For Free Speech Radio News, this is Puk Loh.
And good evening, you're listening to 99.5 WBAI New York. It's 7 p.m. time for Off The Hook.
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you as we break in Redbird behind the board.
Congratulations, Redbird. You brought the show into a safe landing.
I like to hear that.
I sound like crap. I really do.
You sound like God and I sound like crap. Why is that?
This is how it should be.
I know. You're in the engineer seat and I'm in the lowly guest seat.
Do my levels look good? Because I sound awful.
The levels are fine.
Alright, fine.
We have a bunch of people here tonight. Well, obviously we have you, Redbird.
Good evening.
We have Mike.
Hi there.
Near the side of the room. Not Kevin.
Hello.
And down in Philadelphia we've got Bernie S.
Or do we?
Do we have Bernie?
Yes.
Okay, there he is.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
Alright.
My pot turned down again.
And visiting us from someplace is our friend Bicycle Mark.
Hello.
Why are you called Bicycle Mark?
It goes back to being a college student in New Jersey where everybody drove and I had a bike.
You were the only one?
Only one.
Okay. Alright, so we have, we talked to you actually over at the CCC camp last year, or this year actually.
Yeah, that was the highlight of my year.
And now you're back in the States for a short period of time, but you'll be at the Congress.
Yeah, I'm leaving next week for the 24C3.
In fact, so am I. I won't be here next week.
That's one of the reasons why Redbird's behind the board now because he's going to be—
Unfortunately stuck here.
Unfortunately stuck here in New York while the rest of us—well, actually I'm going to be over there.
Bicycle Mark's going to be over there.
Mike, where are you going to be?
The same place.
Same place? But not Kevin. You'll be here.
No, I'll unfortunately be stuck here with Redbird.
And Bernie will be down in Philadelphia, I take it.
That's right, unfortunately. I'd rather not be in Philadelphia.
Okay, well, I know where we're going to be next week, so that's a good thing.
I hear bass.
We're also having the holiday party for the radio station.
They always schedule everything for when we're on the air.
The meetings, the parties, it all happens so that—
I don't think the mics are picking it up, but we can hear it.
Well, the room's vibrating.
It is vibrating.
A lot of bass.
We're missing some soundproofing, by the way.
Bass is always good.
Okay, we have an action-packed show here tonight, and we'll be taking phone calls in just a little bit as well.
So let's start off with this interesting story.
In fact, it's really a question that I think applies to many of us.
And I'll start with you, Bernie, down in Philadelphia.
Let me ask you a pointed question.
Do you, in fact, have a cell phone?
I do, in fact. I'm talking on it now.
Technically, it's a PCS phone.
Don't get cocky.
That's just a technical word.
And do you, in fact, have a landline?
I do not, in fact, have a landline.
I have not had a landline for over a decade.
So you're a pioneer because many people these days no longer have landlines.
They just have cell phones.
Now I'm going to ask Redbird. What about you?
I have a cell phone, not a landline.
You have both.
I mean, I have a physical landline. It's not hooked up to anything.
What about you, Mike?
The same.
The same. You have both.
I have a cell phone and no landline service.
Which means you don't have a landline.
That's how most people would say it, but Redbird likes to talk confusingly, so yeah.
So wait, you don't have a landline either, Redbird?
I have no landline service.
Okay. You know, it sounded to me like you said you did.
No, I do not.
All right. So basically, all three of you so far have no landlines.
What about you now, Kevin?
I have a landline and a cell phone.
Okay. That's good.
Well, you go to school, too.
So in your dormitory room, what do you have?
A landline.
I have two landlines and a cell phone.
Two landlines in your dorm room?
Two landlines.
That sounds kind of wasteful.
One phone for each side of the room.
Wait, is it the same phone line or is it just extensions?
Two separate lines.
All right. How about you, Bicycle Mark?
Well, you don't actually live in the States.
No, I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
And I'm actually in the process of giving up the landline.
The only reason, you have to have a landline to have a DSL.
What I do is I just don't have any physical phone, but there is a landline going to my house.
I just don't know what the number is.
My goodness. All right.
Well, with the exception of not Kevin, looks like most of you have forsaken the old landline.
What about you?
I've got a bunch of landlines, actually.
I've got at least three in my house, maybe four.
Occasionally, I find a line that I forgot about and it's just sort of sitting there and not being used.
And I also have two cell phones.
So I guess I don't know what my problem is.
But here's the thing.
There's a trend.
Americans are cutting the cord to their landlines.
2007 is likely to be the first calendar year in which U.S. households spend more on cell phone services,
according to the industry and government officials that tell us this kind of thing.
The most recent government data show that households spend $524 on average on cell phone bills.
And that was in 2006.
They spent $542 for residential and payphone services.
When was the last time any of you used a payphone?
This weekend.
Tell me. Tell me all about it.
It was a free payphone.
What do you mean it was a free payphone?
There was this trailer on the street about a block away from me with what looks like payphones in it.
But if you look closely, it says complimentary calls.
And you can pick it up and dial and you don't have to put any coins in.
Wait, for those of you listening on the radio, you missed it.
Mike held a picture up to the microphone.
As you can see right here.
What are you, Dennis Kucinich, bringing in a pie chart to a radio station?
You're holding up pictures to the microphone.
Why did you take pictures in the first place?
And these are photos.
They're not even digital.
No, it's digital with an inkjet printer.
Oh, so you went and had them printed out.
No, I have a printer in my house.
No landline phone, but a printer.
So you have a photo lab in your house, but you can't make a landline call.
Okay, great.
This is the 21st century.
Mike?
Yes.
Was there a big tape recording device or some kind of digital recording device inside that trailer?
You know, I couldn't see inside the trailer, but I don't know.
I don't know what the purpose of this thing was.
This leads me to ask the question.
I mean, we saw these things after 9-11 where they would set these up for neighborhoods that didn't have phone service.
But as far as I know, you do have phone service.
Well, you don't actually because you don't have a landline.
But phone service in your neighborhood does exist.
So why was this trailer there?
The best theory I have is that some people's phone service has been disrupted due to this process, which is allegedly going to result in a subway being built.
Oh, the 2nd Avenue subway?
Yes.
It's cutting off phone service.
That's my best guess.
So these phones are you can call anywhere?
You know, I didn't really want to call anyone is the irony.
This thing that people have wanted for years to be able to make free phone calls, and then it appears and no one's using it, and I couldn't think of anything to do with it.
Well, I think maybe after the show, we'll go and make some phone calls, see what kind of restrictions these things have.
Remember back in the day when it used to be a big deal to be able to call for free?
You know, now everybody has that.
No more.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, yeah, it's a trend.
It's a trend that more people have cell phones now or spending more on cell phones.
I'll tell you, there is no comparison between the sound of a landline and the sound of a cell phone.
I hear people talking on these little portable devices, and they sound awful.
On television, occasionally, they want to talk to eyewitnesses to some horrendous event, and you can tell if somebody is on a cell phone.
In fact, they ask them, are you on a cell phone?
Please call back from a pay phone or something because you sound awful.
I just wonder, have our expectations gone so far down that this is okay now that we can sound worse than we sounded 50 years ago on the phone?
And pay more.
And pay more.
How many years has Bernie been calling us on a cell phone?
And we get complaints every week, every week saying, you know, he's got to get a better phone than that.
And you had a better phone than that in the past, didn't you?
Well, a long time ago.
It's probably been about almost 10 years since I had a different model cell phone than this.
Maybe it's just degrading over time.
Well, it was amps.
He used amps before, the old-fashioned.
Oh, yeah.
It was an analog phone.
But, yeah, way back in the day, back in the early mid-'90s, late-'90s, I was still using an analog cell phone.
I still could.
We should do an experiment on one of these shows and switch this Sprint PCS phone to analog mode,
which is still working until next year, at which point the FCC will no longer require cellular carriers to carry the analog calls,
which are effectively high fidelity compared to these digital cell phones, which are cell phone communications,
which are over, like, one-tenth as much bandwidth.
So we should try that sometime.
I could switch to another mode.
I may be out of line here, Bernie, but what the heck.
Why don't you do it right now?
Okay.
It'll cost me a lot, but I guess that's not an issue.
That's okay.
No, forget about that.
Is it just a switch that you throw on your phone?
He's going to have to call us back.
I will have to call back, which I can do, to one of the secret numbers.
The first one, or should I call the first secret number or the second secret number?
I don't know.
Someone's been calling the first secret number.
It's very strange.
Well, pick that up and hang up on them.
That's the BAI style of freeing up a phone line.
And you're going to call us back with analog service.
There's no way we can call you.
I don't know if that will work.
You can try it, but I'll pay just as much either way.
Why don't you call us on secret number two?
And we'll have Redbird check to make sure it's you and not somebody who isn't authorized to call that line.
I'm going to have to plug in my AC adapter because it uses way more current on the phone.
The battery will die quickly.
Well, do you think you'll have this all set up by the end of the show?
Oh, yes.
I can do it right now.
Only on for another 40 minutes or so.
I will call back now.
All right.
This is exciting.
This is what it's all about.
This is the fun of live radio.
So Bernie, whose voice you just heard on a digital cell phone, will be calling us back.
Is he using the same instrument?
I guess he's using the same instrument.
But first we have to teach Redbird to hang up the phone.
All right.
He's got it.
I've been trying to teach him that for years.
People should not doubt Redbird's ability.
This phone is very difficult to hang up.
Yeah, that's true.
All right.
So Bernie right now, is he soldering the phone or he has to make some kind of variation to it?
It's a simple mode switch.
Simple mode switch.
There's no such thing with Sprint PCS as a simple mode switch, but fine.
He has 10 years or how many years of experience with that cell phone?
An awful lot.
He's had that cell phone for a while.
He clings to that cell phone company like grim death.
I don't understand it because everybody is complaining about Sprint PCS and the bad service
and the inability to send SMS messages and various things like that.
And yet, the people who complain the most seem to always stick with them.
So I wonder.
I wonder what it's all about.
I'm trying to kill time before the phone rings.
It's not ringing, is it?
Emmanuel?
Yes.
I wanted to add something.
In the quest to spend less money on phones in general, be it mobile or landlines,
I've been replacing both of those with Voice over IP, including for text messaging.
It works well, but like you said, the quest is spend less money, not sound better.
Well, now, Voice over IP services have the – is he there?
It looks like you're panicking there.
Okay.
Voice over IP has the potential to sound even better.
Right.
My setup sounds great because I have a nice microphone going into the computer.
Yeah.
So we could actually catapult over this horrible sounding phone connection.
And Bernie, you're joining us again in analog mode.
Let's hear how you sound.
Static-y.
Oh, boy.
What's happened to amps?
Well, it used to be great, but I think the carriers have really scrimped on amp coverage.
They're still required to carry it.
But how long has it been since you heard that on a cell phone?
I think they're trying to nudge you out of the amps world and say,
hey, I'll make you say that digital is a little bit better.
It's possible that in my neighborhood it's lesser coverage.
You sound good now, yeah.
Yeah, that's really weird.
It just sort of improved all of a sudden.
Maybe they've reactivated the amps circuit.
Maybe somebody in Sprint listens to the show and they said, hey, stop that to the technician.
Now, in reality, I am probably on Verizon's analog network
because the amps network is on the 800 megahertz cellular network,
and the cell phone tower outputs are from like 870 to 895 megahertz in that range.
Sprint doesn't have any spectrum in that area.
They just have rights to one slice of the 1900 megahertz PCS band,
which is why those are called PCS phones,
and now this is effectively called a cell phone conversation.
So I'm more than likely roaming on Verizon's network,
and Sprint will bill me for its use of Verizon's analog network.
All right.
We're going around the room grading the quality of the phone call now.
Redbird, you gave it an 8.7, and I believe Mike gave it an 8.
I gave it no such rating, but continue, carry on.
Is this a secret poll?
I'm sorry.
I only gave it a 7 because I'm counting the static as something bad
that could affect the entire quality of the phone call.
Well, this is compared to what?
Compared to what we usually have.
You do sound better.
Okay, good.
I'm walking around the room here, and you hear that static coming in and out.
That's what's known as ticket fencing.
Oh, the static's back.
See, that's what I was afraid of.
Barbed wire fence.
Maybe it's just because I've got a computer on.
Can you go back to wherever you were when you sounded good?
I'm going to turn off the computer.
Maybe the computer's interfering.
Yeah.
In fact, if everybody around Bernie's neighborhood in Philadelphia
could also turn off their computers, this might help us.
I don't need a power supply.
You sound like you're talking through a tunnel.
Yeah.
All right.
Now I'm by the window again, and I probably sound better.
No, you don't.
You don't sound any better.
You don't sound at all, do you?
No, I do.
Is he even there anymore?
Bernie?
No.
Okay, well, actually, are you going to call him back?
We have to call somebody else.
Can you get that damn sound off the air?
Thank you.
It's amazing to me that we have a phone system that makes that noise
whenever somebody hangs up,
and everybody else's phone doesn't make that noise.
So the one place you don't want it is on a radio station.
Well, on our show, it seems to add to the effect.
Yes, we need to call that other person,
and he's expecting us to call right now.
So why don't we call him, and then we'll get Bernie back.
And while Redbird is doing that,
we're going to discuss a couple other things.
Now, there's an interesting bit of technology
that's finding its way around various parts of New York City,
and that is known as the speaking advertisement.
And apparently, if you walk down Prince Street in SoHo here in New York,
you will hear a woman's voice.
You might hear a woman's voice that seems to be right in your ear
asking, who's there?
Who's there?
And if you turn around, you don't see anybody.
You'll hear the voice say, it's not your imagination.
And you'll actually hear this inside your head.
That sounds like a phone in Finland.
Hello?
Red Hect, is that you?
Can you hear us?
Hold on.
Okay, well, we're speaking as loudly as we dare.
You're in Finland?
Red Hect?
Yes.
Okay, good.
We're speaking to you live over the air,
and we're going to get to your story in just a second.
We were telling the folks about this new kind of advertising billboard
that whispers messages to you as you walk down the streets of New York.
In this particular case, this advertisement on Print Street
is for something called Paranormal State.
It's a ghost-themed series.
I don't think we should give them any more publicity.
Well, we're not telling them to tune in.
We're telling them what the ad is for.
Yeah, but any publicity is good publicity in these people's mind.
Well, that's true, but we're talking about the ad.
We have to talk about what the ad is.
No, we don't.
I'll just say – I won't say the name of the thing,
even though I already said it.
But it's a ghost-themed series that's premiering on a –
I won't say what the network is, all right?
Are you happy?
Basically, what happens is the billboard uses technology
manufactured by – can I say the company name,
or is that considered advertising, too?
I guess that's okay.
Holosonic.
Holosonic is the name of the company.
They transmit an audio spotlight from a rooftop speaker
so that the sound is contained – get this – within your cranium.
The – I'm not making this up.
The technology ideal for –
That's weird.
Yeah, the museums and libraries or environments
that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows
has rarely been used on such a scale before.
But for random passersby and residents
who have to walk unwittingly through the area
where the voice will penetrate their inner peace,
it's another story.
Now, Mike, I understand – I'm sorry.
You have something?
Well, I wanted to comment that I was actually kind of excited
to see that this is going to be demonstrated on the street.
And I know Mike was very upset about it
because there's one particularly close to his house.
But I want to explain how it works really quickly
because there's not really a good technical explanation
in any of the articles.
And what they do is they transmit two ultrasonic inaudible frequencies,
and the beat frequency that those two ultrasonic frequencies creates
is in the audible frequency range that humans can hear.
And you're able to direct those ultrasonic waves
a lot more precisely than you can direct
or normal audio frequencies.
So that's what they mean by the spotlight.
What kind of equipment do you actually –
I mean, what's to prevent somebody from aiming a speaker out their window
and hitting passersby with maybe obscenities
or something horrible like that?
You can't really do that very directionally.
And apparently it wasn't easy to do this.
Apparently there are all sorts of technical limitations
that prevent you from getting a linear response and all that
that they've figured out.
I don't know if that's true, but that's what their claims are.
I haven't actually tried it.
But you need the ultrasonic transducers to be able to do that.
Ultrasonic transducers?
Is this Star Trek or something?
Do we need a phase inverter and some dilithium crystals at the same time?
Well, Mike, you had some of these actually show up near your house.
Everything is showing up near your house.
My neighborhood has become very strange in the last –
And you have another picture.
I have a picture to prove it, which our radio listeners are no doubt
glad to see right now.
And I'm not sure if it's exactly the same thing.
It's definitely the same advertising campaign because it's the same –
there's posters for the same television program.
But it looks to me like there's just this box
with a really bad loudspeaker in it.
It certainly did not, at least in the instance by my house,
did not sound like it was inside my skull.
It just sounded like there was a bad loudspeaker on the street
telling me all these things.
I remember reading maybe two years ago about a project at MIT
that did something similar, the audio spotlight anyway.
I thought it was pretty cool because the idea was that, like,
say you were having a party or say you were in a bar or something
and you had a dance floor where only the people on the dance floor
could hear the music and then everybody around them was quiet
so they could talk or do whatever.
But I don't know, I guess with a bar that would kind of ruin the atmosphere.
But I thought it was kind of cool.
It's an idea that you'd have one area where, okay, everyone's listening to music
and having a good time, and the other area where it's kind of quiet
and you can talk and all that stuff.
Well, it would be kind of cool to see a room –
The music is blasting, the music is blasting.
Yeah, a room full of people just dancing without having any music.
That would be kind of an interesting sight to see
in a club or something like that.
Doesn't the brain machine use the exact same premise?
It does, except they're using an audio waveform
to generate a sub-audio response, I guess, in your head.
Your brain is sort of computing the beat frequency
between the two frequencies that the brain machine sends.
Speaking of brain machine, we have updates on those.
Some people have been writing to us asking,
where in God's name is my brain machine?
In fact, let me read one letter from one of our listeners.
Many, many letters, that is, and many listeners.
But basically, I pledged $150 last Fund Drive.
I have not received my assembled brain machine.
I'm not complaining about timeliness, which is probably wise
because timeliness is not our friend here.
I'd like to alter the address to which said brain machine should be shipped.
Okay, let me just tell you right there, big mistake.
Don't confuse the mechanisms around here any more
than they're already confused.
Forget what you pledged for.
We actually spent last weekend building a bunch of these brain machines.
I want to thank everybody for coming in.
In addition, we had Danielle.
We had Leo.
We had .ret show up.
All kinds of people that just helped us out
and helped build these things, and we spent all day doing it.
So now we just have to get them to the point where they're being sent out,
which probably won't be for at least another week or so.
So apologies to people for the delay, but they will go out.
They are all getting out there to people.
It just takes a little bit of time.
That was, of course, offered during the last fundraiser here at the radio station.
Bernie, are you back?
I am back on a digital CDMA call.
So my voice is being digitized at about 14 kilobits per second now.
Does it sound better or worse?
Somehow you don't sound as bad as you sounded earlier in the show,
but I don't think you sound as good as you did when you were analog.
When you were anti-static analog.
Yeah, without the static.
If I were in a, I guess the building I happen to be in right now
is oriented in such a way that it doesn't have good connection with the analog signal.
But if I were in a different area,
I imagine the fidelity could have been a lot better without any static.
You were using a different band, and you're using a lot more bandwidth,
and so the signal-to-noise ratio isn't as good.
So there's a lot of things to consider.
Now, Bernie, did you have any comments on this audio advertising that seems to be catching on?
Well, it's interesting to see it deployed at the consumer level,
which I think is going to further encroach into our lives.
I'm sort of a little skeptical that it is what they say it is.
I don't know for a fact that there are ultrasonic transducers inside,
which isn't really a big deal.
There's ultrasonic transducers in, like the older TV remote controls
that had ultrasonic transducers before they used infrared LEDs.
So this is not high-tech stuff.
Humidifiers.
I don't know for sure that these things are really what they purport them to be.
I mean, they may just be cheap speakers in there.
Did anybody actually...
Would it mean that if you had a microphone with an audio recorder,
one of these things, that it would not record this?
No, it would record it, but it would only record it in the quote-unquote beam.
And I've seen it demonstrated in videos where they move the mic around
and you could only hear it in that beam.
But, I mean, Mike says it's pretty wide.
At least the one...
And I don't know if they just had this ultrasonic transducer in one location
and were just using other speakers near me.
But it had all the properties of a normal speaker, as far as I could tell,
including the fact that it is making a lot of noise
and very annoying to walk by.
And it was literally next door to me,
so whenever I had to go anywhere, I would walk by it.
So what I did is I called 311 to file a noise complaint.
Oh, you did not.
Oh, I did, and I have the proof right here.
You actually dialed 311?
I dialed 311, and I spoke to a very nice person
who tried very hard to figure out where to route my complaint.
It was a sort of unusual sort of noise I was complaining about.
But he eventually figured it out,
and an hour later I got an email that I'm not supposed to reply to
telling me that my complaint had been forwarded
to the appropriate city agency for action.
And sure enough, next time I went outside, there was no noise.
Was there even any of the equipment that was there making the noise?
The box was still there, but there's been no noise.
I filed the complaint on Sunday, and there's been no noise since then.
And you assume it's related to your call.
I'm going to take credit for it.
All right, all right.
Well, 311 gets the credit, I guess.
So Red Hacked, speaking of noise,
we're hearing a lot of noise from you down there in Finland.
Tell us where you are exactly.
Well, I'm actually on the last night
of what is basically called our end war in the Army.
So for the people who were here for 6 months, lucky them.
This is the end of their last camp.
It's been basically a practice of everything that we've learned.
You've got the people who are in the Jaeger company.
They've been attacking.
You've got my company, which is the mortar company.
We've been firing mortars and just basically practicing everything.
And it's been pretty long, and we started last Monday.
Not this Monday, but the Monday before.
So I guess it's been like 10 or 11 at this point.
But, yeah, right now I'm on the end of my guard and fire tending shift.
I've been going from tent to tent putting wood in the fires to keep everybody warm.
Maybe this would be a good time to point out that you're in the Finnish Army.
You're not just firing mortars freelance.
You joined the Finnish Army several months ago.
I'm here in the Army.
I'll be here for another couple months because I'm a medic.
It's sort of a requirement as a citizen, sort of not.
You could also do civilian service if you're against war.
But, yeah, it's been interesting.
Also, just to point out, this is an example of satellite delay.
Do you hear this?
This is what I call the Ted Koppel effect where people are talking at the same time
and neither one can—well, I can hear him, but he can't hear me.
Okay, you hear me now?
No, I'm trying to caution you that we seem to have severe satellite delay,
so you're just going to have to take that into account that occasionally you won't be able to hear us.
But not Kevin has something to say.
Now, I'm assuming you're in the middle of the woods, so what exactly are you calling on?
I'm calling on a cell phone.
A severely delayed cell phone.
I've got to say, that's something else.
Just your regular digital cell phone?
Yeah, it's a regular GSM phone.
I might be terribly far from the antenna or something.
No idea, really.
Okay, well, we are picking up a lot of background noise.
So what kind of things are going on while you're out there in the middle of the forest?
Well, right now it's pretty windy.
That might be a lot of the noise.
Other than that, I was in a tent for a little while throwing wood in the fire,
so that could have added to it.
You're throwing wood on the fire in a tent?
Yeah, well, basically, so like I was going to say,
Finland on the whole is pretty high-tech, and I can talk about that in a second.
When it comes to the Army, when it comes to the woods, we're very low-tech,
and with good reason.
My Ili Lutnant explains it pretty well today.
Basically, all this technology that we use, like a stove in a tent with wood in it, works.
We don't have to worry about it breaking.
Same thing goes with when we're doing mortar stuff.
We have to know what our coordinate is so we can figure out how to aim
that the coordinates we're firing on.
And we do it with basically a map and then a wire
to see how far away from whatever point there is on the map.
And somebody asked today, well, why don't we just use GPS?
The answer is, well, the GPS doesn't always work.
It could be cloudy, it could be bad weather,
or if we were at war with the United States, they could just shut it off.
A lot of technology we use is low-tech, but for the reason that it works.
So the United States can just shut off GPS technology at anybody that they're mad at.
Is that how it works?
Yeah, well, I mean, if they were at war with other countries,
they could theoretically make it so that nobody else could use it, right?
You know, encrypted or something like that.
I don't know how it would work, but they're in control of the satellites,
so there's no reason to give the other country an opportunity.
Well, other countries do launch satellites too, though.
This is actually why the European Union is setting up the Galileo system.
Finland itself does not have a GPS system in place.
The United States, Russia has its own, so Russia and the U.S. can do battles.
Bicycle Mark, why don't you tell us something about the Galileo system
that is being set up right now, actually?
Well, I don't know how far along they are in the...
I know they've been launching components of it,
but the idea is that the European Union, the European Space Agency,
is creating their own system called Galileo,
and it will essentially do the same thing for Europe,
and in that instance, as far as I know,
be under the control of the European Union,
which again sets up the ultimate war between Finland and the U.S.
What if Germany goes to war with France?
Will the GPS be on or off?
They're going to have to share. They'll have to share the technology.
They're not allowed, just like West Virginia can't go to war with California.
I'm sorry.
But we can dream.
All right, we're going to read some letters.
OTH at 2600. Wrong show.
OTH at 2600 is our email address,
and we'll be taking phone calls.
212-209-2900 is our telephone number,
and we're going to give Red Bird a real workout tonight.
He's going to have to juggle two phone calls coming in
and a bunch of callers calling in at the same time.
And the dump button.
Yeah.
We're talking to Bernie S. down in Philadelphia.
We're talking to Red Hack over in Finland,
and we've got a bunch of people here in the studio,
so it's all good fun.
We had some feedback to last week's show, quite a bit, actually.
Last episode, a woman called in and explained
that her name shows up on cell phones different than others,
meaning that she was seeing someone else's name
that did not match the name of the person calling,
and she had not assigned that name.
You and the other guys totally dismissed the issue
that it could be possible because it is not a landline
that receives the database of names and numbers, etc., to the phone.
I don't know.
Maybe you guys are living in a hole,
but here in Toronto, Canada,
when a cell phone user calls a landline or cell phone,
the name and number of the account will be displayed
if the user didn't custom name the caller.
So if someone calls me from a cell phone,
I can see the name and number of the cell phone and the landline.
It's a service called Name Display.
The thing that really doesn't add up for you guys to debunk her story
is she said two other people get some Asian lady's name on their cell phone.
So you mean to tell me these two different people
programmed some Asian woman's number onto their cell phone?
Come on.
Sorry, NQ.
Well, Q, first of all,
just because someone says something that we think is impossible
doesn't mean that we should suddenly believe it
because just because two other people see this name
that they didn't program in there,
it still doesn't mean that that kind of thing
is something we're familiar with.
Now, you mentioned you're in Toronto, in Canada.
Okay.
We learned this week, thanks to your letter, actually,
that there is a company there called Rogers
that does, in fact, offer this service.
However, in the United States,
we can find no company that will simply display
the fixed name attached to a phone number.
In other words, cell phones,
you assign the name to a cell phone number.
However, when somebody calls your house
and you see a name on a caller ID display,
that information is coming to you from the phone company.
We have found no company in the United States
that sends the name to you in that manner.
Now, Rogers in Canada apparently does this.
I don't know if that other caller,
if the caller was from Canada,
she did not mention if she was from Canada.
But foreign countries are different.
They have different ways of doing things.
So, yeah, it's interesting that that service exists
in the first place,
but I'm not aware of it existing in this country.
And it's not without a hefty charge,
according to Rogers' website.
And I spoke to the people at Rogers,
Rogers Telecom at Lynx in Toronto.
It looked like it was, and there may be different plans,
but the one I was looking at,
it was an extra $6 a month
to have this caller ID with name service.
And you have to have a special phone.
There's only maybe a dozen or so phone models
that they support that supports this protocol.
So there's a lot of ifs, ands, or buts.
That's $6 Canadian dollars,
which is like $100 U.S. dollars these days.
Actually, yeah, it went back.
It went back.
U.S. dollars worth more than the Canadian dollar now.
Oh, so it's like only $5.80 or something?
Yeah.
Bargain.
I think it would be a good thing to have,
to have that technology,
where if you didn't assign a name
to the number calling you,
that you'd know who it was,
or you'd know who it was assigned to.
Many times I get phone calls on my cell phone
from numbers I don't recognize,
and I have no clue who they are
because no name is sent.
So it would be a nice service,
and it's interesting that they have that in Canada.
As far as I know, they don't have it here.
Please, someone, if you know otherwise,
give us details.
Some people solve this problem
by picking up the phone and asking who it is.
Yeah, I guess you could do that.
I regret that decision every once in a while.
I usually do.
I usually do.
I'm sorry, Bernie, you had something?
I just wanted to add,
I inquired as to whether I could get a Rogers cell phone account.
It's actually a GSM service.
Rogers is a GSM carrier.
I asked if I could get an account in the United States.
They said, well, you'd have to have a Canadian area code on it.
And I said, well, what about number portability?
A few years ago, here in the U.S.,
you could move your phone number from one carrier to another.
And they said they would not allow a U.S. area code
on a Rogers cell phone.
So if you want to have this service in the U.S.,
you can do that,
but you will pay enormous roaming charges
for using a Canadian GSM phone in the U.S.
But you could have your caller ID on your cell phone.
And they said one other interesting thing.
They said if you're roaming in the U.S. with a Rogers GSM phone,
it will often still work through the U.S. carriers.
So I'm not sure exactly how that works,
but they assured me, and they double-checked with a technician,
that oftentimes it works.
So they're saying that it will display U.S. number names?
That's what they're saying.
Well, obviously, we have to test it before we know for sure.
But interesting points there.
Any of our listeners that have a Rogers cell phone with this feature
that lives near the U.S.-Canada border
that would be interested in testing this for us,
we'd like to hear from them.
Okay.
Here's another letter from Zura.
The caller ID on my voice-over IP phone
always identifies my sister's number as belonging to someone
with a name I do not recognize.
In fact, my sister was complaining that I was not returning her phone calls.
It was then that I figured out the problem of the misidentification of her number,
but she never knew there was a problem.
She calls me from her landline.
Well, this is interesting, too.
In this particular case, the voice-over IP phone is doing a lookup,
and the information that it's looking up is wrong.
And that does happen.
And they're both using Verizon VoiceWing service,
we determined from talking with this woman.
So obviously Verizon's database, I think it's called an Arnack database,
has an error in it,
and it has the wrong name in that database for that phone number.
And here's one more caller ID-related program letter, rather, from Ellen.
I was listening to the end of last Wednesday's show in my car,
so I couldn't call in.
Well, you could, but it would be dangerous.
Usually I am working during your show, hence this e-mail question.
On that show, you were discussing a mystery someone had contacted you about.
Well, I have a mystery for you.
I have cable, phone, and TV on Cablevision slash Opto Online in New Jersey.
I have a caller ID feature available to me, but it is not turned on.
I don't have the kind of phone which can receive caller ID.
One night, I was half asleep in front of my television,
and superimposed on the screen, I saw my Houston friend's name and phone number.
A few seconds later, the phone rang, and it was her.
Last night, it happened again with a local number.
Is that as weird as I think it is, or is there an explanation?
I haven't contacted Cablevision. I'm interested to see what you say.
Well, clearly there's some spooky stuff going on with your cable box.
It seems to be possessed with some kind of predetermination of knowing who it is who's going to call you.
And I think that kind of thing is kind of scary,
and you need to contact a technician as soon as possible to come over there and kind of exercise the thing,
because this can get a lot more serious.
Am I off base here, or is there some technical explanation for this?
You're failing to consider the time travel problem involved.
Yeah, well, I don't really believe in time travel.
Bernie, how about you? Bernie, do you know anything about this?
Yeah, well, I researched this.
I contacted Opt Online, which is the company she gets her cable TV and phone service over cable from.
Research? Oh, I didn't think of that.
Actually, it's a dying art these days is researching stuff that you report.
All right, next time.
I won a whole hog this week in making several phone calls and communications with a bunch of parties.
But anyway, Opt Online does offer this service.
I forget the name of it, but it is basically caller ID over TV, I think they call it.
And the technology was developed by a research group called Cable Labs,
which is kind of like what Bellcore used to be to the Bell operating companies.
It's sort of an R&D arm that all the cable companies give money to every year to come up with certain standards that they can all use.
And this is one of those standards.
And I think it's a slightly extra charge, or maybe it's included with some cable packages if you have their phone service over cable.
And basically, it just superimposes the name and phone number of the caller onto the video of whatever TV channel you're watching if you have that enabled.
So there's a way to disable it on your set-top box.
We demonstrated something similar back at the H2K2 Tiger Conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania during a caller ID spoofing seminar.
But that was just a dedicated hardware device that took the caller ID data off the phone line and superimposed it over any video thing.
And that was very helpful in that particular presentation,
because everybody could see the caller ID was being spoofed while they were watching the presenters on the big screen.
But in this case, your set-top box is doing the same thing.
It's taking that data and superimposing it over the video.
And you are not imagining things in your half-awake state.
Now, Redhack, let me bring you into this, because you're over there in Finland, which has all kinds of high tech everywhere you go.
I know right now you're in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of Army people attending fires and hanging out in tents and things like that.
When you're actually in Helsinki or in some other city over there, is the cell phone technology a lot more advanced than it is here in this country?
Well, the cell phone technology itself is just GSM.
They just use GSM.
But it's put to use a lot more.
Like, for example, one of the new things is if you're running late for the bus or don't have money with you or something like that,
you can actually purchase your bus or train ticket with your cell phone.
You just text a certain number, and then it texts you back a different sort of code.
And then you can show the conductor, and that indicates you've bought a ticket, and then they just charge your cell phone.
I've actually also seen Coke machines and Pepsi machines here, where you go up to it, and there's a number.
You text the number, and they charge your cell phone account, and then your Coke comes out.
Now, wait a minute.
So it's put to use a lot more.
Also, when you're in a hockey game, they have, you know, like a chat thing on the big monitor,
and you chat with other people, I guess, in the arena by sending text messages to a certain number or on TV.
They have the same thing at the bottom of the bar, and people will be chatting there by sending text messages.
All right.
It's put to use a lot more.
Let me just ask you a question over the satellite delay here.
Yes, I've noticed.
Okay.
He still can't hear me, can he?
You need better earphones in your phones.
I'll tell you that right now.
But one of the questions I have for people that are sending text messages to Coke machines and having Cokes come out,
what's to stop me from sending a message to an SMS to a particular digit, a series of digits,
and have Coke cans and bottles, you know, go hurtling to the floor all over the country?
What's to stop that from happening?
A large bill?
Well, apart from that, yeah.
It's like putting money in, so you still have to choose what Coke you're going to buy.
Oh, so you have to be standing there and pressing the button to make the thing come out?
To actually make it come out, right.
All right.
So you're not really saving that much time.
You're saving putting the money in, but you have to still hit the button.
I had an experience.
Right.
I mean, it's basically it makes it easier for you to acquire products because you can just do it with your cell phone.
And at the same time, you know, it's like you're not really spending money, right?
It's the same idea when online in a different world you put money in and then you have this fake money that you play with.
It's the same idea.
You're not seeing the transaction.
Okay.
Bicycle Mark, what's your experience?
Hmm.
It's no soda machine, but I did do the train thing.
in Portugal over the summer, and they have that option now for anybody can get their ticket via mobile phone.
The only strange thing is when the conductor comes around and most people hand him a piece of paper and he clips, you know,
he puts a punch in his little hole still.
They still have that.
And I hand him my cell phone and he kind of looks at it for a second and he looks at me and he nods.
Yeah.
You see, I don't get that.
Couldn't you just type the numbers that he's looking at onto the cell phone?
Does he verify it somehow?
Besides the initial number, I should have saved it.
What they have, they actually, so normally you don't just get your ticket checked all the time.
Like if I get on the bus and I use my cell phone, I would show the cell phone and he'd just let me on.
But then if somebody comes by to check the tickets, which we do every so often randomly,
they have a computer, they punch in the code in your text message, and if it's not valid,
and if they try to fake it, then you'll get a big fine.
I think it's something like 80 euros or something for not buying a ticket.
Yeah.
He may have asked for my ID or he may have, well, supposed to ask for my ID, but he probably didn't.
But anyway, they do have that.
Okay.
212-209-2900.
Do we have phone calls coming in?
Not too many.
I have one thing I want to say about our friend Jim.
Yes.
A Jim update.
Again, the phone number 212-209-2900.
We'll take phone calls right after Bernie tells us the latest about our colleague Jim.
Our longtime colleague on off the hook, Jim Vichinch, is doing pretty well.
Still having problems translating the words in his mind into speech, but he's working on it.
And I have an address.
I'm sure he would appreciate letters or cards or reading materials.
And I'm going to give the address over the air now, if that's okay.
Go right ahead.
It's Jim Vichinch, V-I-C-H-E-N-C-H, at the Caton Park Nursing Home,
at C-A-T-O-N, Caton Park Nursing Home, 1312 Caton Avenue, room 312B is in Bravo,
Brooklyn, New York, 11226.
Again, that's Jim Vichinch, V-I-C-H-E-N-C-H, Caton Park Nursing Home, C-A-T-O-N,
at room 312B is in Bravo, 1312 Caton Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 11226.
He's in good spirits.
When Jensen and I visited with him a couple of weeks ago,
and I'm sure cards and letters directed towards him would also boost his spirits.
Jim had a stroke about, I guess, a couple of months ago, and Mike and I had visited him.
And I think from your descriptions that he is making progress.
He seemed a bit more lucid from your descriptions as to the kinds of things he was saying
and references he was making.
And I think that's good.
But what are your impressions?
Because you hadn't seen him before.
Was it pretty much what you expected, better, worse?
I was pleasantly surprised to see him as lucid as he was.
He recognized Jensen and I right away.
He couldn't remember our names, but we wrote them down.
And he clearly knew who we were.
He just could not match our faces with names.
But he knew who we were.
He felt very comfortable with us.
He was overwhelmingly happy and just flirted to have visits.
Really, he was truly touched.
You could tell that.
So we visited with him for a good couple of hours, and he truly enjoyed it.
He is mobile.
He's able to get around, although part of his right side is apparently slightly paralyzed,
and they're doing physical therapy with him on that.
But I think reading materials would be very helpful to him.
He's able to write very little, just a few letters.
It's kind of like playing 20 questions with him.
When you have a conversation with him, he's trying to come up with a word.
But some nonsense words come out.
It's almost like the story Jabberwocky, where just these nonsense words come out.
But they're wonderful nonsense words that always seem to be in context.
You just have to figure out what he's saying.
If we can't make out what he's saying, he'll write back the first couple letters of the word,
and we'll get it.
But I think over time this will get a lot better.
He's all there.
There's just sort of a connection that's broken between his brain and his speech centers that's slowly being rebuilt.
Well, time and treatment as well,
because he definitely needs to have a program where he's working with somebody,
a professional that is good at this kind of thing, bringing people back from strokes.
I'm not entirely sure he's getting the best care that he could possibly get.
I don't know enough about it.
But if anyone there has suggestions or programs that maybe he could be a part of,
we'd certainly like to hear about that as well.
Plus, if you'd like us to send an e-mail to him,
we can print them out and read them to him, or I believe he can read them himself as well,
oth at 2600.com, just write to us, and we'll be happy to share that information.
But good news, and it's definitely a good thing that you guys visited him.
Okay, 212-209-2900.
We're going to go to the listener phone call section of the program now.
And you're on the air.
Nope.
You're on the air.
Is Oscar Jackson getting smashed at the party?
Okay.
Okay, it's good to know the intelligent people are out there and not here.
And good evening, you're on the air.
Oh, that's an analog phone.
Yes, please excuse the buzz, but anyway, let me turn the radio off.
This buzz brings back memories.
What kind of phone are you using?
I'm using a landline, but some piece of electrical equipment has gone bananas.
I got two questions.
Yeah.
One, at one of your big bi-yearly meetings, they had, I guess, the usual lock-picking thing.
Let me turn on my tape recorder so I'll get the answer here.
Okay, but also listen on the Internet.
But maybe that hasn't made its way to you yet.
This is quick.
I don't have to hunt for it.
All right.
And there were two locks, at least this was about five or six years ago, two of them.
You couldn't cram the ballpoint pen filler into and break it.
It was almost impossible to pick.
What were those?
Now, that's my first question.
Well, hold on.
Does anybody here remember this?
Redbird, Red Hag, Bernie, any of you guys know?
Unfortunately, I don't remember.
I wasn't part of that group.
Is he talking about the ballpoint pen hack where he uses the outer casing of a Vic pen
to pick the kryptonite bicycle lock, tubular locks?
Is that what you're talking about?
Can you hear him?
No, I couldn't.
But one was...
Bernie's been having phone trouble all night long.
One was American, one was European.
Uh-huh.
Anyway, my next question...
Yes, let's go on to the next question.
Next question is, remember back in the Gulf War when they talked on the TV about these guys
could get on these motor scooter-like devices and they had sound-counseling stuff on them
and super quieted, and they could go out and attack the enemy sleeping, you know,
shoot them in the head and so forth.
I assume that was some kind of sound-counseling where the waves interfered at opposite phase.
Whatever happened to that stuff?
Did they go black?
I just haven't heard of it since then.
That sounds like something you want to ask Tom Whisker on Weaponry,
which airs every Tuesday night, I think at 1 o'clock in the morning,
because he would definitely know that, and I don't think any of us do.
What, you didn't like the sound of that phone call?
That sounded great.
Phones used to sound like that.
It used to be buzzes and hums all the time.
Okay, we don't have that anymore.
We just sound like garbage, but...
Yes, Bernie.
I just want to interject briefly on a second question.
There's a company that's buying smart cars,
U.S. smart cars, and converting them to electric using lithium batteries.
They're going to be selling them through Walmart, Sam's Club.
But what's more interesting is the same company is developing an electric smart car
or some similar technology for the military,
so the military can sneak up on their target with these very, very quiet electric tiny smart cars.
It's kind of disturbing to know that smart cars might be on the battlefield in electric mode,
sneaking up on people.
I don't know how much you can really sneak up on somebody with a smart car.
It's amazing how quiet the electric cars are.
Electric cars are pretty quiet, but when you see a smart car, everyone's like,
look, a smart car, and, you know, that kind of gives it away right there.
Well, you can replace the panels, right?
So you can get camouflage panels.
Yes, make it a stealth car.
The strategic battlefield advantage is parking.
Yeah, definitely.
Parking on the battlefield.
Let's go to our next phone call.
And you're on the air.
Pick up.
Okay.
Hi.
Yes, there you are.
You hung up?
Why did you hang up when they started speaking?
My goodness.
Go ahead.
Okay, you're on the air.
I think you have to say more than that.
They don't hear you.
Hello?
Go ahead.
You're on the air.
Hi, Emmanuel.
I have a question.
Do you have any comment about the FCC commission overturning a 32-year-old ban yesterday
to allow broadcasters in the nation's 20 largest media markets, including Seattle, to also own a newspaper?
Yeah, that's kind of disturbing.
You'll see things like Rupert Murdoch having control of newspapers and TV stations.
It's not surprising to me that they did this, that they went ahead and made it supposedly easier for such groups to own more.
But it hurts.
It hurts those that don't have the same kind of monopoly power.
Emmanuel?
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
I want to point out that the way FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin pulled this off was very underhanded and sneaky.
And it's kind of like some of the other FCC commissioners, like Michael Kopser, saying he basically did this in the dead of night.
And a lot of Congress members were up in arms about this, too.
This was not – this was totally against –
there was a lot of public hearings that the FCC had about this,
and public response was overwhelmingly against lifting this 30-year-old restriction on any TV stations in the top 20 or 30 markets owning a local major newspaper.
The FCC went against this with a very narrow vote.
Republicans just outweighed the Democrats just by one vote.
And the way it was just done was very underhanded and sneaky.
It was not too surprising, but it was just really against the process that things should really go by.
The FCC said in 1975 that it is unrealistic to expect true diversity from a commonly owned station and newspaper combination.
And apparently in 2007 they don't really care for true diversity, so that's just fine.
True diversity has been overrated, and we don't need it anymore.
Okay, a couple of interesting things here.
Someone wrote in to tell us about this movie that's coming out.
It's called Look, and it's entirely footage from surveillance footage.
Yeah, so if you find this film called Look, which is playing, apparently you might be in it.
They don't have to get permission if it's surveillance footage or something.
I don't know how they got the surveillance footage, but thanks, people, for writing in and letting us know that.
Also, someone wrote in with an update on the Icelandic teenager who accidentally almost called President Bush,
and they say that he likely called extension 7732.
Now, I'm not going to give out the phone number because that would be wrong, even though it is a public number.
But if you can figure out the White House extension or White House exchange, you might be able to figure out the rest of it.
But 7732, apparently that's a White House number that if you were to bounce around enough, it'll lead you to the appropriate person, a.k.a. the president.
Thank you, Colin from Vancouver, who wrote in on that.
I don't think it's fair to say the Icelandic teenager accidentally tried to reach the president.
He sounded very intentional about it.
That's true, but he accidentally got a lot further than he had the authority to word out.
All right.
So we'll take another one.
And good evening. You're on the air.
Hello.
Go ahead.
Okay, hold on. Let me turn down my radio.
Yes, make it fast.
I'm on speakerphone. Wow.
I have been listening to you, I don't know how many years, many, many years.
Are you familiar with this scheme they call pay-by-touch?
It doesn't sound very pleasant.
I think we have that in Amsterdam.
I'm involved in the supermarket industry, and they're trying to get people to convert, and they're getting thousands and thousands of people to do this in certain markets,
from their loyalty card to basically a fingerprint, but it's called pay-by-touch.
And then you connect different, like your ATM card or your credit card or your checking account to your signature,
and you just go to the store and buy stuff and touch your finger, and you're there, man.
You know, this would be great for toddlers who like to touch everything.
Well, I think you have to have, you know, when it was first presented to me, I recoiled.
I said, I remember First Union Bank, which is some other bank now, twice,
they used to have something they called touch signature.
If you wanted to go in the bank to cash a check.
Yes, yeah, you got fingerprinted, basically.
Yeah, they never called touch signature.
Now they have pay-by-touch, and it's in a lot of supermarkets.
And, you know, I've read, like, who's using it because I'm involved in that kind of technology.
Not that, because I've been asked to incorporate that technology into something I do.
And it's like, wow, people will go do that for what?
Okay, so unfortunately we're running out of time, so we're going to have to cut this off.
But you raised some very interesting points. We're going to look into it.
Now, Kevin, you have a comment?
Couldn't you just lift a fingerprint off and then just keep buying people's stuff over and over?
I suppose there's all kinds of security issues.
There are many demonstrations of that at home.
Reddack, any final words from Finland?
It's actually interesting that here in Finland, you know, I have my card actually,
I have a smart card on it, and every time I make a purchase with it,
or most of the time, I have to actually enter my PIN, even if it's $2.
And so it sounds like in the States they make it easier and easier and easier to get by with less security.
And here it's always more security and more secure to actually spend your money and get into your account.
So I think it's kind of interesting.
All right, that's going to have to be the last word as we're running out of time here.
I want to thank everybody for being part of the show tonight.
Again, next week, some of us will be in Germany.
That should be interesting.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
Stay tuned for the Personal Computer Show.