The Colorado ACLU is now working on trying to get the State Attorney General's Office
and Public Utilities Commission to investigate telephone companies for providing subscriber
information to the National Security Agency.
The remaining three Colorado peace protesters will be released from jail this week.
For Free Speech Radio News, this is Maeve Conron in Boulder, Colorado.
You've been listening to Free Speech Radio News, from KPFK in L.A., I'm Marta Bogado.
And it's WBAI in New York, 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 call.
We couldn't get much worse.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
Bum diddly bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum diddly bum!
And good evening to everybody, the program is Off The Hook.
Manuel Goldstein here with you.
Joined by Bernie S. in Philadelphia.
You weren't expecting me to say your name first, were you?
He's not even there.
Bernie, are you there?
I'm here.
Oh, there you are.
Okay.
No, I wasn't.
I was listening to the seven second delay.
Oh, okay.
Well, catch up.
And joined also by Mike.
Hi.
Is that Walter over there?
Hi.
How are you doing?
You're in a different place.
I can't hear you.
You can't?
I'm right to you.
What are you talking about?
You're a few feet away from me.
You have the headphones around your neck.
Put them over your ears.
That's how they work.
They're bare wires sticking out from under the console here.
All right.
Well, you're going to have to rewire the console then.
It's not the first time you've had to do that.
I don't want to short out the radio station.
Of course you do.
But continuing with our introductions.
Redbird.
Good evening.
Redhack.
Hello.
And Jim.
I'd like to say panda.
Okay.
It's been an active week.
All sorts of fun things have been going on.
But I think first and foremost we should get some business out of the way.
And I think a lot of people might know what it is that we're talking about.
I don't.
Well, now you do.
Oh.
Yes.
This is our old number station mystery that appeared on various phone numbers.
It's not really a radio station.
It appeared on phone numbers.
It drove everybody crazy trying to figure out just what it was that this meant.
And on and on it went.
A total of, I think, five or six of these things came out.
Actually, no.
I think it was more like nine came out before it was finally revealed this weekend at the DEF CON conference
that this whole thing was some kind of experiment put on by, get this, members of the Los Angeles 2600 meeting.
And it just goes to show how far-flung we are when we don't even know what the other 2600 meetings are up to.
But yes, it's quite an interesting experiment that they ran here to basically, I guess,
talk about or learn about how information can be spread unwittingly through other people.
Is that how you interpreted it, Bernie?
Yeah.
And it was an amazingly successful experiment, I thought.
They were simulating a shortwave spy numbers broadcast, which had been going on for decades and hobbyists listened to.
I happen to belong to a group of hobbyists who monitor these broadcasts, and we were on a mailing list.
And I saw a post about this on the mailing list and brought it to the attention of this show.
Now, they posted it.
Yeah, they posted it themselves.
Right.
One of the people there said, hey, guys, can you figure this out?
You found it.
And then we talked about it on the radio, and that's when things started to explode, from what I understand.
Then it got picked up by Slashdot and a bunch of other sources.
And then we almost messed the whole thing up by making a fake one of our own.
And I believe, Mike, you have a prepared statement to read to these people.
The problem is that the prepared statement I have is encrypted with a one-time pad, so it could really say anything at all.
Oh, my God.
You're not even going to express any kind of regret for your actions.
It was your idea.
I just want to make it clear.
It was your idea.
Nobody else at this show or at the magazine had anything at all to do with it.
In fact, we pleaded, we begged you not to go forth with it.
Is that so?
Yeah.
A short memory you have there.
Yes.
But you did it anyway, and it was a promotion for the Hope Conference.
I guess it kind of annoyed those people because, well, first of all, understand, we had no idea what was going on.
This could have been spies from the Soviet Union, for all we know.
That's what we're trying to get messages out of from a time warp.
So, basically, we figured we'd never find the answer to any of these crazy numbers going out there.
So, yeah, it was revealed.
It was revealed this past weekend.
In fact, all of the messages have now been decrypted or revealed at least.
I have a question about that, actually.
Yeah, go ahead.
One of the things that they said was that most of those messages were encrypted with a one-time pad.
How do we know that the decrypted message was actually the message that they encrypted?
Because they didn't look like one-time pad encoded messages.
Did you look recently at their site where they basically said what all the messages are?
I looked at the initial articles, and some of them had some of the messages up that were –
Yeah, all the messages are up now.
What they have is basically – if you go to projectevil.org, that's the organization that was behind this,
they will explain how each message was decrypted.
According to – they had a competition for the 10th message.
They had it at the conference over the weekend.
Someone named – well, some organization or person, I don't know, TOT won after a marathon 16-hour and 20-minute session.
They say the code was – and I'm probably going to pronounce this wrong – a Vigenere cipher.
You guys familiar with this?
Vigenere.
Vigenere, yeah.
Okay.
Well, you're nodding, Jim, so why don't you tell us what that is?
I'm not that familiar with it, but it's –
So you simply place letters in a different place?
Yeah, it's –
Where do you think –
It's a classic cipher used by hand-decrypted messages using a one-time pad.
It's been used for decades and decades by intelligence operatives in various Muslim nations.
Well, basically, isn't it – excuse me.
It's an extended Caesar cipher, isn't it, where the shift is based on some sort of passphrase?
It's not necessarily a proportional shift.
It's a one-letter-for-one-letter substitution.
In the traditional Caesar cipher, you may have plaintext A becoming a B, plaintext B becoming a C,
or extended over, plaintext A becoming an M, plaintext B becoming an N.
Vigenere will make it a bit different.
A may be M.
Right.
B may be Z.
Okay.
And from what I understand, you need some sort of a phrase to get it started.
It's basically – no.
Basically, it's like a grid, right?
You have – in one direction, you have every kind of Caesar cipher, right?
So then – and those would be, say, sets A through Z, right?
So – and each one is a different shift.
So, like, A would shift at 1, B would shift at 2, et cetera.
And then your passphrase is used – so, say, your passphrase is cat.
So, first you'd use the alphabet that shifted 3, and then you'd use the alphabet that shifted 1, things like that.
That's how it works.
Get a load of the hint they gave at the DEF CON conference to break that tenth one.
When DEF CON is online, there is no hope.
Oh, that's brilliant.
So, yeah, it's all been figured out now.
The one thing I would like to ask them – it really was pretty cool.
If we had known – if we had known that it was something inside the community, we definitely wouldn't have messed with it in any way.
But we figured that this might never be figured out.
It probably was something real.
What I would like to find out from these guys – and they explain how they got the music.
Basically, someone's iPod played the music, and they thought it would be a good bridge.
It certainly is.
I would like to know, though, how did you get the numbers?
I think there was an explanation posted where they just basically said they called people at random and got numbers.
That doesn't sound quite right.
These sound like, I don't know, automated, bizarre numbers of sorts in some cases.
Sometimes they sound like random people, I suppose.
But there must be – there must be and exist in some place recordings of the original where the person was saying a string of numbers, perhaps.
And I'd sure like to hear that, especially the person saying 3.
Because doesn't the person saying 3 sound like they're saying P?
Doesn't it sound that way?
Couldn't you get a better recording of the word 3?
That's bugging me. It really is.
We'll have to file a complaint.
Hey, listen, listen.
Zero.
One.
P.
Zero.
Five.
It sounds like he's saying P.
Zero.
One.
P.
Zero.
Five.
Six.
Zero.
Five.
Zero.
Six.
So now the point of – sorry.
Yeah, go ahead.
It's worth noting that the Project Evil people are not at all upset with us.
They emailed me back and they said we couldn't possibly have known what we were walking into, so it's no big deal.
Well, they got upset.
They got upset at one point when we put out the fake one.
I know they were upset then, and rightfully so.
But again, nobody had any idea what was going on, so we were just having a bit of fun with it.
It is interesting, though, and very ironic that it's all inside basically the same community.
And I just wonder if we drove the spy agencies completely crazy with all this.
So now the point of it is not – because it was using a one-time pad, obviously no random person could decrypt it.
So the idea was that other sources would publish the numbers or publish the audio so that then somebody could anonymously get the information.
Is that the idea?
Gosh.
I don't even know.
I mean basically you're getting other media.
So you have this number, but you're getting other people to kind of distribute what the message is,
and then your agents can pick it up anonymously without calling the number.
I suppose.
Yeah, it's being passed around by all these unwitting people.
Right.
But you've got to somehow make it known to those people.
But there are all sorts of little Easter eggs that are inside too, which is also on their site that you can find.
But my favorite, my favorite is if you take the first letter of every city that the phone number appeared in,
you get New York, San Francisco, Atlanta.
Those were the first three.
What are the first letters of those cities?
NSA.
NSA.
Then Little Rock, Ottawa, and Lubbock, L-O-L.
And then the final ones, Orlando, Milwaukee, Fort Lauderdale, Gulfport, O-M-F-G.
Nicely done.
Okay.
That's www.projectevil.org.
Emanuel, one last thing.
Yes.
I got the impression these guys were thrilled and very pleased that we broadcast this on the air,
which, as some of our listeners know, is also a somacast on international shortwave at 50,000 watts from the state of Maine,
which is heard through North and South America, which is perfect for this type of message
The whole inspiration behind this message were these spy numbers broadcasts that originally appear
and still continue to this day appear on shortwave.
So it's just sort of like a full circle thing that nobody ever expected, and they were very pleased with that.
And, of course, you can't hear real spy stations if you turn on your shortwave radio and just sort of wander around.
There's no set broadcast schedule, as far as I know.
They just appear.
Between 2 and 13 megahertz.
If you tune around between 2 and 13 megahertz in the evening, you're likely to stumble on one of these things,
and they're really spooky when you stumble on them.
Yeah, they are.
Sometimes they're just computer voices reading things.
Sometimes they're in foreign languages.
One thing is for sure, the chances of you cracking it are next to nothing.
Right?
Right.
Okay.
So let's move on to things that we can understand.
Cell phones have been banned inside the five branches of the First National Bank in the Chicago area to enhance security.
Even using a cell phone in the bank's lobby may result in the person being asked to leave the premises.
We ban cell phone use in the lobby because you don't know what people are doing.
They're talking on the phone.
Yeah, but you don't know what they're talking about.
They could be talking about all sorts of things.
That's according to Ralph Oster, a senior vice president.
Cell phone cameras are also a worry.
Oster said there have been holdups in which bandits were on the phone with lookouts outside while committing bank robberies.
Who was that one woman who did that?
She was on the cell phone bank robbery.
With her boyfriend.
That wasn't the lookout.
I thought he was.
No, no, no.
That was her boyfriend.
He wasn't even helping her out?
Advising her.
Advising her.
What do you mean advising?
He wasn't on the lookout.
Telling her how to rob a bank.
Shouldn't he have done that before she went into the bank?
That's my thought.
So that raises the question.
If you're a bank or a banker and you know that some idiot is going to come in who doesn't really know how to rob a bank
and is going to ask for instructions on the cell phone, it's a question.
Which is worse?
Do you want them to be totally clueless and maybe screw up and kill somebody?
Or do you want them to get some advice while they're in the bank?
I'm still flabbergasted that she would call her boyfriend while she's robbing the bank to ask for instructions on how to rob a bank.
That's the conversation you have in the diner the night before.
All right?
That's how that works.
Maybe you do.
Regardless, I think a much more intelligent way to deal with this is for banks to have cell phone jammers inside them.
That way, if there is a holdup, they can simply press a button and all of a sudden communications are out.
And if you need to make an emergency call and your phone system has been, say, sliced in half, you have the ability to do that.
Aren't those illegal?
Maybe not in banks because anything goes in banks apparently.
I disagree with your assertion that a sensible solution is to install cell phone blockers.
I think the more sensible solution is to get rid of this stupid policy.
Oh, yeah.
There's that too.
But then how do you stop people from robbing the bank over the phone?
I would say it's more of a concern that they have the gun than the cell phone.
That's true.
It's funny how the gun never seems to be brought up as an issue here.
Her boyfriend never had a gun, never showed a gun, just threatened the teller.
Well, yeah.
You can threaten somebody with a cell phone too, I suppose.
Cell phone guns.
That's the newest thing.
You've seen the commercial where the cell phone is a crime deterrent.
Go ahead.
Try to steal my wallet.
In a related story, West Suburban Bank, based in Lombard, Illinois, barred customers wearing hats in January but has not moved to silence cell phones as of yet.
Okay.
Is that really in the article?
Yeah, it is actually.
It really is.
Well, if you're talking into your hat, are you asking for advice on robbing a bank?
There's just so many ways to communicate with people.
You can't control all of them.
Okay, scary news of the day.
Actually, I originally thought this was worse than it is, but Google has reached a deal with News Corporation, owner of MySpace.
I didn't know News Corporation owned MySpace.
Oh, yeah.
That's Fox.
It's Rupert Murdoch.
Fox owns MySpace.
No, no, no.
Rupert Murdoch.
No, it's Fox News Channel.
That's what it is.
No.
It's Sky News, Fox News Channel.
They're all the same.
No, they're not all the same.
They're subsidiaries of NewsCart.
Yeah, but they're all basically the same brain.
No, it's sort of like Disney doesn't really own ABC News.
Yeah, but Karl Rove is behind MySpace is the point I'm trying to make.
It's tentacles of an octopus as opposed to the brains of an octopus, okay?
But it's still the same damn octopus.
All right.
Anyway, Google has reached a deal with News Corporation, owner of MySpace, to pay at least $900 million in shared advertising revenue and become the exclusive search provider for the popular online hangout.
I originally thought that they were buying them, but I guess being the exclusive search provider is a pretty powerful thing to have.
Considering everyone is putting their entire lives on display on MySpace and Google is basically getting information on everybody's lives in other ways, it's a marriage made in heaven, right?
The thing is it's not even just people anymore.
There are all sorts of things ending up on MySpace.
There are movies ending up on MySpace.
If you look at commercials now, you'll see URLs at the bottom are MySpace links instead of just standard web pages.
It's really kind of bizarre.
Yeah, it is.
It really is.
It's driven largely by word of mouth.
MySpace has rapidly risen to become the second busiest site in the United States.
Behind, who knows what the first one is?
Microsoft?
Google?
Google.
Jim?
I was going to say Google.
Walter?
Google.
Okay, and Bernie?
I thought MySpace was the most popular.
Well, obviously it's not, so you have to guess another one.
Well, a couple of weeks ago I read that Google was number two behind MySpace.
Okay, but does that mean you're guessing Google is number one?
I have no idea what's more popular than MySpace.
Okay.
Well, I'm going to guess that it's Yahoo, and I find that I'm right, that it is in fact Yahoo that is in front of MySpace as the most popular.
I didn't know that.
I never go to Yahoo.
Yeah, that's weird.
I think Yahoo still has maybe more content than Google at this point.
I think a lot of computers have just been forgotten about and use that as the default page.
No, Yahoo has a lot of other things like mail and groups.
Finance.
Yeah, services.
Well, all things that Google has now anyway, but.
Right, but Yahoo got there first, so people use them already.
It's more popular.
Okay, what else?
Do you know Hezbollah, a name in the news lately, has hijacked the internet.
The whole internet?
Apparently.
No, no, it's one of the internets, right?
One of the internets, one of the tubes that they got access to apparently.
And it's funny.
There's an article in Time about this.
They spell Hezbollah differently than the rest of the media spells Hezbollah.
They spell Hizballah, unless it's a different group, but I don't think so.
And basically it starts off like this.
What do a small south Texas cable company, a suburban Virginia cable provider, and web hosting servers in Delhi, Montreal, Brooklyn, and New Jersey have in common?
Well, since fighting broke out in Lebanon, they all have had their communications portals hijacked by Hezbollah.
Hackers from the militant Lebanese group, that's right, they have a hacker division, are trolling the internet for vulnerable sites to communicate with one another and to broadcast messages from Al Manar television, which is banned in the U.S.
Did you know that?
Did you know that was banned in the U.S.?
No, I didn't believe it, yeah.
Well, now I want to get it.
I want my Al Manar.
Yeah, well, you know, if you're going to ban something, that's a sure way to get people to want to have it.
So Al Manar, Time Warner Cable, carry Al Manar now, please.
Yeah, we're off the BBC world cake.
We want to see this Al Manar thing that U.S. authorities are so afraid of.
In the cyber terrorism trade, it is…
It's a trade?
Yes, there's a trade.
It is known as whack-a-mole, just like the old carnival game.
Hezbollah sites pop up, get whacked down, and then pop up again somewhere else on the world wide web.
As the Israelis tighten the noose on Hezbollah in Lebanon, these communication nodes become critical,
said Fred Barton, a former U.S. counterterrorism official and now president of Stratfor,
which is a security consulting and forecasting company in Austin.
In today's asymmetrical warfare, the Internet is vital to groups like Hezbollah,
who use it to recruit, raise money, communicate, and propagandize,
including sending transmissions from their leader.
The recent hijacking of a South Texas cable operator is a case study in how Hezbollah moves in.
The Texas cable company has an agreement with a New York-based satellite communications aggregator,
which moves feeds to a variety of customers from throughout the world, including Lebanon.
A technician in New York made an improper connection,
according to an official with the cable company's communications provider,
and that opening was detected by Hezbollah.
And they jumped in, apparently.
I don't know. Has anybody ever come across this kind of thing by Hezbollah?
I get phone calls late at night, telemarketing calls from Hezbollah,
asking if I'd like to contribute.
Other than that, I haven't seen anything on the net.
I think the whole thing is kind of stupid, or at least the claims are stupid,
because there are so many other ways of communicating that don't rely on webpages.
So it's either a very good deterrent that seems to be working for some strange reason,
or it's just a way of getting public attention.
And like I said, there are so many other ways of communicating,
much more securely than putting up webpages.
Right, but you're trying to broadcast to a number of people.
If you're trying to broadcast, yeah, well, that's, you know.
It's unclear to me who they're trying to broadcast to,
because southern Lebanon at the moment does not have things like food and water and electricity
and living people.
So I'm not sure exactly who's surfing the web to find out about Hezbollah.
What I really don't get is, isn't there anybody anywhere in the world
with a completely valid internet connection
who is willing to host this almanac or anything else that they happen to be putting out?
I'm sure there is.
Seeing some of the webpages that are out there now,
I don't think there would be any problems.
So there's something we're not being told in this story.
Yeah.
Pretty obviously.
In March, the whack-a-mole players gained a new weapon in their fight
when the U.S. Treasury announced that any U.S. company found to be doing business with al-Minara
will be subject to sanctions and possible prosecution.
The new rules mean that freelance counter-terrorists can remind slow-moving,
reluctant, or even compliant web hosters that they face financial sanctions
if they do not act to shut down al-Minara.
Now, isn't that very different than doing business with them
if you're simply carrying a message?
Who is this freelance counter-terrorist?
They sound much more, well, I don't want to say more disturbing, but quite disturbing.
Well, they're as nicely defined as the hacker division of Hezbollah.
Maybe we can set up a meeting between the freelance counter-terrorists
and the Hezbollah hacker division,
and they can have a polite conversation about their differences.
Yeah, we'll just simply send a bunch of denial-of-service things to each other.
So if there were a web stream, a video stream of this al-Minara television station,
does that mean that ISPs wouldn't be able to connect to that?
I thought the U.S. wasn't into the whole web censorship thing.
That's why we criticize China all the time.
Yeah, I know. I know that there are people out there with dishes,
big dishes or medium-sized dishes,
that are able to see all the Arab TV channels as they're broadcast.
And some of them are really rather interesting
as far as the propaganda that's being thrown around.
It's not a far reach to simply take one of the signals and stream it on the Internet.
I'm sure it's being done.
Say the stream were originating from outside the U.S.,
somewhere in the world, not here,
and you were getting it through AT&T's underground lines.
Would they be responsible for doing business
because they're connecting you to the stream?
That's what I'd like to know.
That's a good question.
And would they have to shut it off?
Yeah, well, I think the only way to find out is to turn it on and see what happens.
I've got to find a web stream. I don't even know where to start.
I'm sure we'll be getting all kinds of mail from our listeners
telling us how we can watch Al Manar.
Again, our email address is oth at 2600.com.
We'd love to hear from you.
We always read the mail that comes in,
and, boy, do we get a lot of it.
You know what would be really good?
A counter-terrorism firewall
to keep all that stuff on the Internet away from American eyes.
There you go.
Don't laugh. It's coming. It's coming.
Yeah, you might not want to suggest that.
Yeah, people listen and they take notes.
Okay, here's the cheery news of the week.
The AOL privacy breach,
that massive privacy breach that everybody knows about,
apparently was a mistake.
Isn't that nice?
AOL says privacy breach was a mistake.
It wasn't one of the privacy breaches that was intentional.
Oh, boy, I feel so much better now.
They released the Internet search terms
that more than 650,000 of its subscribers entered
over a three-month period
and admitted on Monday that
what it originally intended as a gesture to researchers
amounted to a privacy breach and a mistake.
Basically, what AOL did was they substituted numeric IDs
for the subscribers' real usernames,
apparently on the mistaken belief
that that would not make its way back
to let people figure out who the subscribers are.
For example, many users type their names
to find out where their sites have dirt on them
and then they separately search
for online mentions of their phone,
credit card, or social security numbers.
That's pretty dumb, I think.
A few days later,
they may search for pizzerias in their neighborhoods,
revealing their locations,
or prescription drug prices,
revealing their medical conditions.
All those separate searches
would be linked to the same numeric IDs.
So you can see, it's not hard to link this to a person.
And the really funny part is that
you get a lot more information
not knowing who the person is
and using these random IDs,
or not random IDs, but encoded IDs,
than you do if you just knew the screen name, for instance.
Wait, you have a computer on.
Are you actually looking at these things now?
I'm looking at them right now.
Oh, my God.
It's pretty...
Oh, so let me read the statement that AOL made
under their brief description portion
of the collection that they made available.
The goal of this collection
is to provide real query log data
that is based on real users.
It could be used for personalization,
query reformulation,
or other types of search research.
So they have all this information,
and what you actually see when you look at the file
are a couple of fields there.
There are five fields here, and one of them...
Wait, you skipped the important caveat.
Caveat emptor.
Okay, well, do you want me to read that?
Well, you're closer...
No, go back down.
Okay.
And right there is this.
There's a warning.
Sexually explicit data.
Please be aware that these queries are not filtered
to remove any content, pornography, and yada, yada, yada.
Basically, nothing's filtered.
Well, hopefully you have a filter that will do that.
I'm not going to read the...
Well, I mean, there's not such horrible things here that...
These are AOL users.
What are you talking about?
Every single search has to do with sex.
So they're really funny.
Anyway, so you basically get five fields of data.
One of them is anonymous ID,
which is an anonymous user ID number,
which obviously isn't really so anonymous
because...
Well, there's a number there, right?
It's basically an encoded form of the user ID.
The query string, which is the query issued by the user,
case shifted with most punctuation removed,
which isn't true at all
because there's actually a lot of punctuation in these.
Query time, the time at which the query was submitted for search.
Item rank, if the user clicked on a search result,
the rank of the item on which they clicked is listed.
And click URL, which if the user clicked on a search result,
the domain portion of the URL in the clicked result is listed.
So you can basically see what they searched for,
when they searched for it,
if they liked any of the results,
which ones they clicked on,
and how that result was ranked.
Can we hear some examples?
I can give you some examples.
So user 217, which is right at the top of the list here.
Three-digit numbers?
Well, they get higher, trust me.
You mean they start with very low numbers?
The first one is 142.
Is there a way to somehow make these translate to real usernames
by the numbering scheme?
It wouldn't be like that, would it?
I'm sure that AOL can do it very, very easily.
And I'm sure that maybe eventually somebody will discover this.
All better authorities are contacting AOL right now
saying we want to know more about number 217.
I guarantee you there are many people
who have the ability to translate these.
So let's hear some examples.
So, for example, some of the searches were lottery,
Ameriprise.com, Sushim.
I don't know what some of these things mean.
United.com, Mizuno.com,
and then some searches for weird punctuation,
Asian sexy goddess, buddy list.
See? This is what I was talking about.
Ask.com, weather.com, Wells Fargo.
Why are people searching for websites
when they just have to type in the website?
There are people who don't understand the difference
between search and go to URL.
And also with AOL, the toolbar is the URL bar,
and you can use that for searching.
Never used AOL in my life. Never.
That's a shame.
Yeah, it's a real loss in my life, I can tell.
So basically we have a gambling addict
who's looking for airplane tickets?
Wait, how did you reach that conclusion?
Well, lottery and United.
And also Asian sexy goddess.
Well, and who's in need of a woman.
Okay, well, that's revealing, I guess.
So there's all sorts of really interesting stuff here,
and there are people online already
who have put together, you know, some...
Profiles?
Yeah, some basic profiles of people based on their IDs.
And how many queries are there?
There's over 20 million, something like that.
That were released?
That were released, yeah.
And they're all right here.
Well, 19 million queries from 658,086 subscribers
from March 1st to May 31st.
They're pretty precise information there.
But one user, for instance,
was repeatedly searching for information
about divorcing someone whose husband is in the army
and about dating services in Oakbrook, Illinois,
while another kept searching for members of one family by name
along with a Chicago auto dealer and naked Russian women.
So, as you can see, it's not the kind of thing
you'd really want to have displayed
for the whole world to see.
And unfortunately, it's really invasive
because you can really narrow down
a lot of these searches to who the actual person is.
And...
Go ahead.
Hey, Bern.
There's a...
I've got a brief list of search terms
that AOL user 2708,
which AOL anonymously defined them as.
I'm going to read this short list,
but it's pretty amusing.
This is apparently a woman
because the first one starts out,
Revenge Tactics,
The Women's Book of Revenge,
Dirty Tricks for Chicks,
Voice Changer,
How to Humiliate Someone,
Bill Me Later...
No, Bill Me Pay Later for CDs,
Scams to Play on People,
How to Get Revenge on an Old Lover,
I Hate My Ex-Boyfriend,
How to Really Make Someone Hurt
for the Pain They Caused...
Why don't they just paint the portrait already?
Good Lord.
It goes on. It gets better.
Columbia House,
Advice from Women Who Have Seeked Revenge
on Old Lovers.
Is seek the word?
Wouldn't it be sought?
That's what she typed in.
All right, well...
MakeHimSuffer.com,
How to Say Goodbye Hurtfully,
How to Report Child Neglect
in the State of New Hampshire,
Free Articles on Gay Life
that Can Be Mailed to Me,
Free Christian Things,
Who has ever typed in a search command like that,
free on how to mail it to me?
It's just so verbose.
These are AOL users.
Free Christian Things,
Free Gay Magazines,
Free Angry Stuff to Send to an Ex-Lover,
How to Permanently Delete Information
from Your Hard Drive,
MakeHimPay.net,
Women's Harley Davidson Boots,
www.match.com,
The Worst Thing to Send Someone Via Email,
Thong Dancewear,
LocateASell.com,
What Can I Do to an Old Lover for Revenge,
Mean Revenge Tactics,
and Death Records in Hampstead, New Hampshire.
And that's from number 2701, correct?
2708. I'm looking at it while he's reading it.
Everything he's saying is right there.
It's really funny.
Can we find user 2600? Is there one?
I can check.
If we can, I think we should make it our mission
to find out who that is and track them down somehow.
See if we can do that.
What if it's somebody we really don't want to be associated with?
It's the luck of the draw. It really is.
Okay, you keep looking for that.
I'm going to move on to another story.
This is kind of interesting, too.
This just came in yesterday.
Fantasy Baseball Leagues are allowed
to use player names and statistics
without licensing agreements
because they are not the intellectual property
of Major League Baseball.
A federal judge ruled this yesterday.
Baseball and its players have no right
to prevent the use of names and playing records,
according to U.S. District Court Judge Mary Ann Medler.
Medler, that's a weird name for a judge, isn't it?
I want to meddle in some things.
Yeah, let's be a judge.
In St. Louis, she ruled in a 49-page summary judgment.
St. Louis-based CBC Distribution and Marketing
filed a lawsuit against Major League Baseball Advanced Media,
which is Major League Baseball's internet wing,
after CBC was denied a new licensing agreement
with the Baseball Players Association,
giving it the rights to player profiles and statistics.
Major League Baseball claimed
that intellectual property laws
and so-called right of publicity
made it illegal for fantasy leagues
to make money off the identities
and stats of professional players.
But even if the players could claim
the right of publicity against commercial ventures by others,
Medler wrote, the First Amendment takes precedent
because CBC, which runs CDM Fantasy Sports,
is disseminating the same statistical information
found in newspapers every day.
And in a side note, the Canadian Broadcasting Company
has filed suit against CBC for using their name.
I'm joking, I think.
But yeah, that's interesting, isn't it?
It boggles the imagination
that they actually would think that those statistics
are somehow intellectual property.
They're published.
It's like saying you can't tell somebody a score
because that's our intellectual property.
And how dare you?
It would have been better if Judge Medler had written,
this is clearly not intellectual property
because there's really not a whole lot of intellect going on here.
Well, you know, you'd be surprised.
You'd be surprised how well people can interpret motions
and movements and statistics and things like that.
It's, I don't know,
people who really get into the sports statistics
sometimes scare me with their intelligence.
Mike forgets what the great Yogi Berra once said,
that half of baseball is 90% mental.
And half of the things that he's quoted as saying,
he said that he never said.
And that's probably true.
Add that to your quotas.
90% of the time.
Hey, Emanuel?
Yes, go ahead.
Back to these other crazy intellectual property claims like this.
I remember about 15 years ago,
there was a Supreme Court case
which finally settled the matter
of local exchange carriers, telephone companies,
arguing that the white page listings
with names and phone numbers
was copyrighted intellectual property
and nobody else could use that information.
Yeah, that's crazy.
But it was about 15 years ago
the Supreme Court ruled that,
no, it's not copyrighted intellectual property.
Yeah.
They fought that too.
They nailed it.
Well, they'll try to get anything if we let them.
So, good decision there.
But this could have easily gone the other way too.
Update to a story we reported a couple of weeks ago.
Police will not prosecute a man
for using his home security system
to record detectives on his front porch.
That's a story from Nashua, New Hampshire.
Michael Gannon was arrested June 27th
after he made the videotape
to record conversations among detectives
who were at his door looking for his 15-year-old son
who was being investigated
in connection with a mugging downtown.
When Gannon brought the videotape to a police station
to complain that a detective was rude to him,
he was arrested on felony wiretapping charges.
The case attracted attention around the world
as news spread via the internet.
The case was dropped against him.
Nashua police also have concluded
that Gannon's complaint about the detective was justified,
although the chief added that Gannon himself
was provocative and disrespectful.
The chief declined to say
what discipline the detective might face.
Well, it's, uh,
I guess another piece of good news there,
but it seems like something that's so obvious, right?
Well, that never stopped the legal system
from failing to point it out before.
That was a terrible sentence.
The legal system obviously often misses obvious things.
Yeah, that's much better, Mike, much better.
It's the police.
I'm trying here, okay?
Okay, so, uh, yeah, so I guess, you know,
you can try to feel free videotaping police
when they drop by for a visit.
Emmanuel?
Yes.
Um, this video is not being released by the police.
Um, they're claiming that, uh, it could be illegal.
Just, just that, you know,
they're claiming that, you know,
part of an ongoing investigation,
even though they decided not to press,
the DA decided not to press charges,
it's clear that they don't want to release this videotape.
It's going to be very embarrassing.
Well, the guy can release it.
Why doesn't he release it?
No, because the police seized it from him.
Um, but I think if it ever is released,
it will probably be one of the more popular, uh,
videos on YouTube or Google Video.
Well, he should definitely get that video back.
That's something that, uh, he can,
he can sue for, for certain.
The other thing apparently he's suing for
is I guess the police damaged his video equipment
when they took it.
They're so clumsy, aren't they?
It doesn't look like there's a 2600 user.
There's no 2600 user?
That whole thing, there's nobody with 2600?
I can't believe that.
Well, then we'll have to pick somebody at random
and track them down.
How about number one?
Or 1721?
I don't think there's a number one.
There's no number one either.
1721?
Who's 1721?
Number one.
You don't remember from Hope 6?
That's right, 1721.
Well, we'll give it a shot.
Don't use those numbers lightly.
I'm sorry.
All right.
I didn't mean to.
I didn't think I was.
All right.
Well, anyway, uh, cell phones have,
oh, yeah, we talked about cell phones
being banned inside the banks.
Um, let's see.
We had, uh, some listener mail
sent to oth at 2600.com.
Oh, by the way, we'll be taking phone calls
212-209-2900, so please, uh,
start making those phone calls now.
Uh, this person writes in to, um,
ask, on the August 2nd show,
you talked about the 1-800 tip lines
and the 1-800 records rendering those services
nowhere near anonymous.
Why would 1-800 services keep caller records
and what are they supposed to use them for?
Also, how would one's number be passed to this service,
calling party number or charge number, perhaps?
Um, thanks, and by the way,
Hope 6 was outstanding.
Signed, Fort Schreiten.
Well, um, as far as why they do this,
I suppose because they're paying for the phone call
and they'd like to know who it is that's calling them
to make them pay for the phone call.
That's one of the reasons why
every phone bill you get,
if you have an 800 number,
you'll see the number of the person calling you.
It doesn't, and it doesn't even really matter.
The phone company's gonna log it.
They're probably gonna log it for statistical purposes,
whether or not they actually identify
any of the people who calls them is irrelevant.
The data is actually logged,
and that's, that's the important factor here
is that it's logged, it's available,
and if somebody needs it in the future, it's there, so...
And this does not use caller ID technology,
which can be blocked, theoretically, by star 67.
This uses ANI, and you cannot block that.
You can dial star 67,
but it's still gonna send your number
over to an 800 number and other numbers as well,
so never think that you have
total anonymity on the telephone.
Now, this ANI, what kind of ANI do you get
if you use these voice-over IP services?
Oh, that's a good question.
Which come up with all kinds of strange caller ID?
I'm sure there's somebody who knows the answer.
I hoped it would be you, but I guess not.
No, I don't know.
I'm well behind on the whole VoIP scene here.
Well, we were playing with that a while back,
and the VOIP providers certainly log the phone calls, so...
Yeah, no, they log the phone calls.
That's for sure.
But can you get to them?
That's the real question.
Okay, let's take a couple more pieces of e-mail here,
and then we'll take some phone calls.
Looks like we got a fair amount coming in.
212-209-2900 is our phone number.
The board's almost all lit up
before we even mention the phone number.
That's pretty impressive.
That's interesting, because last week it was dead.
I don't know.
Something weird.
Maybe there was a good TV program on last week.
Dear Emmanuel and off-the-hook crew,
I heard that last show and was disappointed
I couldn't call in with some feedback from Hope 6,
Hope number 6.
My first Hope experience was H2K2,
and unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to the fifth Hope.
Although H2K2 was a total blast,
this one blew it away.
There wasn't a moment I was standing around
at the conference board or looking for something to do.
There wasn't a single panel or talk I attended
that didn't captivate my attention the entire time.
Riding on the Segways was a blast.
The vendors were great,
and the lock-picking village
always had something challenging to try.
The guys at the amateur radio station
renewed my interest in their hobby.
At the time, they were trying to contact
the space station, which was passing overhead.
Unfortunately, there wasn't enough free time
for me to study for the exam,
but I passed it anyways and got my license,
so a big thanks goes out to the volunteers
who organized that.
You mentioned you may try to get Steve Rombaum
to give his talk at some point in August.
If it's possible, you can be sure
I'll make the trip down from Massachusetts to attend.
2600 put on a great conference.
I'll be sure there's no excuse to miss the next Hope.
And signed PH, and PH also wants to know,
who was the vendor selling the RFID
blocking wallets and passport holders?
I have some friends that were interested
and would like to support the company from the conference.
Anybody have that information?
It's called Differwear, D-I-F-F-R-W-E-A-R.
That spells almost every part of that
differently than I expected.
Spell it one more time.
Differ, which is D-I-F-R,
and then wear, like something that you're clothing.
That you wear, W-E-A-R, okay.
Is that their website?
Probably.
Yes, differwear.com.
All right.
I'll buy them when they come out with
the synthetic version.
All right, well, as far as the talk for Steve Rombaum,
we're still looking.
And, you know, I have to say I'm disappointed.
Usually BAI listeners flock with information
on how we can pull off the impossible.
We need to pull off the impossible one more time.
Steve, as you know, was arrested
before he was able to give his talk
at the conference, two-hour talk,
basically talking about privacy,
talking about the information he was able to find out
on one person who volunteered
just by giving his name and, I think,
was there anything else he gave?
Email address, maybe?
Phone number.
Name and phone number, okay.
And how much information he was able to get
just based on that.
And what we're trying to do,
since he was prevented from giving that talk,
is have a makeup talk that would be free admission
and accessible to people in the area,
which we would then videotape
and distribute to people who came to the conference.
But we need a space.
We almost had a place in Columbia,
and that fell through.
So we're looking for anything in the region
where it's possible that we can have a two-hour seminar.
All right, so if you know something,
send us email, oth at 2600.com.
We would...
Can we do it in a public space or not really?
Well, what do you mean by public space?
Middle of the street?
Park or something like that?
You know, like Shakespeare in the park?
Steve in the park?
I don't know.
Maybe.
I could see that happening,
but I'm just worried about acoustics
and also weather.
Weather, yeah.
There are a lot of auditoriums in this city.
That's one thing this city is known for.
I think New York has set the record
for number of auditoriums in a square mile footage.
It's true.
Look it up.
Is it?
And if we just have access to one
that can hold a couple hundred people,
we'll be happy.
And then we can get the word out to everybody else.
We can spread the DVDs that we make of it
and just send the message that, yeah,
you can try and shut down people,
but they're going to speak out anyway.
And again, oth at 2600.com.
Our regular snail mail address is
off the hook, care of WBAI,
120 Wall Street.
10th floor.
New York.
New York.
1-0-0-0-5.
All right, then.
Shall we go to the phones?
Oh, let's.
I've gone over to this phone.
We've lost most of our calls.
I think what they do is they bounce someplace
that we can't see.
I think that's what happens.
Anyway, we're going to try and pick up some calls here.
Good evening.
You're on the radio.
You see, and that's what happens.
That's what happens.
Almost invariably.
Because they get bounced someplace
I don't know where they are.
I'm going to pick one in the middle.
That way I'm assured of getting something.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Good evening.
How are you?
Good.
It's Richard calling.
How are you, gentlemen?
Richard, how are you?
Where are you calling from?
Queens.
Queens.
Okay.
What's on your mind?
I thought we were...
I was going to ask you guys about Rombomb,
but you guys covered that right when I was calling in.
We read your mind.
Yeah, you did.
But what I want to know about...
You were talking about A&I spoofing and stuff.
Didn't sites like CamelPhone and CovertCall
offer proper A&I spoofing?
Was it A&I spoofing or caller ID spoofing or both?
I think it was both.
They both got shut down,
so maybe they did manage to figure out A&I spoofing.
I mean, there is a way to do it, certainly.
People have been doing this for years.
But most people aren't aware of it.
Most people call 800 numbers and assume
that if they put a star 67 in front of it,
they're going to block their number.
And it's just important to realize
that that's not the case.
But, yeah, there are people out there
always trying to figure out how to spoof these things,
and some of them have been quite successful.
And, yeah, the authorities are taking an interest.
They're shutting down these sites.
Wasn't there an article in 2600 Magazine
a while ago about A&I spoofing?
I'm sure there was.
Yeah.
I have to go pick it out of my archive.
Yeah, just go to the Yahoo store and search,
because we list all the titles there.
So if it existed, it would show up there.
Awesome.
All right, thanks for your call.
Thanks, guys.
212-209-2900.
Let's go up here.
And good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi.
Hi.
What's on your mind?
I just got back from Italy,
and I thought it was interesting,
kind of with soccer there.
World Cup.
Say again, what?
I just got back from Italy,
and I thought it was interesting
with the soccer there, the World Cup.
Winning the World Cup and also the big scandal.
Yeah, well, that too.
But it kind of reminded me of the whole commercial aspect
was kind of like ESPN,
where they had the little banners at the bottom.
So I thought it was just as bad.
So it was kind of disappointing in that sense.
Really?
So you're saying things are as commercial over there
as they are over here?
Yeah.
Well, I suppose that's not that surprising.
Yeah.
Also, I wanted to get some information.
A while ago, you said that I missed the hopes.
So if you are getting the ham radio license,
could you give me a website to find that?
If you go to ARRL.org,
you can search for all the V.E. sessions in your area,
and you can certainly find a place to take the exam.
All right, thank you.
If you want to find practice exams as well,
you can go to QRZ.com, QRZ.com.
All right, thanks.
All right, thanks for your call.
212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yes, hello?
Hi, what's on your mind?
Yes, I got a website where people can...
Turn down your radio.
Turn down your radio.
You're on delay.
Yeah, okay.
I'm directly on the line, right?
Yes, earlier you guys were talking about which website
that is the most popular website,
and I think the guest...
Actually, the host of the show said Yahoo,
and he is correct.
As for future reference...
Thank you, thank you.
It's good to hear somebody say that for once.
Well, yeah, there's another website where you can go to,
and it tells you which sites are in what position.
The name of that website is Alexa.com.
How do you spell that?
Alexa, A-L-E-X-A.
You don't need the touch tone.
Spell it without the touch tone.
All right, A-L-E-X-A.com.
What happens if that site becomes very popular?
Well, that's the question.
Actually, they can...
That website rates itself as well.
Oh, really? Okay.
MySpace is number four on that webpage.
Hey, are we on that webpage?
MSN is number two.
Google is number three.
How far down do they go?
They go to like a million?
I see five, but there's probably 500.
Yeah, they go beyond a million.
All right.
Well, find us on there.
I'm kind of curious as to how we rank in an all-time...
Wow.
Okay, so is this in the world or just in the United States?
I can sort by country.
I can do all this cool stuff.
I don't...
Well, it actually tells you the information about the site
that you're searching for,
but I think it searches for sites all over the world.
I'd like you to tell me the number one site in Afghanistan
that people go for.
We could find that,
but you might be depressed about the 2600 ranking.
Go ahead.
It's far higher than 2600.
It's what?
It's far higher than 2600.
Really?
60,309.
Well, okay, fine,
but who's right next to us and who are our neighbors?
Afghanistan isn't there.
I don't know. Hold on.
It doesn't say?
It doesn't have a listing?
Not for Afghanistan.
Thanks for the info, by the way.
Well, that's our goal now,
to get 2600.com into the 2600 position.
Do you realize, though,
that you're talking about all the huge corporations
that have lots and lots of people
and all the blogs that everybody reads?
We're hackers.
We can fake it.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, while he's figuring that out,
we're going to take another phone call.
And...
Whoops.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Go ahead.
All right.
Let's go over here.
Good evening.
Go ahead.
Yeah, are we calling from space?
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, hi.
You are in space.
Well, all right.
That was a call from space.
Everything seems to be just fine up there.
Learning anything yet, Redbird?
Well, we're looking.
There's all sorts of interesting stuff.
People who visit this page also visit
FreeKevinMitnick,
takedown.com,
loft.com,
CultOfTheDeadCow,
FRAC.
Okay, but you can't tell us who's around.
You don't have a huge list there.
No, I don't have a huge list.
Okay.
All right.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Go ahead.
Oh, let me get that radio off.
Yes.
All right.
Can you guys feel the telephony 101 question?
We can try.
I do my own electrical work in the house,
and I'm in the position where
I've needed to test my phone line.
And there used to be a number
you could call to get your phone to ring.
And I don't know what that is anymore.
Yeah, well, it used to.
Where are you, in New York?
Yeah.
It used to be 660,
followed by, I believe,
your seven-digit phone number,
and you would flash the receiver
and hang up, and it would ring back.
I haven't tried that in years,
so I don't know if it still works.
660 followed by seven digits?
Followed by your phone number.
Right.
And then hang up, pick up again,
and it would ring back.
That's how it used to work.
Now I'm being waved at by all these people.
Jim, you have an update to this?
As far as I know,
I thought it used to be 660,
and then the same last four digits
as the last four digits.
It depends on your central office.
Some central offices
just required the last four digits.
Some required the last seven.
Some required something else.
It was different in every place.
On Long Island, it was the 230 exchange,
but then that exchange got assigned,
so I don't know if it even still exists.
I don't know if you can still do it.
But telephone repair guys
must have to be able to do that all the time, no?
That's true,
although maybe they just use their cell phone
and dial it.
I don't know.
Things have changed.
I've always used 550.
550?
But 550 is a mass announcement service recording here.
The 550 plus something,
you'll get connected to a conference
that will charge $10 a minute or something.
In area code 201,
which is my area code.
Yeah, different state.
It's a different state,
so different rules apply, obviously.
People are listening from there.
So yeah, if you know ringback numbers,
consider this an appeal for ringback numbers.
We'll certainly spread them around.
Remember the old days
when you used to dial 330,
wait for your dial tone to come back,
then dial 6,
and then hang up?
No, I don't remember that at all.
That goes back to around 1960.
Wow.
Wait, how would this work exactly?
I remember it
because our friends used to fake each other out.
Like, oh, there's a phone call for you.
You'd have to dial...
That was back when having fun was so much simpler.
Yeah, right, when you're 10 years old.
In those days in Brooklyn,
I remember you would dial 330,
then it would come back to you with a dial tone.
Wow.
Then you would have to dial 6,
and then hang up,
and that would make your phone ring.
What if you dialed something else
after dialing 330?
I remember fooling around with it,
and I found that if you dialed 330
and you got a dial tone,
and I would ask that same question,
what if I dial other stuff?
And I got into some other central office,
and somebody picked up the phone,
basically, what do you think you're doing?
Wow.
One last.
What about when you want to know
what your phone number is?
Well, I think 958 still works.
I know in some places it's now four digits,
so you have to dial 9580 or 9581,
and one of those returns touch tones,
one of those returns a voice.
There are also all sorts of 800 and 877 numbers
you can call to have somebody read back
your phone number using ANI.
So it's just 958,
and you get the mechanical voice?
In most of New York, yes.
I think 958 still works.
There might be other variations of that,
and again, if people know these,
please let us know because we're curious.
Thanks for the call.
Thanks for all those memories,
even though I didn't have those ones,
but it's fascinating.
Okay, thanks a lot.
All right.
And if you have any memories
or things about phones,
please feel free to email us,
oth at 2670.com.
We'd like to hear about them.
Yes, Bernie.
An easy way also,
if you have a cell phone,
is just call your cell phone,
and the caller ID will appear
on your cell phone
of the line you're calling from.
Yes, that's...
It's kind of straightforward,
but some people don't get that.
Somehow it loses the magic
that dialing those numbers
and having things ring back
and freaking people out
is carried with it.
All right, 212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Speak up.
Hi there.
Hi, what's on your mind?
I'm calling about the new articles
in The New Yorker
and The New York Times
that have to do with
the uselessness of the computer
and bloggers
as far as mass communications goes
and, say, the election in Connecticut.
And they're very, very nervous,
it appears to me,
especially The New Yorker article.
Mainstream journalists
from the AP,
The New York Times,
which killed the Downing Street memo story
and several important stories,
they had an end run run around them
by people on the Internet
and blogs and email
and basically all computer media,
which got word out on very important things,
on many topical political issues.
And there seems to be a panic going on
in mainstream news organizations
to try to kind of diss the media
and diss bloggers and email
as having no impact.
I think they're feeling very threatened.
Yeah, they definitely are.
And for good reason.
If someone out there acts as a journalist
using the resources at their fingertips,
then they certainly can do a better job of it.
Of course, there's also a lot of noise out there as well,
but if you can filter through it,
well then,
you might actually be able to
make a very important point.
Is Dexter ill today?
Mr. Kirk, Dexter's in school.
I'm afraid he's not, Ms. Fishbaugh.
Dexter's children's problem is way out of hand.
The Baltimore County School Board
have decided to expel Dexter
from the entire public school system.
Oh, Mr. Kirk,
I'm as upset as you to learn Dexter's truancy,
but certainly expulsion is not the answer.
I'm afraid expulsion's the only answer.
It is the opinion of the entire staff
that Dexter is criminally insane.
And that's going to do it for us here tonight
on Off The Hook.
Emmanuel's been here with you for the last hour
along with assorted folks.
We'll be back again next week.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
Stay tuned for The Personal Computer Show.
Good night.
What does that mean?
You're a nut.
You're crazy in the coconut.
What does that mean?
That boy needs therapy.
I'm gonna kill you.
That boy needs therapy.
Let's have a tea.
How about I count three?
That boy needs therapy.
He was white as a sheet.
And he also made false teeth.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
And tighten your buttocks, pour juice on your chin, and I promised my girlfriend I could play the violin, violin, violin, violin
Frontier Sakaya
I just wanna say thank you
Frontier Sakaya
That boy needs therapy, psychosomatic
That boy needs therapy, purely psychosomatic
That boy needs therapy
What does that mean?
You're a nut!