and community radio station WMNF in Tampa, Florida.
are Randy Zimmerman and Nell Abram.
In Los Angeles, I'm Aura Bogado.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York, where none of the cart machines work.
But that's just nature of the business.
It's just about 7 o'clock, and that means it's time for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would.
Bum diddley bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Bum diddley bum!
This phone's bugged. Don't say nothing about the place.
Or the other place either. Or the guy from the other place.
Now pick up!
You know, if people would simply follow those simple rules,
there'd be a lot less complicating factors in all of our lives.
Good evening, the program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you for this Wednesday evening.
Joined by Jim over there, it looks like.
I thought you were going to talk about the guy from the other place.
Are you the guy from the other place?
Oh, okay.
Now that's fun.
Why don't people just introduce themselves then, since I can't be trusted.
I'm Mike.
Redbird.
Arseny.
Walter.
And, Bernie, that was your cue.
I'm the other guy.
I gave you a visual cue and you didn't pick up on it.
Other guy from South Philly.
All right, we have some late-breaking news, which I think is kind of important,
and we should report this to our listeners in the interest of listening interest.
Apparently this happened just today, but President Bush was thrown into a panic.
That's right.
No, it's true.
Fears that an unidentified aircraft had entered restricted space near the White House
prompted security officials to move President Bush from the Oval Office,
you may have seen the video of this with him physically carrying him like a potted plant down the staircase,
to an underground shelter.
That happened today.
The brief scare lasted only a few minutes before officials determined it was a false alarm.
White House Counselor Dan Bartlett.
What's a counselor?
White House Counselor?
They didn't need counselors?
I guess it's pretty traumatic for them, so they must have, like, all kinds of counselors.
Isn't Dan Bartlett the president of West Wing?
No, that's Joshua Bartlett.
Sorry.
I don't watch that show, so I don't know.
You make me think it's an April Fool's joke, which it's not.
That's what I was thinking for a second.
Some White House staff members were moved to tears.
No, they were moved out of the West Wing.
You know what?
They were moved clear out of the West Wing, and tourists were rushed from the East Wing.
Rushed to where, I wonder?
There was an indication.
Maybe they just swapped places.
There was an indication that an aircraft had entered the no-fly zone.
That's according to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.
He's real.
I've seen him.
There's an investigation to determine what it really was.
So we have an unidentified flying object going over the White House, apparently, because they don't know what it was.
Security officers toting shotguns.
Yeah, that's going to help an airplane.
It's got to be pretty low.
Yeah.
They took up positions around the White House compound during the incident.
Lori Lewis, a spokesperson for the Secret Service, said there was a report of a possible violation of restricted airspace, and it was cleared.
She doesn't say how, though.
McClellan said Bush was working in the Oval Office at the time.
So it was one of these rare moments where he wasn't in Texas and he was actually doing something.
Well, that's what they'd have us believe.
I mean, he could have just been surfing the web or whatever he did.
That's true.
Now, this is the interesting part.
Bush was taken to the underground bunker.
He was there a very short amount of time after he became claustrophobic and demanded to be let out.
Vice President Dick Cheney was not at the White House at the time but arrived minutes after the scare ended.
Don't you think that's a little suspicious?
Oh, guys, what's going on?
What's the commotion?
Unidentified flying object over the White House.
Oh, I wasn't around for this, just like I'm never around when something suspicious happens.
I don't know, Bernie, what do you think?
I guess this tells us how quickly you can get to that underground bunker underneath the White House, right?
It was a Halliburton UFO.
Could be, could be.
But what do you think happens?
He's sitting in his Oval Office.
Is there a staircase right there in that room that he can just dive down into?
They either have an express elevator or one of those really long, like, firehouse poles that you slide down.
Yeah, it must be something like that.
I mean, they have to have it down, but he could be in any part of the White House.
Well, how high up is the Oval Office?
Is it on, like, the first floor or do you have, like, a long way to go?
I should know this.
I should know this.
Does anybody know where the Oval Office is on the first floor, second floor?
It's on the first floor because you can walk out to the Rose Garden.
Is that the Oval Office he's walking out from when he goes to the Rose Garden?
No, it's not the Oval Office.
It's up higher.
The Oval Office is higher?
Because I've seen pictures taken from the windows of the Oval Office, and it's up high.
I don't know if it's at the top floor, but if it's not the top floor, it's, like, next to the top floor.
How many floors are there?
I thought there were just two.
I think there's three.
Three floors?
Well, you know, they're not normal floors.
They probably have really high ceilings, and I think there's three of them.
And there's definitely a basement of some sort and probably something way down.
I think it actually goes further underground than it does above ground.
Well, it doesn't go very high above ground anyway, so that's not that surprising.
But I'm just curious how the whole procedure works.
They get them down there really, really quickly, and it tells you something about where exactly it is
and what kind of communication they have with that.
That's things that we're interested in as hackers, not as terrorists.
So if we paid more attention to 24, we'd learn about the elevator.
If you paid more attention to 24, you'd learn how everything doesn't work.
You'd learn how people are able to transport themselves across town in the blink of an eye
and how Amnesty International has power over the federal government and all that kind of stuff.
If only.
Yeah.
Don't get me started on that.
Bernie, now I believe we have a public service announcement for people too
who may be putting themselves in danger,
and this is something that I urge you, particularly the kids out there,
to take very seriously because we don't want you to get in trouble.
We don't want you to wind up doing something unsafe that could wind up chasing you around for the rest of your life.
All right?
This is something serious.
You could wind up in prison for this.
So, Bernie, what should people be very careful of?
Perhaps this is what the president was signing today when he was carried out of the Oval Office,
because he did sign this bill today into law,
making it a felony punishable by three years in federal prison
to possess a video recording device in a movie theater.
God, it's scandalous.
To possess, not just to simply use one, to actually have one.
Right.
It's like all these laws and ones that I'm personally familiar with.
It doesn't matter if you actually use the hardware or software for any illicit purpose.
Just if you possess it and it has perfectly normal uses for all other kinds of things.
For instance, the law, the language of the law, which I read earlier today,
didn't specify what kind of video recording device it would have.
It didn't say it had to be a camcorder.
It could be just a digital camera.
How many people carry cameras around with them all the time?
You know, people are getting arrested all the time with cameras.
Now, your camera, my camera, everybody's digital camera nowadays,
practically can take some amount of video.
Well, you know, I mean, this is something I'm sorry to interrupt.
I'm sorry to panic you myself, because I'm sure not many people have this.
I'm always way ahead of the times as far as technology goes.
But I have a telephone that can actually take pictures.
All right.
And the thing is, what I'm wondering is, if you have one of these,
well, I mean, I see it all the time.
Star Wars is out with the telephone version where you hold the phone up to the screen
and somebody recorded the entire movie.
And, of course, who's going to want to go to the theater to see the theater version
when you can look at the version that was filmed on a Sprint phone?
Coincidentally, just today, Nokia announced a cell phone with a hard drive in it.
It makes you wonder, you know, are they working with these terrorists that are robbing the film industry?
More than a coincidence.
But in any case, one could conceivably store a whole movie on a cell phone now.
So if you have a cell phone, this Nokia cell phone, and you walk into a movie theater,
you have committed a federal felony.
It doesn't matter if you even have the phone on.
You're guilty.
I would just like to wish everyone a happy World Intellectual Property Day.
I'm a little bit belated.
It was yesterday.
But I think that World Intellectual Property Day really, like,
it's a good thing that they signed this bill just after it because it really highlights
how important intellectual property is.
What can we do to celebrate intellectual property worldwide?
Well, we can innovate according to WIPO, which is the World Intellectual Property Organization.
But I don't see much innovation going on there.
Well, innovation as far as legislation that's being passed.
It's very innovative.
This is, like, really creative.
What I'm curious about, how do we get to turn people in?
I mean, if I see somebody with a phone, how do I alert the MPAA or the authorities,
whoever is in charge of this?
You call 911.
Well, if you see something, say something.
But I don't know if 311 is what you're supposed to call for that.
Well, if you see a crime in progress, I mean, and you want it to be stopped,
isn't that by definition an emergency?
The crime is not actually recording the movie.
The crime is walking in with the apparatus to record the movie.
Well, wouldn't it be the FBI that would be covering this,
in the same theory that the FBI has the warning at the start of the movie saying you can't copy it?
I'm all confused.
I don't know who's in charge.
And I think that the ironclad way to get the perpetrator would be to whip out your own camera phone
or video cassette recorder and tape them carrying this thing into the theater.
You, of course, are on the outside of the theater, but you would see them carrying it in.
So you wouldn't get in trouble, but they would.
I sense kind of a mocking tone here, but let me remind people, we are at war.
These are perilous times.
We all have to pitch in and keep our eyes open and watch out for each other.
Theater employees are legally now permitted to use reasonable restraint to hold you until authorities arrive.
Is that the same kind of reasonable restraint they used on that guy in Long Island last week that resulted in his death?
Not theater owners, though, the cops.
But, I mean, that's the model you're going to base things on is the way police do it, right?
And the theater personnel are free from liability for holding an individual.
So if that happens, then the theater owner and the gusher who knocked the popcorn out of your hand
and held on to you because you saw your cell phone isn't liable.
Now, another part of this law, which is important to mention, too, and it was sort of a compromise.
The reason that this camcorder or radio recording device part was permitted in,
the Democrats were fighting one part of this law, and they compromised to let this part in
for the other part that they did want in, which was a company called Clearplay
that tells a special kind of DVD player that has stored in it a map of a whole bunch of movies
and where all the dirty parts are or the parts that have cursing or things you don't want to see
if you're someone who's easily offended by such things.
So there now is the same piece of legislation, the same law that was signed by the president today
shields companies like Clearplay from any sort of copyright violations
for having information about where the dirty parts of the movies are
so that you can play censored versions of the film.
Now, it's interesting, too, because I imagine the Motion Picture Association people
would be dead set against that kind of a thing, but totally in favor of prosecution of people
for walking into theaters with cameras of any sort.
It was a compromise.
Yeah, it seems that way.
A bad one at that.
The Directors Guild is much more against this than the Motion Picture Association is.
The directors are shuddering at their visions being altered.
Well, these are the people who actually create the movies.
Exactly.
So yeah, I can imagine why they wouldn't want some guy somewhere to re-edit them
so that they can show it in church.
It's not exactly the intention.
And furthermore, on a semi-serious note, the government has said repeatedly and often since 9-11
that one of the ways that terrorists are making money is by selling counterfeit goods,
including movies and handbags and cigarettes that they bring up from places like Virginia
where there's almost no tax and things like that.
And all kinds of other things, too, legitimate things as well.
Terrorists make money the same way a lot of other people make money,
illegitimately and legitimately.
So therefore, since you can't really tell a terrorist, don't buy anything.
Yeah, just stop buying everything.
I mean, besides the terrorists, I want to go back to the issue of these unauthorized edits of DVDs,
and I'm going to do something very unusual, which is side with the Christian right on this one,
and I think it should be allowed.
Well, you are sitting next to Jim.
Well, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I may be Christian, I may be right-wing, but I'm not part of the Christian right.
Let's get that straight.
I mean, I don't.
I sense something, Mike, something deep inside.
Where are you going with this?
Yes.
I mean, I think that this particularly use of the right is a pretty stupid one,
but I think that folks should have the right to take, you know, movies and edit them to their liking.
Oh, I think that's not an issue.
Aren't these people reselling the films in their edited state?
No, no, no.
What they're doing is they're selling a bit of data that enables your player to know what part of the DVD to skip over.
You have to buy the original DVD.
Well, how does it get updated?
I don't know.
I don't have one of these things.
You know, I just have it.
You download them from the Internet, the new profiles for new movies as they come out.
You know, I just had a piece of divine inspiration.
God has just told me the dialogue and lyrics for The Wizard of Oz, it's totally wrong, totally obscene, totally evil.
And he's also told me that the visions that one gets when one listens to Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd are totally wrong.
So, gee, with this new technology that Clearplay has developed, we should substitute Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon for The Wizard of Oz.
It's been done about 50 times already.
Well, that's exactly the point.
This is what Mike is getting at.
Well, here's the thing.
Okay, if the Christian right can do it, why can't anybody do it then?
I think they can.
And how would we wind up editing movies to make them all bizarre and crazy?
There must be a way for us to do that.
Do we have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into the technology?
Well, I mean, I don't know, but it's possible that this Clearplay technology can just accept an arbitrary list of scenes to play.
Okay.
Well, let's learn how this works and we can start making our own versions and make happy endings into tragic endings and make the bad guy win sometimes.
You know, all kinds of things like that.
Movies that suck, maybe we can improve upon.
Some movies, though, there's just really nothing we can do.
Well, then we make them, like, one minute long or something.
I don't know.
We'll come up with something.
I'm wondering if you can tell the DVD to skip backward in time so you could really cut and splice the film, you know, take the part that occurred 10 minutes into the film.
Or a part that occurred an hour into the film, you could bring a part that was earlier in the film ahead.
In other words, you could use the old Mission Impossible technique where you just sort of cut and splice people's words to make them say something they hadn't said.
Yeah, but those tapes caught on fire after they did that.
That's true.
You have to be very careful with the technology.
But, you know, also, I see where you're going with this.
We could have a sequential version of, say, Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs or something like that where the story is told in linear order rather than flashbacks and things like that.
That would be kind of cool.
It wouldn't be difficult at all to modify one of the open source DVD players to just read from a script of different time segments and whatnot and put them in whatever order you want.
See, I had the same idea, like, a month ago.
It just came to me that this would be cool.
And, well, I guess for next show we'll find out.
Yeah, well, you know, I wanted to do this with the movie Memento.
I was going to say, when you do Memento, call me.
I think somebody did.
Someone told me that the DVD actually has the movie playing.
The movie, for those who don't know, is basically a series of flashbacks and flash forwards and things like that.
But if you play it in sequential order, it's a totally different story.
And I always wondered what it would be like.
I heard rumors that the DVD has that as an Easter egg or maybe as a feature, but I don't know for sure.
But that's an example of something you could do by re-editing things and changing the order.
Does Clearplay have a profile for Freedom Downtime yet?
You know, I'd love to know what it is.
I really would.
But it just seems to me that that kind of a system, what they're doing, it seems like they can easily control what people watch and what people don't watch,
by not including titles or just editing them in bad ways.
This reminds me of my Curse Free TV, which I bought in a Christian bookstore in Tennessee a number of years ago.
What that does, that takes – it reads the closed captioning and it finds objectionable words and it mutes the audio and substitutes a phrase on the screen in closed captioning mode.
So if you watch something like Pulp Fiction, there will be a lot of silences and you'll see all kinds of different words show up.
The word hugs shows up an awful lot.
I'll let you theorize as to what that's a substitute for.
They also have two versions.
They have regular mode and religious mode.
Religious mode allows you to listen to preachers who will invoke the name of God, whereas normally you wouldn't be allowed to say that.
So yeah, the religious right is up to all kinds of interesting things technology-wise.
Again, this is a stupid device, but one that should be legal.
Oh yeah, and I don't think there was any doubt that that was legal.
But I was under the impression this one was actually affecting what was being sold, like the Walmart versions of CDs.
That is an ongoing issue, but those companies are not shielded by this law the president signed today.
But there are companies out there who are still battling that issue out in the courts who are literally reselling altered versions of movies on DVD.
So we'll see where that goes.
So apparently it was the Directors Guild that sent the plane over the White House to try and get that bill not to be signed and failed apparently, unfortunately.
But we'll see what they pull out of their hats next time.
Okay, we have a bunch of – oh, by the way, this is also – you mentioned it was World Intellectual Property Appreciation Day or whatever.
It was yesterday.
But isn't it also National Turn Off TV Week?
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
And our TV is off.
Look at that.
We turned it off in observation.
Actually, we turn it off every week.
But they have these devices that a lot of people are playing with these days, like universal TV remotes that turn things off.
Has anyone ever played with one of these?
I have one, yeah.
You have one?
Tell us what it's like.
It turns televisions off.
Well, yeah.
I don't have a television, so it's not so useful for me.
Does it scan through every possible –
That's the claim.
But have you used it?
No.
It just sits on my desk.
Can I have it?
Please.
There are so many places I go to that have TV sets on.
You can also open Mercedes with them.
What?
The Mercedes that use the infrared keys, you can program a universal – some universal remotes can be programmed to open those cars.
Well, I don't know about these particular things.
They're called zappers, I guess.
And there was a big article about this, actually, in The Guardian.
Basically, a group of anti-TV gorillas, they call them, are using a recently launched gizmo called TV Be Gone.
That's right.
TV Be Gone to take direct action against television sets in public places.
The glorified remote control about the size of a key ring will switch off most television sets within a 45-foot radius within 60 seconds.
The device forms the focus of TV Turnoff Week, an annual protest against television's all-pervasive influence, which began in the U.S. 11 years ago.
Organized by the TV Turnoff Network, White Dot, and anti-consumerism group Adbusters, the protest has steadily spread to other countries, including Canada and the U.K.
The protesters plan to identify restaurants, pubs, bars – what's the difference between a pub and a bar?
And other public places they believe are ruined by the presence of a television.
They will then pay each one a visit and forcibly turn off their sets, leaving behind spoof menus and posters protesting about how the background hum of the television has replaced the art of conversation.
What about those places that just have it on video-wise, not the audio?
I did this sort of thing years ago when Casio came out with the universal remote control watch.
There were about 30 or so different settings for different TVs, and you could get TV off in about a couple of seconds.
Well, I've heard there's many cases where it doesn't work, too, where it only gets about half of them.
I'm not sure.
Mike, you've got to play with the thing.
You've got to start turning off some TVs.
There's not so many TVs in my life, which is one of the paradoxes of me owning them.
If you walk around anywhere, you will see TVs all over the place.
The question is, do they accept infrared?
Do they all accept infrared?
There's a place out on the island that I go to that serves food, but not only do they have a TV set on.
It always has some kind of baseball game or opera show on, which really ruins the entire atmosphere of the place.
They have two of them.
They have one facing the front and one facing the back.
They're not both on, but I would love to have this device for that place.
The problem is when you use it, it's pretty obvious who just did it, isn't it?
Well, maybe if you're stealthy.
Yeah.
There's a very simple solution.
What's that?
Duct tape.
The MTA uses duct tape to prevent this sort of thing.
To prevent it from happening, yeah.
Right.
But I'm thinking how do you use this and not be seen as a person doing it?
Like let's say you go to—
Infrared bounces.
If what?
Infrared bounces, so you don't have to point it at the set.
You could point it, you know, if there's a white wall behind you that you can ricochet the infrared light beam off the wall behind you.
I mean there's all kinds of—you could do it out of, you know, where you're out of line of sight from the person you're afraid of seeing you doing it,
but still, you know, bounce the signal so it hits the TV sensor.
Or maybe have a time delay of some sort where you just leave the thing on a table and then walk away and then come back and retrieve it later, you know.
Just have it put in a loop mode.
Or you can outfit your clothes with infrared diodes.
Well, the ultimate test, and this is what I'd like to try, and if we can get a hold of this thing Mike has, I really would be up for doing it any time.
Go into a department store that sells TV sets.
You know, they have a wall of TV sets, and just set the thing to cycling and watch them all turn off.
That's the ultimate test.
There's the risk.
The risk, though, is that this device is also a TV turning on device.
Yeah.
How does that work?
So you have to be very careful not to point it at a TV that's already off.
Interesting.
I never thought of that.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
A lot to think about here, and I'm sure people have experimented with these devices.
Not asimilar at all to the cell phone jammers, which are also making the rounds.
Maybe we can have a field day someday and just cause havoc in the streets.
Okay.
We have a special announcement for the upcoming Hacker Conference taking place in Holland this summer.
It's taking place from July 28th through July 31st.
The deadline, the deadline to submit applications for talks, talks and panel discussions and whatnot, that deadline is approaching.
It is Sunday, May 1st.
Now, if you have a talk that you'd like to give at the conference, the address, the email address to mail the proposal is speaker at whatthehack.org.
Speaker at whatthehack.org.
No dashes, nothing like that.
And the topics can be all kinds of different subjects.
It doesn't have to just be technical.
It doesn't have to be, you know, just about wireless networks and software development and things like that.
That's welcome, of course.
But there are all kinds of other things.
Lock picking.
Let's look at some of the things they have on their website.
Bugs and wire tapping.
Ad busting and culture jamming.
Earth orbiting satellites.
North Korea.
Game theory.
That's right, North Korea.
Mass media piracy.
Do-it-yourself pyrotechnics.
So there's really – there's no limit to the kinds of things you can submit.
This is an outdoor hacking event.
It will be taking place in the Netherlands this summer.
It's a great experience.
If you've never done this before, it's well worth figuring out how to get over there and just being a part of it all.
You'll see a community being built and the talks are a very important part of this.
So, again, the deadline is this Sunday, May 1st.
You can get more information at their website, www.whatthehack.org.
And I believe, Redbird, you're going to be submitting some kind of a presentation.
Sure.
I'll talk about the magnetic stripe reading and how we reverse engineered the metric card and things of that nature.
Yeah, and the article that's appearing in the upcoming edition of 2600.
And we have all kinds of interesting things to submit, things in the hacker world, things that are of interest to us.
So there's no harm in submitting ideas.
And if there's somebody you know of that you think would be a good speaker, they also want to hear about that as well.
So that's the hacker event of the summer.
I'm really looking forward to that.
Bernie, are you going to be there?
I am going.
All right.
I'm looking for the best rate on airfare, but I'm definitely going.
Yeah, well, good luck with that.
But, yeah, airfare for some reason has really skyrocketed this year.
But we'll figure it out.
I've got some interesting news.
I've got some interesting news.
As I might have mentioned, I'm going around the world by land and by sea.
And I managed actually to get a decent rate on the Queen Mary II, not by going through the people that run the boat,
but actually going through one of the discount airfare services that actually has a cruise section.
And I wound up talking to a human being, a human being that walked me through the whole thing, not computerized at all.
Cruises are very different.
I think they have specialists that handle this kind of thing.
It was like night and day dealing with the computer and dealing with the human.
And this guy was able to find me a rate that nobody else was able to come close to.
So I thought that was really pretty amazing and incredible.
And I'm almost not angry anymore at the cruise company for charging the extra for just traveling by yourself.
What they usually do is they charge you double as if you're two people because they say you're taking up a room that could be used by two people.
I've gotten the rate almost down to one person.
So that's not bad.
On that point, I just heard some interesting information.
I could send the document to members of the show here.
But there's a special system that cruise line ships have that's sort of kind of secretive that the Coast Guard has defined the standards of.
Basically, it's like a secret panic button that's on the bridge and in at least one other location that signals through a satellite
of any kind of terrorist event or piracy event, not intellectual piracy, intellectual property piracy, but actual piracy in the high seas kind of piracy.
If any of that stuff's going on on the ship, they can press this button, anybody on the crew who knows where they're hidden,
and then all the authorities will know that there's something going on.
So we'll talk about this next week.
But since you're going to be on one of those ships, you might be looking for the secret button.
I'll look for all kinds of things.
Figure on me just learning everything that's possible to learn about the secret world of big cruise ships.
Also, communication is going to be very interesting too.
I'm not quite sure how the internet works on these boats.
I do know they have access.
I'm not sure how good it is or how expensive it is.
I'm probably going to wind up using a satellite phone while I'm on the high seas and in the Gobi Desert
because I don't think there's any other way really to communicate.
So I'm going to have to learn a lot about that.
Hopefully get a secondhand satellite phone somehow because they're very expensive.
But they're really kind of tiny.
They're about the size of a regular cell phone.
Bigger antenna.
Bigger antenna.
That's true.
All right.
A couple of consumer items which I thought might be a little bit interesting.
On my latest phone bill, this is kind of cool.
You got to read the fine print on your phone bill.
But in the little section called For Your Information was something that just made me laugh out loud.
It says, Introducing Verizon Voice Wing.
They've about run out of names of products, I think.
So they have now something called Voice Wing.
Does anybody care to guess what Verizon?
I mean it was easy in the past, you know, call forwarding, call waiting, three-way.
You knew what that was.
What in God's name do you think Verizon Voice Wing is?
I have a theory.
All right, Bernie.
What's your theory?
It's like it kind of makes you wish on a wing and a prayer that your call goes through.
That's good.
That's very good.
But no, it's not right.
Can you forward to a Verizon Air phone?
That's interesting.
That's a good idea.
But no, I don't think that's what it is either.
Telephony for birds.
Is it something boring like message service?
No, no, because that's called message service, I think, or something like that.
It was too obvious for me.
That's called call answer.
That's what it is.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
They have really good names.
Remember when 9X introduced Caller ID except they insisted on calling it Call ID where
the rest of the world was calling it Caller ID.
Now it's Call ID.
And eventually they just quietly just made it Caller ID like everybody else.
It's really silly.
Okay.
Verizon Voice Wing lets you make unlimited local and long distance calls over the internet
to anywhere in the US.
It works with your home phone and a broadband connection and comes with a host of advanced
calling features.
Visit verizon.com slash getvoicewing4.
I guess they tried this three other times.
It didn't work.
For a demo and further details today.
I would have called that VOIP.
I had to choose a name.
It's interesting.
They're kind of solemnly going along with what's happening with the rest of the world
and saying, okay, all right, if you want to make VOIP calls, we're going to call it Voice
Wing.
Well, you know something is no longer cutting edge when Verizon puts a name on it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's true.
And also right below that, which I thought was also kind of funny, learn at your own
pace for $99 a year.
You can enroll in up to 30 Verizon online courses from standard.
What is this Verizon University online?
It's been in my phone bills for months, if not a couple of years.
Have you taken any of the courses?
It's $99.
I can't imagine what Verizon would do to me.
Have you looked at the list?
Has any of us looked at the list?
Well, the list isn't there.
You can take a court to figure out your bill.
Well, the list would be online.
Yeah, I guess.
But what if you're not online?
What if you're just reading your phone bill?
This is us saying this?
I mean, I guess you do it on the computer.
You don't actually go to university and Verizon professors.
Yeah, that's the idea.
Okay.
Well, continuing on my T-Mobile bill, all the controversy about T-Mobile and their security holes
because people are stupid enough not to put passwords on their voicemail,
and somebody fakes caller ID and gets instant access to all their messages.
Well, they put out this little pamphlet, and look what it says.
Password equals smart.
Yes.
In big letters, they want you to use the password.
T-Mobile has invested millions of dollars to help protect customer information,
and we continue to further reinforce our systems to stay one step ahead of your needs.
Beyond measures we are taking, it is important that you take steps to protect the security of your information.
One way to protect your account is to be diligent in utilizing passwords.
We strongly recommend that you turn on your voicemail password.
Well, it's kind of funny that they're taking this tone with their customers
when they're the morons who through, what was it, the device that what's-her-name was using?
The stupid person?
Oh, the sidekick.
The sidekick, yeah.
It had nothing to do with that.
People were accessing that through T-Mobile, not through bad passwords,
or they were able to get the bad passwords through T-Mobile.
It was a very wide-open system, so it doesn't necessarily make you safe.
Do you see the hole here?
Is it possible for us to call up T-Mobile and check?
I will bet you anything that the most popular password now at T-Mobile is smart.
Oh.
They'll say password equals smart.
You didn't notice that?
Change your password to smart today.
It's the smart thing to do.
Keep in mind that they have the ability to not allow your account to not have a password
if they wish to enable such a thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't understand the purpose of that at all.
I mean, is it really so hard to enter your password when you access something?
Things require our password every time.
Imagine if your front door opened for you simply when you walked up to it.
I guess it could recognize you.
Maybe that's the future where you don't have to use a key to walk up to your own front door.
But then a robber could just push you up to the front door and gain access that way.
I don't know.
The whole thing seems kind of silly.
There was a thing on Risk's Digest the other week.
There was a Mercedes in, I believe, Singapore.
It was stolen along with, since it had fingerprint recognition technology.
Oh, no.
This is, according to the Singapore police, I believe, the finger of the owner.
I knew that was going to happen.
I knew that was going to happen.
Yes?
Well, if they're going to start it once, how are they going to start it again?
Or in a couple of months or anything, are they going to put that finger on the ice?
Well, they have to save the finger.
Yeah, they have to save it.
Yeah, because the maximum is 10.
I don't know if you can use the other ones.
And finally, on the retail business, I guess, I got this from my bank.
I got a whole little pamphlet on what is phishing, spelled P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G.
These are really weird times we're living in.
Phishing, pronounced like fishing with the F, isn't it?
I can just imagine all these people in their 80s reading this saying,
what in God's name are they talking about now?
It's an attempt by individuals not affiliated with the bank,
the bank in capital letters, capital B, that is,
to get our clients to reveal personal information through fraudulent means.
In a typical phishing scam, and a capitalized phishing too,
you will receive an email which appears to be from a well-known company,
bank, or government agency.
The email will instruct you to click on a link that directs you to a website
or pop-up box that looks like the company or organization's legitimate site.
On this fraudulent or spoofed, in quotes, site,
you will be instructed to enter personal information such as your account ID,
your password, your credit or debit card number,
and PIN or your social security number.
Tips for protecting yourself.
Never provide personal information in response to an unsolicited email.
Never click on links in unsolicited email.
If you receive suspicious email that appears to be from our bank,
go directly to one of our websites.
If possible, forward the suspicious email to the bank
without changing the subject line.
And if you think that you may have provided information
to a fraudulent website or email,
contact your branch immediately and also finally change your passwords frequently.
I guess these are all common sense things,
but it's just kind of funny to see this.
You want to be in the room with the people reading it.
I actually want to be in the room with the people writing it
who decide that they have to tell the world how to pronounce fishing with a PH.
Didn't Microsoft attempt something recently of defining all these sorts of words?
Yeah, they did, in fact.
I don't have the link in front of me, but I remember seeing that.
It was hilarious.
But what I'm wondering is why they have to spell it correctly.
If they want to not confuse people, why not just spell it with the F?
Who's going to object and say,
you know, you should be spelling it with a PH
because it has to do with getting information that you're not supposed to be giving out?
I don't know.
I guess, you know, they're creating language.
Maybe the band is somehow involved with fish with a PH.
I don't think so. I don't think so.
Okay, we're going to be taking phone calls in just a little bit,
212-209-2900, but a couple of the news items, which I think are pretty interesting.
This happened yesterday.
Actually, did it happen yesterday or did it happen Monday?
It happened earlier this week.
A report of, it was Tuesday,
a report of suspicious material aboard a United Airlines flight from New York to San Francisco
led authorities to divert it and make an unscheduled stop in Chicago.
This happened on Tuesday.
United Flight 27 landed at 1049 AM, 1149 AM Eastern Time,
at Chicago O'Hare International Airport
and was taken to a remote area.
A bomb and arson squad, including a canine team,
inspected the Boeing 757-200 and found nothing out of the ordinary.
Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications
said all passengers were safely evacuated and no injuries reported.
A spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration
said two passengers reported that another one appeared suspicious.
The man was carrying two vials of medicine,
an MP3 player and wires for his laptop computer.
Yeah.
Law enforcement officials questioned the passenger.
The TSA spokesman said he was unsure whether the passenger would join others
on the final leg of the flight to California.
At that point, I'd just say, you know,
screw this, I'm going home.
My God.
Wires, vials of medicine and an MP3 player.
That's enough now?
Actually, it probably wasn't medicine.
I heard on CNN or somewhere that it was vials of aromatherapy stuff.
Okay.
Why would he be holding that anyway where people could see it?
I don't know.
Maybe the plane didn't smell that good and he wanted it fresh in the air.
Unreal.
It really is.
People watch MacGyver too much.
Yeah.
And there was that other case a couple of weeks ago
where an airplane was actually turned around.
It was coming from Holland and it wasn't even going to the United States,
but it was flying over U.S. airspace.
And because the United States discovered that somebody was on a list on that airplane,
they said, no, you're not flying over our airspace.
And what I don't understand is the plane turned around
and went all the way back to Holland.
Why didn't it land in Canada or just simply go around the United States
and turned all the way back?
And it was practically at its destination or practically at the United States anyway.
I think it was on its way to Mexico or someplace.
Very strange.
Very strange behavior.
And it's causing all kinds of consternation now
because not only do flights going to the United States have to provide lists to U.S. officials,
but now any flight going into U.S. airspace.
So some governments don't really like that idea.
Just a little quickie here about the pope.
You can send him wishes in email.
In English, it's benedictxvi at vatican.va.
He's gotten 40-some-odd thousand messages in English,
12,000 in Italian, 6,000 in Spanish, 3,000 in German,
2,200 in Portuguese, 1,500 in French.
So I was thinking if you know French, send him a message in French
and send it for multiple email addresses.
The address in French is benoitxvi at vatican.va.
Benoit.
Benoit.
Benoit.
Sorry.
B-E-N-O-I-T-X-V-I.
XVI, Roman numerals for 16 in all languages apparently.
And I'm sure he reads every last one of them.
Well, I just thought we could skew the results
and somehow make it sound like there are lots of French-speaking Catholics out there.
You're listening to Off the Hook,
a program about technology and the advancement of the human race.
And we welcome your suggestions, oth at 2600.com.
You can also write to us at – you feel ready for this, Walter?
Do you want to give it another shot?
I'll give it a try.
All right.
Get in position there.
All right.
I'm ready.
All right.
Forgive us.
We're training, and eventually it will pay off.
You can write to us, paper mail, at the following address.
I'm starting now.
Off the Hook, care of WBAI, 120 Wall Street.
New York?
No, no, no.
You were supposed to give the floor, I believe.
Oh, 10th floor.
Yeah, 10th floor.
Okay.
New York, New York.
1-0-0-0-5.
Jim, maybe you could take Walter under your wing.
Well, wait a minute.
In Walter's defense, I have to say last week you said he wasn't doing numbers.
And what did you have him do?
You had him start with 10th.
10th floor.
Well, yeah.
That is a number, technically.
He was supposed to do New York, New York last week, and I don't think you trained him in
between.
We regrouped in the interim, and we'll have a meeting after the show.
I don't know if I want to be under Jim's wing.
Speaking of snail mail, should I do this?
Very quickly.
Okay.
Remember stamps.com and all those pictures of Pol Pot that you could make your own stamp
out of?
Like a traumatic event of my childhood.
Yes, I do.
Well, apparently they're coming back with the ability to design your own stamp and have
it made for a little bit more than double the actual face value of the stamp.
However, now what they have are a giant database of offensive and copyrighted pictures that
have been used before.
And they're also having experts who will examine any picture that you present to them to make
sure that it's not, for example, Hitler as a baby.
How do they know what Hitler as a baby looks like?
Their photos.
Well, I guess.
I've never seen one, though.
He's got the famous mustache.
How about a Hitler youth, a former Hitler youth person?
Oh, such as Benedict XVI?
No.
Oh, boy.
I think if he's not in uniform, you might be able to get away with it.
No, they're going to ban copyrighted photos and photos of felons.
And I'm thinking, how would they know who's a felon and who's not when there are millions
of them running around?
That means they must have a database of all the photos of felons that are out there?
I'm thinking.
I'm going to find the meanest, nastiest felon of all, whose picture is on some wanted poster
in a post office, right in the same place I'd be using the stamp, and see if they object
to that and tell me why they object to it.
Do they print them right there, or is this done in some other place?
I don't know.
It's done on your home computer, apparently.
At stamps.com, you arrange some sort of payment, and you get a code that prints out on the
stamp, and you use it for posting.
Well, we find that cab driver that looks like Osama bin Laden.
Someone told me that they got a ride from Osama.
Yeah, sure, Osama bin Laden is driving a cab in Queens.
That makes all the sense in the world.
But there are people who have similar facial structures.
So you take a picture of someone like that and see if they go crazy because you look
too much like somebody else.
I'd like to know about that.
Okay, more news.
The Red Hacker Alliance.
Yes, that's right.
The Red Hacker Alliance, the largest and earliest hacking legion in China, and I'm glad they
refer to them as a legion, one letter away from lesion, was regrouped recently after
a short break.
The alliance, attracting 20,000 hackers, once ranked the fifth in the world in terms of
the number of its members.
In case you don't know, I'm reading Chinese propaganda here.
It feels good.
Who's number one?
I'm not sure it even says here.
Its website set up at the end of 2000 had nearly 80,000 registered members at its peak.
The task of the alliance was to prevent hacking attacks from foreign countries, but the web
network was disintegrated by the end of 2004 for no specific reason.
The website founder, nicknamed Lion, said in an email that the website existed in name
only, and he closed the website after December 21st, 2004.
The student, surnamed Yang, said, I can design a computer virus in a few minutes which can
dysfunction the use of a mouse and computer, but I will not do this because the mission
of a Red Hacker member is to protect the websites from being attacked.
That's good.
That's by far the most important bit of news in the hacker world, I think, and 20,000 hackers.
Other devious items that are going on.
Hackers have infiltrated an IT exhibition, and they attack delegates' computers with
a new type of wireless attack.
This comes from the UK.
Security experts attending the Wireless LAN event in London last Wednesday found that
anonymous hackers in the crowd had created a website that looked like a genuine login
page for a Wi-Fi network, but which actually sent 45 random viruses to computers that accessed
it.
This gets very nasty, as we've never seen it before, said Spencer Parker, Director of
Technical Solutions at Air Defense.
It downloads 45 different randomly generated viruses, worms, and keyloggers, so antivirus
software doesn't protect it.
It doesn't recognize the signatures.
Parker said that the hackers walked around the exhibition carrying a Linux-based laptop
running software that turned it into a wireless access point.
Initially, they labeled the hotspot Free Internet Access, then BTO Pen Zone, and then T-Mobile.
Yes.
Parker, whose computer was infected by the attack, believes that the website was up for
half an hour.
He said he saw a number of suspicious people asking very advanced questions at the event.
It's always a sign of suspicion when people do that.
At an IT conference.
I saw guys walking around with company badges, and I knew they didn't work for those firms.
Hackers like to know what's going on.
Well, that is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that somebody who's messing with you
is a hacker.
And I also can't believe that they say that they've never seen anything like this before.
These are very common attacks.
Maybe they didn't see it before at their particular conference where they charged $5,000 a head
to get in.
That second site you mentioned, BTO Pen Zone, would that be British Telecom Open Zone?
I would imagine so.
Okay.
Yeah, probably.
Also, this out of Florida.
Yeah, crazy news out of Florida, because that's all we expect from there.
A veterinarian using a wireless computer at his home in St. Petersburg called police when
he realized a man using a laptop computer in a car parked in front of his home had tapped
into his internet service.
While this, according to the police, while this person was accessing his computer, little
icons appeared on his computer screen or his monitor, and this puzzled him because he did
not access any of those areas.
They arrested 40-year-old Benjamin Smith while he was still online in front of the veterinarian's
home.
Smith is charged with offense against computer use, which is a felony.
What?
It's Florida.
That's all I can say.
So, what the computer did, according to the cops, is basically search the area to see
if there was a signal, found it, and utilized it.
St. Petersburg police say it's the first case they can remember like this.
Investigators are still trying to figure out what Smith was up to.
Was he just looking for free internet access or was he trying to hack into the victim's
personal information or maybe download something that would have gotten the victim into trouble?
According to the police, the victim was concerned that this guy might be accessing child porn
or some other such thing.
That's what it all comes down to in the end, right?
It's the same police department that arrested a five-year-old the other day.
Oh, don't get me started on that story.
That's simply incredible.
OK, 212-209-2900.
Sorry, Bernie, what?
I was just going to ask, was the veterinarian a Scientologist?
Don't they sort of kind of run St. Petersburg?
Bernie's email address, by the way, is berniesat2600.com.
All the Scientologists out there, write to him directly and avoid the clogging of the OTH mailbox.
All right, let's take our first phone call.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Go ahead.
All right, great.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Oh, so far that's an improvement.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hey, it's me, Leo.
Hey, what's up?
I was just going to say that you mentioned the T-Mobile thing again.
And basically, what happened is T-Mobile stores all your psychic information on their servers,
which are accessible over the web at a thing that's called mytmobile.com.
And that's what was guessed.
Maybe the password was socialengineered or something, but that's how everything was received.
It was socialengineered through T-Mobile.
Yeah, well, I think they probably called up the operator and said, hey, I lost my password,
and don't send it to my phone because my phone is at my friend's house or something.
And they probably just read it over the phone.
I'm sure it's very possible to still get information from T-Mobile.
In fact, let's have a little exercise and see if people can get information from T-Mobile
after all these security alerts have gone out.
I'll bet it's still very possible.
Yeah.
All right, anything else?
Yeah, Staten Island, they have fiber to the curb or fiber to the premises Verizon's fiber optic network.
It just was installed.
And if anybody wants to find out if their area is going to be getting it,
just drive by your local central office and just check if there's a lot of cardboard boxes in the trash.
That's more than usual because if you do see a lot of them, that's most likely boxes from fiber optics equipment.
And that means you're going to have like it will be available in your area pretty soon.
Okay.
Thanks.
Thanks for the call.
Let's take another phone call.
212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah, is that the TVs that you were talking about, turning off TVs?
Yes, turning off TVs.
Go to the airport.
Every single, not every single, but every major airport in the United States has only one station on it.
CNN Airport Network.
Exactly.
The only news network in the country that doesn't report plane crashes.
Wow.
It's true.
Next time there's a plane crash, rush down to the airport and look at what CNN Airport Network is broadcasting.
Okay, but I guess that's not the same thing as regular CNN.
No, it's not.
What about bus stations?
Bus stations have CNN on also, but, you know, it's just regular CNN.
Well, it's not CNN Bus Network.
No, it's regular CNN, I think.
No, and also, what else has CNN?
You go to some bars has CNN, some local.
Yeah, you know, Rebel, that's a great idea.
In fact, I think you should be the person to do this.
Go down to a bar in the evening when there's some sort of a baseball game or a football game, during the playoff season when you know it's going to be crowded.
And I want to see if, you know, you turn off the TV set and watch the reaction.
How about truck stops?
That's even better.
Truck stops are good, too.
But they have CNN on.
They don't have baseball, they have CNN on.
Well, you know, they have all kinds of different things.
They can change the channel.
But I think the pub or the bar is the best bet because then you have an active opponent who keeps trying to turn the TV set on and you keep turning it off.
And eventually, you know, you'll win.
You just have to be defiant.
Most of those people don't want to watch the game anyway.
They respect that.
Yeah, absolutely.
They just want to talk.
All right.
Thanks so much for your call.
202-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
What's this noise?
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
How are you doing?
I just want to ask a question.
Yeah, you're on a mobile phone, aren't you?
Yes, I am.
Okay.
What's up?
Yes, just curious about some of the copyright laws.
I'm ripping some DVDs so I can play it on my pocket PC.
You're ripping DVDs so you can what?
So I can play it on my pocket PC.
Okay.
I pack a half.
There's nothing wrong with that so long as I'm the one using it and I'm the one buying the DVD.
If you own the DVD, there shouldn't be a problem at all.
But if I start sharing it, then we have a problem.
Is that correct?
Yes.
Now, the definition of sharing, I guess, is what's called into question.
I would imagine handing it to somebody, not having somebody looking over your shoulder.
Supposedly, you're not actually supposed to watch the real DVD while you're watching your ripped copy as well.
You can only watch one copy at a time.
Is that correct?
Yes.
There's some weird clause like that in some law.
But if it's a member of your family, you can share it.
Yes.
You have a really bizarre phone connection so we're going to let you go.
But thanks for the question.
Bernie, you were saying?
I was saying if it's a member of your immediate family that lives in the house with you, you can share it with them.
But, again, as long as you don't watch it at the same time as they do.
But you have to be related by blood.
I think adopted kids are exempted from that.
Well, if you marry someone, you're not related by blood, are you?
You have to sign a specific contract at the time of the marriage, not afterwards at the time of the marriage.
DVD sharing will be permitted.
In the prenup, huh?
Yes.
It's part of that.
You have to be careful.
You have to protect copyright.
Copyright law is a federal law.
So what if you're married in Massachusetts?
Are you going to bring up the same-sex marriage thing?
You know, that's going to destroy copyright in this country.
It really is.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Good evening.
Danny here.
The whole thing with T-Mobile and also Sprint earlier about passwords and faking caller ID, I just don't get it.
I mean, when you call it up from your own phone, can't they do a lookup and see whether or not you've called it from a phone inside their network?
You know, why they need to—
Oh, you mean not just rely on the caller ID data but actually see if you're using their network at the time?
Yeah.
That's a good point.
Basic security 101, yeah.
You could be using a T-Mobile phone on a non-T-Mobile network.
But you've already identified—well, true, but if you're calling from T-Mobile using your T-Mobile phone or Sprint had the same problem a few years ago, they know it's your phone.
Yeah, because you're not billing it to the number that you're faking.
You're billing it to the number that you actually are using.
So, yeah, it wouldn't die.
And they should be able to do that.
Why they don't, who knows?
Anyway, let me let you all get back to your stuff.
All right.
Thanks for your call and very good point.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah, thanks.
How are you doing?
Yeah, I just wanted to comment on the idea about, like, remotes.
The only thing is, like, a lot of these different computers, each brand has a different code for a lot of different functions.
So, like, to do the power thing, you'd have to computerize it and do, like, a random scan probably.
Well, that's what these things are doing.
They're scanning through every possibility.
That's why it takes up to a minute.
What's the time scale?
About a minute, I think.
Oh, well, that might work then, actually.
It doesn't work everywhere, but supposedly it works in a lot of places.
But, you know, I imagine what many bars and other outlets will do is simply cover it up with some masking tape or something like that.
But then that means they can't change the channel either.
We could go up to the TV and change the channel.
That's true.
But for those places that have one channel all the time, I guess that doesn't really matter, does it?
All right.
Let's see if we can squeeze in one more.
How about up here?
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Yes, go ahead.
Hi, Emmanuel.
AJ from Long Island.
Hi.
Okay.
I got the TV begun.
Oh, you do?
Yeah.
And at first I used it in a bank and it didn't work.
Uh-huh.
But then Bill just tried it on our own television and it did.
Really?
Yeah, and it's an old TV, too.
Interesting.
And at five seconds it was off.
You should find out what kind of TV the bank has.
I don't know if they have the actual name of the TV on there.
Yeah.
And maybe it's exempt somehow.
Or maybe they covered up their remote.
Yeah, I'm going to check it out.
But I'm going to hit the town with it tomorrow and I'll report back.
Laundromats.
Yeah, there's so many places.
Laundromats.
Yep.
And, oh, you know, I caused mayhem in a laundromat once with an FM transmitter.
I overrode the signal that they were listening to and played rap instead.
And you should have seen the poor people in the laundromat.
They were tearing their hair out.
Literally, what's going on?
The world's falling apart.
The laundromat is such a good idea.
Thank you.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let's let us know what happens.
Yeah, I'll report back.
Okay, great.
Thanks for your call and thanks, everybody, for calling in and for sending us stories
and keeping us thinking about these things.
Again, the email address, oth at 2600.com.
That's our email address for anything that you think might be of interest to us.
We'll be on again next week at this time.
Until then, have yourselves an interesting and lightning week.
And stay tuned.
Good night.