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And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York.
The time is 7 o'clock. Time once again for Off The Hook.
I cut myself while shaving. Now I can't make a cough.
We couldn't get much worse. But if they could, they would.
Bum diddly bum for the best. Expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum for the best.
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Okay, it's very disheartening to not be able to hear oneself over the radio.
Ah, there we are, because this button was not hit.
So nobody was able to hear me. It's a good thing, too. I said some bad words.
This is Off The Hook, Emanuel Goldstein here on this Wednesday evening,
joined tonight by Mike.
You know I could hear you. Bad words and all.
Okay, you know, somebody is really messing up this studio here.
Go ahead, Mike. Try again.
Is this better?
Yeah, someone pressed all the buttons to make it not work.
I sound unusually loud to myself. I don't know what's up with that.
All right, you know, it's just everything's going wrong today.
The guards wouldn't let us in, and there's cops all over the street blocking things.
But anyway, so Mike's here. Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Kyle.
Hello.
And Bernie S.
Greetings from Pennsylvania. I could hear you the whole time, too.
Bernie S, of course, they pressed that button, too, to make that not work.
Hold on, I've got to figure this out now.
What button could that be? Anybody want to guess?
This one? This one? Bernie, keep talking.
Did you try the blue button?
This is sabotage here. Someone pressed all the wrong buttons, so nothing works.
How about the green button?
No, I pressed all the buttons, and I think we're back now.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, we hear you. Can you hear me?
Yeah, I could hear you the whole time.
Well, I imagine. You couldn't hear me at the beginning, though, with all the silence.
Yes, I could.
Really?
Yes.
That wasn't even registering on the board.
But I could hear you. You were registering with me.
We don't need NSA because we can do this ourselves.
What are the guards doing outside? What's going on?
It's just every other car has a cop for some reason today.
I don't know why that is. I've noticed that all the way in from Long Island.
It's National Police Day or something.
Is the Boston Marathon security perimeter extended all the way down to New York City?
I think so. I think maybe.
Wow. It can't be too safe.
Yeah. We're all freaking out here about various things.
We had quite an issue coming in, actually, just dealing with computer problems before.
I don't know if anybody else has experiences.
Does anybody even just for the fun of it use Windows XP?
Nobody? We're all too good for that?
Yes, I do.
Yeah, I know you were with me when this happened.
Bernie, you do?
Yes, I've used it.
Okay.
Since the support expired.
Yeah, and that's the thing.
It's like, this is fascinating because they're kind of trying to get you.
They're trying to force you to either buy a new computer or go to Windows 8 or something like that.
And today what happened was all of the...
Yes, Mike?
I have a message that your microphone is still not going through the air.
My microphone is still not going through the air? How do you like that? Really?
So I can hear me.
And apparently some people can hear you faintly through these microphones,
but that doesn't help enough.
It doesn't help enough.
What is going on with this place?
How am I supposed to fix this if I'm hearing myself?
I'm going to press every button imaginable now.
Oh God, not that one.
I don't know what to do.
All the buttons are...
Who was in here before us pressing all the wrong buttons?
I don't know how to fix this.
I hear myself fine.
People say they can't hear me.
Then I can't hear me and people say they hear me.
This is like some kind of a nightmare scenario here.
Yeah, okay.
Alright, I have word that it is fixed.
Whatever button you pressed was the right button.
I pressed all the buttons, Mike.
Well, remember to do that next time.
I don't know.
Can we start over again?
Can I just go back outside and come in here?
Because this is ridiculous.
We could, but that would mean getting the band back in here to play the theme again.
Alright, let's change the combination on that door.
You know what? Let's put a combination on that door
and then let's change it so that whoever did this doesn't do it again, ever.
Kyle, maybe you can help me figure this out.
I'm currently on a browser and I used a maximum number of tabs
and I can't get over to the rest.
Oh, wait a minute. Maybe it's over there.
Okay, here we go.
I'm trying to say about Windows XP.
I looked this up and apparently this is a big deal today
that Windows itself is attacking its own operating system
and making it come to a crawl.
There's this thing called anti-malware service
and since XP is at the end of its life, it's no longer supported,
that no longer works.
But it doesn't keep it from trying to work
and what that does, it hogs all the system resources
and makes nothing work.
And the solution, if you click on things to do to fix this,
the solution is buy another computer
or get another operating system
because Windows XP is no longer being supported.
It really is a way of...
It's kind of what's going on here with the board.
They're sabotaging their own products
to make people get something else.
Now, I found the website.
Unfortunately, it's not in very good English.
The headline says,
Today on all Windows XP computers
stopped working Microsoft anti-malware service.
What?
Well, that's what it says. That's the headline.
That's as good as it gets.
What website is this?
This is Microsoft.com, actually.
They don't have anyone in the entire company
who can write in English?
Just a headline. It's not even a whole article.
That's the least of it.
That's the least of the problems they have right now.
This person says,
We have 400 machines that we are migrating to Windows 7
that report same issue.
Antivirus stopped and restart automatically.
But as you can see, everybody shares the same language.
So it's a forum.
So it's not Microsoft's fault, the poor English.
Well, they're not supervising it.
But clients are useless during restart.
Emmanuel.
Yes.
I first thought you were talking about Microsoft Security Essentials,
which is the antivirus software.
It is.
And by de-installing that,
and this is really the way to fix it,
de-install that and everything will work just fine.
Except you might get a few viruses.
I have a computer here that is running Windows XP
and I'm looking at it.
And Microsoft Security Essentials is not,
while it's done its updates,
not going to update any more antivirus signatures
for Windows XP.
It's not hogging any more memory than it usually did.
Well, I've seen nothing but errors
saying that this particular program has crashed,
sent an error report to Microsoft,
that whole deal.
And while that is happening,
and even during the reboot process,
everything slows down to a crawl.
And apparently this is going on
in various other places as well.
This person says,
we also have computers with Windows 7
but they are no fault occurred.
The problem there is that this doesn't happen to Windows 7.
It's only happening on XP.
So that's just something to keep in mind.
It was a bit of fun.
It was just something we were trying to figure out earlier.
My attitude with this is that
basically once this program
is obsolete, you really don't need it
because anything it's done to update
or add something to your system
to prevent it being vulnerable
has been done and updated and installed.
So I think actually removing
the Security Essentials software
you're probably better off just removing it
because the especially annoying thing about this
is that it really, really, really
slows down your system.
I'm sorry, your voice for some reason
isn't going through on the microphone.
Do you want to say all that again?
I'm sorry.
I was just going to say that
Microsoft Security Essentials being now
not supported isn't going to download
or provide any patches or protection
against new vulnerabilities.
So having it on your system
thinking it's
doing things that are useful
it's really
you're kind of on your own anyway.
So having it there
and that in conjunction with the fact that
this warning
takes up a lot of processing
cycles and memory
and really incapacitates the machine
it's kind of almost better to just get rid of it
and deal with this brave new world
of no Microsoft
security software.
Well there's other security software you can use
to replace it.
There's plenty of other free antivirus software
like Avast and things like that
that you can still run under XP
without a lot of problems.
The thing is, one of the options to fix
the problems that you're having
is never uninstall this particular program
that's telling you this.
It's basically replace your hardware, replace your software
for more things from us
and unfortunately most people
won't know to do something else
other than that.
Okay, well we don't want to talk about our problems
all day, do we? Although we seem to have
more than our share.
We do want to talk about some other things
that have been going on in the world.
Bernie, I understand the whole Weave case has been
what, thrown out?
Yeah, Weave
I don't think we've ever had them
on the show. I'm quite sure we haven't
on the show.
As we spoke about
on the show last week or two weeks ago
with our guest from the EFF
about, it was a
computer fraud and abuse
computer fraud and abuse act
prosecution
just in a nutshell
he went to an unprotected AT&T
website that was available to
anybody in the public
where AT&T iPhone users
this is a few years ago, iPhone users
account information
like their email address and stuff
was completely unprotected by any kind of password
or anything like that. And he discovered
this bug and apparently told AT&T
about it and they didn't do much
and so then he told a news
media organization called Gawker about it
and sent them about 100,000
or many thousands of
customers info
which Gawker then published
although redacted, but it took people like
Mayor Bloomberg
Rahm Emanuel who at the time was the White House Chief of Staff
other really important people
who got really annoyed
by this and AT&T got their
pound of flesh by
having the Department of Justice prosecute
Weave. Now it was a really
bogus prosecution
and this computer fraud and abuse
act is really unconstitutionally
vague. It doesn't even define what unauthorized
access means in the statutory language
but the Third Circuit
which in Philadelphia
where his appeal was heard
a couple weeks ago
refused to hear any of those arguments
but they would hear arguments about a venue
and so his attorney said
well this case shouldn't have ever
been tried in New Jersey
because Weave was not in New Jersey
servers he allegedly accessed were not in New Jersey
nothing was in New Jersey
and believe it or not
the court agreed and said
yep, this was held in the wrong venue
it should have been held either in Arkansas
or California or Texas or wherever the servers were
and Weave was in Arkansas
and this is an important case because
not from a technical standpoint
but from a legal standpoint you don't want prosecutors
overzealous prosecutors
to charge you to go around
what's called forum shopping and find
the easiest forum in the land
to prosecute your case in
had this case been brought in the Ninth Circuit
where California is in Silicon Valley
the judges there are a little more savvy
the Third Circuit judges
admitted he had really basically no clue
of knowledge of how the internet works
he said this, I heard him say it, I was there
so
this case was thrown out
he is no longer convicted
but the feds can charge him again
it's not really a double jeopardy situation
they could charge him again but
we'll see
why is this not a double jeopardy situation?
well it's a little bit complicated
and I don't understand it completely but
he
in effect the prosecution
never happened legally
even though he spent more than a year
in federal prison
for this completely bogus prosecution
it's kind of considered
harmless error
I know it makes no sense but the law
has nothing to do with logic or common sense
it's the law
so the feds could indeed go back and charge him
in another circuit
like where one of the servers were
like California or Texas
or where he was in Arkansas
I'm sure the feds really hate to lose
they have like a 97% conviction rate
so they would hate to lose this
but the good thing about this is if they do charge him again
it then does open
the opportunity for him to argue
again about the unconstitutional
vagueness of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
which would be a wonderful thing
because that really needs to be heard
for a federal circuit court
so we'll see how this goes
the good news for Weave
is that he's either out or will be out
very soon from federal prison
he doesn't get the year of his life back
he doesn't even get an apology
they don't give you apologies
they don't give you back wages
they give you nothing
very true
Bernie there was also another case right
there was the Ladara Levison case
on Lavabit
yeah what's going on with that
wow he's the guy that ran Lavabit
which some of us know
is a pretty good secure
email provider
everything is encrypted
and none other than Edward Snowden
had an account on Lavabit
and after those documents
that he allegedly leaked
to media outlets from the NSA
the NSA
or the feds
took a keen interest in
Lavabit because
Ed Snowden had an account there
so they knocked on his door effectively
the FBI did and said hey
this is a national security letter
I'm paraphrasing here because it would be a felony
for me to reveal anything that was in a national security letter
well how would you know it was in a national security letter
yes a national security letter
but how would you know
these are news media reports
and these are things that Ladara
has averred in non-specific language
that he was compelled
by the NSA to
divulge the SSL keys
for his entire
all the servers, everything
not just for this one account
but for everybody that had an account
on Lavabit
and Ladara was actually conscientious enough to say
no
I'm not going to compromise the security of all my users
and he shut down his company
he shut down Lavabit
and then he kind of
didn't make it easy for the feds to have it
and he won the key on paper
in like really
2.3
in a big stack of paper
and the federal judge found him in contempt of court
that's a serious charge
you go to federal prison for being in contempt of court
but this guy really
I admire Ladara Levison
for not
bending over for the feds
and compromising the security of all his customers
just so the feds could get information about one
user
it's insane
so this guy could go to federal prison
for just standing up for what he thinks are his rights
the weird thing is
part of the reason
the reason this is all so complicated is that
he wasn't even able to argue before the courts
about the unconstitutional vagueness
of
what he was being asked to do
or the
constitutionality of having to
turn over all the keys
for all the users
to give access to all the users' communications
and he wasn't able to argue that
because he represented himself pro se
because he couldn't go to an attorney and explain
what was in this national security letter
because it's illegal to do that
it's a felony just to reveal that information
so he had to represent himself as his lawyer
then he got another lawyer
who then when he went to Washington D.C.
to Washington D.C. court
that lawyer wasn't on the bar
to represent him there
and the bottom line is
that the lawyer himself
being able to get a good lawyer
without committing a felony
exposing the national security letter content
he lost the ability
to argue the constitutionality
of what he was being asked to do
so this is a bad thing for him
it's a bad thing for
everyone, one of us
and we need to follow this case
and support Darla Levinson
just look up Lava Bet online
you can find more about this
it could affect all of this one way or another
sounds that way
and wow
so much going on
so much intrigue
and interesting developments
that are happening
but let's focus on something good
that happened this past week
and that was the awarding of Pulitzer Prizes
to various journalists
first of all Washington Post
Guardian U.S. won the Pulitzer Prize
on Monday for public service
which as many of us know
are the most prestigious awards in journalism
and this was for the articles
based on the NSA leaks
that were provided by Edward Snowden
through a series of reports
that exposed the NSA's widespread domestic surveillance program
the Post and Guardian U.S.
set off an international debate
on the limits of government surveillance
the papers also came under heavy criticism
by the American and British governments
with lawmakers accusing them of compromising
national security
the Post and Guardian U.S.
said it gave the award for the authoritative
and insightful reports
that helped the public understand
how the disclosures fit into the larger framework
of national security
David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker
who was not a Pulitzer judge
said that the story was the epitome
of important reporting
and the epitome of what public service
in journalism is all about
when you use epitome twice in a single sentence
you know it's big
David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker
who was not a Pulitzer judge
said that the story was the epitome
of important reporting
and the epitome of what public service
in journalism is all about
when you use epitome twice in a single sentence
you know it's big
David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker
who was not a Pulitzer judge
said that the story was the epitome
of important reporting
and the epitome of what public service
in journalism is all about
I don't know, was anybody surprised by this?
I was a bit surprised
it's nice to see
the mainstream recognizing
the value of what happened
Yeah, it does happen, Mike?
I saw an interesting question, so Laura was
credited as a byline in all kinds of
the other outlet stories
so did she win two Pulitzers?
I don't know if she won two
I think she only won one
Only officially, but she shares in the other
so good for her
We have some good news to report
An interesting thing is that
both she and Glenn Greenwald are
in the United States for the first time in quite a while
and they flew in without any
incident, so that's good news
because nobody knew they were coming, Mike
and now you've just blown it
It was pretty well publicized
It's scary that
both of them are U.S. citizens, they did not know
whether they would be allowed to return to their own
country without incident
they could be harassed next time either of them
tries to come in, but at least
the good news is that this time they just sort of
walked through
Congratulations to them both
and to everybody else involved in that
maybe one day Woodstone will be able to come back to this country
and not face any incidents
although I think that might be a dream
That would be nice, but considerably less likely
Go ahead, Bernie
Do you or Mike or anyone there in the studio think
that the fact that Laura Poitras
and Glenn Greenwald just won Pulitzer Prizes
for
excellent journalism, do you think that that
provided sort of a shield or a talisman
for them to come to the U.S.
and fear
being arrested less?
It would look really bad if the U.S. government
arrested two
journalists that just came to the U.S. to pick up
their
Pulitzer Prize, wouldn't it?
Yeah, I think so. They came on Friday
before the Pulitzers were announced to pick up
a different award, the Polk Award
which is also prestigious
but less so, so it would have been
less bad. It's hard to say, I mean
the U.S. government is really good at not
telling us what it thinks
in certain circumstances, so
maybe
they're just waiting six months for some of the
publicity to die down
This was a very well-publicized
entry, people were tracking
the plane as it went
so maybe sometime they'll just sort of sneak in
and they'll be arrested then
or maybe they're not charged with any crime
They've been cleared by the government's secret
processes. The scary thing
is that there's no way to know
Until the next time
I think this is a really
amazing accomplishment for them to
get that kind of acknowledgement and that
kind of award
As we look back on this further and
further out in the future
this will
strike us as appropriate and
you know, we'll probably
be amazed that that's not
that was the only thing
and I sure hope there are other
institutions and
groups that feel
the importance of what they've done is worthy of
these kinds of awards because having that
as you suggested
Bernie
that's a huge accomplishment
and to go after people like that
it really
you start getting wider
and wider amounts of groups that you
would disillusion yourself from if you're
a government or an authority of some type
The Pulitzer has been around
forever and ever and ever and they're
most known for
like journalistic photography and stuff
so I'm really familiar
with it from that angle and
I think this is a
I don't know, I might even say like a coup
absolutely a wonderful development
for them
I think there are a lot of good reporting. Is the Pulitzer
these days, is it kind of akin
to the Oscars where there's like a lot
of good films but only these really crappy
blockbusters typically get
an Oscar or does the Pulitzer really have
more credibility in being really
sort of the creme de la creme of the best journalism
I mean there's so much good journalism out there
there's tons of really crappy journalism
but of all the good journalism, how do they pick
how do they pick
the few winners and
political concerns must
be part of the equation
There's still that element to the Pulitzer, it's still very prestigious
it's the most prestigious thing in the field of
journalism and photojournalism as well
it's certainly
nobody wins a Pulitzer just because they're popular
at the moment, it's all about the work that
they did and the value of that work
and if you go online and pull up a list
of people who have won this prize
it's a very prestigious list
these are people who have made history, people who
have reported history, people who have been integral
to the whole process of journalism
as we know it
history will remember
now these two
these two have joined those ranks
Bernie, you raise a good point
but it's simply not that shallow
it's a very serious award
I wasn't assessing if it was, I was just asking
if it was. We had a Pulitzer Prize winning
photojournalist come to
the Beyond Hope conference back in
1997, Diff Pram
Diff Pram, the guy who
was, the movie
The Killing Fields was about
and he came and took some great photos of the
Beyond Hope conference which ended up on the
front page of the New York Times
Sunday edition above the fold
and that was really awesome
yeah
absolutely and it's just a
totally different league though and I think to
compare them to the Oscars would be
really kind of a sad comparison
it's real life
yes it certainly is
you know what else is real life?
Google. Google's pretty real and
pretty scary sometimes and this is
something that, you know, the very first day
that Google Glass was announced is a question that I
raised and apparently now
people are starting to figure it out, yeah
they've patented
a smart contact
lens system with a camera built
in so people can be walking around with Google Glass
on, you won't even know it, you won't be able to see them
the lens has the camera
built in, it could be developed to help the blind see
and give them guidance, that's all
fine and good but there are also
other disadvantages that it will
be bringing in, it can
it can shrink Google Glass
to fit on a pair of lenses
they're already developing lenses with a
screen and medical sensors built in
and that project was developed
in the secretive Google X Lab
yes, do you know about Google
X Lab? yeah
just like Hope X but
more on that later
a bit different, a bit different
more evil, yeah
we're trying to be evil, it's hard
yes Rob, we try but I'll
be more excited about the field
of smart contact lenses when that starts
happening in real life
as a lot of people know the patent system is
pretty much a shambles still and
you can get a patent in there for
most any wacky thing that you come
up with as long as you file the right paperwork
you can at least start that
whole process so once this starts getting done
we'll see what happens
elsewhere in Glass news
you can now as a regular citizen
go out and buy Google Glass
if you want to
they were only in a sort of early beta
only approved people got them staged
for a while but now apparently
they're available to the general public
well it's amazing to me, they're very good at this
very good at making their products
desirable
by making them scarce
to this day people still think Gmail
is something that
they really have to jump at
and grab before it goes away
Google Glass, yeah please give me the
opportunity to spend $1500 on something
that might not even work properly
but now apparently everybody
can get one
it's still in development though, there's still a lot
that needs to be fixed for it to
do what they say it's going to do
there were the 10
Google Glass myths that were distributed
by Google a few weeks ago
you guys see this, this is something
that was spread around because
a lot of people are criticizing
what these
particular things are able to do
and
I guess they're concerned with the
public image as to how people might
view it, myth number one
Glass is the ultimate distraction
from the real world, instead of looking
down at your computer, phone or tablet while life happens
around you, Glass allows you to look
up and engage with the world, big moments
in life, concerts, your kids performances
an amazing view shouldn't be experienced
through the screen you're trying to capture them on
that's why Glass is off by default
and only on when you want it to be
it's designed to get you a bit of what you need
just when you need it and then get you back
to the people and things in life you care about
well do we believe this?
has anyone actually
worn one of these things so that
they can try to get back to life
as quickly as possible
I'm pretty good at ignoring life without Google Glass
here's myth number two
Google Glass is, I'm just going to refer to it like
they do, as Glass from now on, myth number two
Glass is always on and recording everything
well just like your cell phone
the Glass screen is off by default
video recording on Glass is set to last
10 seconds, people can record
for longer but Glass isn't designed for
or even capable of always on recording
the battery won't last longer than 45 minutes
before it needs to be charged
so next time you're tempted to ask an explorer
those are the people who are wearing the things
and testing them out
next time you're tempted to ask an explorer if he's recording
you, ask yourself if you'd be doing
the same with your phone, chances are
your answers will be the same, I gotta take exception
to this because if you're holding up a phone
to somebody, it's pretty obvious that you're recording
them, it's not surreptitious at all
if you're wearing something on your head, you could
be pressing a button and recording something, only
records 10 seconds, hey I think that can be adjusted
I think maybe they can extend
that, the battery only lasts 45 minutes
hey you can put another battery in
it's not so difficult and technology
only gets more and more advanced
so yeah, it's entirely possible that people
can walk around all day long
with Google Glass or with the new contact lenses
and record everything they see, it is possible
I gave a 5 minute talk once and someone
with Glass recorded the whole thing without
me knowing about it and posted on the internet
and in that case it was a public talk, I don't
mind at all, but in general
if I had minded, I never would have known
and certainly longer than
10 seconds. The thing I'm always banging
on about the camera in Google Glass
is it's a very crappy camera as these
things go, we all remember the first
blurry camera phones that
that had a very small camera that took very
crappy pictures on our old flip phones and things
that's because the camera was
shoved in there as sort of an afterthought and the
camera on Glass right now is at that same stage
it can only record the
10 second clips by default or
if you're constantly recording I think it's the longest
you can record on a full charge is
10 minutes of straight video
recording before your battery dies
and so
excuse me, so given
that, I mean they're not the
sort of magical future camera glasses
that are being portrayed in the media and stuff
they're just
an eyeball display for your phone or your computer that you
hook it to and the
camera is not the reason for it being
and it's not even a very good reason to get Google Glass
because if you want a secret pair
of camera glasses you can get ones that are
actually better cameras for a lot less than you would spend
on Glass right now.
One interesting possibility
or dangerous part of
this contact thing is
what happens if something fails or
like the screen part of it is
uh
Sorry, go ahead.
No, you should take that. No, I'm dealing with it.
Go ahead. Is it important? Yeah, it's a memo
from somebody in authority. Anyway, my point is like
if you're wearing glasses and it messes up
you can tear them off your face very quickly. If you have
to go dipping into each eyeball
or even one eyeball
to like get, has anybody ever
worn contact, I don't have contact lens, I have pretty good vision
but like it's an
involved process. You need a solution
you have to touch your eyeball
it stings
you tear up a little bit
you might get irritation. What if you get pollen
and an eyelash comes off because you're
messing with your eye, then you get an eyelash caught in your eye
Say you're operating a large
crane on top of a building in
New York City and your glass messes up
and you're trying to get this out and you like
knock over three buildings in the
process or something. I mean it could be
a lot harder to remove
the glass, literally.
Okay, I'm sorry about that interruption
I was informed that we are being
a bit one-sided here and
that we should have some kind of
opposing viewpoint in addition
to all the Google propaganda that
we're putting out right now. I mean yeah, we're saying it now
but we're not saying it nearly as well as a list
can say it. So while we're presenting
the top ten Google glass
myths, we should also present
the top
ten ways not to be what's known as
a glass hole that
Consumer Watchdog has published
and just to give you a couple of
them because we've read two of the Google glass
myths. Let's look at number ten of this
You cannot drive
with a television set on your head
and I guess that's
probably true, right?
It's not a good idea. Why
pay $1,500 to let a corporation
hack your eyes?
Two things to
think about, right? Yeah, they should pay me
to use this silly product, right?
How much free publicity are we giving
this product anyway?
Which list do you want that on? Is that the pro or the
anti? You know, we're giving this
product. I don't think you should buy it. Mike, don't you think you're
a little late? Yeah. Okay
let's go back to the myths.
Glass explorers are technology worshipping
geeks. That's true in my experience.
Everyone I've ever met that
wore one. I mean maybe it's not true in general
but everyone I've ever met. Well Mike,
our explorers come from all walks of life.
They include parents,
firefighters, pickpockets?
No way I read that wrong. But probably does.
Zookeepers. How do they get pickpockets
out of zookeepers? And why
are they mentioning zookeepers of all
people? Brewmasters, film students,
reporters, doctors? I mean, to be fair
most people I meet are technology loving geeks
but... The one thing they have in
common is that they see the potential
for people to use technology in a way that helps
them engage more with the world around them
rather than distract them from it.
In fact, many explorers say because
of glass they use technology less
because they're using it much
more efficiently. We know
what you're thinking. I'm not distracted by
technology but the next time
you're on the subway or sitting on a bench
or in a coffee shop
just look at the people around you. You might
be surprised at what you see.
Well if that's not condescending I don't know what is.
Wow.
Alright let's go back to
the consumer watchdog and match that
with something else. Say goodbye to
using public bathrooms.
Wow. Well think about
that.
I don't want to think about that. That's pretty
scary. I think we've kind of
made the point. We could read this for hours
and I've never used Google Glass
I'm kind of curious. We're going to try and do something
for hope where people can play around and experiment
and maybe break it. I don't know because
that's what hackers do. We experiment.
But this whole
self surveillance society we're building
kind of scares me sometimes. What do you think Bernie?
I agree with you.
It's scary and it's also amusing
that around this, also very recently
Bill Gates or
Microsoft, I'm not sure personally
or Microsoft in general, just got
a patent to detect and
respond to any cameras in the vicinity.
Some device, I'm not sure
how it works. I haven't looked into it yet but it's
a pending patent to thwart
video snooping. Apparently
as a touché to Google's
Glass.
It's kind of amusing that they're both
issuing competing patents
along these lines.
Or issuing or getting
competing patents rather.
I'm also looking at another story
that came in earlier
that apparently Google
may have known about Heartbleed and didn't tell
the government. Have you seen this story?
Google knew about a critical flaw
in internet security but it didn't alert
anyone in the government.
Neil
Mehta, a Google engineer,
first discovered Heartbleed, which is a bug
that undermines the widely used encryption
technology OpenSSL.
Discovered it sometime in March.
A team at the Finnish security firm
CodeNomicon
discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was
able to patch most of its services such as email,
search, YouTube, before the companies
publicized the bug
on April 7th.
Researchers also noticed a handful of other
companies about the bug
before going public.
Security firm CloudFlare, for example,
said it fixed the flaw on March 31st.
But the White House said on Friday
that no one in the federal government knew about the
problem until April. The administration
made a statement to deny an earlier
Bloomberg report
that the National Security Agency had been
exploring Heartbleed for years.
So there's that going on. There are people
that are saying that NSA has known about it
and has been exploiting it
for years now, and now there are people saying
that, well, Google knew about it and didn't tell
anybody, and the NSA didn't know about it at all.
Who do you believe?
So I find the Google
angle not very interesting. Someone at Google
discovered the bug. Of course he knew about
it before he publicized it. The
suggestion is that it was the order of weeks.
I don't really care. It's more than one person, I think,
is what they're saying. Whatever.
He told some of his co-workers. But I think
this question, the Bloomberg story,
did the NSA know about
Heartbleed and use it to get people's
data before
it was publicized is very interesting. It was a very
weird story. They
have all kinds of quotes from all kinds of people
that are all sourced, but they're all information
that was in the public domain anyway.
And then the news of the story was
completely unsourced. They don't say where they got it,
who it's from, anything about it. So my question
is, if the government
will open up an investigation into
who leaked the sources and methods
to Bloomberg, I have a guess
as to the answer.
But it's really interesting. I don't know if this story
is true or not. The NSA denied it,
which makes me think that it probably is true because
anything the NSA says is a lie.
But other than that, it's a really weird story.
I don't know what to believe. Well, I think
the principal technologist for
ACLU says it.
Christopher Sughorn
pretty much says the
U.S. government only has itself to blame
if tech companies like
Google don't trust it to handle sensitive
security information. He said because
government agencies often share information with each other,
there's no way for a company to be sure
the NSA won't get information shared with
another agency and use it to hack into private
communications. I suspect that
over the past eight months, many
companies have taken a real hard look at their existing
policies about tipping off the U.S. government.
That's the price you pay
when you're acting like an out-of-control, offensive
adversary. Wow.
And that's what makes this so interesting
from a perspective of the security industry
because security researchers
would tell you about the idea of
responsible disclosure. And if
you find a bug in something, the
responsible thing to do is try and
inform the people who would be affected by
that in a manner that
can get it fixed before the
quote-unquote bad guys can do a lot with it. But also
if you find a bug, you're
generally assuming that somebody else
somewhere has found it too or will
very soon find it. So you want to get these things
fixed. You want to get the info out there. And
the idea that any
security
workers were sitting on this
sort of thing when it affects really the entire
Internet as we know it, that's
kind of scary.
Go ahead, Mike. So the
government's statement denying they knew about HarperLeed has
two parts. The first part, I don't know if it's true or not,
but the second part was if we had known about
HarperLeed, we would have disclosed it.
That is certainly a lie. The NSA
has a large team of
people who are dedicated to finding these sorts
of bugs and exploiting them for
the U.S. government's interests.
That's well known. And
I would like to hear from our audience, if any of
them run a software product,
if anyone has ever been notified by
the NSA, hey, we found a bug in your thing,
you should fix it. I don't think it's ever
happened. And we know we have people looking
for these bugs. So
draw your own conclusions.
Okay. Moving on to a
segment I think we should label
Dumbass of the Week.
This is the story of a Dutch
teenager who decided
to take to Twitter and
tweet directly to American Airlines.
Hello, my name's Ibrahim and
I'm from Afghanistan. I'm part of Al Qaeda
and on June 1st I'm going to do something really big.
Bye.
That resulted in a
response from American Airlines
to Queen Dimitrix,
which is the username being used.
Sarah, apparently they
looked up her real name. Sarah, we
take these threats very seriously.
Your IP address and details will be
forwarded to security and the FBI.
Well, after the teenager saw
that message, she continued to tweet throughout
the entire day. They started
with messages of regret.
O-M-F-G. I was
kidding. I'm so sorry. I'm
scared now. I was joking and it was my friend,
not me. Take her IP address, not mine.
I was kidding. Please.
I'm just a girl. Please. I'm not
from Afghanistan. I never did anything
wrong in my love, which I imagine
probably was life.
And please save my live,
which I think she meant life.
And later she reflected
on how popular her account had made her
gaining tens of thousands of new
followers. What's particularly interesting
though, I'm looking at the image of
the original tweet to American
Airlines.
2,267 retweets.
2,267
people decided to resend the message
threatening American Airlines.
Anyway, she was
arrested in the Netherlands
and spoke to the Dutch police
and says, we're not in a state that we can communicate
any state of charges
at this point. We just thought it was necessary to bring this out
mostly because of the fact that it caused a great deal
of interest on the Internet.
And a follow-up to that story from the Washington
Post,
one dumb teenager is easily excused.
I'm not sure about that. But the host of
Twitter users currently tweeting bomb threats
at major airlines is another story entirely.
Dozens
of teenagers now tweeting bomb jokes
to American Airlines specifically.
For instance,
Alden Fernandez says, I have a bomb under the next
plane to take off.
Army Jacket says, I'm going to bomb your
737 jet.
Demi tweets, you really seem
to not care that I'm about to bomb your plane
that's headed to Paris. By the way, my name is
Ahmed. Et cetera, et cetera.
It just goes on and on.
This is unreal.
I guess the feature
should be called dumb asses of the week because, wow,
there's certainly a whole lot of them.
Do people really think that they can tweet anonymously
and not have somebody
trace them back? I do wonder
exactly how this girl was traced
though because she's in the Netherlands as we know
and American
Airlines should not have access to
the IP address that she was tweeting from.
That's not how IP addresses
work. That's not how Twitter works.
While this girl may have
committed a crime, it's really amazing that
they were able to track it down so quickly,
so internationally and with
so much internet.
I have some concerns. How are you reading
that American Airlines is the one that had the
IP address? American Airlines says in their first
response to her, we have your IP address.
I think it's not true. They say your IP address and
details will be forwarded to security and the FBI.
I imagine they probably contacted Twitter and said,
hey, we've got an al-Qaeda threat here.
Do you mind when you have a chance
of forwarding that information to the FBI?
I imagine that's the kind of thing
that Twitter would do.
I'd just like to know more. I'm not certain
that anything that I would disagree with
was done, but it went awfully quickly and I would
like to know more about the process.
Bernie, any thoughts on these offensive
tweets? Well, I don't know
who would find them necessarily offensive
if they were kind of stupid, but at what
point do... How many people
does it take? Well, all these... First of all,
everybody who retweeted the original threat
won't they be equally
legally culpable? And
all the other teenagers that said,
me too, I'm going to do this
crazy. I'm an al-Qaeda
operative and I'm going to
bomb in your plane.
Are they all going to get arrested?
At what point do so many people
fake jokes on the internet,
bad jokes, admittedly,
on the internet, where then the government has
to give up and say, okay,
this is all just stupid. We're not going to arrest
anybody.
Yeah.
I don't know.
The way people treat these
particular services always mystifies
me and
thinking that you're anonymous
is really
the number one offense as far as I'm concerned
because it's so obvious that you're not.
Whether you're posting on Facebook, you're posting on Twitter,
saying anything
in a public forum, on a website,
your IP can be logged.
It's like making
a threatening phone call
and not blocking your caller ID, even though that's not enough.
People need to know that, yeah,
you're going to be
traced and that's part of the
threat for people who
aren't threatening
airlines.
Since it's an airline, I imagine that it's not only
like the NSA, but the
TSA would be involved with this somehow.
They've pretty much got instant
access to whatever they want these days, it seems.
I don't think there's much we can do about that.
Personally, from my perspective,
I tell a lot of jokes on Twitter that
bomb and now I'm a bit afraid.
Wow. Especially using that particular
metaphor there.
212-209-2900 is our telephone
number. We'd like to hear from our listeners if anything
is going on in your world.
Any questions that you might have,
we'd sure like to hear from you.
Again, 212-
209-2900.
That is our telephone number.
Jan from Belgium writes to
us. He wanted to know what
the closing tune on the
Off the Hook episode of April 2nd was. I know we
wrote back to him, but do you remember what it was, Kyle?
Off the top of your head?
I don't know the name of the song, but the artist was
Fotec and the album was
Form and Function and that was from around
1998 or earlier.
That's pretty specific information, so hopefully
that's enough for people to run out
and get their own copies.
Jan also continues,
I'm surprised that rotary phones still work
in the US. In Belgium,
where I'm from, they discontinued rotary phone
support on the network at least 15
years ago. I'm surprised
by this. Does anybody else
think that other countries have completely
discontinued rotary phone use?
I'm surprised.
Yeah, I'm very surprised by that.
I always thought that would be something that would just
always be there, but I guess
that's a fantasy.
We have a full switchboard, so
shall we take some phone calls? Hopefully the phones
work properly. Everything else seems to have
been broken today, but let's try this.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook.
Yes, hi. My name is Dave.
Hello, Dave. I have a question
about domain names and web hosting.
Well, ask away and we'll see
if we can help. Yes, talk about
privacy.
I was wondering, I registered
for a domain
registering company. I won't mention the name.
There are a lot of them that
claim that you pay them additional
money and you
get privacy, but I've experienced
unfortunately
that
someone just
files a subpoena without
any intent on my part
or actually doing anything illegal
except listing facts
and they subpoena the
company and they just turn over my
information. So I was
wondering if there's any way that I could
basically
register a domain
name
in private and keep it
private and are there any companies
that are honest as far as
keeping their word? And again,
the domain
name is something that I use
to put up hosting
and state facts.
No libel, no nothing,
nothing illegal activity.
The thing about domain names is they're
associated with every domain that's registered as something
called a whois info and
that by
ostensibly is supposed to be the full name
and address and telephone numbers
and email of the person who owns it.
Now, when
domain names started becoming a thing
it was generally okay to put your real
info in there if you didn't
mind people having that information, but
in the time since and up to now
there are
most domain registrars will
have something along the lines of a whois
guard or a whois
substitute of some sort where they'll put in
randomly generated information and their own
address and a randomly
generated email address that will go back to you.
The thing is the registrar will still
have your information and even if you
enter fake information in there, which you're not
technically allowed to do, but
if you choose to do such a thing
not only would that
probably be against the terms of use of the registrar
but it's also not
much of a defense because the registrar
at some point you're going to need to pay for the domain
and when you pay for it you're giving them
your credit card or some other sort of
info which is pretty easy to trace back
to you in most cases.
It's always going to be when you get
to things like subpoenas, I mean whois is
publicly available so anyone can
look at the information, but when you get to the
subject of a subpoena the company
in question is probably always going to just
comply with it because that's what they do.
So if you're doing
something that you think might attract that
sort of attention, attract that sort of
subpoena,
keep in mind that the company
is probably not going to go out on a limb
to defend you from such things
if they get a piece of legal letterhead
with a subpoena on it.
I would just add to what Rob is saying which is
absolutely true,
just as much as you could do is hold
onto your data, like don't give them
as much
information
as they want. Be as
conservative with what you get them as
long as possible. Keep it out of their
hands if it's simply a feature
that they're offering. Terms of
that feature could change and
if you've already given them the information
as Rob said,
it's already kind of on their
systems and they can do with it what they
feel they have to in one of
those circumstances and my only
suggestion
as far as obfuscating it would be
to create maybe
a LLC or a company
that could represent
what your site is
in so far as management and
operations. Perhaps put
some initials for your contact, your
point of contact for that company and
check out prepaid
credit cards.
212-209-2900 is our
telephone number. We just had a bunch of calls all disappear at
once. I don't know where they all went to but you
guys heard someplace unpleasant so please
call us back. We do have a couple of minutes left.
I remember fondly
the days where you could just do a who is and always find out
who owned a particular domain or
at least what fake name they used and figure it out
from there and now it seems the default
is to just simply hide
all that information and it's
kind of a useless
tool now. I also remember when
it used to be totally free to
register any domain name you wanted. It didn't
cost a penny and people, this was
back when the internet was first starting and
not every website
was taken so you could grab
famous names and companies
or phrases, whatever you wanted and it wasn't
a big deal and those people who did probably are
making out pretty well now. Right and now
we're having more like top level domains
and stuff and with IPv6 we're having
more addresses than ever but guess what? It's not
getting freer. No.
Someone's making a lot of money off this.
Second phone call. Good evening. You're on Off The Hook.
Speak up.
Or don't. If you don't speak up
we have to hang up. Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Anybody there?
Go ahead. Yeah, I'm calling
with a complaint. Okay, go ahead.
I am not
a fan of digital
telephone technology.
I'm a
user of a certain age. I grew up
primarily in the late 60s and 70s and
my first phone in the household
was a rotary phone and then when
I like the touchtone phone
when my parents upgraded
we went to that. The clarity is what I'm
talking about. Back then you
could make long distance calls coast to
coast and even when I
listen to the show and someone calls up on
a cell phone, you always
invariably hear that
I guess it would be voice
digital artifacting or
calls fading in and out.
The clarity, I mean, it's
just not there. Well, can I say something
sir? It sounds to me like you're
very clear. Are you by chance calling
from a landline? Well, here's the thing.
I'm at my
home and I'm calling from a landline.
My phone
service provider, the biggest one in the
New York metro area without mentioning any names
called me up about six months ago
and said, oh, we're moving away from
copper wires to home
landlines and we're bringing in
this new, I guess, fiber
optic technology. So,
I got a spaceship sitting in my
living room that they installed.
It's a box about
18 inches tall by about 10 inches
wide and there's a green light and it's staring
at me right now. And
I told the guy, I said, well, the phone in
the bedroom has always been a hard
wired landline. Can
I hook up to it? Because I'm actually
on a cordless base station phone
that I'm talking to you on.
Do you know if it's possible? Can I
jerry-rig the old touch
hard-lined phone into
that box? Yes.
Yeah? Yeah. But if you're
if you don't like digital
phone technology, it's almost a certainty
that the phone you're using is a digital
cordless phone. So, your
voice is already being digitized
and
you know,
made a mere approximation of your actual
waveforms. And even if you had all
analog phone service
with a copper line to the central office,
as soon as you get to the central office a few
miles from your house or maybe even closer,
it becomes digital at that point.
So, it's getting closer
to you every day and there's
no way to have a complete analog
phone conversation from
point A to point B anymore.
Because it's going to be converted to digital
somewhere along the line
sooner than you think. Like the phone you're holding
your hand right now, almost
certainly is a digital device.
I would just add, the
likelihood is they want to sell you stuff.
So, it's in their interest to dissuade you from
continuing to use copper. And
if you want to, you might be able to use
Sealex, competitive local exchange
carriers, if they're still around even.
But try to find carriers that will
use that company's
infrastructure, but bill you out
through their service. And then
you'll have less conversations with that provider
about all the excuses why
you can't continue to have
traditional pot service. They'll
actually be working
with another business who you actually work
with directly to
have competitive access. Because I
gather, if those smaller companies are still
around, they're
still have a right to
provide that service in the older ways.
Regardless of the fact that the upstream
owner of the infrastructure
is trying to move you towards fiber optics.
And I will also say something about
Fios is that it doesn't
have the same fail-safes
insofar as disaster
and having a powered
line. This is a bit more
technical, but a lot of the Fios boxes
have batteries in them themselves
to support emergency
connections and stuff like that.
If the system goes out, because it's
using light for the
fiber optics, it
takes a little bit of power, so those
boxes have to be powered. And if they can't provide
it from your home to keep one
end of the signal up,
then you have to provide it with a battery, and then you have a
limited use. Now people could hack it, they could
put a generator onto their Fios box,
whatever. But the point is
you can't beat the
huge generators and large amounts of
diesel at a central office.
I think that there's good digital
and there's bad digital. You can do anything
well, you can do anything poorly.
And yeah, you have to mix the two.
You have to mix the new with the old.
But do a good job when you do this.
We're out of time. I'd love to discuss this more
and talk about all kinds of other developments.
But we have to go. We're back next
week. Hopefully things will be working a little bit better.
Write to us, oth
at 2600.com. And another reminder,
we're doing a benefit for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation with
every ticket sold to the
Hackers on Planet Earth conference this July.
Hope.net has
full information on that.
And we have a percentage
going to the EFF
who fight for our digital rights.
It's so important. It's so important to stay
involved and stay informed on that.
This is Emmanuel for Off the Hook.
Stay tuned for the Personal Computer Show. We'll see you next week. Good night.
For one priceless moment.