Journalist Eutrice Leed, as well as Don Rojas, former Director of Communications for the
NAACP, and yours truly, Bernard White, at a community forum this Saturday, April 29th
at 1 p.m. at the Parkway Center, that's 391 Eastern Parkway, the corner of Bedford
Avenue in Brooklyn.
This gathering of some of this country's leading journalists and analysts will examine the
rightward drift of black journalism and the rise of the official, as well as the unofficial,
right-wing in America today.
For more information, call Area Code 212-330-8277.
That's 212-330-8277.
And it's one minute after 10 o'clock.
You're listening to radio station WBAI New York, and that means it's time for Off the Hook.
Best expect the worst I hope that's understood
But let me know
Off the Hook
And a very good evening to everybody.
This is Emanuel Goldstein. The program is Off the Hook.
I know what you're all waiting for.
It's day 33?
No, no, no, it's day 36.
That's right, it's day 36 of the quest for fiberoptic.
We already have that. The quest for ISDN that FiberOptic and myself are engaged in.
And what kind of week has it been for you, Fiber?
It was, I guess, compared to the way it was before, it was slightly eventful.
Eventful, huh?
Well, why don't you tell your story first, and then I'll tell my story, because I got some big news.
I do.
But I'm not going to spill the beans or anything like that.
You tell us what happened to you, and we'll take it from there.
As a result of some complaints with some higher-up types in Ninex,
I was called by a few Ninex people, and ultimately by someone who is a Ninex ISDN order manager,
which I didn't know such people existed, which the average person probably doesn't know either.
And she explained to me that, yeah, it's really bad the way that the whole situation is,
and that she wants to help me as best she can.
So she took down the information of the way I wanted my line set up for ISDN,
and called me back a little bit later the same day,
told me that somebody should be at my house on Friday, this Friday, to install ISDN.
And she gave me my two telephone numbers, an ISDN lingo known as your two SPIDs, S-P-I-Ds.
What does SPID mean in the first place?
SPID is your Service Profile Identification.
I feel like I've been spit upon in the last few weeks.
I don't know quite how to describe that feeling, but that's definitely what I got.
Well, in ISDN terms, it's a universal number, usually composed of your ten-digit telephone number,
area code plus seven digits, plus an extra four digits tacked on to the end, usually zeros,
for a total of fourteen, that uniquely identifies you on the ISDN network.
That's basically your ISDN phone number.
Okay, well, enough talk about this. What happened?
I was given this date, Friday, and I was given two SPIDs.
Just for fun, I called both of these telephone numbers.
You called the SPIDs?
Yeah.
Okay.
Much to my surprise, or maybe not, one of them was still in use by some gentleman
who answered the phone and sounded kind of annoyed, since I probably woke him up or something.
You're telling him that he has your SPID?
He's got something that I thought belonged to me, but maybe there was some mix-up.
Maybe they could have read a digit wrong or something.
I'm not holding it against 9X personally.
Incidentally, the other phone number was, in fact, disconnected, as it should be.
It should not be in use.
And either way, as far as I see it, if, in fact, they do get ISDN in a timely fashion,
if it's not too late for that anymore, then, however it ends up,
I don't really care what the phone numbers are, as long as I have two of them.
So I'm not holding the exact numerology against 9X.
Okay.
So now you're trying to tell me that this Friday...
This Friday there should be someone there between the hours of 8 a.m. and 12 noon.
It's just funny.
I'm not laughing at you.
I'm laughing with you, because there's such hope in your face,
and you really believe that they're going to be there between 8 and 12 noon.
Well, I know you've been through this whole thing a number of times.
Yeah.
Well, I've become, I guess, a bit of a cynic.
Yeah.
You could say that.
I just, I don't know.
Don't get your hopes up.
Well, it is day 36.
Yeah, and it'll be day 38 by the time your appointment comes around,
and I just would be very curious to see if that happens.
Okay, let me tell you my story.
Last week, as you recall, I was very optimistic.
In fact, I guess I was in the position you're in now.
I had an appointment last Friday, and this was the appointment to end all appointments,
because they had missed two before, you know, and they were very apologetic,
and they said they're going to send somebody out this Friday,
and everything will be taken care of.
Everything will be fixed.
Everything will be solved.
Everything will be working.
Well, Friday came.
Friday went.
Nobody showed up.
I could not believe it.
I was beside myself.
Imagine three appointments, and they didn't show up for any of them.
So I started making a bunch of phone calls, you know, at about 4 o'clock on Friday,
because that's when I figured, you know, they haven't shown up,
and this is when I should be getting outraged.
Problem is, I don't know if this has happened to many of the listeners,
when you get outraged on Friday afternoon, there's not a whole lot you can do,
because things start closing, people start going home for the weekend,
and it's bad, because then you have the whole weekend to sort of get through this crisis
without anybody to talk to, and, of course, you take it out on your friends
and loved ones and pets and things like that,
and you have to wait for Monday to come around,
and by that time you've sort of lost all your anger.
I was swearing that I was going to, first thing Monday morning,
call the Public Service Commission.
Of course, that's a farce because I'm never up in the morning anyway.
By the time I did get up on Monday, I made several phone calls to NYNEX.
I figured I would try and just get to the heart of the matter
and find out what was going on.
So I bypassed the representative that I've always been going through,
because I became convinced that this person did not have any connection
to anything having to do with ISDN whatsoever,
except to say that he did over the phone,
and so I called a special number that I had gotten,
an 800 number once that I had gotten from this person,
supposedly where supervisors hang out and where you can get things done,
and they said, well, we can't really help you with that,
but here's a special 654 number that you can call,
and I'm giving the exchanges of these numbers.
They don't really mean anything. 890 is where you start off.
That's where the NYNEX offices are or tend to be.
Then I called an 800 number.
Then they gave me a 654 number.
That didn't quite work out.
They gave me another 800 number.
That 800 number gave me a second 800 number,
and then after that I wound up with a 228 number.
Now, 228 was a good one because on that number I got a linesman
or someone who sounded like a linesman.
You know those crusty old guys that are bitter and have seen it all,
and they know that things aren't the way they used to be.
Back in their days, ISDN worked, that kind of thing.
Well, I called this guy, and of course he wanted something I didn't have.
He wanted the order number.
Now, the order number is the special thing that opens doors.
I didn't have that. They never gave it to me.
They gave me my two spits, which I had called,
and I got a recording saying they're not yet in service,
which is a good recording to get when you're calling a spit
that has not yet been spitted.
So anyway, I love that word.
That's got to be the word of the 90s.
So the linesman said that he could help me
only when I gave him the order number.
So now I had to go back to square one,
call the service representative,
and ask him what the order number was.
Now, of course, by the time I realized that I needed this information,
actually, no, I did catch him.
I caught him just as he was leaving.
This was about, by this time, it was about 445, 450 on Monday afternoon.
And so I called the guy, and he said that, first of all,
I only was entitled to one phone number,
and there was no way I could have two phone numbers
because I was on a 5-ESS.
Now, this is where things started getting a little crazy.
He said because I was on a 5-ESS, I could only have one.
He didn't call them spits. He called them phone numbers.
I could only have one phone number.
And then I said, well, first of all, I'm on a DMS.
I'm not on a 5-ESS.
So he looked up my records, and he said, you know, you're right.
You are on a DMS.
So therefore, you get two phone numbers.
Now, does that make any sense whatsoever?
Actually, at the bare minimum,
it's allowed for you only to have one spit on a 5-ESS at the bare minimum.
Why you'd want to, I don't know.
Well, I want to have two phone numbers for this ISDN line.
You should be able to.
In fact, in either case, whether you're on a DMS-100 or a 5-ESS,
you could have dozens of spits.
Right. That's how I figured it was.
They're known as call appearances.
Now, on a DMS-100, do I have to have two at the minimum?
You need at least two, yeah.
Why is that?
It's some kind of software limit.
It's just the way that the software engineers apparently program the ISDN implementation.
Does it mean that a 5-ESS is more powerful than a DMS?
No, not at all.
It's just, I mean, it's a different interpretation of the same thing.
I mean, on a technical level, it doesn't really matter.
I see.
Well, in any event, I talked to him, and eventually I got the two spits,
and I got the order number.
And so I called back the crusty old guy, the 228 number,
and he wasn't there.
He had left by that time.
It was then something like 4.50 or 4.55.
So he was gone, and he was being transferred over to voicemail.
I was too late.
First thing Tuesday, I called the guy again.
I said, hey, I got an order number.
Gave him the order number, and he tapped into his computer,
and he said, you know, I don't know where this has been for the last few weeks,
but this is the first I'm seeing of it.
It's been stuck someplace in our computer system,
and this is the first I'm seeing of it.
He was very apologetic, and he said he would definitely send somebody over the next day,
which was today.
Now, when a linesman tells you this, you know it's going to happen.
You just do because they have the authority to make it happen.
They have that power.
They are the phone company.
They are the dial tone and the busy signal and the ring all wrapped up in one.
So I knew that that was going to happen.
By the way, I had some funny things happen on the way to getting this guy.
I was talking to one person in some office someplace upstate, and she transferred me.
I had told my whole story, and she said, okay, I can transfer you to somebody that will help you.
So she transferred me, and the person picks up, and I tell the whole story again.
Then she said, you know, that sounds familiar.
I think I transferred you to myself.
It took her the whole story to realize that I was the same person again.
So I totally wasted my time, and that's when she realized that the other person wasn't in that day.
So, you know, little fun things like that were happening.
So today came around, and I woke up especially early.
You know, it's interesting.
You can wake yourself up.
I've got this internal clock thing going where I can wake myself up on demand knowing that something's about to happen.
And I woke up, and sure enough, 10 minutes later, the guy shows up, came by.
And if I hadn't woken up in time, of course, he wouldn't have stayed.
So he came by, and, you know, the quote was great, what he said.
He said, well, this ISDN stuff is kind of new, so please bear with me.
So I said, look, I'm happy to bear with you as long as you're here.
So please do whatever is necessary.
You know, whatever you need is at your disposal.
And so he traipsed around looking for poles and wires and things like that.
And about an hour or so later, he came back and said, well, I've got good news and I've got bad news.
The good news is that the wire to your house is good.
The bad news is that the wire from the main junction area to your pole is full.
There are no cable pairs.
There's no room, and we have to call construction now, have them come out,
and put more wiring in.
He said that should take about a day or so.
That's what he said.
I don't know if it's going to take a day or so, but now it's been thrown into another department.
So I've gotten to the point where I've gotten a visit.
I've gotten someone to come over and actually communicate face-to-face.
Now we have another department.
It's gone from the product managers to the customer service reps to the engineering department,
and now over to construction.
So now construction is going to have to run more wiring to accommodate me.
Apparently they've used every single phone line that there is,
so they have to run a whole new cable just for me.
And when they do that, they can actually install the thing.
That's what they say.
I'm told by the end of the week or the beginning of next week, this should all be finished.
Do you think I'm being too optimistic?
Well...
All right, all right.
That withering look says it all.
We'll see what happens.
Now Dave was on last week updating us.
He was going to the real higher-ups in 9X.
Well, Dave, why don't you tell us what happened this week?
Well, last week I said that I was going to talk to the president's office.
So Thursday morning...
You said you were going to talk to the president.
Right.
Did you talk to the president?
I didn't get a chance to talk to the president.
You were too busy to talk to the president, right?
Yeah.
Okay, all right.
So I spoke to someone in his office, told them my story of woe about trying to get ISDN,
and after about five minutes, I was put directly in touch with the...
I believe his title is the managing director of product development for ISDN.
I found out to my shock and surprise that there wasn't a vacuum between the product manager level
and then the president of 9X, that there actually were executives in charge of ISDN looking over this process.
So when I started telling them all these stories about how I would ask basic questions of the entry-level,
first-tier representatives and get, like, seven different answers from six different people to the same question,
they got really upset because they said that all the information I was asking
should be at the fingertips on their computer screens.
When I finally got to speak to the managing director,
he was very apologetic for everything that happened to me,
and in the first three and a half, four weeks, I had to track down people in ISDN division.
I am now getting, on average, anywhere from four to six phone calls a day from the 9X ISDN division.
Now, I live in Queens.
I'm getting phone calls from business and residential representatives in Manhattan,
business and residential representatives in Long Island.
Don't tell me, Valhalla.
You getting calls from Valhalla in New York?
Not yet.
Oh, that's where the headquarters, some bizarre place up there.
Well, I mean, that's where I'm calling in to the executives in the 914 area to get all the support.
But these are analog calls you're getting.
You're not getting any digital calls, are you?
No digital calls yet.
Okay.
But one of the things I did find out that was in my exchange area in Forest Hills that, you know,
nothing is set up there for packets because I want to get, you know, packets with ISDN.
And what I got now was a promise from the higher-ups in 9X that they will put in high-speed packet in my CO.
They'll enable that switch, even though I'm probably the only one in the Forest Hills area who's requesting it
because I couldn't believe just how apologetic they were.
I mean, they were seriously, these executives were really upset at the fact that people were not being able to get ISDN
and get their answers to their questions.
So, now, how close would you say you are?
Do you think you're going to have ISDN in another week, do you think?
I'm hoping within a week and a half I'll have high speed on the B channel and, you know,
one of the nice things about this is I'm now getting almost any questions I have about ISDN and about X25 are being answered.
Anything I want now from 9X, I mean, today at home a package was delivered fully explaining X25, all the pricings, all the tariffs.
They have that penny a minute thing in there?
Yes, they do.
And now, whenever I have any questions, I now know who to call.
I have one person now who said, you know, don't speak to any other first-year representative.
I am now your personal ISDN maintainer.
Well, that's just great.
I will, you know, I will take care of everything for you.
Just don't, you know, talk to anybody else.
If anyone speaks to you, refer them to me.
And this was the person that was amazed that they couldn't give you the information?
Well, actually, no, this was the one person leveled down.
Okay.
And he was, this gentleman now is the person I call to get whatever I need, which is nice,
but I think this is totally wasteful, the fact that I would have to go through all these channels to get what should be a normal procedure.
I understand that out in California Pac Bell is doing a decent job of this.
And it's funny that like in Mac User Magazine and in Interactive Age and Interactive Week,
9X is being lumped together with Pac Bell saying these are two leaders in the business of ISDN.
I'm like, ooh.
Well, I don't know who they're giving ISDN to, but it's not 9X customers.
Okay, well, that's the story of three people looking for ISDN and hopefully one day finding it.
Tune in again next week when, if nothing changes, we'll be up to day 43.
We're in our second month of looking for ISDN telephone service.
Unbelievable.
All right, last week we started a project, which we finished shortly after the program was over.
But we decided to be good sports and start over again this week.
We were talking about the ridiculousness with which the federal government is going after people for such things as possession of red boxes.
Actually, local authorities, too.
What a red box is basically is, well, a red box can be one of many things.
It can be a touch-tone dialer.
It can be a Hallmark card.
It can be a tape recorder.
It can be almost anything that can simply play back a couple of tones, actually one tone five times.
It's that tone you hear when you put a quarter in a pay phone.
Funny thing is that all you have to do is play that tone into many pay phones,
and the phone company thinks that you've actually put a quarter in.
It's a stupid system.
It's a primitive system.
It's something that the phone companies have not taken the time to fix.
And now they're acting all surprised that people all over the country are taking advantage of this wide-open hole.
Now, the problem is not the tones, per se.
The problem is the technology.
The technology is faulty.
Fix the technology.
Also, fix the pricing scheme while you're at it, and maybe these things won't happen.
So, to demonstrate just how easy it is, we have a RadioShack dialer, which anybody can buy.
Of course, now you're subject to interrogation when you go into RadioShack to buy this.
It's basically the device you use to make phone calls on those, say, pay phones that have been converted to rotary,
on those phones that don't yet have touch-tone service, even though there aren't very many of those.
It's a basic touch-tone pad, but there's something amazing about it.
You can simply solder a couple of parts, replace a crystal or two, and all of a sudden, you have a totally different device.
And people all over the country have been doing this for years.
It's nothing new.
Okay, we've got one now.
That's the sound it makes when you drop it on the table.
Handing it to a technical person now.
Whoops.
I didn't break it, did I?
And they are working on it, turning it into a red box, and we'll see what happens, see how long that takes.
Now, this is not a race, but you will be judged on time.
Okay.
Now, let's talk about the Oklahoma City situation, because that has basically resulted in a couple of very disturbing things.
The Clinton administration, according to Monday's New York Times, Monday, April 12th, banner headline,
Clinton seeks broad powers in battle against terrorism.
Liberties groups worry about overreaction to bombing attack.
Now, let me read one paragraph here.
The White House said Mr. Clinton would seek new authority for federal agents to monitor the telephone calls
and check the credit, hotel, and travel records of suspected terrorists.
He also wants financing to put into effect legislation that requires telephone companies to assure easy access for court-ordered wiretaps
and new digital computer lines, which are harder to monitor than old-fashioned telephone lines.
In other words, the federal government is doing exactly what the American people were advised not to do, and that is panic.
Basically, President Clinton said shortly after the bombing that we must not let this make us afraid.
He would not. He would personally see to it that Americans were not afraid, were not held hostage.
Words to that effect, you know, grandiose speech, which is what you expect from a leader after something like that happens.
All fine and good.
So how come this kind of thing is being said?
We're going to have to curtail freedoms.
We're going to have to figure out ways to tap everybody's phone lines and monitor speech and computers and things like that.
It sounds to me like a panic situation.
That's a best-case scenario.
Either that or it's simply a way of using an unfortunate situation for political advantage.
I don't know which to believe here.
I'm kind of dismayed at how quickly they moved to do something that I think is political in nature,
to get certain legislation like the Clipper chip and other monitoring things that allow federal authorities to spy on U.S. citizens in increasing numbers.
It happened a bit fast, you know, less than a week, and already this legislation is being called for.
It seems to me that it's inappropriate.
It's not necessary.
I mean, if we had had all this technology in place, you still would not have been able to capture the person that set that bomb.
There is no way.
The only way you could have caught that person was if you already knew about him.
And since nobody knew about him, unless everybody in the United States is being monitored 24 hours a day and this person was talking about it, how would they have ever found out?
What are you going to do?
Outlaw fertilizer?
Are you going to outlaw trucks?
It's insane.
You cannot say that the problem is things like freedom of speech on telephones, things like the Internet.
There's an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
White supremacists recruit and spread ideas on the Internet.
There was an article in yesterday's Newsday.
Hate is just a keystroke away.
You know, yeah, it's on the Internet.
You can find this stuff on the Internet.
Big deal.
You can find anything on the Internet.
You can find it on paper someplace.
You don't outlaw ink.
You don't outlaw paper.
You don't make it illegal to know how to read.
But that's basically what people seem to be seeing the whole digital age as being.
Because people are using tools to communicate ideas that may not be healthy.
That makes the medium itself unhealthy.
It's not the right approach.
It's only going to hurt all of us in the end.
And it's a very unfortunate thing.
Do you have a take on this, Weiber?
Actually, I was approached by someone from the BBC who informed me that they were doing a story about Oklahoma City.
And I said, that's good.
And they said that they were curious to know if I could tell them where I could actually
find information about making bombs on Usenet.
And I told them that I wasn't exactly sure myself, since I wasn't in the habit of building bombs.
And regretfully, I informed them that I couldn't help them.
And frankly, I didn't know anyone who could, since I don't hang around with people that build bombs either.
So that was that.
Could you not find this information in a library too?
Sure, I suppose you could.
You could find all kinds of detailed diagrams about building atomic bombs.
I wouldn't be surprised.
The internet is simply a way of spreading information.
And this is information that is being spread.
But monitoring the internet...
Monitoring is one thing, but controlling it.
And watching people that read certain things or say certain things or talk to certain people.
It creates a very unhealthy environment.
While they're at it, they should outlaw MacGyver.
He made bombs out of worse things than fertilizer.
Yeah, I'm sure he did.
Anyway, we'd like to hear everybody's thoughts on these matters and other matters too.
Our phone number is 212-279-3400.
Give us a call.
How's the red box going over there?
Almost done?
Unfortunately, some of the screws are stripped, so that's good.
Some of the screws are stripped.
Well, that's the kind of hurdle you have to anticipate here.
But no problems with the actual circuitry, just some of the screws.
We're just trying to get the housing closed.
The actual mechanism is working.
We just want to make it look nice.
I can understand that.
Here's a couple of news items from recent papers.
Discover, the credit card that gives customers money back on their purchases,
may have to issue new cards to every customer
and spend millions of dollars on computer upgrades
because fraud is gnawing away at its profits.
Yeah.
Discover, which is a unit of Dean Witter, Discover and Company,
said rising fraud from credit card counterfeiters and theft
had contributed to a rise of 31% in miscellaneous expenses
to $91.1 million in the first three months of the year.
Sounds like they've got a problem.
In fact, that's exactly what this guy said.
They have a counterfeit problem, said Thomas Facciola,
an analyst for Salomon Brothers, Inc.
Credit card fraud has a history of getting way out of control
because there is nothing stopping counterfeiters
from turning out hundreds of false cards
that can cause spending and potential losses
for credit card issuers to surge.
He estimated Discover would have to spend $20 million to $30 million
to issue new cards to its 32.9 million accounts
if it chose to eliminate the plastic that was being copied.
Company officials declined to discuss their plans
or specify the amount that they were losing from fraud.
I'm not quite sure what makes Discover different from the other credit cards.
It looks the same, but apparently that plastic is easy to mimic.
Go figure that one.
I had an interesting experience today on a pay telephone.
Actually, I was talking to somebody,
and there was a phone next to me,
and the woman next to me was loudly complaining.
I could hear her saying,
Look, I'm trying to get Sprint. Why do I keep getting you guys?
What's going on here? I'm dialing 103330,
and I expect to get a Sprint operator.
Now, I was amazed to hear that kind of technical expertise
because not a lot of people know to dial 103330 to get a Sprint operator,
but that's correct. That's what the numbers are.
So after she stormed off, I decided to check this out myself,
and I picked up the phone, and I dialed 103330,
and guess what I got? MCI.
I got MCI on Sprint's carrier access code.
I said, That's weird.
So then I dialed 103330, or 102220, rather, which is MCIs.
Maybe it got flipped or something, and I'd get Sprint on them,
but no, MCI was there, too.
So then I dialed 10444, which is AllNet.
MCI again.
10288, AT&T. I got MCI again.
It was the most incredible thing.
Then I started dialing just plain zero plus
to see if, per chance, the carrier of this pay phone was set to MCI.
What do you think I got?
MCI.
No, I got Telecom USA.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
I don't know what's going on here. This is crazy.
You cannot get an AT&T operator or a Sprint operator or anything
on that particular phone.
I don't know if it's that phone or what.
Did you try 1010333?
I did.
I did try that.
Really?
I tried the new 7-digit carrier access codes, yes.
1010333.
Oh, I dialed all that,
and I just got a very angry recording saying,
don't dial that.
So, I don't know.
Is it possible to program a central office
so all the carrier access codes...
Was it a real pay phone?
It was a real pay phone.
A real 9X pay phone.
Yeah.
So, do you think it was something system-wide
in the entire central office
or just affecting that pay phone?
It's hard to say.
I mean, the way routes are set up in a switch,
it tends to be for, in general,
and not specifically for pay phones.
It's not like you could say,
okay, on all calls from a pay phone, send to MCI.
That's kind of peculiar.
Yeah, it is.
I intend to wander around that town a little more
and check out the other pay phones
and see if it's happening to all of them.
Yeah.
It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.
I'm sure it's not happening to residents,
so we'd hear more about it.
Do you know what type of switch it was on?
Yes.
I believe it's a 5ESS.
Really?
Yeah.
It's peculiar.
It is.
Very.
But then again, it might be a DMS.
I can find out very quickly.
So, that's the story there.
I've got a couple other things,
but let's take some phone calls first.
212-279-3400
and see what's going on in the world.
We'll have our working red box real soon, I'm sure.
Okay.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Good evening.
Thanks a lot.
This is Danny Burstein here,
as in Dave's brother, you know.
Yeah.
Hi.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
The good news about ISDN
is right after your show started,
I called the 800-GET-ISDN number,
punched in my fax number,
and I just got a 7-page pamphlet from them
all about how they'll set it up for me
and all the prices and so on.
So, did you ever get a copy of that?
Oh, I've gotten several copies of that.
Yeah.
I believe them.
It's nothing new.
Yeah, that's the first step we took, actually,
was getting that faxed by phone.
In fact, I had a problem with that a few weekends ago
where it didn't work,
so I called three times,
and then, like, at 12.30 on Sunday night,
I got three faxes in a row.
Apparently, they piled up.
So, yeah, anybody can do that
that has a fax machine, obviously,
or if you just want to have a phone ring someplace
with an automatic fax.
It's...
Did you understand everything that was said in that fax?
Almost.
Yeah.
Fortunately, though,
I do know better than to believe them.
I work for one of the Internet providers,
and we've been waiting for months now.
Uh-huh.
ISDN hooked up.
The pricing gets a little bit surreal at some point,
so be careful with that.
And this is the simplified tariff.
Yeah, it is.
The other thing is,
you had mentioned the problems
with routing on the coin phones
to the carriers and the operators.
Right.
Just a little side note,
in the so-called war on drugs,
as you know,
a lot of the coin phones have their touch-tone pads disabled
or replaced with rotary.
I saw a charger call phone in Washington Heights,
one of the nice blue phones that don't take cash
but require credit cards,
rotary dial on it.
Oh, I have to see that.
160-something and Fort Washington Avenue.
160-something?
Okay, we got to go there and take a picture of that one.
I'll try to get one for you.
Yeah, that's going to go on 2600,
because that's...
Take care.
Okay, see you later.
That's better than a foreign pay phone, I think.
A rotary dial credit card phone.
I mean, what are they thinking?
What can you do with that?
You're obviously going to have to enter numbers
after you dial something.
That's how they work.
I don't know.
9X.
9X and their spits.
212-279-3400.
Good evening, you're on.
Hey, let me get my radio.
Hold on.
Hey, how are you?
Okay.
Did you happen to see Dateline NBC a couple hours ago?
No, I'm not in the habit of watching that show.
Well, neither am I, but I caught a couple of minutes of it.
They had something on there,
which they were talking about the bombing in Oklahoma,
and they were interviewing what they called
a computer security expert or something like that,
and they were showing how bomb-making information
can be accessed on the Internet,
and, you know, I mean, this is nothing new.
Nothing new that we were just talking about before.
Well, Dateline NBC, in fact, did a big story about that
about a year ago, where they pretty much implied
that some people in Boston were doing that for kicks.
Doing what?
Providing bomb-making information.
They said how someone blew up a car or something
or got killed, and they traced it to this file
on the bulletin board system,
and it was nonsense then, it's nonsense now.
The information is not the problem.
It's the lunatics that go out and do things with information.
You can always kill people.
You can always destroy things.
That's not going to stop,
no matter how much surveillance and control we have.
It's a question of being socially responsible
and not doing things that hurt other people.
That's where your problems come in.
Absolutely.
I mean, I was sort of...
It sort of bothered me that they didn't mention
that not only was a lot of this information
available in libraries,
but, you know, they also didn't mention
that it's just information,
and whether it's accessible through the Internet
or accessible any other way,
irresponsible people will use it irresponsibly,
and responsible people won't.
I think it's great how these shows
have absolutely no problem
tracking down computer security experts.
It seems that everyone in computer security
is an expert these days.
There's no novices anymore.
Actually, it was funny.
They said that they tried to prove a point
by accessing one of these files
and getting all the information to build a bomb
and then actually going to a supermarket or something
and saying how easy it was to get the materials
and build a bomb.
And they went about doing it,
and they said,
oh, but we're going to be very careful
not to show you what materials we actually buy,
because, you know,
we wouldn't want to continue
to spread this information around.
And yet, when they were showing a shot
from the computer screen
where this expert was connected to the Internet,
you could see he was actually using a web browser
and he was connected to some site,
and I think it was New Mexico.
And I actually was logged on to the net at the time,
and I saw that,
and I typed in that address,
and I didn't quite get to that bomb-making material,
but I got to, I think, the site where it was located.
So for all their care,
they were not all that careful.
No, that's certainly true.
I'd like to know what their conclusion is.
They never quite state it,
but what is it that they want to have done?
Do they want to have all information
gone through a sensor before it gets to people?
What exactly are they saying?
I think they're just saying that,
look how scary and terrible it is,
and aren't you upset about it now?
And, you know, that'll just get higher ratings for them.
Yeah, it's the scare factor.
True.
Always ratings in that.
When it comes down to it,
all this bomb-making information
that's available on the Internet
was, you know, just as available
on local bulletin board systems 10, 15 years ago.
And, you know, no one was really making
such a big stink about it then.
And now that it's much more widely accessible,
of course, now they're making a big stink about it.
Right.
Okay, thanks for the info.
Okay, sure.
Take care.
Okay, while that caller was on,
our project supposedly was complete,
and I'm supposed to test it out now?
Is that the story?
Okay, we have the same dialer now is in my hands.
It's been through a little bit of, I guess, turmoil,
and it seems to have survived.
It's in one piece.
And now if I press this button here,
I'm supposed to get a special tone.
Let's see if that happens.
Wow.
Well, congratulations over there.
Now, by pressing this button and making that tone,
I've just basically, every time I do that,
it's according to a pay phone, 25 cents.
And this radio program has now become a toll fraud device
because if you made a tape and you played this back,
the system is so ridiculously insecure
that by playing this radio show back into a pay phone,
you could make it think you put a quarter in.
That's how crazy it is.
For that, someone we know was put in prison for $100,000 bail
because he had a device that could do this.
That's never proven that he used it for that purpose.
Basically, those five tones.
I must be driving the phone company crazy every time I do this.
Those five tones are something that they would like to see made illegal.
Well, I'm sorry.
That's just the tones are not the problem.
I see parallels here between this and Oklahoma City.
It's not the data.
It's not the sounds.
It's the way you do things with this information and with the technology.
That's how you have to interpret these things.
Okay, so that's pretty interesting there.
Pretty fast, too.
These things are very easy to make.
Ninex has offered to pay for the college education of a Boston teenager
wrongly accused of calling in a false bomb threat to a local hospital last week
within hours of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Walter Ray Hill, 18 years old, was arrested Thursday
and jailed for two days for allegedly calling 911
to report a bomb set to explode at Boston City Hospital,
but police dropped all charges against him Monday
after discovering that the hoax call had been traced to the wrong telephone number
by a Ninex employee.
Ninex admitted that one of its employees had transposed numbers
in tracing the call at the request of law enforcement officials.
They transposed it at the request.
Wait a minute.
I think they traced the call at the request of law enforcement officials.
They didn't transpose the number.
I don't know.
You can read that sentence two ways.
The company's president has apologized publicly to Hill.
The real culprit has not been caught.
A Ninex spokesman said yesterday the offer to pay for four years of college tuition for Hill
was unconditional.
We made this offer Sunday, and obviously we are very unhappy that this has happened.
Hill's arrest followed a wave of bomb hoaxes
that forced the closure of Boston's subway system
and the evacuation of many federal buildings last week.
Law enforcement officials said at the time that Hill would be prosecuted
to the full extent of the law, 20 years in jail if convicted.
Hill, a high school junior, insisted all along that he was innocent,
and his public defender said Monday the family was considering legal action.
So, get accused of a bomb scare and get a college education.
They should give him a lifetime of free phone service or something like that.
I wonder if he can go to any school he wants,
or if he has to go to a Ninex-approved school.
I don't know.
That goes to show that technology is only as good as the people that work it,
and in the case of Ninex, you're better off with, I don't know, smoke,
and who knows what else, just non-technical things.
All right, 212-279-3400.
Good evening. You're on.
Good evening.
I'd like to ask you one question and then answer a question that you raised
but did not answer, oh, maybe a couple of weeks ago.
Could you give us again the number that one dials,
even if you're not calling from a line of the exchange that you want to check on,
to find out what kind of a switch that exchange in that area could be?
Yeah, you dial the exchange followed by the suffix 9901.
9901.
In other words, like 212-XXX-9901.
That's right, and that only works within New York State.
It only works within New York State.
Yeah.
And only on digital switches.
That's true, too.
Oh, must be digital. Okay.
99% of the name.
Is it DMS-100 or 5ESS, really?
Right.
Yeah, pretty much.
I heard it work in a 1A once.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, does it give you a prompt?
No, it just reads out information.
Yeah, it says something like,
Congratulations, you've reached the 30th Street DMS-100.
Serving exchanges, and then they list off the exchanges.
Oh, boy.
Okay.
The other thing is, remember you mentioned, you didn't mention the name,
but AT&T calls it either True Choice or True Choices calling cards,
where they let you choose the first seven, eight, or nine digits of the calling card number.
Or letters, yes.
Okay, right, if you wanted to know.
Now, and then you said, well, in one case they said,
Gee, I'm sorry, someone already has that one,
and you felt that this was a security breach because they were letting you know
thereby that that was an existing calling card number that would let you fraudulently misuse it now that you had it.
Potentially, yes.
Has the obvious point that you were overlooking been brought to your attention since then?
The fact that I don't have a pin?
No.
Okay, what's that?
Oh, wait a minute, yeah.
I mean, in other words, they select the final four digits at random and don't...
Well, yeah, that's not the problem.
That's not the problem.
The problem is when I give you a telephone number,
you don't know that I have a calling card associated with that number,
and there's very few ways that you can find out that information without being me.
Now, AT&T has provided a very nifty way for someone to call and just say a word,
and they'll tell you if that word is taken.
Well, now all you have to do is guess the four numbers.
It's not that hard, but guessing 14 numbers as it was in the past is a lot harder.
Well, in other words, that you might take or have a computer go dialing the 7, 8, or 9
first-digit combinations followed by...
Right, well, that's only going to be one, okay, because they've said...
And then go through the somewhat under 10,000 choices that would be...
Yeah, 9,999.
But if there's some sort of an algorithm at play or someone has the opportunity to choose their own,
you might be able to narrow that down considerably.
Okay, by the way, it would be 10,000 from 000 through 9,999 if they were all usable.
That's true, yes, you're right about that.
Okay, thanks very much.
Okay, thank you.
212-279-3400.
Good evening, you're on.
Go ahead.
Yeah, my name is Daryl from Brooklyn.
Hi, Daryl.
I would like to know how would I get in touch with Panix to get some information?
You want to get in touch with Panix, the service providers?
Right.
I believe their phone number is 212-741-4400, if I'm not mistaken.
If I am mistaken, I'm very sorry to whoever owns that number,
but if that's not their number, you can call information and get their number.
It's spelled P-A-N-I-X.
Okay, but I was talking about the book publisher.
Oh, the book publisher.
There's a book publisher called Panix.
Oh, Loom Panix.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Okay.
All right, the book publisher Loom Panix is in, I believe, Fort Townsend, Washington.
I'm pretty sure that's what it is.
I don't have their number or address in front of me.
Maybe somebody can call in with that information.
So keep listening.
All right, thanks a lot.
Okay, I'm told we have that information, so we'll be broadcasting it in a minute.
Okay.
Okay, thanks.
Okay.
Okay, here we go.
Loom Panix Unlimited, P.O. Box 1197, Fort Townsend.
That's T-O-W-N-S-E-N-D, Washington.
Zip code 98368.
And this is their phone number, right?
206-385-2230.
Okay.
Information is just a step away in this place.
All right.
212-279-3400.
Good evening.
You're on.
Go ahead.
Good evening.
Yes, sir.
Yes.
Hi.
Hi, how are you?
Okay.
Earlier in the show, you had mentioned that you didn't know what set the Discover card,
apart from other cards, in regard to fraud.
Yes, do you know?
In the corner of the MasterCard and the Visa card, there's a foil hologram,
which is laminated into the plastic as the anti-fraud device.
Okay.
And supposedly that hologram can't be replicated to any reasonable degree
unless you have a sophisticated amount of holography equipment.
I don't know what causes American Express cards from...
Well, I can tell you all the credit cards, including Discover,
have a little logo or something that you might call it,
that's visible only under a blacklight.
Now, that's something that I thought was used to prevent fraud.
If you hold any kind of a credit card up to a blacklight,
you'll see either a version of the hologram or the word Amex,
or I believe it's Discover on the Discover cards,
and that's one way of doing it.
Holograms can be forged.
Yes, holograms can be forged.
It's just an incremental step beyond making fake ones.
It would be the H3 hologram.
Right.
I think it's possible Discover cards don't have that blacklight thing.
I thought they did.
But unless we have a blacklight here, there's no way to really tell.
But I know Amex, I know Visa and MasterCard do as well.
So if Discover doesn't,
that could be the reason why it's easy to forge,
because they don't have those little protections.
Okay, that was basically it.
Okay, thanks for the info.
Thank you.
That is certainly true.
The cards do seem to be a little bit cheaper,
and maybe that's why they can afford to give you cash back
those days may be over.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hello?
Okay.
The rule here is you've got to say something.
That's the rule.
Good evening.
You're on.
Hi, yes.
I want to know how can I order the whole spy catalog?
You know, I could tell you that last week when I had it with me,
but I don't have it with me right now.
I know it's available for sale in a lot of bookstores.
Like in spy shops?
Oh, yeah, definitely in spy shops.
Try places like Tower, Barnes & Noble.
I'm sure you'll find it there.
I don't have the publisher's information on me right now.
Okay, and it's called the whole spy catalog, right?
Yeah, that's what it is.
Okay, and another thing, well, sort of related to that,
I went into Radio Shack.
They didn't give me a problem with the dialers, you know,
buying dialers.
Yeah, some Radio Shacks won't give you a problem.
I was, like, trying to make them give me a problem.
You know, I want 15 of that.
Well, okay, try this.
Try buying a dialer and then buying a crystal at the same time.
You know, one of the 6.5 megahertz crystals.
Oh, Radio Shack for the red boxes?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Well, I mean, they're very hard to get from Radio Shack.
They'll give you all kinds of grief, but...
Coming in and start screaming, you know.
Yeah.
Coming in, like, you know, like I don't know anything.
Oh, you had those crystals to tap the phone.
What I'd really like to see,
I'd love to see some of the internal memos that are floating around Radio Shack.
Because these people aren't figuring this out themselves.
They're being told by somebody to give people hassles when they ask for certain products.
I'd like to see what the list of those products, you know, involves
and what exactly they tell people to do.
So anybody in a Radio Shack, I'm sure, could help us out.
Dave, you have something?
Yeah, when I bought my Tone Dialer,
I went into Radio Shack and just the hell of it,
I started describing something totally different,
and he started helping me figure out what it is I wanted.
He says, oh, no, no, you want a Tone Dialer.
And he got one off the shelf and sold it to me.
Aha, did he say you wanted to make free phone calls?
No, no, no.
Describe it.
I was in Radio Shack, actually, should I say the store?
Don't give the exact location.
Okay, but I was in there and the gentleman said,
well, actually, this model here is easier to modify
if you're looking to capture telephone frequencies.
So he was actually helpful,
and he even sent me to an electronics blueprint warehouse
where they sell component parts and manuals
on how I could modify one of their newer models of home scanners.
There's a person that will not be working at Radio Shack for long.
It was an older man.
It's a good thing.
Oh, really?
Quite interesting.
Well, a lot of people deserve to move on from Radio Shack,
and that certainly was one of them.
Okay, let's take another phone call.
Good evening, you're on.
Hi, Emanuel.
Yes, how are you doing?
The first question I have, which is very frustrating,
is when I climb in New Jersey, when I call you from Jersey,
the phone will only ring so many times.
We've been through this many times.
We know this.
How can I beat it?
I'm sorry?
How can I beat it?
Well, you can come to New York for one thing,
and you won't be going through a long-distance carrier,
and you won't be subject to their cutoff,
which is your long-distance carrier's cutoff
is cutting in before the 9X cutoff,
which is generally about three or four minutes, I think.
The problem is, with the digital age,
it's possible to program switches
to only allow a certain number of rings.
Of course, it's also possible to disallow that feature,
but we've had no success getting 9X to do that.
But I've tried to use my credit card.
I've tried through NCI.
I'm hooked up mostly with AT&T.
Basically, the phone companies say, you know,
if a phone is ringing, we're not making any money from that,
so we're going to cut people off.
Very, very few calls, you know, amount to a lot of rings.
It's pretty much calls to radio stations trying to get on the air.
I mean, I don't know where else you would be calling 100 rings.
If I can't beat it, that's fine. I have two questions.
Okay.
One, if I call Federal Express from my office,
their 800 number,
when they pick up the phone, they know it's me and my address.
Yeah, well, do they know your address,
or do they just know your phone number?
No, they know my address.
They say, are you calling from such-and-such an address?
Really?
Yeah.
Well, Federal Express has got quite a database, let me tell you.
They are capturing your phone number probably through ANI,
and using ANI, they are cross-referencing it
probably with one of the many nationwide databases that are out there
getting your address that way,
except they're just doing it very quickly.
I mean, I just have an account with them.
Uh-huh.
I mean, you know, you call up, and before I give them my account number,
they say, are you calling from such-and-such...
Okay, let me ask you a question.
Is the phone number you're calling from attached to that account?
Yes.
That's the number they have.
Try calling them from a number, say, a different phone number.
Right, well, then they wouldn't know it was me.
A phone number in the same...
If you call from a phone number in the same room,
will they know where you are then?
Well, I don't know.
All the phones are connected in that building.
Okay, the thing is, what I want you to do is,
I want you to call them from a phone that's very close to that phone
and see if they can get the address of a phone number
that they don't have in their own Federal Express records.
If they cannot, then you know they're not looking at a commercial nationwide database.
They're looking at their own records.
Right.
I thought that they might have some form of caller ID that...
Well, they do.
It's called ANI.
It's not really caller ID.
Okay.
You're calling an 800 number, and your number is transmitted.
Well, I have a friend in Chicago that when you call that number,
your name shows up.
Yeah, it's called Enhanced Caller ID, I believe.
It's right on the phone.
It's part of a...
What's it called?
Not Southern Bell.
It's a...
Ameritech.
...brand phone it is, but it actually shows up.
You know, it'll say Joe Smith.
Right.
Well, that's...
It's not the phone that's doing that.
It's Ameritech, which is sending the information.
Ameritech, that's it.
Yeah, Ameritech is sending the information out over the phone line.
It's part of Enhanced Caller ID.
It will be available here at some point.
It's going to happen.
In the future.
Yeah, it's just like sending more information along with your phone number.
Thank you.
Okay, thanks for calling.
Anything to say on Enhanced Caller ID?
Yeah, it's...
I believe they're already making it available in some parts of Bell Atlantic.
The other thing that people could do and probably are doing in the meanwhile
is that I've seen phones that allow you...
that have Caller ID, that receive Caller ID,
that allow you to enter in a name that's stored in the phone
so that whenever that number pops up in Caller ID on the display in the phone,
from the phone's memory, it pulls out a name that you told it
is associated with that number.
That's amazing.
I've been playing with this.
Speaking of databases, nationwide access, and things like that,
I've been playing with this CD-ROM that is a nationwide map.
And it's really fun.
I mean, it's amazing what you can do these days.
Picture this.
You have the whole United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, on your screen.
You hit the Page Down key.
You get a little closer.
You hit the Page Down key maybe about 10 times, 11 times,
and you can see a street, any street in the United States.
It's that easy.
You can go back and forth across the whole country using local roads if you want,
every single map, every single street in the country on one CD-ROM,
and you can just go up and down as many times as you like,
zero in on neighborhoods.
As long as you get an address, you can find virtually anybody.
So, yeah, it's getting kind of interesting there
how it's all being compacted into nice, neat packages.
And that's just the United States.
One day the whole world will be on there, and you can find everybody.
Well, not everything is working out according to plan, though.
The Bell Atlantic Corporation called an abrupt halt to its scramble into television yesterday,
saying it wanted to rethink its strategy for upgrading its telephone network.
The company asked the FCC to suspend its application to offer video services
to as many as 3 million telephone customers in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore,
Washington, D.C., northern New Jersey, and parts of Virginia.
So it's amazing.
One day it looks like the phone companies are going to be involved.
The next day it looks like they're backing off.
I don't know what's going to happen next.
Okay, we've got room for about two more phone calls.
Good evening, you're on.
Yes, good evening.
Let me turn down my radio quick.
Okay.
I just had a question about pocket dialers.
Let's see, I guess I would want to know where to get a modifiable one,
being as the new pocket dialers sold at places like Radio Shack aren't run-off crystals,
or at least they tell you that.
The ones we just did right now are modifiable.
Now, I just want to make this clear, though.
We're not telling people to go out and modify these things
and use them to commit all kinds of telephone fraud.
Oh, no, I don't even want to use it on a phone.
I'm just wondering how to make one.
Yes, what we're telling people is that this is what's happening.
It's simple.
It still works many, many years after it was discovered,
and you have to wonder where the phone company's priorities are.
Well, I used to be able to short out, just unscrew the mouthpiece and short out the phone.
Yes, war game style.
That's an old trick there.
It kind of sealed up all the mouthpieces now.
Well, also you don't need to do that anymore since the phone's a dial tone first.
Right.
Back in the old days you would do that to get a dial tone.
Now you get a dial tone no matter what.
Well, my next question then would be if that's modifiable, then where do I get a crystal?
Digi-Key, but they keep telling me they don't have the proper crystal.
Digi-Key should have it.
If not, then try Mouser, M-O-U-S-E-R.
They have an 800 number someplace.
There are many, many places that have them,
and you can see advertisements in various electronic magazines in 2602 that will tell you where to get those.
Huh, and that's Mouser?
Yes.
It's 800-34-Mouser.
Oh, you know this. Okay.
800-34-Mouser.
Thanks very much.
Okay.
Also, I saw the, if not the same CD-ROM, at least one that's similar, about the world map.
It's interesting, though, that it's like the point of infinite mass when you try to zoom in anywhere in the Area 51.
You know, I didn't try that.
What?
I didn't try that.
You give that a shot.
I will.
Thanks for the tip.
Okay.
Now, you had something on a question that was asked last week, and then we have to get out of here.
Something about the...
Yeah.
Last week when I wasn't here, someone asked a question about Project Gutenberg.
Yeah.
Do we have information on that?
Thanks to a listener with information.
Oh, actually, if I was here, I would have answered the question.
Sure you would have.
Sure you would have.
Project Gutenberg is a project at Illinois Benedictine College,
and it's a project where they're aiming to make as much as possible classical literature, at least at first, available on the net.
You have about 30 seconds to wrap this up.
Okay.
Well, that's about it.
I mean, so far they have works like Moby Dick and Aesop's Fables, Alice in Wonderland, and so on, the complete works of Shakespeare.
Is there a net address?
Yes, there is.
I have an FTP address.
FTP to mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu.
That's anonymous FTP.
Log in as anonymous, and the directory is eText.
Okay.
Should I give a worldwide web address?
Go right ahead.
Okay.
Okay, and with that, that brings us to the close of yet another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
Tune in again next week when we'll update people on the quest for ISTN and all the other fun things that are happening in the world,
from civil liberties to the Internet to 9X.
Yeah.
It's 11 o'clock.
This is WBAI New York.
Stay tuned for a rebroadcast of the evening news.
Good night.
9X, go!
9X, go!
9X, go!
Good evening.
news tonight. President Clinton's choice to head the CIA looks like a shoo-in
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