As they say, fist up, book open.
For Free Speech Radio News from Nicaragua, I'm Nan McCurdy.
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And you're listening to 99.5 FM, WBAI, New York.
It's 7 p.m., time for Off The Hook.
Now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
Bundledly bound for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bundledly bound!
And good evening, the program is Off The Hook.
We're joining you here from WBAI Studios in New York.
This is Red Hacked.
I'm joined by Jim.
Hello.
Mike.
Hi.
Redbird.
Good evening.
Arseny.
Hi.
Eric via satellite phone.
Who?
Emmanuel via satellite phone.
Oh, yes, that's me.
How you doing?
Yes, I'm actually about an hour off the coast of Osaka, Japan.
And I've been on this boat now for about 48 hours.
So I'm kind of losing my mind, and I'm talking on a satellite phone.
So you'll have to contend with that for the next hour.
And, of course, Bernie, as always, joins us from Philadelphia.
Good evening.
So what's new on the boat?
Well, you know, this boat, I guess I could call it like a toddler's shuttle.
For some reason, I don't quite know if this is a cultural thing or what,
but it seems like every two out of three passengers on this thing is below the age of five.
And what that basically means is that for the last two days I've had to endure nothing but screaming kids,
running around constantly, chasing each other, playing all kinds of games.
You wind up sharing quarters in situations like this.
There are four people per room.
Two of them are toddlers in my room, which means I have no refuge at all.
I can never get away from the screaming, from the chasing, from the running around.
But the thing is, the most amazing thing about this,
this is different than the way we treat kids in the States,
because they're just doing whatever they please.
And they're not doing anything bad.
They're just running around playing games.
But I haven't seen a single kid crying.
And, you know, if you've ever been in a room with toddlers,
you know that's going to happen within the first 20 seconds.
It hasn't happened once in 48 hours.
So I think there might be something to the way kids are treated over here.
We can hear the wind in the sails, it seems.
Or is that just the wind against the cell phone?
Well, actually, I'm standing on top of the buzz,
you know, if it's a satellite signal or any satellite signal for that matter.
I tried a little further up before, but it didn't work out too well.
And right now the unfortunate side effect of that is that
where I'm standing is right next to the horn.
And the reason that concerns me is because we are, as I said,
an hour away from pulling into Florida and Osaka,
and the show lasts for an hour.
So, you know, do the math.
So we could really, we'll know when you arrive.
It'll be good for us.
Yeah, you'll know. I'll certainly know.
And maybe the phone will know by being blown to bits.
Who knows?
Well, your voice quality is quite good, though.
Well, that's good to know. That's good to know.
Because it certainly cost me a pretty penny.
But never mind all that.
Let's update the folks on things that have been going on.
I was in China last week, and this week coming up I'll be in Japan.
A couple of quick notes about China.
You know, my CDMA phone started to work over there.
That's very strange.
Actually, it's not strange. I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, no. How did it start to work?
Did you do something different, or did you hit a place where there was service?
Well, what I did was I turned it on.
And that was the thing I hadn't thought of doing.
Well, you know, who turns their phone on
that they know isn't going to work in a foreign country?
In fact, Bernie, I believe you admonished me
for bringing the CDMA phone in the first place.
Well, it wasn't admonishment.
I said, why did you bring your Verizon phone with you on your trip
when it's not going to work anywhere you go?
You said it four times in a row in a loud tone of voice.
I consider that an admonishment.
Okay.
But yes, the thing is I turned it on,
and it turns out that CDMA,
specifically Verizon Wireless, don't know about Sprint PCS,
but they have a running agreement in China, all throughout China.
And if you're willing to pay a huge amount of money
to either receive or send calls,
then yes, you can use your CDMA phone.
Now, the other side to all this is that now that I'm heading to Japan,
well, guess what?
My CDMA phone does not work here.
My GSM phone does not work here.
The only phone that works in Japan that I have is a satellite phone.
Of course, that's completely unacceptable.
So I'm going to have to get some other kind of phone device to communicate with.
What's interesting is in Japan they do use CDMA phones,
but they just use a different frequency band than we do use here in the state.
I'm very surprised that parts of China use the same 800 megahertz frequencies
that Verizon uses here in the state.
That's what's strange.
I believe they were using 1900.
Okay.
We have allocations for both, Verizon does.
But China must be one of the few countries outside the United States
that uses some of the same frequencies the U.S. does.
CDMA is used in a lot of parts of the world.
The fact that China uses the same frequencies doesn't seem that unusual
because, frankly, they're on pretty much the opposite side of the world from the United States,
and they're not the highest powered frequencies they're going to skip against the heavy side layer.
There's not going to be interference with cell phones in the United States
if you use the same frequency for cell phones in China.
Also, on technology issues, I was able to use the net quite easily in China
from the hotel I was staying at, but I was not able to see any Internet cafes.
I didn't look all that hard because I was just trying to survive in Shanghai.
Believe me, if you think New York is a busy place with a lot of car honking and people pushing,
go to Shanghai and you'll see that it's about five or ten times more.
Basically, the car horn is like the demon's place.
Imagine this. Imagine a subway train arriving
and everybody pushing to get on before anybody has a chance to get off.
I mean, they're aggressively pushing like you would imagine in your worst nightmares in New York.
I don't want to make it seem like a disgusting place,
but it hasn't quite reached that stage of New York where people say,
excuse me, please, thank you, words like that.
On the subject of Internet cafes not seeing any,
could that be a result of the regulations that they have there?
Because an Internet cafe is relatively anonymous,
you can walk in and pay for some time on the Internet,
nobody wants to take the risk that someone might go to some site that's deemed unacceptable?
Well, I imagine there's a little bit of cloak and dagger stuff going on,
but as we know, the Great Firewall of China prevents a lot of sites from being accessed.
I had trouble in both hotels in Beijing and Shanghai that I was in accessing BBC.
It could not be done directly.
Of course, through a proxy it was no problem at all.
But as far as actually entering an Internet cafe,
I'm not aware of that being something that's taboo.
I imagine that as long as you follow the rules, it shouldn't be that big a deal,
and certainly they have come a very long way on everything else.
There's all kinds of technology all over the place.
So I imagine they're around someplace.
I just wasn't able to see them.
Of course, it was probably written in the Chinese characters,
and maybe I didn't recognize it that way.
I would have liked a chance to play around, not too much obviously,
and see what kind of limitations there were for somebody who wasn't staying in a hotel.
But another part of all this was that I had absolutely no access to American TV,
which I consider to be a good thing.
But every channel in the last couple of weeks on the television set I've had access to has been Chinese.
So I haven't been able to follow the news quite as closely as I would like to have.
I understand that New Orleans has been devastated by a hurricane,
and believe me, the conversation I had with Red Hat right before the show is the first I've heard of it,
other than seeing a couple of pictures on TV which just looked like hurricane damage,
but I couldn't tell what was going on.
Are there any details technology-wise that I understand?
Is there phone problems and computer problems down there?
Well, the whole city is underwater, and this includes the telephone exchanges from what I understand.
But what's interesting is that even if you continue, I know someone who's in New York right now,
and I've had friends trying to call her who have had trouble reaching her,
even though she's in New York, and they just get a recorded message that says
that that number is not accessible because of the hurricane affecting that area.
We had an e-mail about someone with a similar case.
His girlfriend, I think, was somewhere on the West Coast, and he couldn't call her at all.
It seems that even cell phone numbers that are in that exchange,
even though they may not be off the network, for some reason are being blocked,
and it could be maybe an exchange-wide block, or maybe the phone call gets routed to Louisiana
and then doesn't get to the cell phone. I don't know.
It seems to be somewhat intermittent, though, because we did some experiments,
and Bernie S., I believe you were able to get this recording from selected exchanges,
and then I tried those same exchanges and was able to wake people up and do other kinds of things
because I didn't expect it to work.
It's not consistent.
What's really strange, and I called Sprint DCS several times today in response to Nick's question.
Nick emailed us.
He has a sister in New Orleans, although his sister's phone has a New Orleans number
and it's a Sprint DCS phone.
His sister is physically in Dallas right now, and he cannot call his sister's phone,
which is in Dallas, apparently because it has a New Orleans area code in exchange.
What's even stranger than that is his sister's husband, who's also in Dallas,
cannot call his wife's phone, and they're both in Dallas,
and they both have Sprint DCS phones with New Orleans numbers,
and they can't call each other even though they're standing right next to each other.
So clearly they're both on Sprint's network,
and Sprint is clearly not very competent in programming its own switches
because when you call from one phone to another that's on the same wireless network,
it oftentimes doesn't even need to go through the public switch telephone network.
It just stays all on that company's network.
So Sprint does not have its act together.
The same thing was happening on T-Mobile's network, though,
with my friend trying to call her family.
They need to reprogram their switches to route around the areas that are not working.
I think that we'll be getting lots of reports of how technology could have fared better
in a situation like this, similar to when 9-11 happened
and people were trying to communicate in various ways.
We found all kinds of technological glitches
and also some cases where technology somehow held up,
like, for instance, being able to make a cell phone call at all when the city was in mayhem.
I'd like to hear a lot of those stories.
I'm sure a lot of us would be very interested in experiences,
particularly from our listeners down there.
And, of course, you can write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
I'm not sure how clearly that came through,
so maybe you guys want to repeat it in the studio.
I'm also interested in seeing how physically they engineered new technologies
because the levees that were there that were meant to stop flooding and that broke
were actually installed after the last major hurricane back in, I think, the 60s.
69, I think.
Yeah, and so obviously those failed,
so what would be the next step to prevent something like this from happening in the future?
I mean, the city's going to have to be rebuilt at this point, practically.
80% of it is under 10, 20 feet of water.
Well, a word about levees.
I know a little because my father was a civil engineer specializing in flood control.
The levees in New Orleans were not all that high,
and the storm surge essentially went over,
and once you have water going over a levee,
and most of these were earthenware,
earthen levees, not earthenware, sorry,
and once you have the water going over, it washes gullies into the top,
and you have it compromised.
If you have more water going over the top,
those gullies, even though they're underwater,
wash out further, and eventually it's like having no levee at all,
and in fact, eventually it is having no levee at all.
Right. They broke, and pumps failed.
It's not so much that the levees failed,
it's that the water went over them, and at that point you're in trouble.
The levees simply were not high enough.
Right, but the main portion of the damage came from when the levees actually failed
and flooding started.
I mean, the water is still rising there.
After the hurricane, well, a lot of the reporters I was watching CNN
were in, say, the French Corridor,
which wasn't that affected because it was on high ground,
so nobody knew that this was happening,
but then the whole rest of the city was getting flooded.
I'm sure people knew that it was happening.
It was on the news, I would imagine.
It was on the news later.
At first, they seemed pretty unhappy with it not being such a huge story,
and then they went crazy when they realized
that most of the city was underwater,
and people were going to have to be shuttled around and all sorts of things.
Doesn't seem like it was very good news coverage.
Also, the thing to realize is that with levees,
the only song I know with the word levee in it is entitled
When the Levee Breaks, all right?
So, not if, but when.
You know, these things are designed up to a certain point,
but it's inevitable.
It's inevitable when you get something big enough,
a big enough storm, that they're going to fail.
So I don't think anybody should really be that surprised by what happened.
Oh, Don McLean drove his Chevy to the levee, and the levee was dry.
But that wasn't the title of the song.
Ah, okay.
These levees, however, are anything but dry.
Yeah.
Can I go back to China for a moment?
What was that?
Go ahead, Bernie. You first. I want to go back to China after that.
There seemed to be a real, no pun intended,
but there was a real drought of accurate news or complete news
coming out of the New Orleans area,
maybe the day after the hurricane.
It took like an extra day for people to really report
on what was really going on, and I think,
I just don't think there was a lot of good communications
coming out of that city.
And in fact, that may have something to do with the fact
that virtually all the landlines were down,
most of the cell phone coverage was down,
and about the only working communications
on the Gulf Coast there, where it was affected,
is amateur radio operators and two-way paging, believe it or not,
the reflex paging systems, which typically have very high towers
that are on very high ground.
Two-way pagers are being used a lot to get information in and out of the area,
and amateur radio appears to be funding a lot of traffic
to coordinate some emergency rescues.
But there's not a lot else working down there right now.
Excuse me one moment.
How about satellite phones, like what I'm talking to you on right now?
This is true, but they're very far and few between.
There's far more two-way pagers and ham radio operators
than there are satellite phones.
But you're right.
I'll bet you there are people trying to bring satellite phones
into that area now to provide communications
when nothing else works.
The CNN coverage has been using a lot of video phones,
which I think to be kind of strange.
I don't understand how they have the technology
to hook up a phone line to this video,
but not the technology for a normal satellite uplink.
I guess I don't know anything about this.
I think they were using satellite trucks in a lot of the cases.
But the people are really tiny and grainy and slow-moving,
so it's not a normal satellite truck.
A number of these video phones, some of them do work over landlines,
but some of them have...
Boy, the wind of the sails is really...
Some of these video phones have little satellite dishes,
so they don't have quite the bandwidth of the big satellite trucks,
which is why the picture is static and sketchy and intermittent.
But...
I think CNN...
Go ahead.
I think CNN just brought a lot of these things
and they will not turn down any excuse to use one of those video phones.
I've seen them doing remotes from Tokyo.
In Tokyo, you would expect that they would have direct satellite coverage,
and they're using this crappy video phone
where everybody's jumping around like they're on the Internet.
You know, I think they just have a whole lot of these things.
They could do a much better job if they just choose to use these,
just to sort of add to that on-the-field look.
Because let's face it, guys, today,
with the exception of this program today,
it doesn't sound like you're far away when you really are far away.
When you make a telephone call to somebody in another part of the world,
it doesn't sound...
You don't hear that hissing of the ocean that you hear
when you're overseas or far away.
There's not a wave, there's not an echo,
unless you use Sprint.
But there are all kinds of technological advances
which sort of take away the romance of the distance
and the difficulty in getting the signal to you.
Well, one of the things about the video phones, though,
especially if they have these little dishes with them,
is that they're very portable.
I know that a lot of their main coverage was coming,
or at least CNN, which is what I was watching,
was coming out of Baton Rouge
because they were worried that their satellite truck
would become a submarine
and they wouldn't be able to keep a signal.
So these reporters that are on the scene,
they use the video phone a lot
because it's something they can take with them
and they can move around very easily.
They don't have to worry about roads.
They don't have to worry about things like that.
There is a suitcase.
These satellite video phones that CNN uses
are typically in a large briefcase or a suitcase.
The problem is they've got to get power to it.
So they don't run on batteries very long
because they use a lot of power.
But these are suitcase video phones
in most cases when CNN is doing a really tough remote.
But one of the interesting things I thought that I heard on CNN
was at one point they said,
we want to take you kind of behind the scenes
of the technology we use
because they just played a very high quality broadcast
from inside New Orleans
and they were very proud to use this technology called FTP
to upload that from their camera to CNN.
Wait, wait, CNN has FTP technology?
They used FTP, if you can imagine.
You know, we the independent media people
are really in trouble
as CNN has discovered our secret weapon.
Right.
Do we mean file transfer protocol?
Yes, yes, we mean file transfer protocol.
My God, next CNN will soon discover fire.
So, but they were very proud of that,
that they had this technology.
I just thought that was interesting.
Well, imagine, you know,
they're probably thinking that they're speaking to your grandmother
and, you know, explaining it to her.
So maybe they know a little bit more than they're letting on.
Right.
But the grandmother or the theoretical, you know,
person who doesn't know so much about technology
is not really enlightened by hearing this acronym.
Yeah, they didn't explain it.
They just said FTP.
That was it.
The bitter irony of it all.
Hey, listen, can I go back to China?
Yeah.
Okay.
I don't really want to go back to China.
I just want to talk about something.
I think your boat is going away from China.
Yeah, my boat is sailing away.
In fact, we're technically in Osaka right now.
And it's also about 8.20 in the morning here,
which, believe it, it's hard for me to get up at this hour,
but it's worth it for the show.
But back in Shanghai, I tracked down the Maglev train,
and this was not an easy thing to do
because my absolutely useless Let's Go China book,
which turned out to be a counterfeit version of it,
if you look at it, you realize that the pages were Xeroxed,
and I bought it in Shanghai.
It did not have the Maglev train listed at all,
and it was rather hard to figure out exactly where the thing left from.
But this is a train that hovers about, I think, a half inch off the track
with magnetic force or something like that.
I'm sure you guys can get into more of the technical theory of it.
But basically what it does is it takes people from a particular train station
to the airport 30 kilometers away,
and it does this in about 7 minutes
by achieving speeds of 431 kilometers an hour.
Now, imagine if the air train that so much time and trouble was spent installing
in the New York City area was able to achieve speeds even remotely approaching that.
I think they're able to get about 100 kilometers an hour.
How quickly you could get from Manhattan to the airport,
assuming they installed it there.
This technology is simply amazing.
To be going that fast, to see cars going at a high speed,
being passed as if they were standing still,
to just feel like you're on an airplane that's about to take off
and realize that you're actually on a train.
431 kilometers an hour, traveling 30 kilometers in about 7 minutes.
And the thing is, they spent about the same amount of money
to build this entire thing as New York City did to build the air train.
I find that incredible.
The labor costs in New York are substantially higher.
And also, the problem is, in New York, this route that they take is very curved.
I feel like with something that's going 431 miles per hour,
there's probably a pretty straight line.
There were curves, but they were gradual curves, obviously.
And it didn't do 431 kilometers an hour the whole time.
But it accelerated out of the station, and we were doing 100 kilometers within 30 seconds.
The point is, yeah, okay, there are hurdles, there are expenses.
But, you know, we should be able to figure it out.
I think what there hasn't been in our particular part of the world is the desire.
I mean, look, we can't even get the Second Avenue subway to be done already
after, what, 30, 40 years of trying.
The thing is, over there in China, they are building things.
They're building things quickly.
They're building things well, in addition.
So I think it has to do with just the desire to want to do this in the first place.
And that's what I think we have to regain, because we're being left behind.
Walking around a city like Shanghai and Beijing,
seeing them growing so quickly, so fast, we're being overtaken.
I noticed the same thing when I was in Bangkok and other parts of Thailand,
seeing hordes of kids in Internet cafes who were really poor economically
but seemed to be very savvy technically.
I saw the writing on the wall.
I think you're right, Emmanuel, that the U.S. is losing its technological edge.
They could have been gamers.
There have been news stories lately of gamers dying.
I saw some of them coding.
Okay.
It really surprised me.
Interesting.
Yeah.
But on that subject, there has been a story circulating.
I'd like to just sort of refer to this for a moment.
It's about the Chinese hackers.
Now, this comes from the Washington Post.
And keep in mind, I'm in the direct sun here,
so it's kind of hard for me to read my computer screen, but I'm going to try anyway.
Websites in China are being used heavily to target computer networks
in the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies.
Now, that's not even the whole first sentence yet,
but let's just take a look at that part of it.
Websites are being used heavily to target computer networks.
How does that exactly work?
How does a website get used to target the Defense Department?
Well, they could be compromised machines in China that probably weren't patched,
and then they're used by, you know, as command and control.
Or it could be propaganda.
The website could say,
Children of the Motherland, target the imperialist American computers, blah, blah.
Or it could be really bad reporting.
Or it could be a reporter thinking that a website is the same thing as a computer.
Let's finish the sentence, though.
They're successfully breaching hundreds of unclassified networks, according to several U.S. officials.
Now, okay, if it's unclassified, why is this a big, major story in the Washington Post?
That's what I don't understand.
I'll tell you why.
These systems have not been compromised, the officials added.
But U.S. authorities remain concerned because, as one official said,
even seemingly innocuous information, when pulled together from various sources,
can yield useful intelligence to an adversary.
Isn't that sort of what we've been trying to do for many years now,
is gain access to information and have that access pretty much closed off to us?
Because the military and the government says,
well, you know, too much free information can be a bad thing and can be used against us.
I'll tell you exactly why this is such big news.
And the answer is that the Washington Post either got information from a source they consider important
or spent a lot of money reporting the story,
and that's the way it has to go, you know, on the front page.
That's the way it works.
Let me finish with a couple of these quotes here.
The scope of this thing is surprisingly big,
said one of four government officials who spoke separately about the incident,
which stretched back as far as two or three years,
and has been codenamed Titan Rain.
I don't know if I'm supposed to say that, but the codename is Titan Rain.
And I'm sitting on top of this phone, crouched down on my knees, looking at my laptop,
speaking into a satellite phone, and someone just overheard me saying the codename is Titan Rain.
I might have quite a bit of an interrogation waiting for me in Japan.
Okay.
All officials insisted on anonymity, given the sensitivity of the matter.
Whether the attacks constitute a coordinated Chinese government campaign
to penetrate U.S. networks and spy on government data banks has divided U.S. analysts.
Some in the Pentagon are said to be convinced of official Chinese involvement.
Others see the electronic probing as the work of other hackers
simply using Chinese networks to disguise the origins of the attack.
It's not just the Defense Department, but a wide variety of networks that have been hit,
including the Departments of State, Energy, and Homeland Security, as well as defense contractors.
This is an ongoing and organized attempt to siphon off information from our unclassified systems.
You know, I don't see what the story is at all.
It's unclassified.
Okay, you know, siphon off as much information as you want.
That's why it's unclassified.
Well, I mean, they could mean something like the secretary of some general's computer,
unpatched Windows machine that was, you know, vulnerable for a number of reasons.
The legal catchphrase is a federal interest computer.
That is a computer that's operated by a federal government agency
or is a commercial entity that's doing some important work for some federal agency.
But the key phrase is federal interest computer,
and whenever any one of those is touched upon by someone without unauthorized access,
somebody makes a big deal about it, even though there's no classified information on it
and even though there's no damage done to the system at all.
But it's just an excuse for the government to make noise about hackers and paint them as evil, I guess.
Well, I don't have the whole story in front of me,
but I'm not sure if the words federal interest computers appeared in it.
Does anybody else know?
No, it wasn't in the story, but that's what the government looks at.
When they see a computer that's compromised
and if it falls under the category of a federal interest computer,
which there's, you know, hundreds of thousands of them,
most of which have nothing useful in them, I'm sure,
it's still, you know, the power of the beast will consider that a really big deal
and a really important scary thing, even though it's not important or scary.
All right. Any other news from China?
Well, not from China, no.
I would like to touch upon some of the, a couple of other things,
and I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to stay on
because they're kind of calling us to fill out our immigration forms,
but we'll see if I can stay out here longer.
Today is the, I'm sorry for all the PA announcements that we might be hearing.
Today is the 10th anniversary, not 10th anniversary, oh my God,
the first anniversary of the bulk of the RNC arrest last year.
This came to me a little while ago.
As I was walking to the station, I passed by City Hall
and noticed a small demonstration of some folks,
largely from the Time's Up critical mass bicycle community,
but also some other folks, reminding us that Bloomberg
was really responsible for a lot of these abuses that happened a year ago.
Oh, absolutely.
The interesting thing is that, well, September 1st here,
but still August 31st over there, and I was, gosh, you know,
I think it was right about this time of day that I was on the sidewalk being handcuffed,
along with all those other people on 16th Street.
But yes, critical mass, they had been targeted a couple of days earlier,
and the whole thing was a big nightmare.
Just about every case was either acquitted or the person opted for an ACOD,
which means basically stay out of trouble, and this case will be arrested,
and will be erased rather, and nobody believes that,
because obviously they bring it up whenever they feel it's convenient.
There are lawsuits that are moving forward,
and we'll continue to keep you updated as far as how that goes,
but it was definitely a dark week in the history of the city,
and I just felt it was important to make note of that.
We got a lot of email, a lot of email, about PGP,
and ways that you might be able to use it.
And we want to thank everyone for their suggestions,
but we've read them. Thank you.
Let me touch upon a couple of those,
because I was the person who went on the air last week,
and what did I call the people of PGP?
Morons? Idiots? Fools? What was it exactly?
I don't know.
Okay, well, it was something not too complimentary.
And I stand by that, by the way. I stand by what I said.
But let me read a couple of pieces of email that came in.
This person sent a link to PGPI.org.
This is where I've always gone to grab PGP from.
They have old versions.
It's easy to grab from there.
I'm surprised you didn't know about this website.
I got lots of admonitions from people that said,
well, why aren't you using GPG?
It's like, well, you know, I was talking about PGP.
GPG is not PGP.
It's very compatible for the most part,
but you do have to jump through hoops to get it installed on XP.
And, you know, I'm talking about how PGP has changed,
how the company PGP has changed,
how you cannot go to their website anymore and download a free version.
Yes, you can download a free trial version of the new 9.0, I believe,
but you'll be deluged with mail thanking you for your purchase as soon as you do,
even though you haven't given them any kind of credit card information or anything like that.
Let me read you another piece of email that came in after that first one.
Emanuel, just in listening to the latest off the hook,
where you were commenting on PGP,
at first I thought your comments were unwarranted
and simply thought you were downloading the wrong thing
until I went to do some investigation.
I went to www.pgpi.org, where I used to get my Windows version of PGP,
when I used Windows, that is,
and I proceeded to try and install it, and you were correct.
A couple of years ago, you were able to download a completely free version from that site.
I have no idea what happened to it.
In fact, right now, if you click on 8.0, it just forwards you to PGP.com,
and the 9.0, well, you have to agree to buy it.
Since you were kind enough to help me out with my scanner question last week,
I thought it was only fair to try and help you out with your PGP issue,
so this is the way I found to do it, as tested half an hour before writing this email.
Firstly, you'll want to install WinPP, which will install GNU PG
and a nice Windows graphic user interface, all under open source,
because you can find that, and then it gives links and all kinds of things,
and then it gets into the difficult part.
I appreciate that very much, and it's certainly something that we're capable of doing here,
but getting back to your grandmother, is she capable of doing it?
How useful is encryption if it becomes this difficult,
if it becomes jumping through hoops and having to install things
and put in new operating systems?
It should be something that you just click on, and it works,
or something very close to that.
On that subject, you know, encrypting phone calls is also very important.
I knew that was going to happen at some point.
Was that some kind of encryption? We couldn't quite hear what you said underneath it.
No, that was very, very unencrypted.
That's basically saying, I'm here, I'm approaching Osaka, get out of my way.
But just to finish off that thought, yeah, you know,
encryption needs to be simple, easy to install,
and what the folks at PGP have done is make it as hard as possible,
and that's what I was bemoaning.
You know, people are off the hook, we can install things,
we can get things to work, we can find alternatives,
but, you know, can your parents, can your grandparents?
If they can't, it's useless, you're only encrypting the things that are important.
Well, you know, that pretty much puts a red flag on them that says,
hey, this is sensitive, we should be encrypting everything,
the unimportant stuff and the important stuff.
Thank you, thank you very much.
We should just close...
We should just close by offering a couple of the solutions that people suggested.
One, as you mentioned, is the WinPT,
which is a pretty decent GUI for the GNU PG for Windows.
If you're willing to switch email clients, which some people probably aren't,
but if you're going to use Thunderbird,
then there's an extension called Enigmail, which I use,
and it works really great,
and it is available for all kinds of operating systems.
So there are options that are not so hard to use,
but as you said, the PGP is becoming more and more commercial,
and you can't get it anymore.
Well, Mike, if you can get your parents to install that,
you know, without you doing it for them, I would be impressed.
But they don't need encryption.
Oh, come on, everybody needs encryption.
I don't know, Andy.
Everybody.
Even if you don't need encryption, it's good to send things encrypted
to protect those people who do need encryption,
because as Emmanuel said, if only the important stuff is sent encrypted,
that's a red flag to anybody with malintent to try to unencrypt it.
Right, it's like then you're hiding a flower in a field
or just having that one that's a different color.
Oh, I like that, hiding a flower in a field. That's good.
That is good, writing that one down.
Don't you have enough equipment to be juggling
while you're trying to do a radio show without writing things down?
It's unbelievable how much equipment I am juggling.
It really is, and somehow I'm managing to do it.
But, you know, it's weird because I feel like I'm in the homestretch of this trip.
I've been going around the world since July 17th by land and by sea,
and here I am pulling into Japan now.
But I realize, you know, it's still far from over.
I still have to go across the Pacific Ocean.
I still have to go to Tokyo and hang out there for about another week.
In fact, next week's show will be coming, too, hopefully on a landline from Tokyo.
So, you know, I'm still looking at another month or so
before I actually get back to New York.
I have to go across the states on Amtrak, God help me.
So it's going to be quite an adventure to come.
Have you tried turning on your cell phone now that you've approached Japan
to see if Bernie is wrong again?
Well, yeah, you know, I turn on my cell phones, all of them, several times
because we've been off the coast of Japan now since last night, and no go.
I'm going to have to look into some other solution.
So if someone in Tokyo wants to say hello to you, they should e-mail, shouldn't they?
Yeah, in fact, if anybody wants to meet up either in Osaka or Tokyo
and help us out on Project Speakers World where we're getting all kinds of people's input
for various topics that they feel are important that the rest of the world should know about
and speak to a camera and tell the rest of the world, e-mail us oth at 2600.com.
And again, why don't you guys give the addresses out in the studio since my voice might be flaky.
That's oth at 2600.com.
If you'd like to send us a letter, Emmanuel won't get it,
so if you're from Japan, don't do that,
but if you're from somewhere else and would like to send us a letter,
the address is off the hook, care of WBAI, 120 Wall Street on the 10th floor, New York, New York.
1-0-0-0-5.
Walter's not there this week, I guess.
No, he's not. We look forward to hearing from you.
Back to cell phones real quick.
I was just made aware of a new policy held by Verizon.
An acquaintance of mine tried to register another phone on Verizon's network
because the one that she was currently using broke.
And what happened was they said no because it did not have GPS capability.
And so I called Verizon and I wanted to verify this,
and it is in fact true that as of one month ago,
you can no longer register a phone on their network that does not have GPS capability.
And I just thought this was significant to mention because of all the privacy issues we've been talking about.
You can no longer use a Verizon phone without having this capability.
But if you already have one, can you keep using it?
I'm sure you can keep using it, but this is just their way of phasing that out.
Until it mysteriously breaks.
But with GSM service, I actually called a couple of providers to see what their policy was,
not that they could really enforce it since GSM phones are fairly readily available
and you don't have to register them on the network if you just stick in your SIM card,
but they had no such policy.
So this seems to be a Verizon-only thing as of now.
I'm not sure of any other CDMA providers.
Bernie, any idea on Sprint PCS if they have a similar policy?
I have not heard of it, but I continue to use my nearly 7-year-old Sprint PCS handset,
which definitely does not have a GPS receiver in it.
My guess is that all these carriers, which are sort of under the gun from the FCC
to comply with the E911 initiative requiring carriers to provide location of cell phones
to law enforcement authorities upon demand, are buckling under that.
They can provide some level of location even without your phone having a GPS receiver in it,
but it costs them more money and it's more difficult for them to do.
So they're basically hurting their customers' privacy simply to save themselves money, in my opinion.
If I can just touch on your – how old is your phone again, Bernie?
It's nearly 7 years old.
Okay, well, your nearly 7-year-old phone does have a much better vocoder than current-day phones, is that correct?
Well, it's about a 14-kilobit-per-second bit rate vocoder,
and for listeners who aren't familiar with what a vocoder is,
it's basically what converts your speech into the phone, into a bit stream,
and also decodes the bit stream coming back from the other end of the conversation back into human voice.
And what the carriers have done over the past few years is they've made the vocoders more and more efficient,
that is, a smaller bit rate, all the way down to like 4 kilobits per second instead of mine, which is over 14,
and unfortunately voice quality suffers.
It's amazing they can squeeze intelligible voice into about 4 kilobits per second,
but it sounds more and more robotic and it has less dynamic range.
And I know I don't even sound that great on this phone,
but I would sound a lot worse if I had a newer phone.
Are there any newer phones being made that might do a better job?
Well, it's not just the bit rate.
There are better and better vocoder algorithms being developed,
and it's really amazing how much intelligibility you can squeeze out of just a few kilobits per second.
So the vocoder I'm using is probably not as good as reproducing voice
as well as it could at 14.4 kilobits per second.
Maybe I didn't phrase that right.
But in other words, there are vocoders with better intelligibility out now that are more efficient,
but whenever you squeeze it down to a small fraction of what it was, something's going to suffer.
And the reason cell phone carriers and wireless carriers are doing this is they want to squeeze more and more people
into their available bandwidth and make more money without giving people discounts.
I mean, if I was forced into using one-third less bandwidth for my phone conversation,
I would expect something in return.
I would expect my rates to be cut by two-thirds or one-fourth or whatever.
But it doesn't work that way.
It was a whole scam that happened with digital cell phone technology.
Instead of getting a nice wide 30 kilohertz FM signal, which was virtually hi-fi with analog phones,
now people all sound like robots in their cell phones, and they're still paying a lot of money.
I think it's a big scam.
I think it's time that a company appear on the horizon that advertises FM-sounding voice over cell phones
that uses, you know, granted, it might not make as much money right away by squeezing so much into the same signal,
but, boy, you know, what quality they would suddenly be putting on the marketplace.
I think I've heard so many people complain about their cell phones sound like crap.
And the other thing is you don't lose, with the whole digital cell phone technology,
you don't have the ability, it's not a full duplex conversation.
You can't really interrupt somebody, as people have noticed from listening to this show.
You can't interject somebody.
Well, that's mostly because of the satellite, because we have a satellite to land on everything else.
Well, it's not just that.
If it was just digital, it's not just that.
It's digital cell phone to digital cell phone.
Shall we provide a demonstration of interrupting each other?
Exactly.
I'm just having fun with you there.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
It's very hard.
When you're used to using a digital cell phone and then you switch to a landline to talk to somebody,
it's like a breath of fresh air.
It's like you can interject and then the other person can get a word in.
You just can't really do that naturally, like a person-to-person conversation with a digital cell phone.
What's interesting, Bernie, is that in much the same way that there are people who have never used a rotary dial phone,
I think there are a number of people who may never have used a landline phone.
Certainly there are a lot of people who don't have landline phones in their house.
I wonder, you know, people will think this is what phones are supposed to sound like.
This is what phones always sound like.
I think if you just listen to radio, say, 20 years ago, you'll hear people calling in who sounded much better.
Yep.
This suggests a science project for an upcoming show.
Bernie, get yourself on a landline and get a few extra cell phones with various vocoder rates.
Actually, it's interesting.
I forget the name of it.
There's actually a scientific quantifying measurement for the intelligibility of various vocoders.
I'll look that up for next week's show.
But there's a measurement that's actually used to determine the intelligibility of various vocoders.
I wish that cellular carriers and phone manufacturers would actually advertise how their vocoders
and their networks fared under that measurement.
But none of them even say that because they don't want to be held accountable, I guess.
I have a question for Red Hat.
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay.
Do you think it's worth taking the chance of getting three phone calls on the line at the same time?
I can barely handle two.
Oh, you mean as in taking calls?
Yes.
Oh, okay.
I think we can risk that.
I thought you meant three people during the whole show.
Well, a person, too, but no.
You know, the unknown person calling in right now, 212-209-2900.
Right.
Yeah, I think we can try that.
So as Emmanuel said, the number is 212-209-2900.
Let's take a phone call.
If you're calling from a satellite phone, you should dial 1 at the beginning.
All right.
Well, you should dial 0.
Oh.
That's what you have to dial.
Okay.
This is my friend from CS.
All right.
Why?
Why me?
I'm here in Japan and yet this voice still haunts me.
Let's try another line there.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Okay.
This is a cordless.
Oh, God.
What have I done?
It's only a dream.
You're not really hearing it.
If you're not Rebel, call us, please, at 1-212-209-2900.
And good evening.
You're on the air.
No, you're not.
Oh, leave that.
That's a better sound.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Oh, man.
It seems that you get cut off for a split second every time I pick up a line, which
is kind of interesting.
But let's try this again.
WBA iPhone system strikes again.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Turn your radio down, please.
Go ahead.
You're on the air.
Oh, good evening.
All right.
You know, maybe this is a bad idea.
Maybe we'll try in a few minutes.
Let's have a little huddle here.
I have a bit of news from the BBC.
This is British news.
The British government is planning a ban on violent net porn, where possessing and accessing
extreme Internet pornography could become illegal.
This proposal is supported, of course, by the family of Jane Longhurst of Hove, who
was murdered by a man addicted to violent net porn.
Apparently, if this ban had been passed, they feel that their daughter would still
be alive, which strikes me as rather dubious.
Yeah.
If there had been a ban on men as well, the daughter would still be alive.
I mean, give me a break.
No, that's a good idea.
Really?
You say that?
That's fascinating.
All right.
You know, this is coming down to the wire here, because we are docking as I speak.
I'm literally pulling into port, and I'm the only person up here on the deck.
I'm going to try and stay until the end of the show and see just how much trouble I get
into for not disembarking with everybody else, because the show is important.
But shall we try taking a non-rival phone call?
We'll try.
I can't guarantee.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi, guys.
How are you doing?
Hi.
This is Bartholomew.
I'm calling from upstate New York.
Listen, I need some advice.
I was convicted in 1973 of theft of services because I used to manufacture blue boxes,
and I'm still in jail for that.
What?
I'm actually calling you from the penitentiary.
22 years later?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You've been in jail for 23 years because you made blue boxes?
Yeah.
And I also used to...
You know how you used to, like, ground out the payphone wires, and you could dump the
change into the paint, into the return slot?
I used to do that.
I used to do that, too.
You're in a penitentiary right now.
I'm sorry?
Are you in a penitentiary right now?
Yeah, I'm calling you from the penitentiary right now.
What's the name of it?
Can you name...
Yeah, what's the name?
And I listen to you guys every week, and I just wonder, is there anybody out there who
I got...
It's like I got convicted under the Rockefeller drug laws for possession of a blue box.
So now I'm going to be 50 years old, and I've spent half my life in jail because of a couple
of capacitors and alligator clips.
Do you feel comfortable saying your name and the name of your institution over the air?
I really can't do that.
I can say my name is Bartholomew.
That's my actual name, but I don't want to say where I am.
Well, can you send a...
What?
Yeah, send us a letter.
Send us a letter, because we'd definitely like to look into your case.
Do you have our mailing address?
Yeah, I'm actually a supporter of WBAI.
So it's like off the hook, right?
Off the hook.
Yeah, care of BAI, 120 Wall Street, 10th floor, New York.
Do you know anybody who was arrested for that in the 70s who served any time?
Well, Captain Crunch, of course.
But there are many people, but nobody who's been in prison for that long.
Yeah.
So, I don't know what to tell you, but I just want to let you know I'm out here.
How did you make this call, by the way?
Because you didn't call Collect, did you?
No, I got privilege.
I used a blue box.
I know.
Don't say that.
They may take it seriously.
Well, not that blue boxes even work anymore.
No, they don't work anymore.
As far as I was concerned, they stopped working in, like, 1980.
You couldn't use them anymore, from what I understand.
Maybe a little beyond that, but that's when they started working in the mainstream.
Right.
I mean, I used to do all sorts of phone freaky stuff, like, you know,
used to be able to make a telephone call anywhere in the country, run a nickel.
You know how to do all that stuff, right?
Yeah, we all did that kind of thing.
We all did that and dumped the coin boxes into the, you know,
used to wire the pay phones up and you could get it to release all the coins to you
and all that stuff, and I got busted when I was in college.
I got busted by campus security, and then my whole network,
because, like, everybody you know, like I sold the blue boxes to,
everybody was, like, all of a sudden caught because they started auditing
phone lines in the university and a whole bunch of people got caught,
but I was the guy that used to make them.
Like it's a letter.
Yeah.
Because, you know, Steve Wozniak used to make blue boxes, too.
I don't believe he's still in prison.
I know he used to make them, and he's kind of proud of it, and I, frankly,
was proud of it, too, at the time.
But, you know, it's like every time I hear you guys, I'm like, whoa.
When I left, Western Electric manuals were my Bible,
and now the whole world's different, and I've been in jail because of it
all this time.
So what can I tell you?
I'm sorry to hear about that, but we definitely would like to help you,
so please write to us.
I will.
Thank you very much, and keep up the good work.
All right, thanks.
I love your show.
Thanks for calling.
Wow.
Wow, what a story.
Yeah.
Do you guys have any comments about that?
Well, I'm kind of surprised that, you know,
I wonder if there's more to the story, someone being in prison for, what,
I don't know how many years that was, 30 years or something?
For blue boxing, there's got to be more to it than that,
but I'd definitely like to pursue it and look into it some more.
All right.
Should we take another phone call?
Yeah, let's give it a try.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hi, this is a non-rebel call.
Okay.
Did Robert Moog invent the vocoder?
That's a good question.
Wait, I'm sorry, what was the question?
Did Robert Moog invent the vocoder?
No, but he invented something similar that I forget the name of,
but he invented something that would convert your voice
into a musical instrument type sound.
I think it was called a vocoder.
I was just looking up, you know, because he recently passed,
and I was looking on some, you know, old inventions of his,
and it was called a vocoder.
Yes, but it's not what we call vocoders today.
A vocoder in today's parlance is something that converts your voice
to a digital bit stream and vice versa,
and that's not what Bob Moog's invention did,
although I think his invention was pretty neat.
And we actually played a tribute to Bob Moog,
Bob Moog rather, on last week's show.
The closing song was played on one of his inventions.
Is it Moog or is it Moog? Which is it?
Moog.
It's Moog.
The amount of people who knew this before last week, though,
seems to be pretty small.
He had something to do with the Moog synthesizer.
That wasn't him?
That's him, and it's a Moog synthesizer,
or it should be a Moog synthesizer,
because it's named after him.
Oh, dear.
That's how he pronounces his name.
I've always listened to the Moog synthesizer so well.
But, yeah, the thing that Wendy slash Walter Carlos performed,
that had vocals in it.
Maybe not the piece we played last week,
but I'm not sure about the Peter Frampton thing.
Does that have anything to do with the Moog synthesizer?
No, no, that's a talk box, I think they call that.
Ah, okay.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's, like, a totally different thing.
The thing with the tube is not it.
All right.
All right.
Oh, well, we lost that caller.
Yeah.
We're almost out of time.
Emmanuel, you want to give us a quick status update?
Yeah.
Well, let's see.
It appears that we've docked.
I'm all alone here on top of the boat,
so I think what I'm going to do is sign off,
go inside, and fill out my immigration papers
and explain where I've been.
Then I'll be introduced to the city of Osaka, Japan,
where I'll be hanging out for a couple of days
and taking a bullet train over to Tokyo,
where I'll be there for a week
and broadcasting from a landline there next week.
All right.
Sounds good.
We'll talk to you then,
and if anyone wants to meet up with you,
the email address, again, is OTH at 2600.com.
Meeting this Friday.
And there's a meeting this Friday.
All right.
Thank you, and have a good night.
All right.
Good morning, you guys.