Off The Hook - 1997-09-23

[00:03.210 --> 00:07.870]  [SPEAKER_00]: And the other Americans, whatever color we want to call ourselves, can we love each other?
[00:07.970 --> 00:09.010]  [SPEAKER_00]: Can we understand each other?
[00:09.330 --> 00:12.290]  [SPEAKER_00]: Can we really form a more perfect union?
[00:12.870 --> 00:15.630]  [SPEAKER_00]: Hey, with your help and your inspiration, sister, I know we can.
[00:15.850 --> 00:16.670]  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Jerry.
[00:17.390 --> 00:19.190]  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you and all of you for listening.
[00:20.370 --> 00:21.030]  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks a lot.
[00:21.190 --> 00:21.950]  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll be with you tomorrow.
[00:22.450 --> 00:22.730]  [SPEAKER_00]: Good night.
[01:00.820 --> 01:06.020]  [SPEAKER_11]: Both Mobutu and Zaire have passed on into the tragic period of Africa's history where foreign interests dominated.
[01:06.240 --> 01:08.760]  [SPEAKER_11]: But the struggle for the heart and soul of Africa continues.
[01:09.080 --> 01:18.840]  [SPEAKER_11]: In this regard, the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, in conjunction with Africa Leidoscope, will proudly present an historic African Internationalist Forum, The Rebirth of the Congo, A Work in Progress.
[01:18.840 --> 01:26.860]  [SPEAKER_11]: A special showing of the Ron Wilkins video featuring an exclusive interview with President Laurent Kabila this Friday, September 26th, from 6.30 p.m.
[01:26.880 --> 01:27.620]  [SPEAKER_11]: until 10 p.m.
[01:27.620 --> 01:32.600]  [SPEAKER_11]: at the Harriet Tubman Learning Center, 127th Street, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem.
[01:33.160 --> 01:47.760]  [SPEAKER_11]: A special invited guest, Dr. Andre Kapanga, ambassador from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the United Nations, along with Viola Plummer, December 12th Movement, Lee Shu Hin, KPFK reporter, just returned from Rwanda and Congo, and Ilambe Brath.
[01:47.760 --> 01:49.880]  [SPEAKER_11]: The Patrice Lumumba Coalition and Moderator.
[01:50.220 --> 01:59.240]  [SPEAKER_11]: For further information, call area code 212-663-3805 as area code 212-663-3805.
[02:02.800 --> 02:05.520]  [SPEAKER_08]: Thank you for calling the Parking Violations Bureau.
[02:05.900 --> 02:08.720]  [SPEAKER_08]: To plead not guilty, press 1 now.
[02:09.420 --> 02:10.360]  [SPEAKER_08]: Thank you.
[02:10.600 --> 02:11.960]  [SPEAKER_08]: Your plea has been...
[02:11.960 --> 02:12.660]  [SPEAKER_10]: Rejected.
[02:12.740 --> 02:15.540]  [SPEAKER_08]: You will be assessed the full fine plus a small...
[02:15.540 --> 02:17.040]  [SPEAKER_10]: Large lateness penalty.
[02:17.360 --> 02:19.640]  [SPEAKER_08]: Please wait by your vehicle between 9 a.m.
[02:19.640 --> 02:20.560]  [SPEAKER_08]: and 5 p.m.
[02:20.600 --> 02:21.960]  [SPEAKER_08]: for Parking Officer Steve.
[02:22.640 --> 02:23.200]  [SPEAKER_05]: Grabowski.
[02:30.730 --> 02:44.550]  [SPEAKER_05]: The telephone keeps ringing So I ripped it off the wall I cut myself while shaving Now I can't make a call It could be at much worse Understood
[02:50.980 --> 02:52.320]  [SPEAKER_05]: But I'm doing it Boom!
[04:25.890 --> 04:28.950]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, at last, I think people can understand what it feels like to be inside my head.
[04:31.830 --> 04:33.150]  [SPEAKER_02]: And what a week it's been.
[04:33.310 --> 04:39.030]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been one of those weeks where you just feel like things can't get any more exhilarating.
[05:39.790 --> 05:42.250]  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is Off the Hook.
[05:42.650 --> 05:44.030]  [SPEAKER_02]: Emmanuel Goldstein here with you.
[05:44.310 --> 05:47.970]  [SPEAKER_02]: With more exciting news of the world of technology.
[05:47.970 --> 05:52.210]  [SPEAKER_02]: And the many potholes that lie along the information highway.
[05:52.530 --> 05:54.290]  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's been interesting.
[05:55.210 --> 06:01.670]  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know how many of you actually watch mainstream media, but there was a piece on ABC World News tonight last Thursday.
[06:01.670 --> 06:03.290]  [SPEAKER_02]: Actually, it was the second story.
[06:03.290 --> 06:07.070]  [SPEAKER_02]: We were the second most important story in the whole nation that night.
[06:07.490 --> 06:17.110]  [SPEAKER_02]: And it had to do with a rather, rather interesting thing that, a document that, let's just say, fell into our hands.
[06:18.170 --> 06:24.450]  [SPEAKER_02]: That, in light of what was going on with the breaking news network, we've talked about this over the past couple of weeks.
[06:24.730 --> 06:37.050]  [SPEAKER_02]: The company in New Jersey that had been indicted for allegedly tapping pager services, including the mayors, the police department, things like that.
[06:37.050 --> 06:42.030]  [SPEAKER_02]: And, well, I guess we've been talking about this on the radio for the past couple of weeks.
[06:42.430 --> 06:52.930]  [SPEAKER_02]: It was time to show people just how wide open such things are and why it's ridiculous to charge people with crimes for simply listening to a radio.
[06:53.190 --> 07:06.930]  [SPEAKER_02]: In case you have no idea what we're talking about here, on Thursday, information was released to ABC News as far as, well, I guess the best way to describe it is pager traffic.
[07:06.930 --> 07:25.010]  [SPEAKER_02]: Pager conversations involving none other than the White House, the White House and our friends at the Secret Service who are entrusted with protecting the president and our nation's honor and various other things like that and locking people in prison who are a threat to that society.
[07:25.670 --> 07:40.230]  [SPEAKER_02]: And, well, I guess it was kind of embarrassing to point out that, yeah, the Clinton administration is going around saying these things, but there they are simply broadcasting sensitive information out in the clear with no encryption whatsoever.
[07:40.230 --> 07:46.290]  [SPEAKER_02]: Because, I guess they're so afraid of using encryption, because it'll fall into the wrong hands, that they don't even think they should use it themselves.
[07:47.110 --> 07:53.170]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's time people know these things, and that's why we released this at that particular point in time.
[07:53.490 --> 07:55.670]  [SPEAKER_02]: It was the right time to do so.
[07:55.990 --> 07:57.250]  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, Pam is here as well.
[07:57.370 --> 08:04.550]  [SPEAKER_02]: Pam went a step further, and I guess you decided to put it up on the web as well.
[08:04.750 --> 08:05.310]  [SPEAKER_02]: Is that right?
[08:05.310 --> 08:06.790]  [SPEAKER_01]: That is exactly correct.
[08:07.110 --> 08:11.650]  [SPEAKER_02]: So, now people all over the planet are able to see the whole transcript of this thing.
[08:12.230 --> 08:17.490]  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, tell me what, first of all, what motivated you to do this, and second of all, what kind of response have you gotten?
[08:18.270 --> 08:37.050]  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, what motivated me to do this was, basically, we had gotten the transcripts as a submission to 2600 Magazine, but we hadn't had time to publish them yet, as you're well aware, and I felt that I had a copy of them, and since you had made the issue public on broadcast television,
[08:37.330 --> 08:40.550]  [SPEAKER_01]: that we should have the transcript available for people's review.
[08:40.830 --> 08:41.130]  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[08:41.130 --> 08:56.110]  [SPEAKER_01]: So, I went and turned it into webpages, and then actually a whole little suite of webpages that described the technology or links to technology, press release about the information, and also just put the text file right out there for everybody to take a look at,
[08:56.170 --> 08:57.750]  [SPEAKER_01]: and the response has been overwhelming.
[08:58.530 --> 09:07.610]  [SPEAKER_01]: We got about 6000 people looking just at the output file, or the captured transcript file, today, since 8.30 this morning, between 8.30 and 6.30.
[09:07.610 --> 09:08.830]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know what's really funny about this?
[09:08.890 --> 09:14.470]  [SPEAKER_02]: I tested the waters with this story a couple of months ago, you know, because we've had this lying around.
[09:14.730 --> 09:19.050]  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we've got all kinds of weird things lying around, and this is nothing spectacular.
[09:19.370 --> 09:20.310]  [SPEAKER_02]: Anybody can do this.
[09:20.390 --> 09:21.590]  [SPEAKER_02]: The president was here yesterday.
[09:22.250 --> 09:26.990]  [SPEAKER_02]: Any one of you out there with the right electronic equipment could have eavesdropped on the page of traffic.
[09:27.110 --> 09:28.430]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not hard.
[09:28.530 --> 09:29.630]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the point we're trying to make here.
[09:29.930 --> 09:43.310]  [SPEAKER_02]: So, we had this lying around, and I asked a couple of media people a couple of months ago, hey, you know, we've got this example of, you know, of how communications are completely insecure.
[09:43.430 --> 09:45.030]  [SPEAKER_02]: You think you might be interested in doing a story on it.
[09:45.190 --> 09:46.210]  [SPEAKER_02]: Not one of them was.
[09:46.370 --> 09:47.230]  [SPEAKER_02]: Not one of them was interested.
[09:47.290 --> 09:50.510]  [SPEAKER_02]: They decided that it was not an interesting story a couple of months ago.
[09:50.710 --> 09:54.790]  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, all of a sudden, it is an interesting story, I guess because they're indicting people for doing this.
[09:55.490 --> 09:59.010]  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you know, the media is just, they're so clueless sometimes.
[09:59.490 --> 10:00.650]  [SPEAKER_01]: They're so like the media.
[10:00.850 --> 10:01.030]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[10:01.690 --> 10:11.890]  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, in fact, I actually released the contents of the output file to friends and family, people in and around Beyond Hope, a full week before the story was on ABC News.
[10:12.110 --> 10:14.570]  [SPEAKER_01]: And there were no ramifications.
[10:14.730 --> 10:21.690]  [SPEAKER_01]: I even made it a little public to one or two media people myself, low-level media people, and they all were not interested as well.
[10:21.890 --> 10:24.010]  [SPEAKER_01]: So, I guess it's just timing, timing, timing.
[10:24.010 --> 10:25.710]  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, unbelievable.
[10:26.090 --> 10:28.650]  [SPEAKER_02]: So, we had that little bit of fun.
[10:28.890 --> 10:36.710]  [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of media people running around thinking this is the most amazing thing since the coming of Christ or whatever.
[10:36.710 --> 10:37.230]  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
[10:37.390 --> 10:40.530]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just listening in to things that are out there every day.
[10:40.590 --> 10:44.910]  [SPEAKER_02]: And if you have a pager, we've said this a million times, anybody can listen.
[10:45.190 --> 10:50.370]  [SPEAKER_02]: Anybody can see what is coming over your pager, whether it's numbers, letters, whatever.
[10:50.370 --> 10:50.450]  [SPEAKER_02]: Whatever.
[10:50.790 --> 10:52.090]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's all there.
[10:52.350 --> 10:56.150]  [SPEAKER_02]: And the thing is, you know, we can all go down to Washington, D.C.
[10:56.190 --> 10:57.210]  [SPEAKER_02]: and get this all the time.
[10:57.210 --> 10:58.830]  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't have to sit outside the White House.
[10:58.950 --> 11:03.590]  [SPEAKER_02]: We can be anywhere within pager distance, which I think is about 60 miles or something.
[11:04.270 --> 11:06.790]  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, how are you going to enforce the law against that?
[11:06.950 --> 11:07.930]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just ridiculous.
[11:08.190 --> 11:09.770]  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, theoretically, there is a law against this.
[11:09.890 --> 11:18.390]  [SPEAKER_02]: Theoretically, the people who are distributing this to the public are committing crimes, including the reporters at the various networks that are, you know, quoting this.
[11:19.510 --> 11:26.990]  [SPEAKER_02]: How are you going to possibly enforce a law that says it's illegal to, you know, to listen to things that are being broadcast completely unencrypted?
[11:27.750 --> 11:29.270]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the point we were hoping to make.
[11:30.490 --> 11:31.550]  [SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know.
[11:31.850 --> 11:35.150]  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe we made the point, you know, despite the mass media.
[11:35.290 --> 11:35.610]  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
[11:35.770 --> 11:37.230]  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll see what people have to say about it.
[11:37.390 --> 11:42.570]  [SPEAKER_01]: My take on that was even the Secret Service was very forthcoming on the ABC News piece.
[11:42.850 --> 11:45.410]  [SPEAKER_01]: They just very clearly said the technology is insecure.
[11:45.570 --> 11:46.510]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know what was weird about that?
[11:46.510 --> 11:47.990]  [SPEAKER_02]: They had two Secret Service people.
[11:48.130 --> 11:54.330]  [SPEAKER_02]: They had a former Secret Service guy who basically was saying, you know, this information should be protected, which is what we were saying.
[11:54.630 --> 12:01.450]  [SPEAKER_02]: And the second Secret Service guy was a current Secret Service person who was saying, you know, this is how to protect yourself.
[12:01.710 --> 12:03.550]  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, yeah, okay, wise guy.
[12:03.750 --> 12:04.690]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's how you protect yourself.
[12:04.710 --> 12:08.770]  [SPEAKER_02]: But why didn't you guys protect the president in that same way?
[12:08.770 --> 12:15.550]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I mean, perhaps you think that this information is not, well, somebody.
[12:15.850 --> 12:17.650]  [SPEAKER_02]: Somebody, obviously, is being paged.
[12:18.530 --> 12:21.670]  [SPEAKER_02]: Perhaps this information is not sensitive, but I think it was kind of sensitive.
[12:21.750 --> 12:27.430]  [SPEAKER_02]: We're talking about things like, you know, location, where he's been, where he's going, who's on the phone for him.
[12:27.630 --> 12:31.530]  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think they really want that to be broadcast to everybody that can possibly listen to it.
[12:31.670 --> 12:32.270]  [SPEAKER_13]: No, of course not.
[12:32.270 --> 12:34.450]  [SPEAKER_02]: And the solution is not to outlaw it.
[12:34.490 --> 12:36.990]  [SPEAKER_02]: The solution is to protect it, as with anything.
[12:37.490 --> 12:40.830]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's why we don't broadcast our email over the, you know, airwaves.
[12:41.170 --> 12:48.790]  [SPEAKER_02]: We, you know, we have some sort of, some sort of basic encryption system going, some sort of safety net, things like that.
[12:50.630 --> 12:52.030]  [SPEAKER_02]: So, it's common sense.
[12:52.470 --> 12:54.290]  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm surprised the Secret Service didn't show it.
[12:54.850 --> 12:57.850]  [SPEAKER_02]: People want to look at the site or the text.
[12:58.090 --> 12:59.790]  [SPEAKER_02]: Want to give out the web address?
[12:59.950 --> 13:01.250]  [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, I would be happy to do that.
[13:01.250 --> 13:06.470]  [SPEAKER_01]: And for those of you who've tried to link to this off of the Reuters article, there's an error in their URL.
[13:07.430 --> 13:08.810]  [SPEAKER_01]: The site was not taken down.
[13:08.910 --> 13:10.610]  [SPEAKER_01]: I have not been captured by the Secret Service.
[13:11.530 --> 13:29.010]  [SPEAKER_01]: The link to the pages is www.inchinch.com slash tilde, that funny little squiggly thing, esoteric, E-S-O-T-E-R-I-C slash pam underscore suggestion slash formal dot h-t-m-l.
[13:29.610 --> 13:35.990]  [SPEAKER_01]: From that page, you can see the full transcript, the press release, and all the other associated press stories that I've been able to find so far.
[13:37.150 --> 13:37.550]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[13:37.850 --> 13:43.050]  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I'm really happy that we were able to get the word out on this.
[13:43.190 --> 13:44.590]  [SPEAKER_02]: And I hope other people...
[13:44.590 --> 13:49.650]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, there are a lot of nasty things happening as far as encryption, as far as laws, people being prosecuted.
[13:50.530 --> 13:52.390]  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's time to fight back.
[13:52.810 --> 13:53.750]  [SPEAKER_02]: It really is.
[13:53.950 --> 13:55.050]  [SPEAKER_02]: I guess you could say...
[13:55.710 --> 13:59.530]  [SPEAKER_02]: The time is right to fight.
[14:33.510 --> 14:41.480]  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's a coincidence, isn't it?
[14:41.540 --> 14:42.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what I just said.
[14:43.520 --> 14:44.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: How about that?
[14:44.460 --> 14:44.880]  [SPEAKER_02]: Bernie S.
[14:44.960 --> 14:46.080]  [SPEAKER_02]: joins us now from Philadelphia.
[14:46.280 --> 14:46.740]  [SPEAKER_02]: Bernie, are you there?
[14:47.240 --> 14:47.800]  [SPEAKER_06]: Good evening.
[14:47.960 --> 14:48.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: How are you doing?
[14:48.820 --> 14:49.100]  [SPEAKER_02]: Very good.
[14:50.060 --> 14:54.180]  [SPEAKER_02]: We're only touching upon this for a couple of moments here because we actually...
[14:54.180 --> 14:55.720]  [SPEAKER_02]: The show tonight is about spam.
[14:56.760 --> 14:58.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're talking about the pager story.
[14:58.780 --> 15:00.440]  [SPEAKER_02]: I think you heard about it on the news.
[15:00.560 --> 15:01.900]  [SPEAKER_02]: You saw it on ABC News?
[15:03.000 --> 15:06.100]  [SPEAKER_06]: Actually, some people called me and told me they saw it on ABC News.
[15:06.160 --> 15:06.400]  [SPEAKER_02]: Uh-huh.
[15:06.620 --> 15:08.060]  [SPEAKER_02]: So you didn't actually see the piece yourself?
[15:08.260 --> 15:11.740]  [SPEAKER_06]: I did not see it yet, although a friend of mine taped it and he's going to give me the tape sooner or later.
[15:12.000 --> 15:12.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: Uh-huh.
[15:13.360 --> 15:14.740]  [SPEAKER_06]: I read about it on...
[15:14.740 --> 15:26.520]  [SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't a bad piece, except the only problem I have with it is that basically they made it so that you have to clone a pager in order to do this.
[15:26.560 --> 15:29.360]  [SPEAKER_02]: That might be the impression that you got out of looking at the piece.
[15:29.500 --> 15:30.880]  [SPEAKER_02]: And you don't have to clone a pager, obviously.
[15:30.980 --> 15:32.540]  [SPEAKER_02]: You don't have to, like, make a pager.
[15:33.040 --> 15:34.340]  [SPEAKER_06]: You don't even have to have a pager.
[15:34.500 --> 15:36.980]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can do all this just by looking at a screen.
[15:37.220 --> 15:38.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's very simple.
[15:40.320 --> 15:43.180]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, it's too simple as far as I'm concerned.
[15:43.180 --> 15:43.680]  [SPEAKER_02]: Uh-huh.
[15:44.260 --> 15:51.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: So now, okay, as a security expert, what kinds of advice can you offer people that are concerned about their pager traffic?
[15:51.900 --> 15:57.660]  [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, this might be a chance for you to help the Secret Service out, too, because obviously they could use a little bit of advice here, too.
[15:58.560 --> 15:59.580]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I guess...
[15:59.580 --> 16:02.140]  [SPEAKER_02]: I know you might not be eager to do that.
[16:02.300 --> 16:05.840]  [SPEAKER_02]: I understand, you know, you might have some qualms about helping them, but come on, they're in trouble.
[16:06.860 --> 16:07.940]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, they surely are.
[16:08.120 --> 16:15.180]  [SPEAKER_06]: They've been getting a lot of bad press lately, especially now, because of this apparent negligence on their part.
[16:15.840 --> 16:24.720]  [SPEAKER_06]: I don't know if I'm a security expert, but I know a little bit about paging systems, having had pagers over the years and a lot about them and that sort of thing.
[16:25.960 --> 16:29.520]  [SPEAKER_06]: Did you already tell our listeners what happened?
[16:29.800 --> 16:30.500]  [SPEAKER_02]: Pretty much, yeah.
[16:30.920 --> 16:31.280]  [SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[16:31.440 --> 16:33.080]  [SPEAKER_02]: We're kind of winding it down, though, actually.
[16:33.560 --> 16:36.500]  [SPEAKER_06]: So you want to find out what you can do to prevent this from happening to you.
[16:36.680 --> 16:37.060]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, yeah.
[16:37.360 --> 16:39.020]  [SPEAKER_02]: Is there anything people can do?
[16:39.200 --> 16:42.860]  [SPEAKER_06]: Well, right now, there are no standards out there.
[16:42.960 --> 16:46.980]  [SPEAKER_06]: There are no pagers out there that utilize encryption.
[16:46.980 --> 16:49.960]  [SPEAKER_06]: It's not like it's a computer where you can just load an encryption program and run it.
[16:51.060 --> 17:02.980]  [SPEAKER_06]: Pagers simply are not equipped and really aren't modifiable, at least by anyone without an engineering background, to support encryption yet.
[17:03.360 --> 17:04.420]  [SPEAKER_06]: And they should be.
[17:04.420 --> 17:22.600]  [SPEAKER_06]: It's just like the cellular telephone industry decided to save a few pennies on every phone by not encrypting the content of the communications and then rushing to pass legislation when their negligence became widely known and exploited.
[17:22.860 --> 17:24.760]  [SPEAKER_06]: So you have this in the paging industry now.
[17:24.940 --> 17:44.120]  [SPEAKER_06]: I imagine there's a bill that's up for vote sometime soon, House Resolution 2369, that Representative Towson, who wants to make it a felony to use a radio to listen to any broadcast that you're not the intended recipient for.
[17:44.320 --> 18:03.340]  [SPEAKER_06]: So here again, you have legislators bought off by, you know, lobbyists at the telecommunications industry to try to pass legislation to felonize activity that's been legal for decades and hasn't really been hurting anybody who really is serious about their privacy.
[18:04.540 --> 18:22.520]  [SPEAKER_06]: So to protect yourself against having your pager monitored right now, there's not a heck of a lot you can do other than maybe use a very simple form of code and, like, have people send you either numeric codes that you'd have in a, like, a one-time pad or something or just a certain passphrase or something.
[18:22.660 --> 18:26.980]  [SPEAKER_06]: It really meant something other than what it says to indicate what you mean.
[18:26.980 --> 18:28.220]  [SPEAKER_06]: But it's all very awkward.
[18:28.240 --> 18:39.920]  [SPEAKER_06]: And I think pagers, as they get smarter and smarter now, especially with two-way paging, there's no reason why some encryption standard couldn't be developed to support pagers.
[18:39.960 --> 18:50.300]  [SPEAKER_06]: But now, I'm sure the FBI would want to get in the act and have some sort of backdoor to any kind of encryption that was, you know, put into a paging system.
[18:51.220 --> 18:56.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: But, I mean, address the people that see this story.
[18:56.240 --> 19:02.740]  [SPEAKER_02]: They see that the president's privacy is being invaded, in a sense.
[19:03.660 --> 19:06.180]  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe we need laws to prevent people from doing this.
[19:06.600 --> 19:08.020]  [SPEAKER_02]: How do you address that?
[19:08.400 --> 19:12.800]  [SPEAKER_06]: Well, I think we should have laws to prevent...
[19:14.360 --> 19:15.800]  [SPEAKER_06]: It's a good question.
[19:15.960 --> 19:25.520]  [SPEAKER_06]: It's a balance between freedom to do things that don't hurt other people and balancing that against people's privacy.
[19:26.160 --> 19:33.300]  [SPEAKER_06]: I think that the fault lays not in the hacker or hackers who exposed this flaw and made it public.
[19:33.640 --> 19:48.120]  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, God forbid it might have been somebody who intended to harm the president, who took advantage of this information that detailed the minute-by-minute movements of the president and his family and other dignitaries who could have used it to harm them.
[19:48.920 --> 19:55.320]  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, hackers found this problem and made it known to people so something would be done about it ostensibly.
[19:55.320 --> 19:57.900]  [SPEAKER_06]: So I think we should all be grateful that that happened.
[19:58.020 --> 20:02.020]  [SPEAKER_06]: But I don't see...
[20:03.960 --> 20:07.440]  [SPEAKER_06]: I don't see passing laws as changing the situation.
[20:07.880 --> 20:11.040]  [SPEAKER_06]: If the federal government wants to broadcast...
[20:11.040 --> 20:29.320]  [SPEAKER_06]: If the military and the Secret Service want to broadcast the minute-by-minute movements of the president to, you know, to a city of millions of people on a common VHF radio frequency unencrypted that anybody can pick up with a, you know, $100 radio scanner and a computer with the right software,
[20:30.380 --> 20:37.760]  [SPEAKER_06]: you know, passing laws to throw people in jail for listening to these broadcasts and viewing the content isn't going to fix the problem.
[20:38.760 --> 20:46.040]  [SPEAKER_06]: I think there should be a law to mandate encryption of data that involves national security.
[20:46.180 --> 20:46.500]  [SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
[20:46.500 --> 20:56.060]  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's the whole point here is that, you know, these are sensitive bits of information and by broadcasting them in the clear, it's a...
[20:56.060 --> 20:58.460]  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's a violation of national security right there.
[20:58.640 --> 20:59.600]  [SPEAKER_06]: I think that's criminal.
[20:59.860 --> 21:00.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[21:01.040 --> 21:02.800]  [SPEAKER_06]: Broadcasting this information, you know...
[21:02.800 --> 21:21.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: By making encryption such a controversial topic and something that we, you know, we're trying to find ways to defeat encryption so that law enforcement can always find the way in, which is the subject of another bill coming to the floor this week, you're crippling the potential for protecting things just like this.
[21:21.900 --> 21:23.680]  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's a real problem.
[21:23.880 --> 21:27.900]  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think, you know, the Clinton administration kind of got caught up in its own propaganda here.
[21:29.260 --> 21:31.020]  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm just glad we could be a part of it.
[21:31.340 --> 21:31.580]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's all.
[21:31.680 --> 21:32.080]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, really.
[21:32.540 --> 21:35.180]  [SPEAKER_06]: Unfortunately, government will never be limited to...
[21:35.180 --> 21:38.680]  [SPEAKER_06]: Government agents will never be limited to complying with their own laws.
[21:39.200 --> 21:54.280]  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, if backdoor encryption is passed, you know, if this bill is passed later this week, I guess you can talk more about it and how people can call the representatives involved and involve the amendments to the SAFE bill.
[21:55.120 --> 21:58.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: Basically, the House Commerce Committee is going to be meeting on that this week.
[21:58.940 --> 22:05.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's going to require all Americans to provide the government guaranteed access to their private online communications and business transactions.
[22:07.020 --> 22:12.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: And there are all kinds of things going on on the net to protect people against this kind of thing.
[22:12.740 --> 22:31.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: A vote is expected September 25th and we're asking people to call members of the Commerce Committee from Illinois, Representative Rush 202-225-4372, Representative Shimkus 202-225-5271, and Representative Hasterk 202-225-2976.
[22:33.200 --> 22:34.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: Those are...
[22:34.240 --> 22:35.900]  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, why do I have members of Illinois here?
[22:35.960 --> 22:36.260]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know what?
[22:36.300 --> 22:40.040]  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the boneheads that sent this to me are from Illinois and they only sent the Illinois representatives.
[22:40.040 --> 22:41.180]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, you know what?
[22:41.300 --> 22:46.860]  [SPEAKER_02]: Call up the House of Representatives and just ask for your local representative because I don't think these people are...
[22:46.860 --> 22:49.740]  [SPEAKER_02]: Unless you're from Illinois, I don't think that's going to make a difference.
[22:49.920 --> 22:53.240]  [SPEAKER_06]: The two representatives that sponsored this amendment I think are from Georgia.
[22:53.500 --> 22:53.640]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[22:54.020 --> 23:06.280]  [SPEAKER_06]: The first two that you'd mentioned, if you call their offices to express your concerns, they really don't give a damn about your opinion unless you're from Georgia because then your vote doesn't count for them.
[23:06.280 --> 23:13.340]  [SPEAKER_06]: So it's recommended that you say you're from Georgia if you're calling them and they'll ask you your name and address too.
[23:13.500 --> 23:19.780]  [SPEAKER_06]: So have a Georgia address and telephone number ready when you call their offices because otherwise they're not going to take you seriously.
[23:20.060 --> 23:22.320]  [SPEAKER_02]: Or at least have a southern drawl or something.
[23:22.520 --> 23:22.920]  [SPEAKER_06]: There you go.
[23:23.140 --> 23:25.840]  [SPEAKER_02]: But the bill is called Safe...
[23:26.360 --> 23:27.040]  [SPEAKER_02]: What is it?
[23:27.160 --> 23:31.460]  [SPEAKER_02]: Safety and Freedom Through Encryption I think is what it's actually...
[23:31.460 --> 23:32.820]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, and it's being perverted by this amendment.
[23:33.200 --> 23:34.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: Originally it was a good bill.
[23:34.420 --> 23:35.760]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's HR 695.
[23:36.280 --> 23:36.740]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[23:36.940 --> 23:39.840]  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're certainly going to have more on that and what happens this week.
[23:39.980 --> 23:42.040]  [SPEAKER_02]: You might want to watch C-SPAN and see where that goes.
[23:42.240 --> 23:43.780]  [SPEAKER_06]: The amendment is tantamount.
[23:43.940 --> 23:44.900]  [SPEAKER_06]: Somebody used this analogy.
[23:45.100 --> 23:46.760]  [SPEAKER_06]: Tantamount to having a...
[23:46.760 --> 24:13.700]  [SPEAKER_06]: mandating the installation of a TV camera or microphones in every new house or every house in the home in the country that would have the ability or the federal government and the FBI would have the ability to switch these TV cameras or microphones on anybody's house at their whim or ostensibly with a warrant but they wouldn't have to go through any telecommunications carrier to actually
[24:14.160 --> 24:16.640]  [SPEAKER_06]: accomplish the monitoring.
[24:17.200 --> 24:32.820]  [SPEAKER_06]: And if you're having a private conversation using encryption, this basically, if this amendment passes to the safe bill, it will allow the government to go in there any time they feel like it, ostensibly with a warrant, but who can trust them with the FBI's history and sorted
[24:35.940 --> 24:45.560]  [SPEAKER_06]: history of what they've done with electronic surveillance, who's to trust the government from going to the trouble of getting a warrant before they monitor people's conversations.
[24:45.560 --> 24:46.540]  [SPEAKER_06]: I certainly don't trust them.
[24:47.420 --> 24:47.580]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[24:48.200 --> 24:55.260]  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, Pam, you've got a link to Voters Telecom Watch and then we're going to move on to the main topic of the show tonight.
[24:55.380 --> 24:57.700]  [SPEAKER_02]: Bernie, I want to thank you very much for stopping by.
[24:58.160 --> 24:58.740]  [SPEAKER_06]: You're welcome.
[24:58.740 --> 24:59.160]  [SPEAKER_06]: Thank you.
[24:59.300 --> 24:59.560]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[25:00.000 --> 25:02.400]  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll be in touch on this topic and other topics.
[25:02.640 --> 25:02.880]  [SPEAKER_02]: Great.
[25:03.180 --> 25:03.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: All right.
[25:03.400 --> 25:03.700]  [SPEAKER_02]: Take care.
[25:04.240 --> 25:05.460]  [SPEAKER_02]: Pam, what's the link?
[25:05.560 --> 25:14.600]  [SPEAKER_01]: If you guys want to read more about the legislation, you can go to www.vtw.org, that's Voters Telecom Watch, or you can go to democracy.net.
[25:14.960 --> 25:16.440]  [SPEAKER_01]: They have all the details you need.
[25:16.740 --> 25:16.980]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[25:17.480 --> 25:21.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, originally we were going to devote the whole show to a topic known as spam.
[25:22.680 --> 25:32.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: We got sort of sidetracked by all this pager stuff and the encryption thing going on, but we are going to devote the rest of the show to this and to what it's...
[25:32.600 --> 25:53.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, basically I guess the best way to describe it, you're sitting there on the Internet trying to use various things, read news, read mail, and increasingly you're bombarded with all these unsolicited advertisements over and over again for ways of making money fast to all kinds of sites to visit,
[25:54.280 --> 25:56.000]  [SPEAKER_02]: things you have not asked for.
[25:56.640 --> 26:07.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: And with us in the studio today is Dylan, who is a New York City computer consultant who has had a run-in with the spam artists.
[26:07.600 --> 26:11.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: So why don't you tell us your story and then we'll open it up to some listeners.
[26:11.880 --> 26:15.780]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yeah, well this is rather amazing to me that things came to this.
[26:16.760 --> 26:49.840]  [SPEAKER_14]: I was working on a project for a small company here in New York and along with working on the project it turned out that about 25% of all the email going into their system was what one would call commercial unsolicited email or spam and through putting in filters for the email we were able to cut out some of this stuff that they didn't want advertisements Adjustments for sex websites,
[26:50.540 --> 26:59.880]  [SPEAKER_14]: pyramid schemes, where you mail somebody your name and a dollar, and they send you a list of people that will do the same, and all sorts of weird things like that.
[26:59.880 --> 27:00.380]  [SPEAKER_14]: Does that really work?
[27:01.220 --> 27:02.000]  [SPEAKER_14]: I don't know.
[27:02.020 --> 27:02.860]  [SPEAKER_14]: I've never tried.
[27:03.860 --> 27:12.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: Imagine if we suddenly, like, you know, stopped talking about whatever we're talking about right now, and just, like, tried to get people to send a dollar in for a pyramid scheme, and we just kept doing it over and over again.
[27:12.420 --> 27:14.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: 24 hours a day on WBAI, you heard stuff like this.
[27:14.580 --> 27:15.860]  [SPEAKER_02]: Imagine how annoying that would get.
[27:15.860 --> 27:17.560]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what the Internet is turning into.
[27:17.980 --> 27:18.140]  [SPEAKER_14]: Right.
[27:18.380 --> 27:21.460]  [SPEAKER_14]: And this is coming into people's mailboxes.
[27:22.020 --> 27:22.960]  [SPEAKER_14]: They're in the network.
[27:23.720 --> 27:28.300]  [SPEAKER_14]: And the folks that own this particular network asked, you know, what can we do about it?
[27:29.860 --> 27:33.800]  [SPEAKER_14]: My first reaction was, well, you know, we'll filter this stuff out.
[27:34.080 --> 27:41.160]  [SPEAKER_14]: Unfortunately, filtering is reactive technology, and you've got to, you know, sort of have something to filter against.
[27:41.160 --> 27:42.980]  [SPEAKER_14]: Then you can figure out what to filter.
[27:44.420 --> 27:50.020]  [SPEAKER_14]: Then the people sending this unsolicited email figure out, oh, well, you know, it's bouncing back to us.
[27:50.100 --> 27:54.860]  [SPEAKER_14]: Let's try it a different way, sort of like rotating shield frequencies on Star Trek.
[27:55.500 --> 27:56.020]  [SPEAKER_14]: Okay.
[27:56.680 --> 28:04.080]  [SPEAKER_14]: And the next thought was, well, okay, they're taking up bandwidth on the company's network.
[28:04.080 --> 28:06.860]  [SPEAKER_14]: They're taking up disk space on the company's disks.
[28:06.860 --> 28:11.520]  [SPEAKER_14]: And they're taking up the company's employees' time, which has some value to the company.
[28:13.620 --> 28:30.740]  [SPEAKER_14]: So one of these offending parties was sent warnings via electronic mail that should they continue to send their unsolicited email, they would be billed for storage and distribution of advertising materials on the network.
[28:32.320 --> 28:33.480]  [SPEAKER_14]: They continued.
[28:34.440 --> 28:35.740]  [SPEAKER_14]: They were billed.
[28:36.620 --> 28:58.380]  [SPEAKER_14]: And within two minutes of the bill being faxed to them for storage of their advertising materials on the network, they faxed back to the company a copy of a letter that they were sending to the attorney general of the state of New York, demanding that the company be prosecuted for fraud.
[28:58.560 --> 28:59.980]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, let me just take a look.
[29:00.100 --> 29:01.080]  [SPEAKER_14]: I've got a copy of it here.
[29:02.020 --> 29:11.440]  [SPEAKER_14]: Demanding that they be prosecuted for fraud, mail fraud, and any other charges that he would be willing to file.
[29:12.380 --> 29:19.940]  [SPEAKER_14]: And it went on to further state, in addition, you may want to check if they comply with the state business license guidelines and sales tax collection authorities.
[29:20.740 --> 29:30.600]  [SPEAKER_14]: This was the response that was received from billing these people that were essentially sending collect junk mail.
[29:30.800 --> 29:36.080]  [SPEAKER_14]: Spam is just as if somebody were to send you junk advertising mail via the U.S.
[29:36.220 --> 29:39.660]  [SPEAKER_14]: Postal Service, and you were forced to pay to receive it.
[29:39.760 --> 29:42.760]  [SPEAKER_14]: You didn't have a choice not to receive it, and you had to pay.
[29:42.980 --> 29:45.520]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, the difference is when you send something through the U.S.
[29:45.620 --> 29:47.420]  [SPEAKER_02]: Postal Service, you have to pay to send it.
[29:47.420 --> 29:52.300]  [SPEAKER_02]: And if people don't respond, you wind up losing money, so you stop sending it.
[29:52.560 --> 29:55.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: Whereas on the Internet, you can keep sending things forever.
[29:55.680 --> 29:58.820]  [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't matter if a single person responds, you're not really losing anything.
[29:58.820 --> 30:03.140]  [SPEAKER_02]: And the person who has to deal with it is the person that has to store it on their computer.
[30:03.400 --> 30:03.720]  [SPEAKER_14]: Right.
[30:03.940 --> 30:17.500]  [SPEAKER_14]: And somebody can send mass mailings to thousands and thousands of people, millions of people, all over the world, with a $10 or $15 a month Internet access account.
[30:18.060 --> 30:30.320]  [SPEAKER_14]: And that one particular message that they send to all those people actually multiplies in space, because every person that gets it gets their very own copy.
[30:30.320 --> 30:38.000]  [SPEAKER_14]: And so it ends up taking enormous amounts of bandwidth on the Internet and enormous amounts of disk space.
[30:38.980 --> 30:44.340]  [SPEAKER_14]: And the people that are receiving the mail are generally the ones paying for the bandwidth in the disk space.
[30:46.140 --> 30:49.320]  [SPEAKER_02]: Does anyone actually read these things?
[30:49.740 --> 30:50.880]  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I see them everywhere.
[30:51.100 --> 30:51.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: All the news groups.
[30:52.100 --> 30:54.580]  [SPEAKER_02]: I see, you know, spam messages every place.
[30:54.940 --> 30:59.720]  [SPEAKER_02]: Everybody I know who has an account that has done anything with it seems to be getting these things.
[31:00.520 --> 31:03.400]  [SPEAKER_02]: Are there people out there that are responding that's making it worthwhile for them?
[31:03.900 --> 31:05.600]  [SPEAKER_14]: I can't imagine that there are.
[31:05.900 --> 31:14.580]  [SPEAKER_14]: I know that the law firm that initially started this whole thing, Cantor and Siegel, got nothing but complaints.
[31:14.580 --> 31:17.880]  [SPEAKER_14]: They got faxes of complaint, phone calls of complaint.
[31:18.020 --> 31:20.460]  [SPEAKER_14]: Now, Cantor and Siegel, that goes back a couple of years.
[31:20.480 --> 31:21.900]  [SPEAKER_14]: That goes back a couple of years, yeah.
[31:22.100 --> 31:24.260]  [SPEAKER_14]: They were the ones that first started doing this.
[31:24.260 --> 31:39.420]  [SPEAKER_14]: And they didn't really make anything out of it until they published a book that was essentially how to make money fast on the Internet, which told people to go out and do exactly what they had done, which they didn't make any profit by.
[31:39.540 --> 31:41.060]  [SPEAKER_14]: But they profited by the book.
[31:41.160 --> 31:42.960]  [SPEAKER_14]: It was a bestseller almost overnight.
[31:43.800 --> 31:46.500]  [SPEAKER_14]: But I don't know anybody that reads the stuff myself.
[31:48.180 --> 31:50.820]  [SPEAKER_02]: Actually, I'd like to know if anyone out there does read that kind of stuff.
[31:50.940 --> 31:55.560]  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe they could call us and explain just what goes through their heads and if they've really made a lot of money doing this.
[31:57.280 --> 32:04.880]  [SPEAKER_02]: So, okay, so they threatened you with prosecution for billing them for using your computer space.
[32:05.060 --> 32:05.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[32:05.480 --> 32:06.820]  [SPEAKER_14]: So, what happened next?
[32:07.760 --> 32:19.520]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, it seems that the Attorney General in the state of New York has better things to do than deal with this kind of thing.
[32:21.000 --> 32:24.600]  [SPEAKER_14]: So, it's essentially a dead issue from that point of view.
[32:24.600 --> 32:50.540]  [SPEAKER_14]: But it's just amazing the audacity that somebody has that they attempt to fight what is really a legitimate bill by turning around and saying that, well, that business entity is up to criminal activities when their activities could really very easily be construed as theft of services.
[32:50.920 --> 32:52.940]  [SPEAKER_14]: But it's very interesting.
[32:52.940 --> 33:05.120]  [SPEAKER_14]: There was one large backbone provider of the Internet that was hosting the Big Five Spam Factories that, on Friday, I believe it was, turned off three of the Big Five.
[33:05.340 --> 33:07.620]  [SPEAKER_14]: I heard something about that, including cyber promotions?
[33:07.780 --> 33:09.520]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yeah, cyber promo has been terminated.
[33:11.820 --> 33:20.460]  [SPEAKER_14]: And two others, I had it here a moment ago, Integrated Media Promotions and Quantum Communications, Inc.
[33:20.460 --> 33:32.940]  [SPEAKER_14]: on Friday, had their access to the Internet terminated by Apex Global Internet Services, who is the provider that they had to hook them into the backbone.
[33:33.860 --> 33:37.420]  [SPEAKER_14]: It may be because Apex finally got tired of the protests.
[33:37.640 --> 33:40.260]  [SPEAKER_14]: People were showing up in front of Apex's offices protesting.
[33:40.480 --> 33:40.660]  [SPEAKER_14]: Really?
[33:40.660 --> 33:41.120]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yeah.
[33:41.680 --> 33:50.760]  [SPEAKER_14]: People were sending mail to Apex, email to Apex's headquarters every time they got mail that came from somebody that got access through Apex.
[33:51.220 --> 34:04.560]  [SPEAKER_14]: I know I myself wrote a routine that every time I got a piece of email that came from somewhere on the Apex network that was spam, bounced it right back to Apex headquarters and said, kindly don't do this anymore.
[34:04.760 --> 34:07.520]  [SPEAKER_14]: So they may have finally been getting buried in spam.
[34:07.520 --> 34:10.320]  [SPEAKER_14]: Would you consider making a routine like that available to the public?
[34:10.320 --> 34:11.000]  [SPEAKER_14]: Oh, yeah, sure.
[34:11.440 --> 34:12.740]  [SPEAKER_14]: Everybody could do something just like that.
[34:13.020 --> 34:13.320]  [SPEAKER_14]: Absolutely.
[34:13.540 --> 34:15.840]  [SPEAKER_14]: I certainly would make it available to the public.
[34:16.760 --> 34:18.660]  [SPEAKER_14]: We could put it on your website.
[34:18.840 --> 34:19.800]  [SPEAKER_14]: That would be no problem.
[34:19.900 --> 34:20.580]  [SPEAKER_14]: No problem there.
[34:21.220 --> 34:22.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: I got an interesting piece of...
[34:22.780 --> 34:26.860]  [SPEAKER_02]: This is kind of weird because I didn't ask for this mail, but it showed up anyway.
[34:27.080 --> 34:29.560]  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's anti-spam.
[34:30.120 --> 34:32.500]  [SPEAKER_02]: But it was unsolicited anti-spam.
[34:32.800 --> 34:35.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to read this to you, and you tell me if this is legitimate.
[34:36.460 --> 34:38.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: Announcing the Windows 95 cancel bot.
[34:38.780 --> 34:40.400]  [SPEAKER_02]: Finally, you control the USENET.
[34:40.540 --> 34:52.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: The Windows 95 USENET cancel bot will allow us to kill all BS spam on USENET, our favorite news groups, as well as protect our domain names, email addresses, from being misused by USENET spammers.
[34:52.620 --> 34:59.200]  [SPEAKER_02]: Simply scan the USENET, and having this incredible program do keyword searches and cancel commands even while you're sleeping.
[34:59.460 --> 35:02.580]  [SPEAKER_02]: This is the beginning to the end of spam.
[35:02.980 --> 35:04.320]  [SPEAKER_02]: Erase their ass forever.
[35:04.320 --> 35:05.040]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's time.
[35:05.280 --> 35:06.300]  [SPEAKER_02]: Spam is no more.
[35:07.760 --> 35:09.560]  [SPEAKER_14]: Have you heard about things like this?
[35:09.700 --> 35:25.600]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, I haven't heard about that particular Windows product, but there have been cancel bots on UNIX systems for a couple of years for canceling spam on the USENET news groups, which are sort of like the world's largest bulletin board system that's spread across many,
[35:25.680 --> 35:26.280]  [SPEAKER_14]: many computers.
[35:27.200 --> 35:33.460]  [SPEAKER_14]: So, I don't see why a clever programmer couldn't write a cancel bot for Microsoft Windows.
[35:33.680 --> 35:37.000]  [SPEAKER_14]: But these kinds of programs, they could be used for bad as well as good.
[35:37.180 --> 35:38.720]  [SPEAKER_14]: You could cancel people you don't like.
[35:38.840 --> 35:39.060]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yes.
[35:39.160 --> 35:49.720]  [SPEAKER_14]: In that particular instance, cancel bots can be used to cancel all articles by a certain person, all articles with a certain subject, whatever.
[35:51.500 --> 36:09.700]  [SPEAKER_14]: Back 10, 12 years ago, before the net got anywhere near as popular as it is, it was largely a playing field where everything was done by gentleman's agreement, and people were largely courteous and trustworthy, and if somebody overstepped the bounds of good manners,
[36:09.900 --> 36:13.920]  [SPEAKER_14]: somebody would tell them, and they'd say, oh, okay, well, you know, and...
[36:13.920 --> 36:15.420]  [SPEAKER_14]: Can't do that with millions of people on the Internet.
[36:15.420 --> 36:27.400]  [SPEAKER_14]: Wouldn't do that, but yeah, it's turning into the same environment as the neighborhood hoodlums that hang out on the street corner and have nothing to do.
[36:27.640 --> 36:29.780]  [SPEAKER_14]: Now they're hanging out on the Internet with nothing to do.
[36:29.920 --> 36:36.240]  [SPEAKER_14]: Do you support outside authorities getting involved in this, or would you rather see self-regulation within the Internet?
[36:36.240 --> 36:44.800]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, outside authorities getting involved has the downside of most legislators don't understand the technology.
[36:45.280 --> 36:51.760]  [SPEAKER_14]: They don't understand historically the way things worked, which really did work rather well until the last couple of years.
[36:53.040 --> 37:13.720]  [SPEAKER_14]: It's unfortunate that in some cases, some entities have decided that they would try to use this for quick profit, namely some of the spam factories and even Apex Global Internet Services that has decided that they would be willing to host the spam factories.
[37:15.220 --> 37:21.660]  [SPEAKER_14]: If everybody were willing to be reasonable human beings, I don't think there'd be any need for outside intervention.
[37:21.660 --> 37:27.340]  [SPEAKER_14]: But as it is, we may need something akin to the junk facts laws to deal with this.
[37:27.400 --> 37:32.940]  [SPEAKER_14]: But the unfortunate thing there is that it's very easy for spammers than to just move their operations offshore.
[37:34.380 --> 37:35.440]  [SPEAKER_14]: Phiber Optik is here.
[37:35.720 --> 37:36.480]  [SPEAKER_12]: Yes, I am.
[37:36.560 --> 37:36.980]  [SPEAKER_12]: How are you doing?
[37:37.120 --> 37:37.320]  [SPEAKER_12]: Hi.
[37:38.220 --> 37:39.760]  [SPEAKER_12]: Your experiences with spam?
[37:40.200 --> 37:51.300]  [SPEAKER_12]: I deal with spam all the time, since I'm the administrator of a rather large web house, among other things.
[37:51.300 --> 38:04.380]  [SPEAKER_12]: And I deal with spam constantly to make sure that people's mailboxes aren't filled with it and they aren't wasting all their time dealing with it.
[38:04.980 --> 38:11.100]  [SPEAKER_12]: In this particular circumstance, not only is the...
[38:11.780 --> 38:13.120]  [SPEAKER_12]: Let me just describe a scenario.
[38:13.440 --> 38:15.100]  [SPEAKER_12]: You have the spam coming in.
[38:15.220 --> 38:17.080]  [SPEAKER_12]: The spam is stored on the news server.
[38:17.240 --> 38:19.320]  [SPEAKER_12]: It's wasting disk space on the news server.
[38:19.760 --> 38:21.100]  [SPEAKER_12]: Sorry, mail server.
[38:21.280 --> 38:21.800]  [SPEAKER_12]: What am I saying?
[38:21.960 --> 38:23.100]  [SPEAKER_12]: Well, it's news as well.
[38:23.260 --> 38:24.580]  [SPEAKER_12]: I mean, spam gets posted a lot of advice.
[38:24.580 --> 38:27.280]  [SPEAKER_12]: But in this particular case, spam coming in over email.
[38:27.500 --> 38:33.080]  [SPEAKER_12]: It's stored on the mail server, okay, until the people in the organization pick it up.
[38:33.260 --> 38:38.160]  [SPEAKER_12]: Now, they're picking it up with Eudora, and they're reading it on their personal machines.
[38:38.200 --> 38:38.560]  [SPEAKER_12]: Local machine, yes.
[38:38.720 --> 38:38.880]  [SPEAKER_12]: Yeah.
[38:39.220 --> 38:46.620]  [SPEAKER_12]: So not only is it wasting time and energy over the T1 line, it's going out to the net, coming into the particular company.
[38:46.620 --> 38:54.400]  [SPEAKER_12]: It's also wasting time, energy, and resources going within the company from the mail host to each individual person's machine.
[38:54.600 --> 38:57.460]  [SPEAKER_12]: Do you think this could be sort of a plot by hard disk manufacturers?
[38:57.900 --> 38:59.000]  [SPEAKER_02]: What, they get more space?
[38:59.080 --> 39:01.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: Use all the hard disks just to store things?
[39:03.140 --> 39:04.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: Somehow, I think not.
[39:04.260 --> 39:06.360]  [SPEAKER_12]: I think we should turn an eye towards that as a possibility.
[39:06.720 --> 39:07.440]  [SPEAKER_12]: So what do you do?
[39:08.260 --> 39:13.300]  [SPEAKER_12]: I've been just trying to ignore it and dealing with it reactively and doing a fairly good job of it.
[39:14.120 --> 39:43.320]  [SPEAKER_12]: From the administrator's standpoint, the last few versions of SendMail have supported TCP wrappers, which, those listeners that are familiar, TCP wrappers is a tool that came out of Holland that can be used to wrap, so to speak, various services like Telnet and FTP that are running on a server on the Internet and would only allow connections to come from certain hosts.
[39:44.120 --> 39:45.840]  [SPEAKER_12]: So basically, you block the offenders.
[39:46.140 --> 40:02.340]  [SPEAKER_12]: Yeah, basically, you block the offenders, but more importantly, the implementation, the way that SendMail, which is, you know, the server that delivers and receives mail, the way that it blocks the mail is a lot more effective than simply blocking access altogether.
[40:02.340 --> 40:11.680]  [SPEAKER_12]: If it blocks access altogether, then the mail is more than likely going to try to be delivered through a backup mail host or however your setup may be.
[40:11.940 --> 40:24.140]  [SPEAKER_12]: The way TCP wrappers functions with SendMail is that SendMail actually sends a SMTP protocol message back to the offending host saying that it is not allowed to send the mail here.
[40:24.620 --> 40:30.080]  [SPEAKER_12]: So it's not making the other end think it can't deliver because it can't reach you.
[40:30.080 --> 40:37.040]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, but the problem with that is supposing there are people on that other host that legitimately want to send you mail.
[40:37.180 --> 40:37.940]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a problem.
[40:38.060 --> 40:39.400]  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, let's say it's AOL, for instance.
[40:39.560 --> 40:42.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know how a lot of people feel about that, but there's a lot of spam coming out of AOL.
[40:42.860 --> 40:43.080]  [SPEAKER_12]: Yeah.
[40:43.280 --> 40:44.760]  [SPEAKER_02]: That means you won't be able to get mail from anybody.
[40:44.920 --> 41:00.820]  [SPEAKER_12]: The only way that this is really of use is with the obvious sites, like CyberPromo, and, you know, there's a cast of about, you know, a couple of hundred, and you know that you're never going to get mail from anybody you ever want to talk to from any of these sites.
[41:01.060 --> 41:04.000]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'll tell you, most of the spam I see doesn't come from CyberPromo.
[41:04.080 --> 41:06.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: It comes from sites that seem to have just been made up on the spot.
[41:06.820 --> 41:11.960]  [SPEAKER_12]: Yeah, but what you've got to do is look in the header of the message because they make up the from and the to lines randomly.
[41:12.260 --> 41:12.500]  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[41:12.760 --> 41:16.100]  [SPEAKER_12]: Because they think that you can't block it if they randomize the from and the to.
[41:16.100 --> 41:19.360]  [SPEAKER_12]: Well, they can't control where it says the message connected from.
[41:20.080 --> 41:26.460]  [SPEAKER_12]: The actual mail server that connected to you where you're receiving your mail, that information is still going to be in the header.
[41:27.240 --> 41:29.300]  [SPEAKER_12]: And that's the site that you have to go by.
[41:29.440 --> 41:40.340]  [SPEAKER_12]: And that site is either going to be a public site that stupidly allows mail to be relayed through it, or it's going to be a site that you don't ever want to get mail from, in which case it makes it easy to block.
[41:40.340 --> 41:52.780]  [SPEAKER_12]: In the case of sites that relay mail that shouldn't, in current and future versions of send mail, they're most likely going to make the default setting off for whether or not mail can be relayed.
[41:52.940 --> 41:54.920]  [SPEAKER_12]: Is there a legitimate reason to relay mail?
[41:55.400 --> 41:56.760]  [SPEAKER_12]: Yeah, in fact there is.
[41:56.920 --> 42:04.820]  [SPEAKER_12]: If you're an Internet service provider, the number one reason to relay mail is that you have clients whose domain is not the same as yours.
[42:05.020 --> 42:05.320]  [SPEAKER_12]: Okay.
[42:05.620 --> 42:15.840]  [SPEAKER_12]: But in that particular case, all it takes is for the Internet service provider to spend an extra five minutes and only allow mail to be relayed through it from those sites.
[42:16.880 --> 42:24.000]  [SPEAKER_12]: Usually they're just either lazy, stupid, or ignorant, and they allow the whole world to relay mail through them because it's a lot easier and they don't care.
[42:24.620 --> 42:31.720]  [SPEAKER_12]: So until all the ISPs get together and say, okay, we're not going to let people relay mail through us, this problem won't go away.
[42:32.140 --> 42:34.600]  [SPEAKER_12]: They can make it illegal, it's probably not going to matter.
[42:34.960 --> 42:42.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: No, I agree that making it illegal is probably not going to do anything except get more regulations around us, which will probably come back to haunt us.
[42:43.180 --> 42:43.280]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yeah.
[42:43.660 --> 42:44.160]  [SPEAKER_02]: You feel the same way?
[42:44.400 --> 42:44.580]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yeah.
[42:45.260 --> 42:45.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[42:46.020 --> 42:46.540]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yeah.
[42:46.940 --> 43:04.820]  [SPEAKER_14]: But Phiber Optik's, right, it has to be that all of the Internet service providers and everybody that connects to the backbone at any of the peering points is willing to reject the concept of spam and not allow any of their customers to send it out.
[43:04.820 --> 43:13.740]  [SPEAKER_14]: and everybody is going to have to say, okay, we know this is a known spamming site and we are going to not accept mail from them.
[43:14.400 --> 43:34.580]  [SPEAKER_14]: There was a gentleman that was keeping a list of spam sites publicly available on his website on the Internet who ended up having to take it down because the big five spammers came after him with their lawyers saying that it was damaging their business and it was damaging their reputations to be less good.
[43:34.580 --> 43:40.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, well, just for now, for the record and since our show gets archived on the net for all time, who are the big five?
[43:41.060 --> 43:44.300]  [SPEAKER_14]: Okay, well, three of the big five...
[43:44.300 --> 43:45.740]  [SPEAKER_14]: As much information as you feel like it.
[43:45.800 --> 43:53.060]  [SPEAKER_14]: Okay, three of the big five are Cyber Promotions who are based in Philadelphia, Quantum Communication...
[43:53.060 --> 43:54.640]  [SPEAKER_14]: You don't have a net address for them, do you?
[43:54.800 --> 43:56.600]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, yeah, they're...
[43:56.600 --> 43:59.080]  [SPEAKER_14]: But you can't get to them right now because they just cut them off.
[43:59.080 --> 43:59.320]  [SPEAKER_14]: Right.
[43:59.460 --> 44:02.300]  [SPEAKER_14]: But it's www.cyberpromo.com.
[44:02.380 --> 44:09.980]  [SPEAKER_02]: I've seen that one and they actually sort of boast how they can get around all these security things and you can deliver mail to people without them ever knowing who you are.
[44:10.600 --> 44:10.940]  [SPEAKER_14]: Right.
[44:11.000 --> 44:11.920]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, that's what they say.
[44:12.020 --> 44:16.640]  [SPEAKER_14]: But like Phiber Optik said, if you just trace back through the headers, you can find it.
[44:16.840 --> 44:22.040]  [SPEAKER_14]: And that's how system administrators decide who they're going to reject mail from.
[44:22.040 --> 44:27.460]  [SPEAKER_14]: If spam starts coming in anew again, they say, oh, okay, well, this is the new route they're taking.
[44:27.620 --> 44:28.520]  [SPEAKER_14]: Okay, we'll block this route.
[44:28.520 --> 44:38.360]  [SPEAKER_02]: Until people start running it into operating systems, I don't think it's really going to have much of an effect because, you know, only a couple of people who are sharp will do this and everybody else will just sort of let it sit.
[44:39.420 --> 44:44.680]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and I don't know if it'll have much of an effect unless the word is spread about who should be blocked and who shouldn't be blocked.
[44:45.360 --> 44:52.800]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, anybody that's running a site connected to the Internet that has a competent system administrator should be able to do this.
[44:52.800 --> 44:53.760]  [SPEAKER_14]: It's a question of...
[44:53.760 --> 44:54.820]  [SPEAKER_14]: 5% of the net right there.
[44:55.080 --> 44:56.360]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, unfortunately, yes.
[44:56.780 --> 45:03.680]  [SPEAKER_14]: A lot of my customers are Internet service providers that really don't have a handle on the Internet.
[45:04.080 --> 45:04.320]  [SPEAKER_14]: Mm-hmm.
[45:05.020 --> 45:05.500]  [SPEAKER_14]: So...
[45:05.500 --> 45:06.560]  [SPEAKER_14]: Okay, number two.
[45:06.680 --> 45:06.800]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yeah.
[45:07.440 --> 45:09.920]  [SPEAKER_14]: You've got Integrated Media Promotions Corporation.
[45:10.880 --> 45:11.700]  [SPEAKER_14]: You've got...
[45:11.700 --> 45:15.060]  [SPEAKER_14]: And I don't know what their URL would be.
[45:15.220 --> 45:17.740]  [SPEAKER_14]: You've got Quantum Communications, Inc.
[45:18.180 --> 45:18.540]  [SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
[45:18.920 --> 45:21.720]  [SPEAKER_14]: Then you've got another outfit called Nancy Net.
[45:22.020 --> 45:22.700]  [SPEAKER_14]: Nancy Net.
[45:22.820 --> 45:23.220]  [SPEAKER_14]: Never heard of that.
[45:23.500 --> 45:23.560]  Yeah.
[45:23.700 --> 45:23.840]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yeah.
[45:24.360 --> 45:30.000]  [SPEAKER_14]: And then there's LLV Communications in Las Vegas.
[45:30.480 --> 45:30.780]  [SPEAKER_14]: Mm-hmm.
[45:30.920 --> 45:34.200]  [SPEAKER_14]: And CTE, who's also based in Las Vegas.
[45:34.400 --> 45:44.220]  [SPEAKER_14]: And if you look at the who is information for LLV.com and CTE.com, sure looks like the same bunch of people with two different front companies.
[45:44.620 --> 45:44.860]  [SPEAKER_14]: Mm-hmm.
[45:45.260 --> 45:45.540]  [SPEAKER_14]: Yeah.
[45:45.540 --> 45:49.640]  [SPEAKER_14]: And that's where most of the spam comes from that I've seen.
[45:50.380 --> 45:51.120]  [SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
[45:51.540 --> 45:52.120]  [SPEAKER_14]: What's the one?
[45:52.260 --> 45:53.880]  [SPEAKER_14]: I think it's IEMM something?
[45:54.280 --> 46:14.200]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, the IEMMC is an organization that was founded by these five spam companies and Apex Global Internet Services with the idea of promoting standards and allowing people to get off of bulk email lists if they wanted and so forth.
[46:15.440 --> 46:21.340]  [SPEAKER_14]: And when you were able to get to the IEMMC's website before Aegis shut off the access...
[46:21.340 --> 46:22.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, they're part of Aegis too?
[46:22.740 --> 46:22.900]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[46:23.160 --> 46:25.300]  [SPEAKER_14]: They're also connected through Aegis.
[46:25.420 --> 46:27.840]  [SPEAKER_14]: Matter of fact, their offices were in Aegis' headquarters.
[46:28.120 --> 46:28.400]  [SPEAKER_14]: Really?
[46:28.580 --> 46:30.600]  [SPEAKER_14]: And they've been evicted from Aegis' headquarters.
[46:30.900 --> 46:31.760]  [SPEAKER_14]: Must have been quite a scene.
[46:31.980 --> 46:32.700]  [SPEAKER_14]: Must have been.
[46:33.700 --> 46:39.560]  [SPEAKER_14]: They had a website that purported that if you put your email address in, you'd be taken off of all these bulk mailing lists.
[46:41.220 --> 46:54.940]  [SPEAKER_14]: A gentleman out in California named Paul Vixie, who has the domain Vix.com, made up a bunch of email addresses that were known only to himself and his employees, not dispersed outside the company.
[46:55.240 --> 46:57.100]  [SPEAKER_14]: Never posted any email from them.
[46:57.180 --> 46:59.400]  [SPEAKER_14]: Never posted any news group postings from them.
[47:00.520 --> 47:02.840]  [SPEAKER_14]: They didn't appear on any web pages.
[47:03.240 --> 47:07.160]  [SPEAKER_14]: They were just mailboxes in the company for him to run a test with.
[47:07.460 --> 47:19.520]  [SPEAKER_14]: He went to the IEMMC, take me off your mailing list site, put in each of those mail addresses individually, and the next day started receiving spam at all of those email addresses.
[47:19.700 --> 47:25.420]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's interesting because you had told me about this in the past and I experimented with that very same company.
[47:25.540 --> 47:30.160]  [SPEAKER_02]: First of all, I tried to get certain accounts off mailing lists.
[47:30.540 --> 47:32.120]  [SPEAKER_02]: It seemed to work for the most part.
[47:32.260 --> 47:40.160]  [SPEAKER_02]: There were ones that straggled through but I have a feeling it might be because people weren't consulting the list of names to take off.
[47:40.760 --> 47:47.660]  [SPEAKER_02]: I created an account and did exactly as that person did to see if this would happen.
[47:47.980 --> 47:48.740]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been a week.
[47:48.920 --> 47:50.140]  [SPEAKER_02]: Not a single piece of email yet.
[47:50.580 --> 47:51.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: So I don't know if that's...
[47:51.280 --> 47:51.720]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, that's good.
[47:51.920 --> 48:04.640]  [SPEAKER_14]: That means that it's, you know, conceivably they've started actually enforcing their policy because the IEMMC ostensibly had a policy that to be a member you had to respect the block list that they were collecting.
[48:04.640 --> 48:05.020]  [SPEAKER_14]: Right.
[48:05.500 --> 48:08.120]  [SPEAKER_14]: This was about three months ago that Paul ran this test.
[48:08.240 --> 48:12.080]  [SPEAKER_14]: Now I'm just curious who holds that list and that must be one heck of a list too.
[48:12.180 --> 48:14.100]  [SPEAKER_14]: A list of people that don't want to be on a list.
[48:14.280 --> 48:14.520]  [SPEAKER_14]: Right.
[48:14.660 --> 48:19.920]  [SPEAKER_14]: That list is held by the IEMMC which is essentially a consortium of spammers.
[48:20.960 --> 48:22.480]  [SPEAKER_14]: And they hold the list.
[48:22.860 --> 48:24.060]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I don't feel too good about that.
[48:24.340 --> 48:24.940]  [SPEAKER_14]: No, no.
[48:25.120 --> 48:25.800]  [SPEAKER_14]: Nor do I.
[48:26.300 --> 48:27.120]  [SPEAKER_14]: Nor do I.
[48:28.180 --> 48:37.480]  [SPEAKER_14]: I asked a representative of the IEMMC a couple weeks ago to just remove everything that was at a particular domain.
[48:38.600 --> 48:50.800]  [SPEAKER_14]: One of my clients didn't want to receive anything in their domain and the response that came back from the email from this representative of IEMMC was, oh well, just go to the website and put in all the addresses.
[48:51.560 --> 48:55.380]  [SPEAKER_14]: Now, you know, you're talking hundreds of addresses there for a small company.
[48:55.560 --> 48:56.780]  [SPEAKER_14]: It's really impractical.
[48:58.400 --> 49:00.340]  [SPEAKER_14]: You know, but that was their response.
[49:01.360 --> 49:09.180]  [SPEAKER_02]: 212-279-3400 we're talking about spam and we only have about 10 minutes to take phone calls so please keep it on the topic.
[49:09.460 --> 49:18.300]  [SPEAKER_02]: If you have any questions, comments or feedback about this menace to the net and then communications and all kinds of other things.
[49:19.700 --> 49:25.080]  [SPEAKER_02]: 212-279-3400 Let's go to our first listener phone call.
[49:25.280 --> 49:25.620]  [SPEAKER_02]: Good evening.
[49:25.760 --> 49:26.300]  [SPEAKER_02]: You're on the air.
[49:26.800 --> 49:27.360]  [SPEAKER_13]: Hi, Emmanuel.
[49:27.480 --> 49:27.680]  [SPEAKER_13]: Yes.
[49:28.040 --> 49:28.360]  [SPEAKER_13]: How you doing?
[49:28.820 --> 49:30.240]  [SPEAKER_13]: Okay, one second here.
[49:32.340 --> 49:33.240]  [SPEAKER_13]: Okay, yes.
[49:34.020 --> 49:35.800]  [SPEAKER_13]: I live out in Omaha, Nebraska.
[49:36.140 --> 49:36.500]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[49:36.900 --> 49:38.600]  [SPEAKER_13]: And I've noticed something recently in the U.S.
[49:38.620 --> 49:39.880]  [SPEAKER_13]: West phone books that's Clay and Devad.
[49:40.080 --> 49:41.080]  [SPEAKER_02]: You live in Omaha, Nebraska.
[49:41.280 --> 49:42.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's no way you know what we're talking about tonight.
[49:42.980 --> 49:46.220]  [SPEAKER_13]: Absolutely not because the real audio episodes take over a month to get online.
[49:47.220 --> 49:55.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, you know, we were supposed to be on real audio tonight, but somebody fouled up access to a machine so we weren't able to get to the right place at the right time.
[49:55.920 --> 49:58.260]  [SPEAKER_02]: But hopefully next week we'll get it straightened out.
[49:58.940 --> 50:01.700]  [SPEAKER_13]: Okay, will this week's episode be on then so we can get the server information?
[50:02.560 --> 50:04.300]  [SPEAKER_02]: It should be on within the week, yes.
[50:04.920 --> 50:06.720]  [SPEAKER_02]: Just stay tuned to the website and you'll see that way.
[50:06.800 --> 50:10.180]  [SPEAKER_02]: But I'm going to have to ask you to be very quick because we are on a topic here.
[50:10.280 --> 50:12.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: We're talking about spam in case you have anything to say about that.
[50:13.640 --> 50:22.260]  [SPEAKER_13]: Other than the fact that I've listened to your shows and I agree exactly with everything on the comments on spam, no, the one thing I've noticed about U.S.
[50:22.320 --> 50:24.580]  [SPEAKER_13]: West books is that they stopped putting the bell logo on them.
[50:25.340 --> 50:26.560]  [SPEAKER_02]: That is a shocker.
[50:27.040 --> 50:28.840]  [SPEAKER_02]: No bell logo on the U.S.
[50:28.900 --> 50:29.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: West phone books.
[50:30.520 --> 50:33.140]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, well, there's people running out to investigate that right now.
[50:33.420 --> 50:33.800]  [SPEAKER_13]: Yes.
[50:34.320 --> 50:35.880]  [SPEAKER_13]: You have to realize this is Nebraska.
[50:36.040 --> 50:36.740]  [SPEAKER_13]: There's nothing happening.
[50:36.920 --> 50:40.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: No, well, we get calls from Utah too so we know there's lots of places where that's happening.
[50:41.040 --> 50:43.640]  [SPEAKER_13]: I'm also hoping that we can start a 2600 meeting here soon.
[50:44.080 --> 51:08.580]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, if you're interested in starting a 2600 meeting this goes to anybody listening in any foreign city all you have to do is start start start having the meetings spreading the word whatever way you can and then simply mail us back at meetings at 2600.com and tell us how they go and if we see that you're serious and the meetings are actually happening and people are really showing up then we'll
[51:08.580 --> 51:11.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: print it in the magazine and publicize it in other ways as well.
[51:12.440 --> 51:21.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: Otherwise, you just have people saying, hey, I want to have a meeting down here on the street corner and they say it once and they never go and it'll be there for all time if everybody said they were interested.
[51:21.800 --> 51:24.080]  [SPEAKER_13]: Yeah, well, okay, thank you though.
[51:24.300 --> 51:24.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: All right.
[51:24.660 --> 51:25.540]  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for calling.
[51:26.220 --> 51:26.840]  [SPEAKER_02]: Omaha, Nebraska.
[51:26.980 --> 51:27.520]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's pretty cool.
[51:28.020 --> 51:28.840]  [SPEAKER_02]: All right, let's take another phone call.
[51:29.460 --> 51:30.060]  [SPEAKER_02]: Good evening.
[51:30.140 --> 51:30.620]  [SPEAKER_02]: You're on the air.
[51:31.460 --> 51:33.480]  [SPEAKER_10]: Hi, yeah, this is the original Dr. Z.
[51:33.720 --> 51:34.900]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, you called last week.
[51:35.100 --> 51:35.780]  [SPEAKER_10]: Yes, I did.
[51:35.920 --> 51:36.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[51:36.460 --> 51:38.400]  [SPEAKER_10]: And I have an opinion on everything as usual.
[51:38.580 --> 51:39.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, what's your opinion on spam?
[51:40.240 --> 51:59.660]  [SPEAKER_10]: As far as spamming, I think it's disgusting and I think a lot of the major providers including AOL encourage it in order to sell their services saying that you can make money on the Internet by offering, you know, information or whatever to people at random and,
[51:59.700 --> 52:01.000]  [SPEAKER_10]: you know, sending out mail.
[52:01.380 --> 52:05.880]  [SPEAKER_10]: And I think this should be discouraged and probably even controlled.
[52:06.180 --> 52:07.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: Does AOL actually do that?
[52:07.360 --> 52:08.120]  [SPEAKER_02]: Do they tell people this?
[52:08.240 --> 52:09.000]  [SPEAKER_10]: Yes, they do.
[52:09.320 --> 52:16.980]  [SPEAKER_10]: I've had some friends of mine tell me that they've gotten information and actually spam from AOL from AOL administration.
[52:17.900 --> 52:20.580]  [SPEAKER_02]: Not from a user on AOL, from someone who works at AOL.
[52:20.660 --> 52:37.640]  [SPEAKER_10]: from someone who works at AOL telling them how they can benefit by, that they can actually cover the cost of their connection fee and so forth by sending out little things and giving examples and so forth.
[52:38.700 --> 52:40.680]  [SPEAKER_10]: Now, I've heard this from more than one source.
[52:41.400 --> 53:02.120]  [SPEAKER_10]: Also, there's other ways of spamming including changing SMTP servers and the like which is illegal so that even if you do block someone from spamming you on a certain DNS address the mail will come in through a different one and there's no way to get around that.
[53:02.300 --> 53:03.000]  [SPEAKER_12]: Farber, is that true?
[53:03.320 --> 53:04.200]  [SPEAKER_10]: Oh, yes, absolutely.
[53:04.580 --> 53:04.800]  [SPEAKER_12]: saying.
[53:05.020 --> 53:08.160]  [SPEAKER_12]: Unless there's a concerted effort from Internet service providers.
[53:08.860 --> 53:24.200]  [SPEAKER_10]: Oh, yeah, they'll send you a, you know, abusive service or something like that and threaten you but meanwhile you can send out 10,000 messages and say, hey, I'm sorry, I set my things wrong and that's that.
[53:24.380 --> 53:25.160]  [SPEAKER_10]: They don't bother you anymore.
[53:25.300 --> 53:29.640]  [SPEAKER_02]: There are CD-ROMs being sold now with, you know, 250,000 email addresses on them.
[53:29.720 --> 53:30.440]  [SPEAKER_02]: What do you do about that?
[53:30.740 --> 53:37.980]  [SPEAKER_10]: Well, basically you pray that you're not on there and, you know, there's many ways.
[53:38.140 --> 53:53.120]  [SPEAKER_10]: I mean, you can send, you can, you can re-spam them but again, that's kind of self-defeating because it hogs the bandwidth again and, you know, but in order to get rid of these people, you have to, you have to identify the, you know, the primary spammers,
[53:54.240 --> 53:59.840]  [SPEAKER_10]: the primary primary promulgators of spamming and overload them.
[54:00.420 --> 54:01.400]  [SPEAKER_10]: Okay, do unto others.
[54:01.600 --> 54:04.760]  [SPEAKER_02]: So it sounds like you advocate a hacker solution to this problem.
[54:05.380 --> 54:17.400]  [SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, yeah, because unless the gentleman's agreement, as you were previously discussing before, unless the gentleman's agreement is, you know, is rendered, that's the only way to do it.
[54:17.500 --> 54:19.160]  [SPEAKER_10]: You're going to have to out-spam the spammers.
[54:19.900 --> 54:27.100]  [SPEAKER_10]: And, you know, for a while there's going to be a bandwidth drop and there's going to be, you know, lag and overload and delays in email.
[54:27.340 --> 54:29.180]  [SPEAKER_10]: But then the spammer is going to get the idea.
[54:29.320 --> 54:33.500]  [SPEAKER_10]: Somebody's going to get, you know, on the ball and do something about this.
[54:34.160 --> 54:35.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, well, thanks for calling.
[54:35.480 --> 54:36.180]  [SPEAKER_10]: Okay, thank you.
[54:36.280 --> 54:36.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: All right, take care.
[54:37.440 --> 54:44.260]  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, you know, there's something about becoming the enemy to fight the enemy that kind of runs me the wrong way.
[54:44.540 --> 54:47.380]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you fight spam with spam, you think that's a solution?
[54:47.640 --> 55:10.100]  [SPEAKER_12]: I don't know about that, but there was something that Paul Vixie was doing with APEC, which was just black-holing their Internet service, just announcing to all the routers that make up the backbones of the Internet, telling them to route all of APEC's traffic basically to nowhere so that they weren't able to have,
[55:11.160 --> 55:16.360]  [SPEAKER_12]: so that they weren't able to allow all the spam to go through, much less Internet service for any of their legitimate customers.
[55:16.380 --> 55:29.860]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, but that kind of an action has to remain in the hands of people, not government officials or lawmakers, because imagine that power being able to simply block someone's attempts to communicate in any way.
[55:30.000 --> 55:33.480]  [SPEAKER_12]: Well, it can be done right now by anybody who knows how.
[55:33.740 --> 55:36.200]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but those are the people who know how, not the lawmakers.
[55:36.780 --> 55:38.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: You see, that's the difference there.
[55:38.740 --> 55:46.360]  [SPEAKER_02]: We want to keep this technology in our hands, not hand it away to somebody who's simply going to abuse it for their own purposes.
[55:46.660 --> 55:47.840]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's definitely true.
[55:48.560 --> 55:49.900]  [SPEAKER_02]: All right, squeeze in a couple more phone calls.
[55:50.060 --> 55:50.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: Good evening, you're on the air.
[55:52.580 --> 55:54.700]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, you got to speak when I pick up the phone.
[55:54.800 --> 55:55.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the rule there.
[55:55.660 --> 55:56.460]  [SPEAKER_02]: Good evening, you're on the air.
[55:57.640 --> 55:58.620]  [SPEAKER_04]: Hi, quick question.
[55:58.680 --> 55:59.680]  [SPEAKER_04]: What does spam stand for?
[55:59.760 --> 56:02.180]  [SPEAKER_04]: I know how annoying it is, but I'm not sure what the letters are.
[56:02.400 --> 56:03.140]  [SPEAKER_14]: Origins of the word.
[56:03.240 --> 56:04.020]  [SPEAKER_14]: Origins of the word spam.
[56:04.160 --> 56:04.560]  [SPEAKER_14]: Anybody know?
[56:05.320 --> 56:18.620]  [SPEAKER_14]: Well, it comes from a Monty Python skit in which there was a menu and every item on the menu had spam in it repeatedly sometimes.
[56:19.040 --> 56:20.760]  [SPEAKER_14]: That's really where it came from?
[56:20.760 --> 56:22.240]  [SPEAKER_14]: I thought that was a different kind of spam.
[56:22.300 --> 56:24.340]  [SPEAKER_14]: No, that's really where it came from.
[56:25.240 --> 56:45.360]  [SPEAKER_14]: Back in the 80s, people that were using USENET newsgroups adopted spam as the name for a posting that would go to 20 or more newsgroups, generally not anywhere related to the same topic, and the posting would generally not have anything to do with anything on the newsgroup.
[56:46.260 --> 56:54.680]  [SPEAKER_14]: And folks remember this Monty Python thing where, you know, it was salmon and spam and bagels and spam and spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam.
[56:55.660 --> 56:56.280]  [SPEAKER_14]: Spam and egg.
[56:56.600 --> 56:57.220]  [SPEAKER_14]: Spam and egg.
[56:57.420 --> 56:58.720]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, well, I think we got the point.
[56:59.000 --> 57:00.620]  [SPEAKER_04]: I thought the M-man message...
[57:00.620 --> 57:02.940]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it doesn't stand for anything then.
[57:03.060 --> 57:03.260]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[57:03.420 --> 57:06.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: It probably could stand for something if we thought it's a little ham in the can.
[57:07.200 --> 57:08.880]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I know what that kind of spam is.
[57:09.960 --> 57:11.140]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what they're referring to.
[57:11.300 --> 57:11.980]  [SPEAKER_02]: As good a reason as any.
[57:12.340 --> 57:14.560]  [SPEAKER_02]: All right, let's see if we can get one more call in.
[57:14.660 --> 57:14.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: Good evening.
[57:14.980 --> 57:15.380]  [SPEAKER_02]: You're on the air.
[57:16.080 --> 57:16.740]  [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, hello?
[57:17.140 --> 57:17.720]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, go ahead.
[57:17.960 --> 57:18.840]  [SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, well, that's it.
[57:19.160 --> 57:23.620]  [SPEAKER_09]: During the Second World War, I guess it was, that we had rationing and...
[57:23.620 --> 57:26.360]  [SPEAKER_02]: Speaking of spam, I don't think...
[57:26.820 --> 57:28.960]  [SPEAKER_02]: You're the perfect person to speak about spam.
[57:29.180 --> 57:30.220]  [SPEAKER_09]: Well, I did...
[57:30.220 --> 57:30.460]  [SPEAKER_09]: Radio spam.
[57:30.620 --> 57:31.320]  [SPEAKER_09]: ...at one point.
[57:31.500 --> 57:34.420]  [SPEAKER_09]: It's a ham product, compressed ham, you know.
[57:34.420 --> 57:35.080]  [SPEAKER_02]: This is Monroe.
[57:35.240 --> 57:36.520]  [SPEAKER_02]: He calls every radio show.
[57:36.580 --> 57:40.140]  [SPEAKER_02]: For the last, what, ten years, you've called every single radio show over and over and over again?
[57:40.200 --> 57:42.020]  [SPEAKER_09]: What do you mean, every single one on WBAI?
[57:42.060 --> 57:43.300]  [SPEAKER_09]: On WBAI, right?
[57:43.300 --> 57:44.640]  [SPEAKER_09]: Well, I wouldn't say I've called...
[57:44.640 --> 57:45.200]  [SPEAKER_09]: Now, let me make...
[57:45.200 --> 57:46.760]  [SPEAKER_09]: You're not calling any other radio stations.
[57:46.960 --> 57:47.160]  [SPEAKER_09]: You're...
[57:47.160 --> 57:50.140]  [SPEAKER_09]: No, I've called ABC on occasion and so on.
[57:50.200 --> 57:52.660]  [SPEAKER_09]: I've called a little elsewhere, NYC.
[57:52.860 --> 57:54.180]  [SPEAKER_09]: But, you know, they have screeners.
[57:54.360 --> 57:54.520]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[57:54.620 --> 57:55.420]  [SPEAKER_02]: And they deny me...
[57:56.060 --> 58:00.300]  [SPEAKER_09]: That's not because I've done anything wrong, but because I've done correct things.
[58:04.420 --> 58:10.220]  [SPEAKER_09]: Because, you know, these screeners, you just brought it up yourself about government screeners.
[58:10.380 --> 58:11.360]  [SPEAKER_09]: You understand what I'm saying?
[58:11.500 --> 58:11.740]  [SPEAKER_09]: Uh-huh.
[58:11.980 --> 58:13.480]  [SPEAKER_09]: Now, let me ask you a question, you know.
[58:13.760 --> 58:24.660]  [SPEAKER_09]: Have you ever explained where the term mouse came from for the instrument that's used to, shall we say, move the visor or whatever you call that little...
[58:24.660 --> 58:27.660]  [SPEAKER_02]: This concludes our special on spam for tonight.
[58:30.040 --> 58:31.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: With that live demonstration.
[58:31.920 --> 58:33.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very much for calling in.
[58:35.460 --> 58:39.600]  [SPEAKER_14]: Dylan, any addresses you want to give out for people who are concerned about this?
[58:39.720 --> 58:39.940]  [SPEAKER_14]: Sure.
[58:40.120 --> 58:51.500]  [SPEAKER_14]: If people want to learn more about how to keep from getting spam themselves or how to fight spam, got three URLs here they can go to.
[58:51.760 --> 58:55.960]  [SPEAKER_14]: The first one is spam.abuse.net.
[58:57.120 --> 59:21.340]  [SPEAKER_14]: The second one is www.clark.net slash p-u-b slash r-b-e-n-n slash spam.html and the third one is www.cauce.org That last one is the Coalition Against Unsolicited Email.
[59:21.840 --> 59:22.140]  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[59:22.400 --> 59:25.060]  [SPEAKER_02]: Dylan, thank you very much for coming in and good luck in your fight.
[59:25.260 --> 59:25.880]  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[59:26.000 --> 59:27.960]  [SPEAKER_02]: And our fight, too, because it involves all of us.
[59:28.120 --> 59:30.060]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's going to do it for us here tonight.
[59:30.680 --> 59:32.560]  [SPEAKER_02]: Another edition of Off the Hook is History.
[59:32.760 --> 59:33.760]  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll be back again next week.
[59:33.840 --> 59:36.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: Who knows what's going to happen between now and then in the world of high technology.
[59:37.320 --> 59:40.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: But we'll be back in one week to tell you.
[59:40.580 --> 59:42.300]  [SPEAKER_02]: Until then, Emmanuel Goldstein, good night.