and our documentaries, visit our website fsrn.org and follow us on Twitter at twitter.com slash fsrn.
Thanks for listening. In San Francisco, I'm Danny Wood.
And the time is just about 7 p.m. You're listening to WBAI 99.5 FM.
And it's about time for another edition of Off The Hook.
We couldn't get much worse. But if they could, they would.
On Diddly Bum for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. On Diddly Bum!
And a very good evening to you. The show is Off The Hook. Rob T. Firefly here with you.
I'm joined in the studio by Mike. Hello. And Voltaire.
Yes, I shall. And Jim is here.
Hello. On the phone, we have Bernie S. in Philadelphia.
Are you there, Bernie S. in Philadelphia? I'm here. Greetings from Philadelphia.
And who we don't have here is Emanuel, who's running late.
So he's supposed to be on the phone. Are you there, Emanuel?
Yeah, I'm on the phone. I'm also, I just got on the FDR drive. Boy,
what a hassle it's been getting into the city today. Apparently,
I just found out that Obama's in town, and that means all kinds of roads are closed.
But the thing is, they don't, there's no communication. They don't tell you what
roads are closed. Cops direct you to the FDR drive, and when you get there,
you find out that it's barricaded, and you have to turn around and go back.
And there was nothing about this on the radio to guide cars away.
But within the last 45 seconds, I was able to break through a police barrier,
get onto the FDR drive, and I'm speeding downtown right now to Wall Street,
and I hope to be there fairly soon. How are you guys?
We're well, I think. I don't want to speak for everyone, but
those of us who can make it here, even when the president's in town, seem to be doing well.
Well, I'm going to hand the phone over to Kyle so that I can continue
driving safely and not get caught talking on the phone. Just one moment.
It's worth knowing that he's...
Hello?
Hello, Kyle.
Hi, how are you doing?
I'm all right. Voltaire, you were saying something?
Yes, Obama's only in town for three hours, but that's long enough to cause a lot of commotion.
Cause commotion everywhere he goes. Did you see this news from Holland? Our friend Ropp
has been making some waves, I guess, because one of the members of the Dutch parliament
asked the foreign affairs minister, whose name is Uri Rosenthal,
I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, a bunch of questions basically about Ropp's case,
about the whole Twitter fiasco and where the US government is trying to get all this information.
And one of the things they asked is, they asked the foreign minister,
do you agree that the Netherlands will not cooperate with criminal procedures of the
American authorities, such as in the case of potential suspects connected to WikiLeaks?
If not, why not? And the answer was basically, well, no, we're not going to promise anything
if the US government asks, well, we have an extradition treaty with them, then I guess
we might follow it. And this caused all kinds of furor in the Netherlands, which is good.
I'm glad that things like that can cause furor in some parts of the world.
Because most people there believe, apparently, or at least a lot of people believe that Ropp
has not done anything wrong and maybe he shouldn't be sent to the US. But the key thing that Ropp
has posted on his blog to explain is that there is in fact no extradition request
at the current time. So he's safe for now. And the Dutch media storm notwithstanding.
I don't know. What do you think, Bernie?
Well, I think extraditing anyone for something as simple as sharing information is ridiculous.
And we'll see. I wish the United States didn't seem to have a stranglehold on so many other
countries' governments as far as getting them to extradite people to the United States. It
seems to be a one-way street. A lot of other countries have people like in the United States
who are accused of being war criminals, and yet they'll never see, they'll never go to those
countries. So it's a double standard, I think. Hey, Josh, can I break in here for a moment?
I'm driving down the FDR Drive, and Obama has just taken off in a helicopter. There's actually
two helicopters that are flying over Brooklyn right now. And this just happened. Apparently,
I'm right behind him. I'm getting off FDR now, so I should be in the studio in a couple of minutes,
but the whole downtown is being barricaded off as a result of this.
Yeah, I believe those are the two helicopters that Jim pointed out to me earlier that we can
actually see at the helipad from the window of the station here. And yeah, there's the typical
amount of presidential commotion. There's an incredible amount of police activity down here,
vans and trucks and fire trucks, people with those long overcoats. And wow, it's something to see.
I have to say, though, that there's so many police and construction and whatnot going on
around here. Every week that I came down by bicycle, and I was almost all the way here
before I realized, I even detected that it was higher than normal, the police insanity.
What is normal for downtown rush hour? I don't know. I don't know.
Which of the helicopters was the one with the president and which was the decoy? I want to know.
I don't know, but I left my laser pointer at home so I couldn't aggravate them at all.
I just noticed that they weren't the presidential helicopters. I think they're the ones with two
props. I forget what they're called, but they seem maybe like more of his entourage. I think
maybe he left a little bit earlier, but it definitely looks like things are winding down
and it's going to get less crazy downtown shortly. Even his entourage gets helicopters?
Yeah, I think they do. They're like these military ones with the two props,
and I didn't see any of the ones that were green and white, so he must be long gone by now.
All right.
Oh, these are the ones that each one have two props on? They look like a big freight carrier?
Right. I can't remember the name. They're not civvies, are they?
They load these things up with vehicles, like the presidential limousine and all the other stuff
they load on the helicopters and they roll them off.
Right, right.
Wow.
Yeah, it seems like that's exactly what's going on. The last of the equipment and
personnel are taking off. The police officers on motorcycles and all the aid vehicles are
sort of standing around looking like they're done for the day. Yeah, that's about it. I think we're
pulling up here.
The advantage of getting here after 7 is that the parking is free, so
we can have that to point to. I'll be up in a couple of minutes, though. I'll see you then.
Okay, so if we want to do anything terrible to your chair, we have to do it now.
You got the knife, right?
I got it, and the chewing gum.
Oh, that's good. We have this announcement from the folks at the Open AMD project.
Open AMD, folks will remember, has been at the past couple of HOPEs,
and what they make is badges that basically follow you all around the conference and show where
everyone is and where they're going and what they're thinking and, I don't know, all kinds
of things. And they're trying to build a similar system at the Chaos Camp this summer in Germany,
but that conference is not able to fund the project, so they're looking for community
support to build it. So you can go to their website, which is openamd.org slash kickstarter,
and they'll have more information there about how you can support the project.
Always a lot of fun. We always enjoy the Open AMD shenanigans at our conferences, don't we?
In other announcement news, tomorrow there's going to be a—our friends, Anonymous, are
throwing a rally to support Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks at 3 p.m. at City Hall in Manhattan,
so you should all go to that.
Where is that again?
In City Hall in New York.
Is there a website for that?
No, there's a press release and a—
It shouldn't be too hard to find, knowing that crowd.
The official name for the rally is the Rally for Information Freedom, so if you just Google that,
the top search results would be the Village Voice talking about the event. It looks really good.
If you read it in the Village Voice, it must be true, so definitely.
Bernie, I think you had some news as well.
Well, it was kind of—we kind of set the stage last week. We were talking about
social engineering attacks on average people, and it appears that there's a—you know,
in a lot of these companies, a lot of companies you do business with online will
establish an online relationship with you and get your email address.
They're spamming me is what you're saying, right?
Well, yeah, a lot of companies do that, but they also don't even bother to manage
these mailing lists themselves. They form them out to big companies like a company called Epsilon,
and it looks like dozens and dozens of companies who all use this company called
Epsilon to manage their mailing lists got hacked in a bad way, and basically
Epsilon failed to protect these mailing lists, and now it looks like tens of millions of Americans,
at least many millions of Americans' names and email addresses are in the hands of unauthorized
people, and not only do they know your name and address, but now they know what company you do
business with, which makes it a little easier to social engineer people. If you can send a
fake email—these crooks can send any one of these millions of victims now an email pretending
to be from the company they did business with using your name and email address and say,
oh, we need your account information again. We lost it.
So this has all been over the mainstream media the past few days, but we were talking about
this very topic last week, and it just goes to show you really need to keep your guard up,
and here on Off the Hook, we've even gotten some of these attempts just the past week, haven't we?
Yeah, apparently Off the Hook bought flowers for someone. I didn't know that,
but we got an email saying that the flowers people had their database taken.
I also got one from Chase, which is a bank that I do business with, and a couple more.
They're really—apparently a lot of really big companies were Epsilon's clients,
and it's not clear, though, what the risk from this disclosure is.
Well, I like how all these companies, when they say that your information was compromised,
they all say something like—and I'm going to quote the one from 1-800-Flowers. They say,
quote, we take your privacy very seriously, and we work diligently to ensure your private
information is always protected. Obviously, they don't.
Well, no, Bernie, you're wrong on that because they do—by the way, I'm here in the studio.
I made it upstairs.
Welcome. Good to see you.
You know, Obama's really starting to piss me off. That's all I got to say. He's supposed to
let us know when he's in town, and wow, he can't get anywhere. There are other issues, too. Take my
First Amendment rights, take away various liberties, and kowtow to Republicans, fine,
but don't mess with the traffic, you know? Anyway, Bernie, they do take your privacy
seriously. Seriously, they have taken your privacy. I mean, that's what they mean.
Okay.
You got to read between the lines.
All right.
It just seems that the only thing bad that can happen because of this is I'll get more spam,
and that's bad, but hardly novel.
I've been seeing all kinds of notices from various companies, Chase, 1-800-Flowers,
a couple of others, saying that something happened to their mailing list at Epsilon.
Never heard of Epsilon before. Didn't know everybody used a company to store
a mailing list. Why can't they store it themselves? Why do they have to
farm it out to a third party?
Well, it might get broken into if you don't do it right.
Yeah.
It's obviously a very trustworthy third party that you can depend on to keep your information safe.
Yeah.
Wait, did I say is? I meant isn't.
You put everything in one area, one company, and look what happens.
Every admin loves a single point of failure.
Yes. So, I missed the first part of what you guys are talking about as far as Epsilon,
the Epsilon breach.
We were calling you names.
Have there been more developments? Anything else?
We've gotten emails from quite a few listeners who, from different companies, have forwarded us
similar looking emails of apology and informing them of the breach.
Some companies are, I think, a little more proactive at this than others.
Well, I think it's another reason why you don't give out your email address,
unless you really have to give out your email address.
But most times, you don't really have to do that.
But I mean, I don't mind my bank having my email address.
I like them to email me when my statement is ready.
Why can't they just email you when your statement is ready?
Why can't they just... Well, you can check, I suppose.
I have to go there every day to check.
Okay. So, you're one of these people that doesn't get a paper statement in the mail.
A what?
Okay. You know, this is why paper state... Well, another reason why paper statements are a good
idea because, for one thing, and I've seen this with credit cards, a credit card company is always
trying to get you to cut out the paper statement and go green.
That's what they tell you, that you're going green and...
Okay. So, when do they pass those savings on to the consumer?
They never actually do.
And they keep sending you junk mail anyway.
But the point is, if you get the actual thing in the mail,
you can hold on to it for as long as you want.
Try going back five years on any credit card company, and it's virtually impossible.
So, what I do is I download the statement to my hard drive, and I keep it there.
And I'm much less likely to lose my hard drive than I am, like, one piece of paper.
Well, I don't know about that.
I've seen plenty of hard drives go.
Hopefully, you back it up.
If you back it up, okay, I'll agree with you.
But if you're not backing it up, that hard drive is going to go a long time before my
drawer with all my receipts going back for 20 years will...
You have 20 years worth of receipts in one drawer?
You know, I like to keep track of things.
How do you keep track of things if they're all in one drawer?
Well, I know where they are.
All right.
It's a big drawer.
I must be better at this than I am.
Kyle, you made it.
Yes, I made it.
Wow.
Well, you were in the same car as me.
I'm not surprised you made it, but I ran faster than you.
Yes, you did.
You beat me up the stairs.
I just want to comment about what you guys were just talking about as far as bills.
I have friends who, specifically with a phone company, they prefer the paper bill because
they know it forces them to actually print something, and that costs them money.
Whereas the electronic bills, they know it's simply processing.
It's not actually resources.
They don't have to buy paper and pay a printer to actually come up with it or print it internally.
So it's kind of funny that people actually prefer to make them do the work as far as
producing a document that they can then keep in their files if something comes up with
their bill.
Yeah.
I pay electronically.
I do that.
I don't write checks and mail checks.
Although talking about waste of paper and waste of resources, a couple of weeks ago
coming down here on the good old MTA, I get it from all ends.
It's either on the road.
Yeah, Jim, you know, or it's with mass transit.
But I tried to use my card in the subway, and it only had a dollar on it.
But worse than that, it was expired.
And that's the thing with metro cards.
You never know how much is on them when you find them in your pocket.
So you have to go and experiment and try it.
And I found out that not only did it not have enough for a fare, but it was expired.
So I went to the booth to talk to the human, which is something you don't get to do all
that often because machines do everything these days.
And I said, can you transfer this onto another metro card?
And no, they can't do that.
They can't transfer $1 from an expired metro card onto a non-expired metro card.
I don't understand why not.
Obviously, it's there.
Obviously, you paid for it.
They just can't do this.
What she did instead was she handed me a postage paid envelope that I'm supposed to put the
card in, mail it to the MTA.
Then they're going to mail me a dollar in the mail.
How much have they spent already to mail me a dollar?
And how much paper has been wasted?
All they have to do is transfer from one card to another, or maybe not have the things expire,
or God forbid, tell you how much is on them like they do in Washington, D.C.
So you can actually look and see how much is on your card.
These are things that were not thought through.
On a related note, on the Long Island Railroad, which I take,
the tickets now that you buy are only good for two weeks.
If they expire after those two weeks, you can't get a refund.
There is a $10 refund fee on a ticket, which cost me less than $10.
Voltaire, you were telling me this a couple of weeks ago about Metro-North,
which is the sister organization of Long Island Railroad.
I remember train tickets being good for at least six months.
Just like a year or two ago.
How does a ticket expire after two weeks?
What is it in their minds that makes them say, this is no good anymore?
It lets them keep more money.
Obviously, it's that, but how did we let them get away with that?
It's so clearly an evil plot.
The answer is because the state government declines to fund the MTA,
so they have to resort to all these shenanigans to
raise money without appearing to raise the fare.
I don't know.
Armed robbery, I think, would be more moralistic than this, but wow, I can't believe it.
You can write the MTA a letter suggesting they branch out into the armed robbery business,
and maybe they'll take you up on it.
Or write the state government.
Well, just another reason not to take mass transit.
The cost, the ripoffness, the slowness, it's really pretty unbelievable.
Okay.
Have we talked about this latest net neutrality court decision on Monday?
We have not.
Okay.
Well, maybe somebody can explain it to me then.
This is what I've seen.
Federal appeals court on Monday rejected as premature a lawsuit by Verizon and Metro PCS
that challenged the FCC's pending rules aimed at keeping internet service providers from
blocking access to certain websites or applications.
You know, I try to follow these things, but that sentence makes my head swim.
Is this good?
Is this bad?
What is it?
It's good, but it's not in a great way.
It's just a legal technicality.
It says that they filed the paperwork too soon because the FCC hasn't even...
Who filed the paperwork too soon?
Verizon.
Verizon?
And Verizon, they're the bad guys in this, right?
As in most things, yeah.
All right.
And federal appeals court basically told them that they filed something too soon.
Yeah.
So they're going to file it again in a month or so after the FCC actually publishes it.
So it really doesn't mean anything then?
Yeah.
I don't know why-
Well, I mean-
Bernie, what does it mean?
Well, the panel of judges said, quote, the Verizon's prematurity is incurable.
Is that really what he said?
I don't know if it was a medical condition they said that their prematurity was incurable,
but I thought it was a funny thing coming from judges to say that.
But basically what it means is that Verizon's motion to have something decided in their favor,
which was at least temporarily shot down.
So it's good news for people who are in favor of net neutrality.
It's not a final decision yet, but at least it keeps the ball in the game.
And we'll see where this goes.
I'm convinced this is going to go to the Supreme Court eventually,
whether the FCC will indeed be found to have the authority to mandate that internet service
providers not selectively move traffic around and slow things down when you want to go to
one website versus another, throttle you, limit your bandwidth, that sort of thing.
So we'll see where it goes, but the ball is still in the game and that's a good thing.
Now, Bernie, if I understand correctly, this rule is not even full net neutrality,
like many of us have been arguing for.
This is the sort of limited wishy-washy version that the FCC proposed,
which in particular does not apply to mobile and wireless carriers at all.
Exactly.
It was a real trade-off that the FCC took, because I think they just found that the mobile
telephony providers were just too powerful a lobby, I think, for them to fight it all off.
The argument that the mobile carriers made was that we have to be able to throttle traffic and
block traffic, whatever, because we have a limited amount of bandwidth over the airways,
as opposed to the wired traffic, which is much greater bandwidth.
But I think they issued a net neutrality across the board.
But it doesn't look like the Obama administration is even pushing for that for mobile carriers now.
Well, if he's listening on the helicopter, maybe this could be made a priority.
Here's a story. This is something that I thought was just simply brilliant,
involving Condé Nast. Am I saying that right?
Condé Nast.
Condé Nast. Is that how you're supposed to say it? Okay.
Oui.
All right, fine. Condé Nast. Those are the folks who own Wired, right?
And every other magazine in the country.
Well, not 2600 Magazine. They don't own us.
Is that thing still publishing?
Yeah, I think so. I'm pretty sure we're still publishing.
In fact, we just put out an issue, but I'll get to that in a second.
This is something that is indicative of how easy it is to scam a big company
out of millions of dollars.
You can just send a single email pretending to be a vendor of that company.
It's apparently, and this comes from techdirt.com,
that's apparently what a guy named Andy Surface, that's really his name, Andy Surface,
discovered when he set up a bank account for an operation he called QuadGraph,
likely designed to be similar to QuadGraphics,
the giant printing company that prints many big name magazines.
He then sent a single email to magazine giant Condé Nast,
leading the magazine company to send that new account $8 million.
In early November, Condé Nast received an electronic payment authorization form
by email at its offices in New York.
The form appeared to have been sent by QuadGraphics.
The form requested that Condé Nast direct payments for QuadGraphics
to the QuadGraph account and provided account information.
They then filled out the form and returned it by fax from its offices in New York
to the fax number provided in that form.
Following the receipt of the electronic payment authorization form,
they then started making payments for QuadGraphics bills by ACH transfer
from JPMorgan Chase Bank in New York to this QuadGraph account.
The whole thing was discovered when the actual printer noticed
that it was no longer getting paid and they asked Condé Nast what was up.
They then went to the feds who arrested the guy
and amazingly discovered that all $8 million was still sitting in the bank account.
You know, if it was me, I think I would just let it sit there too
because I'd be too amazed that this actually worked.
$8 million?
$8 million, just like that.
And we get this all the time.
We get people sending bills for some kind of directory listing
or some nonsensical service that doesn't really exist.
And if you're stupid or bureaucratic,
you'll just write a check or send in an authorization form and then you get ripped off.
So the headline's a bit misleading because it sounds like
there's one email and in addition, one fax.
So it's not just one email.
Well, there was an email, I think, requesting that they do this.
Right, and then there was a fax.
Then they faxed to him.
The fax came from Condé.
The fax was the reply.
Right.
The email directed Condé Nast to print a form and fill it out
and fax that to the purported printing company,
which it wasn't the real printing company.
Okay, so what exactly is the crime here?
I mean, is it illegal to send an email asking someone to fill out a form?
Because that's really, isn't that all they did?
They filled out a form and they faxed it.
But the actual transfer, they did that themselves.
The bank did that themselves.
Someone just sent, and if he sent it on April 1st,
then I think he's really got a good case.
I mean, if I send you a form and you don't owe me any money,
but I send you a form authorizing you to make payments into my account,
is that illegal?
I don't think it's illegal to send anybody a form.
Well, I'll fill out the form.
I'll even give you my bank account number as long as we can encrypt it.
Okay, here's where the crime might have taken place.
They filled out the form.
They sent the form to this guy by fax.
Then he had to do something with that form.
I think that's where the crime probably took place.
He had to submit that to a bank or something, correct?
I don't know.
I've never stolen $8 million with one form.
Well, it's worth thinking about.
We're talking about $8 million here.
If this guy was smart, he would be in some foreign country someplace, untouchable.
He needs our callers who would tell him to go to Cuba, one-way ticket.
Yeah, maybe.
Bernie, what do you think?
Did he have to do something with the piece of paper
or as soon as it was faxed to him, was it already...
No, it sounds like from everything I've read about this report,
this was just very simple.
In the email that he sent to Condé Nast,
apparently he just specified that he is a company called Quad Graph,
which sounds very similar to Quad slash Graphics,
which is apparently Condé Nast's actual printing company.
And he provided his bank account information,
like the account number and the routing.
And they can't even get him for stealing their name
because he didn't use the same name.
He used some of the letters of the name, but he didn't actually use the name.
I'm sure the federal authorities will charge him with some sort of fraud.
And it's also whenever you use...
It's wire fraud whenever you use email or fax
or ask that something be faxed to you.
That's considered wire fraud.
And there's other kinds of fraud.
You left out a condition there.
You said anytime somebody requests to have something faxed, that's wire fraud.
Obviously, it has to be more than that, faxed with...
If there's fraudulent intent.
And in this case, I think the prosecutors,
federal prosecutors will argue that this was an attempt
to defraud Condé Nast out of money.
Or might it have just been an experiment
to see if this is actually so simple that it could work?
I would think it would be better if you had the money sent
to some charitable organization's bank account.
You know, somebody that would make Condé Nast look really bad
if they asked for the money back.
So, too bad that didn't happen.
Well, here's something else sort of related to that
that I've always kind of wondered.
You know, when you're trying to get electronic payments started
on a credit card or a phone company or something like that,
they ask you to write your checking account number into a form.
And they say, enter the routing code, enter this and that.
And all the information is on your check.
So, that's what you look at.
You look at your checking account and you put it all in there.
And that's really all you have to do.
There are many cases where I've simply given them that information
and then all of a sudden, they start withdrawing directly from my account.
And I've heard cases where people simply enter a checking account number
from, say, the phone company themselves
or from some other, you know, person that has no suspicion this is going on.
And there doesn't seem to be any kind of check of this kind of thing going on.
In my experience, that works for deposits.
You can give your routing number to anyone,
your routing and your account number to anyone.
But you ought not to be able to withdraw with that same information.
So, anybody can put money into your account.
And that's the convenience of the routing number
and your checking account number.
But they ought not to be able to withdraw without authorization.
And you might have to sign or provide some physical thing,
like a check written to someone.
So, I don't actually remember that kind of authorization coming through.
I remember putting in the information and maybe they take money out
or ask you for verification of a certain amount.
I know they do that sometimes in the case of PayPal.
But in most cases, it just sort of starts.
And maybe this is something that has been updated since I did it.
I did this several years ago.
But I was struck with how easy it is to get that information in the first place
and put it in there and start taking money out of someone else's account.
No, I think it is that easy.
It is that easy?
All right.
Well, listeners, don't do that.
But do look at whatever forums you might have to fill out
and see if it might be that simple.
And pretend.
How about this?
Pretend that you're somebody who doesn't agree to this and do it to yourself
and see if money starts getting taken out of your account.
And report back to us.
oth at 2600.com.
How's that?
It seems complicated.
Yeah.
Well, Kyle, we've been working on a lot of projects over the last couple of weeks
involving archiving, involving disk space.
And this got me thinking.
Yes.
What is a word that we've probably been using quite a lot in the last...
A word we can say over the radio.
Insofar as disk sizes.
Terabyte?
Terabyte.
That's very good.
And it got me thinking.
Let's look into the past a little bit.
We have old computers that we're trying to sum it up from the grave.
And one of those old computers, which in fact is a Zenith Z100.
If anyone has one of those out there, you'll know the magic of that machine.
Has a 40 megabyte hard drive on it, which was considered huge at the time.
40 megabytes.
And in fact, when you got the machine, which was actually a Heathkit H100,
you built it, it became a Zenith Z100.
It came with two floppies.
So there was no hard drive.
So adding the 40 megabyte hard drive really put you in the fast lane.
That's like a modification or like an aftermarket thing, right?
Because you're crafty or an enthusiast.
So only the real enthusiasts would add that feature or something like that.
Right.
So.
So basically 40 megabytes.
One megabyte is 1024 kilobytes.
Right.
So we would measure things before that in K, in kilobytes.
So I remember 100 K floppy drives.
Floppy disks, that is, to put in those drives.
Okay.
And people would write programs based on how much you could save,
how succinct you could get it all into, so it would fit onto a limited space.
So you had kilobytes and kilobytes, of course, are 1024 bytes.
And a byte is eight bits, but let's not go there.
Let's go in the other direction.
It does get complicated.
It gets complicated.
Bits and bytes.
It does.
And we could spend hours talking about that.
Sure, continue.
I'd rather not.
So we have megabytes.
And then the step beyond megabytes is, of course, anyone?
What was that?
What's that about?
Speak up.
Gigabyte.
Gigabytes, you're saying?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes, you're right.
Gigabytes.
Gigabyte is 1024 megabytes.
And then what we just mentioned, terabytes, that's 1024 gigabytes.
Okay.
Who wants to say what comes next?
Peta.
Excuse me?
Peta.
Peta what?
Bytes.
Petabytes.
Okay.
A petabyte, you're right.
P-E-T-A-B-Y-T-E.
That's, actually, they say here it's 1,048,576 gigabytes is a petabyte.
That's 1024 times 1024.
Now, why is that?
Why isn't it 1024 terabytes?
Oh, you know what?
They stopped listing.
So it's 1024 terabytes.
Okay.
They just started doing everything by gigabytes.
Okay.
So that's what we're going to be doing with next.
We have, what's the standard these days when you buy a hard drive?
It's a terabyte, two terabytes?
Depends which one you buy.
Well, yeah, but what's common?
I would argue that computers generally come with like 230 or like maybe a 500 gig hard drive.
Okay.
Like out of a store, off the shelf, usually that's around what you'd get.
Maybe more now.
But a terabyte drive, a terabyte drive is pretty common.
1.5 terabytes.
Yeah.
They're readily available.
Two terabyte drives, I think, if you're trying to build a large storage array,
you'd build it out of two terabyte drives.
So, and the reason I'm going over this, because people listen to our show in the future,
and they listen to our shows from the past.
I just think this will be very interesting to listen to a few years down the road
where we're talking about this.
And we're talking about terabytes being the next big thing.
But petabytes is going to come after that.
And soon we'll have petabyte drives.
And the Internet Archive will sell you a petabox.
Really?
Which is not really true because a whole bunch of machines that add up to a petabyte, but still.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that's handy information to have.
So, okay.
Who wants to give a guess as to what comes after petabyte?
And Bernie, I can't say for sure you're not on the internet.
So I'm not sure I'm going to let you guess.
I'm not going to cheat.
And I don't know either.
Okay.
Well, that's honest then.
Anybody?
It's an exabyte.
Oh, you're some kind of wise guy over there.
Exabyte.
Okay.
You've already looked into this.
You know, you need storage.
You need to plan for the future, manual.
Exabyte.
Yeah.
1,024 petabytes.
Try fitting that in your desk drawer.
Well, yeah, that's true.
All right.
You got me there.
Okay.
Well, then you want to say what comes after that?
Too much.
Okay.
So that's where your knowledge runs out then.
Yellowbyte.
What?
Yellowbyte.
No, no.
But that's a good guess.
It's actually a zettabyte.
Yeah.
Have you heard about this?
No, no, no.
My memory is getting refreshed here thinking about this.
I was going to say an oobyte.
An oobyte?
But that's so wrong.
It's XO then zetta.
Okay.
Is it zetta with a T or zetta with a D?
It's a zetta with a T.
T.
But starting with a Z.
Obviously starting with a Z.
How would a zetta start with a T?
I don't know.
A zettabyte.
Maybe they'll be doing that in the future.
Okay.
And Voltaire, what was your guess again?
Yottabyte.
Well, if you look at 1,024 zettabytes, it's actually a Yodabyte.
Not Yoda, Star Wars Yoda.
Yotta.
Y-O-T-T-A.
Yottabyte.
And that's, yeah.
That's one septillion bytes, I believe.
Should we even, we shouldn't even address the whole controversy over
steps of 1,000 versus 1,024.
No, I think we can skip over that.
All right.
But just to give you a sense as to what all this means.
Basically, a bit is a binary decision.
We mentioned a bit before, but let's go to a byte.
One byte is one character.
All right.
Five megabytes.
That's the complete works of William Shakespeare.
It depends how you store it.
Well, store it.
If you print out the pages and scan them in as images, they'll be a lot bigger.
Store it as text.
Store it as characters.
The original ASCII characters.
A lot of characters in Shakespeare.
He had italics.
Oh, very good.
Yes.
You need italics.
Well, you can represent italics in different ways.
And all right, fine.
You know, six megabytes I'll give you then.
But pretty much the entire works of Shakespeare will fit there.
Now, two gigabytes is 20 meters of shelved books.
20 meters.
Have we ever seen 20 meters of shelved books?
It's not that much if you stack them on top of each other,
rather than one big 20 meter shelf.
I suppose.
But it's more than we'd have in our homes.
It's more, yeah.
But a library has got more than that.
All right.
10 terabytes.
What do you think could fit on 10 terabytes?
Well, we don't know.
About 10 terabytes worth of data.
Bernie, you want to give a guess on this?
I'll get all the books in the Library of Congress.
How did you know that?
That's exactly it.
Wow.
It was a guess.
It really was a guess.
That's a good guess.
That might be the best guess ever on this program.
Yeah.
The entire collection of the US Library of Congress will fit on 10 terabytes.
Wait, but store it as text?
You had this text thing.
No, a lot of the works in the Library of Congress,
first of all, they have music and video recordings there.
But also they have images.
We said printed.
Printed collection.
But most, or not most, but many books have images in them.
And you need to store those as well, or you're losing data.
Maybe there's a way to do that in 10 terabytes.
Or maybe you need another terabyte or two.
I don't know.
You can compress it.
I'm sure you can get it onto 10 terabytes.
We can make it a project if you want.
All right.
But let's move on to 200 petabytes.
This is something nobody has yet.
At least nobody we know.
What do you think fits on that?
Anyone want to guess?
The entire compendium of human knowledge?
I was going to say that.
Maybe your entire compendium.
But no, all printed material.
I was going to say everything ever published.
I don't know what that means.
Does that mean the wrapper of a Snickers bar or something?
Or it could be...
Every wrapper of every Snickers bar?
Yeah.
And this is the best one.
Five exabytes.
And remember, these are exabytes.
Five exabytes.
We went on to zettabytes and yottabytes beyond that.
But five exabytes.
All words ever spoken by human beings.
Now, I don't know if that means audio.
I don't know if that means just a list of every word.
I don't know if that means every single conversation ever spoken
or just a list of all the words.
Does it include the plans for the time machine
to go back and give the recorders to prehistoric people?
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
A lot of this is missing.
A lot of this information is just not here.
But there is information on the Yottabyte,
the last one that we touched upon.
It's basically a unit of information of computer storage
equal to one septillion bytes.
As of 2011, this year,
no storage system has achieved one zettabyte of information.
One zettabyte of information.
We're talking about Yottabytes.
The combined space of all computer hard drives in the world
does not amount to even one Yottabyte,
but was estimated at approximately 160 exabytes in 2006.
As of 2009, the entire internet was estimated
to contain close to 500 exabytes.
Wow.
Yeah, that's a good reaction to that.
I'm pretty shocked myself.
But that's what we...
Oh, my goodness.
Is this really...
Yottabyte, using a binary prefix,
is used for the corresponding power of 1024.
All right.
Let's not go there.
No, let's not go there.
Who provided this chart?
That was from Wikipedia.
All right, I'm going to edit it.
Yeah.
It'll say all kinds of things.
Go ahead.
Yes, do your worst.
Bernie, go ahead.
I just want to say that we don't know for sure
that a storage system does not exist that can store a Yottabyte.
Some of the intelligence agencies,
most noteworthy, the National Security Agency,
has, for many decades,
had incredibly humongous storage facilities
because they archive just ginormous amounts of data.
Voice, data, imagery.
They're amazing vacuum cleaners of all kinds of stuff.
It would not surprise me if they have storage capacities in that quantity.
We just don't know about it because it's classified.
I also was a blast in the past when you said Exabyte, too,
because Exabyte was the name of a company,
sometimes in the late 70s or early 80s,
a company called Exabyte.
They made a device called a Stringy Floppy.
Do you remember that?
It was a peripheral for TRS-80s and I think for Apple IIs
that it was like a cassette tape,
only it was smaller and it was like a linear tape drive instead of diskettes.
It stored like 100K or something.
It was called the Exabyte Stringy Floppy,
but only stored like 100K.
I definitely don't remember anything being called a Stringy Floppy.
That's something that is alien to me.
That's a terrible name.
It is. That's probably why it's not around today.
Wow. Okay.
Well, that's something to learn.
Now, as far as this week's accusation against hackers,
oh, by the way, there's that new show premiering tonight
about hackers breaking in on Fox.
I think it comes on after our show
because they know that they're not going to get any audience during our show.
Anybody care to watch this?
Anybody think anything of it?
Do we want to prejudge it?
Or maybe we've seen episodes already somehow
through pirated downloading sites or something?
You know, I've done a lot for the show over the years,
but watching a Christian Slater evening drama
is where I draw the line, dude.
I'm sorry.
Christian Slater is in this?
Yeah.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah. Some people say it's starring Christian Slater,
but really, I have to ask about the ability of anything
to actually star Christian Slater.
Okay. Well, you two have issues, obviously,
so I'm not going to probe deeper into that.
But I think the premise is about somebody who gets hired
by some kind of tiger teaming company
that he goes through all sorts of antics.
Was this the thing that there was a preview
floating around a few months ago?
Was there a preview?
It looked terrible.
It's basically Sneakers the series, I think,
in all but name.
Oh, well, Sneakers wasn't a bad film.
It wasn't a bad film as such,
but there was no Christian Slater in it.
What is it with Christian Slater?
Fine. I guess we'll judge it after it airs,
which is tonight.
Does this mean we have to watch it?
Because I'm not that interested.
Well, I don't know if you can judge things
without seeing them, maybe.
I do it all the time.
Yeah, I guess.
Well, our listeners, I'm sure, will tell us
what they think about it, all kinds of plot holes
you could drive trucks through,
except on the FDR Drive tonight.
Don't try that.
Yeah, so anyway, a hacker was accused
of wiping out an entire season of a TV show.
The producer of the syndicated children's TV series
Zodiac Island claims that,
oh, we're all familiar with that.
Wow, everyone's eyes lit up.
Claims that, and even likes,
an entire season of the show has been wiped out
thanks to a fired employee
and its data hosting company
who hacked into network computers
and destroyed its work.
Zodiac Island has run on more than 100 US TV stations
around the country,
including ABC, NBC, Fox, and CBS affiliates.
I understand why they have to mention
what affiliates they are.
Obviously, it's a syndicated show
that can air on any station.
So yeah, some of them are ABC, NBC, Fox, and CBS.
It's got nothing to do with the network.
The show is produced by Hawaii-based
WER1 World Network,
which signed up with Wisconsin-based
ISP and data hosting company CyberLink.
According to a lawsuit that was filed last week
in Hawaii District Court,
a man named Michael Scott-Juson
was terminated from CyberLink.
From his parents' residence,
he allegedly accessed CyberLink's data
and intentionally wiped it out.
He is alleged to have been charged in February
with a federal computer crime violation
and admitted his guilt in a plea agreement.
The data breach allegedly knocked out
6,480 electronic files, or 300 gigabytes.
Of data.
Now, do you remember what we can store
on 300 gigabytes?
Apparently, you can store an entire season
of a TV show.
About one television show season
is what I was going to say.
Well, what I don't understand is
why don't they simply appeal to people
who must have taped the show?
Jun was driving in right now.
I'm sure he has it on tapes or on TV also.
I think they haven't aired it yet is the thing.
Oh, they haven't aired it yet?
It was the upcoming season
was the impression I got.
Did they really not have any other copies
except their...
I mean, how dumb can you possibly be?
This is what I mean when I say
that you can never have a substitute
for something in hard copy
and you have to keep backups
of every single drive that you own.
Yeah, and any admin will tell you
never have your only copy of anything
on a networked computer.
You always have something offline,
something offsite.
I mean, you could walk into a store right now
with $30 and get a hard drive
that could have saved them all this trouble.
And also, while we're at it,
why is it that a disgruntled employee
instantly becomes a hacker
as soon as he erases something?
What is it there?
I mean, somebody takes out their office
with a rifle.
They're not to suddenly refer to as a hunter.
They're referred to as a maniac.
And you can use similar words
for somebody who does something like this.
There's no hacking ability involved
in logging in and erasing something.
I think this is much less dangerous
than shooting people in an office.
Well, some people would disagree with that.
This is a TV show.
This is a whole season of a TV show.
What's the name of it again?
Don't look at the paper.
It's Fantasy Island or something.
I don't know.
The name is not important.
But the thing is, I'll never know the name now
because all records of his existence
have been wiped away.
Yeah, into the memory hole.
What's that?
At least for this season.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, pretty shocking.
And then we also have the story of .gov sites.
And we should focus on some of these
while we have the chance
with our .gov of the week.
We haven't done in quite some time
because we've been so busy with other things.
But many of the Obama administration's
top open government initiatives
are set to be turned off by the end of May.
Government sources confirm
that the Office of Management and Budget
is planning to take seven websites dark
in two months because of a lack of funding.
I'm sure there's people around here
that will volunteer to run these websites.
A government official who demanded anonymity
because they didn't get any permission
to discuss the topic
but decided to go ahead and do so anyway,
said funding will begin to run out on April 20th
for public sites, IT dashboard, data.gov
and paymentaccuracy.gov.
They also said that OMB is planning
on shutting down internal government sites,
including performance.gov, FedSpace
and many of the efforts related
to the FedRAMP cloud computing
cybersecurity effort.
The official said two other sites,
usaspending.gov and apps.gov slash now
will run through July 30th
but go dark soon after.
We need at least another $4 million
just to keep usaspending.gov
operating this year.
We're looking at a pass the hat approach
but it could be challenging
to get that done in time, they say.
Wow, they really...
Is this an April Fool's story?
No, it's not.
It came out April 4th.
We need $4 million to run usaspending.gov.
That's got to be an April Fool's story.
It's an April 4th joke.
I don't get what all the money is for
but that's what they have to do.
Bernie, any ideas on how to save
these .gov websites?
Well, I think the government needs,
the federal government needs
to look at its spending priorities.
Supposedly, some of these sites
end up saving an order of magnitude
more money to the government
than they cost to run.
But it doesn't look like
what's going on in Congress right now
is right-headed.
So they're just going to cut
everything they can
and it's going to end up costing us
more in the end, I'm sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's sad but true.
So that's the story there
as far as that goes.
Checking to see if we have
listener mail this week.
I know we do.
We always have bits of mail
that people send in to oth
at 2600.com.
But I'm looking at last week's mail.
Let me give out the phone number
212-209-2900
and we'll be taking phone calls
in just a little bit.
But another fun bit of news
involving British Petroleum,
BP employee has lost a laptop
containing personal data
belonging to thousands
of Louisiana residents
who just so happened to file claims
for compensation
after the Gulf oil spill.
What an unfortunate accident that is.
You file for compensation
and your public information
somehow gets out.
It must be hackers, right?
The firm said it had sent letters
to roughly 14,000
or actually 13,000 people
whose data was stored
on the computer
notifying them about
the potential security breach
and offering to pay
for their credit to be monitored.
I'll bet for one year, right?
They get one year credit monitoring
out of this deal
just like they always do
when they leave
your information lying around.
The laptop was password protected
but the information was not encrypted.
Data included a spreadsheet
of claimant's names,
social security numbers,
phone numbers and addresses.
Curtis Thomas, a BP spokesman,
said the company
did not have any evidence
that claimant's personal information
had been misused.
Of course, how would you have
that information?
How would you ever get it
until it actually happens?
And maybe not even then.
I'd like to issue an appeal
to our listeners.
Some of them must have
been the victims
of one of these breaches by now
and got their year
of credit monitoring.
I want to know,
did this credit monitoring,
like any case of it
actually finding something?
Or maybe you have the laptop too,
in which case you could tell us
how easy it was to crack.
That'd be cool.
I bet the password was BP
or something like that.
Hey, Manuel.
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
I just want to point out
this one year of credit monitoring
that these companies
who expose
all your private information
to unauthorized third parties,
I think it's really a ripoff.
I think you should get lifetime
credit monitoring
where any of the three
major consumer reporting agencies
have to tell you
if your credit file has changed.
Because, you know,
if I were a criminal
and I stole all this information,
I would just wait it out
just one year.
You know, all these people's names
and social security numbers
and addresses
aren't going to change in a year.
You wait till the year has passed
and then you go crazy with it
and use it
and so the people who are victims
aren't going to get notified.
So I just think
the one year thing is really lame
and it should be the rest of your life.
Well, yeah, OK, for what it's worth.
But I really wish
they'd stop losing
all this information
and keeping people's
private information
out of the public eye.
And once again, you have
an organization of this size
claiming to only have
one copy of something
and that copy got lost.
I mean, that is
completely ludicrous
for anything like that.
They're either really stupid
or they're lying.
No, they must have another copy
because they sent letters.
Ah, OK, this it's
just another instance
of how people plan for things
and they think that
it's always going to be there.
They're always going to have
access to this information
and they lose the password.
They lose the disk.
Something doesn't work
right after an upgrade
and they're screwed
and it happens so many times
and you can avoid it
by simply keeping backups
and keeping track
of your information,
your files, whatnot.
OK, 212-209-2900
is our phone number.
A couple of letters
that we've gotten.
I heard you guys talking
about emails
that are anonymous,
how they should be accepted.
So if I sent an anonymous email
to a company
or a department
within the company,
will it not even get read?
Signed Ashish.
I don't think it's true
that anonymous email
sent to a company
simply won't be read by default.
Depends what you say.
They might not respond.
They might not take it seriously.
But I do think that
anonymous mail will get read.
Anonymous mail to us gets read.
So if there's somebody reading mail,
I don't think they really care
if it's a pseudonym
or no name at all.
They should read it.
Whether they do anything with it,
that's a whole other issue.
Anybody have other feelings on this?
Depending on the anonymity method you use,
you may or may not be able
to hear back from them.
They might have the ability to reply.
They might not.
So OK, here's another letter.
I'm a big fan of the show.
I've been listening to the show
since 1998
when I was in high school,
off and on.
I'm 28 now
and I'm still a big fan of the show.
I was just wondering a couple of things.
I'm looking through the archives.
When does Rebel appear on the show
for the first time?
Well, Rebel almost always appears
as our first caller.
And he has started doing this,
I think, at the beginning of the 90s.
You'll have to look back in the archives.
I don't know why you'd want to,
but just type the word Rebel
into the search bar on 2600.com
and it should pull up
maybe the first show he called into.
But yeah, that kind of thing can happen.
Number two, is there an archive
to hear old automated systems
from around the country?
I live in Connecticut,
the old Southern New England telephone area.
Rob, you might know something about this.
Yeah, a friend of mine actually
has a website called thisisarecording.com
and it's just an archive
of old telephone company recordings
of all sorts from all points in history.
So there's a lot of good stuff.
All right, there you go.
And if you have access
to information like this,
this is something that we like to do.
We like to put recordings up on the net,
but people out there
have recordings of old phone calls
or recordings of things like that.
By all means, post it someplace,
make a website for it.
It's history.
And number three,
what about the go to Cuba guy?
What's up with that guy?
Signed Aubrey.
Aubrey, we don't know.
We have no idea what's up,
but we have the best minds
at the station trying to figure it out.
And one more letter from Robert in Ohio.
Didn't you have a subscription
up for the Nook at one point?
I bought the previously released edition
in the Barnes & Noble store on the Nook.
Was this not supposed to be there?
Maybe I missed something that you said.
Yeah, Robert, it's a little complicated.
First of all, an update to last week,
we were talking about how
the Kindle version of 2600
was suddenly no longer available
for Android applications
and that Amazon was saying
that this was something that we did
and it was something they did.
We've gotten them to fix it.
We've gotten them to apologize for it,
to contact people
that were complaining about it.
And that is no longer an issue.
But it's one of a bunch of issues.
The biggest being
the whole iPad controversy.
We're committed to getting this thing
onto the iPad by the next issue
one way or another.
It's tricky because
when you're dealing
with different companies,
they're sort of competing
with each other.
And if you give too much
of a favorable deal to one company,
then the other company
doesn't want to do business
with you anymore.
The way it works is Amazon
demands to have the lowest price
for the Kindle.
We could offer it on the Nook,
but they might set it
to be a lower price.
And we have no control
over the price that they set.
If they do that,
then half of what Amazon would pay us
is taken by Amazon.
It's incredibly silly.
But one thing that we want to do
is let people know
every step of the way
what it is that we're working on.
We're also working on volume 27,
which is 2010 issues,
putting them on our store,
putting them out in PDF format
and Kindle format,
Nook format, everything like that.
Our goal is to get everything
into every format.
It takes work.
It takes time.
It's a hassle,
but it's also a learning experience.
And it's something that
we're doing with our listeners.
I think calling the process silly
doesn't really give them enough credit
for the amount of intentional
monopolistic tendencies that they have.
Yeah, I'm trying to be nice.
I'm trying to be nice.
And I definitely don't like
the business practices here.
It's anti-competitive
and it's something
that shuts a lot of people out.
But I figure, you know,
if we use their technology
to tell people about it,
then it'll educate a lot more people,
maybe make some changes.
All right.
We're almost out of time.
So let's try and take some phone calls.
2-1-2, 2-0-9, 2-9-100.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hello.
I suppose in lieu of watching
the breaking in show,
although I'm sure they'll throw in
many wonderful computer jokes,
I would recommend Level 9
and or Max Headroom.
Is that on tonight?
It can be on whenever you want.
OK, true.
Also for the Zodiac Island,
which sounds like a,
you know, serial killer survivor show.
Right.
If the studio is in Hawaii,
why would they have their data backup
in Wisconsin?
Probably because things are cheaper
in the Midwest.
Who knows?
I don't know why data
would be cheaper in the Midwest,
but it's probably...
There are servers in Texas
that feed companies
in other parts of the world.
Texas.
Texas makes sense
because they have no
environmental regulations,
so they can just get cheap electricity
by emitting lots of pollutants.
There you go.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Speak up.
Well, you didn't speak up fast enough, Rebel.
Rebel was number two that time.
As you can see, he's slipping over the years.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hi, how are you?
What's on your mind?
All right.
Here's the eerie thing
about that letter you wrote
about those records.
I got something about four weeks ago
from my hospital in my borough
where I was treated at one time.
And the letter sounded almost the same,
except to say that
the transporting car or truck
got broken into
and they stole the disks.
But it wasn't encrypted.
Exactly the same letter.
Interesting.
Well, I think they have
a boilerplate letter
that's just ready for
any kind of situation to happen.
And it happens so often
that they just fire them off
pretty quickly.
They never seem to lose
their list of email addresses, though,
of victims of their
or customers, as they call them.
One more call, then we're out of here.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Yes.
No, Rebel, you've used up more time
on this show than we have somehow.
I don't know how you did it, but you did.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Good evening.
How are you?
What's on your mind?
I was wondering,
I know how to submit stuff,
articles to the magazine,
but what's the best way
to submit artwork?
You can actually send it
to articles at 2600.com.
It'll get to the right people that way.
And yes, you send graphics, pictures,
whatever that you might have.
That's the best way to do it.
And you can also send it
through the mail as well
to P.O. Box 99, Middle Island, New York,
11953 USA.
Oh, cool.
I did do that.
All right, good.
All right.
Look forward to seeing it.
Thanks.
Thanks for your call.
Thanks for participation.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
Sorry about the late start
or the crazy drive in.
We'll see you next week.
Good night.
Oh, no, nothing ever changed.
I'm just living in a life without meaning.
I walk and walk to nothing.
I'm just living in a life without meaning.
I talk and talk, say nothing.
Nothing ever changed.
Oh, no.
Nothing ever changed.
Walk along the same old lonely street.
Still trying to find, find a reason.
This man comes and smacks me in the teeth.
I don't complain.
It's not my fault.
Nothing ever changed.
Oh, no.
Nothing ever changed.
I'm just living in a life without meaning.
I walk and walk to nothing.
I'm just living in a life without meaning.
I talk and talk, say nothing.
I'm just living in a life without meaning.
This is 99.5 New York WBAI.