And a very good evening to everybody.
This is Off the Hook, the program that you may not have heard for quite some time because
we weren't on for the last three weeks or so.
But while we were away, we've been doing lots and lots of work, lots of preparation for
the upcoming summer fun and also lots of looks back into the past to see all the many things
that we've done here on this radio station.
Boy, it's been something.
If you have access to the World Wide Web, then you have access to every single one of
our shows.
Actually, that's not entirely true.
You will have access to every single one of our shows pretty soon.
We're just about finished with the project of recording, converting each and every one
of them to real audio.
But in the process of doing this, and keep in mind, this goes back to 1988.
That's when our first actual program was.
Although there was only one show that year, there was maybe one the year after that, and
we didn't really become a regular show until 1991.
There was still an awful lot of interesting things going on, ranging from Kevin Mitnick
to the whole fiber optic saga to the more recent Bernie Yes tale, and a lot of things
in between.
We've seen changes.
We've seen New York Telephone go away.
We've seen 9X do all kinds of bizarre things, and we now see Bell Atlantic moving in slowly
but ominously.
So listening to these things, as I've been sort of forced to do over the past six months,
it takes a long time to convert these things, you kind of get a feeling that we've really
gone a lot of places and done a lot of things, and hopefully you've been around for most
of that.
But you can catch up, www.2600.com, and just follow the buttons for Off The Hook.
You should be able to figure it out.
Although, you know, I have to wonder, I really have to wonder, the people that are listening
to the radio show, you know, we've gotten so much mail, and our email address, by the
way, is oth at 2600.com, oth meaning Off The Hook.
Okay, but we've gotten so much mail from people who are asking, how come the next show isn't
on the web?
And, you know, we said, we said last time, we did say this, that we weren't going to
be on for three weeks.
So I'm wondering, are these people listening to the radio show at all, they're just downloading
files and saving them to their hard drive without even, without even playing them.
You know, you have to kind of wonder what that's all about.
But, and then somebody else was sending us mail saying, how come all the shows aren't
on the web?
Well, you know, give us a little bit of time, for God's sake, it takes time to do this.
People are angry at us.
They're angry that we haven't put the shows up onto the web, you know, and I just, you
lose patience sometimes, you really do.
Anyway, the other major project, of course, is the Beyond Hope conference, which we just
found out some exciting news about it today.
And that is that there will be a live edition of Off the Hook taking place at the Puck building
downtown.
I don't quite know how we're going to do this yet, but we are going to do it.
Rest assured, we will figure out a way to do this.
If you are an Off the Hook fan, yes, you will be able to, if you're an attendee of the Beyond
Hope conference, you'll be able to actually be in the audience.
And and I don't know what we're going to do on the show, but we'll do something, we'll
do something fun.
And it'll take place live from from down there.
I'm not sure if we'll have the capability of taking phone calls down there.
Hopefully we will.
It's going to involve a bit of, I don't know, a bit of ingenuity on our part.
So that's that's the exciting news as far as that goes.
Beyond Hope will be taking place August 8th, 9th and 10th.
And that will be at the Puck building, corner Lafayette and Halston.
The website for that is www.hope.net.
And there's a full registration form, all the details you need to get into the conference
there.
We'll be announcing more things as far as panels, speakers, things like that.
I can tell you this, the keynote speaker will be Brock Meeks, who many of you have heard
on this radio show quite a few times.
He's the reporter who broke the story about the Pentagon City Mall incident back in November
1992.
That was when we had a meeting in Washington, D.C., broken up by what appeared to be security
guards.
But what Brock found out was that it was actually the Secret Service behind it.
So this is this is somebody who knows how to dig for for for stories.
And you may have also seen his postings on the net, his stories on the net concerning
censorship, the clipper chip and all the other threats to privacy that are going on almost
daily basis.
More recently, you may have seen him on MSNBC as a correspondent.
So this is a guy who gets around and knows what he's talking about.
So look for him to give a pretty interesting presentation there.
And we're going to have a lot more announcements as far as what we'll have at Beyond Hope.
So stay tuned.
And any questions, feel free to call us during this hour, because that's sort of what we're
here for.
Don't call right now.
Don't call right now, because 9x is going to disconnect you.
All right.
They they disconnect after like, what, 40 rings or so.
And if you're calling from New Jersey, they're just going to just AT&T or MCI or whoever
is going to disconnect you even before that.
You know, after like 20 rings, they'll disconnect you.
It's part of the 90s push for megacorporations to become even more mega.
And boy, nothing, nothing epitomizes that so much as what I saw today, PC Expo, PC.
I've never been to anything like this in my life.
I've never even been to the Javits Center.
You know, I've never seen this place before.
I knew it was over there somewhere, but I never went because there's no mass transportation
for one thing.
There's no subway that goes anywhere near the place.
I don't know why that is.
But yeah, so I went over to this PC Expo thing.
For those of you who don't know, that's going on today, tomorrow and Thursday.
And it's, you know, people interested in computer things, I guess, is probably the best way
to, you know, it's humble, it's small, but it's sincere.
No, it's it's it's none of those, actually.
It's it's big, it's massive.
And it's about as insincere as anything I've ever seen in my life.
But it's it's interesting.
If you like science fiction, it's worth wandering around just to see the kinds of things that
you'll you'll stumble across.
I was there for about an hour wandering around, looking at Microsoft and Dell and Intel.
They have all these like, you know, big, massive presentations with with huge LCD screens and
computers every place doing all kinds of of really wacky things.
And I was there, you know, feeling dizzy, literally feeling dizzy from from all the
corporate propaganda hitting me from from all corners and just all the RF, too.
And after an hour, I suddenly realized, you know, there's more of this is another floor
beneath it.
Yeah.
There's a whole other floor.
And I didn't even know it was there until I was wandering around all this time looking
at the big mega people.
It seems they're the smaller people are downstairs and it's kind of like an alternative community
down there.
It's like it's like the counterculture to what's upstairs, but it's still mega corporations,
but they're just like kind of alternative mega corporations.
And as I was leaving, because the thing closes down at like five o'clock, some ungodly hour
like that.
Someone told me that there's yet another level that I didn't even find at all.
So if I go back, I'll have to look for the third level and maybe there's even more levels
after that.
But I was wandering around looking at all kinds of neat displays.
You know, everybody there.
You go to one of these things, everybody there at these at these corporations, at these these
corporate presentations, they all have these little I don't know what you call them, little
microphone things that that they talk through.
You know, they're all giving a little presentations.
They look like little switchboard operators and they're just talking about their product,
you know, with this.
It's like, you know, it's like walking into, I guess, the Grand Central Station of infomercials,
you know, because they're all around.
Everywhere you look, there's another infomercial going on and people looking all eager and
excited, you know, with that sort of Jim Baker religious fervor about them, except they're
talking about their products, which I guess he is, too.
But you know, this is something that you could actually shell out lots of money for and have.
And they're going around talking about all these things, you know, about their chips,
about their screens, about their software, their hardware, all kinds of things.
But this one guy was going on a little bit more.
You see, the way it works, they keep these things on all the time.
And it's funny.
You walk by and some people are up there in front of a crowd of 100 people, you know,
and they're all enthused because, you know, he's throwing out little Microsoft balls or
something that somebody really wants to keep in their office or, you know, no matter what
they throw out, people jump at it like maniacs.
Well, some people are doing that.
Some people are just talking to, you know, two people, but they still have the microphone
on and they're still coming through the speakers.
You know, it looks kind of ridiculous.
I don't think they realize that.
But they're sort of in presentation mode and they're talking to these individual people
as they go by.
And it sounds like they're talking to a lot of people.
But there was this one guy that I apparently didn't even remember that he had the thing
on because he was just talking to a friend of his.
And I just, I happened to overhear part of the conversation as I was walking by.
Actually, a lot of people could hear it.
And he's like, yeah, I don't know what it is with Becky.
She just isn't the same anymore.
You know, I'm going to try to get home early tonight, but I'm not pessimistic about it.
And I don't think that was anything to do with anything he was selling.
The other guy was like nodding sympathetically.
I guess he wasn't even aware that his friend's voice was coming through the speakers, you
know, or maybe he didn't care.
But it was, uh, it was interesting, it was funny, it was also sad.
But that's part of the whole, the whole scenario down in a place like that.
So PC Expo, it's a world of fun.
I saw the OmniPoint people.
The OmniPoint people were there.
In fact, they have a transmitter down there.
I don't quite know how this works, but they have that little transmitter set up, right?
It's downstairs too.
It's not like high up.
I don't know if it's a, if it's just a mock, but it didn't look like a mock antenna because
it had wires going into it and everything like that.
So I think they were using it to transmit to the, to the conference and give everybody
a good dose of radiation too at the same time.
Uh, I saw their map, I didn't get a chance to actually ask them about this.
By the way, you know, I was looking all over the place for pay phones there.
There are pay phones, you have to wait online, or you can just walk up to the OmniPoint booth
and make a free call on their, on their little phones that they're demonstrating there.
Apparently they let you do that.
They let you call anywhere you want.
It's not something I'm used to.
Well, not something I'm used to legally anyway.
It's um, it's interesting that they just let you do that.
They had this map up there and the map has this, um, uh, this color coding scheme and
they have GSM covered areas and then they have OmniPoint covered areas.
And you know, I was going to ask him, what's the difference?
GSM is one, OmniPoint is obviously part of GSM.
So he's saying that, uh, you know, it's a difference of some sort.
And also the way the color coding worked, the entire country looked like it was mapped
for GSM.
The Northwest territories of Canada look like they're a part of GSM.
So I didn't really understand what that meant.
And of course, you know, the ocean was too.
According to the little handout they give, um, in summer of 1997, which is a couple of
days, they're going to be entirely covering Long Island and looks like most of Connecticut
as well and almost all of New Jersey.
Now, I don't think they really are close to doing that right now.
This map might be a bit, uh, overly optimistic, but that's what they're saying.
They're saying they will be covering that whole area pretty soon.
All kinds of internet service providers are there.
They had, um, they had this, um, ISDN booth from Bell Atlantic, but the funny thing was
they had 9x propaganda there.
I don't know if this is a prelude to the merger, but, uh, there is a bunch of 9x pamphlets
including what ISDN is, how it works, what it does, and why, why it's sort of something
I'd like to know about.
Let's see if that's, uh, indexed in any way, um, ISDN, a better way of working, ISDN helps
people work together, working at home with ISDN, ISDN puts video to work, ISDN, better
access to better data.
Yeah.
ISDN in medicine and healthcare, better phones, quality sound, ISDN in transaction processing,
planning for and installing ISDN.
So that's, uh, that's how they divide up the book, I don't really say why anywhere in there,
but yeah, you can get that little, uh, little handout.
Looking at the Bell Atlantic pricing structure, um, I, I got a bunch of these things.
Of course, the one that I really want to read from is not the one that I have.
I have, uh, Virginia, West Virginia, and DC, and I also have Pennsylvania.
I know that New Jersey was fairly close to what Pennsylvania was, so I guess I'll, I
guess I'll read that one.
Um, for, um, unlimited, because that's what we're all interested in, unlimited ISDN, meaning
2B channels, always in use.
The total cost is $249 a month, so no penny a minute surcharge there, no five cent a minute
surcharge, and that's something that 9X does not offer at all.
Now, the question is, is 249 bucks too expensive?
Well, it's a valid question, and some people would say it is, some people would say it
isn't.
Hard to say.
Right now, with 9X, you can get ISDN service, in fact, they have free installation.
This is something that just happened a couple of weeks ago.
Free installation of ISDN service, or a free conversion of your existing line to ISDN.
Now, at last, finally, 9X is doing something smart.
They're not pricing it out of the range of people who should be using this kind of thing.
Of course, they still don't have the unlimited option, um, oh, here it is, I found New Jersey,
New Jersey is $239, not 249, 239, so there's differences within the states.
But 9X does not offer the unlimited plan, and by unlimited, I mean no penny a minute
surcharge for using 64K or 128K, in which case the surcharge would be two cents a minute.
If you add that up, it would come to a couple of thousand dollars a month, two cents a minute
surcharge every minute of every day.
So I guess the 239 that, that, um, Bell Atlantic offers is a better deal, but it's still kind
of high.
You know, if you're smart, you can figure out ways to keep your ISDN bill down to below
50 bucks.
And one way of doing that, well actually, the main way of doing that is to use data
over voice, and find a provider who supports that, then you don't pay a permanent charge
at all.
You pay like a regular phone call, and since, since using a voice channel of your ISDN line
is like using a regular telephone, you're simply getting increased bandwidth, and you
can get 112, not 128K, 112K, but tell me if you can tell the difference.
I don't know, it's not, it's not that significant, and it's worth the amount of money you wind
up saving.
So we have that to look forward to when Bell Atlantic moves across the river.
Will they bring those rates with them, or will 9x wind up with better rates in a different
way?
Now we have some news items, things that have happened over the past couple of weeks.
We're going to keep this kind of short, because a lot of things have happened, obviously,
and we don't want to take up the entire hour just catching up.
We do want to take some phone calls, which we'll do in about, uh, I guess five minutes
or so.
So don't call yet.
But by now, they'll probably hang up on you, and it's not our fault, there's nothing we
can do about it.
Okay, how many of you have heard this story?
This comes out of Washington, D.C.
I'm just going to read a little bit of it, because I really can't get through the whole
thing.
A Delaware teenager who allegedly hacked his way into a NASA website on the internet and
left a message berating U.S. officials is being investigated by those same U.S. officials.
Actually, federal authorities, but I'm sure the U.S. officials are looking over their
shoulders.
NASA Inspector General Robert Gross cited the incident, the most recent example of a
computer invasion of a NASA website, as an example of how the space agency has become
vulnerable via the internet.
I think they've been vulnerable for quite some time via their own, well, never mind.
We live in an information environment vastly different than 20 years ago, Gross said in
a written statement, hackers are increasing in number and in frequency of attack.
In the latest case, the Delaware teen, whose name, age, and hometown were not released,
altered the internet website for the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama,
according to the statement from the Computer Crimes Division of NASA's Inspector General's
office.
And this is what he said.
We own you.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive, the teen's message said, adding
that the government system's administrators who manage the site were, quote, extremely
stupid, unquote.
Well, the message also encouraged sympathizers of Kevin Mitnick, a notorious computer hacker,
to respond to the site.
Mitnick was indicted last year on charges stemming from a multi-million dollar crime
wave in cyberspace.
Now, that's as far as I'm going to go in this article, because it's a blatant lie.
A multi-million dollar crime wave in cyberspace, where do they get this crap?
I mean, he was never indicted for anything remotely similar to that, he was indicted
for possession of a cellular phone number.
He was indicted in North Carolina for 15 or more instances of having, on a piece of paper,
an electronic serial number or identification number combination, which is known as an access
device.
15 or more access devices, and you can get charged with a particular crime.
That is what we're talking about.
Not multi-million dollars, nothing like that.
In fact, the amount of actual damage is very, very hard to determine, and if it's anything
significant at all, it would certainly not even approach one million.
I'd be surprised if it approached a thousand.
And the other charge was that he had violated his probation, or his supervised release,
as they call it.
Again, that is open to debate, too.
There's a lot of evidence to suggest that this did not, in fact, happen, including phone
records, bank records, all kinds of things like that.
However, it's not being listened to.
Imagine if you have evidence that proves that you were someplace when the government says
you weren't, but they just won't even let you present that evidence.
That's the kind of frustration that Kevin Mitnick is facing, and probably will continue
to face for quite some time.
Remember, he's been in prison for over two years, and what exactly it is he's being charged
with has never been defined.
Articles like this, that say something, say something like he was engaged in a multi-million
dollar crime wave in cyberspace.
You see this in the paper, and what are you going to think?
You're going to think that, yeah, he was doing something.
When they say things like he was in possession of 20,000 credit card numbers, you're going
to think, hey, this guy was committing credit card fraud.
You won't think he copied a file that was passed around all over the internet for the
previous year beforehand, and that the company, Netcom, that owned that file did nothing to
stop it.
You won't think that.
You'll just see he had 20,000 credit card numbers, and say, oh, that was bad.
That means he committed 20,000 instances of credit card fraud, or something like that.
It just sticks in your head that way, when in actuality there's not one instance of him
using a credit card that did not belong to him.
So you're saying, Emanuel, okay, don't get all worked up over this.
It's only one story.
It's only one idiot that, yeah, okay, well, you're right, you're right.
It's only one story.
It's only one newspaper, but there's a very important two words that appear underneath
the author's name, and those two words are associated press.
You know what that means?
It basically is the same thing as putting Pravda underneath it.
It means that those words, in their exact form, are going to show up all over the place,
word for word, newspapers all around the world.
They will not bother to check, because it comes from the associated press.
It's our one and only news source, and it is, because nobody gets UPI anymore.
The associated press is the only news source that newspapers get from around the country,
and same thing for TV stations, radio stations, things like that.
There are others, yes, but as far as the mainstream goes, associated press is it.
So that means when they say something stupid, like Kevin Mitnick was indicted on charges
stemming from a multi-million dollar crime wave in cyberspace, that means millions upon
millions of people will see that stupidity.
Do you think they'll see a correction?
No, they won't see a correction, not at all.
They'll see that, it'll stick in their minds, and then when it comes time to sit in judgment
of this guy, they'll say to themselves, yeah, life in prison or whatever it is that he gets
is certainly a valid thing for all the crimes that he did, but no one as yet has even come
forward and said what crime he committed other than knowing too much and staying free a little
too long.
We've got to be careful of things like this, we have to be careful of mass stupidity and
the corporate media, which seems to be controlling virtually everything we read and think these
days.
Here's another story that also comes from the associated press, I don't know how much
of this is true either, I'm not entirely familiar with the case, but I thought it was kind of
interesting.
A computer hacker has infiltrated the system set aside for authorities investigating the
slaying of Jean Benet Ramsey, the latest blow to a heavily criticized inquiry.
Yeah, someone apparently, according to them, hacked their system.
Now you may ask a very good question, why would a system that had evidence, allegedly
had evidence, why is that online, why is that accessible to the outside world?
Anyway, Boulder Police spokeswoman Leslie Aholm said the computer was hacked, and this
is in quotes, sometime early Saturday.
The word hacked was in quotes, not the sometime early Saturday.
The incident was announced by police on Thursday.
We don't believe anything has been lost, but we don't know what, if anything, has been
copied, said Detective John Eller, who was leading the investigation into the slaying
of a six-year-old girl nearly six months ago.
The computer is in a room at the district attorney's office that police share with the
prosecutor's investigators.
The room apparently had not been broken into.
Computer experts with the Colorado Bureau of Investigations were examining equipment
to determine what had been done.
Meanwhile, police were checking computerized reports against printed copies to see if there
had been any tampering.
Eller said security measures had been stepped up.
I think these people need a lot of help, you know.
They're looking in the room to see if there's a break-in, but they can't tell the difference
between, you know, a physical break-in and an over-the-phone break-in.
It seems really absurd and silly.
They don't go into any detail as to how they know there was a break-in in the first place.
But we all know that police never lie and that it wasn't the cop that did something
that he wasn't supposed to do on the computer system, and it's just too embarrassed to say
so when they're saying that somebody else did it and they're wasting a whole lot of
time.
No, it's nothing like that.
Okay, finally, this little gem can be found on the web.
Kevin Mitnick, computer terrorist.
Not to beat a dead horse or anything like that, but this is something that I guess people
should just see and deal with.
Kevin Mitnick, who has been called a computer terrorist by the Department of Justice, is
perhaps the most high-profile computer criminal and responsible for more havoc in the computer
world today than virtually any other computer outlaw.
Mitnick explored computers and telephone systems for more than a decade, turning complex systems
into the instruments of his lawless trade.
For years, he refined his skills and pushed himself up the ladder of computerized criminality.
Isn't it great how people can just say these things without having to prove anything?
In the early 80s, he started his career in crime as a phone freak, in quotes, one who
gets free phone service by cracking the right access codes.
He also built up expertise calling up companies and pretending to be a computer repairman
to obtain confidential phone numbers and access codes.
He idolized Robert Redford's character in Three Days of the Condor, a graduate student
hired by the CIA to excerpt the plots of novels.
In a scene from the film, Redford poses as a telephone serviceman and crosses phone wires
to shake his pursuers.
Mitnick sometimes went by the handle Condor.
Boy, he sounds guilty to me.
His trouble with the law began at an early age when he became part of a gang of Los Angeles
computer hackers.
Whenever you say gang, you know that means trouble.
They broke into a system at Monroe High School.
High school hackers.
In 1981, at age 17, he stole the manuals of Pacific Bell's Cosmos computer system and
software from Mike Report Systems.
They didn't have the manuals.
They couldn't do anything.
He had them.
He could do everything.
He only drew probation for both incidents because of his age.
By the late 1980s, Mitnick was no longer beating the rap.
In 1989, he was convicted of computer fraud after breaking into MCI telephone computers
and accessing long distance codes, as well as doing millions of dollars in damage to
Digital Equipment Corporation.
Of course, millions of dollars of damage was defined by Digital Equipment Corporation who
put in their assessment of the damage that he did, the people that were looking for him,
their salaries, their food that they had to eat to do this, the education they had to
get to get to the point where they could investigate him, the apartment complexes they lived in
and the people that built those, and all kinds of things like that.
That's how they assess these things.
They just keep going, and they can come up with millions of dollars in damage like that.
Judge Mariana Fouser of the US District Court in Los Angeles ordered him to receive therapy
while in prison, likening his obsessive hacking to substance abuse, and prohibited him from
use of a telephone or computer.
He served one year behind bars in a minimum security prison.
But when Mitnick was released, little had changed.
You know, it really, really annoys me.
First of all, yeah, this judge ordered him to get treatment while in prison.
Did that treatment include six months in solitary confinement?
I don't think so.
I don't think that's what was supposed to have been done to somebody like this.
And the funny thing is this article chooses to just gloss over that.
They just say, oh, he spent a year behind bars in a minimum security prison, not six
months in hell, in a room by himself, not allowed to talk on the phone because they
were afraid of what he might do.
Not dealing with that kind of ignorance.
I'm sure there's a lot more they're going to skip.
Yeah, in fact, they jump all the way to 1992.
They skip all the years where Kevin was trying to become part of the world that had shunned
him and continued to shun him and just basically cast him out no matter what he tried to do.
He tried many times to to go to conferences, to share his knowledge, to to be open.
They didn't want to hear from him.
They locked him out.
Anyway, if you want to read this article, if the rest of it's mostly crap anyway, you
can go to www.freedommag.org, that's F-R-E-E-D-O-M-M-A-G.org slash English slash V-O-L-2-7-0-4 slash
Crime.H-T-M.
And that's the story on Kevin Mitnick, according to that rather closed minded person.
It's just it's annoying.
You know, how many times have you have you known of a story?
You know, we are intimately familiar with the details and you see how they just continually
mangle the facts and and work it around, you know, suiting it to their own interests.
You know, they've already written the story.
They know the beginning, the ending, everything.
They just have to sort of shape the facts to make it sound like that's the way it really
was.
It's it's an education.
I mean, I'm sure anybody who has dealt with the media knows this is the case and we will,
by the way, this is something else that I guess I should have mentioned earlier.
We'll be having a media panel at Beyond Hope will be addressing just these issues and talking
about just what the media is all about, what they what they do.
All right.
Let's take some phone calls to one to two, seven, nine, three, four hundred.
And you know, there's there's word, there's word out there that the White House may be
backing away from its previous support for using the long arm of the federal government
to restrict access to indecent material on the Internet.
Senior administration officials now believe the Communications Decency Act of nineteen
ninety six, which provides criminal penalties for distributing such material electronically,
will not survive a current challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court.
And that should happen sometime in July.
July, the Supreme Court should be should be ruling on this.
And if that's the case, according to the CNN report, some of the administration, some people
over there have been fashioning a new policy that would leave the online world substantially
self-regulated, discarding the use of government sanctions at the heart of the decency act.
Well, that would be something it's a big waste of time, but it would be something if we actually
got them out of the net, got the government away from regulating things like that.
Now, I had a frustrating time at the PC Expo today.
I was trying to go around to like every every booth and and, you know, put their web browsers
onto onto the hope site.
You know, I figured it was just a public service to to let everybody know that WWW dot
hope that net was the was the proper place for them to be looking at.
But, you know, I couldn't do it.
I couldn't do it at all.
You know why? Because every single one of these things was going through some sort of
stupid parental control device and our site isn't rated.
So to protect children, they simply block it.
You know, I'm going to this PC Expo thing and all they can think about is protecting the eyes
of children. I didn't see a single kid in the place for one thing.
But I guess these people think like children themselves or something.
I don't know. But enough time to sit around, hacking it out, figuring out a way to do that.
But maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow a bunch of us can go down there and see just how we
can connect to a website.
Yeah.
And our phone number is two one two.
Two, seven, nine, three, four hundred, I sounded confused there is because I was hearing
myself in delay and that's that's how you'll sound if you listen to your radio when you
call us on the phone.
So, yeah, that's something listening to these shows over the years, listening to the shows
that we're putting onto the website.
That's something that has never gone away.
Our listeners always sound confused when they call in and it's just important to to know
the facts when when when you call in, you're actually calling in seven seconds in the
future. Your radio is seven seconds in the past.
It's kind of weird, but that's the way it works.
That's the way it works in most places.
OK, let's take some phone calls.
Good evening. You're on the air.
You see, this is exactly what I was talking about.
People will be silent.
They won't say anything because they won't know that it's them.
You know, and I just I'm forced to move on to another phone call.
Sounds me, you know, it sounds horrible.
I was I was yelling at myself, listening to myself saying, how could you do that to these
people? But the fact of the matter is, you know, radio time is valuable, very valuable.
And you have to just keep moving.
You can't have silence, you can't have dead air, you can't have things that aren't commercially
viable. Is someone laughing?
I don't think this is funny.
Want to share that with the rest of us?
All right. Two and two, two, seven, nine, three, four hundred.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Yeah, good morning or good afternoon or whatever.
How are you doing? All right.
Good. Listen, I've heard your voice many times.
Well, now here's the thing.
Many, many times.
This is dating back to the 1980s.
Right. This is you have your radio on.
I can hear you. I can hear you.
You know not to turn your radio.
Yeah, well, you should know better.
Of all people. I didn't expect to get picked up so quickly.
Right. Now, here's the thing.
I hope you have other callers, but I'd like to make radio history.
You know, I want to protest that the airwaves are in the public interest.
Well, I don't think you should protest that because I think the radio waves should be in the public interest.
That's I'll be perfectly honest with you.
If somebody I'm just doing what media does and wrapping your words around you.
All right. Now, here's the thing.
It's my job. Somebody's filthy rich, right?
Yes. And wants to say, I want these airwaves for myself.
Man or woman or whatever.
Right. You know, and has an armed force even.
I can't stop that.
But on WBAI, you have broadcasters now like David Rothenberg doesn't take listen to phone calls.
OK, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen.
If you're going to have this conversation, then freedom doesn't doesn't listen.
OK, I'm not hanging up on you, but I'd rather I'd rather you not bring other people into this.
If you have an argument to make, make the argument without bringing other people's shows into it, because they're not here to defend themselves.
By WBAI and Pacifica.
You want to be sued. You don't want to be sued.
If I'm speaking lies, then you have the right to sue me for defamation of character.
Yeah, that may be so. But it's so much paperwork and such a pain.
So why don't you simply state your points without involving specific people?
And and we can we can address them that way.
Broadcasters on WBAI who refuse to take listen to phone calls, who may have taken listen to phone calls in the past and who had a nice, shall we say, a call.
Now, it's true that sometimes people call in on the air, make nasty remarks, you know, that's true.
But that's what you get in when you have a mix of humanity in the world.
And if it's handled right, maybe you can wean somebody away from being a bigot.
I totally agree with that.
But there are some radio shows that don't lend themselves to the call in format.
I think it's up to the individual producer, isn't it?
Let me say this. Both callers, both program people.
Jim Foyne takes a phone call from.
Sounded like a name to me.
That sounded like a name.
I know, but I'm speaking well of him.
Well, it doesn't matter. You see, I'm not I'm not I'm not worried about criticism.
It's just I'd rather not be talking about other people's shows who aren't here to to count.
I mean, maybe Jim Foyne, you know, now you got me doing it.
But let's look now. Look, you've got to stop this.
I it's catching.
And then that's what we need in this country is catching honesty.
You know, I saw Jim Foyne at PC Expo.
He didn't see me. But actually, I heard him.
I heard his voice. And then I saw him.
This is essential. Hey, Jim, you live in a society where we believe in brotherhood and sisterhood.
And yet we run away from each other.
Now, the point is, one of the reasons for it, a primary reason is that you have some
programmers, broadcasters who are bullies.
I've said that on the air right to them.
I say some people choose to interpret words and say, as a result of this word, you're banned
from the radio because of one word that I said.
And it wasn't the N word.
It was the MF word.
But the point is this, you can't talk about multi-frequency tones on the radio.
OK, you know that.
Well, I'm sorry.
I'm trying to be a monotone.
All right. But now here's the thing.
I hope the listeners aren't angry with me.
I spoke. I think the people waiting to get on the air.
All right. But let me finish with saying this.
I mean, I'm going to try and get on report to the listener that some more remarks that is
forthcoming. But I know damn well, unless I go to a different phone that they don't have my
ID on. Well, we don't have caller ID.
Oh, come on. We do not have.
Look, I am looking at it right now and I see no caller ID.
There's no because the people who want to get rid of me, they'll bring it in.
You don't want to get rid of me.
OK, look, I will make you a promise.
I will make you a personal promise.
If I see caller ID anywhere in this station, I will tell everybody.
But we do not have it.
Let me for one thing, it would cost a phenomenal amount.
It's a tremendous rip off.
Really? Yes.
You can't just buy some sort of a phone that or get the service from the Con Ed, from the
telephone or 9x.
We'd have to buy a caller ID box for each and every line or we'd have to buy something
that that has massive caller ID attachments to it.
That there are people at the station who would choose to sort of say we'll take his call
last. Now, you see, if we had an 800 number, that would be it would be a lot easier to
get your number that way, although getting it getting it real time would still be
phenomenally expensive. But getting it on the bill would be very easy.
Well, let me leave you with one thing, and that's this.
I spoke earlier in the day on the program that this new political person, I don't know
how she even got on the air.
I won't mention her name.
Yes, please. After a remark like that, I wouldn't want to know.
No, no. I mean, I don't know how a political person can get on WBAI because I thought
that you couldn't be, quote, political if you're on the you know what I mean?
Let's just make make make the comment.
But my comment is that I talked about Watergate and instead of the way most people talk
about Watergate, I said and it should be quoted, I said, can you imagine if we never
found out about Watergate, if the chap who found the tape on the door had said, oh, I
guess somebody went out to get a soda and is going back.
Supposing the Republican creep people, McCord and all those people, Jay Gordon,
Lydian or whatever, all those people had done their shtick and we didn't know about
it. And the thing worked and they they they desecrated the Democratic Party's reputation.
Well, why don't you think of all the times that it has happened and we haven't found
out about it? Well, let me say it this way.
A lot of times we do find out about it.
Thank goodness for that.
But I do bring up the fact, can you imagine if it had happened that we didn't ever find
out? Because they were a pretty good group of of, you know, sell out people that Nixon
and his crowd.
And so then he went and made up for it with the approach to China and so on and so forth,
you know. But look, that's what I said earlier in the day.
And I'll rest on that because you don't hear that kind of, shall we say, insightfulness.
Now, the next call you get will totally rip me.
Hopefully it'll be Jeff and he'll put all kinds of nasty things on me.
You know, let's let's let's let's let's hope for that.
Thanks very much for the call, though.
Yeah. Jay Gordon, Liddy.
Is that his brother or something?
Good evening. You're on the air.
Oh, boy, these buttons don't work very well.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Well, yes, go ahead.
It's you, you're on the air.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, I wanted to say about the last caller.
Well, you don't have to say anything about the last caller.
I assume you call for a reason of your.
Yeah, I want to know about Kevin Mitnick.
What about Kevin Mitnick?
I want to know exactly why he's in jail.
Well, that's a that's a very good question.
He's in jail because, according to the federal government, he is a computer
outlaw, but they they have yet to charge him with anything that would warrant
putting somebody in jail for a week, much less two years and change.
If you want my personal opinion, I think he's in jail because he embarrassed
the federal government, much like Bernie S.
did, and he embarrassed them simply by a remaining free for for longer than they
wanted him to when they were looking for him.
He was able to elude them for for quite a while and be just having the name to
start with, because he has sort of developed kind of a following in the
computer underground and they don't like things like that.
They didn't like it with fiber optic.
They didn't like it with Bernie S.
They don't like with Kevin Mitnick.
And if they can, they will lock him up for life.
And the only reason he is still in prison is because not enough people have stood up
and said something about it because people don't understand the facts because they
think that, you know, he's really guilty of these things that people are talking
about. But if you look, if you dig down into the story and start asking some
serious questions, you will see that there are no facts there to support locking this
person up. So how do they still keep him in there?
Basically, by by putting out stories like the one we just read that say that he
conducted a multimillion dollar crime wave in cyberspace, you know, something that
that sounds horrible, but really has no facts backing it up.
People, I mean, I saw this firsthand in the Bernie S.
case, you know, where the judge was was listening to the garbage that the district
attorney was telling him and, you know, saying that, yeah, they they found something
that that, you know, looked like explosives in his house, of course, turned out to be
dental putty. But they never said that part.
They just said, yeah, it looked like explosives and they just leave it with that.
And of course, the defendant isn't allowed to say anything.
And when the defendant is not allowed to say anything, he can't really defend
himself. So, you know, we may think that the whole judicial system in this country
is is is working or that's better than any place else.
But I'll tell you, it's it's not working.
And if it's better than any place else, then we live in a really rotten world.
Do you think if if more people knew about computers, that punishments wouldn't be as
harsh? I think if more people knew about computers and were able to to process the
information and understand just what something means when somebody has access to
something, when someone copies a file, it's not the same thing as stealing something
when when they when they realize all the various nuances and subtleties that are glossed
over in the mainstream media.
Yeah, I think I think things like this will not happen.
And you can look look into the hacker community, look into the community of people who
understand how things work and you'll see this treated in a much more fair way.
There are people who think that Kevin Mitnick is is wrong and should be, you know,
should be held accountable. But nobody I can't think of anybody who is in the community
who thinks that he deserves what he's gotten.
You know, someone was talking about, yeah, he should be in prison maybe for a couple of
months or something like that.
But, you know, over two years without any hope of getting out anytime soon.
It's it's it's cruel.
It's insane. So why are they viewed as such a threat?
Well, I pretty much pretty much talked about that because because they're they don't
understand, they don't understand what it is that they're doing.
It's the unknown. You know, it's it's something.
Kevin Mitnick and computer hackers as a rule are seen as, I guess, gods of some sort to
these people, they know everything, they know how to do everything.
You know, a hacker broke into that computer in Denver.
They don't give any details.
They just say, yes, we discovered that a hacker did this.
And everybody in America says, oh, the hacker did this.
Hackers can do anything.
They can break into any any computer system, any place and download things and destroy
things. And, you know, the fear that's injected into people, I think that's that's where
all of this comes from, because people react in a certain way.
They they see something happening.
They don't understand it.
And right away, their first reaction is is is fear of the unknown.
And they want to blame somebody, too.
Unfortunately, people like Kevin Mitnick bear the brunt of that.
Thanks for the call. And thanks for the good questions.
I'm going to move on to some more phone calls.
Two on two, two, seven, nine, three, four hundred.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Oh, sorry about the delay.
The first call I blame.
OK, let me explain the first call.
A couple of things on Star 69 now in the residential field, they give you the time and
number. And if you want to continue with the call, you press one.
Right. You know, that still doesn't work for me.
If I hit Star 69, it rings somebody, you know, and I thought it was going to work that
way, but it still doesn't. Maybe it doesn't work in your exchange.
Yeah. And number two is do you know anything about the Jurassic Park website that was
hacked, supposedly hacked?
Yeah. You know, I heard things about that.
I heard that it was it was hacked, turned into a duck pond or something.
It says on the bottom hackers.
Yeah. But the thing is, there have been allegations that they did it themselves.
But, you know, I don't I don't really know if Universal needed publicity.
I mean, Jurassic Park was like the most famous, you know, human event ever that
weekend. I don't think they needed a hacked website on top of that to to get more.
And I don't think a hacked website would make people go out and see the film.
Right. Right. But so who would who would do such a thing?
Well, I'll tell you, you know, anyone who could.
I thought it was pretty clever myself.
And if it was done by an outsider, I thought it was pretty ingenious.
You see, if they hacked it themselves, that only goes to prove a lot of the things that
we've been saying, that hacking websites is not something that should be considered
harmful. It's it's fun.
It's it's it's a way of getting a message out.
It's it's it's harmless graffiti that can easily be, you know, eradicated right away.
And you don't have to do all kinds of horrible things to the people that do this.
You just need to tighten up your security.
In the PC show, you had your card beforehand.
Did you have the way in line today?
I really can't reveal the way I'm going to ask you.
But I have a pretty good card now.
You sort of move your way up.
You know, you sort of barter things right now.
And right now, let's just say I'm running the show.
Fine, fine. Always remember the third floor upstairs.
People always forget that.
OK, so wait, you got you got the underground community.
You are the lower level.
All right. And then you got the massive mega people.
What level is that?
Intel and the main floor.
That's the main floor. Now you're saying there's another one.
I think upstairs sometimes is another floor.
Boy, OK. Levels usually in these things.
Three levels. OK.
Well, I guess I'll I'll plot around tomorrow and find some more places.
There are a bunch of payphones on, I think, the 34th Street level.
No, there's a bunch of payphones.
But there's always people waiting in line for those payphones.
Like you said before, the only places you can get free phone calls over there.
Yeah. You can just walk up to OmniPoint.
I think Sprint or MCI or AT&T are there too.
The Hope Net, you said before.
www.hope.net.
Yeah, I want to ask the people there by the boots.
You know, how come it's not working on your machine?
Yeah, well, it's because of those stupid parental control things.
Right. Because we don't have a rating.
You know, we don't have a rating on our site, which, you know, rates these things.
I think you rate your own site.
Is that how it works?
Rate your own site? I don't know.
You know, no one's ever come up to us and said, you know, what's your rating?
And I don't believe in the rating system.
I think people should figure these things out by themselves.
I think they worry that people are going to connect to all kinds of, you know,
like weird magazines that have scantily clad or non clad at all people on them.
But I mean, come on.
Let's not, you know, go crazy over this and censor everything.
It's so much. It's being overdone.
Yes. OK. Right. Thanks for calling.
Take care. 212-279-3400.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Yeah. Hi, this is Syringe.
Hey, how you doing?
Pretty good. Yes, radio.
What's what's on your mind tonight?
I don't know. I just told you I'd call you and I had to give a shout out to Ace.
Oh, that's that's that's that's great.
You really don't have anything else to say.
That first guy is an idiot.
OK, that's that's that's no, because you like took all my time
and I've been sitting on the phone for all your time.
Yeah. My time. Your time. All right.
Well, I'm good to know.
It's good to know that that was your time.
Then whose time is this that you're taking?
Well, I'm not taking anyone's time.
You're not taking.
Well, I think the person after that might after you might have something to say.
Yeah, but see, I'm so much better than everyone else that calls.
You see now this is why Kevin Mitnick is in jail,
because because of this kind of attitude, that's that's why I hope you feel
no, you can't be mean to me.
Uh huh. You can't.
I give you on the point, Doc.
Uh huh. OK.
Well, now that now that you've said that.
Thanks. Thanks for the call.
On the point, Doc. Yeah, right.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Don't listen to the previous caller.
Just OK. You finished.
This this is real, real life.
OK, I have two questions. Yeah, go ahead.
OK, the Internet.
Which is the best Internet provider?
And is it worth?
And is it worth upgrading to a 56 K modem?
OK, well, since since I don't want to hear myself over and over again,
I'm going to answer your questions off air or on air, but with you off air.
Best Internet provider.
Look, I can tell you the worst Internet providers.
All right. The worst Internet providers are the are the biggest ones.
All right. The biggest ones, AOL, CompuServe, Netcom, those ones,
because you don't mean anything to them.
You're you're you're not really that important.
The smaller ones, Panix, Escape, Echo, places like that, Inch,
those kinds where people can actually call and speak to a human being.
You know, that's those are the things that you're after.
And they're usually cheaper to upgrade to a 56 K modem.
I haven't done it myself because I don't use a modem anymore.
I just, you know, use ISDN.
So I don't I don't need to know these things.
I haven't heard as many bad things about 56 K modems as I thought I was going to.
But still, I would make sure that whatever provider you use supports that
completely, because if they don't support it, you've pretty much wasted your time
and money. So it sounds like it could be something that that would be right for
you. But again, it's it's hard to know without the specifics of the particular
provider. 212-279-3400.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hey, I got through, huh?
He looks like you did. Yes.
I'm a happy man. You have something to say in addition.
Yeah. You know, I mean, I was I tried a couple of weeks ago and I couldn't get
through. It's like, man, I get a ringing, but I don't ever get through.
Right. Well, you know, it happens sometimes.
I have a question. OK.
I know nothing about computers.
As a matter of fact, I went over a friend's house a couple of weeks ago.
Prize this time of your life when you know nothing about computers.
It's all like that's the advice I can give you.
Computers destroy your life.
They're horrible. So I want to commit technological suicide here.
I went on the Internet for the first time a couple of weeks ago and it was really
amazing. And I have a number of friends of mine who have computers and, you know,
they're telling me about it. But I need to know if there's any literature that can
really help me with an introduction towards, you know, computers and get a better
understanding to get started.
I really know nothing about any of this stuff and I'm trying to learn as a
suggestion. Twenty six hundred.
No, I don't I don't I don't think twenty six hundred is the answer for for this
person's question.
I don't know the specific. Well, if you wander through the various bookstores like
Borders, Barnes and Noble, things like that, there are there are tons of books on the
Internet, probably something like the Internet for dummies.
But does that basically entail an introduction to computers as a whole?
They have they have it broken down to all different aspects of it, because obviously
the Internet isn't going to tell you about your PC or about Macintosh or whatever it
is that you choose to use.
But what's a good type of PC to get started with?
It depends what you want to do.
It's all different. If you're just looking for communications and then something, you
know, low down on the evolutionary scale is all you need.
If you're looking to do all kinds of, you know, publishing and artwork and things
like that, then you need something that could do graphics and and a lot more
processor power.
It really depends on your needs.
OK, if you're just looking to get started, go with something cheap, go something
used and just learn the ropes that way, because, you know, the way it works, if you
get something really, really, you know, powerful, you'll never be able to go down
to something that's less powerful, even if that's what you need.
Right. I know a friend of mine, the individual I had mentioned just a moment ago, he
his computer was basically put together.
He bought it in pieces and a guy was able to assemble it for him.
And he said that, you know, it allowed him a lot of room for expansion.
So he's just basically doing it for like Internet stuff.
But he does he wants to get into doing graphics and things of that nature because
he does prop work, movie stuff.
Right. He wants to advance that.
So he said that he was allowed a lot of room to expand it.
And he only spent something like seven hundred dollars to get this initial set up
going. The important thing to remember is that whatever it is you get in a couple of
years, it's going to be considered outdated.
And that goes for, you know, if you get something used now, it's already outdated.
If you get something brand new, top of the line in a couple of years, it's going to be
outdated. So get something that, you know, you won't be annoyed when that happens.
That's my advice. Hey, listen, we're out of time.
I want to thank everybody for calling in.
Sorry to those we didn't get to, but we will be back again next week, as we should be
because we're a weekly show.
So we'll we'll talk to you all then.
Remember, the website for Beyond Hope Information, WWW.Hope.net, if you want to listen
to some back shows of this program, including eventually this one, which I guess will be
up in about a week, WWW.2600.com.
So then this is Emmanuel Goldstein.
Have a good night.
And I'm going to be back in about a week or so, but I'm going to be back in about a week or so.
So I'm going to be back in about a week or so, but I'm going to be back in about a week or so.
...laying off the wall, dirt piling in the hall, ice on the pipes but no steam at all.
Land low, land low, low down rotten, good for nothing.
And good evening.
This is Mimi Rosenberg sitting in for Scott Sommer,
who is still busy with the issue of what will happen to the Emergency Tenant Protection Act's aftermath.
Obviously, the E.T.P.A., as it's known, expired on June 15th at midnight,
and the question is, what will take its place?
You know, it's an odd thing.
I feel that since August 1996, when Clinton enacted the Professional Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act,
what I call welfare deconstruction and destruction...