How? Thought you'd never ask. Become a BAI Buddy. That's a minimum $10 a month donation
for each of the next 12 months. Help end the heartbreak of psoriasis cures and other lotions,
potions, and nostrums sold on the radio by sending us money to make radio. Go to wbai.org,
our website, and become a BAI Buddy.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York. Guess what? It's time for Off The Hook.
That's understood, but didn't it know?
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you
on this Wednesday evening. Joined tonight by Mike. Hi there. Rob T. Firefly. Good evening.
And from somewhere else, Bernie S. Buried in the snow in Philadelphia. Greetings tonight.
Greetings, greetings. You really cut it to the last second there, didn't you?
Just called in this very moment. Yeah, we were pretty frantic here. We didn't have our theme.
I mean, somehow lost our Off The Hook tone. No need to panic. We'll find it by next week
and everything will be back to normal. Hey, we have a lot of exciting announcements,
hope-related announcements. A lot has gone on in the last week. For one thing, the call for
participation has gone out, and we're already being swamped with people writing in to us and
asking what they can do. Basically, we have a conference coming up in July, and what we're
doing then is having a lot of people speaking as they do every time we have a HOPE conference
every two years. Bernie, any thoughts from you on this? I think you kind of understated it,
Emmanuel. We typically have about 100 people speaking at HOPE and dozens of people presenting
workshops, and there's so much more going on there. Just to say there's a few people speaking
is just scratching the surface. It's over 100 different presentations given at every conference,
and probably more this time, because every time we do this, we manage to squeeze in a bit more. We
find more rooms we can use, and there seems to be more interest. In fact, I can say for sure
there's more interest this time. We have more people registering for the conference than ever
before at this rate, and we also have people contact. People normally that we would be chasing
down to give talks are coming to us pleading, begging. Well, maybe not pleading and begging,
but basically wanting to be involved, because this is important. These are important times.
It's an extremely relevant period of history with all that's been going on in the last few years,
and Hackers on Planet Earth is something that has always been at the forefront of this,
and I think it's going to be particularly relevant this year. It takes place July 18,
19, and 20 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown Manhattan. If you go to www.hope.net,
you'll see our brand new website, too, with all kinds of cool features and bits of information.
You'll see the call for speakers there, how you can participate, the call for workshops.
Bernie, want to tell us something about workshops? What's that all about?
We at Hope No. 9, which was two years ago, was really the first year we really went all out
with workshops, and we had two dozen workshops last time. Some of them were really good sort
of breakout sessions to talks, where you heard a really good talk, but the person talked about
building some interesting thing or hacking some interesting program, and then you can get
together with them in a smaller, more intimate setting and do sort of a hands-on interactive
workshop. You can build the thing that they were talking about or work on some collaborative
project that they were talking about at the talk earlier that day. So it's just a really nice
segue, no pun intended, because we have segues at Hope as well to ride around, but it really
makes a full circle from just hearing about it to being a hands-on participatory event,
and that's what Hope's all about, is getting involved, getting your hands dirty, working on
stuff. Not necessarily dirty, but just hands-on doing stuff. You get dirty. I mean, we have
wash basins that you can rinse yourself off if you do get dirty. It's a hacker conference.
Anything can happen. And this being the 20th anniversary of the first Hope back in 1994,
this is going to be, and the 10th actual Hope conference, since we do it every couple years,
I still don't understand how that works out mathematically, because every two years we
have the conference, and we've been doing this for 20 years now, but the first couple, we only
had three years spaced apart. So mathematically, I don't know how it can be both the 20th anniversary
of Hope and the 10th Hope. It doesn't make sense. It makes no sense. I don't know how.
And it's the 30th anniversary of 2600 Magazine as well. How did you pull that off? I didn't.
I mean, the planets are all in alignment.
It's in the prophecies. I know, but I don't understand. I tried to avoid it.
I'll sit down with some paper later, and we'll draw lines and squares and work it out.
What kind of paper did you bring?
Oh, you mean...
Paper, to do some math.
Oh, I see. Okay, got it, got it.
I think it requires some graphical demonstrations we can't do on the radio, but we'll work it out.
All right. Well, now, speaking of segues, Bernie, segues, I don't know if that...
Does that qualify? That's not a workshop. That's an activity.
No, that's just one of the fun attractions. There's not just talks and workshops and panels.
There are all kinds of activities, and there's attractions that I would call
the segues in attraction. You can ride around on these multi-thousand dollar,
really hacker-friendly devices that have all kinds of gyroscopes and computers in them,
and they kind of read your mind as you ride these things around.
They do. And what you say about attractions is true because we always are experimenting
with different attractions. The segues obviously being one of the attractions that has worked.
The giraffe didn't work out. We only did that once, and that turned out to be a big mess and
not very popular. But it just shows that we are willing to try new and different things.
But on the subject of the segue, what year did we start doing that? Because what's weird about
the segue is that it's still this new thing that no one has really tried before in the mainstream.
So as long as it remains unattainable to most people, it's a cool thing for us to have.
I believe it was the fifth hope. It was the same hope that Steve Wozniak came,
and I remember that because the guy I got to bring a segue, just one segue,
was a friend of Steve Wozniak, who is himself a big segue fan. So it just all worked out really
well. And then that worked out so well that we started bringing in more segues at each additional
Now, on that subject of weird things that few people have,
there has been some talk of Google Glass at Hope. Now, obviously, somebody, some wise guy is going
to be wearing Google Glass throughout. But what I was thinking, tell me if you think this is a good
idea. And literally, we're discussing this live on the radio. We're open to all kinds of input.
If on the opposite side, where we have the segues, people lining up for the segues,
we have people on the other side of the huge room lining up to play with Google Glass,
what do you think about that? I was asking Bernie, but I'm sure you're going to say
something to totally tear it down. I'll tell you why I'm not interested,
because I am much more interested in seeing the things that are not like the products of large
corporations, like the Segway Corporation and Google Corporation. I'm much more interested
to see the creativity that the hacker community can bring in, always does bring to this event.
So you will not be on that line. So there you go, folks, there's one less person
to have to shove out of the way. But I'm just thinking, I've never used one of these things.
In fact, a couple of people have asked, would you like to be put on the invite list for Google
Glass? And I say, well, okay, yeah, sure. But it's an invitation to spend $1,500. I probably
won't do it. And then they don't put me on, because there's this whole marketing thing going
on. It's kind of like a pyramid scheme of some sort, where I'm going to get letters now. Every
time I criticize Google, I get letters. But basically, they don't put you on the list of
people that are being invited to spend $1,500 unless you basically commit to saying that you're
going to take it seriously and do this and live by all the terms.
It's kind of like Gmail. Remember how they did that?
They did that with Gmail. It's called creating value in something that's really
getting people to spend money. But what I'm thinking is that this is something that a lot
of people won't have access to. I don't have access to. I'm not going to be spending money
on that kind of thing. And I also have heard from people that have asked me not to say this
publicly, but I don't care, because I don't see why I shouldn't, that it's really clumsy and sloppy
and in beta mode, and they would not recommend it. So there. Yeah, I betrayed confidence in saying
that. I mean, it's a cool thing. I'm not saying it's not cool to have these devices and these
toys and to play around with them. But that's what we want to do at the conference, is give
people the opportunity to play around and experiment and see just what everybody is
talking about. I should point out, though, that if we do this, those two lines are going to be
kept very, very separate. The Segway riders and the Google Glass users do not mix the two.
I don't think that would be a good idea at all. But, Bernie, what do you think of the idea of
just having people line up to test out Google Glass? Give that a test drive. Well, I'm kind of
with Mike on this. I would much rather see an open source hardware, software version of that.
It probably improves on it and makes it cooler and more versatile. Well, is there one?
There are people working on such things. And by the time Hope rolls around in July,
even though it doesn't seem like it's that far away, I think there will be comparable things
out there from other folks. And I think we should look at that. Well, yeah, I'd be open to that,
too, if such a thing existed. But I would be open to doing whatever does exist at that time, for
sure. So anyway, Google Glass can get you arrested, too, by the way. Yeah. And we have a story about
that. In fact, this happened at a movie theater in Ohio. There was a Google Glass user who,
they say he ran into an unexpected consequence of wearing a camera on his face at all times,
which is basically what Google Glass is. Now, movie theaters can suspect you of piracy if you
do that. This Google Glass user, who has not yet given his name, contacted the tech blog
known as the Gadgeteer. He and his wife had bought tickets to see Jack Ryan's Shadow Recruit
at a mall theater on January the 18th. He wore his Google Glass set with prescription lenses.
And about an hour into the film, they were approached by someone claiming to be a federal
agent. And as the user phrased it, this is this is what was said. The guy came near my seat,
shoved a badge. It had some sort of a shield on it because, well, they all do. He yanked the
Google Glass off my face, which is a violation of Google terms, by the way, just so people know
that, and said, follow me outside immediately. It was very embarrassing. And outside of the
theater, there were about five to 10 cops, as well as mall cops. He went on to say that the
agent told him he had been caught illegally taping the movie, then ushered him and his
wife into separate rooms in the mall's administrative area. And although the
ensuing interview was described as voluntary, it was suggested that not cooperating could result
in bad things happening. Now, federal agents questioned the man about whom he reported to,
how much money he made and other things related to the alleged piracy. And when they finally
brought in a laptop and cable to check the contents of the man's Google Glass and his phone,
they found nothing incriminating and turned him loose. Here's what baffles me. How in God's name
did they find federal agents to swoop down on this theater inside of an hour after somebody
is seen going to a movie with Google Glass? They had ICE representatives, Homeland Security,
FBI, supposedly. And this is something, it's like an episode of South Park. They basically swooped
in because this is the biggest crime being committed within 100 miles. Does this seem
fishy to you, Rob? I'm just relieved to hear that the federal government has solved every other
problem on its plate that's more important than some guy in a movie theater in a mall
wearing Google Glass. I guess we have to assume they did because, wow, they sure were ready for
this. And God forbid something else was happening anywhere in that mall or anywhere else for that
matter. And actually, I think the government did him a service because otherwise he might have had
to sit through that movie. Well, OK. Yeah, I was going to say some things about that. But the less
said, the better. Bernie, what are your thoughts on this? The MPAA has tentacles into all aspects
of our law enforcement security apparatus, as we well know. So I think the movie theater probably
just called up their MPAA contact who then made a couple of calls. And then the Fed swooped down
into the movie theater. I think that's what happened. But one person copying or allegedly
copying a movie in a theater, they can do that. I mean, they had I think close to a dozen different
people there from different agencies. And just for one person, somebody else was taping something in
another part of the town. I think all the agencies wanted to each take credit for being involved in
this massively important bust, which was a bust. Yeah, because they didn't find anything and they
wind up looking pretty pretty red faced. And of course, they that this was verified. This did
actually happen. They had to to say, I think I see representative confirmed to NBC News that the man
was not detained and would have been free to go should he have chosen to do so. Now, it's
interesting, Bernie, you have some experience with law enforcement. If it really was that simple,
if you could just leave because you feel like leaving, why don't people just leave then?
Is there something they say to make you want to stay?
They say things to that are implied threats. So I am not surprised that this guy and his
wife did really not feel free to leave. And you can bet if they left, there would have been some
other way to to detain him. He was he was basically detained. It sounds like he was detained. He was
ordered to, you know, follow them, whatever. It wasn't just said, oh, I'm sure that they did not
feel free to leave. That's how it is. What kind of words would someone say to you to to basically
cover their ass and say, yeah, he was free to leave at all times, but make the person feel
like he has to stay? What kind of tactics? I think people are generally programmed to to
to do what what authority figures say, especially if they happen to be wearing guns and badges and
look threatening and menacing and speaking in threatening tones. I'm sure that's what happened
there. I'm sure these guys were armed. So you really don't want to go against somebody who's
ordering you and has a gun. It's just not wise. I've had federal guns pointed at me and I know
what happens. So I'm finding it really hard to know who to sympathize with here, because on on
the one hand, you guys are totally right that this is a total waste in a sense of police power,
although I doubt they would have been doing something more useful with the police power
instead. But and the copyright industry, as we've discussed many times on this program,
is insane and it's zealous enforcement of its, you know, self-invented rights and all this stuff.
But on the other hand, I'm a little annoyed at the sort of self-entitlement of the people
with Google Glass who think they can just wear a camera and a screen everywhere they go and that
everyone else has to think that's OK. There's a case that was reported recently of someone who
was wearing Google Glass while driving. There's a law in all relevant states that says you can't
have a screen in front of your face while you're driving because that's dangerous. And the person
actually somehow managed to get out of that. They said they had it turned off. Yeah,
there's no way to know. It's called innocence before guilt. The assumption of innocence.
I mean, are you allowed to wear Google Glass in a locker room like where what are the rules here?
And it's I don't think it's OK that the people who have the fifteen hundred dollars to spend
on this product are the only ones who get to participate in making up the rules.
Well, the thing, though, is that these are these are questions we are going to have to
increasingly deal with. What happens when Google Glass turns into Google Contact Lens
and you can't tell because the person looks like an utter idiot walking around with this thing on
that they're recording in the first place? You know, we're moving quickly into that society where
people are recording you at all times and you have no idea they're doing it.
I've been recorded with Google Glass. I mean, it was a public talk I gave,
so I didn't mind that there was a recording snatched them off the person's head. Well,
it was too late by then. But to be clear, I didn't mind that this recording was made,
but I certainly didn't know about it in advance.
You see, these are the kind of things that that's why I want hands on to these devices
so people can experiment and and figure out ways to defeat them or to use them in other
manners or or whatever the technology is here. It's not going anyplace. But yeah,
we have a lot of questions to answer. And we're seeing this coming up in society more and more.
Yeah. The fact of the matter is that while the technology might improve,
people are still the same jerks they always were.
That's certainly true. Speaking of jerks, there's a lot of jerks in Las Vegas. I have
nothing against Las Vegas, but I just wanted to segue into a different story.
And apparently Las Vegas is moving into the world of bitcoins. Yes,
we started last week and now Las Vegas is following. Starting starting this week,
actually, patrons will be able to use the online currency bitcoin to pay for rooms,
food and drinks at two downtown casinos. The D casino. What an imaginative name.
And the city's oldest casino, which we all know, of course, is the Golden Gate,
will accept bitcoins at hotel front desks beginning Wednesday. The cyber currency will
also be accepted at the D's gift shop and two restaurants. U.S. dollars, however,
will remain the only currency accepted on the gambling floor. Unless, of course,
they give you those stupid little tokens that you have to get in exchange for U.S. dollars.
That's interesting. So moving into the gambling realm now, where is this going to go? We have no
idea. We have no idea how this is going to turn out. It's different. It's weird. It's kind of
funny. And that's one of the reasons why we decided we were going to go ahead and take it.
We've gotten a bunch of people registering with bitcoins for the hope conference. So
I think that's kind of cool. And I got to say, there are a lot less fees involved for the merchant.
So we wind up getting a better deal than if we use Visa, MasterCard and all those other people.
There's only one small fee taken out as opposed to 50 fees that the banks take. So, yeah,
bitcoins on the floor of one on the gambling floor, but in Las Vegas, something that this
kind of bugs me as a proofreader and editor. Half the time you see Bitcoin capitalized,
half the time you don't see it capitalized. My understanding, tell me if I'm wrong,
is that when you're referring to the concept of it, when you're referring to maybe the company,
when you say that you're starting to take Bitcoin, that's when you capitalize. When
you're referring to a bunch of them, bitcoins, you know, I'm going to pay you with bitcoins,
then it's not capitalized. Does that seem like it makes any sense? I see it in this news story here.
Mike? I'm sorry. I don't care. Well, I didn't ask if you cared. I asked if you had any idea.
I'm just a little confused. So the Las Vegas thing is just like for it's that the meme,
like I heard you like gambling, so now you can gamble while you gamble.
Is that what's going on? Is that the meme? That's the worst meme I've ever heard.
It's a lot of that, really? Because there's so many bad ones.
I could repeat it now, five seconds after you said it. That's how confusing it is.
Okay. Go ahead, Rob. So I think it might apply like it does when
other product names get genericized, like scotch tape. If you're referring to the
scotch brand that makes scotch tape, then you would capitalize it. But if it's a store brand
scotch tape, then maybe you wouldn't. I'm going down to the store to buy scotch tape,
capitalized. I'm going to scotch tape this together, not capitalized.
I think that works. All right. All right. See, we're learning. We're learning. It's educational
radio. I believe the preferred term is Scottish, and that is capitalized.
All right. Fine. Now, here's something rather interesting coming out of the events
taking place in Ukraine right now. As people might be following, there's pretty much revolution in
the air, all kinds of demonstrations and increasingly violence. And a lot of people
today received this text message. Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass
disturbance. Yeah, that's the text message thousands of Ukrainian protesters spontaneously
received on their cell phones today as a new law prohibiting public demonstrations went into effect.
It was the regime's police force sending protesters the perfectly dystopian text
message to accompany the newly minted perfectly dystopian legislation. And according to this
particular website, whose name was obscured when I printed the text out, unfortunately,
this is downright Orwellian. And I don't think you can get more Orwellian than this. What do
you think, Bernie? Well, yeah, because what it implies is that if you're in that protest
and you get that message, you know that the government authorities, the guys with the guns
and the sticks and the water cannons and everything and the tear gas, they have your name,
your number, your location, and all they need to lock you up or worse. So it would be disturbing.
I think that maybe people will learn the next time there or other places where if you go
to protest to turn your cell phone off or take the battery out to avoid your location from being
logged so that people can pin you on being in a particular place at a particular time.
Well, the phrasing of the message echoed the language in the new law that makes it a crime
to participate in a protest that they deem to be violent. And, you know, governments,
if you throw a teddy bear at a cop or the riot shield, it's deemed violent. That law took effect
actually yesterday. Protesters are concerned the government seems to be using cutting edge
technology from the advertising industry to pinpoint people for political profiling. Now,
there are three cell phone companies in Ukraine, Kyivstar, MTS and Life. They denied they had
provided the location data to the government or had sent a text message. That's according to the
newspaper Ukrainskie Pravda. They're suggesting that instead it's the work of a pirate cell phone
tower set up in the area. And of course, those messages are having little effect. Three hours
after they were sent, riot police officers pushed back past barricades and burned buses
at that site and were met by a crowd of protesters and ski masks and bicycle helmets.
Another reason to wear bicycle helmets, carrying sticks and ready to fight. So, yeah, it's
interesting, though, to see these bumbling attempts by authorities to use technology
in ways to oppress masses. And the thing that worries me, they can only get better at it.
Yeah, I mean, if they're using if they're using your physical location to decide who is a
participant in this protest, then, you know, you, Emanuel, and of course, other friends of ours
know that it is possible to be in at the location of a protest without being part of it. And so how
do they decide who whose whose name goes on the list? And I'm just going to take a wild guess
here and say everyone's name goes on the list no matter what.
As far as technically how it's done, how how would you say any of us understand the actual
technology behind it? I mean, there's so many ways to do it from what we know from from the
Edward Snowden revelations from what the NSA is capable of. Basically, they could get the
government the data from the cell providers, the cell providers would probably lie. So their
denials mean, you know, nothing at all. In this case, they could build a device to to see what
cell phones are nearby. Without the cooperation of the cell carriers, they could do, you know,
any number of things that probably I can't even think of right now. And there's no way to know
which but it's almost not relevant, which because what they are going to do with the data is the
real concern. Well, I'm curious about this talk of a pirate tower. How would something like that
work? The authorities themselves can put up a tower without the help of the cell phone?
Without the help of the cell phone companies? If we if we believe the cell phone companies,
if we were to believe that? Go ahead, Bernie. Well, yeah, there's actually a company in the
US called Harris Corporation that makes such a device. And it's basically it's a it's a,
it's a fake cell phone tower. It's a real cell phone cell site. But it's it's used in the classic
man in the middle attack type method. And it has a lot of other tools. It can turn it on,
they can emulate other carriers, cell sites, so that all the phones register to this to the
government one. And then they have all the phone numbers and IDs of the phones
that are within a particular area. And then they can send a message to all of them log who's there,
where they are, that sort of thing. And that's almost certainly what was done. I don't think
the government would want to go through the extra trouble of contacting all the carriers.
They can just throw a switch on a system like this, which from I just read a government quote
on one of these things, they're about a quarter million dollars in the US.
So, you know, if somebody were to use this entity, what was to use this particular
tower that Harris manufactures? Would would the calls be made through this tower? Or is it
completely oblivious to that? Yes, anybody making calls that have
registered to this tower automatically, which they do, the strongest signal is the signal that
the cell phone locks onto. Any calls that those phones make will go through that tower
and then can be recorded by the system, not just the so-called metadata, the phone number and
the phone numbers and all the other information, but the actual audio can be recorded too from
these types of systems. Okay, but what I'm not clear on is
who's actually placing the call then? Is it the cell phone company or are the authorities now
a phone company placing a call for you? The authority is then acting as a man in
the middle and then tends to call on to the actual carrier.
Okay, so that's what they're doing. Do they pick the carrier or do they know
what carrier you want to use? They know which one that your phone
typically works with and would send it off to there. And this has been going on for at least
15 years in this country. They have had that technology, this man in the middle type thing.
The FBI uses it regularly. You might have seen something that NSA catalog that Ed Snowden
recently leaked to The Guardian and others. So this is not new technology. This has been
around for a while. So in addition to that technology,
which is a thing that you described that actually does exist, there's other technologies that are
passive listening to GSM communications. And some of this is now actually even possible
for hobbyists to do because the encryption in GSM is generally off or in very weakened states.
So it is possible to, without doing what you described, to just put a device in a public area
and listen for the nearby cellular telephones as they communicate normally with the normal tower.
So there's all kinds of possibilities here with varying levels of cooperation from the cell
companies and varying levels of, well, I guess it's all pretty evil from the government.
But yeah, now the question will be if this is just a pure intimidation tactic, which is bad
enough, or if they're actually going to follow through and try and arrest some of the people
who they know were there through the cell data. I would like to get one of these towers for the
Hope Conference and experiment with it. And people would opt in and we could do some real
time monitoring ourselves and see just what these things are capable of. Of course, we have to get
one. It's a dream. How do we actually do that? It's impossible. There's just no way. Yeah, I don't
really believe it. I think there's always a way if we put our minds to it. So that's one of my wishes.
It's also highly illegal.
Why is it illegal?
Because you're not the government and the government makes the rules. You know how this
works.
Okay. But inside of that room, we are the government because we're running the conference.
Look, you get a lawyer.
I will get a lawyer. I will get a lawyer right after the show and I'll make this happen. Rob,
go ahead.
So yeah, if this is your wish, I think that would be sort of an unreasonable wish to make
unless, of course, you were on a radio show that had an audience of a lot of telecommunication
enthusiasts. And oh, wait.
And I have two more wishes after this. I'm saving those.
Oh, okay. So save those for a rainy day. But yeah, if anyone out there has ideas on how we
can do this, get in touch with us, projects at hope.net.
That's right. That's right. Well, you know, I neglected to mention, thank you, Rob,
earlier, if you want to submit a speaker submission, the address is speakers at hope.net.
And it's that simple.
You'll have a much better chance of getting accepted if you go on x.hope.net and read the
rules because then your submission will comply.
True. But perhaps you're driving now and you can't go to a website, but you somehow can
send an email. It's good to give out the email addresses as well. And I heard Bernie mentioning
workshops at hope.net. Yes, Bernie, that's another address that we have. And what kind
of people would email that address besides spammers?
Anybody who's interested in organizing a workshop for Hope or if you are a speaker and would like
to organize a workshop that follows up your talk. Or also, there's another email address,
Art.
Art Space, actually.
Art Space. I'm sorry. Thank you. Art Space.
At hope.net.
Our friend Gus is curating and organizing that.
Yeah, because art and hacking are very tightly connected. And we see all kinds of instances
of that throughout the world. And we want to be more of a tight connection this time as well.
So there are so many talented people around, not only in the hacker community, but in this
specific region right here. So there's all kinds of things we can draw upon. Again,
www.hope.net is the main website, x.hope.net specifically for Hope X, which is our 10th
conference. And you can just put all those Xs into a URL too, xxx.18xnero.xxx. That'll get
you there as well.
Do we own the domain, you know, 1-8-e-x-e-s-nero.com?
I don't think so. Maybe you could run out and check if that's available. Hey, last week we
played something, or we said something actually, and I'm going to play it right now, an exchange
that we had with a caller. Let's see if anybody remembers this.
Go and tell pro to the village voice. And that's what really like blew it up. And Frank Church
gets a lot of credit, but mostly Otis Pike was relentless in his coverage. And I found out he's
still alive. I'm going to look into how I get ahold of him.
Otis Pike is still alive?
That's what it said on Google. I mean, on share.
Wow. I didn't know that. I just assumed, well, Otis Pike is listening. My apologies.
Yeah. And he, the caller was right. I was surprised, Otis Pike still being alive. However,
unfortunately, since that show has aired, amazingly enough, Otis Pike has died.
Can you believe that? It's like fate was listening and saying, oh, wait, I missed one.
And 92 years old, and the maverick New York congressman died on January the 20th,
just two days ago. Kind of scary. Who's listening to this radio show, you know?
I'm not familiar with Otis Pike's work. Could you maybe summarize?
Well, I'm not prepared to summarize his entire career. I just know that he was a congressman.
I remember his name because Otis Pike is a really cool name.
And I know that he was way back. He was one of the people that was
a congressman, I think back in 1960, according to this article.
Okay. You know what? I can tell you something. He served 18 years in Congress. He was a Democrat
elected from a Republican-leaning district on Long Island, a Marine Corps veteran who was
skeptical of Vietnam War escalation, and a patrician bow-tied lawyer with a wicked sense
of humor, which he used to ridicule wasteful spending. Is that enough? I can go on. I have
three pages. Okay.
Okay, Barney, go ahead. I'm sorry to hear of his passing.
Yeah, it's just kind of creepy that, you know, I thought he was dead. Then it turns out he was
still alive. And then he died right after I found out he was still alive. It's kind of weird. Also,
like Ariel Sharon, he kind of died like eight years ago, and then he came back to life long
enough to die for real. Well, he didn't really come back to, you know what I mean. He was in
a coma for eight years. And that was kind of strange because it's like he died twice.
We look forward to your letters.
Let's back out of this gracefully. Did you have something else? Barney, go ahead.
Otis Pike was really a whistleblower. I wish there were more congressmen like him,
congresspeople like him, because he was a persistent critic of Pentagon,
not just overspending, but for overreach and critic of the CIA and some of the shenanigans
it was involved in. And he had this really, really extensive classified report prepared
about CIA activities. And it was, it turned out, well, he didn't classify it, but
Congress classified it, and he allegedly leaked it to the news media. Never admitted doing that,
but it got published by the Village Voice, hundreds of pages of really interesting
information about what a government was doing that it should not have been doing,
or at least people should have been aware it was doing. And he'll be missed. I think we have lost
his spirit for the most part in the halls of Congress. We could use more like him.
All right. Well, speaking of whistleblowing, I'm not sure if this actually qualifies as
whistleblowing, but it's definitely something that's gotten people's attention.
Hacking expert David Kennedy, I'm not sure what you have to do to become a hacking expert,
but he claims that he has been able to crack healthcare.gov within about four minutes and
was able to gain access to 70,000 personal records of Obamacare enrollees. Now, of course,
he reported this on Fox News and scared people into not registering, I guess, on that website.
He said 70,000 was just one of the numbers that I was able to go up to, and I stopped after that.
You know, I'm sure it's hundreds of thousands, if not more, and it was done within about a four
minute timeframe. So it was just wide open. You can literally just open up your browser,
go to this, and extract all this information without actually having to hack the website
itself. Now, I don't know, when I read this, my BS meter kind of went through the roof, because
whenever people say that, yeah, it's this easy, you know, I've been to the end of the internet
and back, and I can do it all, and it's this easy, all you got to do is go to your browser,
you don't need any special tools. I want to see the actual evidence. Has anyone actually seen what
this guy did to get, within four minutes, personal information on 70,000 records? Bernie, did you
hear anything? I just read this article, but of course, he was interviewed on Fox News, so it
must be true. So, you know, I haven't seen any evidence to it. I mean, I think it's plausible,
it could be true, but there's been no evidence presented that I've seen that means it really
happened. But even if it did happen, if he doesn't get prosecuted, it's going to show some very
selective prosecution, because this sounds almost exactly like somebody in the hacker community
where you did a couple years ago with AT&T Wireless's website for iPad users, where the
website was so insecure, you could just change the URL by one digit or something and grab the
email address and name of the user, and other information. So if this really happened,
and if this guy didn't get prosecuted, I called BS on that. Okay, so there's enough BS for
everybody floating around here. But that said, is it right for someone like this to be prosecuted,
do you think? Well, he could be considered a whistleblower, but I'm just saying that the
government would be very capricious and show a double standard by not prosecuting someone who
did something like this, and prosecuting someone else from the hacker community for doing something
almost identical with a corporate website. But why do you think the government wouldn't prosecute
him? This guy is on Fox News, attacking healthcare.gov, Obamacare, pretty much directly.
Do you seem to think that he won't be prosecuted? What makes you say that? Politics, Emmanuel,
politics. This guy obviously is trying to make the administration look bad, not necessarily a
bad thing. So why wouldn't the administration want to prosecute him? That's what I don't get.
Because it could be labeled as a political prosecution.
So you're saying it's political because they're not prosecuting him because it would be political
if they did. It seems like there's no way for this not to be political.
You're right. You're right.
All right. Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, that's pretty much how politics works, I think.
I guess so. I guess so. I should know that. All right. Well, I'd like to know, this guy,
David Kennedy, write an article for 2600, tell us exactly what you did. Because in the hacker
community, we like to reveal the information and show people how it's done, not simply make
wild claims on dubious news networks and expect that to be enough. I'm used to it. I'm used to
people who go around claiming things at conferences and on TV networks that seem really simple,
that are designed to make people afraid of hackers. But when you look at it, a lot of it
is misleading, not really what they say it is, and sometimes just outright false.
What kind of information does he claim to have taken from this website?
He says it was personal information. I don't know what that means. Personal records,
names, addresses, social security numbers, IPs. I don't know.
I mean, I can give you a list of all the social security numbers in the United States,
but that's not a huge problem.
It's not just a number generator or you actually have access to a database.
Yeah. I mean, I've been to healthcare.gov. I'm amazed he got it to work and do something.
That alone is an accomplishment. Maybe he's just been satisfied with that.
Okay. Now, Bernie, you mentioned iPads, which of course is related to Apple,
and Apple has something to do with this story right now. They have settled a longstanding
case with the US Federal Trade Commission over in-app purchases. In-app purchases,
what does that word mean?
That means if you're playing a game and within the game you could spend real world money to
get your character in the game something fancier for the game, then that's an in-app purchase.
Or if you have an app that you're allowed to try out and use for a while,
but then you want to buy the full version, that can also be an in-app purchase.
So it's basically an internal purchase made in the game as if you went out and bought something.
Are you playing a game right now with me? Is this real? I mean, people do this?
I've, for instance, used in-app purchase. Sometimes you have an app and you use it and
there's ads and you can pay $2 to the developer to make the ads go away.
This is part of your whole second life personality?
No.
Okay. Well, anyway, according to a letter obtained by Recode.net, the consent decree
entered into by the Cupertino, California-based technology giant. Did you know that's where
they were based? It's important to the story. And the government agency does not force Apple
to do anything we weren't already going to do. That's according to Apple chief executive, Tim
Cook. Always a nice thing to say after you settle a lawsuit. Yeah, we're going to do it anyway. Big
waste of time.
Where, Emanuel, is the government agency in question based?
They don't get to that. I'm sure somewhere in DC. The FTC said in a statement that Apple will pay
back a minimum $32.5 million to customers affected by the complaint. The agency said
the figure was drawn up to consider full consumer redress. Apple will also be required to change
billing practices to ensure that express informed consent is received before a purchase is made.
The iPhone and iPad maker must make these changes no later than March 31st. The FTC's
complaint alleged that Apple did not inform its smartphone and tablet owners that entering their
password opened up a 15 minute period in which children could incur unlimited charges with no
further adult supervisory intervention. That does sound like a recipe for disaster. So this is all
about kids buying things on smartphones.
Yes, indeed. I think we covered a story about this some time ago when it broke. But yeah,
the source of grief seems to be that parents would just start up a child's game and hand the
child the device to babysit them for a while, like my generation did with television. But when the
kid gets handed the tablet and they're playing their game, they have the ability and the chance
to spend a bunch of mom or dad's money on just hitting a button to get more berries for their
pony or something.
Wow. Okay. All right. That's something. On the related story, the entire side window of the
Apple store on Fifth Avenue shattered today. Apparently it was a snowblower mishap. And they
say it's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix that. And the store remains open,
albeit rather freezing.
Yeah, the number I saw was $450,000 to fix it.
Half a million dollars to fix a window.
Yeah. Apparently it's a very big window. And I think being Apple, it uses proprietary
architecture that they can't get just any provider to fill in for them or something.
I think it's just funny that it's windows that they're dealing with.
And presumably it's not made of Google Glass.
Oh, wow. Anyone else? Okay. I think we're-
I was just going to point out that the $32 million, to get back slightly to the previous
story, is just not a lot of money to Apple.
No, definitely not.
And this only reinforces it to learn they can spend half a million dollars on a window.
They can buy 64 windows now with what they settled that for. So go ahead, Bernie.
I was going to say, it's probably just a few minutes of Apple's profits that went to pay
off the government for their misdeeds without having to admit any wrongdoing. Kind of like
what happened to you last week when the government didn't admit to any wrongdoing. How do they get
away with not admitting wrongdoing and just paying money?
Yeah, that's definitely true. Speaking of Windows though, did you know that a lot of
ATMs run Windows XP? I didn't know this. And did you know that on April 8th, Microsoft is
going to stop offering tech support for Windows XP? I didn't know that either. And that means
that ATMs that are running Windows XP are no longer going to receive regular security
patches and will not be in compliance with industry standards. Most machines that get
upgraded will shift to Windows 7, which has been around since 2009. But I wonder what this is going
to mean for those banks that don't upgrade their machines in time. Is there going to be some kind
of security scandal? Are these ATMs on the internet? Because that sounds like the much
bigger scandal, if true. Everything is on the internet these days, Mike, everything.
And that is a scandal, you're right. But, well, April 8th, let's mark that day. Maybe
there'll be some fireworks. And Starbucks. Starbucks is in the news. They have apparently
been storing mobile passwords in clear text. That's right. Usernames, email addresses,
passwords have been stored in clear text for their mobile payment app here in the United States.
Their credentials were stored in such a way that anyone with access to the phone can see
the passwords and usernames by connecting the phone to a PC. No jailbreaking of the phone is
necessary. And that clear text also displays an extensive list of geolocation tracking points,
latitude, longitude, that kind of thing, which is a treasure trove of security and privacy gems for
anyone who steals the phone. Wow. So, yeah, they've been kind of caught. They could have
chosen not to store the password on the phone, but then users would be forced to key in their
username and password every time they wanted to use the app to make a purchase. Wait, wait.
That is not true. There's many alternative architectures they could have used. Why don't
you tell them? Maybe this can be cleared up very easily then. Okay. I'm sure they can afford my
rates. No problem. Maybe they can. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe everyone's demanding money
and they just wanted to provide convenience. But, yeah. So, clear text. Wow. That's something.
Hey, we should take phone calls. Wait, what's our phone number? 212. Sorry.
212-209-2900 is our telephone number. We'd like to hear from you if you have any thoughts on
news of the day or of the week or of the month. Anything involving the NSA or Edward Snowden or
hackers in general. Questions maybe about the HULP conference. Incidents involving your life and the
challenge of technology, telephones, computers. What else could we be talking about? All sorts of
things, right? All you have to do is call 212-209-2900. Go ahead, Bernie. Surveillance.
If you feel like you're under surveillance, call us. Absolutely. Absolutely. Surveillance. The only
thing is that, Bernie, it's possible you might not hear them. It's possible they might hear you.
Well, I'm used to it. Yeah. We're going to have to be kind of...
kind of... well, we'll tiptoe around it. We'll see if we can do this gracefully. All right,
I'm going to take the first phone call now. If you hear a period of silence,
that means that you can't hear them. Good evening. You are on Off The Hook.
Hi. I would like to talk to the host, please. I have a question regarding...
Well, before you go any further, let me just say that you are on the radio right now,
so if you can think of that question, this would be a great time to do it.
Sure. I want to expose a case that has just happened with AT&T and the way they do their
contract and how they're basically tying me up to their contract.
Okay. Let me first step in here and ask Bernie, are you able to hear any of that?
Yeah, I heard them fine.
Okay, great. Okay, so what specifically is your question or observation?
I'm sorry, what was that?
Did you have a specific question or observation?
Well, yes. Basically, I know we don't have much time. I wanted to know if within the U.S.
there was an actual service, a phone, a cell phone service that I can use without being tied
up to a contract. I know that there's a way of doing that by you buying a phone that is off
contract. So what would you suggest? What would be a company that you would suggest?
Well, I do know T-Mobile doesn't have contracts for many of their services. I also know that it's
possible to do prepay and not have a contract in that particular case. So the options are out there.
I have tried to prepay, but unfortunately, their service is not very good.
What do you require with service?
Well, I had an iPhone 4S and I needed a lot or I use it a lot for emailing. So I need a good
bandwidth. I'll come in and I'll go in for that and a lot of texting as well.
What company was the iPhone 4S originally connected with?
AT&T.
Okay. So it's a GSM iPhone. So you can only use it on either T-Mobile or AT&T wireless. You could
not use it with Verizon or with Sprint because they use CDMA as opposed to GSM. So your options
are limited right there. But both, I believe, as Emmanuel mentioned, T-Mobile has a prepaid service.
They have new contract service and that's probably your best option, frankly.
T-Mobile.
Well, it's not hard because it's only, as Bernie says, two companies that you could use that do
GSM in this country. So if one doesn't work, then use the other.
Has anyone ever tried it if you make a conference call to the representatives of the two companies
and try and get them to bid against each other for your service?
It's hard enough getting one representative on the phone and not having a computer to deal with.
But thanks for that call. We're going to move on. And good evening. You are on Off The Hook.
Hello.
Hi. What's on your mind?
Yes. I have a quick question about AT&T.
Go ahead. It sounds very much like the last call, but go ahead.
Yes. I wanted to know, how is it possible for me to maybe separate from a phone plan,
like a family phone plan?
Like not have a contract?
No, like you know how they have family plans all together?
Oh, so you want to basically split up from your family and just sort of venture out on your own?
Yeah.
Ah, can you do that? I've never been part of another service. Rob?
It's an important time in every kid's life when this happens.
I guess, yeah.
But yeah, if you have your own phone number on your family's plan,
you should be able to start up service somewhere else and then port your phone number over to it
so you could keep the same number and move it over to whatever future service you go with.
But they'd have to terminate whatever it is they're on right now.
Are you looking to do this without letting the rest of the family know?
I mean, I don't want to be sneaky. I mean, I'm kind of thinking about it. It's an option, but...
Well, you know what? Call the representative
for your company and just ask them how that works. Have you tried that yet?
No, not quite. I just had one more question, not to bother you guys.
Okay, one more question from you and then we're gonna hear from Bernie.
Okay. In terms of the iPhone and like computers term-wise,
so I've recently been using Windows 8.
My condolences.
Yes. I'm actually a Windows XP fan. Unfortunately, I heard your broadcast.
I like XP too. It does everything I need it to do for the machine I use it on. And I resent
being pushed into getting things that, to be honest, are more of a pain to use. But that's just me.
Yeah. But the main thing that I hate about Windows XP is that every time I sync my iPod,
it constantly wants to go into iTunes and then back it up. And then when I try to see the backup,
it won't allow me to do anything. So if I try to go into iCloud and see that backup,
it won't let me view that backup. Any suggestions?
You know, I'm sure there's an answer to this and probably the personal computer people coming on
after us would be better suited to answer that question. So I suggest calling them and they
might know. Now, Bernie, yes, what do you have? I just wanted to warn our caller that he may not
be able to get that mobile carrier, AT&T Wireless, to change anything if he's not the authorized
contact for the account, which might be one of his parents.
Well, but at least that fact can be conveyed, you know, just to get the information as to
what would be required. Then he can go and impersonate his parents later.
I didn't want to.
No, that's not good advice. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to actually.
Oh, no, it's fine. It's fine. I'm not an idiot completely to do that. So that's fine.
Yeah. All right. Good luck with that. Let us know how it turns out.
I'm always willing to help out the young people out there.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
All right.
Please turn down your radio.
It's down.
All right.
There it goes.
All right. What's on your mind?
All right. The guy thinks a story about the guy in the movie theater in Ohio with those
Google glasses.
Google glasses. Yes.
That is so weird.
Isn't it?
It's really out there.
It's out there.
I mean, I'm just I'm just wondering what's to stop them from checking when they're going to
start checking people when they go into the theater for the cell phones with cameras on them.
I mean, heaven forbid, somebody would want to maybe they want to take the movie.
It's really good.
Or maybe they want to check and see or take the scene in the movie.
What's to stop them?
Yeah, well, already there's already technology for this.
The NPA has announced, although I think it's mostly just smoke and mirrors,
that they have technology that was borrowed from a military contractor to seek out lenses.
They have like special cameras and sensors back behind the movie screen, up above the movie screen.
And they look to see if there are like camcorder lenses or the lenses on cell phone cameras.
And they can detect them and put them all on a screen so the security people know exactly
what seat to go to to grab the person taking the video of the movie.
That's kind of scary. I didn't know they had that technology.
Wow.
Ironically enough, Bernie, if you were to actually build such a system,
probably mirrors and or smoke would actually be involved.
Yeah, in this particular case.
You guys are kidding.
We're not kidding.
I wish we were.
But thanks for that call.
We have time for one more.
Let's see who's out there.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hello.
Yes, speak up.
Hi.
Yeah, I was curious.
I had a question about the Hope Conference.
I didn't know if there would be an applicable room rate at the Pennsylvania Hotel.
Oh, excellent question.
Yes, in fact, there is.
We just announced it this week, and we totally forgot to mention it on the radio.
There is a special rate.
You call the Hotel Pennsylvania, ask for the Hope X rate,
or you go to the link that we provide on our website.
And believe it or not, this is kind of amazing.
The rate is actually lower than it was two years ago.
So that's pretty awesome.
And Emanuel, what's the phone number for the Hotel Pennsylvania?
Pennsylvania 65000.
Now, the way you spell that, obviously, is P-E-7-3-6-5-thousand, area code 212.
Oldest phone number in the world.
All right.
Thanks.
Thanks for that question.
All right.
Take care.
And that's going to pretty much do it for us here tonight on Off the Hook.
We'll be back again next week.
You can write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We'll be happy to hear from you.
Maybe we'll even read your letter on the radio.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for the Personal Computer Show here on WBAI.
Stay out of trouble.
Stay out of controversy, because Lord knows hackers don't want you to
get involved in that kind of a thing.
It's Emanuel for Off the Hook.
See you next week.
Good night.
Hey, man.
That was Off the Hook.
That's what I say.
Oh, my goodness.
Hey, they come out with great music out there.
Hey, you know, everything's going on.
Is it cold enough for you?
No.
No, it's not cold enough for you.
It's cold enough for me.
I'll tell you that in New York City.