Also, many in the room were critical of the lack of attention to the displaced population,
who were not represented in the Bring Back New Orleans Commission.
Loretta Tate, parent of a local public school student, pointed out many of those displaced
need other services as well.
And I'm a displaced resident in Houston, Texas, and I want to know, ask the Education Board,
what are we doing for our children so far as counseling?
Because Houston is not embracing our children in those school systems.
And I need to know, what are we doing to get some counseling to those children?
And it's going to have to remain an open question, as we are out of time for Free Speech Radio
News.
It's now two minutes after seven o'clock, 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 cuff, we couldn't get much worse, but if
they could, they would.
Bum diddly bum, for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum diddly bum.
Bum diddly bum.
Bum diddly bum, for the best, expect the worst.
And a very good evening to everybody, the program is Off the Hook, Emanuel Goldstein
here with you, and we have a full cast of characters here in the radio station tonight.
That radio station, Mike being?
WBAI New York.
Yeah, okay, so I forgot to do a legal ID on the top of the hour.
I understand the FCC is already in the minivan on the way over.
We have, as you've just heard, we have Mike, we have Jim.
Hello.
We have Redbird.
Good evening.
Arseny Returns from various world travels.
Hi.
Lynn is here.
Hello.
And Bernie joins us from down in Philadelphia.
Greetings from the city of brotherly love.
And we also have Slick and Walter over in the corner, but there's not enough headphones
so they have to sit over there, but maybe we'll have you on later.
Now Bernie, we're going to try again to get you Skype connected, as we did last week during
the two-hour show, but I should point out that we're probably not going to be able to
keep the connection because we don't have an input.
We haven't quite figured out how to do this yet to put an input into the computer, so
the only way you can hear us is over the telephone, and for some reason that's not pleasant for
you?
Well, what happens is there's a latency, there's a delay in the audio between my SprintTCS
phone and the Skype connection, which is also over a SprintTCS wireless connection card
over their broadband wireless service, and it's a two or three seconds delay, and it's
kind of like, those of us who remember long-distance calls via satellite, like you'd make a call
to across California and might get routed through a satellite, and there'd be some two
or three second delay, and then maybe not even that much.
But if there was bad echo, it was very disconcerting, so you're liable to drive me mad if you do
this very long tonight, because I'll just be hearing myself a few seconds later.
Well, let's try to drive you mad.
We're going to double-click on your name here in the Skype window, and that's the sound
of your phone ringing.
Hey, it says you're calling.
All right, why don't you pick up?
I've picked up.
All right, I don't hear you.
Are you speaking into your microphone on your computer?
It said that you called right away.
And I see your face.
How did your face get on there?
Did you transmit your face or something to the computer?
Oh, I added a little picture of myself, so it comes up.
Okay.
It says here, Skype cannot hear you talking.
You may need help with your microphone or headset.
Well, we know that, because we don't have an input, but why can't we hear you talking?
I hear something now.
Maybe I'm jiggling the connectors.
Okay.
I think maybe you have a bad connection or something.
It always comes down to a bad connection.
Should I cut the red wire or the blue wire?
I hear what sounds like breathing.
How about now?
Yeah.
Okay.
You have some kind of loose connection there, Bernie, because we are hearing you, but ...
Yes.
It was the microphone plugged into the headphone jack trick.
Okay.
Yeah.
That doesn't work.
Okay.
So this is driving you crazy now, the way we're talking to you.
How's that?
Well, now we hear you on the phone.
Okay.
But we want to hear you on the computer.
All right.
Now I'll unplug the ...
I'll turn you down on the phone.
What I'm saying is we're talking to you on the phone now.
Is this driving you crazy?
Well, yeah.
I hear myself on my phone.
Everything I say on my phone, I hear myself delayed about a second back into my phone.
Why listen to yourself then?
Simply when you talk to us, hold the phone away from your head.
Try that.
Okay.
Now I'll say something to you.
I knew you were good for something.
I'll say something.
Hello, Bernie.
I got to turn the volume up.
We're talking at the same time.
That's bad.
All right.
I don't hear you, Emanuel.
You don't hear me.
You're on your phone.
I think somehow my instructions got confused here.
You should listen to other people on your phone, but when you're talking, and you'll
know that because your mouth will be moving, when that happens, take the phone away from
your head.
But it's like side tone.
It comes back half a second later.
I can't pull the phone away from me a half second after I say something.
No.
You pull the phone away from you after we say something indicating you should reply.
I get it, but I'm still going to hear it.
It's going to be disconcerting.
I think you're driving us more crazy than we're driving you.
But in any event, this is a good demonstration of how the sound quality can improve.
Now, Bernie, we're using the Sprint PCS network for both of these connections, aren't we?
Well, that's what's weird about this.
I am on my Sprint PCS phone, and my interconnection is also through my laptop, which has a Sprint
PCS connection card, which is about a, oh, I don't know, 600 or kilobit, or about a megabit
per second internet connection.
And it's an EVDO internet connection, wireless.
And the Skype vocoders and the Skype network, using voice over IP, sounds so much better.
And ironically, it's over the same wireless network.
So it just goes to show that Sprint is ripping us all off by providing really terrible fidelity
when they could be doing so much better, like Skype is.
Well, in all fairness, though, every phone company is doing the same thing, not just
Sprint PCS, right?
They're all greedy.
But this goes to show that, yeah, the bandwidth exists.
We can have FM quality, well, almost FM quality phone calls over regular phone lines or over
the same frequencies.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, when all cell phones were analog, that was true wideband
FM audio.
There were 30 kilohertz channels.
You're telling me cell phones used to sound like FM radio?
Analog cell phones?
They did.
Yeah, they used to.
I mean, they really did sound a lot better.
I mean, they were wideband FM, well, narrowband FM compared to FM broadcast.
See, I skipped that whole part of evolution.
I just sort of jumped into the digital phones.
That was when it was $3 a minute.
Yeah, that's probably why I skipped it.
Well, maybe someone can bring a brick to the next meeting or something, and we can play
around with it.
If they still actually use the things.
Good luck getting it to work.
Yeah.
They are turning them off.
They no longer have to maintain the analog channels anymore by FCC regulations.
So they are turning them off as quickly as they possibly can with their contracts.
But you can usually use an analog phone, and then they want you to give them a credit card,
and then you're back to the $3 a minute thing for some reason.
How about that?
My Sprint phone is a dual mode.
It's analog and digital.
So when you go to analog, what happens?
I get charged more.
It's like $0.25 a minute.
But I could pay, I think, $10 a month extra, which gives me unlimited analog calling.
But when you go to analog, your phone doesn't sound any better, right?
Of course it does.
Really?
No vocoders.
It's actually analog connection.
Yeah, but you have to be in the right place.
You have to be in the right place, or you have to play with...
You have to be in the right...
In a roaming area, or you have to mess around with that PRL thing, and if you want to look
at that, it's from Hope.
Bernie, when you say it sounds better, does it sound this kind of quality, where it sounds
like you're almost here?
Well, it may not be as good as Skype voice over IP, but it will be significantly better
than a digital cell phone connection.
The bottleneck as far as sound quality would be the actual telephone network, and not the
analog transmission between him and the cell phone tower.
I see.
Now, we are hearing some dropouts when he talks.
The issue there is that the protocol is UDP, right?
So it's not a TCP connection, so packets are being dropped, and they're just lost.
And he's using...
Quality of service.
Yeah.
But that's the best way to do voice over IP anyway, and he's using the Sprint network,
so it's kind of a flaky connection.
I was going to say, it doesn't sound like Bernie's in the room to me.
I've been in the room with Bernie, and he doesn't sound like this.
You're saying he doesn't sound this good when he's in the room with you?
I'm saying he doesn't sound quite so much like a robot.
Oh, well, no.
He does have the robotic qualities.
That's a personality trait, though, not so much a voice trait.
He can still hear us, you know, so just point that out before you say more things about
robotic qualities.
I would venture to say that if you ever get the chance to try this with a better connection,
cable modem or DSL or something, it would sound much better.
You wouldn't get the robotic-sounding.
Oh, I'd like to try that.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's like when I was in Switzerland trying to use Vonage, and it was the same
thing except 10,000 times worse.
I mean, I would just go away.
But when I use Vonage at home, it works fine, and other voice over IP providers through
Asterix.
I mean, you know, there's tons of them out there.
Okay.
Well, it's fun to play with this.
Now, Bernie, do you want to go back to the regular phone, or are you getting used to
this?
I'll go back to the regular phone.
Okay.
Let's meet you over there.
And Bernie, now you're back on the phone.
I'm going to unplug my headset.
Okay.
This is the Bernie we all know and love.
We're going to be running into problems with voice over IP this coming year, I think, as
internet service providers, you know, the big broadband ones, Verizon and some of the
cable companies start blocking SIP protocol and Skype packets.
I think this is going to be an issue.
They're going to deliberately, once cable companies, for instance, start running a voice
over IP over their networks on a large scale, I think they're going to start interfering
with their traffic.
Well, that's certainly an indication that it's a threat and therefore a success.
So I think if they did something like that, they'd basically be spelling their own doom.
By the way, Bernie, you haven't hung up the phone and the minutes are racking up.
Could you please hang up the voice over IP connection?
The free minutes on Skype?
Yeah.
Up to seven minutes and 54 seconds.
Oh, there we go.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
After the show, last week after the show, I decided to play around and see if I could
talk to someone randomly somewhere far away.
And I spoke with a woman named Maggie in Southern China for about an hour.
Wait a minute.
You just called somebody at random in Southern China?
Yeah.
How did you...
Well, you gave her a name out, I mean, her full ID, but how did you find her full ID?
You can just look for all Skype open connections and they list by their nickname and what language
they speak.
And I just...
There's someone named Maggie in China.
So I spoke with her.
She was at her...
It was morning time in her office in Southern China and she was bored waiting for some people
to come in.
She had to interview.
And we had a really interesting conversation for about an hour and I taught her some English.
She was...
She spoke surprisingly good English, but she had some...
I told her what a thesaurus was.
She'd never heard of a thesaurus.
Well, now, if Maggie from Southern China didn't want men from the United States to be calling
her at all hours, does she have the ability to turn that off?
Yes.
Okay, good.
Good.
She said her biggest problem...
She said the reason she stayed on the phone with me so long as I was...
She said I was interesting to talk with.
She said most of the time she gets these guys from Turkey calling her.
They just want to talk about sex.
Yeah, the guys from Turkey.
We all know about them.
How about that?
Well, okay, that's a fun side effect of Skype and, of course, you didn't pay a penny for
that either.
Nope.
It was free.
Wow.
Well, the problem is now what you just mentioned about ISPs selectively blocking various voice
over IP protocols is now all of a sudden you're not paying for internet access, right?
You're starting to pay for services which the ISPs choose to allow you to use and the
only solution in the future may be to upgrade to a more expensive package like a business
package that doesn't block ports.
Well, how do you define internet access?
Who's to say a telephone-type connection is not internet access?
This all should be considered internet access you're using.
Why should they be allowed to block ports and still consider it that sort of service?
Right.
They're a network.
Well, you can also choose not to buy from them, hopefully.
Well, when you're in a certain area, sometimes you only have two choices.
You have the cable modem provider, you have the DSL modem provider, you have...
To steal a phrase, the companies are starting to refuse to provide a sort of end-to-end
access is what they call it, which is what allows new things to be created on the internet.
But instead of allowing new things to be created, of course, these companies have a serious
interest in taking their old business models, their old monopolistic business models and
bringing them to the internet era.
And it's a real question, actually, to see who will win.
And now, I guess you're...
I didn't even think about the fact that the FCC has just closed the door on DSL carriers
running over the Lex copper.
So now you're...
I mean...
No, you can't do that.
You can't get naked DSL anymore.
Well, you can still get it where they have contracts, like where I live in Atlanta,
my ISP has a five-year contract with Bell South, because Bell South said,
well, we're not gonna deal with you unless you sign a five-year contract.
Now they wanna come back and wanna get them to reverse the contract and buy them out of
the contract, because now they're competition.
In other words, they wanted to lock them into it, so in case they went out of business,
they could get as much money as possible from them, but it backfired.
So now we have five years, five more years before they get the plug cut.
Do you know what the situation is in New York?
No.
What is it?
I don't know, but I had one heck of a time getting DSL installed, and I have an update
on the story.
Last, I think we left it, I had written a very angry letter to the attorney general
of the state of New York, Elliot Spitzer, and that actually resulted in something.
I got a letter...
Elliot Spitzer got your results?
Well, I don't know if he personally...
You sound like a campaign ad.
I don't know if he personally did it, but I'm gonna give him the credit and he can pass
on that credit to whoever deserves it.
But basically what happened, first of all, soon after I sent that letter out, Verizon
miraculously found the apartment and got the thing installed, and DSLNet did the rest,
and the thing, as of today, is working just fine at 1.5, which is a tremendous achievement.
I know it's nothing for the people in Europe, but for us, it's a big deal.
But I got a copy of the letter that Verizon sent back to the attorney general after they
were contacted, and basically they said, well, we didn't show up because we had the wrong
address every single time, and well, now we have the right address and we finished
the work.
It was the worst case of covering your ass I have ever seen, but it was pretty obvious
what was going on.
We've heard so many times from people that Verizon just doesn't show up when there's
no money for them to make, and well, complain to the attorney general and they'll show up.
It's amazing because we don't...
When I got DSL hooked up at our new house in Atlanta, Bell South is more than happy
to show up for the money.
They have a guy that comes out in a little van and he tests it and he says, this is the
percentage of what your available bandwidth you're getting, and they leave a little door
tag on your door and the whole nine yards.
Even if you're not getting the DSL from them?
Yes.
Okay.
Well...
They showed up in three days of ordering it.
I mean, I have to...
There's a lot of things I don't like about Bell South, but I got to say that they abide
by the contract that they've signed with the third party carrier.
Well, they're a lot friendlier down there too.
Yeah, we're a lot friendlier down there.
Okay.
We have a couple other stories.
There's a crackdown on disposable cell phones.
This is really kind of bizarre.
This is truly the biggest threat to America today.
So I, for one, am glad they're cracking down.
Oh, good.
Well, a recent large-scale purchase of disposable cell phones in California and an attempted
purchase in Texas have caught the FBI's attention.
These types of phones, which can be bought without a credit card or identification, have
been used in terrorist attacks, such as the Madrid train bombing in 2004.
Has it been verified that they were, in fact, disposable cell phones?
Does it matter?
No, it doesn't.
I mean, what was used was a timer, which I don't think you need a cell phone to have
a timer, and you certainly don't need a disposable cell phone.
The latest incident, on New Year's Eve at a Target store in Hemet, California, 150 disposable
track phones were purchased.
Store employees notified police, who contacted the FBI.
Track phones are made by Track Phone Wireless, a unit of Mexican telecommunications company
American Movil.
M-O-V-I-L.
Movil.
Movil?
Yeah.
Well, that's not how it looks.
There should be an E at the end if it's Movil.
Write them a letter.
I will.
The V is pronounced like a B.
The V is pronounced like a B now?
So it's mobile.
Like Cerveza is spelled with a V, but it's not a B.
Let's just pretend it's a B then.
It's American Mobile.
Not Mobile.
Mobil.
You pronounced it right.
If you were saying it phonetically, you would have pronounced it as a V.
All right.
Let's just skip over this part.
Although law enforcement agencies acknowledge there could be legitimate reasons for large
scale purchases of disposable cell phones, reports of similar occurrences in other cities
across the U.S. identified individuals of Middle Eastern descent as the buyers.
Bernie, what do you have to say about all this?
Pars.
Middle Eastern people.
Like who?
Jamie Farr?
I think it's just this country is so far gone that you're not going to get any non-sarcastic
response out of us.
Yeah.
That's probably true.
But Bernie, tell us something about what they're thinking here.
Well, I think the government is trying to force some sort of prepaid cell phone registration
where you have to show identification to buy one.
It just makes it easier for them to wiretap everyone when they have an identity directly
associated with the prepaid cell phone.
Right now, you can buy them for cash without ID.
Yeah.
But you know, in Europe, you can't.
Yes.
So you have to give it like I had one cut off in Zurich that was a Sunrise phone because
I didn't go into a store and give them a passport number.
I had to physically go into a store by a certain date or they cut it off in Switzerland.
Now, Redbird, you bought some phones.
Absolutely.
We bought two different brand prepaid SIMs in Amsterdam, actually.
And you know, you could use it with a phone that you haven't used on any other network.
But the Dutch are much less uptight than the Swiss.
So if you were in Switzerland, you're saying that he wouldn't be able to buy without showing
ID.
Interestingly enough, here, T-Mobile, their prepaid service requires you to register with
them.
But there's a lot of little shady cell phone dealership places where you can go and purchase
a prepaid SIM that's already been registered for you.
And I did this recently.
And it was registered under the name BlackBerry.
So it's as anonymous as you can get without, you know, IMEI tracking or other methods of
tracking.
BlackBerry.
Now, I'm just trying to see what the threat – what are they thinking people are going
to do with all these disposable cell phones that are anonymous?
I think that Swisscom is nervous about it because there were a lot of rumors that the
9-11 people were using them or using actual Swisscom SIMs.
No, it's to communicate, not to detonate, to communicate.
Not to detonate, to communicate between each other because Swisscom used to have a very
nice service that was like 99 cents a minute in a whole lot of countries.
And they got rid of the whole plan, unfortunately, because it was a very nice service.
But no, it's gone.
Well, just a couple of years ago, there was all this hype over prepaid cell phones and
how excited everyone was to be able to get them because now they don't have to worry
about their kids going over usage and all this stuff.
And all of a sudden, it's become this horrible thing.
Well, now, wouldn't a calling card provide the same means of anonymity?
Sure.
But you'd have to have a landline.
OK.
Or a pay phone.
Yeah.
Well, you can't receive calls on a calling card.
That's probably true, though.
There might be some kind of a –
All right.
It's hard.
Yeah.
Like a voicemail type of a function.
A calling card is not as anonymous as we may think it is.
In fact, in 2600 Magazine, there was an article some years ago about the Oklahoma City bombing
and how the FBI managed to trace through supposedly anonymous calling cards phone calls
between the various conspirators.
It was just a matter of timing.
They knew when certain phones were being used, and they matched it up to when certain calling
cards were being used.
So couldn't you do the same thing with one of these track phones if you knew?
Sure.
Bernie?
Yes.
Absolutely.
And that's largely what the NSA has been doing with this widespread wiretapping program,
too.
It's not just listening to calls.
It's establishing patterns and connections between this number called that number, and
then let's tap everybody that's called that number.
You build a very fast seven degrees of separation between all these numbers rather quickly.
Yeah.
And you said the NSA word, so now we've triggered the supercomputer somewhere.
And unfortunately for individuals, it's still relatively difficult to be anonymous if you
have the government looking after you because, for example, you can buy a prepaid SIM, but
once you use it in a phone that you've already had associated with another network, if they
have the records from both those carriers, they can easily link them together.
Yeah.
And I think one of the July 21st bombers, would-be bombers in London, found that out
the hard way when he went to Italy and plugged another SIM into a phone that he had used
before, and they found them within a few seconds.
Yeah.
And the CIA found that out the hard way as well.
How so?
Well, they did the same thing with their little overseas kidnapping at Vince.
Oh.
They left the prepaid SIMs, or they left their SIM cards and they got traced back to the CIA.
Oops.
Interesting.
Okay.
We also have this development with cell phones, and we're going to move on from cell phones
after this.
Supposedly, the New York City subway is still looking for a way to wire the subway platforms,
but a coalition of cell phone companies looking to make a collective bid on the contract has
been dragging their feet.
The deadline actually was today.
I don't know if anybody has any information on what happened, but basically the MTA wanted
to wire all 277 underground stations, and some of the cell phone companies fear that
if the tunnels aren't also wired for cell phone service, people won't be on the phone
long enough for the cell phone companies to generate enough extra business to make
the project worthwhile.
The MTA insisted that wiring 700 miles of tunnel would be impossible because it would
involve interrupting train service for too long a period of time.
Interesting ideas.
I know in many countries they already have done this, and they seem to have done it without
all this hoopla.
Jim, you have some insight?
I'm going to beg the New York City Transit Authority, which is something I've never done
before.
We have enough people talking to themselves on trains, in the tunnels, on the stations.
Please don't do it to normal people with cell phones as well.
You see, I do agree with you on that point, but what if you do need to make an emergency
call or something like that?
What if something is happening that you need to either transmit a picture to the news people?
I have an idea for an invention where it would be a normal telephone, except it would have
like a coin slot and a coin box, and you would go over to it and you could put a coin
in it and then dial your number, and it would be free for 911.
You just gave me another idea, though.
You know how a lot of subway cars have like a driver's compartment, even though there's
no driver in the subway car?
Right.
It's only at the front.
You turn that into a pay phone and make that into like sort of a cell phone, only one per
car, and you got to pay through the nose to use it, but you can use it if you really want
to.
I like that.
Then it would be relatively soundproof.
Because the subway is allowed, unlike in other countries where you can talk quietly on the
phone.
I've sat next to people.
I didn't even realize they were talking on the phone.
That's how quiet it is.
New York City subway, that would not work, both because of the people who ride it and
because of the sounds that the train makes.
I was going to suggest that if it's truly an emergency, you could go upstairs and outside
and make your phone call.
If the train's moving?
If you're inside the train?
Yes.
But this proposal is not to wire the tunnels.
The MTA said it's impossible.
That's what I'm disputing, whether or not it's that impossible, because other places
have done it.
Berlin does it.
It's very simple.
You know, one of the reasons why things are harder in New York is that there's not five
hours a day when the trains aren't running where they can run wires.
How about on the L train?
They seem to have five hours a day where they don't run that train, and they still drag
their asses getting things done.
Okay.
If anybody has an update on what happened today, we'd sure like to know about it.
Some more legal updates, which are always a lot of fun.
The music industry is trying to extend their copyright war by taking legal action against
websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics.
Yeah.
We're not talking about music.
We're talking about the lyrics and the scores and sheet music and things like that.
MTA President Loren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed.
He said unlicensed guitar tabs and song scores were widely available on the internet but
were completely illegal.
He said he did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can
throw in some jail time, I think we'll be a little more effective.
This is the MTA being the Music Publishers Association.
This is insane.
I mean, there's no other word for it.
Am I wrong here?
Look, there's a lot of lawyers and they need a hobby or something.
Well, a number of years ago, there was a lyric server, a server that you could look up the
lyrics of many a song, which was a relative voluntary organization.
People could submit lyrics and they could be corrected, much like Wikipedia.
They forced them to shut down in a copyright dispute because, yes, technically, the lyrics
of a song, if it's-
Where does this end?
Can I say the title of a song?
Is that-
Titles, interestingly enough, under copyright law, are not copyrightable.
You can take a title and reuse it, as you can see in many a movie.
Can I quote a song to somebody?
Can I read lyrics?
Well, the fair use lets you quote a few lyrics.
Usually it's what, eight bars, four bars that you can play of a song before you incur copyright
royalties.
But that's the song itself.
It's like if you describe something, are they going to get you on that now?
I'm sure there's a lawyer somewhere who's trying.
It's just every week, I hear something even crazier.
Here's another one kind of related to this.
A company that runs sports fantasy leagues is asking a federal court to decide whether
major leaguers' batting averages and home run counts are historical facts that can be
used freely or property that can be sold.
In a lawsuit that could affect the past time of an estimated 16 million people, CBC Distribution
and Marketing wants the judge to stop Major League Baseball from requiring a license to
use the statistics.
The company says baseball statistics become historical facts as soon as the game is over,
so it shouldn't have to pay for the right to use them.
That makes sense to me.
I agree with that.
I think that the corollary would be that if you have a news program and you carry sports
and you want to report on the sports, Major League Baseball should pay you to say who
got a hit if they own it.
You are giving them publicity, just like you're giving the music industry publicity by spreading
information about their product.
You're not pirating the music and you're not reproducing the game or something like
that.
You're talking about the game.
You're giving statistics.
It's like I've heard rumors that they want to charge for the weather.
They want to make the weather something that you have to pay for.
I think all plans to make it harder to talk about sports are good plans.
Okay, you can say that, but you can also copyright anything then.
You can copyright voting statistics.
We're not allowed to talk about them without paying somebody.
It's interesting because the lyrics are not what's being sold.
They're not the product that's being sold.
For the most part, these websites that have all the lyrics are compiled by people who
are transcribing them from the music.
I can't tell you the number of times I've heard a song, I didn't know who it was, I
typed some lyrics into the internet and gotten back a result and I found the person.
And then you could buy the CD?
And I could buy the CD, but there's a fat chance I'm going to do that with this kind
of attitude going on.
I just want to point out that the contents of this show cannot be used by the MPAA, the
BMI, ASCAP, or Major League Baseball.
Unbelievable.
So, if you have any crazy stories like that, please email them to us, oth at 2600.com.
And yeah, it gets crazier every single week.
It really does.
Okay, we have some listener mail we'd like to read and we're going to take phone calls
in just a little bit as well.
This person writes in, what do you think about tinfoil bras?
This is in response to the latest Homeland Security business where, well, actually I
guess this is going on worldwide where people are being scanned and their naked bodies can
be seen through the scanning materials.
Continuing here, I think we should get into the business now before the rush.
We could have special ones that have messages for the scanner that light up after being
scanned.
Signed, Erethid.
Thank you very much for that piece of mail.
But don't forget, last week we talked about the person who gave the V sign to the traffic
camera in England and they were hauled off the court for insulting a camera.
So be careful what you write on that tinfoil bra of yours.
And the device that scans and would see the tinfoil is also in the UK.
How embarrassing would it be to have that picture brought up in court?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Another letter here.
This whole Homeland Security opening mail disturbs me.
My wife of seven years who has resided here in the US for six and an immigrant from the
Philippines has told me of this violation of privacy herself.
Her brother who has been here in the US just recently had his birth certificate FedExed
him from the Philippines and it too was opened and resealed with green tape.
I can almost comprehend a piece of paper in an envelope being opened and inspected.
Does it sound like prison yet?
I can almost comprehend a package being opened and inspected for suspected drugs, contraband,
and terrorist tools of destruction.
But a simple letter being opened is just not right.
After all, the contents of a letter or piece of paper can be sent to the US via the internet
in many encrypted forms including steganography with no examination possible.
This level of privacy intrusion is just too Orwellian for crying out loud.
X-ray the package.
Anyway, chocolate rationing is up 23%.
I'm looking for new razors.
Signed, Geminis.
Thank you very much for that.
Oh, he also was the listener who phoned us from Iraq last year and sent us pictures of
their payphones which we have yet to print but we still have them.
Dear OffTheHook, I'm a longtime listener to the show.
I enjoy it very much.
I'm writing you from Long Beach, California.
I just got a Gmail subscription and I do enjoy the service but why doesn't Gmail log you
off when you leave the page?
Hotmail and Yahoo both do this.
Let's not bring up that kettle of worms again.
I find it annoying.
I live with three other roommates who would love to read my mail.
Who do I complain to about this?
Well, complain to Gmail.
Complain to Gmail and let other people know about it too.
Complain to your landlord.
It's those roommates that are the problem, not Gmail.
Well, complain to them too but yeah, it's a privacy thing on many levels.
One more thing.
I enjoy Taco Bell but the service sucks at times.
Okay, more times than not.
How does this relate to anything?
Okay, we're going to get there.
We really will.
So I thought I would intervene and call Taco Bell to complain but this did not work.
So I took matters into my own hands.
I made up some professional looking yum business cards, YUM.
Does anybody know what that stands for?
It's the company that owns Taco Bell and the rest of the world.
How do you know this, Mike?
I know a lot of things.
You know the company owns Taco Bell?
I know a lot of things about corporate America.
We're going to get you in jeopardy.
Do you know what YUM stands for?
I think it just stands for yum but I'm not sure.
All right.
Anyway, I made up some professional looking yum business cards, walked in,
and told them I was a QC director, quality control, for YUM and Taco Bell slash KFC.
KFC is part of the whole conglomerate.
I told them we will be sending plainclothes workers in to check on the quality of the food and service every now and then.
I then proceeded to order a meal.
Let me say it was by far the best meal I've ever had at Taco Bell.
Can Taco Bell do anything to me for doing this?
Signed, Dilbert.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, if you have the guts to go through something like that, more power to you.
Yeah, you kind of lied to them.
If he paid, I can't imagine what for.
Yeah.
What did you force them to do exactly?
Be better at what they are supposed to be doing?
Apparently they prepared the food better but isn't it all just come out of a big tube?
Yeah, but maybe they didn't do something else to it that they normally do.
It could also be that the – what's the guy's name?
Dilbert.
Dilbert's perception of the food was raised without the thing itself actually being raised.
That's also possible.
Like, you know, the soda tastes better coming out of a glass bottle than out of a little can.
It does.
Yeah, I agree too.
But people say I'm imagining things.
Okay.
Some more email here.
And our phone number, 212-209-2900.
We'll be taking calls in just a couple of minutes.
Gosh, all nice stuff.
Should I read some hate mail?
Hate mail's good, right?
Yes.
We have a peeping Tom.
What's this?
The British peeping Tom, closed circuit TV workers were locked up in jail for spying on a naked woman in her own home.
Well, tell us about this.
How'd they get into the naked woman's home?
Well, there's closed circuit TV cameras all around London, all around England, frankly.
In Liverpool Crown Court, a guy named Mark Summerton, he's 37 years old, from Liverpool, he admitted voyeurism and attempted voyeurism.
Attempted voyeurism.
Attempted voyeurism.
He was sentenced to four months in prison for spying on a naked woman in her own home.
But again, how did he get the camera to point?
You can just turn cameras and point to houses?
Well, many of these cameras are on these pan-tilt zoom mounts, so you can remotely control them.
And zoomed right in on her inner window.
And this woman says her life's been almost ruined, her self-confidence has been entirely destroyed by the thought that prying male eyes have entered her flat.
And the only reason that this has even come out is because of oversight within that organization?
Clearly.
I mean, they weren't caught red-handed by anybody else, right?
I don't know how they were caught, actually.
That's very hard. How do you catch a camera looking in your house?
First of all, was this camera, did it have some kind of infrared or something, or was it just a regular camera?
Probably wouldn't need infrared. It was pointing in a window that had lights on in the apartment.
True.
And over a period of several hours, she was videotaped cuddling her boyfriend before undressing, using the toilet, having a bath, and watching television dressed only in a towel.
It seems like they were able to follow her all over the house, then.
Well, maybe you could all see this through a big window.
Okay. Well, it certainly underlines the fact that when you have these forms of technology introduced, they will always be abused.
And that goes for the people who scan you going through the airports and get your full body makeup by doing this, people running closed circuit cameras, people listening in on phone calls, everything.
It always will be abused.
And whether you ever find out about it, it's very doubtful.
These are government workers, British government workers.
So generally in government situations, you don't seem to have very much oversight.
It's just no oversight anywhere.
In government and corporate use of these technologies, there's just not a lot of oversight.
So there's going to be abuse.
Okay. We have hate mail here.
Yay.
It took a little while to find it, but I did find some.
We always get hate mail.
And we welcome it.
We welcome all the hate mail.
We don't get enough, though.
We don't get enough.
There's not enough hatred out there.
Hopefully we can whip some up.
OTH at 2600.com.
Dear Emmanuel and others.
Others in quotes.
You've recently read several letters and taken phone calls from people who don't want you to keep talking about your leftist politics, yet you continue to do so to the utter dismay of your core fan base, good, honest Americans who don't care what you think.
Oh, yes.
Those are the good, honest Americans.
You see, in America, we have the freedom of speech and the freedom to think whatever we want.
And once we've decided what we want to think, you have no right to try and convince us otherwise.
Is this real?
Is this a real letter?
It's in the United States Constitution that you claim to love so much.
Do us all a favor and go back to what you're good at, hacking voicemail boxes.
I haven't done that in a while.
Like most others, I only listen to your show because the beepy, boopy sounds of the telephone pad are more melodic than so-called pop music played on other stations.
While I don't have any solid statistics, I know for sure that the number of listeners to your show has swiftly declined since you turned into a bunch of Marxist propagandists spewing forth your views onto the airwaves.
It's great.
Whenever you have conversations with these guys that say these things, there's always this large number of people that agree with everything they say.
But you never hear from that group of people.
They're always there someplace.
I talk to all these people.
They all say the same thing.
These people agree with me.
You know, if you're out there, say something.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We'd like to hear from all of you.
Have you ever heard the song, We Want the Airwaves by Elvis Presley?
Well, some punk stole it, but he would give you a swift crack on the jaw if he heard your gibberish.
If you feel the need to get into politics, just let that guy who said he likes white people talk.
We like him.
That would be you, Jim.
Emoticon and Rusty McRightwing.
You know, there's something about this letter that makes me think that it might be tongue in cheek.
It's going to be hate mail.
It's going to be real hate here.
Okay, continuing.
New letter.
I tend to catch episodes of Off the Hook a bit late due to downloading the shows rather than listening to them live.
And, of course, you can download them at www.2600.com slash off the hook or just subscribe to.
I was going to say you can even configure your software to download it automatically.
How would you do that?
You would subscribe to our RSS feed.
What kind of sorcery is this?
It's the new way, I hear.
All right.
What do people do?
They get a program.
It's called something else, but it used to be called iPotter, and it downloads stuff.
And there's a lot of other software that can do it, too.
Okay.
And, of course, we don't like to use, or you don't like to use the word podcast.
This listener writes in, Mike Hickey writes in and says,
Since the term podcast is somewhat hated and automatic download is a little over the top, how about the term autocast?
Yes, autocast.
The blurb from the Oxford Dictionary stated that podcast is the combination of iPod and broadcast,
but I agree that it doesn't necessarily make sense since there are a large number of users whose podcasts never make it onto an iPod.
The term autocast could be the combination of automatic download and broadcast, and this does make sense.
Whether a person is using iTunes and an iPod or Yahoo or any other RSS-enabled audio player,
they are still automatically downloading the broadcast.
What do you think, Mike?
I guess.
Say it.
What?
Say the word.
It? The word?
No.
You don't even remember what the word is.
The word is autocast.
Maybe there's hope.
I like the word.
You like the word?
Hope is in July.
Well, there is hope.
Maybe.
All right.
Let's read another letter.
212-209-2900.
I tend to catch episodes of Off the Hook a bit late due to downloading the shows rather than listening to them live,
but I wanted to offer my two cents on a topic that has been cropping up recently.
The supposed quality issues Off the Hook has been accused of suffering.
Some people object to political discussions on the show.
That seems silly to me because the show has always been about how hacking relates to the outside world.
I've downloaded a gazillion episodes, and from what I've observed,
it's never been about the technical angle or the latest Unix exploits.
What I miss and what was a larger part of the show in the past are interviews.
When was the last time FiberOptic was on the show?
Joy Bubbles.
Let's get John Lee or Woz on.
Why not get DVD John to do an interview?
I liked how you got Rob to talk about Skype on the January 4th show.
That was a nod in the right direction.
Well, actually, you know, I agree with this person.
I think that we should have more interviews.
But you know what we had last week that we didn't have normally?
We had two hours.
We had more time.
What we do every week is we read through the news.
We read some letters.
We take some phone calls, and the hour is up just like that.
We got a lot of good feedback from that show too.
A lot of good feedback, and the time went so fast.
If we had known that we were going to be on for two hours,
we would have prepared some interviews and had more people on,
and it would have been really cool.
So, yeah, I know time is limited here at the station,
but anything is possible.
Anything is possible with listener input, so keep that in mind.
And we did get a lot of good feedback, and it was a lot of fun.
Ironically, we were only prepared for what, a half-hour show or less?
We were prepared not to be on at all because they told us we were preempted
because of the Supreme Court hearings.
Anyway, another thing that has been bothering me is that you talk about
how worthless various draconian anti-terrorism laws are
but don't offer any constructive ideas.
Surely, as New Yorkers, you have to admit there is at least a smidgen of risk,
and it is the responsibility of state and city officials to protect its citizens.
How could they do so without infringing on our rights?
If random bag searches on the subway is a dumb idea, then what is a smart idea?
We're hackers.
We're probably smarter and more resourceful than the average citizen,
so why not use those wits?
These are only suggestions.
I still love the show and download it every week.
It's truly admirable.
You could stay motivated to do the show for so many years.
Signed, Glutton.
Well, Glutton, do we have any suggestions on a smart way to do things?
Yes, Mike.
Well, I mean, it's pretty clear that what they're doing now is so ineffective
that if they didn't do it, I'm pretty sure we'd be about as safe.
So that's one answer.
Another answer is, of course, to go after the root causes of terrorism
and consider what makes people do what they do and proceed on that basis.
I saw the film Munich last week.
Did you?
It's a bit of a propaganda piece for Israel, but other than that,
it was kind of an interesting timepiece.
One thing that I saw, one thing that I learned watching this movie
was the number of terrorist attacks that took place in that period of time.
People were hijacking airplanes, taking hostages in airline terminals.
It was like an episode of 24.
It really was.
Things were happening almost every day, assassinations, all kinds of things.
None of that seems to be happening now,
except, of course, for the occasional bombing of countries that we do.
But the kinds of terrorism that were so common back then have become rather rare.
There's a lot of kidnappings in Iraq.
There's some kidnapping, but it's a war zone.
It's a war zone.
Those kinds of things are going to happen there.
I just wonder how much of this is really urgently needed,
like we're being told it's urgently needed.
We survived the 1970s, and we didn't see this kind of hysteria.
We didn't see homeland security back then.
We didn't see our rights being infringed upon quite to this degree.
So we're told certain things are crises, and we believe that.
So I think maybe we should question whether that's really true.
I think one of our strong points has always been pointing out security measures which don't work.
This is very obviously a case of a whole bunch of security measures that don't work
because in our day-to-day lives, people are defeating it.
Absolutely.
Here's one more letter, then we'll take some phone calls.
Dear 2600 crew, I was quite grateful that Off the Hook finally got two hours
and being preempted so many times.
With the two hours, the show didn't feel so rushed,
and you were able to play around somewhat.
Yes, it was lots of fun.
Using Skype is a great idea on the show.
I hope you can include guests from around the world,
and it will sound like they're in the studio as well.
Let's see if Rob and other European characters will be willing to stay up into the wee hours for this fun.
I would very much look forward to the feature where a guest could be interviewed.
I didn't understand the problem Bernie S. had with Skype.
Was it the seven-second delay or something like that?
He sounded much, much better on Skype than on his tinny 8KBBS Sprint connection.
This was from the letter T.
Bernie, the problem you had basically was that, as we described before,
you were getting echo, and that drove you mad.
It wasn't Skype's fault.
It was my hearing you on my cell phone and you hearing me over Skype,
and my hearing myself fed back into my Sprint PCS cell phone,
and it was very disconcerting because I was hearing myself a second later.
There's also the issue that you can't hear us through the computer.
We have to figure out how to wire the board into the computer.
The issue here is not having the equipment to do it
because what needs to happen is the output from the board is going back into Skype,
so Bernie's hearing himself because that's what's coming out of the board,
so we need to subtract Bernie's voice from what's coming out of the board,
and we just don't have the equipment right now.
Well, the board isn't feeding into the computer. That's the problem, right?
If it was, we would still have to subtract Bernie.
Okay, so we have to figure out how to subtract Bernie.
People have been trying to figure that out for years,
and we might just succeed on this show.
Okay, 212-209-2900. Let's take a phone call.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Go ahead. Speak up.
Thank you. Thank you for taking my phone call.
No problem at all.
Okay, I'm having a bit of a problem.
I'm in the market for what they call as a call filter, landline call filter.
I've contacted a few websites,
and many of them have told me that the item has been discontinued,
and others basically say that they've got to go overseas to secure the product.
I, right now, am dealing with Verizon in a call,
I believe it's call intercept and caller ID,
and I'm getting a recurring rate,
as those that have the service know that it's recurring,
and I would opt to buy the call filter as a one-time purchase with an outgoing message
where only those calls that I need to speak to can get through once they know the code.
Can you offer some help as to where I can reach out?
I don't think you can get this on a retail basis on the street,
or I haven't seen it in a catalog.
You can.
Okay, go ahead. I'll just listen to your remarks
because I've just had a hell of a problem over the past year in trying to secure the product.
Okay, you listen to us over the radio.
Yes, I do.
Okay, we'll answer you on the radio then.
Bernie, go ahead.
I don't have the information at my fingertips,
but I was just researching recently this same thing,
and there is a box you can buy.
It's not terribly expensive.
It was well under $100, I think.
It's basically a caller ID decoder,
but you can program it with all the phone numbers that you only want to hear from,
and it will only allow your phones to ring in your house
when you get calls from numbers that are on your approved list,
and others can either get summarily dumped
or listen to some message saying that you don't want to hear from them or whatever.
Is that what you're looking for, or did the guy hang up?
Well, he said he listened to us over the radio,
but I see that as being a good idea
but also being very easy to kind of like bite you in the ass afterwards
because let's say somebody loses their phone
and is calling you to tell you that they lost their phone
and they're calling from a different number,
you're never going to hear from that person.
That's true.
It's not a fail-safe thing.
People could have to call you from a pay phone for some emergency,
or you never know where they're going to be calling you from.
There's nothing on the market, obviously,
that will identify the caller's voice and say,
hey, this is the person you want to hear from.
There's other devices in the market you can buy
that will force the person calling to enter a four-digit security code or something
that will allow the call to go through and then make your phone ring,
but then you have to give everybody this four-digit code
or however many digits it is,
and that's kind of a hassle.
Yeah, it reminds me of 800 numbers way back, maybe 10 years ago,
where people were given four-digit pins,
and if you didn't have that four-digit pin,
it might even have been a two-digit pin,
then you wouldn't get through to the person
and you wouldn't be able to talk to them.
It's hard to figure out what it was, though.
I think MCI had the service for college students
so they could call home collect or something like that.
We've turned into a society where every phone call
is some kind of combative type of action,
and if you call somebody,
remember you used to get a wrong number and it wasn't a big deal.
Now, if you call somebody by accident,
they're going to call you back and demand to know why you called them,
and you better have a good reason why you did that,
and that could turn into all sorts of complications and unpleasantness.
Now, Bernie, you're getting that service.
You said you were looking into it. Is there a reason?
It's not a service. It's a product.
No, I was just researching a different...
I have always been looking just to satisfy my curiosity
if there was such a device out there, and I finally found one.
And if this listener who just called us, this caller,
emails us at oth at 2600.com,
I will be happy to reply to him
with a link to where he can buy such a device.
Bernie S. doesn't even have a telephone,
so he couldn't possibly get this device.
That's right. I haven't had a landline for 10 years.
It's amazing.
And when you see Bernie S. in person,
he's gotten so used to this that his voice actually sounds like this.
Yeah, it really does.
People recognize me at that Dayton Hamp Engine by my voice,
not by how I look. It's very strange.
All right, let's take this phone call. Good evening. You're on the air.
Ah, yes. You...
Oh, you have a hum.
I have a hum? Oh, well, let me...
Oh, there. It's gone. What would you do?
I was on speakerphone.
Okay.
Yeah, you're asking about all these problems with,
well, for example,
I live in Staten Island.
I went to the ferry terminal today,
and they had recurring announcements on the PA system,
and they said one of the first things I heard was,
don't disturb the dogs, they're doing their job.
And I said to myself, you know,
I mean, it's going to be real trouble.
Well, that's the dog disturbing you.
Well, precisely.
But to get serious,
the only thing I can say is,
to answer your question,
tune in to WBAI on Tuesdays from 5 to 6,
and you'll find out what's going on,
because the totalitarian state is well underway.
What program is that?
It's called Taking Aim,
with Ralph Sherman and Maya Schon.
Okay. All right.
Well, thanks for promoting our own station on the air.
And let's see if we can get some more calls here.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Go ahead.
Oh, you gave up.
This is the sound of somebody who's had enough
and has moved on.
Well, good evening. You're on the air.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Yes, go ahead.
Okay, you know, you've got to move faster than that.
I'm sorry. Good evening. You're on the air.
Boy, should I try again?
This is insane.
Let's try this one.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Go ahead. You're on.
Yes, it's you.
I wanted to comment regarding the track phones.
Okay, go ahead.
Basically, I'm in the cell phone industry.
People who buy those,
especially the track phones,
they send it overseas.
There's a model that's like $25 cheaper in the U.S.
than overseas.
Same thing happens with the T-Mobile.
The pre-paid, pre-activated one
that one of the gentlemen bought,
basically, it was from one of these track phones.
So people are sending them overseas to save money
or to commit terrorist acts?
No, to make money.
You're a dealer. You're a small dealer.
You buy a lot of these from Target or whatever.
I do this myself.
I go and I buy, you know, 50, 100 at a time.
We take it. We activate it.
We take the SIM cards.
We activate those and sell those separately.
The phone goes separately.
So you're giving us a legitimate reason
why people would buy so many of them?
Oh, yeah.
Okay, all right.
And this is done all the time.
I'm glad we heard from you
because this definitely answers a question
as to just what was going on.
It makes perfect sense.
And one more thing.
How come you guys don't get two hours all the time?
What do we got to do to get you guys to two hours?
You know, contact the station, contact management.
I'm not saying, you know, be nasty or anything like that,
but if something works, let them know.
If you think that we do a good job, let people know.
Very good.
All right, thanks for your call.
That's going to just about do it for us
because the personal computer people are here
and ready to take on the next hour
as they do every week at this time.
This has been Off the Hook.
We'll be back again next week with another exciting episode.
Until then, write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We'd love to hear from you.
Let us know if any weird things are going on
in the world of high technology, low intelligence and whatnot.
Until then, Manuel Goldstein.
Have a good night.
If the kids are united
They would never be divided
Just take a look around you, what do you see?
Kids with feelings like you and me
Understand him, he'll understand you
For you are him and he is you
If the kids are united
They would never be divided
If the kids are united
They would never be divided
If the kids are united
They would never be divided
If the kids are united
They would never be divided
If the kids are united
They will never be defunded
I don't want to be rejected
I don't want to be denied
And it's not my misfortune
That I've opened up your eyes
Freedom is given
To speak how you feel
I have no freedom
How do you feel?
They can lie to my face
But not to my heart
If we stand together
This will just be the start
If the kids are united
They will never be divided
If the kids are united
They will never be divided
If the kids are united
They will never be divided
If the kids were united
They would never be divided
www.bainewyork99.5fm