They hope it becomes a model for integration across the country and are planning more lines
in other favelas.
Building trust, however, in these long-neglected neighborhoods might take more than innovative
urban planning.
Adam Rainey, Al Jazeera, Rio de Janeiro.
Thanks for listening to Al Jazeera English on the Radio, broadcast exclusively by the
Pacifica Radio Network, free speech radio.
And you're listening to WBAI New York, where the time is 7 o'clock.
And yes, we're back.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum-diddly-bum.
This is Jason Scott from The Last Hope taking place in 2008, one of the 20 or 40 DVDs that
you get by calling 212-209-2950.
Let's take a listen.
So that flow of history, that flow of information is something that I have found over and over
again.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to quickly just touch on some events.
This is going to be a very quick touch on events.
I do want to make clear now before people wander away in case they hate me or they're
hungry that tomorrow at 3 p.m. there is a talk on the history of phone phreaking, 1960
to 1980, and this will be wonderful.
He's in the audience.
I'm sure he's nervous.
But my God, I've seen this man's work, and it's beautiful, okay?
You think you know phone phreak history.
You don't.
And he's been working on getting a history together, and I've been really impressed.
I've been working with him for a while.
Wonderful work.
Nothing makes me happier than to see a historian working on something.
I have to make that clear.
One of the things that can happen is that you have a version of a story, and it becomes
yours or a theory about how things happened, and it becomes yours, and I don't really believe
in that.
I think that I come up with some ideas, and I'll tell you some here, and this is my lineage.
We as a people, and by people I mean human race, like to tell stories.
We like legends.
We like myths.
Myths are very cool, and when you tell a person a myth that sounds compelling enough, they
will live by that myth, even if they start to ironically and sarcastically refer to
it later.
There's still that core of believing in it.
For example, just off the top of my head, there's a great myth that rises up in the
1980s, which is that if you hack enough and commit enough crimes, you will eventually
get a well-paying job.
And it's a very compelling idea.
It says that if you continue to commit crimes, you'll actually come out the other end into
a lawfulness that will actually earn you money.
And it rises up in messages and statements, things like, I broke into it, and they were
so impressed, they gave me a job, I've been hired to break into this.
And a lot of that core of the security industry, which we now see, is still kind of beholden
to that, with this strange hacker security person situation.
I'm going to go back, I'll get back to that in a moment.
Let me just quickly mention the 1851 World Exposition, which I consider to be the world's
first and real biggest hacker con.
This was an event that was held in England, possibly in response to a French exposition
that had been smaller, but of course Queen Victoria wanted the best, so they built a
place called the Crystal Palace, and they invited engineers and products from all over
the world to come in for a multi, multi-week exposition, which would impress the pants
off the world at how far England had come as a center of commerce, technology, and knowledge.
So what you had there was you had this building that was built, engineered a certain way,
it was built in a very short period of time, it had trees inside of it, they had tens of
thousands of exhibits, they had so many exhibits you could not hope to see them all.
You could not hope to see them all for the area of the exposition.
And so you had this situation where there were a massive amount of engineers, fabricators,
and other types of mechanical folks all assembling in a strange country where they would drink
at night, hang out, share information, put stuff together, and then go back with some
pretty good ideas.
Similarly, there's another event called the Last Telegram of Samuel Morse.
Samuel Morse is the inventor of the telegraph.
Upon his retirement in the late 1800s, he was part of a very complicated ceremony that
took place that was to basically indicate that he was retiring from being a part of
the business life and he was going to go away.
So they went crazy.
They rented a massive hall, they had a parade for him, they brought in so many people to
the location.
And then as the extra bit, now you have to understand about telegraphs, a lot of people
sometimes think of telegraphs as telegraph wires telegraph.
In fact, even by the period of Samuel Morse's retirement, they had repeaters, they had abilities
to send things along so that you would have a message shop here and then go along further
and it would stop there.
So basically, you could send out a message and it would relay out.
So he was too ill to attend the parade during the day, but during the actual ceremony held
in this massive ballroom where there were these thousands of engineers who had made
their living.
Now keep in mind in the beginning that when you started out doing, when you were a telegraph
operator, it was a very esteemed job, an esteemed job like we sort of hold airline pilots now.
You had to have this skill set, this code knowledge, this ability to transfer things.
It was a really high esteemed job.
And slowly machines made that until it was kind of a menial kind of watching things position.
You really weren't all that skilled.
You just watched stuff come in, shove it into the other machine, keep going.
Yet there was still at this point of time, a major amount of pride about being a part
of the brotherhood, part of the telegraph operators.
Wow.
That's, I don't want to say it brings back memories because obviously I wasn't around
way back then.
But you see the parallels, you see the parallels in history between things going way back to
telegraph operators and the beginnings of technology.
And just that sense that you're part of some kind of exclusive club of people that get
it, people that are putting it together and designing things for the future.
You see the same thing today in the hacker world, in the technological world, in the
programming world.
And that's why I think this is something that everybody can benefit from, this kind of a
package.
We get 20 DVDs filled with history of hackers, of technology, all from various hope conferences
that we've held since 1994.
This particular piece that we just heard was from Jason Scott.
It's called the Hack Freak History Primer.
It comes from 2008.
And basically what we said back then, in 2008, 2600 is 24 years old.
The computer bulletin board system is a 30 year relic.
And a good number of attendees of hope conferences were not born when some events of the modern
era of computers and hacking began.
Jason Scott of textfiles.com presents a quick primer of a large part of the basics of hacking
and freaking history, touching on those sometimes obscure or hilarious subjects that may have
escaped notice in a web 2.0 world.
That is one of 20 talks that you will get, all based on history, for a pledge of $75.
But that's not all.
You'll also get the brand new, to be released next month to the world, hacker calendar that
a bunch of us have been working on meticulously for the last bunch of months.
And I got to say, this is something that I'm really, really proud of.
It's a piece of history that I've never seen the likes of before, because it brings it
all together.
It brings it all together pictorially, it brings it all together as far as a dateline
of various things that have happened that affect all of us.
And now we can have it right in front of us every single day to remind us that this is
something that matters.
Every time I read one of these, there's so many milestones, like the I love you worm.
I forgot about the I love you worm.
When did the I love you worm come out?
That was 2000, on Friday the 4th.
Of what?
Oh, sorry, May.
Okay, so on May 4th, you will notice that, if you have this calendar up on your wall,
you'll notice the anniversary of the I love you virus.
Like every day, pretty much almost every day has stuff on it.
Pretty much.
Guess what year the first book, the first spam email was sent?
1879.
Correct.
No, 1978.
And again, May 3rd.
May 3rd.
You're in May, obviously.
I like May.
Well, he only gave me two months.
He's being very stingy.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, because we all...
You know what?
You didn't give me any months.
Yeah, I did.
I just have pictures here.
Huh, you just gave me...
Lies.
Oh, there they are.
I'm sorry.
You should probably give the phone number for people to...
Oh, you're right.
I should, shouldn't I?
Like, you've talked a long time about how great this calendar is.
2-1-2-2-0-9-2-9-5-0.
We had two calls during the piece we played, and we have another piece we want to play right
away.
But we want to see some calls come in, because this is really a spectacular deal.
We're only offering it tonight.
$75.
You get 20 DVDs and this autographed Hacker Calendar, first of its kind, never been offered
before anywhere.
For $125, you get 40 DVDs plus the Hacker Calendar, 2-1-2-2-0-9-2-9-5-0.
Now I believe, .red, you discovered something rather interesting insofar as a particular
anniversary.
Yes.
What did you find?
On July 10th, you have the birthday of good old Nikola Tesla.
Nikola?
What year?
That was in all the way back in 1856.
Wow.
Yeah.
And then...
Seems like yesterday, but...
I know.
I didn't realize it was so long ago.
Felt so recent.
And also the same day, now is the anniversary of the EFF being founded.
So the Electronic Frontier Foundation started on the same day that Nikola Tesla was born.
On the birthday of Nikola Tesla.
And that's the kind of thing that you'll notice on the calendar is certain events that sort
of line up, historical events.
Because we're not limited to just one event per day, oh no.
There's sometimes three or four events on a single day.
But what I loved is that the day before, you had the anniversary of the first DEF CON meetings,
conference, and the release of TRON.
It's like, well...
On the same day?
Yeah.
The same year?
No.
Oh.
I don't know which year these things happened.
I know the first DEF CON was 1993, right?
Yeah, and TRON was 1982.
This is something that I think every hacker, everybody who's interested in the hacker world
needs to have to get a sense as to just when things happened and what things happened.
It's incredible how quickly we forget certain historical milestones and just how many things
actually this community encompasses.
And the Hacker Calendar is a tremendous way of seeing that.
212-209-2950.
We have no calls on the line.
Can it be that people aren't interested in history?
I mean, yeah.
It is America.
I know history is a dirty word, but we make it fun.
We make it a lot of fun by having the talks that teach you various things that are going
on in the world of technology and also the calendar that shows you various milestones
and the pictures.
Wow.
The pictures are just simply incredible.
I'm looking at the cover.
If you go to thehackercalendar.com, you'll see the cover of our calendar and just how
amazing photography we have here.
This is a picture of a bell system emergency alarm, but you didn't know such a thing existed.
But we found it.
It's a big red alarm.
You pull this thing when something bad happens in the bell system.
Well, since there is no bell system anymore, I guess maybe you don't pull the alarm.
And they pulled it and went out of business.
Maybe that's what happened.
Maybe that's...
We don't know.
There are pictures in here of architecture that are simply staggering.
Some New York phone company buildings, buildings in New York, that is, that are owned by the
phone company, taken in such a way that just looks so...
I believe the architecture is called brutalist architecture.
I'm not kidding.
That really is a form of architecture, brutalist.
And it's this sort of concrete, really menacing type of a feel to it.
And this picture really brings it out, done by one of our master photographers.
So you get basically one picture for every month.
You get a picture for September through December.
You get a cover picture.
You get all kinds of other dates and historical moments that you can learn about, plus the
20 DVDs.
212, 209, 2950.
Just to describe the style of the photographs, the stuff that you've come to expect if you've
been reading 2600, you know how great the covers and the pictures of telephones are.
Well, it's interesting you should say that, because one of the geniuses behind our covers,
Dave Buchwald, is the person, one of the photographers here.
And basically, we have two photographers that took all these pictures of various telephony
objects throughout the world, and it really is throughout the world.
And I'm blown away by it.
If I sound like I'm at a loss for words, it's because I am.
Some of these pictures are just phenomenal and really worthy of being appreciated by
a lot of people.
But the pictures are just one part of it.
You get the calendar with all the dates.
You get the talks with the video and historical references of all sorts.
And again, if you want more DVDs, 20 additional DVDs, you'll get 40 DVDs plus the Hacker Calendar,
the autographed Hacker Calendar by photographers and myself.
212, 209, 2950, 40 DVDs for a pledge of 125.
There are, well, there was one call on the line, but you know, really, the line should
be lit up for this.
If we don't get some more calls, then we're selling the station to Rupert Murdoch.
You know, that could happen.
That could happen.
Well, OK, let's do this.
You have something?
I'm going to play another piece after you tell us something about some historical relic
there.
Well, some of the photos you see are fascinating.
You know, it's not just, you know, amazing angles.
Some of the things that you find in here is hilarious.
For instance, a 9x plaque where it has a reward for $2,000 for information leading to the
arrest and conviction of persons damaging or robbing public telephones.
Yeah, the snitch line.
They used to have those things all over the place.
It's like you hear those, you see those things for police and they had that sort of thing
for, you know, the phone company.
Join the caller on the line now, 212-209-2950.
This is a very unique offer.
You will not find this any place else, either on this radio station or any other radio station.
Why?
Because these things have not been released in this form.
The historical Hacker DVDs, I should point out, are not just from the two most recent
conferences.
They're from all the conferences.
In fact, one of the pieces, we're not going to play this one because we don't have it
with us tonight, but one of the pieces is actually the very first talk at the very first
HOPE conference back in 1994.
Try finding that.
And this is what I mean by history being erased or lost.
We did this.
We ran this conference back in 1994.
It was a big deal, a lot of publicity, a lot of people.
And yet, try finding a copy of that talk anywhere online.
You can't.
You can't do it.
We have recently gone through our archives and rearranged a whole lot of things.
And yes, if you pledge either $75 or $125 to the radio station at 212-209-2950, one
of the DVDs you get will be the very first talk at the first HOPE conference.
What was it about?
Was it about the Dharma Initiative?
No.
Actually, you know, it could have been.
But it was Robert Steele was our keynote, XCA operative.
Robert Steele was our keynote back in 1994.
He was a teenager then.
And you'll see myself, too.
I was like five then, as well as our friend Rob from Amsterdam and just a bunch of people
in the crowd.
So join the people on the line now, 212-209-2950.
Let's play another clip.
This is actually from Steven Levy, who gave the keynote address back in 2008, again, at
the last HOPE.
And it's kind of an interesting story about how he got involved with the hacker world.
Please make those phones light up, 212-209-2950, $75, 20 DVDs plus the calendar, $125, 40 DVDs
plus the calendar, 212-209-2950.
So one day I got this assignment to write about these people called hackers.
And this is about 1981.
I'd never touched a computer before and, you know, didn't know much about them.
And around the time, the big controversy among writers is whether we should get these
things called electronic typewriters, right, which kind of remembered one line of what
we did.
And, you know, a lot of people thought, you know, boy, you really wouldn't want one of
these ugly things with a screen on your desk.
That's kind of lunatic.
But I thought, you know, this is kind of an interesting idea.
And I looked into it and I checked out the literature.
And there wasn't very much about people called hackers.
If there was, you know, pretty much the definition would be hacker, antisocial nerd, by and
large a loser who was addicted to computers.
Maybe dangerous, but mainly a booger-stained curiosity.
Okay.
I thought I could do this.
Well, there it is.
Are you proud of that or do you still talk about it?
Well, please let me know so I won't sit in your chair afterwards.
Okay.
So I looked for stuff about hackers.
And I found an article in Psychology Today, it was a cover story, it was called The Hacker
Papers and it had a picture of some really creepy looking guy on the cover.
The article actually was an edited, you know, version of some dialogue that had gone on
at Stanford University, edited by this psychology professor named Philip Zimbardo.
Well, actually, I met relatively recently and he's been doing some really interesting
stuff on Abu Ghraib and the psychology of evil.
But back then, you know, he was at Stanford doing these things about hackers.
And he wrote, and this is his take on the paper, fascination with the computer becomes
an addiction.
And as with most social addictions, the substance that gets abused is human relationships.
And this was seconded in a book with one of the few passages about hacking that I could
find.
This book was written by an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum.
Now, he's best known for writing that program Eliza where it's like a psychiatrist session,
you type in something and the computer flicks back your question at you and it seems like
a session with a psychologist there.
But he also wrote a book called Computer Power and Human Reason.
And he had very one distinctive passage that became sort of notorious at MIT and it was
not very flattering.
Let me read you that.
Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen
sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already
poised to strike at the button and keys on which their attention seems to be riveted
as if a gambler's on the rolling dice.
When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over
which they pour like possessed students of a kabbalistic text.
They work until they nearly drop, 20, 30 hours at a time.
Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them, coffee, Cokes, sandwiches.
If possible, they sleep on cots near the printouts.
Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaded faces, and their uncombed hair all
testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.
These are computer bums, compulsive programmers.
Well, this is straight out of Dostoevsky, right?
You couldn't get a more gloomier, more depressing group of people.
You know, if Angelina Jolie had seen this, she wouldn't want to portray a hacker, she
probably wouldn't want to adopt one.
So, I figured, okay, cool, I'll do this story, I'll write about these weirdos, and I'll go
to Stanford because that's the place that was in the psychology today.
Before I left, I tapped a former colleague who had been writing about technology a little,
and asked him to give me a list of sources I might talk to out there, and he presented
me with a list of some key people in the burgeoning PC industry there, and some other people involved
in some interesting computer stuff.
So I get on a plane, fly out to California, I'd only been there once in my life before
in a college trip, like a road trip there, and hadn't done anything about computers there,
and got off the plane, within four hours, I was in a hot tub with this guy, Jim Warren,
who founded the Computer Fair, along with a couple people who lived in his property,
who were editing a magazine for him about beaming data on radio sidebands, and I was
learning about how computers empowered people, and were actually exciting.
And this is like a tone which set for the entire trip, and I went to Stanford, and I
talked to other people in the PC industry, and entrepreneurs, and engineers, and other
people doing interesting stuff, and I was totally blown away by what I found.
These were not anti-social nerds, but adventurers of the mind, and their thought processes to
me were utterly fascinating.
And what's more, they were on to something.
Talking to them, I realized that the things they were doing were things that all of us
were going to be doing, everyone was going to be doing, in not too long.
And this was a world that I hadn't seen, and I got really excited about it, and wrote my
story, and wanted to just continue writing, writing more and more about it.
I also, as soon as I got home, said to my girlfriend, who's now my wife, we've just
got to get these things, and we both bought Apple IIs at the time.
They cost, for two Apple IIs and one printer, which we shared, we spent $9,500.
Yeah, and it was worth it, man.
And I started writing about it.
It was kind of funny.
Back then, again, not too many people who weren't technoids had computers, and I remember
about a year after we got the computers, a popular computing magazine, one of the magazines
at the time, did a story on women and computing, and they had a full-page picture of my wife,
not because she was anything technically proficient.
She really didn't know anything about programming or things like that.
She just simply used a computer.
Wow, a woman using a computer, imagine that.
It would be like now, someone doing an article on women and pencils, right?
So around that time, a publisher asked me if I was interested in writing a book about
hackers, so I've been writing about it more.
And again, I thought, well, gee, this is kind of a good idea.
I'd wanted to write a book for a while.
I had a proposal circulating, believe it or not, to write a book about cheesy nightclub
singers.
That wasn't catching on, so I thought, hackers, great, I'll do that.
And I thought, it was my first book, I was a little nervous.
How am I going to get this done?
It's much longer than anything I've ever done.
Then I'll maybe write a chapter about this kind of hacker and maybe a chapter about that,
and I'll just kind of write chapter after chapter until finally I had a book's worth
of stuff, and I'll put that up, and that will be my book about hackers.
But my editor, a guy named James Rames, he was really great.
He said to me, listen, I want you to think big, be ambitious.
And Tim O'Reilly, who runs the Food Camps and O'Reilly Publishing, has a saying, that
you should always try big, hairy, audacious goals.
And of course, I didn't know Tim O'Reilly then, and maybe he wasn't even saying that
then, but that's essentially what my editor told me to try to do.
And I think, let me try to do this.
Let me go for it.
Why not?
Now's the time.
So I decided, instead of just kind of piling chapter upon chapter, I would try to write
this thing like a narrative.
It would be an epic story about how these rebels changed the world.
And that's how I got the idea of hackers, heroes of the computer revolution.
And that was Stephen Levy speaking at the Last Hope Conference back in 2008 about the
origins of his book, Hackers, one of 20 DVDs that you'll get for a call to 212-209-2950.
And also, you'll get the brand new hacker calendar autographed with all kinds of pictures
and dates and things like that.
We have a decent response, but it's not good enough, I'm afraid.
We need more people.
We're getting kicked off the air soon.
Well, that could happen.
I mean, we have to.
We don't have a good showing.
We need a good show.
We weren't on last week.
We weren't on last week.
Well, that's because somebody has a crappy car.
Yeah, I don't want to get into that.
But we need to see those.
We know this is a good deal.
We see people paying rapt attention.
People in the other room are supposed to be having a meeting.
And instead, they're glued to the speakers listening to us, because what's coming out
over those speakers is interesting.
It is.
We have 20 talks here being offered for $75, 40 for $125.
And you get the hacker calendar, which basically will make a hacker expert out of anybody.
And certainly, you will be ahead of the media, the mass media these days.
When people hear the word history, they probably think of dusty old stuff.
If you listen to what you've heard so far or what you're about to hear not too long
from now, a lot of this is the same kind of very interesting stuff that everyone comes
to hope for, to learn about.
These are the kinds of things that have shaped the world that we live in today.
You'll find out when Kevin Mitnick was captured.
You'll find out when he was released.
You'll find out all kinds of denial of service attacks, but also historical things such as
when the Bell System was founded, when Alexander Graham Bell did various historical things
to networks, when the first computer was turned on.
There's even stuff here from this year.
Yeah.
There's like 2011 stuff on some of these days.
And there's also stuff in the future, because we somehow were able to predict certain things.
OK, we got one call on the line.
Amazing.
Well, the end of the world is coming, and that's on there as well.
Don't forget, this is the last calendar ever, because 2012 is the end of the world.
But we don't want to have a gloomy outlook tonight.
But we do have a bit of humor as well in the calendar, along with the pictures.
Some of these DVDs are amazing, like how the US shattered the Enigma code.
Oh, the ones we're offering?
Yes, the Enigma code is on there.
You can't get 20 DVDs for 75 bucks anywhere.
You can't get 20 blank DVDs, I don't think, for that amount.
There are all kinds of talks on vintage computing, the phone company, the FBI, and phone freaks.
Email, Descendant of the Telegram by our friend Cheshire Catalyst.
There's a talk on indie media, the transformation of journalism.
The life and times of Alan Turing, father of the computer.
Mischief and Mayhem at the Republican National Convention.
Every single one of these talks has something historical in it that people,
decades from now, will be pointing to saying, wow, this was an interesting period of human history.
We're seeing it around us today in newspaper headlines,
all having to do with hackers one way or another, whether it be through Wikileaks,
or LulzSec, or Anonymous, or the antics going on at News of the World.
It all ties into technology somehow, and an understanding of that technology is vital.
By keeping this radio station going, you keep our voices on the air,
so we can talk about these things in the future,
and you can learn so much through the DVDs, and through the radio station, through the radio show.
212-209-2950.
We only have one call on the line.
Yeah, we should also say, you don't have to give 75 bucks.
I mean, if you want the DVD package and the calendar,
you give 75 bucks, but you can give $10.
You can, yes.
We would prefer any amount.
Any amount does help.
$1,000 also, going the other direction, you can do that.
212-209-2950.
I want to see five calls come in at the same time,
because we have people down there.
We want to make sure that they have something to do.
OK, two calls coming in, 212-209-2950.
It's important, not just for the fact that you'll be getting 20 or 40 DVDs plus a calendar,
but you're keeping a radio station like WBAI on the air,
where we can talk about things like this.
We can talk objectively.
Yeah, there's not much public radio left.
No, there isn't.
It's all perfectly funded or bland.
There is a war on this kind of radio, and they are winning.
Yeah, and you know, if you look at the radio dial,
I was going to do some research on this.
Maybe I'll do this for a future week.
But I was going to go through every single frequency on the dial in New York City
and give a brief history as to what happened on that frequency.
And you'll find that WBAI has been around longer than any other radio station in New York.
Every single station, I think 1019 is the latest one,
is undergoing tumultuous changes in frequency and in format
because they can't figure out how to find an audience.
And it's really...
I mean, Laszlo, you've been involved in commercial radio for a number of years.
I can tell you how to find an audience.
Play the crappiest music.
That's what it seems like.
It seems like their way of doing radio is to just do what everybody else does.
Play bad music or have a bunch of right-wing blowhards
get people fired up all day with hate speech.
Since 1960, WBAI has existed in the middle of the commercial band
in New York City on the Empire State Building
by appealing to listeners to simply help us keep going by being the sponsors,
by being the investors.
And that works.
I mean, we've had our rough spots.
We always are having conflicts here.
But no other radio station, can you say,
has survived for 51 years based on one particular philosophy,
based on a particular format,
which in our case is many, many different formats,
many different views.
But it works.
And you know, when you pay,
most people don't even blink at spending $100 a month on their cable bill.
A lot of that money is going to some very bad people.
Yes, absolutely.
So you should give $10 to these guys.
I disconnected my cable and I realized I'm saving more
than what it would cost one person to call in
and pledge something to the radio station.
I'm saving that every single month by not having cable
and getting my video some other way.
212-209-2950.
Join the three people on the phone now
and pick up your hacker calendar or your DVDs
or whatever it is that you would prefer.
I want to play something just for a moment
because I think it's important to emphasize this.
We did this project with Laszlo's help a couple of years ago.
Do you have something urgent, DotRed?
You're waving your hand like we're on fire.
What's going on?
Yes, we're on fire.
He's waving his hand like he just doesn't care.
Well, we have four calls.
We are on fire.
One call away from the five I wanted.
212-209-2950.
You had something of more importance?
Well, it depends on which talk we're about to play next.
If we're playing the...
We're not playing a talk yet.
We're not playing a talk yet.
We're going to try to scare people right now.
Okay, no, no, but I'm bringing that up first.
All right.
Well, basically, a couple of years ago,
Laszlo and some of his friends worked on a project.
I guess we can give you credit for this.
Yes.
Okay.
We wanted to sort of...
It was April Fool's Day
and we wanted to sort of have a demonstration
as to what could happen if this place were not around.
And we tried to sort of come up with
what would the last moments of WBAI sound like?
And this happens in real...
It does.
It happens on radio stations all over the place.
All the time.
It happens to non-commercial radio stations all the time.
So we basically put together this piece
of what would happen if WBAI was no longer able to survive
and how that might sound
and what it would be immediately replaced with.
Now, it only lasts for three minutes.
Actually, it lasted a lot longer when we did it on April Fool's,
but we're only going to play three minutes.
So don't be too scared.
But please see this as a wake-up call.
212-209-2950, the last moments of WBAI.
This is WBAI, New York.
Serving the community since 1960.
How long shall they kill our prophets
while we stand aside and look?
Yes, some say it's just a part of it.
We've got to fulfill the book.
Won't you help to sing
these songs of freedom?
This all I ever heard.
Redemption songs.
All I ever heard.
Redemption songs.
These songs of freedom.
Songs of freedom.
This is WBAI, New York.
This is WBAI, New York.
Redemption songs.
All I ever heard.
Redemption songs.
All I ever heard.
Redemption songs.
All I ever heard.
Redemption songs.
Redemption songs.
Redemption songs.
Redemption songs.
Redemption songs.
Redemption songs.
Redemption songs.
What?
B minus 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two...
It's you!
Welcome, welcome!
To the new country 99.5!
Okay, okay, okay, we're sorry.
People in the station are freaking out, people are running around, oh my god.
That's what happens though.
They don't tell, they don't tell the staff when they change formats and this is the worst
nightmare of all, 10,000 songs in a row.
It's not advisable, this is the kind of thing that really happens.
Yeah, so when we produced this, that's my buddy Jeff Berlin, he's a voice guy on like
stations across America and I told him about this, he was totally into it.
So then I had to go find like country hit songs at the time, you know, went to the Billboard
chart and then I had to actually pay for them on iTunes and then downloaded them and then
put this whole thing together.
So you went for like 15 minutes.
We did, we played 15 minutes.
We played actual real country music on this station.
People were calling up and yeah, it's a demonstration, it wasn't a fundraiser then, it was April
Fool's, but this is a fundraiser now, 212-209-2950, this could happen.
We don't want to scare people, we don't want to terrorize them, but this is a reality of
radio when you can't pay the bills, when you can't keep the station going, this is what
happens.
Right.
But nothing against country music.
That's not country music, that's pop, that's 20 pop garbage.
It can happen anywhere.
It's Johnny Cash.
212-209-2950, we have two calls on the line.
I think we should be having a full switchboard with that kind of motivation.
Hey, I'm going to get a dial tone here.
We're going to be calling one of our photographers for the Hacker Calendar and basically, hopefully
we'll see a lot of calls coming in.
Yeah, I mean like, you know how much people spend on coffee that they don't think about
it?
A lot, a lot.
People spend on their cable bill, they don't think about it.
Hang on, the phone's ringing.
Is anybody there?
People should pick up the phone quicker than that when we're calling.
2600 Waste Management, this is Kyle, how may I help you?
Kyle, 2600 Waste Management, really?
Okay, yeah, I guess it's earlier over there, you're still on the day job.
Great.
Kyle, you're one of the photographers.
You and Dave Buchwald are two people who put this together.
And of course, Mark, our amazing layout guy, does the layout for 2600, put this together
as well.
And we all did research on the dates, but maybe you can say something to motivate people
to call in and get this calendar along with the 20 DVDs that we're offering.
Tell us something about the kinds of pictures you take.
Well, this is a lot of documentary stuff I did at a museum that's in my neighborhood
and other historical things I pick up through travel and seeing things in their sort of
native setting as I wander the globe a little bit.
And so I was inspired and went through, you and I were walking around, I think, in a bookstore
and we thought, hey, what if we had a calendar?
What if we could show people some of the images and some of the things we see when we travel
or things that we can't really show in a magazine?
It was December.
As we're about to break the 1000 mark, which is great.
Thanks to people for calling in.
Please keep the calls coming.
212-209-2950.
Get a copy of the hacker calendar that Kyle has taken half the pictures of and a bunch
of really important dates in the hacker community.
But yeah, as you were saying, I remember we were in this bookstore.
We were looking at all these different calendars.
And there's calendars not only for cats, but for different color cats.
And dogs and horses and windmills and all kinds of things like that.
And I remember just saying, you know, why isn't there a hacker calendar?
We have so much of interest to share with the world, so much history, so much richness.
And we have fascinating pictures.
You're a photographer.
We have all kinds of things to document and to share with the world.
And that is where the idea was born.
And we've been working on it ever since.
212-209-2950.
Get your copy of the brand new hacker calendar for 2012 by pledging $75.
And you'll also get 20 DVDs filled with history from the Hope Conferences.
For 125, you'll get 40 DVDs plus the calendar.
212-209-2950.
Most importantly, you get the radio station.
You get the radio station on the air.
You preserve this voice, this noncommercial voice in the middle of the FM dial.
Isn't that worth a phone call?
212-209-2950.
The phone lines are open right now.
Kyle, can you maybe, I don't know, inspire people to call in?
Well, Emmanuel, this really was, it ended up being a collaboration between Dave and myself
and other people that work on the magazine.
And we think this would appeal to the hacker community but also people who listen to other programs on WBAI
if they want to get an overview because these dates are rich.
There's not just your average one.
I mean, there's regular dates like, you know, you have your Groundhog Day.
If you can't live without that, that's on there.
But there's other dates, recent, you know, like 2010 or 2011 dates with like recent news
all the way to the historical.
And we really try to tie that in with the art.
And we compared and sort of shared with each other and came up with a really good visualization
for the stuff we've compiled in the past year.
Since we even thought we could do this, you know, you had the idea.
And I said, well, I mean, I'll try to pull stuff together.
And we talked to other people and really started brainstorming and trying to put it together.
We worked really hard.
I'm really proud of this.
Yeah, I am so proud of this.
This was featured on Boing Boing, in fact.
And we had a number of people write in to us with suggestions of dates.
Here's one of them.
On February 12, 1997, three teenagers from Croatia hacked into Pentagon computers.
And at that time, hacking was not a crime in Croatia.
So it was a very interesting turn of events.
But that's something that you'll see on the calendar on that particular day.
And every single day just about.
There are just a few days that don't have things listed on them.
But I've never seen a calendar so chock full of information, humor, and just informative and fun stuff.
212-209-2950.
Join the people on the line right now.
We have two calls coming in.
We're in our last moments.
And I do want to play another clip.
And Kyle, I'm going to just give you one more chance to say more about the calendar.
But then we're going to have to go and get on to this final clip of the night.
Well, I'd really thank people if they call in and support WBAI
and keep this community radio station on the air and alive and thriving.
And they're an important voice.
They help support us and help us get information like this
and keep us lively with all these projects
and able to tell people who ordinarily wouldn't know about what we're into and what we're doing,
to give them an opportunity to hear it.
And so we invite you to participate and support us in this way
and make this fun drive the best one yet.
We've had a really good response.
There's been a lot of people interested in the hacker world in recent months, recent days certainly.
And this is one of the best ways to learn what makes us all tick
and the various things that have been going on over the years.
212-209-2950.
Again, you get 20 DVDs including a DVD about the ECSS
when we were sued by the Motion Picture Association of America.
That was a big moment in our history.
Retrocomputing back from H2K in 2000
where you had all kinds of people talking about old computers, old computers back then.
A computer in 2000 now would be old.
But it's fascinating to see just how perceptions change and how certain things stay the same.
You'll see the mentor, the guy who wrote The Conscience of a Hacker,
the thing that was quoted in the movie Hackers,
reading his particular essay at H2K2 in the year 2002.
212-209-2950.
Kyle, I want to thank you for joining us tonight.
And I hope that your work inspires other people
as I know you've been inspired by many of the things in the hacker world.
Yes, I hope the same.
And thank you for having me.
And keep up the good work, you guys.
It's sounding great.
And thank you for calling in everyone who's supporting this station and our show.
Okay, thanks, Kyle.
And 212-209-2950 is our phone number.
We have to play this next clip.
We have to because it's important.
This is from the group Anonymous.
That's right.
We have Anonymous, too.
They weren't so anonymous when they came to our conference in 2008 and gave a talk.
And it was a really good talk.
It was fascinating, in fact.
Let's hear a little bit from this.
These are people that actually appeared on stage representing the group Anonymous.
They were attacking Scientology at the time.
And this is the kind of outspokenness that you'll see in the hacker community.
Please, 212-209-2950.
It didn't work.
I pressed a button and it didn't work.
Hang on.
I'm going to try it over here.
Anonymous from 2008.
Oh, hey, it's Paul.
Yeah, they can't find where I live twice, so I don't give a damn.
Yeah, I'm not really going to talk about family involvement in Scientology.
I can talk a little bit about that if you want after the panel.
But like in a question-and-answer session, talk a little bit about the bad that they do,
how they really, truly ruin lives, and, you know, all that unfun stuff.
But right now we're going to keep it on the fun side.
So I'm going to start off by saying some things that I have written down and reading them with my eyes.
So, you know, I think we fit in here nice today because, you know,
Fox News said that we're a bunch of hackers on steroids.
That was 2007.
They also called us the Internet hate machine.
That's a nice one.
And they recommend strongly that if you buy curtains and a dog, you can really protect yourself against hackers.
That's a good one.
I think that we should all do this.
And we're also known for exploding yellow vans, according to them, too.
Yeah.
Well, this is a Rupert Murdoch network, so you know it was true.
For the most part, I'm not that tech-savvy.
Certainly not in this crowd.
I'm sure all of you totally surpass me in every way.
But, you know, I guess I'm just humble.
I'm not really part of the Internet hate machine.
I only joined up with Anonymous as Chinology started.
So call me Anonymous, call me Chinologist.
If you're into that semantics, go have fun by yourself.
I'm going to be with these guys.
I really didn't know what Anonymous was until I saw the first message Scientology video that we played just before.
I heard about them once in passing over the years, but I wasn't a huge Internet user.
I was just sort of a, I don't know, normal kid growing up.
And, you know, I got my AOL CDs and then drink coasters over the years in like the early 90s.
But for the most part, you know, I had heard about Anonymous once when they sort of made the news.
Not even the Fox News report, when Anonymous way back when decided to catch some pedophile because they thought it would be funny.
And as it turns out, it was.
And it was also awesome.
So, you know, yay them.
Right?
You're a dick.
You're making us sound like crime fighters here.
All right, Batman, calm down.
He looks more like Robin with the goggles.
Screw you, man, screw you with your aviator lenses.
What are you, 70?
And your hat, come on.
All right, cool.
So really, we're a bunch of communist Nazi cyber terrorist aliens from the Markavian Empire being paid by the psychiatric industry to protest in order to push the homosexual agenda and make sure that alien ghosts remain in prison here on Earth.
So now you know what Anonymous stands for.
That was a piece from the talk they did at Last Hope in New York City back in 2008.
Awesome panel.
I think it's worth the $75 alone just to get this one panel.
But you'll get 19 others and you'll get the Hacker Calendar filled with all kinds of other, by the way, anonymous things that happened, such as when Project Chinology began and various LulzSec attacks as well.
Because it's part of the hacker history.
It needs to be notated and remembered.
212-209-2950.
We're up to 1435, which is great.
We want to hit 2000.
So please help that happen by calling 212-209-2950 and joining the people on the line now.
212-209-2950.
We have 20 DVDs, 20 historical DVDs from various Hope Conferences, from the first one to the one that took place last year in 2010.
And you get that plus the Hacker Calendar for a pledge of $75.
And if you want to pledge $125, you'll get 40 DVDs plus the Hacker Calendar.
212-209-2950.
Now, .Ret, do you have something?
Yeah.
For me, that one talk alone is probably one of the best talks that I've seen so far in this entire lineup.
I love how they're getting on each other.
They're sort of just insulting each other.
But it's all done in fun.
And that's what you have to understand about a group like Anonymous.
Don't take anything too seriously.
But even more so is that they were just doing that to have fun.
Meanwhile, a couple of years later, this talk they were doing just for fun turns out to now be something of a great historic significance.
I think you touched upon something there because a lot of what happens in the hacker world is just for fun.
And that's where you learn things, by having fun.
212-209-2950.
We have fun here at the radio station, but it's also a serious thing to keep the calls coming in, to keep the funds coming in.
And we do have to break that 2,000 mark.
And we have no calls on the line.
And we only have five minutes left before we have to get out of here.
212-209-2950.
The personal computer people are outside.
Please give us a call.
We're done.
I'm sorry?
If they show us up, we're done.
Yeah, I know.
I'll never be able to live that down.
212-209-2950.
You want to thank some people quickly?
Yeah, we have some great listeners that we should thank.
So we have Gary from Mount Vernon.
And thanks to Robin in Long Island.
212-209-2950.
And Adam in New Jersey.
Earl Whitaker and Frank Donovan as well.
All right, great.
Thanks so much for those calls, for those pledges.
Please join those people.
Join those people.
Keep the radio station going.
212-209-2950.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Even if you can only afford $5.75, we'll take it.
Yeah, well, you know.
You don't have to give $75, but it's a good idea.
But, you know, Laszlo, that is how this place exists.
Because people contribute whatever they can, and it adds up.
And that's how it's been working since 1960.
So, yeah.
You know, we can sort of say it semi-humorously, but it's true.
This place could be the next news in the world.
Don't say that.
A lot of legacy, and then it gets taken over by a tyrant.
Oh, it could happen if people don't call.
That's what I'm saying.
That's certainly true.
Yeah.
We are out of time, unfortunately.
But you're not.
You can still call 212-209-2950.
Get the 20 DVD set.
Get the 40 DVD set.
Get the Hacker Calendar.
And learn a lot about the history of hacking and the future of hacking as well.
It's the most incredible world, I think, to be involved in.
212-209-2950.
We'll see you next week.
We'll have Kevin Mitnick on for a two-hour show.
And we hope you help out.
Bring us to the 2000 level.
Again, 212-209-2950.
Night, everybody.
Night, everybody.
All right.
Ooh.
Okay.