It's high level of cesium and now there is in Scotland where in one area
sheep still cannot be bred for meat. There may be many more as these hot
spots are still difficult to trace. I'm Danuta Szafraniec, Free Speech Radio News, Warsaw.
You've been listening to Free Speech Radio News.
Hello.
And you're listening to WBAI in New York. The time is two minutes after seven o'clock.
Time for Off The Hook.
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 a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you
on this Wednesday evening. And I want to welcome everybody to the program today.
With us today is Jim. Familiar sayings to everyone.
Excuse me? There's a reason for that. It's in one of the articles in the magazine.
Somebody will know what that is. And it won't be me. Mike is also here.
I'm just going to say hi if that's all right.
Please. Redbird.
Good evening.
Arseny.
Hi.
Walter.
Hello.
And Bernie S joins us from down there in Philadelphia.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
And we have a bunch of news stories. Of course, we'll be taking your phone calls and updating
you on all sorts of important news items and events and things like that. You guys hear about
what happened up in Westchester. New York's Westchester County has enacted a law designed
to limit identity theft by forcing local businesses to install basic security measures
for any wireless network that stores customers' credit card numbers or other financial information.
It's a lot of conditions going on in there. It'd be nice if they just had some kind of
like requirement for security of wireless networks, period. But I guess if you keep
credit card information, you're supposed to be extra safe.
I don't know. This is sort of interesting. I think it's a good idea. Well, it's an okay
idea. But what would really solve these issues is if the companies were actually liable,
if their customers' information was taken and abused. That would work much better than this
$50 fine or whatever it's going to end up being for a technical violation as opposed to actually
being liable for the effects.
Well, it says the law requires businesses offering internet access, which includes,
say, coffee houses, hotels, things like that, that they post signs warning that users
should have firewalls or other security measures. Yeah, so I guess-
Well then.
I don't really know what's going to be accomplished by this. According to
the County Executive Andrew Spano, there are many unsecured wireless networks out there,
and any malicious individual with even minimal technical competence
would have no trouble accessing information that should be kept confidential.
It seems to me like they might have heard that New York One story a couple of weeks ago,
where anything on wireless can be intercepted, and that's how identity theft happens. It's not
quite that simple.
I have a comment on this.
Go ahead.
What Mike said actually makes a lot of sense. And not that what he says doesn't always make
a lot of sense, but it sounds like this law was drafted in order to prevent companies
from being liable, from being held liable. Because if they make notice, like a posted sign,
like a new press tagging sign or something saying, our wireless is not secure, use a
firewall and all this, then that could be used as an argument in court to say, well hey,
we warned them that it wasn't secure if they didn't have all this stuff.
Then, you know what I'm saying? I think this law was actually drafted to prevent
commercial operators of wireless Wi-Fi networks from being held liable.
What's interesting is that there's a whole lot of ways where this data could get into the hands of
someone who shouldn't have it. And Bernie, like you mentioned a couple weeks ago,
sending account numbers on the outside of postcards or how many times have we heard of
something being lost in the mail or a truck being intercepted or something like that.
There's a lot of ways. There's a lot of possible weak links. And it just seems like this is an
arbitrary one that they're choosing to try to prevent a problem. And it's obviously not the
correct way to approach it.
What would be the correct way to approach it?
Like Mike said, hold the companies liable.
But how exactly do you do that? I mean, how does that practically work?
It helps to have it embodied in law saying any company that operates an insecure wireless network
where the users can prove that their information had been stolen
or copied as a result of that insecure network, then they're liable.
You could bet that that would create a whole lot of more secure networks right away.
I mean, I think you could even write a more generic law saying that
the privacy of your customers and business partners is your responsibility. You don't
have to say if the disclosure occurs because of an insecure wireless network. You say,
no, if you're incompetent or whatever, and your customer's data gets out,
then it's your fault and your customers can sue you.
Even better.
Well, I think we're talking about two different things here. The wireless network that we use
in a coffee shop or something is profoundly different than hopping onto the wireless
network of some corporation that you're not even supposed to be able to access,
which is behind a firewall, right? I mean, that's something that they should be liable for.
All right. So I just want people to get confused thinking that identity theft is happening
when people go to bookshops or coffee houses or any place that has open wireless networks
for you to use.
Although it is possible. It is certainly possible. However, it's not the only way it can occur.
It's possible, but it's not as clear cut as it's being made out. It's not as simple.
There are many other ways to do it as well.
Certainly.
And I think that identity theft, as identity theft vectors go, I think Wi-Fi networks are
pretty low down on the list as far as methods go.
Unless you're incredibly stupid. Unless you do everything in the clear
and broadcast all your information without using any sort of very simple security precautions.
I don't think it's a question, excuse me, of being incredibly stupid. I mean,
it's the responsibility of these banks. If I'm online banking and all the banks do this,
my connection to the online bank should be encrypted without any intervention from me.
Right.
Now, one counter to this is a couple of online vendors, which I have come across,
and there's certainly a lot of them who request credit card data and other sort of banking data
in the clear. And it's obviously people who are not well-versed in web design and using SSL and
all this stuff just sending clear credit card information to their web servers and logging
it that way instead of going through proper SSL channels. And it's still possible to have
your data stolen over unencrypted wireless networks. However, there are also a lot of
other ways.
Right. You have to do something profoundly stupid like not use SSL. And of course, that should be
the responsibility of whatever organization is encouraging you not to use SSL and transmit your
credit card information. If you go to an online store and you don't see that little padlock on
the bottom of your browser locked and they're asking for your credit card information, those
people should be reported to somebody, at least to consumers, so that they can beware of using them
because they're not safe.
Right. And it comes down to, on a technical level, just educating yourself with basic knowledge to
know when you're using SSL and when you're not and when things are encrypted and how to properly
ensure that certificates are correct and all this other stuff.
All right. But just using the wireless network in and of itself is not a security risk.
On the subject of Wi-Fi, interesting story coming out of Florida, the village of St. Cloud.
Apparently, they were supposed to have free internet access throughout the city's Wi-Fi
network, and it's not quite working out the way it was supposed to. More than a month after St.
Cloud launched what analysts say is the country's first free citywide Wi-Fi network. The 28,000
person Orlando suburb, individuals there are still paying to use their own internet service
providers as dead spots and weak signals keep some residents offline and force engineers to
retool the free system. Everyone's happy they were going to have it, but I don't know if they're
happy right now, said one resident. The same troubles with the small town's big internet
project could be lessons for municipalities from Philadelphia to San Francisco considering
similar networks. What do you think, Bernie? I think a lot of these cities are going to
start having technical problems when they try to roll these networks out. I'm here in Philadelphia,
and our mayor has been pushing for a citywide free Wi-Fi network, or after everybody starts
using it, then he's going to up it to $20, $30 a month. I really don't trust most local governments
to setting up, one, a working wireless network that's citywide, let alone one that's secure.
I just don't think most city governments are capable of pulling off something of that nature,
even though it's not that difficult. You ever talk about government running something
really well thought out? It's typically an oxymoron. You also got to consider that the
government actually probably wants to make money from this, and it's very profitable to get a large
amount of data from users for marketing purposes. It's an incredible privacy risk if you don't like
people finding out what you do, when you log on, where you log on from, things like that.
Aside from, obviously, your credit card number could easily be stolen, or your identity.
I mean, just to respond to Bernie's point, I think there's some
insight in noting that governments may or may not be able to do this competently,
but the only entity that I'm sure could do a worse job is these sorts of large corporations,
if you look at how they provide internet access. I mean, if you look at municipal electricity
companies, which exist around the country, by and large, they provide a better service
at a lower cost than their corporate competitors or colleagues. I wouldn't be so certain that
the municipality is going to do any worse a job than Verizon or whomever.
In Philly's case, and you make a good point, in Philly's case, the city is really
outsourcing the whole project to Earthlink. It's the same thing. You have to throw the
worst of both worlds. You've got a corporate entity running the network under the direction
of a government agency, which is sort of like compounding the errors.
Well, it'd be interesting to see. Philadelphia, you have a project. San Francisco, I believe,
has a wireless project. I don't think anything in New York is official, is there?
There are some, not government-sponsored.
No. There's New York City Wireless people. I guess that might be more effective to have
people organize themselves and just get this done.
And it's interesting because you can have networks where people voluntarily put up a
node or something like that and volunteer some of their bandwidth to support free networks like this.
Okay. Here's a fun story. A 15-year-old Buffalo girl was charged last weekend after she admitted
making about 1,000 fake 9-1-1 calls from her cell phone and six 9-1-1 prank calls from a
church telephone. They say that she could be a copycat mirroring the highly publicized case
of Warren Merced, the prime suspect in nearly 1,000 fake 9-1-1 calls from his family's Westside
home. I think this is the Westside of Buffalo. I'm not sure about that, though.
Merced, his wife Felicita, and their oldest son, the whole family involved in this, have
been charged after the phony emergency calls allegedly were made from the family's 15th
Street apartment over a period of several weeks earlier in the year. Police do not believe the
two cases are connected. The girl, who cannot be named because of her status as a juvenile,
was charged with two counts of misdemeanor falsely reporting an incident for allegedly
making six 9-1-1 hang-up calls from a phone inside an East North Street church.
The girl is going to be appearing in family court. That should be entertaining.
It sounds like a copycat to me, said the central district officer, David Rodriguez,
who was one of the arresting officers. She didn't give us a reason for doing this. She
was very disrespectful, and she said that she was going to keep calling 9-1-1. My god,
this is like a nightmare story. You ever hear of something like that?
A thousand times?
Apparently, she's claiming she called it a thousand times.
Wouldn't you get bored?
I don't know. I guess walking around with a cell phone, you can just keep doing this over and over
again. During the calls, the girl rarely reported that a false incident had occurred. She mostly
taunted 9-1-1 dispatchers, laughing, joking, harassing them, and making snide remarks,
such as, you can't catch me. Sometimes the prank calls lasted several minutes. At least one
spanned about an hour. What kind of prank call spans an hour? That's like getting to know people
really well.
Because as a 9-1-1 operator, you have to stay on the line and make sure that the call actually
isn't an emergency.
At some point, when they're laughing and joking and making fun of you, I think you can say,
there's probably not an emergency here.
But I'm sure in some cases, that could probably be an indication that there is actually something
wrong.
I don't know. I don't know. It's one thing I've never done. I've never pranked 9-1-1. I've
called 9-1-1 by accident as a kid. I was scared to death. I don't know very many people who do,
because it is profoundly stupid.
Yeah, it is kind of a stupid idea.
I know stupid people too, but I guess the two have never connected.
Anyway, she admitted making the 9-1-1 calls from the church, and she admitted making about
1,000 fake calls from her cell phone. Her mother declined to take the girl home, so she was sent
to the youth detention center. She had no respect for authority. When she was being processed,
she was so unruly, kicking the table and spitting on the floor, and she had to be handcuffed.
It's interesting to note that she thought that she could not be caught
from calling 9-1-1 from her cell phone, which, of course, is not the case if the cell phone
is registered to her or someone in her family could trace back to her.
But of all those analog cell phones that are still out there you can pick up at flea markets or
garage sales or whatever, like the bag phones or any old analog cell phone,
you can still call 9-1-1 on those without the phone being registered with a carrier,
because the FCC still forces carriers that can still handle analog amps calls to carry 9-1-1
traffic. So you can make untraceable 9-1-1 calls with an analog cell phone, which you can get for
like $5 or less at a flea market or garage sale. I don't want to give anybody ideas about making
prank calls, but it's a very useful idea for people to keep if they don't want to pay a
cellular phone bill. Just have one of these old analog bag phones in their car, plug it in the
scar lighter and make emergency calls when you have to, and that way you don't have to pay any
monthly charges. But you most certainly will be traced if you use a digital cellular phone,
if you use a landline. Star 67 is not going to work, it's not going to block.
They will find out where you are and they will come for you. That's what they do.
Apart from the fact that you're tying up like an important resource, right? So it's a silly thing
to do. Yeah, there's other people's time you can waste. Here's something out of New Jersey,
in an effort to throw a video, it's like we've read this before though, a video dragnet around
hotspots, law enforcement officials will position 35 surveillance cameras throughout the capital
city by Friday, aimed at snagging drug dealers, gangs, prostitutes, illegal dumpings, and other
criminal activity. Don't look for a map of where the cameras are located though, that's a secret.
And even if you do spot one of the camera bubbles hanging from a traffic lighter pole,
don't be so sure. It's not a dummy model of the wireless seeing eyes that will scan 360 degrees.
The city will be installing several of the decoys in addition to the 35 working cameras.
That doesn't make any sense. I mean, wouldn't they install lots more than just several decoys?
I imagine they're a lot cheaper. It doesn't make sense because in the end, it's probably more of
a labor cost to install these things than it is a technical cost to actually install a real camera.
It just doesn't make sense that they would install dummies like that.
But like I said, they install a hundred dummies because that's very cheap.
Installing only several and having 35 working cameras makes no sense at all.
And this is the second time we talked about this with New Jersey, wasn't there a Jersey
City story not too long ago? Yeah, there was.
There's more related to this about New York City. Do you have that?
Well, I want to finish this one first. Oh, okay.
But basically, Trenton is joining a number of locations throughout the US and Europe
where police departments are relying on video surveillance to catch criminals.
The United Kingdom, this is no surprise, is the largest user of video surveillance
with an estimated one camera for every 13 people.
London reportedly has 500,000 cameras around the city with 6,000 located in the subway system alone.
And of course, last July, those cameras helped to identify the four suicide subway bombers.
New Orleans has 200 cameras.
Chicago is linking 250 cameras to the 2,000 that monitor public housing.
And Baltimore is spending $2 million for a network of 90 cameras in the touristy Inner Harbor area.
Philadelphia Mayor John Street also wants to bring a video surveillance system to his city
through a referendum next month.
Bernie, you know about this?
He's been talking about this for years.
And there's a lot of public opposition to it down here with good reason, I think.
And I really don't think that they're that...
I talked to some federal park police here who installed a really high-powered video camera
in a powerful zoom lens in the bell tower of Independence Hall, of all places.
Yeah.
Backersank places.
And I was talking with the park police after a local newspaper article was written about it.
And they were really upset that people knew about it,
because it was easy to spot if you knew what you were looking for.
And I said, well, wouldn't you want people to know about it?
They said, well, how are you going to catch criminals otherwise?
I'm like, well, shouldn't this be a deterrent rather than something that should be secret?
And they just didn't understand that deterrent might be more important.
But I don't think that this city in Philadelphia is going to roll out a widespread
video surveillance system anytime soon.
Well, it depends how afraid the people are.
It depends how people think that they're in danger and they need to be watched all the time
to keep from being victimized.
But let's have a little contest here.
How many cameras do you think there are in the subway of New York City?
Anyone want to guess?
No?
Lots.
Yeah, come on.
Give me a number.
A thousand.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Did you read this article too?
No.
I have a comment from an event that occurred a while ago.
Hang on, hang on.
In New York, there are a thousand subway cameras.
Another 2,100, though, are set to be in place by 2008.
And another 500 have been placed throughout the city.
Additional 3,100 monitor the city's housing projects.
So we're pretty well covered here.
Now, there was an event maybe two or three weeks after I got a ticket for,
quote unquote, turnstile manipulation at the Union Square station.
What the hell does that mean, turnstile manipulation?
This was a while ago when I was doing the MetroCard project and playing with the turnstiles
and all this other stuff.
And we discussed it on a previous episode sometime.
But a couple of weeks after that, there was an event where a gang
beat a whole bunch of people.
I forget exactly how many and what the specifics of that were.
But this was at the same bank of turnstiles that I was supposedly manipulating turnstiles at.
And they used the cameras to give me a $75 or $80 ticket or whatever it was,
but not to catch the gang that was beating up on the people at the subway.
Did they decline to catch the gang?
No, but the event happened and the gang got away or something.
It was very silly, but they had the cameras there.
So they're selectively using the cameras for when it benefits them.
Well, that would be something to tell the victims that, by the way,
they had cameras here and they didn't catch these guys.
It's pretty obvious where the cameras are.
Well, maybe they ran out of film or something.
I just want to clarify.
You said that Baltimore is building a network of 90 cameras for $2 million.
Let's see what that story says.
New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore spending $2 million for 90 cameras
in the touristy Inner Harbor area.
That's $20,000 per camera.
Yes, but it's in the touristy area.
It's expensive to put a camera up in a touristy area.
You can run a television show with less expensive cameras.
Well, yeah, that's true.
That's one way to get people like us.
Those are scripted.
But yeah, this is what I said last week that we better get used to this.
At least one moron wrote in not understanding that that meant that
I'm not saying that I'm in favor of this.
I'm saying that, yeah, this is the way we're going.
And unless we do something about it, we're going to always be watched.
And we will get used to it because things change.
Your rights get lost very gradually,
but they get lost very profoundly over the course of, say, 10 or 20 years.
This is the letter.
Boy, this letter really gets my goat.
Your acquiescence to Big Brother spying slash tracking of our cell phone location
is truly frightening, not to mention disappointing.
May I be so bold as to ask you the purpose of your program?
Is it to do away with the United States Constitution?
Oh, yeah, you nailed us.
There still is a Fourth Amendment,
even if you and George Bush and company serve to ignore it.
Cell phone companies and the government do not have the right to track my location
without my permission, period, signed Patrick.
Well, thank you, Patrick, you moron.
No, you just didn't understand anything I was saying here.
We're not saying that, yeah, this is the way it should be.
This is the way it is.
Wake up.
And by standing up on your soapbox and saying,
you don't have the right to do this,
you're not doing anything to prevent them from doing it anyway.
And they will.
And they are.
I would suggest homework for our listeners.
Go to the library, not a bookstore, unless it's a really good bookstore,
but I would suggest the library.
First, the dictionary.
Look up the words satire and sarcasm.
Then go to the librarian and ask for examples of satire.
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal, is one that may be good.
There'll be other examples.
Read them.
Then listen to the show after you've read them.
But I wasn't being satirical.
I was being cynical.
I was just saying, this is how-
You were being sarcastic.
No, it wasn't sarcastic.
Sardonic, maybe.
All right, I'll accept that, perhaps.
But the point is-
It went over his head.
Listen, by me saying our rights are going down the toilet,
does that mean I'm flushing?
No.
It means I'm pointing it out, all right?
Wake up.
And stop fighting each other.
We have to deal with this because a lot of bad things going on.
Okay, one person wrote in with a very-
Well, actually, somebody called in-
Actually, someone wrote in last week,
and someone else wrote in to agree with them.
As per your request in the 419.06 program, that's last week,
let me add my vote to change your phone call answering process
to the version in which someone answers all calls that come in
and puts the acceptable ones on hold for your later accepting on the air.
I, too, have the type of long-distance phone service
that will not let the phone ring indefinitely until it is answered.
On the times that I've attempted to call in,
I was never able to get through to you,
even if I had a legitimate ring,
since it was never answered in that brief period.
This would be remedied if calls were answered and put on hold,
either with the program audio fed to those on hold
or with some audio fed to us, i.e. music.
This should help eliminate the calls you answer and then reject.
It's not foolproof, but it would reduce those annoyance calls.
I'm one of your listeners that listens each week
on the WBCQ shortwave relay, signed William from St. Louis.
Well, William, there are a couple of problems with this,
but we are going to try something.
The problem is that we don't have somebody to answer the phone
and put you on hold and screen the calls,
and we don't want to do that.
It sounds a little too staged if we know who's there
and what they want to say and things like that.
But I think we can do an experiment.
We can put the calls on hold and pick them all up
at the same time, I think.
But that means you're going to be paying for the phone call.
What we can do at, let's say, 7.40, 40 minutes past the hour,
if everybody calls in at that time,
we'll start putting people on hold,
and then we'll just go to those people.
But you got to stay on the line.
You got to play ball here.
Stay on the line, and we'll just go to the phone calls.
And that way, if you're calling from far away, you'll be on hold.
You might not hear anything, though.
I'm not sure if there'll be audio.
Is there a message on hold or not?
I don't think there is.
You would think that WBAI would want to have WBAI audio on hold, but...
Well, I don't know.
I'm not on hold.
I don't usually call on hold, so I don't know.
I've been on hold since the station moved down here from 35th Street.
Ironically, at 35th Street, it did broadcast,
or it did give over the phone what was going out over the air.
But here, it's nothing.
You've tested it.
Are you on hold?
I've been on hold for other shows.
Yeah, let's put Bernie on hold right now, and you can report back to us.
Hang on.
OK.
Bernie is now on hold.
Wait a minute.
No, you're not on hold, because...
I'm not on hold.
I'm sorry.
Hold on.
I got to un-press this button, I guess, and then put you on hold.
Dang.
There.
Bernie's on hold now, for sure.
Anything anybody wants to say about Bernie?
Oh, you know, that Bernie.
We only have 32 minutes left.
Everything we can say can't go over the air.
All right.
Let's go back, and he'll never hear that.
OK, Bernie, what did you hear?
Yes, I heard you guys almost with no interruption.
Oh, really?
So this is VI Audio.
But when you're picked up, just for our listeners to know, there's this beep sound.
Well, everybody who calls in has heard that sound, all right?
That's nothing new.
OK.
But for people who want to call in tonight, be aware.
You'll hear the station audio, but you'll know that you're being picked up when you
hear this beep sound.
Right.
And we'll also be yelling at you, say something, please.
OK, now, that's at 740.
So that gives everybody a fair chance of calling at the same time, in case you're listening
on delay.
And some people on the internet, it's a couple of minutes.
So at 40 minutes past the hour, call the number, which is 212-209-2900.
Don't call before then, because it'll probably time out, and you'll just waste your time.
Does somebody want to call now, though, just to see how long it takes for a regular cell
phone connection to drop?
Because I'd kind of like to know, just for the record.
Why can't people just redial?
Because, I don't know.
I guess you'd get through, but probably all the lines would be taken, and you'd get a
busy signal then.
Or you'd wind up all the way down at the bottom of the list, you know.
Let me know when that starts ringing, and I'll start trying to ring.
OK, I've started the timer.
And you tell me again when it stops ringing.
I'm going to read a couple of letters here.
Due off the hook, I was walking around downtown Culver City, California, just after dinner
at a movie, and I came across a really neat box on the corner of a main street in the
downtown area.
It had some really interesting art painted on it, so my girlfriend and I took a picture.
Right as she took the shot, I heard a loud click within the box.
We thought it was interesting, so we took a picture.
By now, I noticed a small semi-circular plastic window and realized it was the flash on the
camera that was causing the clicking.
Again, we tried it, and another click occurred, and then all of the lights on both sides of
the street flipped off.
I guess my question is, what is the use of this?
Aren't streetlights timed?
Stopped.
Already?
That was only 40, 45 seconds.
My goodness.
Continuing here, why would the trigger be sensitive to a bright flash of light?
Well, and this is from Dave, and he also says, this reminds me of my childhood.
We used to hit streetlights with aluminum bats to turn them off, but that's probably
unrelated to this.
Does anybody have an idea what that thing could possibly be?
Jim, you're waving and gesticulating.
It's an Opticon, is it?
Is it not?
It's one of those handy-dandy devices that some guy recently got a ticket from in Colorado.
No, that was a traffic light.
Those are streetlights.
Streetlights?
All the lights on both sides of the streets flipped off.
I imagine that means that the lights turned off.
That's what I think he's talking about.
He's saying streetlights.
He's being unclear as whether it's traffic lights or streetlights.
If those are streetlights, I don't know.
Bernie, what did you get from this?
It sounds dangerous if there are traffic lights.
I don't think traffic lights can be turned off.
No, they could be maybe switched to a different color with one of these Opticon devices.
Not to be confused with a Panopticon, by the way.
When I was a kid, I remember I would go out with a big flashlight that kind of took five
D-cells, and I pointed it at the top of the lamppost on my block.
And if you shined it there for about maybe 20 seconds, the light would turn off because
the light would think it was daytime.
So it's kind of cool.
I've done that locally here.
There's a streetlight right outside my window, which is really annoying.
Some nights when I have a migraine headache or something, I don't want to deal with a
light.
I have a green laser pointer, which you're all familiar with, I think, that I point at
the cadmium sulfide cells at the top of that streetlamp, which are more sensitive to green
light than they are red light.
So you can't use a red laser pointer.
They work with red.
Yeah, but not as quickly, apparently.
But this one doesn't.
Anyhow, because it has like a green lens on it.
Anyhow, I'm able to shut off the streetlight and get some sleep because the bright light
is not in my window.
Also, because you've blinded half of Philadelphia.
No, it's just pointed at the streetlight.
Nobody can even see the damn thing.
The darn thing.
Okay.
Again, they can write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
We do like hearing from you, most of you anyway.
And we have a street address, too.
And I think we're ready to add another line.
And I think Redbird, you've earned this.
You've earned to read the actual next line in the address.
And I think we're going to give you the street address.
Okay.
Can you handle that?
Do you want to practice it first?
120 Wall Street.
Good.
Good.
That's right.
All right.
But remember, Walter still gets 10th floor.
Right.
All right.
Okay.
So the mailing address to send letters to is off the hook.
You're going to be okay?
You're cracking up there.
This is a very important line here.
It's a very serious part of the show.
I think I'm good.
All right.
Because we can give this to somebody else if it's too much responsibility.
I want you to give me a shot here.
Off the hook.
Care of WBAI.
120 Wall Street.
10th floor.
New York, New York.
10005.
That was good.
That was professional.
That's what it should be like.
Okay.
We're progressing.
Without a script, no less.
Okay.
Arseny and Mike, you're going to have to fight out for the next roll.
I think it's okay.
I'm against this whole thing because I think people can't understand what the address is
when like four people say it.
Why would that be?
We get letters all the time.
They're not computers.
They're not voice recognition type things.
They can understand when many people talk at once or at least in quick succession.
Okay.
This person writes in, one difference I know with Morse code dialects is an American Morse,
the character C is did, did, pause, did.
Whereas in international Morse, it is da, did, da, did.
Thank you, Jim W2JC.
Let that be the last we ever speak of this.
Hi there from Dundee, Scotland.
I just wanted to congratulate you on being the only radio show I consider listening to
as the stuff over here is the usual pop rubbish.
I received 22.4.
That's the winter issue of 2600 and have poured over it for the past week.
I'm considering a series of articles for your fine magazine related to the history of computers.
In other references to the historic, I stumbled on the first recording of off the hook.
I am aware of to refresh your memory.
It introduces the expensive and in my opinion, silly notion of chat lines.
It also featured a manual, unlocking the phone lines and making our own chat line at a local
rate.
This yields three questions.
Number one, how was this made possible?
I would love a basic explanation of how this was done.
Of course, if WBAI were annoyed by this, I understand if you ignore this question,
no, we're not annoyed by this.
It's a very good question, but it's also a very simple answer.
Back then, we had a very non-complicated phone system.
It just was 10 buttons.
We pushed all 10 buttons.
That's all.
And doing that, doing that, pushing all 10 buttons at once, we were able to hook 10 people
together or was it seven people?
I'm not exactly sure how many we had.
But actually, we were able to do that without sounding too bad.
The phone we have now, I think we can only hook three people up at once.
It's called a modern phone system.
Wait, wait, this phone system, I don't know what it is, but modern is not a word I'd use
to describe it.
Well, yeah, but I had italics around there.
It was sarcasm.
It wasn't even a phone system.
It wasn't sarcasm.
Well, I guess that was sarcasm.
But it was also cynicism.
Number two question, will you do this again?
Oh, I think we just answered that.
It would be fun to hear this happen again sometime.
I'd love to be able to do that, but with the current phone system, I know of no way
to have more than three lines on at the same time.
If there's a way, someone please tell me.
And number three, could you congratulate a member of 2600 staff for me?
I believe she identified herself as Mary.
And due to a problem with PayPal, she arranged to contact me when it suited me, not the company,
which is a nice touch, and help me as fully as possible with the inquiry.
She seemed to understand me.
And despite the long distance call, which would have been expensive, she still spent
time answering inquiries afterwards.
Give the woman a pat on the back and a big thank you to your customer service team.
Thank you for reading this.
Signed, Ghost Dog.
And thank you, Ghost Dog.
Thank you, Mary, for all the good work you do for us.
Many people write in to say that.
You know, we're on the Yahoo store, and we just started taking PayPal recently.
And I went through, and I checked the ratings, and we are so far up there.
We're like in the top half of the top 1% of all Yahoo stores in customer satisfaction.
And that's got to say something.
Not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but yeah.
Perhaps Mary can be an inspiration to the rest of the customer service team at 2600.
Well, yeah, I think maybe she is already, you know.
Was that cynicism, Mike?
I don't know what it was, but we'll find out later.
It was good cheer.
Okay.
In just under three minutes, we're directing people to call 212-209-2900.
And what's going to happen at that point is Mike is going to reach over and
take all those calls and put them all on hold.
I don't know how to do that.
That's why you're going to learn.
I'm not exactly sure.
I think what you do is you press the button down, hit hold, press the button down, hit hold,
and hope that Bernie asks.
We'll put him on hold too, so he doesn't get disconnected to start with.
There's an event announcement I want to read before we do that.
Okay.
But I'm just giving the number out so people know and call up, and we'll do that.
And stay on the line.
This next Wednesday from 6 to 8 p.m.
at the Jefferson Market Branch Library, which is 425 6th Avenue at 10th Street.
Even Moglen, who is the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation,
is going to be speaking on free software and free media.
So I think that sounds interesting.
What time?
You're directing people away from our radio show.
What time is this?
6 to 8 p.m.
Well, so it ends in 20 minutes, Mike.
Next week.
Oh, okay.
May 3rd.
Tonight.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
May 3rd.
All right.
Yeah, you are directing people away from us.
Yeah, but they can put an earphone in.
We can be online.
We can what?
We're online.
People can listen to us after the fact.
Yeah, but it's not as good.
It's true.
It's always more fun to listen to us.
I have something else that has time constraints.
Okay.
Make it fast, then.
Bruce Schneier, who's an old friend of the show, expert on cryptography and security,
has a contest.
The easiest URL to get to it is tinyearl.com slash O-L-G-R-S.
This is for terrorist plots that you might see in a Hollywood screenplay.
He's looking for unlikely things that may be true yet.
It's rather fascinating reading in parts.
It ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous.
And it ends this Sunday.
So anybody interested should read this.
Enter.
Help security.
Help Hollywood.
Help yourself.
Okay.
And it's just about 10 seconds from when those first calls should start coming in.
And I haven't seen any come in yet, which is good, because that means people aren't jumping
the gun.
But in 4, 3, 2, 1.
Okay.
So people...
Oh, my.
Oh, my.
Look at all those lines lit up.
None of them have lit up.
I don't understand this.
That was sarcasm.
Maybe people are...
No, that was lying.
People are calling up, and maybe it's just not connecting, because so many people are
calling at once.
That's got to be the reason.
All right.
So now...
But if I answer it, they'll come on the air.
First, you have to take Bernie out of VIP mode and then put him on hold.
Otherwise, he won't go on hold.
And once again, in case you've forgotten the number with all this repartee,
it's area code 212-209-2900.
Okay.
So what you do now is you pick up each line and immediately put it on hold.
And just...
Oh, wait.
I know what I'll do.
I'll pick up the phone so they don't go over the air.
Well, then I turn them down.
Oh.
I am capable of turning it down.
You know, just do that really quick.
And if you just got picked up and I put it on hold, stay on the line.
Don't hang up, because then we'll just get a dial tone or something, and that's no fun.
And the whole experiment will be a failure.
This way, especially if you're calling from far away,
that means that you won't fall prey to the trap of greedy phone companies
that only let you ring for 45 seconds and then disconnect.
Hopefully, we'll get a whole new crowd of people.
How many people do we have so far?
We have a whole bunch.
We have nine.
We have nine?
Well, if we have nine, that means we're full.
We have eight.
Okay.
You want to just leave it at that?
Because I don't know if we'll get through eight.
I'm going to put Bernie back.
Put Bernie back.
Put VIP back on.
Look at that.
Okay, Bernie, are you back with us?
I'm back.
All right.
Sorry if that was scary, but we just had to do that.
I was afraid.
Okay.
I don't know how I managed to press so many buttons on the phone without losing Bernie.
Hopefully, you actually picked up on calls.
All right.
Let's try one.
Okay.
How did you retain control of the phone?
Go ahead.
Push a button.
Hello.
Go ahead.
You're on the air.
Speak up.
It's you.
But they don't know which one.
What do you mean they don't know which one?
Everyone's hearing the same thing.
Yeah.
I'm talking on the phone.
They should be listening to their phone.
Right, but they're all hearing you.
Oh, I see.
That's the problem.
Why isn't everybody talking?
Whoever hears themselves will know it's you.
Everybody who's on hold now, say hello.
Okay.
Let's try another call.
How do we possibly get around this?
Now we know why we didn't do it before.
This is one reason.
Yeah.
Being on hold is a real pain in the ass because we have no way of communicating with this person.
All right.
I'm getting rid of this one.
Yes.
Try another one.
If you've just been disconnected, that was you.
That's how you know.
I'm going to try this one.
Hello.
Good evening.
You've got to say hello.
You're on the air.
Danny from the Personal Computer Show here.
So wait a minute.
Not only do we not get somebody from far away across the country,
we get somebody from the next program on this radio station.
Actually, no, I'm out of town right now.
But listen, I missed the first 10 minutes, I'm afraid.
Did you get to do the Verizon versus Global Maps issue?
No, we did not.
All right.
Any of you see my email about it?
Doesn't ring a bell.
Tell us.
Okay.
Let me waste some time.
This is a biggie.
Global Maps is what's called a CLEC, Competitive Local Exchange Carrier.
They have phone numbers all around the country.
They have a little bit of their own network.
They also camp on other places.
They are used a lot by groups like internet service providers to give you
local phone numbers when you dial up.
Remember dial up modems?
A lot of people still use them.
Anyway, very, very few ISPs have their own modems anymore.
They contract out to these big regional or national carriers like Global Maps.
Verizon sued Global Maps, and there's a bit of a...
I couldn't make head or tail out of the news coverage.
But the net result was Verizon said Global Maps owed them a lot more money.
GNAP is not paying.
Verizon shut down.
The Global Maps exchange is in the Massachusetts area, which means all these...
Well, for computer folks and then all the people using dial-up modems
that were going through GNAP...
And again, they're a wholesaler.
So you don't know what your own company was using, your own ISP was using.
You are now out of luck.
And Verizon is going to extend this, no doubt, to all the others as soon as they
can get their little paws out there.
Is there anything you want to direct people to do?
Oh, yeah, I sent you some info.
If you can put it up on your website and hopefully the PC radio show after you
will have a bit more info.
Okay.
I'm afraid, though, I'm not down there myself.
Okay.
We'll make sure that they say something.
Thanks.
Thanks for your call.
And let's see if anybody else is out there.
And good evening.
You're on the air.
They hung up.
You see, this is exactly what we asked them not to do, and they hung up.
And of course, you know, people hear that burst of static.
That means they're the ones that are on the air.
That's one way to know.
Did they hear it now or did they hear it when I first picked them up?
As soon as I push this button, they should hear it, right?
But we already pushed the button.
Oh.
It's very confusing.
Bernie, when we brought you back from hold, did you hear the burst of static again?
No, that time I didn't hear it.
I didn't know what I did hear it.
I did hear it.
I forgot I heard it.
It sounds like this.
Yeah, it's worth calling in just to hear that.
It is pretty cool.
But I got to go over here.
All right.
People keep hanging up.
You see, this is the problem.
Let's try another one.
Let's go up here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Go ahead.
It's definitely worth waiting for.
OK, where are you calling from?
I'm calling from Westchester.
OK, that's not too far away.
But I guess do you usually not get in?
Yeah.
OK.
That's what usually happens.
I have to redial and redial and redial.
I'm just glad my contract allows me after 7-3.
OK.
All right.
So you finally got on.
What's on your mind?
Uh, I'm calling for a cat who works at work where I work.
He's a guard.
And we were talking about broadband phones
and getting real Internet access on a handheld machine.
What do you what what two or three possibilities are there?
What are you referring to using Wi-Fi?
Oh, no, like a real broadband phone.
I don't know what that means.
I mean, to cruise the web on a phone in your hand as if it was a computer.
Yeah, some most of the carriers, I think, offer that.
You can get it at various rate plans from any of them.
I know someone who uses it from Verizon, and it seems to work relatively well.
Because the Verizon was the one you were talking about as the first real true high speed phone.
I don't know if the speed is higher or lower than any of the others.
I haven't done a lot of research into it.
I've never seen anything that would necessarily constitute broadband integrated into a phone.
I've seen services offering, for example, PCMCIA cards that use their network to
deliver broadband speeds to a laptop, for instance.
But on a phone, there's really no need for broadband.
Well, some of these mobile web browsers are on like PDA type phones.
They're okay.
I have some information on this.
Go ahead, Bernie.
What the wireless carriers call broadband really isn't broadband.
It's like with Sprint PCS, which uses the CDMA technology that Verizon also uses in
a 3G implementation called EVDO.
Don't ask me what it stands for.
That only gets you about 700 kilobits per second, which is way faster than dial-up,
but it ain't broadband.
So it's sort of a lie what these wireless carriers are calling broadband.
But yeah, there's some phones...
You got to also know that some of these carriers will...
Even though the phone itself supports broadband connectivity, they disable it in the firmware.
The Sprint was disabling the broadband connectivity or high-speed EVDO web connectivity
on the Trio 600 phone, or maybe it was the 650.
And then some hackers figured out a way to unlock that aspect of it so you could plug
the phone into your computer, in your laptop, and then surf the web at semi-broadband speeds.
So you got to research this stuff online before you commit yourself to a particular phone
or service to make sure you can do it.
Okay.
Listen, thanks for your call.
We got to move on.
Is 2600 a good place to look?
Is 2600 a good place?
You mean the magazine?
The webpage.
The webpage?
Not so much for that kind of thing, but we could certainly run articles on this kind of thing.
Thank you again.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
All the best.
All right.
Let's go to this person over here on hold.
Good evening.
You are on the air.
Hi.
Hello.
Hi.
How did you know we were talking to you?
I heard it off of air like that.
You did?
Okay, good.
Yes, I did.
All right.
Where are you calling from?
I'm calling from Greenwich, Connecticut.
My name is Brian.
Okay.
And is this a better way of calling in for you?
Well, I've never tried to call before, so I don't know how hard it's been to call in.
But it's very confusing, you know, with hearing all the voices at once type of thing.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Well, it's sort of like you just listen to the radio though, right?
A little bit.
But you don't know if it's you.
And I didn't realize that puff of air and stuff would actually come up because you never heard.
Some people seem like they didn't hear it or not.
Right, right.
So what's on your mind?
What I want to talk about was I'm fairly new to computers and the internet.
But a year or two or three, I've been doing it.
But I heard about there used to be, and I figure you guys are the only ones that might know about
it, used to be something called Fidonet.
And it still may exist.
Yes.
And for like BBS boards.
And apparently it's dying out, but it's not connected to the actual internet.
It's kind of like a hidden net or something.
They use it a lot in Europe.
And in Russia, I know they use it a lot.
Do you know any group like they're using, you know, maybe like an old Commodore computer
club or somebody around town that's actually still uses it around here?
I've tried looking on the internet, but I just can't get much information about if it
still even works in the U.S., you know?
There are some Fidonet nodes still in the U.S.
I don't know any off the top of my head.
But if you do, if you just do a web search for Fidonet nodes, you might find some phone
numbers that you can call.
And there are some Fidonet internet gateways as well, which is kind of interesting.
But you just have to do some research online and find them.
And then you can get offline and get on Fidonet.
I have a, I've actually been looking a lot.
But I just, I found a few that were like out in Arizona or California.
Apparently, they divide up the U.S. into a few regions or zones type of thing.
Yeah.
And then it, the nice thing about Fidonet, well, the only way it could possibly work
is that, you know, on a certain scheduled time, I don't know, it was once a day or more
than once a day, each node would call another node and download the messages for that node.
And so forth.
So it was, you know, it wasn't real time like the internet.
You know, these messages would, you wouldn't get them until the batch had been transferred
from one node to another.
So you'd send mail to somebody in one part of the country and they would get it the next
day.
Yeah.
Which back then actually seemed like a pretty good deal because after all, a postal letter
would take a lot longer than that.
And it worked great.
All right, I'm going to try to research it a little more.
If you guys hear something, I'd appreciate if you spoke on the show and I do subscribe
to your magazine.
I don't understand much of the stuff that's in there.
I'm trying to learn a bit, but a few of the articles I'm able to comprehend.
Okay.
Well, that's a good average.
Thanks.
Thank you for your time.
And if you do hear something, I just kind of would like to try something, you know,
a little offbeat and see if it works still, you know.
Okay.
Well, let us know what you find out.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Yeah, Fidonet, the good old days.
I might want to explain what that is because I bet a lot of our listeners have absolutely
no idea.
I think Bernie kind of just did with as far as the way Fidonet transfers messages from
one system to another.
It's basically a big network of BBSs.
Yeah, Bulletin Boards.
Yeah.
So that's what we're referring to.
Yeah.
They were not connected in real time.
No, no, no.
And then they would call each other and transfer data in batches to each other.
And it was a way of sort of a bucket brigade technique of getting messages from one point
to another, to another, to another, to another, until eventually your message got to where
it needed to go.
And it was a – it wasn't real time, but it worked and it was very effective and I
kind of miss it.
And the reason why it was cool is because back then, people would call a BBS.
They'd call a number.
They'd wait for it to be not busy for hours at a time sometimes.
And then when they finally got in, they'd either be one of one line that they were using.
They'd be one of maybe three users at the most.
And that's it.
They were on that Bulletin Board.
That means they weren't on another Bulletin Board.
They weren't connected to the net.
There was no net to connect to at that time for consumers.
And this allowed you to connect to more than one board, not in real time, however.
And another reason was cost.
And because at that time, long distance calls were a lot more expensive than they are now,
overlapping local regions could call a BBS from – one BBS from one region could call
another BBS from another region where if someone were to call the first BBS, it may be a local
call but not a local call to the second BBS.
But from BBS to BBS, it was a local call.
So it was a very cheap way of transferring messages all over the place in sort of like
this daisy chain of BBS calls.
And some people even thought we were getting away with something by
transmitting information without paying for it.
Okay.
We have a couple more calls on hold.
So let's see if they're still there.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, how are you?
I'm all right.
How about yourself?
I've been here for 12 minutes.
12 minutes.
13 minutes.
Where are you calling from?
Bulgaria.
Bulgaria.
Oh, you win the contest.
Wow.
So I guess you never would have gotten through ordinarily then.
Well, no.
That's not true.
I talked to you once from off the ship, if you remember.
But way back when we were going around the world.
I do remember.
Yeah, I remember a call like that.
We met you.
I forget your name.
We met you at the What The Hack, though.
Awesome.
And everyone at the OTH IRC channel says hi.
Well, hello to them.
They're on the internet.
So we're running out of time.
So tell us quickly what's on your mind.
I was just wondering if you got my email from last week,
which is not related to the show.
I sent it to a manual at 2600.com.
I was wondering if you got it or...
I don't remember it.
If it got clobbered by some junk mail.
It's possible.
Why don't you send it again?
I do get a ton of email.
And hopefully...
Is that your only question?
Well, yeah.
Okay.
Will we be seeing you at Hope?
I don't think so.
You know how your government wants
fingerprints in exchanges for visas?
We've heard, yes.
We've heard rumors of that.
Well, actually, I remember we were discussing
how they stopped taking fingerprints on entry points.
But in order to obtain a visa,
you have to give them fingerprints.
That's why they stopped it at airports.
Well, I wish I could make it to Hope,
but I don't think so.
Maybe 23C3 or something like that.
Well, here's my question.
Is the fingerprint the only reason
why you're not coming to this country?
Well, no.
I also don't have the budget.
Okay.
Well, that's a better reason,
because I have a feeling...
And again, this is not me advocating this,
but I think this is where we're going as a world,
as a planet.
I think it doesn't matter where you go.
They're going to want your fingerprints everywhere,
whether you're going to a building,
whether you're going into a country,
whether you're going into your own house.
But that's just me.
Listen, thanks for calling.
Hopefully, we'll see you again over there
or over here at some point.
And we have one more call,
which I don't know if they are still there,
but we're going to try and see
if there's a person here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Go ahead.
You're the last person.
There's nobody there.
You know, if you hear me talking right now,
there's only one person on hold,
so you might as well say something.
And not you, Bernie.
No, they're not.
Oh, who's that?
Say that again, whoever said that.
Bernie, was that you?
Did you say something?
I just said, OK.
Thank you, Bernie.
Thanks for confusing me.
There was another voice in there, though.
I think it was an echo.
I think we're echoing over this person's poor phone line.
Oh, well.
All right.
Well, that's it.
All right.
We tried to be patient here.
OK, so we tried that.
What do you think?
Should we do it this way from now on?
It's very confusing.
It's a pain in the ass.
I'll tell you that.
And not that many people seem to think that they would.
One person said that he got through
that wouldn't ordinarily.
We'll do it occasionally.
How's that?
Every now and then.
OK, this has been off the hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein saying good night.
We're back again next week.
Going out with this is kind of rare that I play the same song on both shows.
But this one is just so cool and so topical and so catchy.
Let's all take a listen.
And on Friday, I stood up and said, I don't appreciate the speculation about Don Rumsfeld.
He's doing a fine job.
I strongly support him.
But what do you say to critics who believe that you're ignoring the advice of retired
generals, military commanders who say that there needs to be a change?
I am the egghead.
I'm the commander, I'm the decider.
Baghdad city policemen sitting pretty little targets in a row.
See how they die when shrapnel flies, see mothers cry.
I'm lying, I'm lying.
I'm lying, I'm lying.
Yellowcake uranium, imaginary WMDs.
They classify and fax, exposing secret agents, taxing for the wealthy, leaving all the poor
behind.
I am the egghead, I'm the commander, I'm the decider.
I'm the decider.
And I decide what is best.
And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense.
Sitting in a White House garden, talking to the Lord.
But my thoughts would be busy, busy hatching if I only had a brain.
I am the egghead, I'm the commander, I'm the decider.
And I know the speculation.
But I'm the decider.
And I decide what is best.
And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense.