People think comic book is nothing, but comic book shoots right across young culture in
America.
It shoots right to the kids.
It hits the, it hits key kids who are decision makers in their groups.
Comic books are read by people who read.
Comic books are commented on by people who think.
They're not, they're not for stupid people, and they're not for ignorant people, and they're
not for non-leaders.
They are for everybody, but as from my experience, they go directly to people who have things
to say, who will have things to say in the future, and the fact that they're being done
the way they are, and the fact that they're being done by people who really care about
what's going on in America is, I believe, is going to make a difference, and it's not
a small thing that's happened there, and I'm very happy to see it happen.
That was Neil Adams speaking on an early episode of Nuff Said.
To hear thought-provoking and entertaining discussion on the subject of comics, tune
in every Tuesday night at 10 p.m. for Nuff Said here on WBAI New York, 99.5 FM, and visit
our website, NuffSaid.net, for our upcoming schedule of guests.
See you there.
And the time is 20.02 and 35 seconds.
It's a little late, but it's time for Off The Hook.
And good evening.
I know you just overheard that as I'm trying to very panickedly get to Emanuel.
You're here, right?
I'm here.
Very good.
I don't know what the problem is.
It's a simple matter of dialing a telephone, but...
Well, it isn't just that.
There was an error that I got that said your number is not accepting incoming international
calls.
Let me just stop you right there.
Go ahead.
You're using a company known as Voice Dream.
In any other society, saying the word Voice Dream would be a curse that you could not
possibly say over the radio.
So I guess we have some freedom here, and we could say Voice Dream over and over again.
But every time somebody tries and calls me on my cell phone using my Voice Dream number,
it just goes all haywire.
You need to get fast, busy, not enough circuits.
You can't make this call.
How dare you make this call?
Sometimes it goes to a voicemail recording.
Sometimes it goes to a voicemail prompt.
It's an embarrassment.
I mean, I have a GSM phone here.
GSM phones are great.
They're amazing to do all kinds of things.
In this country where I'm standing right now, which is the Netherlands, I am able to choose
between five different phone companies.
In the United States, we are not allowed to have more than one at a time.
So we're stuck with Voice Dream.
We can't compete with anybody else.
And it really sucks, really, really sucks.
Everybody here is able to send SMS messages back and forth.
I can't.
I'm forbidden from doing that for some reason.
Email works.
I don't know why, but email works.
There must be an oversight on their part.
But I'm very impressed with the technology and very embarrassed that I have to use such
a substandard company.
I don't know how I got that out of my system.
Well, here in America, you're using such a substandard company, you're trying to say.
Well, yeah, but I have to go through them here, and unfortunately, that's the restriction
I'm facing.
We can do all kinds of wondrous things with GSM technology in other lands.
In the United States, unfortunately, we're gumming that technology up as well.
I don't know.
Hopefully, there'll be competition.
Hopefully, there'll be expanded services.
I wouldn't hold my breath.
Anyway, now that we got that out of the way, what's going on over there?
What's going on over here?
I'm sitting in the studio.
I'm in front of a microphone, and we're kind of doing a radio program.
Uh-huh.
I meant to ask, every time I come overseas, all hell breaks loose at the radio station.
It seems like this is yet another example of this.
I'm hearing all kinds of...
I hear these reports in various forums, and I heard that a couple of troubling things,
that we're losing more and more people.
Robert Knight, for one, one of my all-time favorite radio hosts, apparently no longer
is doing radio in the city, but at the radio station.
His program, Earthwatch, is absolutely one of the best programs that I can ever remember
hearing on the radio.
Just more recently, Brother Shine.
I was listening to Brother Shine's show on a train today, on the way over to the HAL
campsite.
We'll be talking about hackers at large in just a moment.
Basically, I downloaded an MP3 version of his show on Sunday night.
I was wondering how you did that.
Okay.
Yeah.
I downloaded it onto my laptop, plugged a headphone into it, and was sitting on the
train for three hours, or actually two hours, listening to a program that really...
I can't express it in words, but it was basically his last radio show at the station.
He chose to resign.
Obviously, the things that are happening at the station have been affecting him in a very
deep way.
They've been affecting a lot of people in very deep ways.
All kinds of conflicts, disagreements, tensions.
I think a lot of people forget the human aspect of this.
It really doesn't matter what side you come from on an issue like this.
You have to remember there are human beings involved.
The stress, the tension, it's enough to really completely drive you crazy.
It really will.
I think that's something that we need to keep in mind.
We need to open up a dialogue, because we're just simply losing too many good people for
one reason or another.
I don't have all the facts on why people chose to resign, why people were let go, why people's
programs were canceled.
I don't have the actual reasons for this.
I do know that it's not good when these things happen.
I do know that it's very important that we open dialogues and have people on the air,
have a lot of people.
BAI taught me the importance of dialogue, the importance of expressing yourself, the
importance of having disagreements, like a big family hanging out and arguing and yelling
back and forth.
That's kind of what BAI is like.
To silence that and not have that is not something that I want to be part of, certainly.
I want the controversy.
I want the excitement.
I want the disagreements.
I want the back and forth.
It's very important that we have a degree of respect involved with that.
When it turns into just name calling, for instance, you and me, Isaac, on the air we're
cordial to each other.
Well, we very rarely resort to name calling.
Yeah, we do that after the show.
Exactly.
Usually that's when the police get involved.
It wouldn't be proper for us to do that on the radio because I think that's something
that the listeners don't really need to hear.
I also think that when you're working with people, it's important that you try and reach
them on their level.
I just think that everyone's been guilty of that on all different sides, just basically
doing a lot of shouting and covering up their ears.
I just hope that we get over this because it's going to kill us if we don't.
Robert is one of the people that I think is one of the people that represents the soul
of the radio station, and Brother Sean as well, and all kinds of other people like Sidney
Smith and Max Schmid and Sally O'Brien and Amy Goodman.
The list just goes on and on and on forever of all these people that have been there for
a very long time that personify what the radio station is all about.
These are valuable people.
These are people that should be broadcasting, giving their opinions.
You may not agree with what they have to say, but it's very important that they be around
and that we hear them and that we engage in a discourse with them.
That's all I want to say about that.
It's rather disturbing standing here again in Amsterdam, which is where I was the last
time.
Things seem to be rather tense, although they've been kind of tense throughout, I guess.
I wish I was there.
I wish I was there to be able to try and help out in whatever way I can.
Hopefully, there will be more of an open dialogue.
I really think that's a good thing.
We've been moving around all over Europe on the way to HAL, which begins this weekend.
We'll have full details on how you can still go to HAL, the Hackers at Large Conference,
which is looking like it's going to be the Woodstock of all hacker conferences.
It's happening this weekend, but it's not too late for you to do something crazy and
hop on a plane and just head over here and be part of it, Isaac.
If you don't have the money, it tends to be kind of tough.
Come on.
You can use Priceline.
You can use a credit card.
You don't have to pay until next year.
It can be pretty cheap, too.
I'm not a big credit card user, though.
I don't like them.
Yeah.
There's all kinds of things.
You can use PayPal or whatever.
The latest internet gizmo is out there.
PayPal airline tickets.
That's kind of cool.
Yeah.
I like that.
Use your imagination.
Use your imagination.
But I expect to see you out here this weekend.
You might hear me out there.
That's a different story.
Before I get into the whole HAL thing, I'd just like to talk about Denmark a little bit.
That's where I was last week.
That's where I was for the 2600 meeting.
I went to the one in Aarhus, which is, I guess, Denmark's second biggest city.
Copenhagen being their first big city, Aarhus being the second one.
We met a bunch of people.
I'm sorry?
That's a very, very, very fine house.
Yeah.
Aarhus.
Yeah.
Anyway, we wandered all over the country meeting various people from various, I guess, hacker organizations.
It's great to see the hacker spirit exist in foreign countries all over the world.
It's the same kind of thing.
People that just like to play with technology and see what happens when you press this particular button.
Actually, I pressed a button I shouldn't have pressed.
What button would that be?
Well, actually, I've ridden on so many trains in the last few weeks.
You just would not believe it.
The trains, for the most part, are much cleaner, much more modern, much more intelligent.
But this train, I think, kind of defeated itself.
The bathroom had a button that you pushed.
It had a little green light, which meant, okay, you can push this button.
There's nobody in here.
And that was it.
There wasn't a door handle or anything like that.
You just pushed a button, and the door opened, and then you walked in.
On the other side, you pushed another button to say that, hey, I'm in here.
Close the door, and don't anybody else come in.
You pressed the button, and you walked out, didn't you?
Exactly.
I wanted to see what would happen.
I wanted to see if it would be that stupid that I could just reach my hand and push the button
and disable the bathroom, and that's what happened.
And you did.
All I know, that bathroom is still disabled on that train.
But I wanted to see what it would look like on the outside,
and it turned the little green light red, of course.
You could have had a friend help you with that.
I didn't want to get anybody else involved.
I had to find out for myself, and I had to take the risk.
Unfortunately, nobody found out about it, so I'm safe.
You would have gotten quite a pummeling if people knew it was you who did that.
This guy's got to start walking up and down the cars trying to find a restroom.
I'm really amazed.
I told you how much I was amazed by the way things are in Norway.
I'm equally amazed by the people in Denmark, how they just have this kind of common sense approach to everything,
and it just kind of all works out.
There are no hassles with doing things like there are back home,
where basically there's all these rules and regulations,
and you're not trusted to make any kind of decision on your own.
I'll give you an example.
I don't think in all of Scandinavia I saw a single stop sign.
What I saw were yield signs, which basically means you can go if it's safe to go.
Otherwise, yield.
But in America, we have to be told to stop.
In fact, everybody has to be told to stop.
It doesn't matter if you're coming from one side of the intersection.
The guy from the other side of the intersection also has to stop.
You just see these stop signs all over the place because people don't have the intelligence to look and see when traffic is coming.
No, no.
We pass these laws for the children, of course.
The children need people to stop at intersections.
Well, as long as you bring up the children, that's a very good point.
Okay.
Because children in that part of the world, in fact, in this part of the world too,
children are given so much more respect, so much more responsibility.
Ah, that's the key.
They're trusted a lot more to make the right decision, and they're able to make the right decision.
They're not incapable of doing this because it's not suddenly thrust upon them at a certain age like it is in our country.
At the age of 21, all of a sudden, yeah, he can do everything.
But you have absolutely no idea where to start, and usually you wind up making all kinds of mistakes,
except you're a lot bigger at that time.
So I don't know.
It becomes very frustrating to constantly see this all the time, to see how other people do things
and how we just seem to refuse to do it the sensible way.
But I already made this rant, so I guess I'm not going to go into that again.
Let's get into Hal.
Hackers at large.
Well, you need to spend money to get into Hal.
I mean, it's a ticket price, right?
Oh, yeah, it's a ticket price, and I'm not sure exactly what the ticket price is.
It's on the website of www.hal2001.org.
But if God were to drop like a $50,000 bag of money on my lap, I would go to 2600.com and register there?
No, you can't register there anymore.
I can't.
Well, because the pre-registration ended last week.
If you had been listening to the show last week, Isaac,
you would have known that last week was the deadline for the pre-registration.
And quite a few people.
Sometimes I ask these questions on behalf of the listeners who weren't there last week.
I may sound like an idiot when I do these sorts of things,
but I'm informed and I'm trying to present it in such a way that it doesn't make people feel stupid.
Okay, I guess I'll believe you on that.
All right.
So anyway, we've had quite a number of pre-registrants.
I think the total number of pre-registrants is something on the order of 1600 people.
Now, keep in mind that pre-registration usually is done by a minimal number of people, like not the majority.
So we're expecting upwards of 4,000 people at this thing.
It's a beautiful site.
It's very nice on a college campus.
Lots of green fields.
The difference here is that they have college campuses with lots of green fields that aren't athletic fields.
They have to have athletic fields, too.
But where I come from, if there's a green field, you either put a parking lot on it or build a building.
But here it's just these rolling fields, and they're already being set up with tents
and all kinds of equipment that are going to be serving the hackers for the next few days.
Keep in mind, this is only Tuesday, and people have been setting up since last weekend.
I went to a planning meeting tonight that pretty much filled the auditorium.
That's how many volunteers there are.
So you can imagine what it's going to be like when things actually get started.
And by the way, I'm giving the keynote.
Somehow I got suckered into that on Friday, so that should be pretty interesting.
We're also showing Freedom Downtime, so that's going to be fun as well.
Now, let me give some directions to people that are planning on going,
because it's really important that people know how to get there from either the airport
or the central train station.
It's not really set in a way that people from around here can understand on the website,
but it's really not set in a way that Americans will be able to understand.
So I think it's important that I clarify a couple of things.
While I'm doing that, maybe you want to, you know what?
We're going to call them live because we want to hear the phone ring and all that,
although you're having trouble making international calls, so I don't know if it's going to work.
Who are we trying to reach?
I'm calling Porkchop in a minute.
Oh, I've got him on hold.
Oh, you already called him. Okay.
I'm a consummates professional here, man.
Okay. All right. Well, that's fine.
Let me just quickly go over the directions, and we'll get right to him and a couple other people there.
There are two major points.
If you're coming to the conference, there are two major points where you'll probably be traveling from,
either Amsterdam Central Station or Schiphol, which is the airport just south of Amsterdam.
And in both of those cases, assuming that you want to go by train,
you want to take a train, an intercity train they call them,
to a city that looks like it should be pronounced Onshade, but it's not.
It's pronounced Onshede.
It's spelled E-N-S-C-H-E-D-E.
You want to take a train that goes to that city, but you do not want to get off in that city.
You want to get off one stop before that city in a town called Hengelo.
That's spelled H-E-N-G-E-L-O.
Now, at that point, you have a choice.
You can either get on what's known as a stop train, a stop train being kind of like a local train.
The intercity train, this is how you tell the difference.
The intercity train kind of looks like a robot when it's approaching.
You'll know when you see it.
The front and the back just look like this evil robot.
And the stop train either looks like a caterpillar with eyes,
or it looks like a dog, depending on which one you get.
I'm not kidding.
The trains here are really cool looking.
This is the highly technical explanation.
Well, I mean, I could go into more detail as to precisely the area.
No, I think we should move on.
Locomotives and things like that, but I don't think that would really serve the listeners.
Not at all.
In the station Hengelo, which is spelled H-E-N-G-E-L-O,
you can do one of two things.
Get on the stop train and take that one station to a station,
which actually is also called Anshidae, but it's Anshidae-Drainello.
But you don't really need to know.
You just need to know that you have to take it one station.
If you do that, you simply walk from the train station away from the stadium,
and that will take you to the campus where you'll see all the tents and all the fun and festivities.
Or if you don't want to do that from the Hengelo station,
you can take bus number three, and that will take you right to the campus.
So that's about as simple as I can make it for the people coming from America.
But also a couple of other things that you need to know.
Basically, you can buy the ticket all the way to the Anshidae-Drainello station.
So that should make it fairly easy for you.
You don't have to buy a whole lot of tickets.
Right.
And I believe Porkchop is with us over in Anshidae or in Hengelo,
or wherever that place is, over there in the eastern part of the Midlands.
Hello, Porkchop.
Hello there.
How are you?
Pretty good. Yourself?
I can't complain.
It's a little hot here.
It's raining pretty good right now, but people shouldn't be concerned by that
because we've looked at the weather forecast,
and the rain is expected to get out of the way pretty much tomorrow.
Tomorrow is the last day of rain.
The weather is expected to get much better over the next couple of days
and be perfect over the weekend.
So the mud should clear up by the actual weekend then as well.
Well, there's a lot of grass, so I didn't really see any mud.
It's actually good for driving.
Unless it was under the grass.
So, Porkchop, what do you have there?
With me we have Aldert Hazenberg, something like that.
He is the chief of, I'm sorry, some of these names that are around here.
Something like that, but it's the guy's name, for God's sake.
Boy, the tongue twister.
Yeah, well, he's standing right next to me and not looking any happier.
And you're still standing. He didn't punch you out.
People don't do that in the Netherlands, Isaac.
That's an American thing.
I'm sorry.
Anyway, he is the chief of network operations.
Also with us is Greg Newby.
He's the stage manager.
He actually spoke at the last TOEP conference.
That's right.
Okay, who wants to come on first and tell us what's up?
Why don't we start with Greg Newby.
He'll tell us something about the people who are coming to speak.
This is the chief of network operations, CNO.
Well, hello.
Hey, Greg, how are you doing?
Outstandingly well, and you?
Pretty good.
Well, I'm standing in a pay phone, actually, in Amsterdam.
But I'm using my cell phone again because these pay phones don't take incoming calls.
There's nothing I can do about that.
We actually heard that story.
We were listening to the live stream on the Internet.
Yeah, I can't do that either because I don't have net connectivity here.
But I have my laptop perched precariously on top of the pay phone,
and I'm talking on my cell phone, which hopefully won't die in the next hour or so.
Yeah, that's right.
Pray to the battery god somewhere.
But you had a regular phone.
You're over there at the campsite.
We're on a landline in the campsite in basically the managing trailer right next to the network downlink site.
It's an outstandingly connected campus, but I'll let Aldert tell you about that.
What I want to tell you about a little bit is the speakers.
Yeah, who's speaking?
How many watts, man?
Well, we got a bunch.
We have basically a minimum of three and as many as five simultaneous sessions going on.
The biggest room is like 800 seats, so it's really a pretty large-scale affair.
I think I looked through our schedule, and I think there are a couple of household names.
Phil Zimmerman is going to be here.
Cool.
And John Gilmore is going to be here.
Cool.
And those are both household names.
In addition to you, you're doing the lead-off, which I didn't hear if you mentioned,
but I don't want to forget you're doing the keynote Friday morning.
Got suckered into waking up on Friday morning to do a keynote.
That's right, and it's not even.
It's going to be middle of the night for East Coast time.
Phil Zimmerman is actually talking about Hushmail 2.0 and voice encryption,
so it's not just PGP anymore for Phil.
That should be pretty interesting.
We also have, actually, you're going to be in a, what are we going to call it,
a debate or a dialogue with Andy Mueller, Magum of ICANN and Chaos Computer Club.
I think we're pretty much going to agree on just about everything.
I wasn't sure what the point of disagreement could possibly be,
but this sounds pretty fascinating to me.
The whole cyber-squatting issue is something that, I mean,
there's just no greater example in the Internet of the big guy squashing the little guy.
Have you heard the most recent thing regarding the .info scandal that's going on?
Basically, a whole lot of fraudulent trademarks were basically filed
or alleged to be filed for very common words, you know, like flower.info.
Somebody claimed that they had a copyright or trademark on that,
and that means the only way that you can possibly get it is to challenge them for $300.
That's how they're allocating new top-level domains, you know, with fraud at the center.
I mean, well, I've got to give them something, right?
It's yet another new business model on the Internet.
So any new business model on the Internet, you know, we've seen the ones that failed.
So maybe this one will win. You never know.
So what else can we expect to see?
I'm sorry, what was that?
What else can we expect to see and how?
You know, it's actually pouring on the trailer here, and I can just barely hear you.
Try again.
Okay, one more time.
What else can we expect to see and how?
Oh, now I can hear that.
All right, Emanuel's trying to ask.
It's really raining.
I can hear you better.
Emanuel's trying to ask what else we can expect to see and how besides himself and some others.
I'll let Alder tell you about the network because it's just astounding.
But if you're at Hope 2K in the Hotel Pennsylvania, if you take that whole top floor of the hotel
and take all the other floors of the hotel and slice them up and scatter them around 100 acres, that's how.
It's just an astounding scale of, you know, tents and open space networking and events,
all kinds of socializing and, of course, the speaker sessions.
So, I mean, if you have the means and you have the interest, then I strongly advise, you know,
getting on the Internet somewhere and seeing if you can get your butt over here for Friday morning.
All right already, all right.
It's more than just a conference because these people are actually living together for the weekend
and making things work.
When I saw it today, it was absolutely astounding.
I was amazed, too, because I was also at the, you know, the Hope setup, and that was amazing itself.
But what we have here is just the whole setup is just much, much larger scale.
And I don't know if you've had this experience in Europe, but you go to the United States
and you close the door and the door kind of rattles and the handle's about to fall off.
You go to Europe and you close the door and the door slams and it's solid and everything's just well made.
And the whole conference is like that.
You know, it's just really built to last, even though it's only going on for the weekend.
Well, you do have to leave the field at some point, right?
Something like that.
At the end of the weekend.
But it's really amazing the work that has been put into this.
And as somebody who has organized several conferences, I can attest that there is a lot of work involved.
But these guys, as far as organization, I've never seen a better organized crew.
I've been on the program committee pretty well from the start, from about six or seven months ago of planning.
And it's essentially, I don't know if it's geometric or exponential, but it's just an increasing curve.
Because by the time the conference is almost here, everybody's up all night sending hundreds of emails a day.
Everyone except for poor Americans like me has a cell phone and a radio.
And they're just, you know, really donating 100% of their time to get things running.
You know, even having a cell phone doesn't help if you're an American.
That's what we know.
And if you wanted help in Europe, you have to get the GSM phone anyway, which costs a fortune.
Well, I have a GSM phone.
That's what I'm saying.
And you still can't win.
Okay.
Let's hear from others.
I'll let him tell you about the network and some of the other infrastructure we have here.
All right, so this is...
Hello, sir.
How are you doing?
You're the chief of network operations, right?
Very good.
What kind of bandwidth we got, man?
Big question already.
One gigabit?
Into the middle of a field?
Wow.
...ever with network connection.
We do not just deliver power, but we also deliver network to every tent, UTP-wise or wireless.
We can do this.
How many people are you preparing for?
We are preparing...
Well, network-wise, we are preparing for 5,000.
But power-wise, it will probably start to fill at 3,500 people.
In tents.
3,500 people spread out over 100 acres.
Yeah, 3,500 people.
Wow.
That's quite a service.
I mean...
Yes.
...especially for three days' worth of events.
Yes.
We have about 60 miles of UTP cable connecting all the participants to the central network hubs.
And we have a backbone of about two miles of fiber optics connecting to the network concentration point called FHQ.
Okay.
Headquarters.
And from there we have direct fiber uplink to the main backbone of a big university called University of Twente.
And there we are going directly with one gigabit per second into the backbone of the Netherlands.
That's...
I believe I heard you say before that you actually have enough volunteers.
We have.
For the network.
Question again.
Did you actually have enough volunteers for the network?
Everything is progressing smoothly?
Yeah, that's correct.
We have enough volunteers for the network.
We have about 80 volunteers for the network.
Those people are the elite of Dutch system administrators with clues, of course.
And we need loads and loads of other people who can help us do other logistics.
Everybody who wants to help is welcome.
Come early.
Have some fun.
What should people bringing computers make sure to bring with them?
Okay, what we want you to bring with you is about 10 to 15 meters of UTP.
UTP so you can have your own 100 megabit connection.
Or bring your laptop with your wireless card.
Bring a computer anyway.
Bring your tent so that you can camp outside.
And bring your good mood.
Okay.
Thanks very much and best of luck to you.
Yeah, okay.
All right.
Want to throw Portia back on?
Yeah, I will.
Portia?
Hello again.
Okay, so Portia, you've been part of organizing 2HOP conferences.
Yes, that's right.
And now this.
So how do you compare?
Well, it's like you heard earlier with the comparison to the last 2HOP conference with the hotel.
It's true.
I mean, you're not really restricted by any sort of space restrictions here.
So there are gigantic tents.
I mean, 50 meters long tent doesn't sound like a whole lot.
Because, you know, we're used to thinking in small increments of feet.
But 50 meters, that's, I don't even know what that is.
That's got to be more than a football field.
I think that's another kind of thing you can instantly translate.
Yes, it is more than a football.
No, it's not.
A meter is a little longer than a yard.
So you're looking at just under a football field.
I just don't understand why we don't use the metric system.
But that's a whole other thing.
Yeah, you're right.
But anyway, the main tent is absolutely giant.
And there are other tents scattered all over the place that aren't a whole lot smaller.
The small tent must be about 40 meters long.
There are, by 30 meters wide, I think they all are, or 25 meters.
And there are other tents all over the place, some of which belong to HAL,
some of which are actually, they look like old German surplus army tents
that the CCC are in and several other groups.
Some of the vehicles that I've seen coming in there is that truck from Germany,
which just looks so cool, the Mercedes-Benz truck.
The Unimog.
It's straight out of a film or something.
It's absolutely fantastic.
The other thing I have to say is that the size, as far as size goes,
the amount of acreage that's available to people to camp out, it's amazing.
It really is.
There's so much space to pitch tents and to have fun with.
I really can't compare it to anything we've ever done in New York
because everything we've done in New York is cramped.
It is New York City.
This is close to the middle of nowhere.
The generators are all over the place.
I think it's 14 generators and some of them are 1.3 megawatts or something along those lines.
That's astounding.
You're basically setting up a small city in the middle of a field in Norway.
And the Netherlands.
And the Netherlands, I'm sorry.
That's quite an undertaking.
Actually, I remember thinking several times today that all the infrastructure going up,
this infrastructure could make a city and this city could exist for months if not years,
but it's all going to be over in a weekend.
Maybe we should be thinking ahead towards some kind of a hacker city
that would exist on some kind of neutral territory someplace.
We'll see how long that lasts.
Well, yeah.
That sounds sort of like a bad movie.
It would be fun, though, just to try it.
But, anyway, Portia, I want to thank you for all your hard work and for updating us.
Well, thank you.
We've got a full slate here.
We've got to move on.
Of course, it's also 2 in the morning here, so I know you guys are tired over there.
We'll be happy to get some sleep.
Yeah.
So, I will see you tomorrow.
Pretty much people are starting to show up now.
The conference itself starts on Friday, runs through the weekend,
but get there as early as you can because the fun is starting right now.
So, next we want to bring in Mike from Columbia, who actually is out in California.
Isaac, have you managed to call him?
Gene Pitcher, I've just hung up pretty quick.
Hold on.
Yeah, I hope you don't hang up on me by accident.
I think I can manage the phone here.
All right.
I just got to get Mike back.
Yeah.
Is Mike there?
Not yet.
Okay.
Basically, Mike's going to be giving us an update of the case involving the first criminal prosecution of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
of course, 2600 being the first civil prosecution with our MPAA lawsuit,
which is still, to this day, not been decided as far as the appeal goes.
Well, we're working on it.
Yeah.
It gets more and more interesting by the week, and we have an update that makes it even more interesting.
Is Mike with us?
The phone is ringing.
Okay.
And it's still ringing.
Still ringing.
Well, I can fill you in if you want.
You're calling a Sprint phone, so that's an even worse phone than what I have.
Oh, well, that's not too good.
Yeah.
It's still ringing.
Still ringing.
But you know what's going to happen?
It's going to ring 100 times and go to voicemail.
Of course.
And he's going to say it didn't ring at all.
I mean, he's going to be right because it didn't ring at all.
All right.
Well, real fast then, Dimitri, yes.
Yeah, I got his voicemail.
All right.
Try him one more time.
All right.
One more time.
You want me to do this one on the air, though?
Yeah, do this one on the air.
Okay.
That'll make it more exciting for the listeners.
Don't dial the little numbers over the air.
That wouldn't be good.
Live dialing here on Off The Hook.
Emanuel Goldstein here with you standing on a pay phone.
All right.
We're dialed.
In the rain.
Actually, yeah, that's right.
They probably couldn't hear me while I was talking since it's on the same channel, wasn't it?
That's about right.
Yeah.
I didn't even think about that.
Is Mike with us?
No, he's not.
I don't hear the phone ringing.
Neither do I.
Are you sure you dialed all the digits?
I've dialed all the digits, man.
You included the one for his bizarro area code.
Mm-hmm.
You seem to be having dialing difficulties tonight.
Oh, it's not me.
It's the systems, man.
Well, it's that phone that you use.
You have to press all the digits really hard because sometimes they don't register.
I dialed them all.
The phone system was made in 1952, for God's sake.
Oh, by the way, we're getting a...
It hasn't started ringing by now.
I don't think it's going to start ringing.
Well, I'm redialing.
Okay.
We're going to do shipment of vacuum tubes, by the way.
So you're going to have to get the guys together, and we'll put them in.
That's good.
Straight from Moscow, right?
Mm-hmm.
All the leftover things from their old transmitters.
No, I got his voicemail immediately now.
Okay.
Well, I'll take his part, then.
Hi, I'm not Mike, and I'm not from Columbia University.
Dimitri Sklatov was released on Monday on $50,000 bail, paid for by his company.
That's right.
Moving on.
After being in prison for three weeks, which is really unbelievable,
for basically writing a program.
I mean, that's how I describe it.
Is that not accurate?
Well, the big thing is he did this in Russia,
and he came here to speak at a conference on what he'd done in Russia.
And he's now being held for violating the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
And I'm kind of at a loss as to what they're hanging on to him for,
unless he actually distributed it here in the United States.
I don't know.
I haven't read any of the documentation.
I just think it's a very unfortunate sort of situation.
But he's out on bail.
He's with a friend in California.
And, hey, the next step is the next step.
Well, there's going to be a trial.
A pretrial hearing is set for, I think, August 23rd.
There may not.
They may drop the charges and let him go home.
Or he may run away.
You think they're going to do that?
You think they're really going to do that?
Why not?
Adobe is no longer interested.
The Justice Department, as pig-headed as they are,
probably see that this isn't the greatest thing they could try for so far as setting a precedent.
Here's something where I'm going to actually have to, like, say something that I would expect you to say.
Okay.
Basically, technically, the guy broke the law.
The law exists and it's written in such a profoundly bad way that he broke the law by writing the program.
He broke the law by printing information about another program.
Well, wait a second.
We have to wait for the jury to decide whether or not he actually broke the law.
So, you know, let's not go that far yet.
Okay.
Frankly, I think there's some...
I don't want to be the jury, but I'm saying, you know, if this is what he is accused of breaking...
He's alleged to have broken this law.
Right.
It doesn't seem to be a far reach to look at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and look at what he did and say,
yeah, you know, this is a violation of that act because that act is such a profoundly bad law that, yes,
it's possible for somebody simply for writing a computer program to be imprisoned.
Right.
That's the threat.
That's what we've been trying to warn people about for the last couple of years.
So, yeah, you know, if they just drop the charges, that just leaves it open for the next guy.
You know, it might be harder to sympathize with.
I think with this guy, you know, he's pretty much a perfect candidate for somebody who is being victimized by an unfair law.
Well...
He's got a wife and kids.
He's from a foreign country.
He's a simple programmer.
He's an intelligent person.
And to be thrown in an American prison for three weeks...
Imagine if the same thing had happened to somebody over in Russia who was an American.
We'd be outraged.
Yeah.
Well, if I were the Justice Department, which I'm not, but if I were, I would probably drop this and look for a much better example by which to set the precedent.
I mean, this is a very complex sort of situation that they're involved in with a foreign national committing the act in a foreign nation
and then coming to America and just talking about it.
I mean, there are far better test cases for their use than to go after this guy.
Well, I think they've really kind of committed to this right now.
Oh, you can always spin it. Come on.
We'll see. We'll see.
You know, I don't think it would be in our interest to just drop it and wait for the next one.
I think this might have to be fought at some point, and now is as good a time as any.
Well, you haven't been fighting it with your legislators and your representatives?
You're not trying to convince them that this has to go away?
You only go so far with these people because they're in the pocket of the industry that makes the laws.
We all know this.
We all know this.
This has been going on for decades, if not longer.
But you can go farther in a courtroom with a single man who makes the decision.
Not following this logic too much.
Right now what we have is the opportunity to reach a whole lot more people who can see just how bad this law is,
and we've been doing that with demonstrations all over the country.
We had demonstrations or handouts on Friday with the 2600 meetings,
and basically more people are seeing, hey, somebody is going to prison for writing a computer program.
This is awful.
This is not the kind of law that we should be passing.
And that's how you reach people, by waking them up in this manner.
Yeah, we can write all the letters we want to the legislators, and they'll just ignore them because, you know,
they'll be voted into office anyway by all the people who don't write letters and don't care.
Unfortunately, that's the way it works.
You have to wake up the people first, and that's what we're trying to do now is wake them up.
Well, that's a valuable thing, but if they do let this guy off,
I wouldn't be sitting there waiting for the next prosecution to come along.
I would be continuing to lobby your representatives and tell them, hey, listen, this is a problem.
You're the guy who can pass something to get rid of this,
because I'll tell you exactly what the outcome is going to be if he's acquitted.
And, you know, they actually go through with the trial, and he's acquitted.
The judge is going to say, this is the problem with the law.
This is where it's not constitutional.
The legislature is going to go back, and they're going to review,
and they're going to change the law the minimum amount possible
so that it is in compliance with the constitutional problem that that particular judge found.
They're not going to go back and scrap the whole thing.
They're just going to tweak it so that the law stands as it is.
So to continue to fight this sort of thing in the courts I think is a, I won't say a worthless battle,
but it's certainly a much more difficult one when you can just pass an omnibus piece of legislation
and say, listen, this is bad, let's get rid of it, repeal it,
and we'll replace it with something better from the get-go
without having to be poked and prodded by the judicial branch.
Well, when you see a single congressman with enough guts to actually propose that, let me know.
Well, I think you should be electing them.
Well, we've been looking for quite some time.
In fact, we can't even find people that are running on other platforms to take a stand on this
because it's too complicated, people don't see the value of it.
Now at least we have a case where people can say, wow, that's wrong, I'm going to oppose that.
So, yeah, maybe we will get some candidates out of this, but that's still a couple of years down the road.
What we have to do right now is make sure this gets publicity, make sure the media is covering this,
make sure that people know that people are going to prison for writing computer programs.
That's as simple as we can make it.
All right.
Well, anyway, moving on.
Speaking of simpletons and things like that, Code Red.
More on Code Red.
Oh, come on with the Code Red already.
Code Red 2.
Code Red 2.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's people.
That's right.
This one's from Wired.
Code Red 2 infects a system and installs a backdoor into the system,
allowing a malicious hacker to remotely connect to and can control any Code Red 2 infected web servers.
What's most troubling?
How about a stupid idiot allowing them to have their system completely compromised
because they refuse to listen and install secure software?
If you patch for the original Code Red, Code Red 2 is not going to be a problem.
That's right.
I'm reading from the article again.
What's particularly troublesome about this new variant of Code Red
is its ability to open up an infected computer system completely to the Internet.
It's a server.
Shouldn't it already have that?
Says Ian Hammeroff, business manager for Computer Associates.
He continues.
This means an intruder could browse through and even download files from an infected web server.
Web servers are made to download files, and I don't think he quite sees the problem here.
Never mind.
Never mind that reporter's inability to get to facts.
What can be done here is a very good thing.
We can turn bad into good.
We can turn lemons into lemonade.
We have Code Red 2.
Evil people go out there and get access to the system.
Well, when those people get access to the system, you know what they should do?
Download the patch and install it.
There.
Problem solved.
Well, I think that will be Code Red 3, the actual worm for the patch.
In other security news, this is from Reuters,
wireless network group discloses new vulnerability.
The security system for the leading wireless networking system
that links office computer systems is vulnerable to hacker attacks via a quicker and easier method
than previously known, a trade group said last week.
The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, the group that promotes the Wi-Fi standard,
said Friday it had long urged wireless network users to supplement Wi-Fi's built-in security system
with stronger encryption tools.
The paper detailing this new vulnerability, written by Scott Fleur of Cisco Systems,
and Itzik Mantan and Adi Shamir of RSA, who is presently with the Weissman Institute in Israel,
is presented to the 8th Annual Workshop on Selected Areas in Cryptography,
being held in Toronto, August 16-17.
Despite its popularity, critics have long said Wi-Fi was vulnerable to attack by hackers.
Yes, in fact, early this year, a group of security experts at the University of California, Berkeley,
discovered weaknesses in the Wired Equivalent Privacy, or WEP, algorithm,
a security system used for Wi-Fi networks.
And in March, two months later, researchers at the University of Maryland published a report
entailed, Your 802.11 wireless network has no clothes,
that claimed the wireless networks are vulnerable to attacks.
So here we are, a year later, and the announcement is, uh, this is really, really broken.
It's not just broken, it's really broken, and now it's really, really broken.
And yet, we're still considering that these wireless networks are secure.
Next one.
Next one.
All right. Well, I got another news story, if you want to touch that one.
It actually is an expansion on the Scarfo thing we discussed last week,
but perhaps we should address that next week when we have more time.
Well, it's just we've gone over so long, and I do want to give listeners a chance to call in.
Well, what time is it over there now?
It's 10 to the hour.
Yeah, so let's take some phone calls.
Hello, you're on the air.
Yeah, I went to Drake's Bay, California.
Okay, now hang on a minute.
I said let's take some phone calls.
I understand, but this is a personal thing.
Rebel, on Friday at the 2600 meeting, you skipped out on your restaurant bill.
In fact, this is the third or fourth time you've done that.
So I don't want to see you at 2600 meetings anymore,
or at least not at the restaurant when we go out to dinner afterwards.
Those people take care of us, and for you to skip on a check like that is not right.
Hello, you're on the air.
Yeah, Manuel, I went to a toll station.
He doesn't listen.
I think maybe he doesn't.
Hello, you're on the air.
Maybe he's not really there.
Hi, how are you guys doing?
All right, how are you?
Very, very well.
You guys have a really great show.
Actually, I work for a company, and we do cryptography.
I wanted to know the paper that you were just mentioning, where can we get access to that?
Hang on.
Let me retrieve that.
Thank you very much.
Are you on the other side of the room?
Well, yeah, I did a David Letterman kind of thing.
All right, which paper do you want?
You want the one from January, the one from March, or the latest one?
The latest one or all of them.
All right, the one from January is by UC Berkeley on WEP.
I don't remember the title of it.
The one from March is out of the University of Maryland,
and you can probably just do a search for this title.
Your 802.11 wireless network has no clothes.
I know that was posted.
No clothes isn't clothing, right?
Yeah, no clothes isn't clothing.
I know it was posted to Cypherpunks and a couple of other lists,
and it's probably on Cryptome.org as well.
In fact, you can probably find all of these on Cryptome.org.
Cryptome.org?
Yeah, yeah, that's a very fine site for a lot of crypto stuff.
And the last paper, whose title I don't have here, is by Scott Fleurer,
F-L-U-H-R-E-R, Itzik Mantin, M-A-N-T-I-N, and Adi Shamir, S-H-A-M-I-R,
and if you're a crypto guy and you don't know how to spell Shamir,
you don't deserve to call yourself a crypto guy.
Thanks for your call. Let's move on.
Hello, you're on the air.
Hello?
Hello.
Hi, this is Mike.
How are you doing, Mike?
I'm doing all right.
We couldn't reach you.
Yeah, I don't know what to say.
We tried.
But did you get a chance to talk about Dimitri's case?
Yeah, he's out. He's on a $50,000 bond and we're waiting.
We had a nice little argument over...
Actually, Mike, you were in the courtroom when this happened.
What was it like?
It was kind of interesting.
We saw Dimitri come in looking kind of confused as to what he was doing there,
but otherwise fine.
And the U.S. attorney and Dimitri's attorney had already come to an agreement in advance,
so they basically just got the judge to rubber stamp it.
Okay, that's pretty interesting.
Now, there were demonstrations going on outside the courtroom as well?
Right.
There were some demonstrations outside there in San Jose where it took place
and also in four other cities.
And I imagine the courtroom itself must have been packed with people.
Right, it was packed.
There was a good chunk of media there as well as a number of concerned people.
Now, are there plans for future demonstrations?
Yeah, there's going to be nationwide demonstrations this Monday, the 13th,
and there's going to be a big nationwide thing on Thursday, August 30th.
Richard Stallman's going to be at the one out here in California,
and there's going to be other exciting stuff around the country.
He's out.
What are you demonstrating for?
Well, he's...
I knew you were going to ask that, Isaac.
I knew you were going to ask that.
He's out.
Go ahead.
Go ahead, answer it.
He's on bond.
He's out.
Is it still free, Dimitri?
Are we trying to give him away now or what?
He's free.
He still can't go back to Russia.
Well, he could run.
It's not too wise.
He's not going to be able to come back, but, you know.
Well, I don't know if he'd want to come back, but anyway,
he has to stay in the northern district of California.
And the DMCA is still in effect.
Okay, but why is that now the focus, this Dimitri demonstration?
I thought the entire idea was to get him out of jail.
He's out of jail.
Well, let's start focusing on the actual court case.
He still has the charges hanging over his head.
Okay, so let's...
He still has to go to prison.
Well, what are we accomplishing by standing outside a jail that he's not in?
We're not going to be outside the jail.
Well, where are you going to be?
Outside the courtroom where they're not actually talking about the case?
This Monday they're going to be at the San Jose Public Library
where they're going to be protesting for...
The library?
They're going to be in support of libraries.
Libraries have also been severe critics of the DMCA
because you can't lend books.
You can't lend e-books.
All right, I can see that, but what...
With librarians on our side, I feel safe.
As do I.
I actually...
I think we need to unite with the librarians on this issue.
They get it.
They understand.
There's definitely been talk of that.
People who know anyone in the American Library Association,
we'd love to talk to you.
All of the contact info is on the website.
Give us the information so people know about the demonstrations.
What website should they go to?
There's a kind of centralized calendar,
and all that information is on the free CCLI-RF website,
which is F-R-E-E-S-K-L-Y-A-R-O-V.org.
Okay.
Mike, thanks for all the hard work you're putting into this.
It's been a number of people who have put in an amazing amount of effort.
I'm really impressed by a lot of them.
Yeah, I think that's one positive thing that's come out of this
is just seeing how quickly people mobilized and got together
and got the word out.
It's really been very effective.
Well, they've certainly accomplished getting him free.
My question is that this system isn't exactly geared toward solving the problem
that is now presented to you.
I'm not seeing him hanging out at a library,
and being an eyesore there is going to help change the law.
How about this, Isaac?
Let's each do it our way, all right?
Okay.
In 30 days, let's get back together and compare notes
and see who was more successful.
All right?
You do it your way.
Oh, you don't want to take this bet, Matt.
All the legislators have told you in return,
in reply to all the letters that you sent them,
and we'll tell you how many average people we were able to reach
by having demonstrations.
All right, we'll see you in 30 days.
I'd like to know.
Okay.
I'll take that bet.
All right, all right, cool.
Sounds good.
Somebody mark down the calendar,
because I'm in a phone booth in Amsterdam,
and I can't really do that.
Well, yeah, you don't have the calendar.
We should also see who is able to get more attention to the case,
because, I mean, without public outcries,
it's never going to go anywhere.
Well, then you should have some playboy model
walk around the city with a placard saying,
Down with the DCMA,
and you'll certainly get a lot of attention there,
but it's not going to be the kind you want.
I would encourage you to go to the New York planning meeting
and suggest that.
Okay.
Yeah, go ahead.
Bring a camera when he does that,
because I'd like to get that.
Do we have time for any more calls?
We've got another three minutes.
Okay.
Mike, thanks again.
Thanks, Mike.
Let's get some more calls.
Hello.
You're on the air.
Yes.
Just to tweak something that Emmanuel said slightly.
He said, this is, I guess, about outgoing calls only.
He said in the United States,
you can only have one long-distance company at a time, of course.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm talking about the GSM Consortium.
Oh.
All GSM carriers agreed not to compete with each other on their turf.
Oh, I see.
I was thinking about the 1010 codes.
Oh, no, I know about those.
I like to plug 101-6868.
It's not 1010.
It's 101-6868, and they have all their rates at 101-6868.com,
and they're extremely competitive.
Are they owned by another phone company?
No.
They're called PT-1 Communications.
Yes, PT-1 Comms.
I've used them before.
They're pretty good.
I like them.
I mean, you get the U.S., four of the five U.S. dependencies,
and Canada and the United Kingdom all for 7.9 cents a minute
with no monthly fee, the only.
And Ireland.
Not Ireland.
Not Ireland?
No, no, no.
Oh, that's news to me.
Northern Ireland.
What's the condition?
Northern Ireland, yes.
Yeah, part of the U.K.
Well, that's kind of what I meant.
You said there was a condition?
You said there was some kind of a condition for this?
Well, let me think.
What did I say there?
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Okay.
It's just that being residentially oriented,
they bill in full 60-second increments rather than with my AT&T
incoming toll-free service from the business department,
they bill in tenths of a minute with a three-tenths of a minute per second.
Right.
At least they don't bill in ten-minute minimums like some of these companies do.
That's where they make their money.
Yep.
Well, thank you, sir.
Thanks.
That's one of my favorites, actually.
The rare occasions I make long-distance calls, I use those guys.
True.
All right.
We're two minutes to the hour, so we're basically done here.
Okay.
Well, Isaac, it's been a pleasure as always.
Yeah, I'm sorry I couldn't reach you earlier.
You're going to figure out a way to get to Hal, I'm sure.
I'll start rowing now.
A lot of our listeners I hope can see at this,
yeah, it's in the Netherlands, it's in a foreign country, you know,
just deal with it.
Get over here.
It's going to be great.
For more information, go to www.hal2001.org.
It should answer all of your questions.
And next week we're going to have a report on how it all went.
Not bad.
Music for tonight, in fact, is brought to you by a fellow I discovered online,
Scott from Canada.
That's mp3.com slash scottfromcanada, one word.
And on that, I think we're going to be on our way.
You want to say goodbye to the folks, or should I?
Yeah, goodbye to the folks.
I'm going to try to run back into the house and not get wet.
And, well, hopefully you'll read all about Hal in the papers.
Sounds good.
All right, for Emanuel, this is Isaac.
You have a good night.
So I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a cuff.
It couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum-diddly-bum.
46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53.
See how relaxed you're getting?
You're tuned to High Five, WBAI 99.5 on your FM dial, New York.
And good evening, my friends.
9 o'clock on WBAI.