There's as many today, even though we've got more people, smaller percentage, but in terms of kids and mothers and fathers, you bet they're suffering, and they're still in that picture that Roosevelt drew so well, and the answer is still, as Roosevelt drew it, to bring under public control private autocratic power. This is Jerry Brown for We The People. I'll give you a chance to call in with your response tomorrow. Thanks for listening. I'm Barbara Fisher, Tom Whelan for engineering and producing. Good night. The Patrice Lumumba Coalition and Africa Lighterscope, in conjunction with Our Americas, the WBAI's weekly report on Latin America and the Caribbean, will present Africa and the Americas, a community forum in commemoration of African American History Month. Join us as we examine the role Africans have played in the building of this continent we call the Americas. Speakers will include Marta Molina Vega, executive director of the Caribbean Culture Center, George Priestley, director of the Latin American Studies Department of Queens College, Myrtha Colon, Honduran Garifuna community, Panamanian activist Roberto Brown, Maggie Amelio of Our Americas, and Elambe Brath, host of WBAI's Africa Lighterscope. This Friday, January 24th, from 6 to 8 p.m. until 10 p.m. at the Harriet Tubman Learning Center. 127th Street and Adam Clayton College, Union Boulevard. For more information, call area code 212-279-0707, extension 121. That's area code 212-279-0707, extension 121. And it's just about 8 o'clock on this Tuesday night, welcome to Off The Hook. And a very good evening to all of you. The program is Off The Hook, this is Emanuel Goldstein here with you on this Tuesday night. As we prepare to start another program talking about high technology and the future of the net and all kinds of other things. There's weird sound effects in the background. Yeah, I don't know what's going on over there. Fiber is en route, in fact I think he's in the elevator right now. We just talked to him on his cellular phone and he's very close. He's at that range where he's out of range, so he must be really close. Because that's how those things work. Well, we had an interesting week last week where we went over the net to all parts of the world. Off The Hook was heard throughout the country. In fact, we know that somebody in Portugal was listening because we checked the logs to see who connected and somebody from Portugal actually connected and listened, I think, for the whole hour. So that was a bit of a historical radio broadcast. We were able to, for the most part, we had some technical glitches and that's to be expected. But for the most part, we got sound out over the internet to up to 40 people at one time. Next week we will be trying something similar, I believe. Check the website www.2600.com for updates on that. If you check it right now, you will see absolutely nothing about it because there's nothing there yet. But over the next couple of days, we'll post details as to just what the next experiment will be. Actually, you know, you're the wrong people to be telling this to because the people that we want to do this are the ones that can't get us right now. So why don't you just not do anything? Just forget I said anything. The people over the net will be the ones that check the website and hopefully listen to the show for the first time. Fair enough. We have a bunch of news items that have been taking place over the past couple of weeks. We'll be taking phone calls, 212-279-3400. And we've got a couple of special type of announcement type things, which we'll also be getting to. And we'll be probing around for some, I guess, information from experts at the same time. Well, Gateway 2000, the computer maker, says it is recalling some promotional videotapes because an unknown number apparently include about 30 seconds of sexually explicit content. Apparently that's not what they do. The videos were produced between December 20th and January 6th. Gateway said its general product video is known to have been affected. As a precaution, Gateway is also recalling its destination promotional video. Gateway said the offensive material was apparently inserted by a disgruntled employee of a video reproduction supplier, although an investigation continues. Maybe disgruntled. Maybe he just had a bizarre sense of humor. You know, that's possible, too. Gateway said it contacted both local and federal authorities about this tampering and is cooperating fully with those agencies in their investigations. A Gateway spokesman said the company, a direct marketer of computers, made the promotional videos available to consumers who called a toll-free number included in its advertising. The promotional videos preview Gateway's products, including its new destination big-screen personal computer line. The spokeswoman said the company did not know how many videos were affected by the tampering. She said Gateway was alerted to the problem by a handful of customers. I'll just bet. And individuals who received the videos from Gateway over the holidays were advised to destroy the tapes or return them to Gateway at the company's expense. It said the objectionable tapes were limited to a single shipment occurring in the week following Christmas, but all tapes produced during that period were being recalled. Our main concern right now is protecting our customers, said the senior vice president. Well, that's just another snafu out there. And here's a story you'll be interested in, Fiber. Oh, Fiber, you're here. Yes, I am. How you doing? Everything okay outside? Yeah, it's actually a beautiful night. It's a very nice night. I've been stuck in for at least a few minutes to say hi to the folks. How about this? Police across the country secretly tail hundreds of people each year by attaching high-tech transmitters to suspects' cars and tracking them on squadron computer screens. You heard of this? Yeah, it sounds like a lojack gone awry. Yeah, yeah. Detectives, federal agents, and prosecutors routinely conceal use of the technology from defendants, their lawyers, and the public. An investigation by the Orange County Register has found. This report comes from the Orange County Register. Authorities in Orange County often plant the devices on cars without getting a warrant from a judge. The technology marketed by a company called Teletrac is simple. A transmitter sends a radio signal to a computer, which pinpoints the car's street location. Police with the proper software can follow a transmitter-equipped vehicle in real time as it moves across a street map on a computer screen. Is there any expectation of privacy on the whereabouts of a car on a public street? I suggest there isn't, said Jeffrey Ferguson, president of the county's narcotics officers' association. I've told them they don't need a warrant unless they intend to enter a car. Something, isn't it? They just strap a transmitter on your car, and you're telling them where you are at all times. The system automatically records the time, date, location, and duration of the car's stops. The system could tell police, for example, that the suspect's car stopped on Main Street between 4th and 5th Street for about an hour on January 5th. The records help police focus their investigation on places the suspect's visited. So, um, that's, uh, that's kind of scary. Yeah, I guess bug sweepers are going to be in really high demand in the very near future. I mean, they could have that on my car right now, you know. They probably do. Yeah. Well, how do you find it? A frequency counter will. A frequency counter detects something like that. It depends on how primitive the device is. If the police are using it, I'd wager that it's probably pretty primitive. Well, if it's going to transmit across the city, the signal has to be strong enough so it's able to be picked up by a frequency counter. Yeah, you would think. Well, depending on, uh, it could be a spread spectrum device. But again, if it's something that the police are using that they can afford with their budget. Well, they use spread spectrum for communication sometimes. 800 megahertz, uh, you know, police communication. Yeah, but some of the really expensive high-tech wireless transmitters are spread spectrum and they're extremely difficult to detect. Uh-huh. But, uh, those are, again, those are really expensive and it's highly unlikely that the police are using these, like, on a whim. Uh-huh. Something's wrong. I can tell. Where? Something's wrong. You have this expression. Did something happen to your ISTM line again? Oh, yeah, that's right, you know. I can just tell, you know. It's that, look, you know, I can tell what the status of your service is when you come in. Last week you were buoyant, you know, you were happy. And I could tell that you had full bonding and everything going. Yeah, for whatever reason, my, uh, my second recreational ISDN line was just mysteriously turned off again. 9X terminology, recreational ISDN. Yeah. Okay. So, I don't know, I reported it again to, uh, the infamous answering machine. And, uh, I still haven't, uh, heard back from them. I suspect that... It's not an answering machine. They use 9X voicemail, don't they? I don't, um, I didn't really care. Well, you can tell by the beep. If it's a boop, that's 9X voicemail. If it's a beep, that's an answering machine. I don't really remember what the boop was because I was rather angry at the time. All right. But, um, I suspect that they're doing it on purpose by not getting back to me because of the whole, uh, penny a minute thing. 9X doesn't do anything on purpose. I think they do. Really? Yeah. Occasionally, maybe. Sort of in this, uh, compartmentalized kind of way. Mm-hmm. Well, you still have one ISDN line. Yeah, I still have the other line that I've had all along. Mm-hmm. So I went back to, uh, using the other channel on that. Mm-hmm. But, um, who knows? The last time this happened, I, uh, woke up the next day and it was back on again. But, uh, somehow I just get the feeling that that's not gonna be this time. Has that finality to it, that sense that... Yeah, well, the thing is that they were supposed to send me a corrected bill... Mm-hmm. ...uh, switching me over to residential service, which is what I originally asked for. And they, uh, have still yet to do that. Well, I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. But, um, it's, it can be fun dealing with 9x sometimes. Although, um, I heard that MCI is starting to, um, to offer local service in New York City. I saw this big full-page ad last week in the New York Times. So I said, okay, I'll buy it. I'll see what they, what they have to offer. And I called them. I called MCI. I called, uh, uh, they're not, actually, they gave a web address. So I connected to the web address, got the phone number from there, called the phone number. And the person there had no idea what I was talking about. But they, they switched me to an office that supposedly did. All right, then I talked to that person for a while who was out in Texas. And he explained to me how they don't yet offer local service in all of New York City. Just in the southern part, like on 6th Avenue. So I have this guy in, in Texas lecturing me on the geography of New York City. And getting it all wrong. Telling me things that aren't possibly true. Saying that it's not yet offered here when the ad clearly says that it is. And then when I try to find out, okay, it's offered in California. What are the rates? I must have been transferred to six different offices. And eventually I came around a big circle. I wound up in the same place. So they're going to send me a brochure. Now, why can't they just read the brochure and tell me what the rates are? You know, that's all I want to know. I don't want the service if it's too expensive. You know, I'd like to know if they have calling plans or anything, anything like that. They're probably just going to send you a brochure that says that the service isn't available yet. That's probably what they're going to do. And they're not going to mention rates anywhere. So it's a big waste of time for everybody. I don't know if the local phone service is something that, I don't know, that afflicts you like a disease or what. But it's just, I don't know, people don't seem to make any sense. Once they start talking about local phone service. So that's the deal as far as that goes. MCI soon will be another player and you can get frustrated by them as well. Great. Anything new with the OmniPoint world? I don't recall anything new. My service is still exemplary. Of course, they still don't have any competition. But the service has been great. I certainly don't have any complaints. Really? Any more e-mail messages from yourself from the past? No, actually, I haven't actually tested that recently. But hopefully that'll be fixed fairly soon. It's taken quite a long time. And it's not in OmniPoint's hands. It's in the hands of an Internet service provider who we won't name. Okay. Well, actually, we can name them. Why don't we name them? We name names on this show, so go ahead. It's IconNet. IconNet? And IconNet is one of these supposedly larger Internet service providers, but for some strange reason I can't figure out why they can't seem to set up a simple e-mail gateway. It seems to be beyond me. Although they should know, and they might not even know this, that I was able to send a message once or twice to my phone and from my phone in different weeks. I don't know if they ever noticed that this actually happened. Probably screwed up the whole system when you did that. No, they probably have been trying to configure it to get it right, and that was like the one time that they actually had it right that they didn't know. So if they go back and check their logs, they can configure it the way it was when they saw that my message went through because that worked. Now, you're having experiences with OmniPoint, and I'm having experiences with EasyPass. I think we're both sort of like testing out these new systems. I gotta tell you, EasyPass is the biggest waste of time I think I have ever seen. It doesn't work. I mean, it works. Yeah, it works. You go through with your car through these gates and things like that, but the roads are not designed for this. I mean, coming into Manhattan on the Midtown Tunnel, you have to wait in line to use the fast lane. The slow lanes go much faster because no one's in them, and two out of maybe ten people that are in the fast lanes aren't supposed to be in there, so they tie the whole thing up for everybody. Today, I knocked over a cone getting from one lane to another. I never did that before. I felt like a real rebel, and I drove across like four lanes expecting to be arrested or something. But, I mean, this idiot is just standing there, you know, tying up traffic. Reading a brochure about EasyPass. And even when there isn't somebody like that, there's traffic backed up for miles, you know, and by the time you get to the toll booth, that's when it opens up. You don't save anything, you know. You don't save a thing. It's just frustration. And their system doesn't work still. You call them up to find out where you passed, but they don't have any information. They don't tell you anything. And I've yet to see a bill from these people. So maybe it's not a bad system after all. Maybe you can save lots and lots of money. Who knows? So, it's just crazy, though. I mean, I think an ideal system would be a lane that's just an EasyPass lane that you stay in, right, and only people in that lane go fast. Everybody else goes slow because, you know, they don't use the nice, modern, efficient way of doing things. Why don't they just make more than one EasyPass lane? I bet that never even occurred to them. Well, the thing is, there's only three lanes leading up to the tunnel in the first place. Right. And then they have something like 25 toll lanes, you know, so it splits off. But it doesn't split off until a few feet from the toll booth. So, you know, those three lanes are always, you know, blocked for miles when there's traffic. Why can't they just equip all three of the toll booths with EasyPass and have it work both ways? They should. But the thing is, there's only one EasyPass lane that's just EasyPass and nothing else. Right. And invariably the wrong people are in there. And plus, it's very hard to get to. It's in the middle. And if you're on the left or the right or even in the middle, you have to cross around through barricades and things like that to get to the magic lane. And even if nobody's in it, you have to battle all these other people that are trying to get to the slow lanes. It's just a big waste of time. I don't know what they're thinking when they make these things. You know, it could be a good system. It really could. But not with the people running it who are running it now. I think you should just get an OmniPoint phone and walk more. Yeah, that would be interesting. That would be fun. All right. We have to find some information now. You in an information-seeking mood? Uh, sure. All right. Let's get us a dial tone. Oh, good. Nice fast service there. Oops. I shouldn't dial the whole number. Okay. And there. Ready, Shaq? Yeah, hi. You got DVDs. Excuse me? You got DVDs. DVDs? Yeah. For what? Well, either for my video recorder or for my CD player. Or for my computer actually. DVDs? Yeah. Radio, Shaq. Oh, who else? What is it, cable? What is it, a system? Well, it's the standard. It's, you know, that's how you watch videos and things. DVD? Yeah, digital versatile disc. No. You know when you'll be having them? No, we don't have that. Will you be getting it soon? No. You won't. Okay, thank you very much. All right. Radio, Shaq there will not be getting DVDs anytime soon according to that spokesperson. You know what DVDs are, right? Well, sure. I think we should get a spokesperson on the show from like Toshiba or something. Every time I go to a retail, actually I went to the Wiz the other day and they knew what I was talking about. Right. And they said they're going to be here soon within, say, a couple of weeks. At least they know. Right. I mean, that guy didn't know anything. And it's just, you know, I called that totally at random, not knowing that person. I was not set up, okay? It's not a friend of mine. I knew they weren't going to know anything about this. Why is that? This is the standard that's going to replace videotapes, it's going to replace CDs and, of course, CD-ROMs at the same time. And it's all going to happen in the next couple of months. I think they should know about it. Yeah, I have to agree. I think they should know. We need to go out there and do some schooling. We're the people that do it, right? Yep. We're them. That's all I have as far as those kind of updates. Well, did you hear about London? Yes, I did, in fact. What's going on in London? You tell the people. Our British connection tells us that after they went through all the trouble to divide London in half as far as dialing codes go. Well, first it was city code 1. Right. First it was 1. Then it was city code, was it 171 and 181? That's right. No, no, no, I'm wrong, I'm wrong. It was 081 and 071. And then they switched it to 0171 and 0181. 0181, right. Yeah, which is what it is right now. 171 and 181. They're just going to abandon that whole system. Yeah, and supposedly in the year 2000 they're going to reunite the east and west ends and make it 020. And why are they doing this? I have no idea. 020. Yeah. I just can't believe this. So it's going to be one area cut for all of London again. Oh, once again. And all of this, the phone day madness that they had a couple of years ago, all that's for naught. For naught. There's no reason for any of that. Unless, of course, our British connection was wrong. That's true. He probably heard it on good terms from... Reliable sources. Yeah, British Telecom probably, yeah. British Telecom and MCI. Yeah. One and the same. All right, 212-279-3400 is our phone number. Give us a call, let us know what you've experienced this last week. Any feedback from the show last week? Yeah, in fact, we got a lot of email. We got tons of email. Yeah. I'd say most of the people actually were able to listen. There were some problems. I don't know if you noticed, but one of the emails we got was actually from a listener in Portugal. Yes, so I heard. He said that he heard a snippet of the show. Uh-huh. But he couldn't be bothered to call us from Portugal at that point. Probably be too expensive. To realize to death, knowing that someone from Portugal is listening at that moment. Maybe he doesn't know English. That's true. What's he listening to the show then for? I don't know. Well, I can say right now, nobody from Portugal is listening at this moment, I don't think. Unless someone's holding a phone up to a radio in New York. But maybe next week when we try this again. We're going to hopefully try this again. We're not sure we're going to try it again, but I think we will. Well, I called Manos earlier. Manos the technician? Manos the technician, yes. I spoke with Manos the technician. Okay. And he said that he's looking into the possibility of using a Java-oriented utility that allows you to receive streaming audio and video and animation and stuff. What kind of sound quality? That I couldn't get a definitive answer from him on, because he had only tested it on ISDN and T1 speeds. Really? He had tried it on regular dial-up modem speeds, so I don't know what kind of quality people would get. That's interesting. In the absence of that working next week, we'll most likely be using real audio again. Okay, we'll be using something, I guess. Yes, something. Again, these are the wrong people to tell, but the people on the net will tell. But anybody can listen. Anybody who has the technology can do this. Speaking of fun things on the horizon, Beyond Hope is happening this summer. I don't know if we've mentioned that before, that the sequel to the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in 1994 is coming up this summer. It's going to happen August 8th, 9th, and 10th, downtown in New York City. There will be all kinds of fun panels, seminars, and experiences. Now, if you're on the Internet and you want to take part in this and learn more about it, there's a special mailing list you can join. Now, a mailing list is different from a news group. It's more active. You actually get things sent to your mailbox, and you can contribute and have all kinds of fun. But you have to take a few little steps. So, Fabio, why don't you explain how to subscribe to the Beyond Hope mailing list. What you do, simply, is send e-mail to Major Domo. Who is Major Domo? I haven't the slightest idea who Major Domo is, but that's the name of the mailing list software that seems to be extremely popular on the Internet. That's Major, as in Major, and Domo, as in D-O-M-O. That's one M. And it's one word. One word. And it's majordomo at 2600.com. And in the message body, it doesn't matter what the subject is, the message body should simply say, subscribe, the name of the mailing list, which is Beyond Hope, that's one word, and a space and your address. So, you do not do this in the subject? No. You do this in the message body. It doesn't matter what the subject is. Okay, so the subject can be anything in the world, but that first line has to be? It has to be subscribe, space, Beyond Hope, space, and, for example, a manual at 2600.com. Now, wait a minute. I have to disagree here because you don't need that last part. You don't need it. No. No. So why do it if you don't need it? Just in case. In case of what? Because I notice a lot of people don't realize that the address that they think they're sending mail from isn't the address they're sending mail from. Really? Yeah. All right, so if you think you may not realize that, do it. Yeah. Because then we'll get the message of an attempt that somebody tried to subscribe from an address that wasn't their own, and if we see that you seem to be the same person, we'll add you. Right. Otherwise, we'll take action. Yeah. Otherwise, we'll get angry. Yes. Okay, and then once that happens, there's more. Yeah. Once that happens, then you'll get a confirmation message sent back to you, which will say that in order to authenticate yourself, you need to reply to the message that you just got with an authentication key, which is chosen at random. The reason for that is so that people don't get mail-bombed, so that somebody like you, for example, doesn't receive all sorts of forged subscription notices. Like 10,000 pieces of mail in a couple hours. Yeah. That's an inconvenience sometimes. Yeah, so to prevent things like that because we care. Yeah, it's just a simple matter of what system administrators are willing to do. Right. And we simply, what, we put a setting. Yeah, it was a one-line setting. It was either on or off. Right. We chose it to be on. Right. That's a bit of extra trouble on our part. Yeah. A few extra keystrokes. It was worth it. In the long run. So they'll get this confirmation message, and then they have to send back. They have to follow the instructions. Yeah, it's very simple. The instructions say simply reply to that message, and it'll say a little authorization key that you send back. And then you'll get the welcome message, welcoming you to the Beyond Hope list. Right. And then you can post, and you post by sending mail directly to beyondhope at 2600.com. That's correct. You can do that to your heart's content now, but it won't go anywhere if you're not subscribed. That's right. Okay. All right, and it should be a lot of fun. We're expecting a ton of people to show up, and we're open to suggestions as to what kinds of things you'd like to see covered, what kinds of speakers you'd like to have down there, and events, things like that. It's going to be happening in the Village. So it's kind of a different setup than last time when we had it right across the street from Madison Square Garden, or actually Penn Station. So it'll be, I think, a cooler part of town. Yeah. We should mention that our friends across the pond are having their conference at exactly the same time. That's right. The Hacking in Progress, the Dutch counterpart to Beyond Hope. HIP. HIP, yes. That'll be happening in a field. Again, they'll be doing like a campout type of a thing. So we're going to have some sort of a video connection over there, and maybe a couple of panels where one of our guests is actually a TV screen. You know? Well, we'll see how we can work that out. But, yeah, it's going to be the first ever dual Hacker Conference. Maybe there'll be more. Maybe we'll have other Hacker Conferences happening at the same time, too. But we'll be updating that here as well. All right, 212-279-3400 is our phone number. And let's go to the phone and take our first call. Good evening. You're on the air. Hello. Yes. Hi. I have MCI service for outside of my local area code. I see. And they signed an agreement with British Telecom. That's right. I happen to have a brother who lives in Scotland, and I call him quite frequently. And, anyway, they said for a $3 club charge, I guess it's friends and family, they normally charge me $0.12 a minute to call Britain. Isn't that rather cheap? $0.12 a minute? $0.12 a minute. I couldn't believe it. In fact, AT&T had called me a few days later, and I said, can you match $0.12 a minute? They said no. The cheapest they could give it to me for was something like $0.32 a minute. That's pretty good. Now, what do you have to do to get this $0.12 a minute, though? It was a promotional thing that I got in the mail from MCI. And I called them up. It was a 1-800 number. I called up MCI, and they said, would you like to sign on to this new friends and family? And that's it? That's all you had to do? That's all I had to do. But you have to pay a monthly fee, you said? $3. $3. I think it's worth it. And there's no upper cap on how many times you can call England? No, I didn't hear of any. No time of day differences? It's around the clock, $0.12 a minute? I think so. They didn't stipulate anything other than the fact it would be $0.12 a minute. Well, go crazy. Call England and see what happens. If it's $0.12 a minute, you might as well make some friends over there. I have a brother who I call quite frequently. So I think I'm getting my money's worth. But I think it's the case where the fact that British Telecom, which is almost like a British monopoly in the telephone, and MCI, which is a very big player in worldwide telecommunications, I think that's what did it. It's almost like a monopoly between Britain and America. You know what I'm saying? They must have some kind of lines to utilize at 100% capacity so it can pay for itself. Wouldn't you think? Well, I would imagine a lot of people signing up for their service would also help pay for it as well. I mean, a lot of long-distance companies are doing things like this. They're giving away. I made, like, several thousand frequent flyer miles just for switching a phone line that I never use to sprint. I mean, that's the equivalent of me traveling around the country a couple of times. And I just had to switch a phone line. And they said if I switch it back, I can keep the miles. I mean, these people are out of their minds. And then the first phone call I made on Sprint, I got another thousand miles just like that. They're throwing the miles around, you know? But I think it's going to hurt the competition. I think this MCI-British Telecom deal is going to definitely hurt the competition. Not AT&T, but maybe Sprint. I think they're going to hurt. How could big companies taking over other big companies hurt competition? I'm joking. Yeah, right, right. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Because I see that's what's happening with the airline industry. You know, the British Air is trying to sign up with American Airlines, and the European Airlines are saying, oh, that's foul, that's foul, no good, no good. Right, right. But if it helps out the consumers, God bless us, you know? That's right. All right, well, thanks for calling. Okay, thank you. Take care. What do you think of mergers? I guess that kind of makes cable and wireless the value jet of the long-distance market, right? Well, no, I wouldn't say that, because cable and wireless is a subsidiary of the second biggest phone company in England, which is Mercury, Mercury Communications. So they're not a fly-by-night operation. They're pretty big over there. Yeah, but yet and still, they always manage to screw up your Internet connection at least once a week. Well, yeah, I wouldn't necessarily recommend them for Internet connectivity, but, you know, for making a phone call, they can manage that. Mercury got out of the payphone business over in England a while back. They weren't making much money doing that, so they pulled out of that. But now they're big into the cellular phone industry over there. Right, they own, which one is it? Is it Orange? I think it is Orange. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. We might be wrong on that. Also, cable and wireless is the sole phone company on many Caribbean islands. In fact, there have been revolutions on certain islands where cable and wireless is what they are trying to drive out, not some dictator family, but cable and wireless, this horrible phone company that gives them lousy service and doesn't offer any choices whatsoever. There have been violent demonstrations against them. I've heard about this, and it's kind of interesting. People would do that. Yeah, so there's also this other... I read this in the New York Times yesterday. There's a kind of phone service in Japan called PHS. Have you heard about this? PHS, no. It's known as the Poor Man's Cellular Service. And they say it's catching on in several Asian countries. The price is about a fifth that of cellular. And the reason they don't think it's going to catch on here in this country, they say it's similar to PCS, to what you have. But the reason it's not going to catch on is because it doesn't work in high-speed moving cars. They don't hand off very well at high speeds. Does PCS do that? Yeah, it does. But I remember in reading those British magazines about wireless and GSM stuff, and they rate each one of the companies because some of them use slightly different technology, like Orange, isn't quite PCS. It's something else called PCN. And I understand that that has a much smaller range, and I don't think that hands off as well either. So it sounds like another little offshoot technology that really isn't meant to be that widespread. Still, a fifth the price of cellular? I mean, if you had a service that was a fifth the price, and it didn't hand off very well in fast-moving cars, I think a lot of people would get that. They say a lot of people are switching to regular cellular once they get used to the deficiencies and get sort of hooked on having a wireless phone all the time. What does PHS stand for? I'm not sure. It stands for something. I don't have the article in front of me. Does it stand for anything in English? Yes, it is in English. It stands for something, but I don't know exactly what. It's in yesterday's business section of the Times in case we don't get a call. All right, 212-279-3400. Good evening. You're on the air. Turn it down. Yes, turn it down, please. I'm wondering if it's a poor hand-off service that PHS stands for. That's a pretty quick comeback there. I like that. That's very good. I'm wondering if you've heard of... I got sort of pitched this Lucent technology. I guess Lucent's interested in delivering a low-cost, low-grade interactive television service called MediaLink. You've heard of this one? I've heard of MediaLink. I've heard the phrase bandied about. Why don't you tell us about it? Oh, what? It's a low-power radio transmitter that can either go in your television or attaches to the back of your television through a coax connection. What they want to do is code in things like telephone numbers or URLs, Web addresses, other ASCII information and the regular broadcast signal. Then it will go into your TV. MediaLink box will resolve this extra coded information and send it over to your telephone so that if there's an ad for a florist or something, they can code in the number of the florist to save you the trouble of dialing it on your phone. It will actually send over the number. You can store it in your phone and call it later or call it right then, etc. They're interested in competing with other more expensive interactive television solutions or systems. The advantage is, of course, you don't have to lay quite so many millions or billions of dollars of Ethernet backbone and so forth to deliver it, but it really doesn't go more than one way. They kept describing it as, oh, it's very similar to Caller ID. You get a Caller ID kind of box on your phone and it would allow you to store the numbers of the ads you see on television. Yeah, it's just like Caller ID. Just like it. Wow, that's something. Are you going to do anything with this? I don't know. They're shopping around to media companies and they're interested in suggestions for how they can make this commercially viable. They want to get it into as many homes as they possibly can and have interactive test beds in Toronto, I think. One of these things, if they build a huge network of these things, then they can charge whatever they want to TV stations and advertisers because, of course, I could see this would mainly be local business. Every local TV station would have to buy a coder attached to their commercial films, the MediaLink content. We'll be keeping an eye out for that, MediaLink. Yeah, actually, what? That's the in-house name. MediaLink's already a registered trademark or something like that for someone else. So what are they going to call it then? Yeah, they don't know. That was another one of the questions they asked. So they have this product. They don't know what they're going to call it. Yeah, they don't know how to roll it out and don't know what they're going to call it or what the content will really be. Well, you can come up with snappy comebacks for initials. Maybe you can come up with a name for this company. It would start with a P, definitely. Okay. All right, that's something then. Thanks for calling. Sure. Take care. 212-279-3400. Good evening. You're on the air. Okay. Hang on a minute. All right. Thanks for calling. Sure. How do I play over there? I lost my radio. All right, good. What's on your mind? I wonder if anybody has any current news about what's going on with America online. Oh, that's an interesting story. You heard about this one, Fiber? Yeah, I did hear a bit about it. They kind of didn't plan for this very well, did they? They did a huge advertising campaign and now you just can't connect correctly. Well, they basically... It takes hours to load. Yeah, what they did was they changed their billing structure from, what was it, 295 a minute to unlimited for... Unlimited. Unlimited for how much? $19.95 a month. $19.95 a month. And you can stay on as long as you want. Well, when you have, what, how many customers? They had 3 million to start with. 3 million customers. I guess, you know, that could cause a bit of an overflow as far as number of people trying to connect as opposed to number of phone lines they actually have. So the upshot is a lot of people are getting busy signals. I guess they get a little message on the screen saying try back in 15 minutes. Yeah. And that just doesn't sit well with a lot of people. So there are lawsuits now. A lot of unhappy people out there. The main thing that's happening is that it doesn't load the first two screens promptly. It doesn't? No, it just hangs up. And finally, you know, the phone disconnects because there's no signal on the modem. Yep, I've heard the same thing. I also heard a rumor that it could be that they did this knowing full well that they couldn't handle all those people but they're fearing bankruptcy because of mismanagement. You're saying that they're doing this because it's a ploy? They're trying to make back some money in an emergency. Uh-huh. What, they can't make enough money charging $2.95 an hour? I think that they've seen a lot of mismanagement in their time. Well, this is a good example of mismanagement. Oh, yeah, this is a great example. This is how it's done. In the past, I think they've had bigger problems between the technical and the marketing people not understanding how much actual technology it takes in order to satisfy X number of people. Uh-huh. That they're actually getting as new users after some gargantuan marketing ploy. They say that even if they go ahead with the expansion that they're planning it's not going to even be half enough of what they need. Internet service providers generally have I think 10 users per modem line. Does that sound about right? About 10 per modem line. So that way, you know, if all 10 people decide to call at once obviously 9 of them are not going to get through but that never happens. AOL is something like 35 to 1. And that's, uh, that's just not true. So it's like traffic trying to go up and get across the bridge with EasyPass. It's sort of like EasyPass and, yeah. Well, the strange thing though is that you can access AOL using PPP also and I've heard that the connections are just as shoddy. Well, now, how is that possible? Well, apparently the reason is that they don't have enough bandwidth to satisfy all the people that are trying to access AOL who can't get in over direct dial-up. So this is a bandwidth issue, not just a phone line issue. Yeah, both. Is this slowing down everything for everybody else? No, this is, well, yeah. I guess in essence it would be. If more people are using the same internet connection that goes to AOL, then it's going to be slower for everybody. Now, how would somebody connect to AOL not using the phone line? I've never tried to do this. No, all you do is if, well, you can use their own. They're using their own, I think they call it AOL link or something or other. But if you already have PPP through some other service provider, you just run your AOL application and in the little sign-on pull-down menu, you choose TCP. Okay. And then you put in your login and password and it connects over your already established PPP connection. I see. You can't like Telnet or FTP or actually you can FTP, can't you? Well, you probably can if you use their AOL link thing because you can use Netscape if you want to. So I assume that there's no reason why you couldn't use Telnet or anything else. Right. Okay. How about an alternate provider? Is there something called Webspan? I've heard that name advertised. Yeah, what about it? Is it good as an alternative provider? I couldn't tell you because I've never used either one. But it's something to consider. I think anything would be a good alternate provider to AOL at this point. Why do you use AOL? What's on AOL that's so great? Dirty pictures. Ah, well, let me tell you. If you want dirty pictures, all right, you can find them all over the net, all right? AOL does not have the market on dirty pictures. Well, they don't. It's not that funny. Is that helpful to you, sir? Yeah, thank you. All right. Well, good luck in your pursuits. Good evening. You're on the air. Hello? Yes, go ahead. Hi. I was wondering if maybe one of you knew, some of you knew, either by knowledge or speculation, you know Philips Corporation or whatever they're called? Yeah, well, they call it Philips Corporation. Yeah, okay. It's one L, not two. Okay. He didn't spell it with two Ls. Just in case. There's two different Philips. Well, what's the other Philips? Philips Multimedia something or other. They have nothing to do with Philips. Well, that must be confusing when they answer the phone. Yeah. All right. Yeah, well, that's good to know. Well, my question is, if I'm not mistaken, Philips either invented and or developed the audio cassette. That's true. He's not mistaken. And also the VHS video cassette. Did they? I don't know. I don't think so. I'm not sure. I could be wrong about that, but nevertheless, the CD. I thought... They co-developed it. Who did? They co-developed it. Yeah, okay. Okay, okay. So they at least developed the cassette, audio cassette. Okay, yeah. Possibly VHS. Possibly VHS. Co-developed CD. Yeah. Why haven't they taken over the world? Especially because now they're coming out with DVD. They're advertising the non-computer net web access with Magnavox. They basically invented or co-invented or co-developed something that 90% of the developed world is using all the time. Why have they not taken over the world, and why is their stock not doing anything? Well, if they were a Japanese company, they probably would have taken over the world already, but they were a laid-back Dutch company, and I guess according to the Dutch mentality, they don't really want the world. So who would they sell or lease their patents to? I mean, these are worth trillions. And they probably have all this money. Why does their stock do nothing? I couldn't tell you. I'm figuring out where I can put a few thousand dollars and be a millionaire soon, but Philips always fails, even though they developed something that within five years 90% of the developed world is using. Well, I know that they also own Magnavox and Norelco. So why haven't they taken over the world? That's the question. I couldn't tell you. Maybe they have taken over the world, we just don't realize it. Yeah, maybe someone can call in and ask who's hiding these patents, a little secret company shooting up. But sir, if you're looking for a place to invest several thousand dollars, let me suggest CD-ROM Manufacturing and Atrex. I understand they're both going to do really well in the next year. Well, didn't Philips invent them too? Well, yeah, of course. That goes without saying. So how do you find out who owns the patents now or what companies have them? I've been told this radio station is also owned by Philips. Is that right? What's that? Probably. Which radio station is owned by Philips? I didn't know that. I didn't know that. They probably own part of it. Pacifica is part of Philips. Wow. How about that? Well, maybe someone can come in with some more specifics. That's the whole thing. It's very quiet about it. Yes, Philip? IBM Online Patent Search. I'm sorry? IBM Online Patent Search. Yes, you can do that. You can do that as well. Online what? Oops, I disconnected him. Just say that again for the benefit of him listening on the radio. IBM now allows online searching of recent patents. Go to their website. Yes. All right. And enough talk of Philips tonight. Good evening. You're on the air. Go ahead. Hello? Yes, speak up. Let me turn my radio off, please. All right. They should invent a patent. Sorry about that. It does that. Yes, go ahead. I was sort of listening out of one ear, and it sounded to me before like you thought if somebody gives you several thousand miles, you can fly all over the place on that. No, no, no, no, no. I would have to fly several thousand miles to get several thousand miles on a frequent flyer thing. Because in my experience, a frequent flyer mile translates to something like a tenth of an actual air mile. Well, don't you get one frequent flyer mile for every mile you travel? Okay, but the word mile... Okay, for like 20,000 of those miles, then you get a free trip someplace. Right, for 20,000. I just didn't want... It's one of my pet peeves that the word mile in frequent flyers doesn't mean, you know, an actual mile distance. Well, it's a way of measuring how far you've traveled, which is kind of interesting. But of course, if you switch a phone line and get 2,000 miles for that, you haven't really gone anywhere, have you? That'll get you to Staten Island. Not even that far. I mean, I'd have to go anywhere to do this. So it's... The whole mile thing is kind of meaningless now. Listen, incidentally, about this whole AOL problem and everything else... Yes. I use a local guy. I'm in a little town in New Jersey. Uh-huh. He gets maybe $25 a month instead of $20. Uh-huh. And no problems. Yeah. And there's a human being I can speak to if there's a problem when there almost never is. What's the name of it? It's just a little guy. His name is, I don't know, Center Access or something. A little guy with no name. He sits in a florist shop because he's also doing some kind of florist web thing. Well, yeah, the two have been always connected, sort of. But anyway, I mean, why go with one of these big deal AOLs? Yeah, I mean, you probably get more out of the net than anybody using AOL does because you're right there on the net. You can... Absolutely. You don't have to waste any time or anything. Exactly. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thanks for calling. I don't know. Have you ever used AOL? Occasionally. Oh, you have, haven't you? Occasionally I've used it. And why is that? Only because sometimes it can be really easy to find a software update or when you get sick of searching for something in AltaVista and you get a million matches that have nothing at all to do with what it is you're looking for. Yes, it's true. Sometimes just on a whim you go and check AOL. But that means you have to have an AOL account. Yeah. You have an AOL account. No, it's not mine. Ah, you have that little program that generates them. No, no. I use someone's with permission. Someone's program that generates them? No, someone's account. Oh, okay. I see. That's interesting. Is that legal to do that? To use someone else's account? Sure. There might be an AOL charter against that kind of thing. No, they call it multiple screen names is the AOL lingo. Okay. Yes. All right. AOL talk. Enough of that. Speak up. Yes. You mean you're going to get the free diskettes for 50 hours from AOL? You know, I just remembered. I got one of those free diskettes yesterday. Do you know what I got it in? I got it in my health insurance bill, all right? Why is my health insurer sending me free AOL? I mean, this is ridiculous. If you log on, you'll have a heart attack trying to ring up the number, getting a busy signal. I get those things now with virtually everything I buy. CDs or disks. All the magazines, all the computer magazines. They're giving all these free diskettes out for free hours. That's funny because they didn't even say why they were sending it. They just said, here's, you know, a free AOL disk. Oh, great. I want to tell you with the E-ZPass, with the tokens, January 31st is the last day you'll be able to buy tokens for the bridges. Really? They're doing away with all the tokens. I want everyone to transfer to the E-ZPass system. Well, when is it going to get easy? That's what I want to know. Never. When you start walking. Actually, maybe if they get all those people out of the way with the tokens, you know, because they never seem to have the tokens handy when they're waiting in line. Right, right. Maybe that'll speed things up. Who knows. Is there a way to see who's online on your website? If I make up a website, right? Yeah. See who's logging on? Yeah. A log will tell you. A log? What's the name of that log? Well, what? To see who's on a website? Right. Well, no one's actually really on a website. Once it gets loaded, you're not on it anymore. Yeah, you're getting hits, you know. Yeah, if someone hits my site, can I see who, his URL or something? Yeah, you can see who hit it, you know. Well, you don't know the username. All you know is the actual site they're connected and when. Right. There are programs that will break that down for you and tell you where they're coming from. Yeah, they'll digest it into nice formats and stuff. But you have to have, is this through your service provider? Right. You'd have to have access to their web logs. They have to provide it to you or tell you where it is on the system. They might not give you permission to the logs themselves. I see. But they have a record of who's hitting the site? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, by default, if you install a website, it's going to be logging somewhere. Right, right. That's something to keep in mind, though, for all of you that are going out there and looking at, like, you know, nefarious things on the web that, you know, they do record the address you're coming from anyway, if not the username. Why can't they record the username? Because the only way they could really record the username is if, well, you know the answer to that yourself, is if you're running IDENTITY. Which many people do. Right, which many people also do not. Right. But if the system that you're on does, then it's rather easy for the site to log the username as well. But I've never seen a site that actually does that. But they certainly can. That information would be available to them if the site was running IDENTITY that the person was connecting from. Now, there is a website that I've seen. There is a website that I've seen that is called the Anonymizer. And you go through that, and all of a sudden, you're going through them. You're not going through you. What do you think of such things? What, it's basically the same idea as, like, a remailer? You put www.anonymizer.com in front of the address, and then you do HTTP, backslash, all that stuff afterwards. And it's like a double web address. But what happens when you follow a link on the site that you go to? I think it keeps the Anonymizer part in front of it. Yeah, it does that. In fact, I even anonymized myself to the Anonymizer, and it kept that. I had a triple address up there on the screen. Sounds like a neat tool. But you've got to figure those people have the information as to what exactly it is. Yeah, it's the same as the anonymous remailer in Finland that was so famous. There are records someplace. It's not so anonymous. Those 900 numbers that make anonymous calls for you for $2 a minute. There's records being kept someplace. How secure they are, that's open to interpretation. All right, let's fit in a couple more phone calls. Good evening. You're on the air. Hello? Yes, go ahead. That PHS you were talking about? Yes. It is Personal Handyphone System. Handyphone? Handyphone, H-A-N-D-Y-P-H-O-N-E. Are you looking at the article? I have the article in front of me. Wow, okay. I don't remember that phrase, but yeah, I guess that's what it's called. Now, what I'm really calling about is, I don't know whether I missed your comment on it or whether you missed seeing it, but in the New York Times about two or three weeks ago, there was an article saying that they were going to promulgate a rule that anybody who had ever been convicted of hacking would not be permitted under federal law ever to use the Internet again. Did you see that? What? Uh, no. You want to tell us more about that? Huh? Tell us a little more about that. I don't have the article in front of me, so I can't. I just remembered having seen it about two or three weeks ago in the business section of the New York Times. Well, if anybody knows specifically what article that is, we'll definitely follow up on it, but that sounds kind of absurd. Okay. But it doesn't mean it's not true. It just sounds kind of weird. Hmm. Alright, anything else? That's it. Alright, thanks for calling. No problem. Good evening, you're on the air. Hello? Yes, go ahead. Hi, my name's Nathan. Hi, Nathan. I remember, this is the 2600 Radio Show, right? Well, that's one interpretation of it, yes. Yeah, okay. I've been listening, and about a month ago, you were talking about the new Star 69. Uh-huh. The speaking Star 69. Yeah. Well, I had that for at least three or four months up here. I'm up in Rockland County, over the bridge. And I've noticed it, yeah, at least three or four months ago, and I'm surprised that they wouldn't have it in the city, because it's still 9X and everything. Well, we city folk lag behind in many things, and I guess that's just another one of them. Really? Actually, 9X tests new features in the outskirts of the city before they actually install them in the city. That's pretty cool, though, because sometimes you may not want to call a person back. You may just want to see who it is. That's right, that's right. And, you know, if it's somebody that's harassing you, you don't want to call the person that's harassing you, because they might think you're leading them on or something. Yeah. I was looking at an SGI reseller, like the Silicon Graphics computers, and they have them really nice ones, but they're like $16,000 each. That's a bit taxing, isn't it? Yeah. And I was just wondering what kind of work you could do on them to maybe alleviate the price or something after you get them, like graphics or something. You mean to make back the money that you just spent on this thing? Yeah. People pay for that? Well, I mean, you know, not many people that we know go out and buy... I don't know actual individuals who go out and buy an SGI. I know corporations who do, but... Yeah, but they're cool. Yeah. Well, yeah, they are cool, but I don't know, for home use. So what would you recommend for... I'd recommend a nice high-end PC and save yourself on all the multicolored plastic. Yeah, but if he wants to get, you know, one of these, you know... There are no cheap Silicon Graphics machines. No, but if you get an expensive one, what can you do to offset that cost? What can you, you know, what kind of... How can you, like, lease it out and, you know... Well, unless he's going to do computer animation for Industrial Light and Magic... There you go. I don't think he's going to make the money for that. Can you do that, computer animation? Depends. Probably, if I learn how to do it. You could do, like, an episode of The Simpsons or something, right? Oh, the problem is that the software that he'd use is going to cost many, many thousands of dollars. Yeah, do you think you're getting off easy with that $16,000? There's more that you've got to spend. You see, the thing is, it's corporate mentality. You've got to, like, you know, be part of that little club. What about ISDN? Would that be cheaper if, like, if you go to an ISP's website, it says corporate rates for ISDN. If there's a personal rate, would that be cheaper, usually? And would the 9X rate itself be cheaper if it's for personal use? Well, now, if you're talking about an ISP's corporate versus personal, usually what they're referring to is a personal unlimited access. It's somebody that dials in as many times as they want. A corporate is something that's left on all the time. Yeah. Well, I'm talking about, like, 9X. Would they charge you less if you were using the ISDN for your own purposes? Yeah. The residential rates are cheaper than the business rates. The business rates are timed by the minute, no matter what kind of call you make, voice or data. That's good. Because right now I have a dial-up modem, and my ISP disconnects me on idle, like, 15 minutes of idle time. Right. So I just, like, wrote a program to start sending packets to some host. Right. And that would keep me online. That's what you do. Yeah, that's what everybody does. A lot of people are doing that on AOL now, because AOL is trying to solve the problem by kicking people off after, like, three seconds of inactivity. What about the new 57.6 modems? Are they any good? Do they really go 57.6? 57.6? Yeah, the X2 modems. They're not 57.6. What's the speed on those? 56.2? Are those 56 even? Yeah, something like that. Well, 50-something, right? Yeah. No, well, I mean, there's a catch to those. The catch is that in order to use one of those, the person that you're calling has to have one of those. Yeah, well, my ISP says they're going to support them sometime in the first quarter of 97. So that should be, like, next couple months. If your ISP has them and your ISP is the only number you call, I imagine that would probably be worthwhile, then, wouldn't it? Really? Yeah, well, the thing is that even if, like, say you, Emmanuel, got one of these, and I got one, we still wouldn't be using that speed. The thing is that if you actually had a bank of phone lines that were connected, say, through a T1, so that the phone lines on your end were already digital, we're skipping that extra stage of converting analog to digital and back again. That's where the actual savings is, where otherwise we would lose the actual bandwidth that would be available to us. Because we're skipping one of those analog-to-digital conversions, we have more total bandwidth available, more throughput, and that's what the X2 modems take advantage of. If I dialed into my ISP, I'd actually be getting somewhere around 57k a second? You could be. But, I mean, they're talking about sustained, yeah. And, of course, in one direction. That's the direction from them to you, not from you to them. Okay, we are out of time. Sorry to cut the person off there, but interesting discussion. I'm sure we'll be playing around with those kinds of things more. Maybe we'll have some of those at the Beyond Hope conference. We'll mess around and see how they work. All right, thanks, everybody, for calling in. And we'll be back in next week, hopefully with one of our international shows. We'll see if that works out. Check the website for more details on that. If you want to email us, oth at 2600.com. If you want to send us mail here, off the hook, Care of WBAI, 505 8th Avenue, New York, New York, 10018. Until next week, Emmanuel Goldstein for FiberOptic. Have a good night. Good night. I found this good, I'm digging it now. Dallas Cats Productions and the African Caribbean Rights Organization invite you to an evening of entertainment to benefit a medicine drive for the Congo Relief Committee.