New World Order
Families sleeping in their cars
Out in the southwest
No child, no home, no peace
No rest
No rest
Radio Station W
B.A.I. New York
Time is 7 o'clock
Time once again for Off The Hook
Trust me
It's vital that we make the public
hate the phone company
I mean really hate it
Now I can't explain all the details right now
but not only America but the whole world
depends on what we do here right now
Believe me
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
Von Diddley Bond for the best
Expect the worst
I hope that's understood
Von Diddley Bond
Von Diddley Bond
Off The Hook
Was that from...
I just heard a fraction of it
Something from Back To The Future?
No, that's a good guess though
But no, no
Back To The Future was not nearly as cerebral as that
Okay
Rob T. Firefly, you have a knowing look on your face
That was the president's analyst
Wow, you did know
Oh yes!
Kyle and I saw this film the other day
just by mere chance
and kind of didn't expect what happened to have happened
It's a film from 1967
It's got all the usual 60s jazz in it
all kinds of running around in VW campers
and seeing old New York City streets
when they didn't have yellow lights or don't walk signs
and basically it's about this psychiatrist
who gets a gig being the president's analyst
and that means that he has to put his whole life on hold
move to D.C.
and somehow everywhere he goes there are flashing red lights
and whenever they flash
that means he has to go immediately to the president
who has just found time to see his analyst
and it kind of wreaks havoc with his life
and of course leaders from all the rest of the world
are very interested in finding out
what he has found out from the president
so he's always in danger
and about two-thirds through the film
it just kind of goes off in a totally different direction
and all of a sudden
instead of all the countries of the world
being the real threat, the real enemy
the most dangerous entity possibly known is TPC
you've seen TPC everywhere, little stickers
and that is the phone company
and it's just, it's unbelievable
I can't believe I've never seen this film before
and they have this master plan of sorts
that basically they've been working on
they kidnap the president's analyst
and this robotic figure
explains to him just what the phone company has been up to
let's take a listen, this will last about a minute
there are quite a few people
who actually dislike the phone company
and because of this irrational dislike
of their own publicly owned company
they often don't pay their bills
and sometimes even damage the equipment
now to look at that hand
you'd never dream you were also looking
at a miracle in modern communications, would you?
thanks to the science of microelectronics
you are looking at a complete telephonic receiver and transmitter
we call it the cerebrum communicator
or the CC for short
this dandy little device can actually perform
every function of the old fashioned telephone and more
and it does it without any costly maintenance
without telephone poles, without wires, without exchanges
without anything in fact except another CC in another location
now you're probably wondering why have we made it so small
because it will be in and powered by
your own brain
yeah
now can you believe that 1967
they were basically throwing these ideas around
and what do you think, Kyle?
it was pretty remarkable, wasn't it?
yeah, I couldn't believe that they were talking about this
that long ago and it only makes me wonder
what's going on today, like what real technologies like that exist
because a lot of different media and programs
have had different technology that's actually come true
in various ways, you get that a lot
when people talk about Star Trek and stuff
this is pretty funny and very, very interesting
considering its age
so we recommend that film wholeheartedly
the President's Analyst, have you ever seen it, Bernie?
I've seen it several times, I just didn't recognize that clip
but it's one of my favorites
with many homages in it to the phone company
and I even use that ringtone
you know that special ringtone
when the President's Analyst's phone rings
when the President's calling
I have that on my cell phone
it's so classic
cool, well that's something to look for
if you're looking for an interesting film to see
okay, we've had some news today
from Europe about the ACTA treaty
and what happened was
the European Parliament has voted against
signing up to the controversial
anti-counterfeiting trade agreement
and this is something that we've been talking about here
for quite a few weeks
most people, probably even in Europe
but certainly in America, don't realize how
impossible this is
the European Parliament has never before
voted down any treaty that they were told
by this other entity, the European Commission
to approve
and this is the first time they voted it down
and they voted it down overwhelmingly
I don't know if you have the vote total in front of you
I do, 478 to 39
wow
and so I really want to
congratulate and thank the people
of Europe for putting pressure on their
European parliamentarians to
to stop this thing
yeah, absolutely
and, well Kyle, maybe you want to
describe what happened in Poland
yeah, I don't know if any of you guys saw this
but I was looking around at some of the news around this
this morning and I found this awesome picture of
members of Polish Parliament
and they all had Guy Fawkes masks
and they were holding them up
very, very seriously
in protest
and this picture is just, it's really, really
great, because you have all these guys
in suits and they're holding on to these things
fiercely, some of them not so much
but they all sort of were unified
and made that statement
but it's sort of an odd
way for parliamentarians
and suits
those types of politicians
and stuff to be protesting in that way
but I think it speaks to the
oppression and the overwhelming
like, dissent
for this kind of stuff
and the Guy Fawkes mask itself, of course, nowadays
among activists, it's more of a
reference to V for Vendetta and its use
in that film, but for anyone who's up on
European history, it's really funny
to think of parliamentarians wearing the mask
yes, and there was
one guy who didn't put the mask on, right?
you've got to look up this picture
how can we find that picture, Kyle?
this Polish Parliament, I guess, actor
it was the main photo
very large photo, just under the title
and the subtitle from a
Telegraph article
and the name of the article is
European Parliament Rejects ACTA Piracy Treaty
and you'll see
why don't our legislators do things
like this? it just seems so
with it and cool, you know?
it doesn't happen at all
because when they do things like that, it's not with it and cool
well, I mean, these guys don't look all that
it's usually in favor
of some new repression
I just love that they were
into it, and I don't know how they were convinced
and who ran off the copies of the mask
and got these guys to do it, but
it was pretty unified
pretty much every single one of them is holding it up
and some of them are smiling
the one guy that's not wearing it is smiling
and some of them, as I said, are holding it
with two hands
it's just a really, really cool symbol
in light of this news
I'd like to play an excerpt
actually, I'd like to play a very short film
that was made in Germany about this whole
controversy before the vote
that just sort of, kind of wraps it all up
and explains what ACTA is all about
probably better than we could
take a listen
Can you imagine your internet service provider
policing everything you do online?
Can you imagine generic drugs
that could save lives being banned?
Can you imagine
seeds that could feed thousands
being controlled and withheld in the name of
patents?
This will become reality
with ACTA. ACTA
is the anti-counterfeiting
trade agreement
Disguised as a trade agreement
ACTA goes much, much
further than that
For the past three years
ACTA has been negotiated
in secret by 39 countries
But the
negotiators are not democratically
elected representatives
They don't represent us
but they are deciding laws behind our backs
Bypassing our democratic processes
they impose new criminal sanctions
to stop online file sharing
ACTA
aims to make internet service
and access providers legally responsible
for what their users do online
turning them into
private copyright police and judge
censoring their networks
The chilling effects on free speech
would be terrible
In the name of patents
ACTA would give large corporations
the power to stop generic drugs
before they reach the people who need them
and to stop the use of certain seeds for crops
The European Parliament
will soon vote on ACTA
This vote
will be the occasion to say no
once and for all
to this dangerous treaty
As citizens
we must urge our representatives
to reject ACTA
And of course that is what happened today
The European Parliament overwhelmingly
voting against ACTA
However, countries that have signed the agreement
are the United States, Australia
Canada, Japan, Morocco
New Zealand, Singapore
and South Korea
although none of these countries has yet ratified it
and the EU vote
will not affect
I'm just playing the end credits to that film
that's kind of cool sounding
The EU vote of course is not going to affect any of those countries
so I don't know
what does it mean to the future Mike?
Who made the film, do you know?
Who made the film?
It was uploaded to
by La Quadrature
Does that help?
Wait, say that again, you said it so nicely
La Quadrature du Net or something like that
They've spoken at a bunch of conferences
They're French, they're not German
Yes
I'm trying to go to their website now
LQRDN.FR I think
But regardless
La Quadrature du Net
and it's all in French
Oui
So there's a whole thing about ACTA
You can get the word out
and so many other people marched for this
and just
basically did what we did for SOPA over here
and hopefully killed that once and for all
It's no surprise that La Quadrature
is behind this kind of video
They've done a lot with net neutrality
and those kinds of issues
so it's actually really good that they're putting out these kinds of things
so people can get an understanding of it
in sort of a
really accessible way
I think it would be surprising if it was ratified any place
after this
because how do they move ahead without the EU
working with them?
It's going to be very difficult
Yeah, I hope they don't
You know the
They said 39 countries were part of this
27 of them are the EU
so all those 27 are now out of it
and maybe there will be some
treaty among the remaining 12
certainly
many of these countries need no help from the outside
to create bad laws
for their own citizens
Well they said 22 countries in the EU
so I'm not sure, maybe there's 5 that aren't part of it
somehow
Hey Mike
Would it be a good guess
to think that the United States
US State Department
pressured
some or many of these other countries
into
enacting this legislation in those countries?
I mean I have no specific information
but I'm sure that many
entities in the United States
were behind this thing
the entertainment industry in particular
and a lot of times they can get the State Department
to do what they want
Well the important thing is
it didn't pass in the EU
and that's major
A lot of those countries that may
or may not be based in the US
they end up being global entities
especially big media conglomerates
and stuff like that
and movie production companies
July 4th 2012
is the day that
ACTA may have meant its end
and that they may have discovered the God particle
but that's a whole other story
We should point out that the European
Union is so
like weird and undemocratic
that this could still come back
but hopefully it won't
You think people would just let that happen though?
It's a very
weirdly run organization
in the EU
They hold up signs and they act
very differently from our
elected representatives
I have some hope
Like with any large law that's bad for the
populace and put out there by people with lots
of money
don't think that it won't just
get put to the vote
again slightly disguised as something else
with some nicer ribbons on it
A different acronym
They always try
We never take our eyes away from this
But it is a victory
and we should be happy about that
Some more movement on
law changes and things like that
A ballot proposal that would require automakers to provide
tooling and computer codes
to independent repair shops
for the same prices as franchise
dealers' service operations
has likely gathered enough
signatures to appear on the November
ballot in Massachusetts
We've talked about this before. It's the Right to Repair
Act that hopefully
is moving forward
Basically about 16,000
signatures have been turned in
roughly 4,500 more
than required
If approved by voters, the proposal will take effect
in 2015, a year earlier than a proposed
measure the Massachusetts legislature
is considering
Once the proposal is on the ballot, voters would have their say
even if state lawmakers pass legislation
Automakers also took
action on the issue yesterday
or actually two days ago, Monday
with the state's Office of Campaign and Political
Finance to register the
Citizens' Committee for Safe and Fair
Repair
Yeah, Citizens' Committee for Safe
and Fair Repair
CCSFR
I can't pronounce that
It makes as much sense as anything they say
The state's campaign finance
law requires groups to register
in order to raise money to support or oppose
ballot proposals, candidates, or
political parties
The committee is made up of the Alliance of Automobile
Manufacturers, which represents
12 automakers, including Toyota, Volkswagen
and the Detroit 3, as well
as global automakers, and that represents
Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and 11
other import brand automakers
So, basically
what this is all about
is a
very disturbing trend that has affected
the auto industry, where
cars cannot be repaired by
regular mechanics without access
to computer codes, which
very often is either not given to them or priced
so high that it's impossible for them to get
and what that means is that when you buy a car
you're pretty much locked into
having to take it back to the dealer
that retains pretty much
the exclusive rights to repair the vehicle
to access the vehicle. You don't actually even own the vehicle
You're just basically
agreeing to
drive this thing, and whenever it breaks down
you go to who you're told to go to
and nobody else
It's very scary
Cars just aren't the way they used to be
You can't just take it to a mechanic
Yeah, there's a lot of computer systems
and stuff in cars these days
way more than has been
in the past, and it seems to be
become exponentially
more complex, and there are more
and more systems with all the features
with infotainment systems and all this kind of
content
and features in the car
and now you're getting
cars that are hybrids
that have different types of drivetrains
or combinations of drivetrains
and that adds to the complicated
nature of it. It's not just
fuel and combustion
the way it used to be
It's really
disconcerting to see this
trend, because people
that own cars, it used to be that
you could get
your car, you could get a service manual
and you could repair it yourself
You might need some help with certain
special things, like machining something
or ordering
certain parts. You might have to stop by the dealer
or another shop or something
but it's sort of
prohibiting you from doing that
It keeps you from having that empowerment
that ability to work on your own vehicle
And now you might see a sign that says
no user serviceable parts inside
Right. You can only send it away
to one particular place
a place that pays for the right to do that
There's a certain
joy to being able
to know that you can get your car moving
again if it breaks down
You know what to do to plug something in
or replace a very simple part or something like that
but imagine it breaks down and the only way
to get it fixed is to have somebody
who has a license to
replace something or simply snap
another component in. That's the only way to get it moving again
And
it's not just cars
It's a lot of technology that
we use every day that basically
is going down that road
It's sad. And people depend on
these things and it's absurd if you think about
it in the context of other forms of transportation
I mean what if your wheelchair you weren't able to
fix yourself or your
bicycle. You couldn't
change your own tires or
shorten your chain up yourself
You had to go and have some certain person
with special tools do it
and you had to pay them a hundred or more
an hour which is like an average
mechanics rate
The other part of this and I think what's going to be really
interesting is truck drivers
and like huge lobbies of people
that depend on their cars
for business and like I think
those groups of people as well
as small mechanics
small repair shops and stuff
that's where it's really really hurting
because those guys you know your local
mechanic maybe you go to them with
several different types of cars but you have
a relationship with them. They're like
it's like small town book shops
and stuff how basically they're sort of
struggling they can't really
keep their business going because when people bring
in these new cars they have no idea how it works
they can't license the tools
to fix them because it's
prohibitively expensive and some tools
with Mercedes-Benz it's the
STAR system and I think with Volkswagen
it's called the GECCO system
it's an acronym for something but basically that's
the dealership computer
system that issues different types of codes
to unlock and lock things
reprogram key fobs stuff that
has security implications but also
is just they want to keep you
from servicing it yourself
because they get to charge a premium
for your access to their tools
and then thus know how
so it's really bad
for independent mechanics and I really think
if you get those people together
and people that depend on their vehicles like
truckers and stuff that
it's going to gather some strength
against this kind of practice
and I can't believe that they have a committee
you know, big auto
manufacturers, I mean I can believe it but I mean I can't believe
they can take themselves seriously.
Bernie, did this surprise you? I know you've had your share
of car problems over the years.
Yeah, I think this is good.
The process of this legislation has been moving
very, very slowly but it would be
a good trend.
Which season is this? Massachusetts is it?
Yes, Massachusetts. If they enact this I'm hoping that
causes a domino effect
and other states wake up
people in other states wake up and say hey
this is such a good idea
we need to encourage our legislators to enact this
unfortunately the legislators are
a lot of them are
paid off by the motor vehicle
industry lobby
who has a huge vested interest in
keeping their monopoly
so that people who own particular brand cars
have to go to that
dealership for that
car company
so basically this is an anti-monopolistic
piece of legislation
and I really wish it success.
And as we know with other monopolies
this keeps systems bad
it keeps it really cruddy and there are some really
bad vehicle computer systems out there.
You're looking at me.
Squarely.
Alright, the smart car does have its share of problems.
No, I mean terrible, terrible systems
and microcontrollers and all of that
and keeping it closed
just keeps it horrible
You know, people want to know
how the things that they're licensing
I mean, I really mean own
I mean if you buy a car, it's yours
It should be, yes.
Perhaps you're licensing
you're paying for access to
software but it shouldn't be that you're licensing it
such that you can't modify it or you can't
understand what it's doing.
Yeah, can't access certain things and we see the same thing
with DVDs where you're not
allowed to look at something from a different
country and so many people I know just
accept this because they don't know any better
They have DVD
readers and writers in their computers
and I give them a DVD
Hey, check this out, it's from Europe
They can't see it unless they change their region but then
they get locked in if they do that
I think two or three times. They have to stay
in that region. It's all artificial
It's a way of controlling the consumer
Same thing with
consumer DVD decks
that you use to play on your television
and this encourages people to
resort to torrents
basically downloading things
without buying them
which maybe that is the solution
but it seems that
that's not really what Hollywood and
the other creators of
content would want people to do
but it's driving them to do that
So if I understand your position correctly it's that
we should pirate automobiles
Well, if we can figure out a way how
I would love to see
automobiles where this is not
an issue but it seems like all the manufacturers
are buying into this
If there's a manufacturer out there that just
manufactured mechanical cars like the old days
I'd give that a chance
I don't think that even has to be the case
So some of this computer technology
does useful things like increase fuel efficiency
and what not
but even so
you could make this technology
accessible to people and independent
repair shops
Could we actually have an open source car that's street
legal and on the road?
I think that question can be asked
to swing things over to what we're putting
on in another week or so
The Hackers on Planet Earth conference coming to New York City
Friday, Saturday and Sunday of next week
There's a couple of talks
at least that will be dealing with this subject
Here's one, how to communicate with your car's network
Modern vehicles are essentially
mobile computers and controller networks
On average there are around 10 embedded
controllers in a vehicle
These controllers are responsible for running the engine
locking and unlocking the vehicle
sounding the horn and much much more
These networks are very different from
current computer networks and this talk
will help you understand how to get started
what information is on the vehicle network
and how you can use this data to get information from
and send commands to these controllers
Additionally, the talk will list
the current tools available for communicating with vehicles
and how to interpret the communications between
the controllers. So it's mostly about understanding
existing systems but certainly the question
will come up as to how to bypass
them and how to understand
alternatives and things like that. That's taking place
next Friday night
we're having that panel
and also our friend Tiffany Rad is giving
a panel on
the subject of
automotive systems
and other systems as well
I just want to say two more things
that speak to the safety
they're calling themselves a safety committee, the manufacturers
the alliance of manufacturers
and as I said, I mean you're
you don't have access, you have no idea what the software
is doing and because it's a vehicle
I mean it could be prosthetics, it could be
any number of other things
which I think some of these talks are going to touch on
but you're basically
entrusting your life to something that you have absolutely
no, you have no way of scrutinizing
the way it's working
and how's that safe if I don't know
what this manufacturer is putting into the car
and then I'm going to get in it and trust the brakes
to stop and that kind of thing
I also wanted to speak to the fuel efficiency thing
which you're absolutely right Mike
fuel efficiency, I mean the software
and systems with
creating a better fuel economy
or like the hybrid where it switches
from battery to gas, that's really good for the environment
but there's actually instances where some of these
companies are
they're
they have clearly a relationship with the
fuel companies in this country
and there are situations
where different types of fuels are actually
being
the engine designs are being
are designed such that
it's hostile towards certain fuels over others
this happened with Volkswagen
and post injection
like certain model Volkswagen TDI's
from like 2009
till 2012
they're having problems with, people that run biofuels
and blends of biofuels
were having problems with post injection where
I don't know the exact technical details
of it but basically the fuel
was not being combusted because the engine itself
was engineered to burn only
ultra low sulfur diesel and like petroleum
based diesels and I've also
been reading, if you look on Volkswagen's
sustainability site they're actually trying to develop their
own fuel called Sunfuel, so if you can imagine
manufacturers trying to sell you their own
fuel and bar you out of using
other types of fuels that perhaps you make with waste
products or other ways that are
cleaner or whatever, I mean that's
pretty bad, I mean they're basically
locking you into their repair, their
own fuel, they want it all vertically integrated
and that's bad. Could this actually reach
the stage where brand names
aren't accepted, like you buy
a shell car that won't take mobile
gas, could it actually get that absurd?
Crazier stuff has happened with technology
like hardware and software so
So they're going the laser printer route
basically where you can only use their supplies
and their stuff. Like I said, in some ways
I mean Mike you're absolutely right, I mean
fuel efficiency is totally
benefited from the ability of
sensor systems and micro controllers
to in real time evaluate
what's going on with the engine and adjust
especially if something
is modified and stuff like that
the engine can recalibrate itself
for the most efficient. And these are
good uses of technology, there's no need
for a black box system where you have absolutely no idea
what's going on and you just have to rely on them
to replace it and repair it
with no understanding of what's actually happening inside
your vehicle. Yep. Alright, let's move
on because it's not... I could go on and on.
Yeah, it's fascinating and it just goes to show this one
aspect of the hacker community is
it gets a lot of passion
response and that's how we get
truck drivers to come to Hope because
they're just as...
when you spoke down in Virginia at one
of the hacker spaces, there were truck drivers
there. Yeah, it was the opening night for reverse space
and there were some truck drivers there, some guys
doing modifications to
like Cummins diesels
and Cat diesels
and they were talking about some of the things they've tried to do
as far as accessing automobile systems
and I know there's guys
in tuning communities that are
removing electronic
systems entirely, running completely
mechanical engines
and tuning it mechanically so it's
just fixed at a fixed tune.
There's also people that are
strapping third party
computer systems on. There's a couple of manufacturers
that build them and I'm sure there's going to be people
building their own. We'll see.
There is not one field
out there that I can think of involving
technology in any way that is not touched
by these questions.
Musicians, artists of
all sorts, writers
and truck drivers
who knows? I'd be hard
pressed to find something that is not touched by
this one way or another and that's
why people
come together and talk about this kind of thing. We hope to see you at
the Hackers on Planet Earth conference
next week. It's coming up
very, very soon and we're going a bit crazy
here. More information at www.hope.net
and I should point out this is
the last week that you can get
pre-registration. It's going
to be more expensive and you won't be able to get it online
so that's
an important announcement that we have
for the folks out there. Bernie,
anything you want to add to this? Well, could we tell people
where they can get more information about the
HOPE conference? Well, I did give the website but
I'll give it again.
If you didn't hear it, maybe other people didn't hear it too.
www.hope.net
stands for Hackers on Planet Earth
and that should give you all the
information you need. It has a full list of all
the talks that we have and
I understand there's a whole bunch of projects and
workshops as well, Bernie.
Now, if they go to hope.net, they're going to see a rotary
telephone dial, won't they? If they go to hope.net
they'll see a rotary phone dial. If they go to
www.hope.net, they'll go right to the HOPE number
9 site. If you get the rotary dial,
click on the 9. I imagine most people figure that
out pretty quickly. If you click on any other number, you'll
get different conferences from different years
but this is HOPE number 9.
It's confusing. You get somewhere different if you
omit the W's? Yeah.
It happens. It's not only us that does that
but yeah, it is true. It's confusing.
Well, that's why we give out the www
so people don't get confused
in any event. Or you can go to
hope9.net and avoid the whole thing.
It just goes right to the main site
but hope.net just sounds cooler.
Alright, so let's
go to some other stories
because other things, believe it or not, did happen
and this is
kind of an interesting story I just found out about.
Wayne Rogers,
a New Jersey teacher,
sat down at his
school's computer lab to check his email
and he accidentally
bumped the mouse of the computer next to him
and that's what changed
his entire life. The screen on the
adjacent computer came on and
Rogers saw that one of his colleagues,
Linda Marcus,
had left herself
logged into her Yahoo! email
account. He saw an email thread
with the subject, Wayne Update.
Remember, his name is Wayne Rogers
so I would certainly take an interest
in that. Now, he was curious.
He clicked the email and found
it was a private discussion with another teacher
all about an argument between Rogers
and Marcus. One of the
emails read, I guess
in brackets, Rogers chooses not
to listen. I will not respond to him. He is
so fake and
so with the dark side. These are teachers
talking like so with the dark side.
I will never tell him
quote-unquote the truth. Not because...
Did they add extra O's to the word so
or are you just... How else would I be
saying this? I want to be clear, that was in the email
you're not just... There are five O's
in each of those so's, okay? That's a lot.
I must know and now I do.
Alright, I will never tell him the truth. Not because
he can't handle it, because he's too dumb to understand
it. See you later.
Obviously, that's a high intellect
there. Okay, but whatever. It's a
private email. You shouldn't have read
it, right? It's wrong to do
things like that. Anyway, he printed out this
email, this email thread as well as a
second thread that also discussed Rogers.
Marcus, by the way, was
the president of the local teachers association
so he brought copies
of the email to the next meeting of the
association and confronted Marcus about
their contents. Well, Marcus
was outraged and other teachers involved
in the email threads filed a complaint with
the school, eventually filed a lawsuit
against Rogers in New Jersey courts.
Yes, and
according to New Jersey law, a person is
guilty if he knowingly accesses
without authorization a facility
through which an electronic communication
service is provided or exceeds
an authorization to access that facility.
Well, the judge ruled
that Marcus, not Rogers,
had accessed her email.
So, Rogers was
on safe ground on the access
question, because he didn't access it, it was
already accessed. However, the judge
let the jury decide whether
Rogers had exceeded the authorization
Marcus had accidentally granted to him.
The jury ruled that
he had not.
As an appellate opinion puts it, the judge
in this case submitted questions to the jurors
that were carefully crafted to ascertain whether
Wayne knew he lacked authorization
or knew he exceeded his authorization.
Their answers demonstrate that they found
he did not know. All seven of
the deliberating jurors found that he
knowingly accessed the facility providing the service
and that he obtained an electronic
communication and electronic storage,
but six of the seven found that he had not
exceeded an authorization to access that
facility, and seven found that Wayne
had tacit authorization
to do what he did.
Now, Marcus appealed the decision, but last week, a three
judge panel of the Superior Court of New Jersey
refused to overturn the jury's decision
or find fault with other aspects of how
the trial was conducted. So,
if someone forgets to log out of her email
account, is it illegal to snoop?
The frustrating answer,
according to this newspaper,
at least in New Jersey, seems to be
it depends on what the jury thinks.
Since jurors aren't required to give
written opinions, it's hard to know exactly what
they were thinking, but at least in this case,
the jury concluded that Rogers hadn't broken
the law. Either way, it's a good
idea to stay on the safe side. Be sure to log
out of your email account if you're using a public
computer, and if you discover someone
else has left herself logged into an email
account, don't snoop.
Well, I don't agree with that last part, because
I don't think there's anyone of us who
had seen something like that just lying
around wide open on a system
that someone had walked away from and did
not belong to them. I have.
You have what? I have seen that.
Years ago, I was at an
ING direct bank branch where they have a little
cafe, and there was a computer there,
and I went to use one to check my
email, and someone before,
a woman, apparently, was still logged
into her Hotmail, I guess.
And I'm like, wow.
Was she talking about you?
No, not at all, but I
emailed myself from her account and then emailed
her back from that. I logged her
out, then I emailed her back from that from my account
and said, hey, you left your email
totally exposed to anybody that walked in.
You should probably be more
careful. And then she asked me out on a date,
but I didn't accept. Well, you know,
it's just a natural chain
of events, I guess. But Gmail
is probably one of the worst, because people are
constantly leaving their computers logged into
Gmail and walking away from them.
I've had people visit me,
and days later,
I check a system
that they have been using, and there's
their name next to
a Google search, and I can simply access
all their... They've gotten better. They actually notify you
now if there's another
account logged in, and they tell you
what your last IP was, but oftentimes
they don't notice, and it's really
bad, because you can send things
as them. You can read all of their email,
and it's
a very bad idea, Mike. You can already
send email as anybody.
Tell us the secret, Mike. How do you do that?
You just change your from address in your email program.
Okay, you know, you can do that, yes, but I'll know
in a second that it's somebody else, because there's
more than just one from
field in email. And if you take
the time to read all of them, you might notice, but
I don't on a regular basis, and I suspect
that most people don't either.
I don't know.
I guess there are some systems where
it's very simple to be fooled like
that, but I don't know.
For instance, if you get that mail from PayPal
that says, hey, you've got
money coming to you.
All you have to do is click on this link,
and it looks like it's from PayPal, but all you've got to do is
look at the headers, and actually it's coming from
some country in Southeast
Asia someplace. I happen
to believe that PayPal is not generally
sending me money, so I know that it's a problem,
but if...
About Nigerian...
No one in Nigeria owes me any money,
I'm pretty sure.
But if I sent you an email
from someone you know
and I said something
that was sort of plausible, you might believe it was
from them.
Well, I've got a challenge for you. We have a coordinating list
on the Hope site
where we coordinate the conference.
Post as me.
Go ahead. See if that works.
Fool them into thinking that you're posting as me.
I don't think you'll do it, but we'll see.
All right.
Moving on.
We might give out our phone number,
212-209-2900.
We'll probably not be taking phone calls for the next few weeks,
because next week is the pre-Hope show,
and it's also a fundraiser. Yes, it's the
summer fundraiser coming up.
It's definitely summer outside,
so you can't blame us for this.
It's just time passing a little more quickly
than we wish.
We'll have a million people in the studio and also
we'll be begging for money, but hopefully not
too much begging, because we have so much else to talk
about. And the week after that
will be the post-Hope show, again with a million
people in the studio. Again, we'll be begging for money, hopefully
for a short bit. And I think the week after that
is when the fundraiser ends.
But by then, summer will probably be over.
Hopefully.
All right. This is something that happened
in Denmark.
Traveling by train in Denmark can sometimes
include unruly youths,
mostly compartments,
whinging children. That's a British
way of saying whining children, I believe.
And for a few hours recently,
pornography. Yes.
Information screens at Aarhus
Central Station that were supposed to display
arrival and departures suddenly showed
something a bit racier. Pornography.
Hackers are suspected in being
behind the pornographic prank, because who else would do something like that?
That's according to
an apologetic vice president of the transport
company. We could see that something
was happening on the screens.
It looked like someone was sitting and programming
on the screens. Together with some guards, we
pulled the plugs on all three screens.
I'm not sure what that means.
Is that what the pornography was? Somebody sitting
and programming? That was...
Emmanuel. Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
It may be a sheer coincidence
that the Aarhus Central Station
is the location
of the 2600 meetings.
Yeah, I was going to get to that, actually.
Yeah, because there is no indication
and no connection that I'm aware of
that just because we have meetings
in that particular train station
and that happened to be the train station
where this particular bit of mischief was
performed, that
it was these people. For one thing,
for one thing, it did not
happen on the first
Friday of the month.
July 2nd, I believe, is when this happened.
Today is the 4th, so that
would be Monday that this happened.
The first Friday of the month, I believe,
Rob, is this Friday coming up, right?
That is correct.
If it was the Monday after the
first Friday, I might believe that someone had
stuck around for a couple of extra days and done
this or maybe worked on it all weekend long
and done this. It strikes me very hard
to believe they would have come in the previous Monday
to do this.
What other reason do people have to go to train stations
other than for a 2600
meeting? Anyway, they
say we can't say for sure how it happened, whether someone
has gained access to codes or
just tried to continuously gain
entrance. They
do know that the hacker, because they're convinced
it's a hacker, gained access
to a program from a third-party supplier.
The program was uninstalled
after the incident.
Yeah, that's
what's going on in Denmark.
Something else that you might want to be
careful of, if you have
an open Wi-Fi network, you might get a
visit from a SWAT team,
not because you have
a Wi-Fi network per se,
but apparently what happened in Indiana
was that these
people were sitting at home,
minding their own business. In fact,
they basically said they were watching
the food network, comfortable on the couch, and all of a sudden
the heavily armed SWAT team broke down the door
and stormed into the living room.
18-year-old Stephanie Milan was
in Evansville, Indiana, her parents'
home, when a team of police officers
broke down her storm door. The front door
was already open. I guess they could have just opened it.
And they tossed a flashbang
stun grenade into the room.
Well, yeah, you kind of have to do that,
don't you, if you're a SWAT team.
Workers were at the Milan home on Friday, repairing
the storm door and broken windows.
According to the Evansville Courier and Press,
carpet inside the house was stained
with black residue from the flashbang grenade.
Is that really the name of it, the flashbang grenade?
What a childish name,
flashbang grenade.
Apparently what happened was
somebody made some kind of
anonymous online threat,
and what they did was they used
an open Wi-Fi router inside that
house to do it.
And, of course, the SWAT team
figured that that meant it had to have come
from that location and without asking any questions
just burst in.
Yeah, first of all,
what kind of a threat do you make that
gets a SWAT team coming at you?
Online, no evidence whatsoever
of anything happening except for an online threat
that gives a particular
internet protocol address.
Seems like they really didn't have very much
to go on there at all, but
I guess one of the lessons to learn here,
other than people on SWAT teams
can be kind of thick sometimes,
is that you should put a password on your
Wi-Fi router and not leave it open so anybody
can use it. They had to have been very close
by though, right? These people had to have been
next door or passing by in the street or something
like that? I mean, that's exactly what
they want you to do is put a password on your Wi-Fi
and, I don't know, I don't like
this trend in society that everyone
has to have a password on their Wi-Fi.
Yeah, because there are open Wi-Fi routers. We use them all the time
to access email when you're on the road
or something like that.
And this, I guess, basically encourages
people not to do that, right?
Right, and it reinforces high costs
for access and a lot of people can't
pay for access, so it's good
for people to run public and
open Wi-Fi networks.
Well, a lot of people are already paying for access, they just aren't
paying for access in the particular space they happen to be in
right now. When I was in London, you know,
we needed to renew a hotel room
and, you know, there was no talking
to them, actually, and there was no online
access anywhere else, so we just sat outside
a Starbucks that was closed and they had an open
router and we just logged in and
everything was happy.
Sorry, you were in a hotel and you couldn't renew...
Well, we weren't in the hotel at the time, we were outside the Starbucks.
We would have to have run back to the hotel
because apparently you couldn't do it over the phone.
You have to show ID, or you could do it
online through a third-party
agency and pay by credit card
that way, but you can't do it over the phone. No, of course
not. Yeah, this is London,
there are rules.
One other thing, they wouldn't necessarily have had
to have been very, very close because they
could have used some kind of amplifier for whatever
machine they were using.
So how far away could they be?
I don't know. I mean, there's
one watt, you know, Wi-Fi antennas,
they're not necessarily legal.
Well, they would have to be using, they would have to be
amplifying their signal to do that. I don't think this
poor girl watching the Food Network was
amplifying... Right, the attacker might have
something that could amplify their signal.
The attacker could amplify someone else's
Wi-Fi signal? No, they could amplify their transceivers
so that they don't have to necessarily
be as close. You could build your own
antenna and stuff. Is that right, Bernie?
Yeah, you could set up a more sensitive,
it wouldn't be amplifying, you'd have
a bigger antenna pointed in the direction of
the open Wi-Fi router you want to access.
But I'd like to see some case law on
this, where it
becomes law, or at least case
law, that an IP
address alone does
not constitute a physical address.
Or it does not constitute a probable
cause to
bust down the door with guns drawn and
flashbang grenades at a particular
physical address. Yeah, I didn't think it did.
I never thought it, I thought, you know, you could
spoof IP addresses so easily that you have to be
a complete moron to think that
you have solid evidence if you see an IP
with any kind of information.
Well, that's what happened here. Yeah, apparently.
It's really weird. Yeah, well, people don't
run their own servers anymore, so... No, that's...
These things fall by the wayside.
Certainly true. That's another indication of why you gotta
get your hands messy and do things yourself, otherwise
all kinds of horrible things happen.
Alright, our phone number is 212-209-2900.
We'd like to take some phone calls
in the time that we have left on this Independence
Day. I realize a lot of people are
out doing Independence Day-type things.
I think we have all kinds of explosives about to go off
outside the...
inside the station. Okay.
It's a volatile place.
It only
happens once a year, so maybe people aren't
listening, or maybe
new people are listening. Who knows? It's a very
strange day today. Very strange
week when you have the Fourth of July in the middle of the week.
I think some people took the entire week off, right?
There's not a lot of people in the city.
No, there really aren't. The people that are in the city are
strange people that I don't recognize.
They're all around here. There's all
these people from elsewhere. Yeah, I noticed
the street was closed, and it looked like something
had happened already, and I don't know what it was.
Some kind of market or something.
But I don't think we can see the fireworks from here.
I think it's only on the west side now. Yeah, they're
on the west side on the Hudson. Used to be on the east side, too.
It used to be for the Brooklyn people and the
Queens people, but now apparently it's just for New Jersey
and people on the west side. All right, let's
take some phone calls. Good evening. You are on
Off the Hook.
Speak up. Monroe. Yes, go ahead.
Monroe.
Speak up, please. Monroe.
No, Monroe is no longer here. Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook.
Speak up, please. Monroe. Yes, go ahead.
Yes, I'm
looking for Stevie D.
Okay, you're looking for an engineer.
I don't know if we're
on the air. We're getting personal calls on
the studio line.
No, there's no engineer here
at the moment, and there are no former listeners
who have passed away last year here either,
so please do not call for those people.
This is the on-air line, 212-209-2900.
Gotta love this place. Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook.
Yeah, hello. Good evening. Hi, what's on your mind?
In the automotive business,
I was thinking for a long time now
that with the cars with all the sensors
on them for helping you park, and the
cameras and the computers for
adjusting, you know, the fuel and
everything, it's only a matter
of time before some hobbyist gets
ahold of car parts and builds a robot out of
a car, and I don't want to make any
Transformers jokes, but, you know,
it could possibly be done, I'm sure.
I think definitely, and with
those Google cars that are
starting to hit the highways, and
people just becoming slaves
to the technology, where they can't park a car
themselves, they need the
car to do it, or they have to be looking out the
camera in the back.
Yeah, it's scary
times ahead. What is the fundamental
motors in the cars for the windows and
so on, adjust the mirrors,
there's all kinds of possibilities there.
Yeah, go ahead, Mike. What is the fundamental
property of a robot that a car doesn't already have?
It's not trying to kill us.
Cars kill lots of people all the time.
Yeah, but they don't set out to do it,
I don't think.
It's a good point, though.
I had those GM cars a long time ago
that were going out of control, and a lot
of other cars since then that have surged
out of control, and I had the theory
that this was because of the computer chip
that they were putting in there,
and that they just solved it by putting in new
chips that were programmed differently, and not
telling us that they were programmed differently.
I would just say, bring it in, we'll take
care of it. That's a good point, though, with
new technologies, it makes it
much cheaper for certain components,
and we need people thinking
differently about some of these products, and not
using them the way they're sold to us,
because you can get a product,
I know with Blu-ray, it became
really easy to get blue light
diodes, laser diodes, and stuff
like that. I mean, it becomes
cheaper for people to access components
instead of having them bought specially
in their raw form, you can
maybe buy one product, and
split the cost, and pull components out of it.
I know a lot of hackerspaces doing these kinds of
things. But with more and more functions
of a car being taken over by computers,
how long do we have before it becomes a
regular occurrence for the car's computer to crash, and
therefore cause a car crash?
Yeah.
It's true, we're looking at things like that, absolutely.
Thanks for that call, we're going to move on to another one.
And good evening, you're on
off the hook.
Speak up, please.
Okay, if you don't speak up, you're not going to be on the air,
that's how it works. Good evening, you're on off the hook.
Well, we have a lot of confused people calling tonight,
what is going on? It's the heat, I think. It must be the heat,
people just passing out by the phone. Good evening, you're
on off the hook, are you there? Let me just
lower my radio. Yes, please do.
I was
just wondering why you guys hadn't
sort of spoken more about the flame
virus in greater detail,
and the fact that Dooku and Stuxnet
and Flame were all related.
Well, we've talked about Stuxnet quite a bit over the
years, it seems.
But I mean, the latest sort
of relationship to that
being attributable
now to the United States
in an official government sense,
and also to
the sort of less than
infamous 8200 group somewhere
in Israel, and the
cooperation between these two governments to
unleash official cyber
warfare, which really isn't the first time they've
done it, because they did it on Iraq way before
Desert Storm.
But they've also
crossed a threshold, and rightly
so, some of these
DCIs and other people,
the Director of Central Intelligence,
and also the
National Intelligence Director.
These acronyms get really
sort of confusing, but most of these people
have an NSA background,
and they are commenting as if
this is a new threshold that has
been crossed, and that officially
they're sort of expecting
Iran, now that it's officially been confirmed
that we were behind it, to be
entitled to attack us.
It's an interesting question,
and I wish you guys would devote more to it,
devote more to it, because
it's obviously a very, very
important area
that's going to be increasingly
modified
and extrapolated
upon by all sorts of different people,
and what do you got to say about it?
Well, I mean, it just goes to show the mentality
of the people in power,
where they think, yeah, this is something
that's acceptable, we can do this to another
country, and God forbid another
country does it to us. Can you imagine if it had been the
other way around, if Iran had been caught
trying to do something
to our infrastructure through a virus, or
a worm, or something like that? It would be
justification for an invasion, or
another bombing attack, or something like that.
And it's, you know,
I can't say any of us were surprised when it finally
was revealed that, yeah, in fact, the United States and Israel
were behind it. People have been saying that ever
since it first came out.
I was actually surprised that the
admission was there in the first place, but
it's very disturbing, the direction that we're
heading in, where this kind of thing is
considered par for the course.
I mean, I'm all in favor of shutting down nuclear
weapons facilities
nonviolently, I just think maybe
we could start with Los Alamos.
Well, that's a pretty
well-guarded area, but maybe not
so well. We're finding out things that
the United States government is not so good at.
But what about sort of an international
outcry to this stuff, where
people would take aggressive
action, like a catalog of every single
camera in the New York City area?
Oh, I'd love that. I would like that a lot.
There was one some years ago, the ACLU
did one. You know how hard they'd have to work
to do it now, the more cameras there are?
Imagine how much cooperation you'd probably
get from all sorts of people that would help
and canvass their local neighborhoods to really
get it down and give an updated
list, so that the ring of steel
becomes the ring of Swiss cheese,
and our civil rights are
maintained by vigilance, which is
after all one of those tenets that we should be
celebrating on a day like today.
Of course, yes, very good point.
I think also, if you take a good look over
in the UK, in London, where
Kyle and I just were, you see
all kinds of surveillance
that we have not yet approached,
but it's considered normal over there,
and I think that's something that's very sobering,
because we're definitely heading in that direction, and if we
don't do something about it, yeah, our every movement
is going to be tracked, and we're going to
live in fear when there isn't a camera behind us
watching what's going on. We won't
feel safe at all.
It's instructive, and it takes
but it takes, we're really excited
about these kinds of projects, and we'd love to do them
all, but it really takes people out there, and that's
what excites us so much about HOPE and
events like that, because people step up,
they create websites, they create projects,
and they do really creative stuff, so
absolutely, as soon as we hear about this kind of stuff,
we love to spread it around and help people
organize, and as you said, be vigilant.
Let me also say to the caller that
this will probably interest you a lot at our conference, we
have an ex-NSA analyst
who turned whistleblower
giving one of our keynotes on Friday,
the 13th of July, so
go to www.hope.net
and you'll see all the information on
William Binney, and it's going to be
really, really fascinating, and a very courageous
guy with all kinds of
information, knowledge, and
experience. All right, let's see if we can fit in
one more phone call. Good evening, you are on
Off the Hook. Oh dear, it's a
dial tone. Let's try another call over there.
Good evening, you are on Off the Hook. Yes,
go ahead. Speak up.
Yes, yes. Yeah, hi.
I just had a question for you.
On law and disorder, there was some talk
about how Google is using
collecting users
information in a database.
There's something called Startpage
for searches
that provide
privacy. Do you have
any thoughts
on that? Or similar
types of sites
that anonymize you
when you do searches?
Are we getting blank stares here in the studio?
I know there are sites
that do anonymize.
Like the Tor Project? That's a pretty big one
out there right now that's anonymizing
all of your browsing, basically.
Yeah, the Tor Project.
Torproject.org, I believe.
T-O-R project.
That's probably the best known.
Although it doesn't actually solve this particular
problem
because Google still,
if you sign into Google, they still know who you are,
even on Tor.
So how do you hide, Mike? It's very hard.
There was a project called Google Sharing,
which was a great project
a couple years ago. I don't know if it still works.
Where it would
have a centralized repository of all
people's different Google cookies and it would give you
a random one when you tried to search for things on
Google. So I could be
Kyle and Kyle could be someone else
and so on down the chain.
But I don't know if it's still running.
It's kind of like those
price club things where your customer
loyalty cards, you swap them around.
All right. Last phone call. And good evening.
You are on off the hook.
Hello. Hi. Speak up quickly.
Yes. I'm trying to
connect with someone in 2600.com.
Uh-huh. What do you mean you're trying to
connect to somebody in 2600.com? What does
that mean?
Well, I've been working with Steve
and he's trying to connect me with Emmanuel Goatstein
or... Uh-huh.
All right. Well, you're calling into a radio program
right now. Do you mean to be calling in over the radio?
I hope
I'm not on the air right now.
Yes. You are on the air because you called the airline.
But I'm going to fade you down now and hopefully
you can talk to Stevie about just
what number to call and when.
We're out of time now. So
if you want to write to us
and not be on the radio, write to us
oth at 2600.com.
That is our email address.
And we'll be on
again next week. And Rob, I believe there are meetings this Friday.
Is it true? Yes, indeed.
Find your local one or start one.
And don't forget that Hope is coming up.
Hackers on Planet Earth is coming up next
week, next weekend.
Friday the 13th, Saturday the 14th, Sunday the 15th.
And this is your last week
to get advanced
pre-registration tickets at a discounted
rate. So go to www.hope.net
for information on that
and all the various speakers and panels
that we have and activities and all kinds
of fun stuff. In the meantime,
enjoy your Fourth of July.
We'll see you next week. Good night.
I came the farthest
Among the hardest
Survival
Learned from these streets
It can be bleak
Accept no defeat
Surrender, retreat
So we're struggling
Fighting to each
And we're wondering
When we'll be free
So we patiently wait
For that fateful day
It's not far away
Hi, I'm Ella Joyce
and when I'm in New York
I listen to WBAI
99.5 FM
The more you listen, the more you learn.