Musicians. Singers. Bands. We've extended the deadline. You have until 11pm Thursday March 29th to apply for the second annual WBAI Artsy Fartsy Show Battle of the Bands.
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One more time, the extended deadline is March 29th to perform in the second annual WBAI Artsy Fartsy Show Battle of the Bands.
Oh my. It's 7 o'clock, you're listening to WBAI New York, in case that was not apparent. It's time once again for Off the Hook.
But if they could, they would. Bum diddly bum for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Bum diddly bum.
Bum diddly bum.
And a good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Mike. Hello. Rob T. Firefly. Good evening. Jim. Hello. And on Philadelphia, Bernie S. Greetings from Philadelphia.
Well, spring is in the air. It's officially spring now. I'm feeling very sentimental. We had that wonderful reunion on Saturday night, pairing up the police batons with the heads of protesters.
It's great to see everybody back in the swing of it. It's going to be a long year and a very interesting one too.
Just came from Union Square where things are heating up as well. All kinds of demonstrations and gatherings and things like that. I think it's the goal of the NYPD to close every single park in the city this year.
If people gather there, they'll put up metal barricades, push people away, and people move on to the next park. It's going to be a fun time, right?
We can't have the public clogging up the public parks. No, no. Heaven forbid. Especially not Union Square. I mean, no one's ever had a protest there before.
Yeah, that's the thing. It's meant for that kind of thing. And I guess, you know, on Saturday night, not Saturday night, it was actually I think Monday night, that there were people lined up for some stupid film.
I shouldn't say stupid film. I don't know what the film is. I just know people were lined up all night long for some kind of film. And then you had people with the Occupy Wall Street movement in the park.
And for some reason, one was a threat and one wasn't. One was treated with hostility and one was tolerated. And I think that'd be a great tactic for Occupy Wall Street to simply pretend they're online for a movie and then all of a sudden break out with chanting or holding signs or all those things that the authorities are so afraid of.
What if someone was waiting for the movie and started chanting? Like, let us see the movie now or some kind of chant like that?
I think that would be okay in the eyes of the authorities. I think that would be okay. But if you start chanting for social change or anything that, you know, could be a little bit dangerous, then they'll move in. It's hacking the authorities, figuring out what they'll tolerate and what they won't tolerate and how you can push their buttons and get them to do certain things or not do certain things.
All right, here's what we do.
Yes, go ahead. You first.
Here's what we do. We make a movie called Social Change. And then we get the people in line to say, what do we want? Social Change? When do we want it now?
You know what I like to do? And then Bernie, we'll hear from you in a second. I'd like to set up a mic check. You know the mic check. So that's where you basically, you can do this anywhere too. You just shout mic check twice and no matter where you are in the city, people will start chanting whatever you're saying. Try it if you don't believe me.
Mic check.
I mean outside.
Mic check.
Yeah, people know what it means now. But what if we got a whole lot of people? I mean a lot of people. This is the big leagues, folks. We get a lot of people and we surround Central Park. All right. It can be just one person abreast all the way around and someone starts a mic check and goes all the way around the park and wait for it to come back and see. It won't be like playing telephone because people pretty much chant verbatim what is said or close to it. It should be the same and you can keep it going. You can have a really cool effect.
Emmanuel.
Yes.
Here in Philadelphia, we have a former Philadelphia police captain who was up there for Occupy Wall Street. Remember he's the elderly gentleman that went in full captain police uniform and was physically abused and harassed by NYPD officials. He was there in support of the Occupy Wall Street occupiers.
But he wasn't in uniform, I'll bet.
He was in uniform.
Really? He was in uniform and he got harassed by NYPD?
Absolutely. I don't know if you're aware. This is a really big story. But anyway, he was in Philadelphia here where he lives yesterday protesting on a corner right across the street from where the Occupy Philly compound was. You remember that? And he had a big sign, a couple signs out protesting.
The commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department recently said it was totally unacceptable for retired Captain Ray Lewis to be wearing his uniform in public. Basically impersonating a police officer, the commissioner said. And he had to backtrack. Ray Lewis has been saying that he's exercising his First Amendment rights to wear his uniform even though he's retired.
And the police commissioner earlier this week here in Philadelphia had to backtrack and say, well, all right, we're not going to prosecute him after all.
Well, they let him keep the uniform, right? I assume there's a reason they let him keep the uniform. And that's not so that he doesn't wear it.
Well, that's true. Anybody who retires from the police department, especially if you're a captain, you get to keep your uniform.
Yeah, you get to keep your gun too and you're expected to use that as well.
No, I don't know about that.
Captain Ray Lewis has been a great supporter of the occupied people, both in New York and in Philadelphia. And I just want to point out that not everybody who is or was a cop wants to bust heads.
No, definitely not. And I think that's an important fact to keep in mind. And also to try and figure out what is it that would make somebody who is surrounded all the time by so many men in blue think differently and actually start communicating in a positive way with the people that he's supposedly against or trying to suppress.
People like that exist on active service right now in every city. And it's important to not simply write them all off and to try and reach these people. But it would be interesting to study just how the propaganda on either side lands and ways to thwart that.
For sure.
All right. Yes. Let's move on to some other material that we have here. We have some revelations. We always get revelations, but this actually came from the Daily News, so it's not that much of a revelation. But names like Javelin and Petrus. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about, right, Bernie?
I do.
These are the Secret Service code names for Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Which one's Javelin? Anybody know?
Petrus.
I assume they're in order, but I'm not sure.
That was his grandfather's name.
Javelin was whose grandfather's name?
No, no, no. Javelin is Romney because Romney's father was a high-ranking guy at American Motors Corporation, which produced the Javelin automobile.
Oh, okay. You know what? I just realized, looking at the story now, that they get to pick their names. Santorum picked Petrus, which is Latin for rock. Who told him about Latin? Somebody must have let that slip. It's also the root name for Peter, the first pope of the Roman Catholic Church. But he actually was naming it after Peter Griffin. But that's something.
Well, I mean, how do you know which Peter he was naming it after? Now, these code names, they're used in radio calls between Secret Service agents, typically between two to three syllables long. The tradition of using the names goes back to when communications between the Secret Service and White House was not encrypted. And I guess today, Bernie, is it all encrypted?
The protective details are typically encrypted. But in this case, unless you're the actual president, you don't get the level of encryption in your protective detail.
Okay. Now, they say the names are usually picked by the candidates themselves, presidential candidates, that is, or their communications offices, but they have to be easy to pronounce. So you got to be careful what you pick. And it's got to be something that, for instance, I don't think you could say nuclear, because George W. Bush would have gotten that one wrong.
Can't say it.
No. It's funny, though.
Jimmy Carter, for that matter, and he was a nuclear engineer.
It's funny, though. I never realized I had something in common with the Secret Service, because, you know, I, too, have my own special names for many political individuals, but I'm not allowed to say mine on the radio.
No.
They are easy to pronounce, though.
Well, now, Bernie, this information, obviously, the Daily News printed it. Is it something that's considered sensitive? Is it something that we're not supposed to have?
No. I mean, for decades, this information has been released to the media. They're not secret or classified code names. It's published in magazines and in the New York Daily News.
Back in 96, when I was before a judge with the Secret Service trying to demonize me, the Secret Service said I was dangerous and cited facts like I had possession of code names for the president and his family and staff.
Well, that was in a magazine article that they took from my library about President Reagan and his staff and family. And they'd been out of office for like over eight years at that point. So they were just deemed now. It was just BS from the Secret Service.
Yeah, but they still try to use it to demonize you, don't they? They can still do that.
Sure. That's their game. That's their gig.
So, now, if somebody wanted a full list of all of the Secret Service code names, how would they get that?
I would just search the web. That information is readily available. And some of it's pretty humorous, too.
How does the web get it?
Well, it's just people post this stuff online. It's readily available. It's just like...
I want to be one of those people is what I'm getting at. I want to find out how they get the information in the first place. People could post fake names, you know.
I think every time new names are due, like around now, media, news organizations contact the Secret Service and get this information or it's leaked to them or whatever.
Okay. I think we're a news organization. We're a radio station. We're a radio program. We should contact the Secret Service, get whatever newsletter or email is sent once a month with the newest names.
And, you know, it's good to know this. In case someone shouts a name down the street, you know who they're looking for.
Well, we're going to look into this. If anyone has more information on how to get the Secret Service code names, please let us know.
OTH at 2600.com.
Here's a story that refused to die. In fact, tell me if I'm wrong. We talked about this before.
This is a story about people applying for jobs and being asked to log into their Facebook account right there and then while they're being interviewed to show the person doing the interview, I guess, various private things and settings.
And this is turning into a bit of a scandal as if this was something that people would even consider doing. Of course, I guess someone desperate enough would hand over whatever.
But Oren Kerr, a George Washington University law professor, former federal prosecutor, says this is akin to requiring someone's house keys and I bet there are people who would give those up too just to get a job.
And of course, all kinds of questions being raised about whether or not this is legal in the first place.
But is this a real story or is this something that just keeps coming back that is not actually happening? Anybody have any information?
The legality of it aside, it's against Facebook's terms of service to give out your login and password information to anybody.
And that's what they're doing. In a lot of these cases, they're not just asking you to log in there, they're asking for your login and password.
That's what I don't understand. It doesn't make any sense to me. Why would an employer go and log in as somebody else? Were they going to post under your name?
What they want to do is they want to see your private content so they can see the photographs of you partying last weekend and decide not to hire you if they don't like the kind of parties you're going to.
If they were your close friend on Facebook, wouldn't they see all of that? They don't have to be you.
But they're not my close friend on Facebook.
But they could demand to be your close friend and then they would see everything.
Facebook has sufficiently sophisticated or at least complicated privacy settings that this is really the only way to be sure you're seeing everything.
What if Facebook made a new privacy setting of Big Brother or something like that?
Somebody who would see all your intimate thoughts, everything that you were posting or took back, erased, that kind of thing, but not being you?
Because if you give the account information to them, they can change your password.
They can post under your name.
They can do all kinds of things and you can accuse them of trying to besmirch your credibility.
Whereas if Facebook instituted a new Orwellian type of surveillance model, everybody would win, right?
The employers would get to monitor the employees 100%.
The employees would get their jobs and Facebook would be in the clear.
Well, everyone would win except the employees whose privacy is being invaded and the friends of these employees.
Not if they don't care.
If they don't care about their privacy, then nothing's lost.
Well, at least some job candidates do care enough to have contacted the media.
And they didn't get the job.
That's true.
Which is something that not everyone can afford to do in the current economy.
That's true.
That's very true.
They do make compromises just in order to get what it is that they want.
But it just seems like a really clumsy way to spy on somebody.
I think the spying is the shameful part.
Who cares how clumsy they do it?
It's good that it's clumsy.
At least you know about it.
But I think that my employer shouldn't have the right to know what I do when I leave work unless I'm besmirching their name or something.
What if you smoke?
What if you smoke and you're on their health insurance?
What about that?
What if I smoke and I'm on—
Hospitals are excluding people who smoke now.
Yeah.
Employees.
There's all kinds of things.
All kinds of things that they're doing that affect what you do not when you're at work but when you're at home.
And all kinds of results occurring as a result of that.
Yes.
And, of course, they're singling out Facebook now.
But if this goes by without raising any hackles or gets accepted as a normal thing, then, of course, if you don't use Facebook or if you use other things, if you use other services, or even if you host your own website, what are they going to ask for the keys to next?
Right, right.
Why not just ask for your login information for whatever email service you use?
Why not read all your email?
I'm just going to bring—if I have to job interview again, I'm just going to bring my entire sock drawer so they could plow through it themselves.
Might as well.
I've seen the kind of socks you wear.
I don't know what you keep in your sock drawer not wearing when I'm around, but there's a lot to be learned.
So this is real.
We've determined this is a real story.
There's people actually doing this.
I've never met anybody that has been asked to give up their login information for a job interview.
It just sounds so bizarre.
I mean it really depends what you do.
I work in the tech industry, and there's sufficient competition for jobs that anyone who asked me this would be told no enough times that they'd stop doing it.
But other industries aren't so lucky, so I believe it.
Go ahead, Barney.
I think the big story that broke this week was it was a guy who was applying for, I think, an upgrade to his security guard prison guard job, and it was part of the security process.
Wait, a prison guard?
A prison guard wouldn't have a Facebook page.
What friends is he going to have?
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to be nasty, but it's true.
No, prison guards are people.
Some of them are not very nice people, but some are very nice people too.
Yeah, but the only friends they're going to have are people who are also prison guards.
That's not true.
My point is there are some jobs where security is really important, but for other people it's really not that important to be looking at their Facebook private stuff.
And frankly, I think if anybody is really serious about their own privacy, they shouldn't have a Facebook account because Facebook is not serious about their users' privacy.
That's easy to say, but people do have Facebook accounts, and it shouldn't be a requirement to get a job that you lack a Facebook account either.
I agree.
I'm just stating that if you're really serious about your own privacy, don't use Facebook.
And also we can say Facebook doesn't care about your privacy, but you have to care about your privacy.
And if you don't care about your privacy, you can't be high and mighty about Facebook because in the end it's your choice what you do and what you don't do.
All right.
Well, we have an update on the Kim.com case.
Seems that authorities in New Zealand made a procedural error prior to seizing property belonging to the founder of Mega Upload, who actually is named Kim.com.
And that mistake could mean the government will now be required to return all of his property.
The police, as you recall, arrested.com at the mansion he lived in outside of Auckland, New Zealand on January 19th at the request of the United States government.
U.S. Department of Justice alleges that .com is the mastermind of a criminal enterprise designed to help the masses pirate music and movies.
And they've offered him a free trip to the United States to answer those charges and possibly be a guest in a big building made out of concrete.
So I don't know.
You think this case is now in danger because of a procedural error?
I think the people in power get what they want.
I think they're going to get what they want in this case.
Whether it takes an extra month or not, I don't know.
But, Bernie, what do you think?
Well, I don't know much or really anything about New Zealand law.
But here in the United States, there's a legal doctrine called fruit of the poisonous tree.
If evidence is seized illegally, any evidence that comes out of that seizure cannot be used as evidence against you.
And it's what happened in this case.
A whole bunch of stuff was seized from Kim.com, apparently illegally.
And I'm sure his lawyers will be arguing that they can't use any of that evidence to prosecute him with.
So it's going to be interesting to see where this goes.
But I agree with Mike that there's so much effort, there's so much power and pressure from the United States government,
I don't think the U.S. is going to allow the New Zealand government to throw out the case.
Well, I guess we'll be watching that as well, seeing what happens.
Do you think they're going to succeed, though, in extraditing him to the United States?
It's anybody's guess.
I think they're going to really try.
All right.
Well, that seems to be the latest thing these days is trying to extradite people,
getting them to come to this country to answer charges.
We talked about a guy last week, Richard O'Dwyer.
In fact, we heard from his mom afterwards.
She listened to the show.
I think that's great.
And he's being extradited or they're trying to extradite him because he was involved in streaming –
allegedly involved in streaming television programs.
He was not even allegedly involved in streaming television programs.
What makes this so bizarre is that he was allegedly involved in providing links to other people
who were involved in providing television programs for download,
which is not illegal in Britain, the country where he lived and worked.
Is it illegal here?
Apparently.
To provide links to sites?
I don't know.
Is there an equivalent to radio broadcasting?
I mean, if I sat here and told people out loud that if you go on YouTube and search for it,
you can find pirated television material, would I be in trouble?
What would you search for?
I don't know.
Something I don't own the copyright to.
Well, let's start giving out links on the radio and see what happens.
It won't be very interesting radio, but who knows?
It might alert some lawyers somewhere.
All right, speaking of legal things, and this is where I'm going to need some help
because when it comes to legal matters, I am notoriously ignorant.
This has to do with patents, and boy, I don't understand patents at all.
I don't understand the mentality behind so much of this world.
But apparently, there is a series of cases, a series of lawsuits involving mass transit.
Now, the most recent of these suits was filed last week claiming that
Portland's transit tracker system infringes a patent owned by a rival star,
and that is a patent holding company that enforces patents by a guy named Martin Jones.
And what he is alleged to be doing is basically going from city to city,
not physically but legally, and filing lawsuits against the transit systems
who use GPS technology.
What he's doing is allegedly known as patent trolling.
And basically, he has the patent for this GPS technology.
I believe that's the right way to categorize it.
Am I correct so far?
I don't know if it's the GPS technology itself, which is run by the government,
but sort of the application of GPS to tracking transit vehicles.
Okay, so basically what he's doing, and the reason why this is called patent trolling
is because the tactic seems to be to target cities that are rather financially strapped,
so that rather than enter a multi-million dollar lawsuit, they opt to settle.
And the cities are settling.
They're saying, okay, we're going to give you money and then we won't get sued again.
We'll be able to use this technology.
Now, as far as I can understand, and again, there's a lot I don't know about this
because it's just a crazy world.
It really is.
He has the patent.
This guy Martin Jones has the patent for the technology,
but he hasn't actually invented the technology.
He hasn't actually come up with a prototype or anything like that.
Basically, he has the patent for if you want to track a bus, for instance,
you want to put GPS technology on a bus and say, okay, this bus will be here in five minutes.
Somehow he came up with the idea.
Is that the logic here?
And because he came up with the idea, every time somebody implements this, they need to pay him.
So he says.
So he says.
So the patent law seems to say as well.
The patent law is really vague about sorts of things like this,
and a lot of times if you have enough lawyers, you can fight it and win,
but no one has that number of lawyers.
So if I come up with ideas for various things, like how a spaceship to Mars should work,
and they actually say, yes, good idea, we should do that,
but they come up with the idea completely independently,
then I can say I thought of that idea.
Because I think of all kinds of ideas.
I have no clue how to implement them, but I think of all sorts of ideas.
I've been doing that since I was a kid.
You have to have some notion of how it should work,
but a lot of the particularly controversial cases of patent trolling are for really obvious things
where you take thing A and you take thing B, both of which are already well known,
and you have a patent combining things A and B.
For example, he didn't invent GPS.
He didn't invent buses, but he claims to have invented the idea of putting a GPS on a bus, which is –
How does anybody not come up with that idea?
I mean if you have something, global positioning, and you have a vehicle,
it just makes sense that sticking the two together would be a very convenient thing to do.
I'd like to know how do you get credit for coming up with the idea to just merge the two together.
I've heard of this for years.
Wasn't a company trying to or maybe succeeding in double-clicking?
Double-clicking was something that was patented or one-click shopping.
Amazon owns and very vigorously enforces the patent on one-click purchasing.
One-click purchasing – so if you just do one click, they own that one click
because no one else would have ever come up with the idea to have a single click do something.
Is that the –
I think it was after people had been shopping online for some time,
and clicking to order things was common practice.
It's just now it's one click.
Okay. Go ahead, Bernie.
I think the problem, the root of the problem here is, besides greedy people,
is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which grants patents.
I'm sure it's a bunch of overworked people there, but they grant patents, as Mike said,
to really obvious stuff that really shouldn't be patented in the first place.
Once the applicant gets that patent in their hand, they can just go on a lawsuit binge
and sue anybody for using their overly obvious idea.
It's really a shame that our U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is not better funded
to really sufficiently analyze these applications to determine whether they really should –
these ideas should really be patented or not.
Well, you mentioned that this is the U.S., but what about other countries?
How does it work there?
I don't know. It's probably – it could be just as bad there.
But you seem to be hearing about this more with U.S. patents being just crazy.
So I would guess it's not as bad in other countries, but who knows?
Yeah, and particularly in the field of software patents, the U.S. is a real innovator in stupidity,
to use some words.
Can we just come up with some idea now so that we can patent it after the show
and then make a lot of money?
I'm thinking Mars for some reason. I was reading stories about going to Mars.
Maybe like oxygen masks for Mars. When people go to Mars, they'll need oxygen masks.
We can come up with the idea to wear an oxygen mask when you're on Mars.
If you have a good enough patent lawyer, you might be able to get a patent for that.
And that way nobody can breathe on Mars without paying us first.
No one else would have thought of that, right?
But now that you've just said that on the radio,
I bet there are at least a dozen patent trolls running to their local patent offices
filling out paperwork on the way.
Damn it, you're right. I didn't think of that.
So there was one bit of good news this week on the patent front,
which is that the Supreme Court ruled that it is not allowed to patent a law of nature,
which may sound obvious, but it had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to be decided.
The specific case is that there was a drug company that tried to patent a method
for determining the dose of a certain drug.
So you would take the patient's weight or whatever,
and they'd tell you how much of a drug you should give them.
And the Mayo Clinic fought this patent and won.
The Supreme Court says you cannot patent a law of nature
or its sort of trivial application like this.
So kudos to the Mayo Clinic, kudos to the Supreme Court.
I just wish we could see more of this.
I can't patent gravity.
You can't patent gravity.
You can't patent a method of computing gravity based on mass,
which is basically what this lawsuit tried to do.
So that's really nice.
I hope for further sensibility from the Supreme Court, but I'm not counting on it.
The trouble is that our system is hopelessly broken
because it's very easy to get a patent for something ridiculous,
and it's very difficult to fight it once you're in that position.
So you can go and get a rubber-stamped patent for any damn thing you want,
but if you're on the wrong end of one, you have to spend money,
you have to take time, you have to throw lawyers at it,
and you may or may not win depending on how the stars are aligned that week.
So it's very easy to break the system and very difficult to fix it.
And, of course, whenever you hear about companies being taken over by other companies,
oftentimes it's not the company that they're taking over but the patents that they own.
Google was alleged to have done this, I believe, with Motorola.
Yeah, Motorola's cell phone division.
Yeah, it wasn't about the technology.
It was about all the patents.
And they're trading these things like baseball cards,
and apparently there's a lot of money in it.
So what's really crazy is that the reason Google wants these patents,
so they claim, is not to sue anybody,
but what they want to happen is they want to have sort of like a nuclear war mutual deterrence effect
where Apple can't sue them with the patents that Apple owns
because if they did, then Google would be able to countersue.
So they want to just have the sort of giant patent portfolios.
The problem is that there are smaller companies which might like to genuinely innovate
but can't because they could be sued by these behemoths.
It's almost like you're afraid to come up with ideas
because someone else might have already written it down someplace
and then you get sued and you're worse off than not coming up with the idea in the first place.
There's a real fear of that.
Can't we just go back to making cool devices and technologies and things like that?
Get all these patents out of here?
Open source.
It's depressing.
Well, yeah, is open source immune from this?
No.
No.
Didn't think so.
Okay.
Well, okay.
Here's something.
Here's an invention, I guess, or an innovation that hopefully wasn't invented before.
You know those old payphone kiosks that appear everywhere.
According to the New York Post, I don't want to quote the New York Post
but this seems like an interesting story.
New Yorkers who are stuck with a battery-drained iPad or Blackberry
will soon be able to turn to the city's newest payphones
which are computer kiosks that users buy access to the web, email, and various apps.
It's a Jetson-style setup dubbed Mike.
I bet this Mike, maybe you can sue them because they used your name.
That would be a trademark, not a patent.
All right.
Well, you know, whatever.
My internet kiosk everywhere.
That's what Mike allegedly sued.
They might sue you.
You're looting Mike's name.
Yeah, but he's using their name.
Anyway, it's soon going to replace.
These kiosks are soon going to replace every single antiquated payphone throughout the city.
That's according to the New York Post.
Every single antiquated.
That's a lot of payphones.
Didn't they try this?
I don't know.
I don't think they tried to do every single one.
They tried to do a few and no one used them, so I assume they stopped.
Well, these units will feature 22-inch touchscreens
that will have cameras for video applications and surveillance of the populace
and will be outfitted with electrical outlets
so users can juice up their own phones and laptops while staying connected.
So you can actually recharge at one of these places.
That's kind of cool.
How do you pay for that, though?
The upgrades will be paid for by California-based Pacific Telemanagement Services,
the company that last year took over Verizon's stock of public payphones
after the communications giant decided it wasn't making enough money off them.
Did we know about this?
They took over Verizon's public payphones?
Yeah.
Pacific Telemanagement Services.
Before cell phones, payphones were a way for people in motion to have contacts,
Kurt Gibbs, a PTS vice president.
This is where technology is going.
It's next in the evolution of the payphone.
Of course, elimination of the payphone is, I guess, a necessary step in that evolution.
PTS has bought several old payphone franchises.
In November, it took over 16,377 Verizon units in New York State.
The Internet phones will soon show up at Penn Station
and then in other public locations such as hospitals and schools.
And in a matter of months, 100 mic systems will be installed around the city.
PTS charges 50 cents for a 15-minute call, $1 for four minutes on the Internet.
$1 for four minutes on the Internet, wow.
And users can pay with cash or plastic.
The devices also cater to tourists who are traveling light
or for those who can't afford a smartphone.
It's futuristic, said a random Brooklyn resident.
It would have been great to have this when we were on vacation.
One drawback, though, is that users can't surf while they're talking on the phone.
Yeah, I guess we just have to live with this kind of thing.
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
Actually, you can surf while you're on the phone.
One user found it distracting that while she was on the phone,
she couldn't pay attention to the conversation while she was surfing.
But I remember in the late 90s, do you remember this?
Back in the late 90s, there were similar devices out there.
There were these payphones out there that had web browsers
and color touchscreens and a keyboard.
And I remember I'm here in Philadelphia,
and the business model just fell flat after about a year or two.
These companies went out of business.
And I predict the same thing is going to happen with this.
Bernie, I'm going to sue you for patent infringement
because I believe that I had that idea just a moment ago.
The idea that it was going to fail?
Yeah.
Okay, well, I think we all had that idea right away.
Well, I mean, the playing field has changed a bit, hasn't it, since the 1990s?
Everyone's got their stupid smartphones now,
and they're in need of all kinds of apps or charging or whatever.
I mean, it still might fail, but it's pretty different.
I'm officially waiting for my next-gen Redbox.
All right, yeah.
Somebody get on that.
Those are the days, right?
Okay.
Let's move into the world of so-called piracy
and all sorts of other fun things.
Did you know about this?
Did you know that 14 members of Anonymous had been banned from using Twitter?
Yeah, it's true.
Over objections from the Department of Justice, though,
a judge has lifted a Twitter ban on 14 accused members of Anonymous
who are now under indictment for their alleged roles in a coordinated online assault
that was against PayPal,
an attack prosecutors contend was carried out via the social networking site.
So basically these people were banned from using Twitter while the case moved forward,
and now that ban has been lifted so they can tweet with impunity now.
It's amazing.
Twitter is really the only way people can communicate in the eyes of the authorities,
and taking that away will cripple them.
It seems really odd.
The authorities are not very bright.
Yeah, but something like this really makes you wonder what they're thinking exactly
because obviously they can just get on the phone
or they can get on another social networking communication site or something like that.
They could use Facebook.
They could use, I don't know, what are alternatives to Twitter?
The thing is there are dozens of these services out there, many of them quite active,
but Twitter gets singled out because I think it's the ones
that the authorities might have seen mentioned on a TV show or something once,
and so they're the ones that are in the sort of public mind right now.
Of course, if you can't tweet, can you Tumblr?
Can you LiveJournal?
Can you do whatever else?
LiveJournal?
Really?
That's still around?
I don't know why some just fall out of favor and why others become popular.
It doesn't seem like the features are any better on one than another.
Why do people stop using MySpace rather than every single page is ugly as sin?
Isn't that enough?
No, not really.
If you look at some of the pages out there now, I don't know.
It just seems like a trendy type of a thing, which I guess is the nature of this.
The thing that seems to kill a lot of these, completely digressing from the point,
but it seems that once something gets sufficiently trendy,
then a bunch of people jump on it because it's trendy,
then people try and monetize it in strange ways because it's trendy,
and then that just fills it up with crap that nobody wants to look at,
and so they move on to somewhere else, and it's a cycle.
Yeah.
Well, we'll watch that cycle and continue to update people.
Now, the former head of security at the now defunct movie streaming site Ninja Video
has been sentenced by a federal court in Virginia for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.
The government demanded a prison term for 33-year-old Jeremy Andrew,
but the court decided that three years' probation is sufficient as he was not motivated by monetary rewards.
Interesting.
It was the first round in the ongoing Operation In Our Sites, S-I-T-E-S,
through which more than 300 domain names have been seized to date.
You know, that's what it was called, Operation In Our Sites.
What a silly name.
I think we've mentioned that before.
Well, it's still silly.
After the site's domain was seized, five people connected to the movie streaming site were arrested last year,
and with the sentencing of Jeremy Andrew, all have now been sentenced.
Now, Andrew was accused of taking part in the Ninja Video conspiracy.
Well, that sounds evil.
And pleaded guilty to a copyright infringement charge last October.
Andrew, known online as...
I can't say this word.
It doesn't have any vowels.
I'm not going to say that.
It's just letters.
H-T-R-D-F-R-K.
How are you supposed to pronounce that?
I have no idea.
People, really, I mean, if you're going to have a handle, put some vowels in it so we can pronounce it.
Unless we speak Welsh, there's no way we can do this.
Andrew was known as a random series of letters, started out as a regular visitor to the site,
but was later recruited as staff member.
His tasks were to secure the servers and moderate the forums,
which the prosecutor described as important roles.
Like the other charged defendants, Andrew filled an important role in the Ninja Video conspiracy.
Andrew served as Ninja head of security.
Can you believe our law enforcement people are taking time to say sentences like that?
Andrew served as Ninja head of security.
This is what it's come to.
Which involves setting up, managing, and securing servers used by the conspiracy to store infringing content.
Andrew also served as one of the moderators of the Ninja Video forum board.
In that role, he provided technical assistance to website visitors,
which included assisting visitors with accessing infringing content.
But you know what?
In the end, a lot more people saw your mediocre videos than would have seen them ordinarily,
and you probably should be thanking these people for helping you get publicity.
How could they get a site called Ninja Video for piracy?
Because ninjas can't be pirates.
They're mortal enemies.
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
That's a good legal defense.
You should contact the lawyers.
Maybe that's why he didn't end up in jail.
This July.
In fact, this is supposed to happen on July 12th,
which is the day before Hope No. 9 begins.
And by the way, on the subject of Hope No. 9,
we're moving along with speaker submissions.
We've gotten a bunch of those since last week.
If you would like to submit a speaker or panel request or idea, rather,
write to speakers at hope.net.
Tell us what you want to speak on
and give us one or two-paragraph summation
and tell us something about yourself as well.
We've gotten so many good entries,
and we're going to be releasing some of those probably later this week.
And all kinds of other things are planned as well.
I believe we also just recently posted some tips to help us like your submission.
There are some tips, yes,
because you want to maybe pick on a couple of things that people do that,
well, they kind of annoy us sometimes,
or they don't do you any good if you submit something and fall into these patterns.
The main problem we've had is that some submissions have been too vague,
so we don't know what you're going to talk about.
That's putting it lightly, yes.
And if we don't know what you're going to talk about,
then we can't really appreciate how fascinating it's going to be.
People write in and say,
I don't know what I'm going to talk about.
Can you suggest something for me?
Thank you.
Come on, that's not a speaker submission, people.
That's not.
No, you've got to tell us what you want to talk about.
We're not going to assign things.
This isn't school.
Think about what you're impassioned by,
something that you know a little bit about, that you've had experience with.
We don't discriminate based on who you are, how famous you are.
We'll give the floor to someone who's never spoken before if the topic is something interesting.
So I don't think many other conferences can say that,
and we have so many good talks.
If you look at the history, just go to hope.net or go to 26.com.
There's a list of all the HOPE sites there.
You'll see the very many different amounts of topics that we've covered.
You can be part of that, speakers at hope.net.
Emmanuel?
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
I just want to say, too,
the HOPE Conference has a really good track record of having unique content from its speakers.
So one of the problems that people are submitting talks that they've made at several other conferences,
and we're really not interested in rehashing their ideas again at HOPE.
Yes, absolutely.
If you submit something to us and it's been presented at another conference,
verbatim, word for word, same description.
Now, we don't accept that kind of thing because every audience is different,
and we want people to submit things that are fresh.
You'll find the same talks at many conferences, word for word almost,
and you'll find people giving their, what's the software called on the screen?
PowerPoint.
PowerPoint, yes, that's it.
Keynote, too.
People use this and they don't detract from it,
and we prefer people to actually speak to the audience, engage the audience, that kind of a thing.
Those are the talks that we're going to give preferential treatment to.
So, yeah, if you've submitted it to a whole lot of conferences and you're seeing who bites, we're not going to bite.
We're not going to bite at what everybody else is biting at.
We're going to go for something unique.
And also, on that token, the subject matter does not have to be super technical,
does not have to be technical at all.
It can be a social issue that ties into the hacker world.
The hacker world is huge.
Those of us who have gone to the chaos congresses and chaos camps and the Dutch conferences,
you'll see the talks there.
It's a wide range of subject matter, everything from energy to open source software to all kinds of social engineering issues.
We're open to all of that, and this is the window to mainstream culture to tell the people of the world what hackers are all about
because a ton of media show up to these things, and it's a great way to present a positive face.
With no disrespect to the European conferences, I think we do at least as good a job in presenting a diversity of topics,
and we're always excited when we hear from people who can help us expand that.
Yes, very much so.
And again, www.hope.net is our web address.
Visit that for the latest updates.
And you know what?
If you've ever been a part of a HOPE conference, if you've ever presented at a HOPE conference or helped to organize,
we want to follow you on our Twitter account.
Yeah, we want to sort of get a whole big family together.
Our Twitter account is hope9, and that's 9, the number 9, not spelled out, hope9.
And let us know what your Twitter ID is, and we'll follow you.
If you've given a talk in the past or if you're giving a talk this time or if you were a volunteer or a coordinator of some sort,
let's keep track of each other and plan for July 13th through 15th, which is HOPE number 9, Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City.
All right, continuing with the piracy and also our phone number, 212-209-2900.
We'll be taking phone calls in just a moment.
This is an interesting story, and I almost can't believe it.
It's not April 1st yet, but the story apparently is real.
The world's largest and most resilient BitTorrent site plans to redefine cloud computing with a plan to move at least some of its servers onto unmanned drones miles above Sweden.
Yeah.
The Pirate Bay has announced new low-orbit server stations, LOSS, that will house the site's servers and files on unmanned GPS-controlled aircraft drones.
Now, one of the site's administrators, Mr. Spock, said, you know, it's hard for me to take this seriously.
It really is.
I'm quoting Mr. Spock.
I'm talking about servers up in the clouds literally, and Pirate Bay is the source.
You know, I'm sorry.
It's difficult.
I got used to the 21st century.
You have to love the Pirate Bay's real flair for the dramatic.
Well, it is dramatic, and I guess drones are the theme for this decade.
Mr. Spock says, with the advent of miniature computers such as the Raspberry Pi, which is a $35 microcomputer the size of a thumb drive, really?
Wow, that's so cool.
That includes a Wi-Fi and SD card slot for storage.
The site can take its servers far from any law enforcement.
We're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air.
This way, our machines will have to be shut down with airplanes in order to shut down the system, a real act of war.
Oh, boy.
So the problem with this plan is that they can still take out the ground stations.
Yeah, yeah, there's that, but it does add some interesting aspects to the whole thing.
I would really like to experiment with drones at Hope No. 9.
I don't know.
Is that a fantasy?
Can we launch something up over the streets of New York City and communicate with it?
Is that legal even?
Well, we've had the microcopters floating around.
But we haven't had the microcopters here in New York City, have we?
Yeah, we have.
In the streets?
Not in the streets.
Well, that's what I mean.
No, I want to go up by the Chrysler building and just, you know, sort of give our own little traffic reports.
You'll get shot.
Well, the copter will get shot.
No, you'll get shot.
By who?
The police.
Okay.
Well, it's a thought anyway.
If anyone out there has ideas, again, write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We're always open to new and different ways of doing things.
Isn't it great living in a police state?
Now, I started to read this story, actually.
It's the day that ISPs will begin punishing BitTorrent pirates.
Yeah, you've heard about this?
Major U.S. Internet service providers will start assisting copyright holders in their fight against online copyright infringement.
Major ISPs, including Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable will begin fulfilling their obligations
under the terms of a Memorandum of Understanding signed last year,
which will see the providers send out copyright infringement warnings to their millions of customers.
Now, after years of painful negotiations, last June it was revealed that the RIAA, MPAA,
and some of the United States' largest internet service providers had finally come to an agreement
on action against unauthorized online sharing of copyright works.
The deal involves content owners, such as recording labels and movie studios,
monitoring peer-to-peer networks, including BitTorrent, for copyright infringements,
and reporting instances to internet service providers.
The ISPs have agreed to take steps to educate, allegedly, that's in quotes,
allegedly infringing customers through an escalating system of notices, warnings, and other measures.
Yeah, while it was big news at the time and a very hot issue,
since mid-2011 very little has been reported on the progress of the deal.
The initial announcement said that ISPs would start implementing the alert system by the end of last year,
but this obviously didn't happen.
However, according to the Center for Copyright Information, which is known as CCI,
the organization responsible for administering the scheme,
all parties are on target to initiate the programs by July 12th of this year.
Now, what's going to happen supposedly is that warnings will be sent out
and they're going to keep track of who you are.
If you change providers and you have, say, four black marks against you,
you could find yourself banned from the net from any of those providers, even if you move.
I don't know how they're going to do this.
I don't have the technical information, but this is what they're trying to do.
They're trying to make it so that they keep track of how many strikes you have,
and if you are a well-known infringer, you're going to find it very difficult
to go through any of these providers to get internet access,
and I guess it's their attempt to blacklist you from the net.
Sounds like great news for the small independent providers who won't participate in this.
And I'd like to get a listing of those providers
because I think they're going to play a very important role in all this.
But the thing is that this has been tried in other countries,
and it's incredibly dangerous because the copyright holders make mistakes.
They say they own copyright in works they don't own.
They say you're downloading a work that you're not downloading.
They say you're downloading a work when it turns out to be your child or neighbor or anyone,
and there is no appeal process, or at least not a fair one.
And so this system is just going to blow up.
They're going to be kicking people off the internet for no good reason.
Not that copyright violation is a good reason anyway.
And I want to know how we can stop this, but I didn't even hear about it until today.
Well, all I know is it will be implemented one day before Hope No. 9,
so it will be a hot topic there at the conference,
and hopefully we don't get kicked off the net immediately.
We'll see. 212-209-2900.
Is the phone still broken where we only get one call at a time?
Either that or we just have one call.
I think the rollover is not working.
No, I see we have two calls. Now we have three.
Okay. You know what? People were just hesitating.
All right. Let's move over to the phones.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Hi. I was wondering if you had any idea how Anonymous stays anonymous,
what kind of programs it uses.
Is it TOR or something more sophisticated or some kind of live booting CD?
I was wondering if you had any idea.
The best non-technical way for people allegedly with Anonymous to stay anonymous
is to not draw attention to themselves, take credit for things, and be a focal point,
because no matter what kind of precautions you take,
whether it be TOR, whether it be encryption,
whether it be just bouncing all over the place,
eventually something is going to connect you to something else,
and you will be found out.
It happens every single time.
That said, anyone want to comment on some of the technical things?
TOR is probably the best solution,
although there's a lot of complications to using it properly
that you can read on their website torproject.org.
It's not supposed to be secure.
It's not supposed to protect your actual data.
It just protects the source.
It protects the site you're communicating with from learning who you are
through certain means and not through other means.
If you tell it who you are, even though your IP address is masked,
they'll learn who you are because you've told them.
It's quite complicated to get everything right,
but a good first step is to install and use Tor.
Okay, and that's spelled T-O-R, and it can be found at tor.org?
No.
The Tor Project.
Yeah, okay.
This is, again, the Tor Project?
I think it's just torproject.org,
but if you search on the internet for Tor, T-O-R, it should come right up.
Yeah, and that's key is actually learning how to use it.
Like any other tool, there are lots of people trying to use it
and just getting false senses of security
because they're not using it correctly.
You do have to study.
You do have to understand what it's doing, why it's doing it,
and, yeah, do your homework.
Just remember, everybody makes mistakes,
and nobody is immune from that.
The most technologically sophisticated people make stupid mistakes sometimes,
and it's best not to focus too much on any one thing,
not to brag about the fact that you'll never get discovered,
because you will.
It happens all the time.
The strength of anonymous is in its numbers,
and when a head gets cut off, two more sprout in its place,
and that's something that you can't really fight.
It's very difficult to do that,
and as long as that continues,
the power, I think, of such a group will remain uncontested.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Yes, I'm enjoying your program,
but I'd like to be as candid as possible and ask you a question.
Go right ahead.
You know, I'm generally sympathetic to a generation
that relies on other people's technology and creativity
in order to enhance its own image,
but why do you think you and others like yourself
have the right to steal other people's work
and not have to compensate them for it?
It doesn't make sense.
Okay.
Well, hang up and listen, not to argue.
Okay, but could you define stealing?
Well, the fact is, if someone copyrights something,
if someone takes time to create something,
I mean, I preface my comment by saying
that this generation of computer geeks or whatever
have pretty much destroyed creativity in this country,
let alone the world,
so now they take it upon themselves,
because they lack skill and talent,
they're going to siphon off the energy of those
who were truly blessed with creativity.
Well, I think that, okay,
well, you didn't stick around for the answer,
but I think the best way I could say that
is that that's a gross generalization.
There are certainly people that don't want to pay for anything
and don't really care about creativity
and just want to, you know, entertain themselves,
but I think it's a tremendously creative time,
a tremendously great time to be an artist,
online or offline.
As somebody who publishes a magazine,
I can say that we're reaching more people than ever,
and it's great when word gets spread.
That's what anyone who wants to say something
or wants to create something,
or is a photographer or a movie maker
or a recording artist, that's what they want.
They want people to be hearing and seeing their material,
and you need to reach people in order to do that,
and if they can be your vessels to get that word out,
you can't ask for a better public service than that.
Stealing is when you take something
and you no longer have it,
or somebody takes credit for something that you did.
I don't see that happening right now,
and, you know, the whole quote-unquote piracy movement,
imagine if these people were taking all this music
and all these films and sticking their names on it
and saying, I made that.
I made Apocalypse Now.
That was my film.
That would be true piracy.
That would be something that would actually hurt the artist,
but when it actually gets out there
and reaches so many more people,
that's the best thing you can hope for.
Yeah, and as one of those artists
who are doing this stuff today,
I am, I find myself very well rewarded for my creativity.
I'm not, because I put my work out there for free.
There are free content scenes.
There are Creative Commons and GNU
and all these freely shareable licenses
on these scenes in which people
are sharing all their work freely.
They're building on each other's work.
Everyone's getting credit for what they do,
and, like, if someone sees my work and enjoys it,
then I might get commissioned for something,
or I might sell something,
or, you know, I can get financially rewarded that way,
or I might, you know, find employment that way,
which has happened, but beyond all that,
it's just a sense that, you know,
I'm running a great computer right now
on free software and open-source stuff,
and this is all just everybody sharing willingly
rather than trying to jealously guard
what they do for them and them alone.
I just want to point out that you might not
make any money from your work online,
which is the exact same position
you would have been in before the internet.
Very few people were making money from creating content.
Let's be honest.
We all want to be Lady Gaga and, you know,
Justin Bieber and all that kind of thing,
but odds are it's not going to happen.
Odds are that, you know, we're not the next Madonna,
but at least let the audience decide that,
not some record executive,
and by getting your material out there,
you have a good chance of being discovered
if you're worth discovering.
And, of course, Justin Bieber, for example,
made it big by singing other people's songs on YouTube.
Yeah, yeah.
Litigation is still in progress for that, I understand.
All right, we are out of time,
or just about out of time, anyway.
Any final thoughts?
Anything happening this week that we want to share?
Bernie, anything in Philadelphia?
We had a spring equinox here yesterday in Philadelphia.
Really? Well, we had one, too.
Really?
Yes.
It wasn't just confined to Philadelphia as well,
but spring is here.
That's amazing.
Spring is here, and yeah,
finally we'll get some springtime temperatures.
That'll be nice as well.
You know what?
Let's take one more phone call
because we do have a very short outro.
Oh, everybody hung up.
Everybody hung up.
I guess we can't do that.
Our listeners are so well-trained.
Okay, personal computer show coming up next.
Again, write to us, oth at 2600.com.
That's our email address,
and go to www.hope.net for information
on the upcoming Hope No. 9 conference coming up in July,
and we'll see you again next week,
same time, same place.
Have a good night.