What are you listening to?
What you are listening to.
Yeah, but I don't know what it is.
It's WBAI.
Wow.
Sounds weird.
Weird.
But I like it.
I like it.
What is it?
It's WBAI.
I like it.
Did you honor your pledge?
To go low-carb?
Hmm.
To send money to WBAI.
Oh, you mean write a check?
Yeah, I mean write a check.
I wrote it.
Well, now send it.
Oh, send it.
To WBAI.
120 Wall Street.
New York, New York.
1-triple-zero-5.
WBAI.
I mean, you just read the article and you said hackers, you know, hackers, or the site
was hacked.
Well, I read the article that said hackers, yes.
Right, exactly.
But are we not just perpetuating the same?
I mean, what are we going to call them?
I mean, the traditional name for people who are doing negative things is crackers, right?
But we don't tend to-
No, that's a stupid name.
That's a stupid name, because all it is is just saying that, okay, these are evil hackers,
and they're crackers, so okay, case closed, they're crackers.
No, I mean, call them vandals.
Call them vandals.
Call them-
I liked attackers.
That was a fine term.
That was a fine term.
Violence, though, attacking.
But-
But vandals, it's vandalism.
I don't get what purpose this is.
Now, who uses the FAA website?
I guess-
Yeah, that's a good question.
I've never-
I mean, I don't know.
If it's just the website, maybe.
If they were taking down the network, and it affects, you know, actual aviation stuff
that's important-
Why would aviation stuff be on the worldwide web?
I feel like they probably have their own network for that kind of thing.
Yeah, I would hope so.
So if they're attacking a website, I don't really see what purpose this serves, and what
really gain North Korea would have from taking down somebody's website.
Right.
Like you said, these are sites that get attacked every day.
Millions of attacks, you know, constantly.
And so what this boils down to is something that happens constantly also happened again.
But now they have someone that they want to blame it on, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, I just want to extend the offer to North Korea if they need some expert witnesses to
stand up and say that I know where North Korea was at that particular time, and it had nothing
to do with this.
You know, we're just willing to help out.
Do you suppose this has anything to do with the football?
You know, I don't think so.
It might, though.
I mean, there might be a little peeve that they're going to be sharing the World Cup
with North Korea.
They launched some missiles.
Well, North Korea launched some missiles, but that was just to celebrate Independence
Day for the United States.
Maybe South Korea thinks that this will really get our goat, and we're going to go after
North Korea now.
Forget the missiles.
But they attacked our website, God forbid.
But actually, South Korea wants conflict with North Korea less than the US does or did.
I'm not really sure what the policy is now, but.
Yeah, they're going to lose more people in the case of conflict.
Yeah.
And they're not going to be thrilled about having reunification either, because then
they have to deal with millions and millions of people that they have to finance, and you
know, a lot of East Germany.
Or in wretched poverty, as I understand.
I mean, things are really bad in North Korea.
Yeah, but then maybe bad in South Korea as well.
And Russia and China, they're not interested in this either, because they'd have to deal
with all those people too.
OK, so that interesting story that just came out.
Now, this is something else that we were talking about on the list a little bit, and it was
kind of reminiscent of something that happened over a decade ago.
Husband and wife owners of a California company that distributed pornographic materials over
the internet have been each sentenced to one year and one day in prison.
That's according to the US Department of Justice.
Extreme associates and owners Robert Zucari, also known as Rob Black, and his wife, Janet
Romano, a.k.a. Lizzie Borden, pleaded guilty in March to a felony charge of conspiracy
to distribute obscene material through the mail and over the internet.
They were sentenced on Wednesday.
The couple in their plea agreement acknowledged distributing three videos through the mail
and six video clips over the internet to Western Pennsylvania.
They forfeited their domain name, ExtremeAssociates.com, as part of their plea agreement.
That's an interesting penalty there.
They've been de-memed.
Well, so that then people can't find their content, in theory.
Well, yeah, the company is also defunct.
What is the government going to do with this domain name?
That's a really interesting question.
Extreme Associates produced and distributed sexually degrading material that portrayed
women in the most vile and depraved manner imaginable, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan
of the Western District of Pennsylvania said in a statement.
These prison sentences affirm the need to continue to protect the public from obscene,
lewd, lascivious, or filthy material, the production of which degrades all of us.
Now I'm a little confused here.
Were they distributing beauty advertisements by any chance, or possibly like Paris Hilton's
TV show?
We've all seen obscenity on the internet, have we not?
When did it become illegal to have obscene things?
I mean, over the air, yes, I can understand that.
But to distribute video clips online, we're not talking about underage porn or anything
like this.
This is apparently consenting adults.
Did I miss a chapter in our history?
I think there's just not a very strong legal definition of what's obscene and what's not
obscene.
And we've seen that, of course, with what's on the radio, you know, the words you can't
say and all that.
Right, but that's the radio.
Right.
And so I think the law is kind of vague in these areas.
And so basically, you have pornography, and then you have this porn.
I actually looked at what some of the videos were.
I didn't look at the videos, but I looked at the descriptions.
And I mean, they were pretty terrible, but, you know, it's kind of—
Yeah, if you're interested in this—
But I think the thing is that, you know, you can take these and say, oh, well, these are
really, really bad, so let's prosecute them, because maybe a jury or a judge will side
with us.
If it's consenting adults, yeah, it's disgusting or something, but—
I didn't say it was right.
What are we talking here?
Was it violence, or was it—
There were all kinds of—
Coprophagy, or, you know—
Yeah, all kinds of things.
Okay.
But, you know, it's still—we see violence in films every day, so that's not illegal.
This is something that doesn't involve children or unwilling participants, I assume.
I didn't say I agreed with it.
I'm just saying that they—
I'm not asking if you are agreeing with it.
Yeah, they took—
I'm saying this is—this doesn't seem in line with what we're allowed to do and
not allowed to do on the internet, on our computers.
Right.
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
This raises, really, a very old question that first became—raised a lot back in—geez,
it was back in the early 90s or late 80s.
I think it was the Rusty and 80s.
You're talking about the amateur action case?
Yeah, the amateur action bulletin board.
Right.
What was that about?
That was like a couple of decades ago.
It was in the 90s, I think.
But, yeah, it reminds me of that, where somebody wound up accepting a package from Tennessee
or something like that.
No.
I mean, where the standards, where the community standards of Tennessee were applied to someplace
that was, you know, many states away, and really out of their jurisdiction.
And that's one of the problems you have when you try to apply obscenity laws to the
internet.
Obscenity laws really are enforced by the community standards of what's considered
decent or obscene for that local community.
But, you know, when you apply that—the most conservative—I've been to western Pennsylvania.
We've all driven through western Pennsylvania on our way to Dayton, Ohio, every year.
Yeah, we drive very fast through there.
It's a very, very socially conservative area, parts of west—it's right near West
West Virginia—and, frankly, those community standards do not match or even come close
to the community standards of most other communities.
So you have, clearly, a very overzealous prosecutor who's applying their local community standards
to someone who's in a completely different community, where the standards there may be
perfectly okay with the information that's being distributed on the internet.
But, frankly, this information wasn't imposed on anybody.
This was available to people who were requesting it.
So I really have a problem with prosecutors, overzealous prosecutors, going after people
in other jurisdictions trying to enforce their local community standards on some other community.
But you're going to have this until there's some sort of agreement on how this should
really be handled sensibly.
Right now, obviously, it's not being handled sensibly.
I mean, what's interesting is, in this case, what you have is you have investigators requesting
and ordering or ordering these things, and they're saying, oh, well, they were delivered
to us, so it's clearly the fault of the person providing it, because even though we requested
it, they actually sent it to us.
But I mean, how can you have that?
How can you have that in commerce, that, oh, okay, well, we've got to remember not to send
something to western Pennsylvania, because we have to know the community standards of
every single part of the United States.
That way we don't violate their local obscenity at a local level.
I mean, how can you know that?
How can you carry on commerce that way?
I can't ship something.
Plus, that sounds like entrapment as well, if it's investigators asking for it.
You know, it's different, I guess, when you're talking about things that are plainly illegal.
So if a state has outlawed some sort of drug or something, you can't ship it there.
Fine.
But that's also on a state level.
But I mean, this is ridiculous.
Right.
And community standards change, and you have to keep updated on all that.
Yeah, community standards are completely different all over the world in every locality.
And if I put something on the internet, is it now my responsibility to somehow impose
some sort of filter that lets my website be seen by the entire internet except Western
Pennsylvania?
Right.
How do you do that?
How does that even work?
So maybe this was worse because they pleaded guilty back in March.
Maybe if they had fought this, maybe this couldn't possibly have stood.
But I don't know.
Now, these guys fought pretty hard.
They did.
I mean, they ended up pleading guilty, but this was not a case of just giving up at the
first opportunity.
I think, you know, I think, but now if someone pleads guilty, though, that doesn't set a
precedent, right?
It has to be that they lost the case.
Well, the judge has, like we learned a couple of weeks ago, the judge has to make a ruling
for it to set a precedent.
So I'm pleading guilty to a crime.
No, it's not a precedent.
So this is just on this one case then?
Mm-hmm.
It seems that way.
But what a case.
What a case.
Okay.
And something else that's rather shocking and surprising.
This comes from an Electronic Frontier Foundation press release of about a week ago.
EFF urged the federal court to reject bogus copyright claims in a ringtone royalty battle
that could raise costs for consumers, jeopardize consumer rights, and curtail new technological
innovation.
Millions of Americans have bought musical ringtones, often clips from favorite popular
songs, for their mobile phones.
Mobile phone carriers pay royalties to song owners for the right to sell these snippets
to their customers.
But as part of a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies, the American
Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, known as ASCAP, has told a federal court that
each time a phone rings in a public place, the phone user has violated copyright law.
Therefore, ASCAP argues, phone carriers must pay additional royalties or face legal liability
for contributing to what they claim is cell phone users' copyright infringement.
In an abacus brief filed last Wednesday, EFF points out that copyright law does not reach
public performances without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, clearly
the case with cell phone ringtones.
If phone users are not infringing copyright law, then mobile phone service providers are
not contributing to any infringement.
EFF senior intellectual property attorney Fred von Lommen says this is an outlandish
argument from ASCAP.
Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget
to silence their phones in a restaurant?
Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your
car radio with the window down.
ASCAP has responded by saying that it does not plan to charge mobile phone users, just
mobile phone service providers.
But if ASCAP prevails, consumers could find themselves targeted by other copyright owners
for public performances.
Worse, these wrong-headed legal claims cast a shadow over innovators who are building
gadgets that help consumers get the most from their copyright privileges.
Because it is legal for consumers to play music in public, it's also legal for my mobile
phone carrier to sell me a ringtone and a phone to do it.
Otherwise, it would be illegal to sell all kinds of technology that help us enjoy our
fair use, first sale, and other copyright privileges.
This is a really scary slippery slope.
All this looks like to me is, once again, an industry that's losing control over its
business model because it hasn't kept up with technology, just trying to maintain a revenue
stream at whatever cost possible.
If you think about it, there's no way that they're going to make the money by going after
service providers either because anybody can basically download, can put any of the songs
on their phone.
There's all kinds of providers for ringtones out there, and they're not going to be able
to corral all of them.
Plus, you've got to think about the slippery slope.
The car radio example is great.
The other example is Happy Birthday, for example, is under copyright, even though it was written
by somebody at Teachers College.
It just happens.
People whistling songs as they walk.
People whistling songs.
Somebody's created a website, unhappybirthday.com, where you can go and turn in your friends
and say, so-and-so was singing Happy Birthday in public.
Oh, awesome.
Yeah.
I think that's Mako Hill did that.
There's a site where you can turn in your friends for singing Happy Birthday in public.
I think we should just get rid of copyright law.
It seems to cause too many ... I mean, obviously, we can't, but the thing is that all of these
industries that go after the most ridiculous things, and I'm glad that they get publicized
in the media, at least to a degree, they're not getting themselves any good PR.
I mean, I'm sure with every one of these rulings, every one of these court cases, I'm less inclined
to go out and buy music because I don't want to pay them because they're a bunch of jerks.
But you're already paying for the music if you buy a ringtone, something I can never
understand why you'd buy a ringtone, but now that's not good enough for them that you're
buying the ringtone to start with?
The thing I'm still waiting for an explanation for is why it costs $2 for a 30-second ringtone,
but you can buy the whole song for a dollar.
Yeah, that's weird.
It also seems like they're double dipping here.
I mean, like here we're on the radio, the station has a license to play certain music
and we can play it.
Somebody listening to that song on their radio does not have to pay any amount of money to
anyone for the ability to listen to it, even if they're in public.
When the ringtone companies sell the ringtone, aren't they already paying the royalties on
this?
Has that ringtone not been now authorized to be played by those who own it?
You're actually a mistake, Rob.
If I own, say, a restaurant and I have the radio playing in my restaurant, then ASCAP
and BMI and CSAC will solicit license fees from me.
The most important thing here, the difference between an individual playing it and a restaurant
playing it is because, as the person said, when the restaurant plays it, it's for indirect
commercial gain.
When an individual plays a ringtone, they're not getting any commercial gain out of it.
In fact, they're probably losing money because people think they're lame with the lame song.
The thing I don't get is that if you're on a radio station, it's always been a problem
with me, if you're on a radio station and you're playing music, it seems to me you're
helping the people who produce the music.
You're doing them a favor.
You're giving them free publicity and an audience that they would not have.
How can they actually want to charge you money for that?
That's an interesting thing.
For years, I believe one of the industries lobbied against having to pay royalties for
music played on the radio, but now the music industry has done a turnaround and they're
actually doing a campaign.
They have an AstroTurf campaign called Music First, which I believe is supported by ... I'm
trying to remember who ... Sweet Honey and the Rock was the act that surprised me in
there, but there are a number of acts that are signed up to this grassroots campaign,
which basically says, well, we're fighting to make sure that artists get paid for the
songs that get played on the radio.
In fact, a lot of the time, there's been evidence that artists aren't actually getting paid
on these music from the ASCAP suits, from the RAAA suits, which is a tremendous problem.
This is really ... Sorry, I lost my train of thought.
Bernie, go ahead.
Go ahead, Bernie.
I just want to say, ASCAP is really being disingenuous on a number of points.
First, them claiming that a ringtone ... I call them ring tunes because they're actually
a tune.
If you happen to be in public and it plays, that that constitutes a public performance.
Then for them to say that, oh, we're not going to go after the consumers' pocketbooks for
this.
We're just going after the cell phone providers, that's disingenuous, too, because what do
they think the money's going to come out of the pockets of, ultimately?
If they increase the royalty prices to the cell phone providers, obviously, cell phone
providers don't pay for anything.
They're going to kick it back to the consumer.
This is just doubly disingenuous.
As Gus pointed out, it's just another desperate attempt by an obsolete business model grasping
for the last dime.
You know what?
I think that if we shut down all of the law schools in America for about 10 years, a lot
of these things would go away.
I think the problem is we have way too many lawyers who are sitting around going, what's
the next suit that I can file against somebody?
I need something to do.
I'm twiddling my thumbs here.
Where do I go?
This is why you get all these crazy lawsuits in America.
I think we should go to law schools.
If I go home and I publish an audio track that's just a small electric motor buzzing,
and I publish that and I obtain copyright on it, can I get paid every time someone has
their phone on vibrate?
Excellent.
No.
Interesting.
Good idea.
Interesting idea there, Gus.
Going on with the, in addition to law schools, PR firms as well, I just wanted to say a couple
more things about the Music First campaign.
I first heard about this from somebody who worked at Sony.
And what Sony was doing when they had this fake grassroots campaign, this AstroTurf campaign,
was they were going to people within Sony and saying, here's this great grassroots campaign
that has sprung up magically to protect artists.
You as a Sony employee really ought to go out and join this campaign.
So there was this internal pressure, basically artificially inflating the ranks of people
who were going to be fighting for people to get paid when things played on the radio.
So it's not like it's, I don't think they have much, if any, popular support.
And they're certainly wearing down their popular support by suing everybody and making that
their business model.
Absolutely.
All right.
It's fun to watch these things unfold, because there doesn't seem to be any end of the silliness
out there.
But let's move from silliness to complete utter stupidity.
You guys hear about the MI6 chief's wife?
You hear this story?
This is a good one.
All right.
MI6 chief's wife walked into a bar.
The new MI6 chief.
Yeah.
The wife of the new head of MI6.
What is MI6?
It's the spy agency over in North?
It's like the British CIA, more or less.
Yeah.
They've caused a major security, she's caused a major security breach, and left his family
exposed after publishing photographs and personal details on Facebook.
Sir John Sowers, who is the head of the MI6, is a former CIA agent.
He's been a member of the CIA for a number of years.
He's been a member of the CIA for a number of years.
He's been a member of the CIA for a number of years.
his family exposed after publishing photographs and personal details on Facebook.
Sir John Sowers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November,
putting him in charge of all of Britain's spying operations abroad.
But entries by his wife, Shelley, on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising
details about where they live and work, their friends' identities, and where they spend
their holidays.
This is Lady Shelley, right?
She's got a title.
Yeah, I think so.
On the day her husband was appointed, she congratulated him on the website using his
codename M. No, actually, I'm sorry, it's C, not M. I'm in James Bond land, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
James Bond worked for the MI6.
James Bond would never have a Facebook page to start with.
He's got some intelligence.
This is why James Bond was single.
James Bond wouldn't have a wife, exactly.
Actually, he did have a wife, Penny Farthing.
This is Penny Weather, or Penny Farthing, whatever her name is, she wouldn't have any.
Lady Sowers had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, making it visible to any of
the sites.
200 million users around the world who choose to be in the open access London social network
on Facebook.
And by the way, if anybody out there has a cache of this page, I'd love to see it because
they've taken it down.
And not to mention the fact that, you know, just, okay, it was public to all the people
in London, but the fact that she's actually putting it on Facebook in the first place,
it's somewhere.
So, you know, with enough digging or enough context, you could dig it up, right?
If I was really determined to get this information, I could call somebody up on Facebook and I'm
sure I could pay somebody off to send me the data.
Yeah, but I'm sure enough people downloaded it and saved it that they must have it now.
Well, no, I mean, she was an idiot, but, you know...
Was she an idiot, or was she just a typical person thinking that this is...
She was a typical person.
Just because you have privacy settings doesn't mean that your data is necessarily going to
be private forever.
Somebody has access to it because you've put it on the internet.
I don't think she saw any reason to be private.
Why would I want to hide this information?
How could this be bad?
Facebook's not going to be on your side here either, and I don't mean, ooh, they're evil,
they're just, they're about to, they've announced the intention to make everybody's page public
by default.
They're just going to do that at some point, even if your privacy settings are already
set to private.
And so this stuff really could change anytime, and it's really worth thinking about that
when you put things up.
Absolutely.
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
When you're married to someone who works in the highest levels of British intelligence,
MI6 is foreign intelligence, like our CIA, and MI5 is domestic intelligence.
When you're married to someone like that, you cannot be unaware of information security
issues.
You know that there's stuff you just can't talk about.
Now, wait.
Have you ever been married to a spy?
Sometimes they don't tell you what they're doing, you know?
Maybe I am, and I don't even know it.
Yeah.
There's a lot of secrecy going on in that household, I'll bet, and she probably thought
it was just nice, normal life.
Well, there's probably going to be some good yelling and arguments in that household, but
I could just...
To be a fly on that wall, and it probably is possible with a Facebook application.
I could just see this guy, the head of MI6, having to explain to members of parliament
and the heads of MI6, just, I'm sorry, my wife is a stupid git.
I don't think that she is a stupid git.
I mean, she's just not thinking about the fact that she's married to the head of the
MI6, and that she needs to not behave in this very...
Posting the information that she posted on Facebook is an incredibly normal thing to
do for people of her social station, and she didn't make the connection that she needs
to opt out of this.
I agree that it's a normal thing for people to do, but I think in general, the whole thing
is stupid, where people are constantly posting all their private information, and this is
exactly the kind of thing that can happen.
It's a very exaggerated case, but it's a good example.
I do wonder whether maybe there's sort of a slightly different social norm for this
in England, and I'd love to hear any callers who could tell us a little bit more about
this, because I know that in the American government, there's a huge, huge tendency
right now to try to get people to cleanse their information on the internet.
I have a high school acquaintance who's now a lawyer for the US government doing labor
law, and she contacted me a little while ago saying, please take down your webpage about
me, and I said, I don't have a webpage about you.
What we have is a comment that my friend left on my website, where he said something
including your name, and he might as well have said Octopus Blender, and it would have
meant basically the same thing.
It was sort of a nonsensical reference, and she's like, well, my employer needs me to
take it down.
I get stalked by people.
Please take it down, and I sort of gave her the runaround for a little bit, because it
is actually going to be technically hard for me to take it down because of comment spam
as it happens, but the way this conversation ended with her, and this really disappointed
me, was with her saying, well, I'm sure you know a lot more about this than I do, and
that was her way of signing off and sort of going, I washed my hands of this, and I really
wish that as a lawyer for the government, she knew more about what was going on.
You know, this brings up a good example of an incident I had with somebody over the last
week, concerning trying to explain something and having it fall on deaf ears and just completely
go out of control.
Occasionally, occasionally nonsense happens on the internet, and I see something that
is not spam, something that is actually something I need to pay attention to.
Like if somebody from Nigeria sends me an email saying that they're leaving me all this
money and something like that, that's something I tend to take seriously and pursue.
It hasn't quite panned out yet, but I'm sure at one point it will, but this particular
case, I saw this order come in, and it was an order to my name, and it was basically
an order for, what was this, for Sun Armor Water and Stain Units.
I have no idea what those are, but somebody ordered two of them.
They had my address, they had the address, but the credit card number, they had the last
four digits of credit card number, I have no such credit card number, they just had
the address.
So this company basically sent me an email saying that this was being shipped to me as
per my request.
That's a good trick, I mean you have so many credit cards, you have almost every possible
last four digits.
Well, no, I really don't.
I'd have to have 10,000 for that to happen, but basically this company is called Gordon
and Gordon, Inc., and they said, Gordon and Gordon, Inc., confirmation number, I'm not
going to give the confirmation number out because that's probably not a good idea either.
If you're not completely satisfied or have questions regarding your purchase, please
contact customer service, 877-223-8245, public service giving their number out.
Have your confirmation number available when calling so we may assist you promptly.
Well, I knew this wasn't a valid order, I knew they apparently hadn't checked to make
sure that the address matched the credit card, so I sent them a friendly little note warning
them that this was not quite what they thought it was and that they were about to be ripped
off.
I basically just said, this is a fraudulent order, please don't ship, please check your
credit card info more thoroughly to prevent this sort of thing in the future.
Thanks.
Well, apparently I ruffled some feathers by saying that.
Next thing I knew, I was getting an email from Rebecca over at this company, Gordon
and Gordon.
Dear Mr. Goldstein, are you insulating, that's not even a word, insinuating, yeah, insulate
and insinuating.
We're possibly insulting at the same time.
Insulting and insinuating.
Are you insulating our staff stole your credit card number and charged a fraudulent order?
If the answer is yes, I would recommend before you start attacking my staff's integrity,
you better have concrete proof to back up your insulting comments.
I hope I am making myself very clear, you are out of line, you are incorrect and you
are lucky my attorney is not writing this email.
Mr. Goldstein, we ship thousands of products each year and this is the first issue we have
ever had in our company's seven year history.
I believe you owe my staff a written apology, signed Rebecca Walton, President Gordon and
Gordon Inc.
My God, talk about cluelessness, trying to help somebody out and you get attacked like
this.
This company, I don't know how they survived seven years, but if they're not checking credit
card addresses with the credit card orders, anybody can enter any number and send it to
anybody they please.
It's that simple and anybody can understand that.
How do you know this isn't just like a spam?
The company really exists and that person really exists.
No, but how do you know that somebody didn't set this up as a prank?
Obviously, it was set up as a prank because someone used my address.
But the thing is, this company fell for it and I'm trying to warn them, don't fall for
this.
It's a good business practice.
Did you get the product?
Not yet, but this was only happening a few days ago.
But if I do get the product, I'm not obligated to return it.
I don't know what I'm going to do with these water stain units.
I don't even know what they're for.
I am going to enjoy life to the fullest with these things if they do show up.
And I was not obligated to contact them either and tell them about this.
Not at all.
If I ran a business and somebody told me that a fraudulent transaction was going on, I would
be thankful.
I would be grateful that they just saved me a packet and saved me getting ripped off.
But apparently, it's okay to take it a little more personally.
Well, it's interesting how defensive they got so quickly.
So basically, anyone could go and put their address in and put in a fake credit card number
and then claim that they'd never heard of this order before and get some free stain
unit.
Yeah, or whatever it is they sell.
And this is not encouraging people to do this.
It's encouraging people to wake up and pay it.
This is the first thing we learned when we opened an online store is to watch out for
fraudulent orders because there's a ton of them out there.
For every conceivable store, people order hundreds of hats to go to African countries.
It's just whatever you sell, someone will try and buy it fraudulently.
Okay.
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
Most consumers are not going to do this, but you might.
Did you happen to examine the email headers of the message you got from them to confirm
that it actually came from them?
Yes.
Okay, so it really was from them.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Okay.
And I researched this person's name too.
It's Rebecca.
So you'd really think she would have a better customer service attitude than that, but go
figure.
Yeah, it's something.
Let's hope they wake up.
Okay.
Time for you to wake up.
Give us a call.
212-209-2900.
I'd like to read this incident report that somebody sent in.
This is great, talking about cluelessness.
This is the Olympic gold medal of cluelessness.
On June 6th, this is from a police report, on June 6th, 2009 at 638 in the morning, myself
and Officer Adkins were dispatched to Holiday Inn Express at 2370 Sanders Street in reference
to a burglary alarm.
While on route, we were advised that multiple windows had been broken and that there was
water on the floors of the hotel.
Upon arrival, I observed approximately 100 to 150 people standing in the parking lot.
An audible fire alarm could be heard and many of the windows were shattered.
I made contact with employee Christina Bergman, who advised that she was working at the front
desk of the hotel when she received a phone call from an unknown number at approximately
6am.
The caller identified himself as an employee of Grinnell Fire Sprinkler Service.
Bergman stated that the caller then advised her that there was a problem with the fire
sprinklers and that she needed to pull the fire alarm to reset them.
Bergman proceeded to pull the fire alarm at this point, causing the audible alarm.
The caller then advised Bergman to push the alarm lever back up.
When she was unable to do so, the caller told her that in order to keep the sprinklers from
coming on and causing serious damage to the hotel, she had to break all the exterior windows.
At this point, customer Rusty Brown came into the lobby to assist Bergman.
Brown identified himself as an incident commander and Bergman gave him the phone.
The caller then proceeded to tell Brown that the exterior windows had to be broken in order
to reset the alarm and keep the sprinklers from activating.
At this point, Bergman and Brown began breaking the lobby windows with a fire extinguisher.
While Brown was breaking the lobby windows, the caller advised Bergman that she must break
a portion of one of the sprinkler heads in order to keep it from activating.
At this point, Bergman removed a portion of the sprinkler head, causing a large amount
of water to flow through it.
After breaking several windows and realizing that the alarm was not deactivated, Rusty
Brown got back on the lobby phone with the caller.
The caller told Brown that he must reset the control panel for the system.
Brown told the caller that the water from the sprinkler was keeping him from reaching
the panel.
The caller then told Brown that he had to find the breaker box and shut down the power
to the hotel.
At this point, Brown gave the caller his cell phone number in order to stay in contact while
mobile.
The caller made contact with Brown by phone and continued to give him instructions.
Brown found an employee and gained access to the main electrical room and shut down
the main power.
Brown advised that at this point, the unknown caller called his cell phone again and advised
him that he was connecting him to the hotel manager, whose phone number he had gotten
from Christina Bergman.
At this point, Brown was in contact with Candlewood manager Donna Caldwell, who was unaware of
the situation.
The fire department was contacted and informed of the situation once they arrived on scene
and determined the hotel was safe.
The guests were allowed back inside to retrieve their property.
Manager Angela Bagby advised that she had made contact with Donna Goodell, who happened
to be staying at Holiday Inn Express in Little Rock, and that a similar call was received.
At this point, Sergeant Hodges advised dispatch to put out a call to all Arkansas law enforcement
agencies and advised them that more of these calls could be coming in.
There was extensive damage to the windows, water damage to the carpets and electrical
system as well as cleanup cost and lost revenue, which they estimate as a total of about $50,000.
Officer Britton took photographs of the damage.
Okay, you know what?
When you have people in charge of things like this, anything is possible.
It doesn't matter how much security you have.
This is, I've never heard of anything like this, but this is a real police report.
This really happened.
This came from the smoking gun.
And you're staring at me in disbelief.
Go ahead.
I'm blown away.
I'm really not sure there's anything we can say in response to that.
Well, I mean, if somebody calls, a stranger calls you and tells you to pull a fire alarm,
right away that should be, something should go off in your head saying, this probably
isn't kosher.
And then breaking windows with fire extinguishers, yeah, you know, that goes over the line for
me too.
And that's kind of like when your bank calls you and you need to verify some information
and then you give it to them because it's the bank that called you.
And you're warned about that.
I guess you're not warned not to break windows when someone calls you to do that because
I guess we just figured people weren't that dim that they would do that.
Yeah.
You know, I love a good prank phone call every now and then, but I think there are lines
and limits and this crosses several billion of them.
Yeah.
But I mean, how could you stop?
Once you started talking to somebody like this and they just keep doing whatever it
is you asked them to do, how can you, I mean, how much further can you possibly go?
If you're talking to someone who's willing to go smashing the windows of the workplace
because you tell them they have to, is there really any challenge?
I just hope whoever did this was recording the phone call.
Can you imagine how it sounded to them on the phone, hearing the windows breaking in
the distance?
Oh boy.
Did the caller identify themselves?
I think they just identified themselves as an employee of the fire alarm company.
It would have been great if they used like a fake name that was hilarious.
Well, I just love how they found the actual manager who was probably asleep someplace
at six in the morning and connected this person to them so they had to explain, yeah, I just
broke all the windows and pulled the fire alarm and there's water everywhere and the
cops are on the way.
Yeah.
212-209-2900 is our phone number if you have any questions, comments, experiences of your
own to share with us.
We'd sure love to hear them.
Let's take this call over here.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
How stupid that is.
Pretty stupid.
Yeah, I think that's, that word definitely summarizes it.
You know, because if I'm an employee, the manager will have to come and tell me, do
that.
Nobody.
One Christmas morning, I have a very good alarm system in my home.
And one Christmas morning, the two fire engines turned up at my house, knocked on the door.
We came, opened the door, and we got a silent alarm from this house that said no alarm went
off.
When they came and checked, the alarm went off silently.
And my wife was doing some baking in the kitchen, and the thing went off silently.
And they got it and came.
You know, I can understand that.
But for somebody to call me and tell me what, you know.
Well, people are open to suggestion on lots of things.
No bank, no person should take any call from a bank and give their vitals on the phone.
First thing, your social security number should never be repeated on the phone.
Never.
That's the first law.
Yeah, yeah.
But many times they ask you for that.
Many times computers ask you for that.
Yeah, they do.
I was asked for that today, in fact.
I was asked to give the last four of my social by a computer.
Last week, I was taken out on an insurance policy, and they wanted me to give them my
social on the phone.
I said, no way.
You have to send me the documents, let me fill them in.
You know?
But there's something that I don't know.
You have to think twice, or maybe three times.
I think some people need to think half a dozen times.
Before doing it.
Thank you for taking my call.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You were an off-the-hook.
You're an off-the-hook.
Go ahead.
Speak up.
Hey.
How you doing?
What's on your mind?
I used to work for this company that we used to get calls all the time that was meant for
the Claral Hair Care Helpline.
And they would listen first to the voicemail for the company, and then they would hear
me say the name of the company.
And they would still ask for advice on their hair products.
And this happened so many times.
We started dispensing advice, and I would tell them that, oh, that product's been recalled.
It will actually cause all your hair to fall out.
And we had a study done by the Charles Manson Institute.
And I'd mentioned that the head scientist, Ms. Lynette Fromm, has confirmed this.
Oh, good old Squiggy, yes.
Bravo, sir.
What's Squiggy up to these days?
But they would go for it.
But I would always put a time-lapse on it.
I would say, there's going to be an announcement tomorrow in the newspaper.
So they knew when they opened the paper tomorrow if it wasn't there, maybe, just maybe, they'd
finally figure it out.
But this was after you told them that they weren't actually reaching Claral?
Well, when you call the company, first you get the voicemail of the company, you've reached
such and such company, then you'd hear me say the name of the company.
It wasn't even close to Claral.
Our telephone number was a few digits off, but these people were just so nice.
It's like, you know what, if you're that crazy, you might as well have some fun with them.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thanks.
Thanks for that good advice there.
We see that kind of mistaken identity going on all the time on the internet.
I actually maintain a website, gumbaby.org, where basically you get people saying, dear
Maury Povich, to some poor random person's blog.
And so if you enjoy more of that, go check that out there.
A similar thing used to happen to an old friend of mine whose cell phone number unfortunately
was one digit away from her, the local crisis line.
So she found herself dispensing advice to people because she couldn't hang up on them.
Yeah.
Well, hopefully that didn't go badly.
Luckily, she was a nice person.
Yeah.
I mean, calling for hair products is one thing, but calling for, you know, crisis intervention
is something else.
So yeah, you do have to know the boundaries.
You have to know when common sense must prevail.
What if it's a hair crisis?
Yeah.
I don't think anyone's ever jumped off a bridge for that.
But then again, I'm probably wrong.
Some people almost certainly have.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're right.
Okay.
All right.
Let's move on.
Some people sent us a link to an article about the last phone booths in New York City.
You know, there are only four outdoor phone booths left in Manhattan.
They're all on West End Avenue.
Only four.
Here are some pictures of them.
Look at those.
This one is at 101st Street.
This one over here is at the corner of 100th Street.
So I'm sure if you stand, you can see both of them at the same time.
And then if you go a little further down, you'll find a tree-shrouded booth at the corner
of 90th Street.
And finally, this one right here, see in front of next to the mailbox in front of that store
there on West End Avenue, it's at 66th Street.
Now we're talking about enclosed phone booths.
Enclosed phone booths where the doors close and the light comes on.
And there's only four left in Manhattan.
And I think we should visit them.
I think we should take pictures of them.
It would be a fun thing to do.
Yeah.
I'm actually looking to set up some sort of a field trip through nyc2600.net.
So if any of our local listeners are interested, get in touch with us through that site and
let me know.
Okay.
Thank you so much for joining us on the show.
And also, we're almost at the end of our year-long feature on songs relating to telephones.
I counted the number of times we've done it.
We've done it 50 times, which means this week is number 51.
And next week will be the last one.
So if you have suggestions on what our last phone-related song should be, email us, oth at 2600.com.
We will see you next week.
I'm in a phone booth, baby.
Number scratched on the wall.
I'm in a phone booth, baby.
Number scratched on the wall.
I'm new in Chicago.
Got no one else to call.
Been walking all day.
Got friends I can't find.
Heart's so cold.
Had to buy me some wine.
Calling you, baby.
Took my very last dime.
I'm in a phone booth, baby.
Number scratched on the wall.
I'm new in Chicago.
Got no one else to call.
Had to buy me some wine.
Took my very last dime.
Had to buy me some wine.
I'm in a phone booth, baby.
Number scratched on the wall.
I'm in a phone booth, baby.
Number scratched on the wall.
I'm new in Chicago.
Got no one else to call.
Had to buy me some wine.
Got no one else to call.
Said, call me the reader.
Anytime, day or night.
You know I'm broken up cold, baby.
And I hope you'll treat me right.
I'm in a phone booth, baby.
With a cold wind right outside.