corporate America.
We have already stolen your proprietary source code.
We have already pillaged your million-dollar research data.
And if you would like to avoid financial ruin,
then heed our warning and get the blank out of Dodge.
Happy Thanksgiving Day, turkeys.
And they post their PGP key there.
What do you think of that, Fiber?
Before I say anything, I want you to know that you're breaking up.
I think something's wrong with the telephone there.
Well, that wouldn't be the first time.
Maybe you should call back in one line below what you called in on.
Want to try that?
Well, there's some people waiting for the payphone.
I'm sure that sounds familiar.
Well, they must know you're on the radio, right?
No, I didn't announce it to anybody.
Maybe you should tell them that because there's other payphones in New York they can use.
Well, why don't we stay on this phone just for now?
Okay, I don't want to sound overly rude here, but this is not a prison situation.
People can use any payphone in this, you know.
Yeah, this is true.
Your opinion is important here.
So, you've read this before.
I showed it to you earlier.
So, what do you think of it?
I can't say I agree with their actions, but I can certainly relate to their motivation.
Well, with respect to what we read before about ANS being bought up by America Online,
do you see that as another step towards the over-commercialization?
It certainly sounds like it.
I mean, I'm not all too thrilled to hear that happen.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds pretty ominous.
Every week we seem to be taking some more steps away from what the Internet was when it first started
and towards more control, more rules, more charges.
Yeah, a lot of people are reacting to this in a negative way.
I can certainly understand why.
Of course, doing malicious things is certainly not going to help the cause any,
but by the same token, standing back and doing nothing is certainly not going to help anything.
So, we have to take a stand in some way.
The question is, what's the best way to do that?
The whole thing really reminds me of something from history, from the 19th century.
I mean, in some ways, it's probably how Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull might have felt
when all these rebel factions of Native Americans were banding together
and just doing really rowdy and destructive things
simply because they were lashing out at anybody who was literally on their turf.
And they didn't want this domestication and settling and dividing up of their turf.
And it seems like the same thing.
Well, does anybody really have the right to call the Internet their turf, though?
Apparently, these companies think they do.
I can't say that lashing out in a destructive way is the answer,
but I don't know what else to do about it.
I mean, it seems like it's happening,
that the people with all the money are the ones that are going to win in the end.
That's how it seems.
That's how it's been in the past.
But the Internet has always been different in many ways.
It's brought people together in ways that have never been accomplished before
in the history of mankind.
So maybe the same rules won't necessarily play out in this case.
Let's hope not.
We've got the network.
We've got millions of people that are able to communicate with each other.
We've got the support.
So that should count for something.
That should be able to keep people from being victimized yet again.
We're going to take some phone calls.
212-279-3400.
Are you able to stay on?
Yeah.
In fact, now the people that were waiting left.
Why don't you call me back?
Okay.
I believe the last four digits of your phone number are 9885, right?
That's correct.
Okay.
I know the first three, so I'll call you right back.
Okay.
All right.
Let's call him back on a better line.
Got a dial tone here?
Oh, you know what?
I don't have a means of dialing yet.
Hang on.
I have to do a special technical trick here, which is best left unsaid.
Okay.
We have that.
And now we have a line.
That's...
This should be the Fiber Hotline.
I sure hope I got that number right.
Hello?
Ah, good.
Okay.
Let's wait for a second.
Okay.
Here's something else that you might find interesting before we take some phone calls.
This is...
I shocked people a few weeks ago by actually complimenting 9X on their voice dialing service,
which I believe I mentioned to you how it works.
Yeah.
Yeah, you did.
In fact, you demonstrated it for me while I was away.
I'm glad I was able to do that.
That was a bit tricky doing that, but we managed to do it.
Well, in addition to that, 9X appears to be taking some very positive steps.
If they actually succeed in eliminating the touchtone fee this January, that will certainly be a positive step.
But this is something that I think is even more positive.
And on this show, we said that they were capable of doing it over and over again.
And, you know, I almost think that they listen and that the people who are listening to us now contact 9X
and are responsible for some of these changes.
Listen to this.
As we've previously mentioned, there are two services 9X makes available
to prevent your number from being displayed on a caller ID device.
Beginning December 15th, these services will also prevent your call from being returned.
So you will be able to block star 69.
What do you think of that?
That's a step in the right direction.
It certainly is.
So if you decide to have all call restrict, not only will your number not show up on caller ID,
they will not be able to star 69 you back.
I think that's just great.
That's what we've been asking for from the beginning.
We were told that it was impossible.
They couldn't do that.
We proved that it was possible because there were certain companies where that was true.
Now, that's one thing.
You know what the second thing is?
Remember we were complaining about this, how when you dial star 67,
you don't know if you're toggling it on or toggling it off?
Right.
Well, they're changing it.
Star 67 will prevent call ID and call return.
Star 82 will allow it.
Hmm.
So no more of this uncertainty.
Star 67 will turn it off.
Star 82 will turn it on.
It makes you wonder what's wrong with star 87.
I don't know.
We'll have to figure that one out ourselves.
I don't really care what they make us dial as long as they allow us to do it,
and I'm very happy to hear this.
Yeah.
That's definitely good news.
Yeah.
So that's something that all of us can celebrate.
That's beginning December 15th.
That will take effect.
All right.
So shall we take some phone calls?
Sure.
All right.
Let's do so.
Good evening.
You're on the radio.
Hi, Emmanuel.
Let me turn down my radio.
Oh, okay.
I'm calling from work, and I was using my AT&T calling card,
and you were down to just one incoming line instead of your normal five.
Yeah, those were dark days in the history of BAI.
So I was calling again and again, just hitting the pound key,
typing in the number, getting a busy signal, or getting it to ring,
and it would ring 50 times, but you wouldn't get to my call,
and I'd have to call again.
So I'm doing this, you know, for the duration of the program,
and I'm hoping to get through,
and then all of a sudden I'm entering in my calling card number,
and it says, Invalid number.
Please try again.
I'm like, What?
So I wait until the program finishes.
I call up the friendly folks at AT&T.
I speak to one operator, and I speak to another operator,
and she hooks us up to a third, and they tell me,
Well, you made 66 attempts,
and we thought it was unusual activity on your card, so we canceled it.
Well, I was trying to get through to a radio talk show.
Of course I was calling over and over again.
One of them gets very apologetic and goes,
Oh, well, I hope you were able to get through, sir.
I was like, I wasn't able to get through.
You canceled my card.
Well, we'll hook that back up.
But first they put me through a lot of more rigmarole
of telling the number that I was calling them from,
the number in Manhattan that I was attempting to call,
and then they said it would be five minutes after I hung up,
and the card would be reactivated,
and they'd give me some more leeway in the future.
So hopefully I won't be disconnected.
It's interesting, because that tells us that they keep track of the attempts,
not just the calls that are completed.
I mean, sometimes if you call overseas for extended periods of time,
they'll take note of that and cancel your calling card.
But if you just keep trying to get through to a busy signal or a continuous ring,
they actually take note.
No connects, just attempts.
That is something.
That is incredible.
And, of course, a lot of times they will cut you off themselves,
saying your party's not answering, please call again.
The company themselves, AT&T, that is cutting you off and making you redial.
If they didn't do that, then they wouldn't have this problem.
Yeah, it is.
I've been dialing through MCI just because they don't have annoying prompts
every 10 rings telling you things like that and cutting you off.
And I tend to get more rings that way.
MCI does cut you off, right?
Well, eventually I get cut off after 50 rings.
Well, you'll get cut off by our central office.
Right.
But after dialing through AT&T,
I get a whole bunch of different options that I can do to leave a message for you
for a big change.
Okay, this is another thing.
If 9X is out there listening and if the other companies are out there listening,
this is something that really annoys some of us, not very many of us,
because it doesn't apply to very many of us.
How many people out there actually have to make a phone ring a couple hundred times?
Not very many.
So it doesn't really cost the phone company anything to allow that to happen.
So why disconnect people and cause problems like this?
When you need to get through, it's probably important,
so it's best to err on the side of caution and allow it.
It's been the case for decades.
There haven't been major problems as a result of this.
I see no reason to cut people off after 20 or 30 rings.
If they need to get through to a show like this,
they should be allowed to continue trying.
One other thing, I remember the article that came out in Wired,
and I remember seeing the gentleman that wrote it at the HOPE conference.
You're talking about that awful piece that said that HOPE was rather bland
and basically just said all these negative things?
He said a lot of negative things,
and I remember speaking with him towards the end of the evening,
and he was telling me he was very upset because no one had been arrested.
That was his angle for the show,
was that covering the big bust that was going to occur,
and it didn't occur, and he didn't have a story,
so I guess that's why it was so boring for him.
Yeah, he also was vocalizing that very loudly during one of the panels.
During the cryptography panel,
he was shouting that there was not enough crime being committed,
and that's kind of interesting.
If you see the videotape, you actually get to hear that.
So it's been quite a smattering of odd reviews
and reminiscences of the show in the press.
What is this one in details about?
Details one is kind of weird.
I don't really know what to say about that.
That's just kind of strange.
Very strange view of hackers in New York and in general.
Some good pictures, though. I like the pictures.
And the nice pictures of Madonna, too.
Yeah, some of the pictures I meant.
Well, thank you for your time, Emanuel.
Okay, take care.
There's a good piece in a magazine called New Scientist,
which you can get over in England, about the HOPE conference,
which I thought was kind of humorous.
Gosh, I don't know.
There was a piece in the New York Times,
and that's pretty much it, I think, as far as press goes.
I don't know.
There are some radio pieces, too, that were okay.
All right, let's take another phone call.
Good evening. You're on.
Hello?
Go ahead.
Speak up, please.
Oh, all right.
Yeah, I have a question.
Okay.
I have a call forwarding.
Okay, you've got to speak louder.
I have call forwarding.
Yes.
And, well, I've had call forwarding, and I got it canceled.
Uh-huh.
And I sometimes get, like, phone calls from, like, other people
that are asking for, like, some other person.
Okay.
And I tried, and I have two numbers,
and I want to know if I'm getting billed for this.
Why would you think you're getting billed for it?
I don't know.
It just doesn't seem right, because, like, there's a,
let's see, there's, like, two phone numbers,
and I was thinking maybe I would be getting billed for it
since there's two phone numbers.
You have two phone numbers?
Yes.
I have two phone numbers, but, like, I did, I dialed 958,
and it said, like, the one that I have, not the call forwarding number.
Okay.
All right.
We're going to have to back up a little bit here.
You have two different phone lines, right?
No, I have one phone line.
You have one phone line?
Yes.
So do you have call forwarding on anything right now?
Yeah.
You just have a regular phone line?
Regular phone line.
So what is happening to that regular phone line?
Every once in a while I'll get calls for, like, another person,
and they're saying is such and such there,
and I ask them the number, and it's, like, a different number.
It's a totally different number.
Okay.
And what happens is the phone rings twice instead of once.
Uh-huh.
What do you mean it rings twice?
You mean two quick rings?
Hello?
Yes.
So you mean two quick rings, right?
Yes.
Okay.
That's interesting.
It's always the same wrong number.
Oh, yeah, and it's the same person, too.
Have you tried calling the number that he gives?
Yes, I have, and someone else is on the line.
Someone else picks up?
Yeah.
Is the number at all similar to yours?
Oh, it's totally different.
Totally different.
Mine is, like, the ending is 94, and this one is 23.
Is that the only difference?
Oh, no, it's, like, the whole thing is different.
The whole thing is different.
Fiber, any ideas on this?
Well, it sounds like a bit of a puzzle,
but it wouldn't have anything to do with call forwarding.
No, I don't see why that would enter into it.
Like, we've had call forwarding before.
Right.
And we stopped it.
But, like, the number that we used, the activation number,
then we typed star 72.
Right.
Yes, you dialed star 72 plus the number you're forwarding to.
Yeah, and what happened was, I guess, I don't know,
maybe somewhere on the line I got, like, another number.
Yeah, but, you see, your line would then be forwarding,
and you wouldn't be able to pick it up.
You're getting calls on that line,
so it can't possibly be the call forwarding on your line.
Yeah.
I mean, it could be a central office problem of sorts.
I've had things like that happen where people swear they dialed
a totally different number, and yet they reach me.
I mean, it could be, okay, it could be something like this.
It could be somebody who misprogrammed their speed dial
and somehow got your number in there instead.
So, every time they dial, you know, five or something,
thinking that they're calling their friend, it routes to you.
Since they're not actually physically dialing the number,
they assume they're dialing the right number.
Oh, but to dial me instead.
Yeah.
Now, next time this person calls, ask them how exactly they dial.
Did they dial using their touch-tone phone?
Did they use speed dialing?
Did they use voice dialing?
You know, there might be something weird that they're doing that's causing this.
Yeah, and I have one other question.
Yeah.
Are there any codes?
Because I've tried dialing, like, the five numbers and, like, 9947.
Uh-huh.
And you know how it says, like, your company access code
or something like that?
Is there anything you can do with that?
You're talking about the recordings you get that say you need
a carrier access code or something like that?
Yeah.
You're just accessing recordings that are being stored by the phone company.
You're not actually getting those recordings.
Oh.
Yeah, if you dial 99XX, those are just phone company test numbers.
So you can go through, and in some exchanges,
you'll find a whole lot of different recordings.
But there's really nothing you can do with those recordings per se.
You can always use carrier access codes in the format 10XXX
to route over different long-distance lines.
I mean, you do have that ability.
Oh, okay.
All right.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Okay.
Those are some interesting questions there, huh?
Yeah.
It might very well be that his line got crossed with somebody else's outside
or underground.
Yeah.
That always happens.
People are amazed how often that happens.
But you will pick up your phone, and you'll get somebody else's phone line.
But how do you know?
You know, you pick up your dial tone.
I think dial tones should be personalized.
You know, it should say, Hello, Frank.
How are you today?
Or whatever.
And, you know, you'll know then if you're getting somebody else's dial tone
because it will be greeting Bertha instead.
And then you'll realize, Hey, this isn't for me.
Right now, all dial tones sound the same.
So you pick it up, and it's somebody else's.
And, you know, you dial 900 numbers, and you don't know.
Now, the only way to tell is to dial 958, obviously,
and see what phone number comes back.
And that will tell you if you have your line or somebody else's.
If you have somebody else's, then you know there's a problem.
This happens repeatedly to people where the phone company messes something up,
and they have the wrong line coming into an apartment.
It's also very easy to do intentionally and never, ever be caught doing it.
It's that simple.
Phone lines are so easily accessible.
I know people that have phone lines for their entire apartment building
coming in through their closet.
Imagine that.
You can go into your closet, and there are phone lines there for other people.
You don't even have to leave your house.
Have you ever heard of such a thing?
Yeah, actually, I've seen that myself.
Someone that I know that lives in a rather posh apartment building
in, I believe, the Upper West Side.
But, yeah, the phone lines go throughout the building inside the closet.
Now, how many nefarious schemes do you think are going on in the city right now
with private detectives that happen to rent out apartments
that have all the phone lines for certain buildings going through them,
and they can just simply tap into whatever they choose?
You'll never know.
Okay, let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook.
Hell, Emmanuel, I'm glad I got in.
I had an interesting quote from Newsweek December 5th.
Yes?
It says,
He's concluded this is something the casual user might see once every 2,700 years.
You're talking about the Pentium chip?
Yes.
Ah, yes.
Tell us something about that.
All I saw was this quote.
It says,
Intel spokesman John Thompson announcing a circuitry error
in the company's much-vaunted Pentium computer microprocessor.
This flaw appears in all Pentium chips now on the market,
incorrectly calculating certain division problems.
Now, one has to wonder,
how did they calculate the odds of how many times this was going to happen to somebody?
Yeah, the casual user.
Did they use a Pentium chip to do that?
Yeah.
I have to wonder.
Well, you know, what do you think, Fiverr?
Do you think this is going to drive down prices of Pentiums?
Because it has a division?
Well, how bad is this division problem?
Is it, like, down to a few decimal digits, or is it completely wrong?
I don't know.
I'm going to write to Intel,
and I'm going to try to make a program for the assembly
to flaunt the error and just distribute it.
Yeah, I mean, they should advertise the error, exactly what it is,
and we'll be able to figure out how common it really is.
How did they discover it in the first place?
I have no clue.
Yeah, that's what we need to find out.
So if anyone out there is able to figure things like this out,
supposedly it's for very, very large digits.
That's what I understand.
I have one other thing to say.
Yes.
I have a cellular phone,
and I called up every once in a while
while my phone is just sitting there lying down.
It's a portable model,
and if I'm, like, quiet doing work or something, it clicks.
And that's it coming out of its, like, suspend or sleep mode
and transmitting to the cell site,
wherever the nearest one is just saying,
here, this is what I presume, here I am.
So I called up Bell Atlantic Mobile,
and I asked the lady, and I said,
can I be tracked by this?
Like, please hold on.
And then, like, I wait on hold for two hours,
well, about a half an hour.
She comes back, and she's like, yeah, I just spoke to a technician,
and that was re-registering in the system.
It's you re-registering in the system,
and technically you could be tracked.
And then I said, can I please speak with the technician
that I talked to to get this information?
And she quickly hung up on me.
That's not good.
Sir, thanks for the call.
All right.
All right, take care.
We have some updated information.
This is on the Pentium.
Claude, our studio engineer, has rushed in with an article
detailing exactly what the error is.
Now, I'm going to read what it says in front of me right here,
but I think he'll be able to explain a little better.
The problem is when you take this calculation, all right,
not just for this calculation, but this is an example.
It's imprecise rounding I think is what it is.
4,195,835 minus, and then you put all this in brackets,
4,195,835 divided by 3,145,727 times 3,145,727.
Now, Claude, you're going to explain all this to us.
What does this mean?
Well, okay, for one thing, those numbers you read,
they're only two numbers.
You can assign them to A and B and do the calculation simply yourself.
I just tried it in station on what is probably an 8286 or an 8088.
Yeah, I think that's all we have here.
We don't have any Pentium in this one.
But it came out right.
That came out right in GW Basic.
That's how I tried it.
It's apparently there's a rounding error somewhere way down the pike,
and they estimate what?
It's 61 chances in 100,000.
Well, now the correct answer to that problem is zero,
but the Pentium will tell you it's 256.
Right, and if you look at the formula, you can see that it has to equal zero.
So it's clearly a rounding error somewhere down the pike.
You see, they're only two numbers they're using.
They're both enormous numbers.
Well, they're not that big.
I mean, I thought this was just a million-something.
I thought it would be like pi to the three lines worth of pi there.
Fiber, what do you think?
Well, if there is, in fact, a problem,
it certainly wouldn't manifest itself in GW Basic.
What they're probably meaning is that if that bit of arithmetic is done
directly on the microprocessor with a really small machine language program,
that you would get the error.
They're probably talking about that there must be a problem
with the integer arithmetic unit in the Pentium.
Well, I think what I've read is it's when you're doing double precision floating point.
When you want it extra precise, that's when you get the failure.
So it's definitely floating point.
Yeah, that's where the error shows up.
That's not the first time we've had problems with a floating point unit.
You know, I've always wanted to design a calculator that just gives wrong answers.
I guess this sort of opens that question up.
You know, imagine that.
You give somebody a calculator, and, you know,
you do it with the intention of completely fouling up their business,
and it could probably have that effect very handily.
It strikes me that as software becomes more sophisticated,
you could be running through a spelling checker,
and this error could make a difference.
Lord knows.
How they make an estimate of how often it shows up,
it's in their interest to come up with a very low probability.
It makes them look less foolish.
Well, this is good.
We have an actual thing to play with here.
Now we just have to find a Pentium we can play with.
All right, thanks, Claude, for coming in.
Can I keep this, or make me a copy?
Make me a copy, thank you.
That's going to be fun.
I think Pentiums are going to come down a bit in price.
Don't be surprised if you suddenly see Pentium SXs out there.
That was how the 486 SX was born.
There were 486s where the floating-point unit didn't work properly.
I don't recall the kind of publicity that this is getting, though, for that.
All right, let's take another phone call.
We have a couple minutes left.
Good evening, you're on off the hook.
Hi, well, don't know where to start.
Hello?
How are you doing?
Yes, sorry, listening from two points there.
Well, just a minor, rather trivial correction.
Of course, the second element of the name Cincinnati Bell is bell.
They do use the bell symbol.
They were partly owned by AT&T, about 20 or 25 percent owned.
They were not one of the 20 local companies that formed the seven bells,
and thus they were not part of divestiture.
But AT&T sold off that holding later.
They have continued to use the bell symbol and so forth.
They serve that one metropolitan area lying, however, in Ohio and Kentucky
and a tiny bit into Indiana.
Same with Southern New England Tell, the Connecticut company,
and AT&T later sold off their holding of that as well.
Let's call them the 21st and 22nd local AT&T, or the two semi-AT&T companies.
Let me ask you this.
I'm talking with a 9X rep today who said that even if you use star 67,
or as it will be after December 15th, I'm sorry, the other way around,
as it will continue to be after December 15th,
if you use star 67 to block the number for an individual call
and you do not have per-line blocking, that it will still prevent call return.
Was that part of what the notice that you got said?
The notice that I got said basically that star 67 will prevent the display
from going out or from being displayed.
It will prevent call return from succeeding with you,
and star 82 will do the exact opposite.
Right.
Whether or not you have it, if you're not sure as to which way that line is.
Which I have complained to you on the show and to many people at 9X about,
and two years after it came to New York State, it was in November of 92,
it's certainly nice to see that whatever knucklehead designed it to go that way
so that if you're at somebody else's house or office,
you don't know whether you're unblocking it or blocking it.
It's long overdue.
But my question is this.
Now, each time you mentioned it a little earlier on the program,
you said that if the call is coming from a line that is per-line blocked,
in other words, where all the calls are blocked unless you unblock them,
that the call return would be defeated on any calls made as long as you left them.
Actually, haven't you just described all-call block?
Per-call block is where they are not blocked.
Per-line is the same as all-call.
Okay.
Per-line.
So my question is, if you have only per-call blocking on that line,
in other words, generally, let's say you don't block your calls
and you have to do star 67 for each call where you do want to block it,
and you do do it on a particular call,
will that also, for that one call at least, will it serve to block call return?
Yes.
It will block both display and star 69.
Right.
And not only, right, even if you're doing it just for that one call.
Right.
Right. Fine.
That's what the rep told me.
Whether you have all-call restrict or not, it'll work, star 67.
Great.
Yeah, this is really good.
It makes you think that they're actually paying attention,
which is a very healthy sign.
And plus the fact that you can block star 69 at all.
Remember they were saying that was impossible?
And that was one of our biggest gripes here.
Well, this is the first time you will have been able to.
That's right.
Right.
I mean, the toggle thing is the other good thing.
What's that?
The toggle thing.
Not the toggle thing.
Star 67 was what you dialed to go one way or another,
but now you can dial star 67 or star 82.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a voice prompt
instead of the stutter dial tone to let you know what you're doing actually.
Major improvement.
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks for the call.
Right.
I think we've got time for one more quick call.
You with us, Fiber?
Yes, I am.
Okay, let's take one more.
Good evening.
You're on.
Go ahead.
Yes, go ahead, please.
I guess I just have a little information and a quick question.
Okay.
First, the House of Windsor number, the 1-800-433-3210 number.
Yes.
At first it would list unpublished numbers,
and it would also give street addresses, apartment numbers.
I don't know if you tried it out lately.
Now it will only give the street name.
It will not give apartments.
It will not give unlisted numbers.
It just tells you if you enter a number that was unlisted,
it tells you the catalog will be mailed out,
and it won't even say the street name.
Oh, really?
Well, I didn't try that.
I do know that they stopped giving out street numbers,
but I wasn't aware that they stopped with unlisted numbers.
Yes, so it's also stopped.
And just a quick question.
I had tried to build the GTMS decoder for the IBM that was in 2600 a couple of issues ago.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Have you experienced any problems with that?
Has anyone else there built it?
I haven't tried building that myself.
I'm not aware of any problems.
Okay.
I had tried to build it.
I just had a problem.
The A drive just seems to spin continuously.
It writes the file where the numbers should be, where the logs should be.
It doesn't actually log any numbers.
What kind of computer are you using?
46.
So there's nothing atypical about your setup.
Well, I'll check into it.
I'll see if anybody else has had problems with it.
You might want to e-mail us on that.
Okay.
I was just curious if anyone else had any problems.
If there is a fix, we'll, of course, print it.
Okay.
All right.
Great.
Thank you.
Thanks for calling.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
Well, that's another example, I guess, of the House of Windsor catalog being diffused there.
You were aware of that, right, Fiber?
The House of Windsor?
You there?
Hello?
Hello?
Yeah.
You there?
Oh, sorry.
It's okay.
You weren't paying attention, were you?
Well, I heard what he was saying about the touchdown.
All right.
All right.
All right.
Well, anyway, the House of Windsor, are you familiar with House of Windsor?
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Oh, I did that, too.
Okay.
Well, yes, they appear to have mostly pulled the plug on that, which is good.
So, another example of BAI listeners, 2,600 readers, finding out about something and expressing
discontent and having it changed to what it should be.
Yeah.
So, something to keep in mind for the future of the Internet and for hacker stories like
the one we read about over in England.
I'm going to scan all the newspapers, see if they've done anything on this, and we're
going to follow this story, of course, in the weeks ahead and see if we can get a hold
of some of the players involved, because this is something that I think it defines what
hackers are all about.
It defines what too many secrets really mean.
So, we'll keep you abreast of the situation.
That's really all we can do.
Again, British hacker finds out all kinds of military secrets and leaks them to the
press, and they were all lying in wait for anybody that had access to a British telecom
computer.
Simply shocking.
Fiber, thanks for being with us, even though it is on the phone.
Well, I'll be there live next week.
Yes.
Just in case anyone's concerned, Fiber's not in trouble.
He just had a conference to attend tonight, and he wasn't able to make it in person next
week.
Of course, you'll be here live.
Yep.
All right.
So, thanks for participating.
Thanks, everybody, for calling in.
We'll see you next week on Off the Hook.
Bye.