Hey it's Ife tuning in every Tuesday night, Wednesday morning at midnight to seldom heard as well as classic R&B, soul, funk, disco and hip-hop music.
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So stay up at night with me with The Show, that's the name of it.
Every Tuesday night, Wednesday morning at midnight on 99.5 WBAI.
And the time is just about 7 o'clock p.m. You are listening to 99.5 FM WBAI New York and it's time for another exciting edition of Off The Hook.
But if they could, they would. Bum diddly bum for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Bum diddly bum.
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 I should have Emmanuel.
Yes, I'm here.
And is Kyle there as well?
Yes, I'm here.
Excellent.
And we also have Greg Newby joining us.
Excellent, excellent.
Hi everyone.
Always good to hear from you Greg.
We're all in the same room actually, but we have three different phones.
That's pretty exciting.
It's the most exciting thing that we've done in a while actually. No, it's not true. We've been doing lots of exciting things.
So this is an international conference call we're taking part in.
It's an international conference. I guess you could say that, yeah, because we're in Ontario and you're in New York and we're conferencing.
Yeah. What were you conferencing about before we got you on the phone?
Nothing really. We were just talking amongst ourselves.
All right. Well, lovely speaking to you. We'll talk to you next week.
Okay then.
How's it all going out there?
Well, okay. Last time you tuned in or may have tuned in, we were in Dawson Creek in what province was that Greg?
What province? I was in Yukon. Was it Yukon Territory?
No, it was British Columbia. That's where it was.
We actually dipped down into northern British Columbia and then back into Yukon.
We had stopped in a park there with our 34 dogs that we were transporting across the country.
That's where we took a break and did a half hour of radio.
Since then, we've made it all the way to Ontario.
Seven days of driving, three vehicles, six drivers, 34 dogs, and everybody made it.
Everybody made it to Ontario. All the dogs are happy.
Greg, I guess they have a lot more land now to run around in.
It's really super. They have several acres of enclosed fenced area.
That's quite safe for the dogs. A lot of green pasture and places to explore.
They've been exploring.
The trip was completed successfully.
Unfortunately, we had a bit of a snafu literally right after arriving here while we were trying to unload the moving van.
Kyle had a bit of an accident and wound up breaking his hand.
Ouch.
Kyle, you broke your hand.
Thank you for waiting until you were in one place.
I'm sure the rest of the caravan appreciates that.
Then I hear your hand was fixed by socialism.
Yeah, it was quite an interesting experience.
It seems to be on track to be mending properly.
A lot of the people here have been incredibly supportive.
It certainly is interesting when you're in a foreign country and you're covered.
You have some semblance, some approximation of what people might mistake for health care in the States.
Then you go to a country's different system.
They have an entire process.
In fact, you have to fill out a whole bunch of separate forms,
acknowledging that you're not going to just skate and avoid paying and so on and so forth.
They have a great system in Canada.
I did fill out those forms and promised to be available to look at their billing.
You have to pay up front, basically.
That's how most of the systems work, I gather.
You get to take your bill after having paid it one way or another or attempted to pay it and then submit it.
Actually, no, that's not true.
You get the invoice and you don't have to pay it necessarily,
but you get to hand-carry or otherwise get that to your provider,
and then they have to figure out how to get money overseas.
That's how it works.
We actually had a very interesting conversation with the doctor there
because it would really be very easy for Kyle Sembly to skip out on this and go back to the States
and not pay the hospital bill.
The doctor, after looking over Kyle's hand and explaining all the medical issues,
got into the billing issues.
It was really kind of a weird thing to be talking to a doctor about payment,
but that's how it works here.
He basically said that the way it works is that if he billed through the hospital,
it's likely that it would be one of those cases that never got resolved,
and he would not get anything for that.
Basically, it's just written off.
Now, if we paid him up front in cash, literally,
he knocks a certain percentage off, so we wound up paying him $150 right there on the spot,
and that pleased him, and I thought that was the right thing to do.
But what we could have done was simply paid, I think, about $250 or something
after getting billed back in the States and maybe not paying that at all.
So that's basically how they present things to you when you're a foreigner here.
We still have to get the hospital bill, and there's a follow-up appointment,
which is why we're still up here.
But overall, I'd have to say they're pretty up front with the way things work.
It's very fast.
People say it's slow, and it can be slow for certain things,
but when it's an emergency like this, things seem to work.
Again, we're not finished yet, but right now I'm pretty impressed with the system.
I just have one question, which is how do they expect you to fill out all these forms with your hand broken?
Yeah, no, Mike, that is absolutely the most hilarious and ironic part about a lot of this
because if you think about it, there's a lot of things you do with your dominant hand,
and I happen to be in a situation where my dominant hand is the one that's injured.
So like brushing your teeth, shaving your whiskers,
all those little simple things you take for granted become incredibly taxing, trying, difficult.
It's a challenge to remember that you, oh yeah, cannot do it that way,
and you have to figure out another way.
So I'm having a lot of those kinds of experiences.
To answer your question, I ended up signing it with the other hand,
and it was really hilarious the way it looked, but they accepted it, and we all had a good laugh.
Yeah, they're all very friendly and supportive, and they answered any questions we had,
and it was very bizarre being there in the middle of the night in a small town
that we had just arrived in having to deal with this,
and we were really, really tired since we had just driven about 1,000 miles that day,
and we just wanted to go to sleep, but we wound up staying up for most of the day anyway.
But it was also really kind of interesting when Carl tried to contact his insurance company back home,
because that's when a guy kind of Kafkaesque.
He didn't have his insurance card with him,
and he needed to either get a copy of that insurance card or get the information that was on it.
But to do that, after logging in, he had to be quote-unquote verified.
Even though he was logged in, even though he paid his bill every month, he still was not verified,
and the only way he could get verified was to have a postcard sent to the mailing address
that was on file back in Washington state,
or the second option was for him to personally visit them in Washington state.
Obviously, neither of those was a very good option for us,
but it was just insane watching him on the phone trying to deal with these people
and explain to them that, look, I'm in Ontario now. I can't do that.
Can you please just give me the information that is my information?
This is supposed to be the online, high-tech, convenient way of accessing all your stuff.
The irony is how antiquated their verification system is.
That was a quick reminder of what I faced back home,
and probably foreshadowing for how they're going to handle my invoice from here.
I also find it kind of entertaining that there you are, you're in a strange foreign land,
seeing exotic witch doctors or whatever they use out there,
and still the most frustrating part of this process seems to be dealing with your own company back home.
Absolutely.
Now, Greg, I need to have some words with you, Greg,
because I remember specifically telling you last week that I needed both of these guys
back in somewhat broadcastable condition after they were done helping you out out there.
But I just wanted to ask, did you have to staple Kyle together at all?
There were no staple-worthy incidents.
I had the staple gun standing by.
In fact, since we're in the middle of Ontario in sort of a rural area,
there's really not a lot of noncommercial radio,
so I was tempted to reach out to local media with the staple gun.
But I'd say that Emmanuel and Kyle, for the most part, behaved.
We tried. We really did.
But speaking of radio, yeah, radio is something that is very important, obviously,
if you're traveling across, what, 4,000 miles of territory.
And I was always trying to find either Radio 1 or Radio 2 from the CDC,
but occasionally we'd find some other interesting stations.
AM radio, I heard some really amazing things on AM.
There was a local radio station, I believe it was near Edmonton or maybe Winnipeg,
one of those that was reading out bingo numbers, literally playing bingo on the radio.
The guy would say, what's a bingo?
Like A3 or something like that, a bingo, right?
And then he would say, the first number is A3.
There'd be a ten-second pause, A3.
There was no audience or anything like that.
Everybody was listening on the radio.
These were farmers and their wives and people like that all over the region.
And then after doing this for about ten minutes, he'd say, oh, the phone is ringing.
We may have a winner.
We're going to confirm that.
Yes, we have a winner.
Okay, on to the next game.
That went on for an hour, and that was how they ran that particular radio program.
I just thought that's really kind of cool.
You know, you've got this local radio station, and they're playing bingo with all the local people,
and they're winning money, too, some of them are winning a good amount.
There was another radio station that had classified ads on the radio.
I heard some guy reading an ad saying that he needed a radio for his 1973 Dodge,
and that was just being broadcast to everybody in the region.
And I'll bet he got his radio that way.
It's better than just hearing the same old garbage that you get repeated from city to city
on radio stations to see them used locally like this.
But at the same time, we also heard in the middle of the night,
because in the middle of the night when there is a night, that is,
many of the places we went to didn't have a nighttime.
But when night falls, AM radio travels a lot further.
We were able to hear distant Canadian stations and local Canadian stations as well
that were playing music, and you don't hear that very often these days.
Most AM radios talk.
But there's something, and I can't really explain this to people who don't share the same sentiment,
there's something really appealing about hearing a song you like that sounds really crappy on an AM radio.
It's kind of like, I guess, hearing an old jazz piece on a crackly vinyl record
rather than on a pristine CD.
There's something about it, and that's what they do up here in Canada.
They have radio stations that play old songs or even new songs on AM radio.
I just think that's kind of cool.
There is something charming about that.
I've heard of things like the classified ads and little auctions and things still happening in this country,
but mostly in the sort of rural areas where I guess it's a smaller town thing and it makes sense.
I don't think you'd find much success with that here in this particular radio market we're in.
But who knows?
It's interesting to think about.
It certainly is.
We have some interesting news in the hacker world, obviously, that we need to get to as well.
Tonight we're going to be talking about some of that from the various parts of the world that we're in.
We're only going to be on until 7.30, then Bernie steps in from Philadelphia,
which is great because there's Philadelphia connections to the stories we're going to be talking about tonight.
But I understand today was a day of snafus.
United Airlines had some technical issues.
They had to ground flights for a good amount of time.
And then the stock market went down and trading was halted for a while.
I believe the stock market even went down significantly as a result of that.
The Wall Street Journal homepage was down.
I had trouble getting my Mac to boot.
There are all kinds of issues today.
The only sad part of this is that the stock exchange apparently is working again.
Yeah, that's what I heard.
I heard that they were down for about four hours.
And they lost 261 points.
They're blaming it on Greece.
My favorite thing, actually, about WBI radio is that they're not always telling you about the Dow Jones,
whatever that is, going up and down.
So we should not break that rule, I think.
All right, we won't do that then.
I understand that the West Side Highway is jammed up right about 120th Street.
Is that true?
It seems like a reasonable guess.
I had nothing to do with that.
And then sports today, how are the Mets doing?
You know, there's a lot we don't talk about on WBAR.
All right.
But the traffic and the sports, I at least know what those are.
The Dow Jones, I don't know what that is or why I care why they're always talking about it on other stations.
But we know what airplanes are.
And United Airlines grounded tons of flights, about 3,500 flights this morning
due to apparently a networking glitch in their system.
And this happened, I think the Wall Street Journal went down after that.
Their homepage just went down.
And, yeah, then the New York Stock Exchange also went down.
They had some issues earlier in the morning.
Apparently certain stock symbols were causing trouble, you know, as they do.
But they thought they had it fixed, and they didn't.
So they took everything down, and it only started up again around sometime after 3 today, I believe.
So, yeah, apparently.
And the interesting thing about that was just watching everyone's reactions to it
because the people that I know who are into the whole world of stocks and bonds
and, you know, pieces of paper with numbers on them,
they were all sort of freaking out about it in much the same way as, like,
people that I know who play things like Warcraft act when their game goes down.
Although, of course, when Warcraft goes down, it doesn't tend to make all our grandparents lose their houses.
But, yeah, it's kind of fun to see it mixed up a little.
I mean, the world of Warcraft is a lot more fun than the New York Stock Exchange, if you're going to play games.
I'm not really into either one, but I see the appeal of the Warcraft thing.
What I find interesting about all this is how quickly everybody was to jump up and say
this was not a result of any kind of intrusion.
It was just some kind of technical glitch.
And I don't know if that makes me feel any better,
knowing that a technical glitch at any time can just really foul things up
and ground airplanes and stop trading on stock markets or whatever.
You know, things that are supposedly important,
just because of a malfunctioning router or some bad code or something like that,
everything grinds to a halt.
I'm kind of more comforted being at the horrible mercy of unfeeling machines
than I am at being at the horrible mercy of terrible people.
I mean, there will certainly be many long meetings where people try and figure out what went wrong
over the coming days at these companies.
I feel bad for the people who have to sit in them.
But, I mean, do you think they're lying to us, or what do you think?
I have a theory, Mike.
I think it's that we're at a point now where this stuff is so important and so common
that we can't deny it, but we can kind of slow down the effects of it, right?
And it seems like a PR mitigation method,
because as soon as you start saying it was an attack or something else,
a whole other realm of possibilities opens up.
And what's really important is the trust in your brand,
the image, so to speak, of your corporation.
It comes into question, and that then becomes vulnerable,
and that is like the ripple effect of sales and maybe deals or negotiations
that are currently underway.
It overshadows it.
So if you can vaguely describe what happened,
but not really admit to what technically happened or be absolutely upfront,
so you're kind of saying it without saying it, I think it's a strategy.
And I think it is now kind of the state of the art, as it were,
with PR for these companies, because they know it's important,
but they cannot say things that would not instill,
but that would make their investors and customers feel as though they can't put
a lot of faith in them in handling things properly.
But to me, it's all the same, right?
It's all something messing up or some system or protocol not being
appropriately implemented and so on and so forth.
It's just about how they're going to characterize it.
And that basically, if we can put some mystery around it
or make it seem as vague as possible,
I think that that is a better choice in a lot of these people's minds.
Yeah, I mean, we've also seen, on the other hand,
companies too eager to blame malicious actors for their own messing up.
So we'll see what happens, I guess, next time.
Yeah, not just companies, but politicians and people like that
and anyone who wants to use what's going on to support their own agendas.
Well, speaking of maliciousness, there is this company known as Hacking Team.
You all have heard of them, I assume.
Hacking Team, yes.
I think those of us on the air have, but maybe some of our audience hasn't.
Okay, well, Hacking Team is a company based in Italy
with a very strong presence in the United States as well.
And just to give you a sense, the register, we love the register,
they had this headline that basically was alluding to what happened recently.
And the way they phrased it, they said Adobe Flash and Windows Zero Day
vulnerabilities were leaked from a Hacking Team raid.
Now, what they refer to as a raid, most other media would refer to as a hack.
But basically, it was a raid.
Somebody went in there and used a security vulnerability
to retrieve information that basically exposed everything these guys were up to.
And I've got to tell you, what these guys are up to is seriously disturbing.
We're talking about breaking into people's computers,
breaking into companies' computers, helping oppressive governments of all sorts,
and using vulnerabilities such as the Flash and Windows vulnerabilities.
Basically, these security holes are used to inject malicious code into PCs,
and then that installs surveillance tools to monitor the users' every move
and remotely control their machines over the Internet.
Now, the Hacking Team counts the governments of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Sudan,
Egypt, Lebanon, Russia, and, of course, the United States,
plus various private organizations as its customers.
Now, with Adobe Flash, this is from the register.
What we've seen so far, inside the leaked source code lies an Adobe Flash exploit
for which no patch exists.
It can be used against Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari,
and affects Flash Player 9 to the latest version, 18.0.0.194.
A proof-of-concept exploit uses the flaw to open calc.exe on Windows,
proving a malicious Flash file downloaded from the Internet
can execute arbitrary code on a victim's computer.
A Hacking Team describes it as, quote,
the most beautiful Flash bug for the last four years, unquote,
in its internal documentation.
So, Emmanuel, I'm a fan of beautiful bugs, of course, as we all are,
but what Hacking Team would do with these bugs,
maybe they sell these to these governments,
to the police forces of these governments,
and what these police forces do, you listed a long list of countries
who are not maybe the biggest fans of human rights,
you know, the United States among them,
but certainly not even the worst offender on the list.
And they, so we've been hearing sort of rumors
of what Hacking Team is up to for a while,
but it's been hard to get concrete information
because they don't talk about their client list,
but there have been journalists in Ethiopia
who people believe were targeted by this kind of stuff,
and now we know that the Ethiopian government
was in fact a customer of Hacking Team,
so this is not something that is sort of
purely amusing on a technical level.
This is something with real consequences
for people who are trying to do good in the world,
and Hacking Team was, you know,
selling their tools to police states all over the place.
Yeah, I'd like to go back actually to a story from 2012.
I think we might have focused on this.
Basically the headline was
how government-grade spy tech used a fake scandal
to dupe journalists.
And it's interesting, too,
because I searched through our own email archives
to find some of these stories,
and they've disappeared from Google News.
You can't find them on Google News anymore,
which just goes to show you how easy it is to,
not that I'm saying it's intentional,
but it's easy for news to disappear
if you don't save it yourself.
So that's why it's important to do that.
Now, an email claiming to reveal a political scandal
will grab the attention of almost any journalist,
but what if the email was just a ruse
to make you download government-grade spyware
designed to take total control of your computer?
It could happen, as a team of award-winning
Moroccan reporters recently found out.
Memfakinch.com is a citizen media project
that grew out of the Arab Spring in early 2011.
The popular website is critical of Morocco's
frequently draconian government,
and last month won an award from Google
and the website Global Voices for its efforts
to defend and promote freedom of speech rights
on the Internet.
Eleven days after their recognition, however,
their journalists received an email
that was not exactly designed
to congratulate them for their work.
It was sent via the contact form.
It was titled, Denunciation.
It contained a link to what appeared to be
a Microsoft Word document
alongside a single line of text in French,
which translates as,
Please do not mention my name or anything else.
I don't want any problems.
Now, some members of the website's team,
presumably thinking they'd just been sent
a major scoop,
tried to open the file,
and after they did so,
they suspected their computers had become
infected with something nasty.
Well, as it turns out,
that was something from the hacking team.
It pointed straight to that Italian company,
one of the leading providers of spyware-style tools
to governments and law enforcement agencies
worldwide.
So that was from a number of years ago.
We knew about this company.
A lot of people were talking about them,
but it took somebody going in there
and exposing their files
and showing who they're doing business with
and what they're taking advantage of
to really make this a news story.
Now, Microsoft is sending out patches
for the Windows vulnerability,
and that vulnerability is actually
a pretty major one.
It's a vulnerability in atmfd.dll,
which is an Adobe font driver
in the kernel level of the Windows operating system.
It basically affects 32-bit and 64-bit Windows XP
all the way up to Windows 8.1,
and that vulnerability can be used
to elevate an attacker's privileges
to administrative level,
allowing more damage or surveillance
to be carried out.
Now, Microsoft is out there
patching this right now,
but I find it interesting.
They're patching it based on stolen information.
Now, they've got stolen information
from somebody who hacked into
the hacking team website,
and now they're using that for their advantage.
So I wonder, a clever lawyer
could probably get Microsoft in trouble
for protecting themselves.
I like this.
I like the way you think.
Something that just came about today
as a result of all this,
a hacking team finally,
after a couple of days of this whole fiasco,
posted a response on their site
to what happened, a news release.
If you go to their website,
they probably have some malware on there.
Watch out.
I went to their website.
I've also gone to their website.
I have it right here,
and it's kind of funny but expected
how they would spin all this.
They're basically not admitting
to doing anything wrong,
despite all the proof
that they're doing wrong things out there,
which we'll go into, I think, a little bit more.
But they start with saying,
it is now apparent that a major threat exists
because of the posting by cyber criminals
of hacking team proprietary software
on the Internet the night of July 6th.
Hacking team's investigation has determined
that sufficient code was released
to permit anyone to deploy the software
against any target of their choice.
Before the attack,
hacking team could control
who had access to the technology,
which was sold exclusively
to governments and government agencies.
Now, because of the work of criminals,
that ability to control
who uses the technology has been lost.
Terrorists, extortionists, and others
can deploy this technology at will
if they have the technical ability to do so.
We believe this is
an extremely dangerous situation.
Now, to interject here,
I don't believe that this is
any more of a dangerous situation
than when just these people
had access to the technology
because it's been shown
that they've been doing
kind of bad things with it.
I mean, the exciting bit
is that the vendors
are now patching these vulnerabilities
that the hacking team
has been sitting on for years.
So the result will be
the Internet will be
just ever so slightly more secure.
But, you know, they're right
that there will be an interim period
where even more criminals,
not just criminals with lots of money,
can use these vulnerabilities.
They're right that the people
who broke into their servers are criminals,
but I think these criminals
are like the best criminals in the world.
So, yeah, I mean,
and just the documents
that have come out of this,
there's some amazing stuff in here.
It's also funny how they're phrasing it
just because anyone in the computer security industry,
basically, standard procedure,
if you find some kind of vulnerability
or some kind of zero day
or whatever you want to call it,
the proper way to go about that
is to assume that somebody else somewhere,
maybe somebody on the other side of the law
from where you're sitting,
also has figured out that vulnerability.
So, you know...
Yeah, they basically,
they kept this to themselves
and used it for their own advantages,
and now they have the gall
to actually say that
because the rest of the world knows about it,
that's the threat,
that's the injustice there.
Now, Rob, that statement you just read
from Hacking Team,
and it really pains me
that they call themselves hackers,
but that's what they do.
Do you have the name of the person who wrote that?
That was written by Eric Rabe,
R-A-B-E,
Chief Marketing and Communications Officer,
info at hackingteam.com,
plus 39-337-114-3876
is the phone number that this is signed with
on hackingteam.com.
That's his Italian phone number.
Yes, his company is in Italy.
He's actually from the Pennsylvania area
and he has a 215 number as well.
I did a little bit of digging
and I discovered that
unless there are two people from the same area
with the same name,
this guy used to be
the Vice President of Communications
at Verizon.
And we did a story a number of years ago
talking about Philadelphia
having a plan to provide
low-cost wireless Internet access
throughout the city's 135-square-mile area.
And not surprisingly,
Verizon was against that idea
because, well,
they didn't get to charge people money for it.
And one Eric Rabe,
Vice President of Communications at Verizon,
said,
I reject the idea
that this network has to be built
because service is not available.
Verizon and Comcast today
cover all of Philadelphia.
Broadband may not be available
the way the city wants it,
so they have a right
to try something different.
I also discovered this guy
used to be an anchorman
at a TV station
known as WTAJ-TV,
and that's located
in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
Now, again,
apologies to the other Eric Rabe
if there are two of them,
but I suspect,
since I saw a 215 number show up
on one of the press releases
from Hacking Team,
I suspect it's the same guy.
It's interesting,
the background that he has
and the connections
that he must have as a result.
I mean,
I wish I could be surprised,
but the sort of, like,
you know,
sales of, like,
evil technology to governments
is something Verizon
does pretty well, too.
And, you know,
they deny,
Hacking Team has publicly denied
doing business
with some of the countries.
The Sudan, for instance,
but in the leaked archive
is an invoice for €480,000
to the government of Sudan,
so if you want Hacking Team's
bank account number,
that's on the invoice,
as well as instructions for payment.
It's just,
there's so much stuff in here.
I think people are going to be
going through this for weeks to come
and continuing to find
interesting stuff.
Yeah, there's lots of,
if you follow any security researchers
on Twitter,
chances are you've heard a lot
of individual things
that are coming out of this.
A 400 gigabyte, basically,
torrent of Hacking Team's
own information
is what leaked out
and what's been posted.
And there are a couple of websites
that are mirroring
the contents of the torrent
if you don't want to download
the whole thing.
But, yeah, there's a lot to look at
in there,
and I'm sure,
like any other massive leak,
we'll be hearing about things
that come out of this
for a long time yet.
I predict that, sadly,
that, well, not so sadly,
by the time people actually
get through this,
this Hacking Team company
will probably be, like, dissolved.
I don't agree, Kyle.
All right, well, hear me out.
Yeah.
Because I think that there are
incredibly,
there's an incredible amount,
and it's becoming sort of popular
to have these sort of
private consultancies
who do cater to governments
and institutions
and large corporations
and so on.
And I'm not,
these aren't like your
big antivirus companies.
These are like
private little consortiums
of security companies,
and there's some,
some, like, little
promotion and so on,
but they're fairly quiet,
and they fancy themselves
experts, right?
And so what I think is that
this company's brand,
whatever value it may have,
will probably be
fairly well-tarnished.
And the sad part is
a lot of these people
will probably be looking
for other jobs,
and they'll join
other small
private security companies
and do more of the same
stuff that,
in my opinion,
is fairly criminal
against the rest
of the people
in the world
and on the Internet
who maybe would like
their privacy
and not like to be
spied upon.
But, you know,
the person we're talking about,
Eric Rabe,
agrees with you, Mike,
that this company
is not going to go away.
It's going to rebound
and continue to exist.
I find that hard
to believe myself,
but even if,
as Kyle says,
they do disappear,
there's a bunch of companies
just like them,
and we have to keep an eye
on every single one of them.
Now, there is a hacker
known as Phineas Fisher
who has taken responsibility
for this,
and he's been
part of attacks
on spyware makers
in the past,
one known as Gamma
several years ago.
I have a feeling
that they're going to find
Phineas Fisher
and throw the book at him,
and we all, of course,
need to step up
when that happens
and try and protect
him or her
as much as possible.
According to Motherboard,
on Monday,
Phineas Fisher
wrestled control
of a hacking team
Twitter account
and proved his identity
through promoting
the hack
through his personal account
at the same time.
Phineas has also promised
to later reveal
how the network
was breached
once, quote,
they have time
to fail
at figuring out
what happened
and go out of business.
Now, Eric Rabe
did not appear sure
of the hacker's identity
in the last few days
of a social network storm.
He said,
we can disagree
about public policy,
but that doesn't give someone
the right
to put someone
out of business.
We don't believe
there was a guy alone
in his basement.
But, you know,
it might very well have been.
That's kind of the beauty
of this whole thing.
So, from me here in Ontario,
I want to thank
Phineas Fisher,
and I'm sure many people
who care about freedom
throughout the world
also would like to do that.
Here's what I think
the hacking team
is going to survive.
Phineas Fisher
has, of course,
named himself
or herself
or themself,
whatever the,
you know,
gender and number
of this entity is,
after the first target,
I guess,
that they did publicly,
which was FinFisher,
which was a similar
sort of company
selling evil software
to evil entities
like governments,
and they're still around
just fine
because the customers
of these companies
and the customers
of hacking teams,
people like the Thai police
and the investigative police
in Chile,
and, you know,
just a whole list
of police agencies
and national police agencies
all around the world,
they don't care.
Like, 98% of the people
in the world
can think,
can be united somehow
and think that a hacking team
should go out of business,
but the people
with the money,
with the power
to be their customers,
I don't think they care
one bit.
So that's,
and of course I agree
with Kyle's analysis
and your analysis
that if they do go out of business
it won't really matter
because the people involved
will just start something new,
but I think in this specific case
they don't even have
to go out of business.
And I think it's definitely
something that we're going
to have to keep an eye on
and, you know,
maybe if nothing else
hacking team will dissolve
and come back as something else
and then they won't be called
hacking team.
I kind of have
a little bit more hope
in that, you know,
there are a lot of rural
police departments
in the U.S.
that are just figuring out
how to use computers.
I mean, I am absolutely serious.
I have a friend
whose family members
are in the police
and he had all kinds of rackets
and complaints about computers
and this and that
and how confounded
everything was
and blah, blah, blah.
And I would have to say
that institutions
and governments
are probably going
through the same thing.
They're fairly expert
and so on,
but they aren't as pervasive
as the rest of the people
who are also empowered
by the great leveler
which is technology.
So that may be true, Mike,
but I don't think
it's going to last
and I think the more
we talk about it
and the more we understand
our right to privacy
and security,
the better understanding
the governments will have
because people will respond
and that's kind of
what we need right now.
I think Kyle
put his finger
on something important
which is that
the notion of
hackers for hire
is something that
these governments
and companies need.
They need to be able
to go outside
of their own expertise
in the case of government,
sometimes outside
of their own legal frameworks
or beyond their jurisdiction.
And so if it's not
this particular company,
there's going to be
other companies that step in.
In other words,
I think the market demand
is going to persist
even if the individual
companies don't.
Indeed they will.
Well, it's run
a little bit long,
but it was great
talking to you guys
over there in Canada
and Kyle,
we hope you heal up quickly,
but while you're there,
enjoy that sweet,
sweet Canadian health care
and we will catch up
with you guys
on a future episode
of Off the Hook.
All right.
I just want to take a moment
to thank Greg Newby
for just taking us
on this incredible adventure
of driving 34 dogs
across the continent
and just teaching us
so much about them
and about what it means
to be a dog musher
and just to see
it all come about.
We're surrounded
by 34 dogs right now,
as you can hear.
They're not barking
like last week.
They're all relaxed
and having a great time
and they're going to keep
improving their lives.
And yeah,
that's what
Hope Coordinators
do with their lives,
all kinds of interesting,
fun things.
Yeah, I echo that.
I thank Greg a lot
for the experience
and it just proves
that hackers
are very,
very interesting people.
Diverse skill sets.
And thanks to you guys
for sticking with us.
It's been an amazing journey
and we're getting
to the cleanup phase,
but of course,
the journey continues on.
Excellent.
Well, pet the dogs for us
and we apologize
for any extra cleaning up
you have to do
after Emmanuel and Kyle.
All right.
Good to talk to you, Greg.
Will we see you in person
next week, Emmanuel?
Well, it depends
on a couple of things.
It depends on Kyle's
follow-up appointment
with the orthopedist.
Yeah, I might get
some upgrades.
And it depends on us
getting over the border
and a bunch of other things,
but we'll see.
All right.
Well, one way or another,
we'll talk to you
hopefully next week
and we will make
some phone calls
and while we do that,
I'm going to complain
about the local cable monopoly
in my part of the world.
I have been using
for the past year
this service called Clear,
which I had gotten
through Calix,
which is an organization
that I hope much
of our audience
is familiar with,
but they may not be.
Calix is a small
technology concern,
one of the very,
very few concerns
to have publicly fought
a national security letter.
So they're great people
offering a thing
at Hope last year,
actually,
where if you gave them
a donation,
you get a year of
wireless through Clear.
And, you know,
it wasn't a great service,
but it was an okay service.
And my year is up
and I was thinking
of renewing,
but apparently Clear
is going to shut down
in a few months,
so it was time
to get rid of them.
And if you are in
my part of New York City,
like the center
of the universe,
you really only have
one choice
for broadband internet,
and that is a company
you may have heard of
called Time Warner Cable.
And so I went
on the website
of Time Warner Cable
and, you know,
clicked some buttons.
I would like the internet.
I would like it
at this such speed.
They charge an amount of money,
which is really silly
if you want to rent
a cable modem from them,
and you can get one
from the store faster anyway.
So I clicked that
I will buy my own cable modem.
And, you know,
and then a couple days later,
the cable modem arrived
and I want to set it up.
And apparently somehow
they managed
to mess up my order
to indicate that
I would be going
to their store,
their office,
somewhere in,
I don't even know where.
They never told me where,
but apparently
they believed that
I was going to go there
to get a cable modem from them.
And that was the one
associated with my account,
even though I had already,
you know,
online chatted with them
to give them
the MAC address
of the thing
that I actually owned.
So I had to call them
and fix that.
And let me,
like,
like,
I don't want to talk to them
and they don't want
to talk to me
because it costs them money.
Like,
every time I'm on the phone
with these people,
they're losing money.
So it was,
it's really
in our mutual interest
for there to be
no telephone conversations.
But I had to have one
and it went on
for about 10 minutes
and I thought
they fixed my problem
and I had the internet
and it was working
and then,
like,
an hour and a half later
it stopped working.
And,
and I was like,
all right,
maybe it's a temporary glitch.
They're,
they're not a very competent
internet provider.
So I was like,
all right,
well,
I gotta get back
on the phone with them.
So I called them back up
and talked to someone else
and they were like,
they,
they told me to unplug
and replug my modem,
which of course
I had already tried,
but just to humor them,
I was like,
all right,
I'll unplug it
and I'll undo the cable
and redo the cable.
And what do you know?
Like,
after all that it worked
and I was like,
I already tried this.
Did you do something?
And it turns out
that they did do something.
They just wanted me
to feel stupid
while they were
actually fixing the problem.
Um,
and the problem
was apparently
that my order
was in their words,
never completed.
I don't really know
what that means
because it was
clearly completed
because it was working,
but 90 minutes later
it was uncompleted
and,
and not working.
Um,
and,
and I'm a little bit worried
because I just got an email
during the day
while I was at work,
uh,
asking them,
please,
asking me to please again
provide them with my Mac address.
So I suspect that my order
has somehow gotten uncompleted
yet again
and I'm going to have to talk
to them again.
Like,
why can't they spend?
It wouldn't cost them
that much money
to build a system
that actually works
and then they wouldn't have to
pay all these people
to talk on the phone with me
and I would be happier.
I,
I really don't get it.
We feel your pain, Mike.
We feel your pain.
Um,
we're joined now on the phone
by Bernie S.
Greetings from Pennsylvania, Rob.
Um,
good to hear you.
And you,
and you.
Um,
so,
I,
I wanted to ask you something
about a,
a,
a former wireless,
uh,
uh,
internet service provider
called,
uh,
um,
Clear.
Yeah.
And,
uh,
yeah,
they had been,
they,
like last year,
they were purchased by,
I think it was last year,
they were purchased by Sprint,
which dissolved Clear
but continues to operate
this WiMAX,
um,
not Wi-Fi,
it's a different technology,
WiMAX,
uh,
Sprint,
uh,
has a sublicense
used as 2.5 gigahertz spectrum,
which was originally allocated
by the FCC
for use only by nonprofits,
um,
to distribute,
uh,
uh,
analog,
uh,
close circuit analog TV broadcasts
to schools.
This is before the,
the World Wide Web
and all that.
Um,
and,
uh,
a nonprofit,
uh,
involved with that,
um,
they had the license
for the 2.5 gigahertz spectrum,
and they said,
hey,
can we lease this,
uh,
this spectrum
to a for-profit
internet service provider
if that,
not that,
for-profit non,
uh,
internet service provider,
um,
gives us an unlimited number of counts
to provide to nonprofits
at very low cost.
And,
uh,
that provider
is known as Mobile Citizen.
So I encourage our listeners
to look up Mobile Citizen.
The Clear WiMAX network
is going away in November,
Sprint is migrating it
from WiMAX to LTE.
But for people who are listeners
who are,
uh,
sort of underserved
and,
uh,
uh,
either can't afford,
uh,
expensive internet service
from,
uh,
Time Warner and so forth,
go to mobilecitizen.org
and get more information about it
because they have the license
for the spectrum
and Sprint is obligated
to provide
an unlimited number of counts
to Mobile Citizen,
which then provides them
to other organizations
to provide them to,
uh,
to the people they serve
so that people can get,
uh,
it's not fast,
it's like,
you know,
a few megabits per second.
It'll be faster when it's LTE
but it's worth checking out.
So I just wanted to provide
that information
about the whole Clear thing
because there's,
it's an interesting hack
of the,
uh,
the RF spectrum.
I mean,
it frankly wasn't
a very good service
but I was really excited
to not be doing business
with Time Warner
for a year.
It was better than nothing.
For people who are underserved
and didn't have internet access
and couldn't afford it,
it was better than nothing.
And,
and I will say,
I never talked on the phone
with them for the entire year.
The only person I talked to
was Nick Merrill of Calix
who's a joy to talk to
and,
and handed me the device
at Hope
and,
and that was it.
Got it.
Well,
um,
Bernie,
uh,
were you listening to,
uh,
what we were talking about
before about hacking
Yeah,
I was listening to the stream,
um,
before you called me
about this,
uh,
this guy,
uh,
who was the lead counsel
for,
uh,
this hacking team outfit,
this evil company.
Yeah,
so what do you think
about our new special friend?
Uh,
well,
I think he's a new special friend.
Uh,
some of our folks
in our community
have been talking about him
for quite a while.
Uh,
our,
our friend Jake Applebaum
has been talking about,
uh,
um,
Eric Rabe for,
for a couple of years,
uh,
uh,
according to Jake Applebaum,
uh,
this is a hacking team,
not,
not real hackers.
Uh,
and similar software
can be the difference
between life and death.
Uh,
Jake said,
quote,
these people are tortured.
Some of them are murdered.
The result of the things
that we are talking about here
is life,
as a life and death matter.
Uh,
and,
uh,
Jake said that at a,
uh,
at an RSA,
uh,
security conference session
a couple years ago.
Jake said,
quote,
we're having to deal with
companies in Palo Alto
and it's a shameful thing
and we shouldn't be exporting it.
Um,
so,
uh,
you know,
people,
hackers,
people,
real hackers in the hacker community
have been saying this
for quite a while,
like Jake Applebaum,
but now,
thanks to,
uh,
Phineas Fisher
and,
uh,
other ethical hackers
who have exposed
this,
uh,
really egregious
and dangerous use
of,
uh,
technology by companies
like Hacking Team,
which is going away.
I think the government
purchased their,
their evil surveillance products,
um,
and then used them against,
uh,
uh,
political activists,
uh,
civil rights activists
and,
and so forth.
Uh,
they don't care one whit
about what most of the people
in the world think.
But,
um,
I think it's still useful
that,
uh,
the people around the world
can,
can know
what these companies
are doing
so they can be better
prepared to deal with it.
And,
I like that. And next comes the pronunciation of the town name.
Umeå.
So Umeå? That's probably still wrong, but a lot better than I would have done without MW's help.
Absolutely. Thank you very much, MW.
That's great.
Yeah, it is pretty great.
I think I've made that first sound before, but not for that context.
Well, this is because you're not a Swedish person.
Right. I've been to Sweden, but I'm not a Swedish person.
And I do enjoy herring. I had pickled herring last week.
Indeed.
Another email we have. Jane writes,
WTF. I live in NYC and this is the second Amber Alert I've gotten on my cell phone with Sprint, a service provider.
This one is telling me about a person in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who abducted a baby at knife point.
In case I see him around the nabe, I'm to call 911.
Where are these messages coming from? Sprint or local governments? Across state lines, too.
Did we get signed up for this without knowing it? Please inform or address my question.
Thanks a lot, Jane. Dedicated fan of OTH for many years.
Well, Jane, what you experienced there and what a lot of people experienced on the 6th when this was sent out
is called a Wireless Emergency Alert, and it comes from the FCC.
Now, Bernie, I think you know a bit more about this.
A little bit. I missed her email, too, but I've been really preoccupied this week with other things.
Yeah, there are these, I think they're called EAS, or something like that, messages that local municipalities
and state and even federal governments and even the White House has total control over the system.
They can send these emergency messages to all the cell phones in a particular geographical area
defined by who is sending the message.
And it sends this weird kind of a tone into your phone, and then you see this message.
And you can block all of these except for the ones from the White House.
You cannot block the presidential emergency messages coming to your cell phone, should the president wish to send one to you.
Yeah, it came up a lot around the sort of blogs and Twittersphere, particularly last week for some reason.
But yeah, there are options in Android phones and iPhones and whatever else to limit the amount of these that you get hold of.
But yeah, the president can send messages to your phone without you being able to block them.
But it comes from the FCC.
I highly recommend turning these off. They're generally pretty useless.
I did get one sometime last week that informed me as I was next to a window that was open and letting the rain in,
which I could hear the thunder through and see the lightning, that there was in fact a lightning storm going on.
So, you know, it's a good thing I had my phone with me or I would have been terribly confused.
You know, I have mine turned on because I like to see what they're sending.
Sometimes they're entertaining and I can laugh at them.
But I haven't gotten one for quite a while.
I've gotten a few when there's – actually, I got one that was really well timed.
I was driving down a country road in the dark one night, and I thought there's probably going to be some small stream flooding
and this road could be washed out.
And like two minutes later, I got the alert that there's going to be flooding on this road.
And I was like, hey, this actually worked the way it was supposed to.
So I took the high road, I got around the flood, and that was cool.
That was the only time I had one recently.
So it can serve a useful purpose, but it can also be misused by local municipalities who think,
oh, this must be important, everybody should want to know about it.
And it's really not that important.
Bernie, you say this can serve a useful purpose,
but the example you gave was literally telling you something that you had yourself thought two minutes prior.
Well, this is true, but I may have been a little more prescient than most travelers on that road that night.
So it may have helped other people.
All I know is that most of my coworkers were awakened at four in the morning last week,
and I was not because I had these stupid things turned off.
It's not the purview of the federal government to decide whether or not Bernie's likely to take the high road unless they tell him to.
I like that.
Absolutely. So yeah, send us an email, oth at 2600.com.
We are working on getting telephone lines so we can hear your voices,
but until then, we will love to read your emails.
Yes, very soon we will.
Yep, so we will be back next week with another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
Stay tuned for the personal computer show.
For now, I leave this with a dedication to our friends on Wall Street who are dealing with crap today.
For Off the Hook, this is Rob T. Firefly. Have a good night.
Staying alive was no job, had second hands.
Moms bounced on old man, so then we moved to Shetland land.
A young goof, you're rocking the go-to.
Low goose, only way I begin the G-off was drug lube.
And let's start it like this, son, rolling with this one and that one.
Pulling out gats for fun, but it was just a dream for the teen who was a fiend.
Started smoking wools at 16 and running up in gates and doing hits for high stakes.
Making my way off fire escapes.
No question I was speed for cracks and weed.
The combination made my eyes bleed.
No question I would flow off and try to get the dough off.
Sticking up like boys on board court.
My life got no better. Same damn low sweater.
Times was rough and tough like leather.
Figured out I went the wrong route.
So I got with a sick tight click and went all out.
Catching keys from cross seas, rolling in MPVs.
Every week we made 40 Gs.
Yo, brothers, respect mine, a hick of the tech now.
Shabab, move from the gate now.
People will steal from their mother.
People will rob their own brother.
People can't even walk the streets.
Big girls now never know when the world they're gonna meet.
Cause I need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, need, 
Tell em, tell em, tell em, tell em
That we love you
Tell em, tell em, tell em
We don't care
Nothing we gonna give you
Nothing we be sorry for
Tell em, tell em, tell em
That we do we love you
Tell em, tell em, tell em
That we contribute
Tell em, tell em, tell em
I need me, I need me, I need me, I need me, I need me, I need me, I need me, I need me,
I need me, I need me, I need me, I need me, I need me,
I need me, I need me, I need me, I need me,
Incarceration, patient, no one upstates my destination
Handcuffed in back of a bus, 40 of us
Life as a shorty shouldn't be so rough
But as the world turned, I learned life is hell
Livin' in the world no different from a cell
Every day I smoke from Jakes, givin' shakes, sellin' bass
Smokin' bones in the staircase
Though I don't know why I chose to smoke sex
I guess that's the time when I'm not depressed
But I'm still depressed
And I ask, what's it worth?
Ready to give up, so I seek the old earth
Who explained, workin' hard may help you maintain
To learn to overcome the heartaches and pain
We got stick-up kids, corrupt cops
And crack rocks and spray shots
All in a block that stays hot
Leave it up to me while I be livin' proof
To kick the truth to the young black youth
But shorties runnin' wild, smokin' cess, drinkin' beer
And ain't tryin' to hear what I'm kickin' in his ear
Neglect it for now, but yo, it gots to be accepted
That what? That life is hectic
Tell me what you want