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And the show is now off the hook.
The station is now off the hook.
A very good evening to you.
The program is off the hook. Rob T. Firefly here with you.
I am joined in the studio by Mike.
Good evening.
And on the phone by Emanuel.
Greetings from Budapest, Hungary.
Budapest, Hungary. And is that Kyle as well, I hear?
Yes, that's me.
How are you, gentlemen?
Well, we're kind of tired. It's 1 o'clock in the morning here.
But we're committed to doing at least half the show before Bernie comes on at 7.30, 1.30 our time.
Excellent. So what are you guys getting up to in Budapest?
Well, we've been basically just familiarizing ourselves with this pretty expansive city.
There's quite an extensive transit system, which always is a good start if you're in a new place.
And, well, we're still getting used to it.
But it's really functional and beautiful.
And, well, the city is as well.
Very old, but just very busy, very fast.
A lot of stuff going on.
And before this, we were in Bratislava in Slovakia.
Actually, the second time I was in Bratislava, and only the first time I was in Slovakia.
Well, the first time I was there, it was Czechoslovakia.
Before that, we were in...
We're having a hard time hearing you, Emmanuel.
I don't know if you can rearrange your antenna or something.
Well, I'm sure I can do that.
Louder. Can you hear me now?
We can hear you a bit. You're just breaking up a little.
Okay. Well, yeah, phone service is a problem in some places, although...
I guess you're managing to retain the ire of the phone company wherever in the world you travel.
You started to say that it was a problem, and then proved yourself right.
He's just tempting fate out there.
Did we lose him entirely? There's no way to know.
There really isn't, unless we hear from him or don't hear from him.
Okay, I'm here. Can you hear me? I'm staring my head out the window.
Now we hear you. Now you're clear.
My head is out the damn window right now, all right? Can you hear me?
Don't do anything rash, buddy. We can hear you now.
I want to be heard, all right?
I'm sure the good people...
Can I please get this out that I'm trying to say that things are very cheap over here,
and it's an amazing place to be,
and when people consider traveling, they should consider traveling to this part of the world.
It's very enlightening. People are very friendly, and you learn a lot.
How's the pastry?
I wouldn't know about that.
You don't know about pastry?
I know about it. I just haven't gotten to that part yet.
We've been exploring and figuring things out.
But listen, our travels are the least of what we're going to be talking about.
There's so much going on in the world, and, well, gosh, I don't know where to even begin.
It's been such a week of craziness as far as free speech, hypocrisy.
Well, they always seem to go hand in hand, don't they?
They really do.
Yeah.
Today, of course, marks one week after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
And, of course, we had the rally in Paris and throughout France that drew millions of people,
and a lot of people here in Europe are talking about that.
The headlines, of course, are all about that.
And almost, you know, in sync, unfortunately, with this is the hypocrisy that comes with it,
such as, well, we'll get into what David Cameron had to say,
but just the appearance, the appearance of all the Western leaders in the capital,
trying to join in with the march for freedom of expression,
when these are the people that have done more to hurt freedom of expression than, I think, anyone in the Western world,
it really was almost laughable.
But I think what we have to be careful about is not to confuse what the people are standing for
with the hypocrisy that the leadership of their respective countries represent.
And that's an unfortunate thing.
That's what the headlines focus on.
But it really was a good week for freedom of speech.
It really was something that people came together for and spoke loudly on their own,
not because they represent a government or anything like that, because they represent themselves as people.
It's something that we as hackers have always recognized and have always fought for.
But this goes far beyond anything that we've said.
This is something really courageous and massive.
Yeah, I'll just add, it's sort of a situation where the leadership,
I think of it as though they're there to learn and be led by the people.
They're not there.
I mean, they're there as individuals, and I think that's important to remember.
And in this moment, it sort of feels like there's a lot of reactions, a lot of opinions flying around,
and it's sort of like the chaos is ensuing.
And it feels a bit like an echo chamber of reactions and causes and effects and stuff like that.
But definitely it's opened up and a worthy discussion to be having on all sides.
Emmanuel, I'm not sure I agree with your analysis that it's been overall a good week for free speech.
The leaders of the world have been spending the week after this rally and some time before it
coming up with new ways to restrict freedom of speech.
The most insane, perhaps, coming from Britain, as so many totalitarian ideas do,
is that he wants to ban a lot of encrypted messaging apps, he being Prime Minister David Cameron.
Okay, yeah, that's exactly what I was saying before, Mike,
that you shouldn't confuse the hypocrisy of the leaders with the actions of the people.
In this particular case, the people spoke loudly, regardless of the hypocrisy of the leaders.
And yeah, David Cameron is a real imbecile.
We should focus on what he actually thinks he can do and tear it to pieces,
I think people will march against that as strongly.
I mean, it's just insane that somebody thinks that encryption is the problem.
There is nothing to indicate that any of these attacks have taken place
were in any way aided by encryption or technology of any sort.
And even if they were, that would be no excuse to dismantle something that I think is our right.
But maybe you can go into some more detail as to what specifically Cameron is proposing.
He's proposing, I mean, it sounds like he's exaggerating, but I'm going to read you directly from the New York Times.
Prime Minister David Cameron said he would pursue banning encrypted messaging services
if Britain's intelligence services were not given access to the communications.
And, you know, that sounds like hyperbole, but it's what he's proposing.
He wants to ban things like Snapchat and WhatsApp.
And, you know, those are sort of vaguely possible to ban because they're centralized services.
You can somehow try and block these services from the UK.
I think it's a difficult problem, but a solvable one.
It's not clear how he would ban more decentralized services like, you know, encrypted Jabber with OTR and stuff like that.
But it's almost like a Mad Libs sort of totalitarianism.
He just wants to, you know, he can't read people's private communications, so he wants to ban privacy.
And he's running for re-election, I guess, in May.
And so he's currently in a coalition with some people who will not go for this sort of thing.
But he's saying, you know, vote just for my party and we'll be able to pass this sort of stuff without this interference.
Yeah, Mike, I think this is a great example of kind of the chaos I was talking about.
I mean, in a large way, like these guys have stuff kind of on the shelf ready to go.
I know that's really broad generalization, but they're going to do these kinds of things.
And you see the same kinds of people stateside have been hearing things.
It's just the kind of people just chomping at the bit to take a moment like this and, well, kind of put forth an agenda that doesn't actually show an intelligent handle of what has occurred and its overall impact in the world.
I'd like to just read the quote, the quote everyone's talking about, that Cameron said at an event on Monday.
Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn't possible to read?
And my answer to that question is no, we must not.
He's basically saying that thinking is a crime because you communicate with yourself by thoughts.
You communicate with others by knowledge that you have in the past, unspoken words.
You understand certain things that are agreed upon in the past.
There are so many ways you can communicate that people cannot listen in on and should never be able to listen in on.
And I maintain, I've said this a number of years ago, that if brainwaves were something that could be listened to by the authorities and all of a sudden they lost that ability, they would claim it was impossible for them to do their job without monitoring brainwaves.
You give them something, you will never get it back.
And that's why it's so important to battle this type of thing whenever it comes up.
Yeah, it ties into what Kyle had mentioned about these people having things on the shelf ready to go and they're just waiting for an excuse that can be made to fit, like the attacks in Paris.
There was a joint statement by European Union politicians after the Paris attacks where they called on ISPs to report potentially harmful online material aimed at citing hatred or terror.
The direct quote from this joint statement is,
We are concerned at the increasingly frequent use of the Internet to fuel hatred and violence and signal our determination to ensure that the Internet is not abused to this end.
So, yeah, they're concerned that bad people are using the Internet and so therefore the Internet itself is the problem unless they can take control of it.
This is not a line of reasoning that I can follow with very easily.
I mean, they should know that bad people are using the Internet. They're using the Internet.
It certainly runs the spectrum.
It's like, you know, whether it's just reactionary stuff that people want to say like, you know, just ignorant stuff to be hateful or all the way up to politicians.
Regardless, as people and community members, we should encourage people around us to maybe think a bit more before they speak and as well and speak to our politicians and work with our governments and lead them away from what, of course, they're going to try to do.
You know, it's silly, but we have to seize the moment ourselves.
You know, what I think is also really amusing and kind of crazy is the amount of attention that's been paid to the fact that CENTCOM had their Twitter account hacked.
First of all, I don't consider being able to get access to somebody's Twitter account hacking in any sense.
But for the sake of argument, let's just call it hacking because that's what everybody else is saying right now.
Yeah, CENTCOM got their Twitter account hacked.
So what? Who cares?
It's like the top story in all the American media, and it just goes to show how out of touch with reality this is a Twitter account for God's sake.
It just makes organizations look stupid maybe for a little while.
It has nothing to do with national defense.
It has nothing to do with any kind of threat to anybody and certainly should not be used as an excuse to further tighten up on privacy or make privacy the enemy or anything like that.
To give you an idea of how crazy and insane this was, there was a group basically claiming to be ISIS that hacked the social media accounts of U.S. Central Command on Monday.
But here's the thing, and a number of people have noticed this.
ISIS doesn't call itself ISIS, all right?
They were very clear that they named themselves Islamic State or maybe ISIL if you want to really stretch it a bit, but they don't call themselves ISIS.
So whoever did this doesn't know the name of their own terrorist group that they allegedly are a part of.
It's probably somebody just looking for attention, probably somebody who basically knows how to get into a Twitter account and not much else.
There was another incident a couple of weeks ago, actually, in England where a Bristol, the city of Bristol has a bus website, and for some reason that bus website was hacked by Islamic extremists.
It sounds ridiculous because it is.
The group apparently wrongly believed the website was the main site for promoting Western travel because it was called Travel West.
So they got hacked by Islamic quote-unquote hackers.
This kind of thing is happening everywhere.
Anonymous has declared war on ISIS and ISIS, or people claiming to be ISIS are hacking French websites.
This is not the same thing as killing people, not the same thing as blowing up buildings or shooting down airliners or anything like that.
Yet it's being treated as if it's something parallel to that.
It's just basically the same absurdity it always has been when people just are playing with technology and using things as graffiti walls.
I don't want to give the CENTCOM story too much attention, but it's gotten so much that I think we need to refute some of it.
The people, whoever hijacked this account, claimed to be posting secret documents.
Much of the media initially took this claim at its word.
I took a look at these documents and said immediately, these seem to be not secret documents.
Someone did some research and found them all in the public domain already.
But this is the kind of inane claim that people can make on the internet and instantly have reported in the mass media.
I feel bad for whoever bored person probably somewhere in the West did this and is going to feel the full force of the law come down upon them as though they had actually hurt the military or something.
But it's just nuts.
As you guys said, it's about when somebody is made to look stupid.
When the person who's made to look stupid or when the entity that's made to look stupid is somebody with power, is somebody with money, is somebody with some level of control,
they're going to try and push back against that.
How much do we want to give up to give them the right to do that?
The reason I feel strongly about this is because I see what the reaction turns into whenever somebody does anything that could be construed as possibly leading to an event that might cause somebody embarrassment on a computer system someplace.
As a good example of that, there was a Georgia Tech student, his name is Ryan Pickering.
He allegedly pulled a prank, a football rivalry prank.
And because he did this, he could wind up being a felon for the rest of his life.
Here's what he did.
Before a game in November between Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia, they're kind of like rivals,
he basically, he was a computer engineering student at Georgia Tech.
He got into the University of Georgia's computer network and posted a message on its online calendar.
Its online calendar, yeah.
November 29, 2014, 12 p.m., get ass kicked by GT.
He basically changed the calendar event to say that.
Because he did that, he is facing, I think, 15 years in prison.
And he can be marked as a felon for the rest of his life.
He will possibly never be able to get a job in the field that he wishes to have a career in.
All because people see this as a serious crime when it actually is just a harmless prank.
Yeah, he could have caused damage if he kept doing things.
He kept doing bad things on the computer system, but, you know, he didn't.
It's like somebody painting something on a wall.
Yeah, you know, they could have kept painting on the wall and maybe used a jackhammer and torn down the wall
and kept going into the building and killing everybody inside it, but no, they didn't.
It was just basically a one-time prank message, and it's not being looked at in that way.
We're losing our sense of humor, we're losing our sense of mischief,
and basically equating Twitter accounts to anything serious only makes that a lot more of a reality in our lives
and something that we're all going to have to deal with.
Emanuel, you know that it's going to get worse, of course.
The law that this Georgia Tech kid and the CENTCOM people, if they ever are found,
are going to be charged under is something we've talked about a lot before,
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the CFAA.
And I unfortunately haven't had time to digest the proposal,
but Obama is planning to strengthen the terms of this bill,
which has been used to get such strong punishments against people who have done so little,
but he thinks that's not enough.
He's making cyber security proposals, so 15 years in prison for pranking a calendar,
that's not enough for Obama.
Yeah, and another sense that we're losing is our sense of proportion,
because these actions that are being taken, they might be the equivalent to writing your name on a desk at school
and having to clean up afterward, or doing something harmless, doing something stupid,
doing a joke that's not necessarily funny, but that is a joke
and isn't really hurting anyone in the grand scheme of things.
But as we've talked about so much on this show,
if you add with a computer to the end of any action someone takes,
all of a sudden everyone's so much more terrified of it,
all of a sudden everyone gets punished so much more seriously about it,
and it's really a sad and confusing state of affairs.
Well, another aspect of this that I see whenever we talk about this kind of stuff
is what kind of users are we creating with these laws and regulations.
Innovation itself comes about through testing boundaries
and finding out how things work and thinking beyond the walled garden,
and I'm afraid that's becoming what the entire network is.
There are entities, and beyond the rationale and the safety and all the excuses,
it's creating a system and users that are quite, what's the word, docile?
I think that's the word, yeah.
Yeah, easily kind of guided, go here for this service,
and you use this to talk, and you use this to write,
and you only socialize here,
and that's not really what it was ever supposed to be in a lot of people's minds,
and it's just this slow creep towards really, as we are becoming more malleable,
as the scale of the consequences gets ramped up,
because people are really, really afraid.
Hey, listen, guys, I know we have an awful lot to cover tonight,
and there's a lot more to come on Off the Hook.
I just wanted to address one listener who wrote in to us,
and I know Kyle has some things to say about some hackerspaces we visited over here in Europe,
but basically this listener named Joshua wrote in to actually follow up on a call
that we got late in the show last week concerning a caller ID.
I believe this caller had received a call from somebody,
and it came from her own house, and it had the name of her husband on it.
Am I correct, Rob?
That sounds about right, yeah.
Yeah, and she seemed very baffled as to how that could have happened,
and this listener also asks,
how do you command a switch to ring with its own ID?
Is this something new?
Well, and can it be stopped?
Joshua, it's not anything new, and there's really no way to stop it,
because it's the nature of the phone system.
There is a service, a company called SpliffCard.
We've talked about them many times.
You can basically, and it's not just this company that does this.
It's anybody that has access to the right kind of hardware and software.
You can basically change the number that shows up on caller ID screens,
and when you do that, it accesses the database that stores the name.
It's not the same name that shows up in the phone book.
It's a name that shows up when you call somebody on their phone.
It's really hard to get that name to change.
It's usually the same name that's in the phone book,
but it actually comes from a different database.
And if you call from your house, your name will show up,
assuming your name is affiliated with that number.
It's really actually a rather ingenious way to find out people's phone numbers,
because if you keep, say, calling yourself and incrementing the number by one,
you'll get the name of the person who belongs to that phone number,
whether it's listed or not,
assuming they didn't have the foresight to put a fake name there.
So it's something that can have some use in some way,
but something that can also be used to trick people.
I know of one case where somebody was trying to get a contractor to finish some work
on their house, and he wasn't answering their call.
Well, when they called the contractor with his own phone number to his cell phone,
he picked up right away, and the work was finally finished.
So these things are very possible.
If you see your own phone number, I imagine there are some telemarketing companies now
that actually are sleazy enough to call you with your own phone number.
If you see something like that, express an interest
to the point where you get information from them as to how to buy their product,
and then report them for harassing people and things like that.
So this kind of thing is possible.
It can be used for good. It can be used for bad.
But, yes, people should be aware of it.
Yes, indeed.
And, yeah, caller ID spoofing, it's not limited to just spoofing the number
that you're calling as looking like that.
You can put any number you like in there, basically, and go from there.
So, yeah, when that happens to be the number that you're calling as well,
you get the classic, the calls are coming from inside the house scenario.
And that can be used for fun, or it can be used for more evil things.
One thing I did want to get to was all the spaces that Emmanuel and I got to see
in the last couple of days.
Briefly, one space we started out, the first one we saw was in Dresden,
and it was really, really nice to talk to those guys.
They had just been at the Congress as well.
And, really, they were showing us their space, actually looking at expanding
and going through kind of real, well, realistic things we don't really think about,
but trying to expand, trying to grow, deal with the space.
I guess the whole building is changing in one way or another,
and they were kind of putting feelers out to get kind of moving.
I think they do have a plan at this point.
But it was really nice.
We got to go out, and one of the members kind of joined us.
We just went out briefly, and he showed us kind of one of the funkier parts of town.
I guess there's a community radio station that was sort of interesting how they
operate with kind of a sparse radio spectrum there.
And when we were there at the station, I was alerted to a poster,
and I don't know if we've talked about this.
This is embarrassing.
We probably have, but there's this similar build to like ACTA and PIPA,
stuff we've talked about, and it's called TTIP, and I think we've talked about it.
I don't know if we have, but there was some anti-TTIP.
Do you mean the Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP, or something else?
You got it.
Okay.
You got it.
I think we have talked about that, yeah.
Cool.
So I just wanted to remind people that that's what's going on,
and there were some interesting talks about changing copyright at Congress,
also CETA, C-E-T-A.
I think that's the Canadian-European Trade Agreement.
Well, there's a lot of awareness about this,
and this particular radio station that Kyle's mentioning in Dresden, Germany,
is actually a commercial station, but at certain times,
I think it's from 6 in the evening until 11 at night,
they basically could just give their frequency over to non-commercial entities.
They broadcast from a different studio, and then at the stroke of 11,
or I think it's longer on weekends, it goes back to being a commercial station.
It's a very interesting arrangement, but apparently it's something that's not that uncommon.
And I'm sorry, CETA was Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement.
But it was cool to see the spirit there and get reminded.
It's crazy that every time I come to Europe,
I hear about more of these agreements, which are basically the same kind of thing
that we once again have to be aware of.
But from there, we continued on,
and we got a really, really fascinating tour at BRMLab.
It's spelled B-R-M-Lab.
And this was a major lab in Prague.
They've got about two of them there, and it's one of the larger ones.
And the guys were great.
We stopped by, talked to a few of the folks that were there late night.
Tons of different project areas.
I really can't get into all of it.
They had a radiation measuring machine that a guy was working on.
It was really like laboratory scale and impressive.
They had a fume hood, a bio area,
where they had a pretty enormous microscope setup
that was also sort of being used for decapping
and some other interesting microchip stuff.
A really interesting kitchen that they had just built
with some of the help from some of the food hacking people.
Really just so much stuff going on.
They also had an ultrasound machine, if you can believe it.
So it was just a whirlwind talking to those guys.
And from there we went on to Bratislava in Slovakia,
which also we were able to track down a space there called Progress Bar.
And they were having a really interesting kind of open hack night.
I think they had a talk on photographing astronomical photography
or astrological.
I think, well, either way.
Anyway, and then after that they had a talk on simulating space travel
and they were going through kind of a cool little game
that you've got to build your own rocket.
And a lot of new members were there.
And we basically just had some interesting talks with them.
They're also considering moving.
Right now they're just in sort of a flat,
but it was very cool to see the growth and the excitement
and actually a lot of familiar kind of problems,
well, idiosyncrasies of running a space.
The place in Bratislava was packed last night when we went there.
Over 100 people attending this lecture on astronomy and rocket boosters
and all kinds of things like that that were just kind of of interest.
But as Kyle said, the subject matter ranges tremendously in Prague.
We were seeing people talking about radiation
and building their own GSM networks and all sorts of things like that.
So it's really good to see as we travel city to city
there's always a group of hackers someplace that's waiting to welcome us
and to basically share what it is they're doing.
That's a brilliant thing, and also Progress Bar.
One of my favorite things about hacker spaces
is the great names people come up for them.
That's great.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In fact, they're hoping in the next space
they'll actually have the bar element
so that it'll facilitate grander, larger-scale socializing.
But yeah, we saw software-defined radios being used as GSM base stations
and just that kind of awesome stuff that they're going to put out there
and share with everybody, and it's really kind of inspiring.
Well, anyway, so much to talk about there.
And that's going to do it for us
because you have so much more to talk about there in New York.
Yes, indeed.
We're going to continue wandering around here.
I'm not sure where we'll be next week at this time.
But if you're in Austria, you might want to send us some email.
Maybe we can drop by wherever you happen to be, oth at 2600.com.
And good hearing your voices over there in New York,
and I hope that the rest of the show goes well.
And yours.
Have a great trip out there, and get some rest.
It's late.
Okay, and with that note, I will let them go
and get some other folks we know on the phone.
And while I'm doing that, I think, dear listeners,
I will leave you once again with some tunes.