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Time for Off The Hook.
We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
One diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
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WBAI New York
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Mike.
Hello.
Kyle.
Hello.
Bernie S. on the telephone.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
some kind of big hollow room? Do I sound like I'm in a hollow room? You sound like you're
in a cathedral or something, yeah. Let me turn the volume down. How about now? Is that
any better? I don't know what you're using, but please try and use the telephone in the
manner in which Alexander Graham Bell would have preferred, holding it directly up to
your face. Bernie is also coming through a speaker in the room, which can't be helping.
He's coming through a speaker in the room. Bernie, why are you coming through a speaker
in the room as well? Oh, I got lost. I'm sorry. All right, well, is this better? I'm using
the same headset I usually use, so I don't know. All right. I think we'll have to deal
with this. There's a market improvement. He sounds less like he's in a microchip. Well,
okay. You know, it still happens though, where when I talk and I bring Bernie up, I sound
like I'm on the phone too. I don't have to do that. Our studio is slowly, slowly, slowly
getting built and no phone lines yet. I don't know where the phone lines are. I keep hearing
stories about where the phone lines are. We want to hear from our listeners. I understand
there might be a way for us to plug cell phones directly in. Is that right, Kyle? Yeah, I'm
still looking into the right hardware for that, but we're excited about the prospect
of phones in the future. Real phones. Real ones, yeah, but we may come up with a bit
of a clear stop gap in the next couple of weeks if we don't see anything a bit more
substantial here. Because we want to hear from our listeners, not just when we're asking
them for money. It makes for a great program, especially our program, which centers on
that stuff and really relies on the topics being opened up to all kinds of voices, which
we have here. I mean, it's not the same, but people can still send us an email, oth at
2600.com, and we love to hear from you and we might read it on the air. I have to address
an issue here, and I think you've all noticed this. We are getting a lot less mail than
we used to get, and I don't know why that is. Is nobody listening anymore, or do people
just not write emails anymore? Bernie, what do you think? Maybe. I think it's the latter.
I think they're just not sending emails anymore. For some reason, people have kind of ditched
email. A lot of people I know have ditched email in favor of Facebook and other social
networking apps, and I'm not really happy about that. I like email, and I think people
should write to us, oth at 2600.com. Tell us what you think. Yeah, you know, I don't
understand that at all. I mean, I'm on Facebook, I'm on social media, but it's not a replacement
for actually writing paragraphs and sending them to people and having them in your library
of correspondence so that you can look back on it. I mean, I can't find anything on Facebook
from last week, let alone last year, and it's also an issue of trust as far as do you want
all of your personal communications in the hands of a company and not you. People are
pretty confident or adamant about their lack of email use. I don't know. I've run into
several people that are just admittedly, they say right up front, they're terrible at using
email, and for whatever reason, they feel as though I should accept that, like that
is a normal or even cool way to be, and it's unfortunate because I've found a lot of things
that actually get done, get done through methods like email. I don't understand. How are you
bad at email and good at Facebook or whatever else they're using? It still involves writing.
I mean, yeah, you can misspell every word on Twitter, I guess, and abbreviate things
and limit yourself to 140 characters. It seems to me that's more of a skill, basically eliminating
everything that you want to say and making it so concise, but how does that translate to being
bad at expressing yourself with words and sentences? I mean, I guess maybe I've answered
my own question. I mean, I think email definitely has some usability issues that people know about,
but here's something which is sad, which is that email is still the only popular
communications platform that no one central body controls, right?
That's sad, that's happy, right? That's good news.
For the central providers who want to use your communications to sell you things,
then that's good news for them, but for those of us who don't trust a single entity,
who want to maintain control over our own infrastructure or at least have the opportunity
to choose among multiple competing providers and still talk to people who have made a different
choice, email is the only largely adopted thing, and people are going to write in and they're
going to say Jabber's the other one, and it's true, there are some Jabber users, but the only
widely adopted one is still email, and I think that's a real flaw with a lot of the new communications.
Many of the new communications technologies, not the big social media ones, but many of them
are doing really interesting things with encryption and privacy and all this stuff,
but none of them are focusing on decentralization in the same way, and I think that's really sad.
Yeah, I think IRC would be the only other argument you'd be able to pull up,
but it's not very widely adopted, I guess, at least in this country.
I mean, it's still used.
IRC is not a substitute for email either.
No.
It's different.
I'm saying, but as far as distributed communication methods go, there's even some
zealotry around people that don't really enjoy email that much, then they want a more concise
email, or they don't want to be reading things that are incredibly long, or so on.
It just goes on and on about just the right way to not have a lengthy email.
There's a lot of correction around that, I think, too, that people that are just coming
into using technology are exposed to, and think that, well, okay, this is the way to be, is to
tell people not to write email in one way or the other, or to only write short and very
direct emails if need be, but don't write short responses if it wastes my time reading that you
said okay, or something like that.
It must be a worthwhile email for me to get it at all, and all this kind of craziness.
What has changed in the last 20 years that makes all these rules all of a sudden have to exist?
Well, people have very little time, right?
Is that not it?
It's that we value our time so much, and we've aggregated and filtered things so well that
we want to maximize that time or something.
I don't know.
I think that's a bad reason.
It seems to me people are just wasting their time on other things if they're not wasting
their time on email.
But I don't really recall very many people ever complaining, I'm wasting so much time
on email, sending email, reading email.
Usually, if you're spending a lot of time doing that, you're involved in some kind of
a fight or something, and you're enjoying it.
And really, I think it's the first thing that you mentioned, that it's the lack of interest
in, I think, writing, or lack of emphasis on writing.
Which we should encourage.
There's all kinds of things to say, but if it's in your head, or it's not very portable
like in words, in text, it's very hard for you to share that.
I think you're actually completely wrong on that.
People these days read and write more than at any point in history.
Particularly write, but read as well.
How are you defining the word write?
Creating strings of text.
Okay, that to me is not writing.
A monkey can do that.
So they're not writing well enough for you, but substantially no one wrote well enough
for you ever in history.
It's just that the communication that is now done with what you're going to describe as
bad writing was not done, or was not done with any form of writing in the past.
Well, you hold up a street peasant from the era of Shakespeare, and you have him write
something compared to somebody twittering, and I think we'll see who's more literate.
The street peasant in the time of Shakespeare was not literate at all.
So that's an easy one.
And the people today who just communicate with little initials, that's literacy.
That's today's literacy.
Yeah, emoji is language.
I think there's more than just spelling the words correctly, it's also what you are saying,
actually thinking things through, and expressing yourself.
And we're not seeing enough of that.
I don't think people are writing more today than ever, and maybe if they're reading, they're
reading advertisements, and they're reading tweets, and you can't equate the two.
At least my old-fashioned way of thinking.
Yes, Bernie?
People who have corresponded with me by email know that I'm kind of long-winded with my
email.
So that's one of the reasons I prefer email.
You can write long diatribes and edit them to your heart's content before you send them.
Do we sound like a bunch of old fogies saying that this medium, email, which has developed
from decades and decades of hacker collaboration, RFCs, Internet Engineering Task Force, all
this work that has been done from thousands and thousands of people around the world to
create this effective means of written communication, do we sound like a bunch of old fogies
arguing that people should continue to use this as opposed to this new stuff?
I don't think so, but maybe not.
Well, no more than, I mean, sometimes old fogies are right.
But no more so than your grandpa encouraging you to stay in school and learn how grammar
works and things like that, that you might reject out of hand because you don't see the
use of it.
I don't know.
Here's, let's make an offer to people who may not be writing any more emails for whatever
reason.
Make an exception.
It probably won't hurt as much as you think.
And write to us at oth at 2600.com and explain to us why.
Try to use sentences, but if you can't, then use whatever you're used to using these days.
And we just want to hear.
We want to hear what's out there.
Because is it really, I do notice this in other forums, that people are sending emails
less and less.
And it's tragedy, I think.
Because all you're getting, you're getting trendy things.
You're getting hashtags.
You're getting what's hot and what's not.
You're not getting an exchange of ideas other than a popularity contest.
It's fragmented.
There's a lot of it, but it's incredibly fragmented.
It's not thought through.
It's not revised.
And we just have evolved.
We've simply changed the way we communicate.
I mean, that, I guess, is the takeaway of our event.
I wonder, in 10 years or so, what the people who swear by Twitter now are going to be bemoaning,
and what that's going to be replaced with when they say, wow, people used to be able
to write when they tweeted, and now it's just ridiculous.
You know, try to imagine that, if you can, in five words or less.
Well, in history, we go through people's letters.
We understand someone's life through their writing and their communication with other
people.
And I think it's going to be a lot different telling stories and looking back at what people
have accrued over their lives and what maybe their life was like without these kinds of
repositories of expression.
So I don't know.
It does seem like we're complaining a lot about the way things are going downhill.
But we do have a lot of evidence on our side.
I mean, the quality of phone calls is awful now compared to what it was.
People aren't writing like they used to write.
I mean, there are good things.
There's exceptions to all of that.
Of course, there are plenty of good writers out there, and people who read, and people
who are into all this, and plenty of good sound as well on the right kinds of instruments.
But I'm looking at it overall as a trend.
But anyway, we can't spend the whole show on this, much as we'd like to.
On the subject of old school, some very sad news.
A guy known as Bill Acker, who was a guest on this show back in February of 2013.
A phone freak extraordinaire passed away this week.
Bernie, I know you have some pretty strong feelings about this.
Yeah, I talked with Bill a few times.
And brilliant man.
We had him on, I think, back in February of 2013 for quite a while.
Brilliant guy.
Made some really noteworthy discoveries.
He's credited as being, if you read Lapsley's book, Exploding the Phone, Bill Acker is
credited with discovering a way for phone freaks to make international phone calls for
the first time back in, I think, 1971 directly.
It sounds like, so what?
It's so easy to make international phone calls.
But it was insanely expensive to make them back 35 years ago.
And he figured out a way to do it.
And having phone freaks just jumped on it.
It was like, wow, we can just direct dial now.
So he just created what's called a free switch that a lot of people using voice over IP
technologies are still using today.
But he was a classic.
He collaborated with Captain Crunch and with Joy Bipples, who back then was Joe Ingressia
and Steve Wozniak was.
He was one of the original phone freaks from back in the late 60s, early 70s.
And we should really commemorate his life because he made a lot of things possible for
us just in a way of thinking and challenging.
Like, you can't do that.
But he figured out a way to do it.
Well, one way I'd like to commemorate Bill Acker is to play an excerpt of what we had
on our airwaves a couple of years ago.
This is from the February 6, 2013 program when we were interviewing him and Phil Lapsley.
Here's Bill Acker.
Now, Bill, what do you think of the way the phone network has changed over the years?
How it is right now?
Is it a good thing?
A bad thing?
You might have gotten an unintended, but certainly a good hint of it by what I just said to Bernie.
I'm so sorry to hear all this wonderful stuff or to not hear it, except thanks to
Wide Web.
I get to hear lots of it, not to mention my own tapes as well.
But anyway, the way I phone freak these days is by building voiceover IP networks
using Asterisk and FreeSwitch and whatever.
In fact, FreeSwitch makes a marvelous soft phone.
I run that on my laptop.
And I do that.
And so I'm happy.
Linux and Internet Protocol version 6 are my primary focus these days.
So that's what I'm up to.
Awesome.
Any stories you'd like to share with us?
Were you ever in trouble with the authorities for playing with the phones too much?
Well, yeah, a bit.
I was indicted in the Middle District of Florida.
That was a little less than fun.
They dismissed the charges because they went about getting the evidence in a way that the
judge wouldn't have appreciated.
They used that, I think it's part of the Omnibus Crime Act.
I need more coffee.
Where they could listen to a phone call long enough to determine who was making the call,
if it was like triggered by a 2600 detector that they'd placed on a phone line.
But that's all they could do it use is the information for that.
And that's the very one.
Absolutely.
And yes, Bernie's doing that with a computer.
Bernie's doing that.
And I heard he sent one, two, three, before.
By the way, to get that smartphone, at least on Android, you can download a BlueBox application.
And that's a lot of fun.
Cool.
Awesome.
And anyway, it was only designed to determine who made the call.
And as a result, they couldn't use the information against me.
It didn't help my buddy who called me.
But it certainly helped me.
And so I was not actually convicted.
But it was not fun.
I can assure you it wasn't fun.
The voice of Bill Acker, who passed away this week.
A master phone freak over the years.
And Bernie, I'd say this is the example of a true hacker.
Yes.
And by the way, Bill did all that while blind.
Yes.
All the experimentation and exploration of the phone network.
Actually, Joan Grecia also was blind.
Phone freaks who were blind were quite prolific over the decades.
Yeah, I think it gave them an edge, frankly.
Because they had less distractions from visual things.
They could really focus on what they heard.
And picking out signals with their really fine hearing.
So I've got to hand it to Bill Acker, Joan Grecia, later Joy Bevels, Steve Wozniak.
All those early, John Draper, all those early phone freaks.
And there were many of them, some of us included,
who really loved to play with this stuff and learned a lot.
And I think helped change hacker culture.
I mean, the 2600 community is sort of based on that, isn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, we owe so much to what these guys pioneered and what they found.
And just their overall spirit of exploration, sharing information.
And that's something that I do think is still strong today.
I know there are a lot of forces.
Maybe we'll have time to discuss it.
Lots of forces pulling in all different directions
to make the hacker community something that it really never was before.
But I don't think you could find anyone purer than Bill Acker as far as getting it.
As far as the actual spirit of it all.
And the thing to remember in sad situations like this
is that you have to talk to these guys.
You have to hear their stories.
You have to share their stories.
I regret that we only had him on the air once.
And I wish we could have talked to him a lot more.
Same thing with High-Rise Joe.
He was an incredible storyteller and he just could explain things so well.
There are people like that still in all fields.
And we need to engage them more.
We need to listen to what they say.
We need to learn from them and emulate them, I believe.
And Phil Lashley's book, Exploding the Phone,
covers a lot of Bill Acker's work and a lot of other phone freaks' work over the years.
So we've had Phil on the show many times.
He's been a speaker at Hope Conferences talking about history of phone phreaking.
But Exploding the Phone is probably the penultimate book on this topic.
So I highly recommend it.
Penultimate means next to last, does it not?
Oh, you know, just ultimate.
We'll call it that.
You've been tweeting too much, Bernie.
Oh, boy.
How many more books about phone phreaking will be written, you know?
I don't know.
Hopefully an infinite number.
Hopefully there'll be more things to explore and the spirit will remain.
I think it definitely can.
But moving on.
Mike, you're back from Germany, right?
It's true.
You went to the chaos camp?
I did.
It was in Mildenberg, which is a brickworks, a former brickworks, about 45 minutes north
of Berlin.
And almost 5,000 people came.
Wow.
Okay.
That sounds great.
That's a lot of people.
It is.
It is.
It was almost too many people, but it was good.
We had a thunderstorm, which apparently Germans aren't used to.
I don't know.
They're really freaked out.
Camps always have downpours.
I don't know about thunderstorms.
We had a thunderstorm and we were all made to evacuate during the thunderstorm.
Evacuate where?
We were told to evacuate to our cars, which is interesting for those of us who don't have
cars and flew there from other continents.
How did you take that?
But there was some buildings we could go into.
I don't know.
It seemed to me an overreaction to the bad, but unexceptionally so weather, but they were
freaked out.
Was it ground or sky to ground lightning, bolts and things like that?
There was some lightning.
Yeah.
There's different kinds of lightning.
I don't know how to distinguish amongst the kinds of lightning.
Well, did you see a bolt coming from the heavens and hit the ground?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, then they were right to say evacuate because every now and then people on golf
courses get struck by lightning.
It's not because the heavens are upset at golfers.
It's because that's how it works.
You're out there in a field, which I imagine most people probably were out on fields.
You're very prone to being struck.
So being in a building is definitely the wise thing to do.
But I know more happened than a thunderstorm.
There were a number of excellent talks and they gave everyone who attended this thing,
which I'm holding in my hand, which is called the radio badge.
R A D 1 0.
And what's interesting about it is you can switch it on and there's an old Nokia LCD
screen.
So you can use the joystick and you can change your name.
So you could wear it as a name badge if you want.
But also you can plug it into a computer and it becomes a software defined radio.
Wow.
What can you do with that software defined radio, Mike?
Anything you can do with any actual radio, as long as it's within the spectrum of the
supported chipset, which for this particular one is about 100 megahertz up to four gigahertz or so.
So you could tune to 99.5 FM on that thing right now?
I could not because I don't have a computer hooked up to it, but it is a supported feature.
It's slightly outside the supported band, but I think people have got it to work.
You do have to provide your own antenna for that kind of thing.
But you can intercept Wi-Fi if you want.
You can, you know, anything that is transmitted over the radio in that spectrum, you can configure
your computer to decode it with this hardware.
So what were people doing with these devices over there?
Well, a lot of trying to get them to work.
Typical hacker convention.
Yeah.
Very familiar.
And of course, one thing that is, there's special pads on it for extension with LEDs,
because no hacker convention is complete without LEDs, but no part of a hacker convention is
complete with LEDs.
So there's eight slots for soldering LEDs on.
But according to the screen print, you can decode DECT with it, which is a kind of phone.
You can listen in on GSM calls if you have the know-how, all kinds of things.
And I don't know enough about radio waves in general to be able to give you a complete list,
but the people who do are really excited by this.
And I want to spend some more time with it, getting it to work.
Well, okay.
Apart from that badge, what else happened at the conference?
Do you have any talks?
I did.
One thing that, there were, I think, fewer talks than there have been in the past,
but some really community broadening ones.
So there was one talk that I went to given by some folks who are refugees in Germany,
who are working with other refugees.
So it's an entirely refugee driven project to build internet centers in a lot of the
refugee housing that they have there.
So it's empowering on two levels, both that people get access to the internet and it's
a community space.
It's one of the few, in his description, spaces where refugees from different countries come
and meet and talk to each other within Germany.
And the kind of project that I just never would have heard about if he hadn't been there
at the camp.
There was a delegation from the Indian hacker community talking about some of the events
they're doing there and their net neutrality campaign, which I think we talked about on
this program as it was happening, which is just a fascinating case study in campaigns.
They got over a million emails sent to their telecom regulator there in just a very short
time of public comment.
Emails, wow.
Emails, emails.
But it was a website.
So they could have, if the telecom regulator had been accepting comments by some other
medium, I'm sure they could have pulled that off too.
The Brewster from the Internet Archive was there.
And if you don't know about the Internet Archive, after you listen to this program, just go
archive.org and learn all about it.
It's amazing program, amazing service.
And our former colleague, Gus, and some colleagues of hers gave a talk about building usable
encrypted communications infrastructure, which is so important.
It's not sufficient to just build a thing that is technically cool if no one can figure
out how to use it.
So that was a really important talk that was there.
And there's so many others that I'm probably forgetting that were also as good.
But it's always great to see the diversity of the hacker community on so many different
levels at these sorts of events.
Absolutely.
And the best conferences are the ones where you see that.
You see that diversity.
And you celebrate it.
And it's not something that's forced.
It's something that actually happens and evolves right in front of your eyes.
So that's why I like to go to those.
I really wish I could have made it to this one.
But I'll probably be at the Congress in the winter, which is also worth going to in Germany.
They're expecting 15,000 people this year.
It's amazing.
Wow.
And the building holds 15,000 people.
So they think they've reached the limit.
And I was talking with someone who helps organize it.
And he was like, you know, there aren't just not that many buildings in Europe that are
bigger that we can go to if we need to.
So it's amazing.
Yes.
All right.
Moving on.
Well, we have to talk about the Ashley Madison thing because it's everywhere.
And everyone's talking about it.
And it's embroiling the entire hacker world for right or for wrong.
Is that how we make our coverage decisions these days?
Whatever everyone else is talking about, we have to talk about that.
When they're talking about us, yes, we should.
It keeps us cool.
Yeah.
Well, maybe.
We'll see about that.
Here's what is known so far.
The Ashley Madison people known as Avid Life Media.
They're based in Toronto.
They're offering $500,000 Canadian dollars to anyone with information that leads to the
identification of the hackers.
Now, $500,000 Canadian.
What's that like?
How low has that gotten now in American dollars?
Anybody know?
It's not $500,000 American dollars.
You keep talking and I can look it up.
$300,000, I'm saying.
It's OK.
It's not as much as you might think it is.
Yeah.
But that's beside the point.
Supposedly, people are now killing themselves over this.
Two suicides are supposedly linked to that.
Here's the thing that really kind of upsets me here is how, again, I don't do the same
thing week after week, but releasing data is not a hack.
Figuring out how to get into it.
Yeah.
OK.
Maybe.
Maybe there's some hacker ability there.
Or maybe it's just an insider job.
Somebody just said, hey, this is how you get access to everything.
Not much in the way of hacking.
But the media, once again, all over this saying hackers are now causing people to kill themselves.
The hackers say they aren't done yet.
Who are these hackers?
What makes them hackers?
Just the fact that they say that.
Here's a story that really was kind of funny from The Independent over in London.
Basically, a small group of what they call ethical hackers has now dumped thousands of
personal details of adulterers and would-be adulterers onto the web.
This is what's happening now.
People who do something that you might agree with, even though it's a horrible thing, like
releasing people's private information, are considered, quote unquote, ethical hackers.
I've never liked that phrase.
It's a nonsense phrase.
Because hacking, by definition, is an ethical thing.
It's exploration.
It's experimentation.
It's divulging information.
And for these dimwits to come along and say, well, because these people exposed a bunch
of cheaters, those are ethical hackers.
I don't think they're ethical.
I don't think they're hackers.
Anyone agree with that or disagree with that?
I mean, I think it's more complex.
I agree with your judgment in this case.
I think hacking can be done ethically or unethically.
I think the people who run the so-called ethical hacker programs who tell you to go work for
governments and big corporations and other things like that are not great places to take
ethics lessons.
But I do think there is a debate to be had about what's ethical and what's not.
And I do think, in this particular case, releasing the private information of however many thousands
of people seems pretty ethically dubious.
It's millions, actually.
36 million email addresses, anyway, were revealed.
How many of those are fake?
How many of those are duplicates?
Nobody really knows.
But it's a lot.
It's a lot.
And people are really freaking out over this.
And the danger is that when you keep attaching the word hacker to this, any time the word
hacker comes up in the media, it's something bad.
It's something evil.
It's something to be afraid of.
And no matter what you're doing, it's going to be considered wrong and dangerous.
And there will be crackdowns based on this perception.
Bernie, do you agree?
I do.
It appears to me, and even the CEO of Avid Life Media, the owner of Ashley Madison and
some other equally dubious websites, has even said that this was an insider, somebody who
had access to information anyway.
So was this really even a hack?
Yeah, that's my point.
Yeah, it's like releasing people's information that you had access to as a contractor, does
that make you a hacker?
I don't think so.
But I agree with you, Emanuel, that releasing this private information about individuals
was not, I don't think it was ethical, frankly.
But calling out a company like Avid Life Media for fraud, which apparently happened in this
case, I think that is ethical.
But it's all a matter of opinion, I think.
Yeah, and by the way, you can look yourself up.
If you go to a site called ashley.cynical, yeah, ashley.cynic.al, you can look up your
email address and see if you've been exposed as somebody who was on Ashley Madison.
I've only found a couple of people that I know on there.
Emanuel, there's an exception here.
This company, this website, Ashley Madison.com, did not require email authentication.
They didn't send you...
So anybody could register anybody on that site as an unpaid user using anybody's email
address.
Kevin Middleton was on last week.
He said a bunch of people used his email address to register, and he said he's never been on
there.
I think they used his name.
I don't know if they used his email address, but...
But in any case, I've heard stories of people whose email addresses were used, and I've
read that this company, Ashley Madison.com, did not, or Avid Life Media did not require
email authentication.
They didn't send an email to that address that you had to confirm, whatever.
So just because your email address is on there doesn't mean that you were a registered user
of that site, and I think some people are in an awkward situation having to explain
that to their partner.
Well, I mean, the thing is, yes, that's absolutely possible.
By the way, Bernie, I just checked you, and you're not on there, so you can rest easy.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
But if you're up to skullduggery and being dishonest with people, you already have problems,
and these problems are going to come out in some way.
I wouldn't worry about this.
This is just one thing that a lot of people are involved in, and signing up on a website
is not a crime, and there's all kinds of reasons people might do this without being up to something
nefarious.
People should not be taking it so seriously that they're ending their lives or having
all kinds of dramatic relationship issues.
It's out there.
Deal with it and learn from your mistakes.
Because if you put private information on a system like this, you made a big mistake,
and that's what you really should learn.
Yeah, Kyle?
I wonder, I don't know, maybe we addressed this already, but if this is private information,
it's different than something that's fairly ethically bland, right?
Like, okay, you're banking stuff or something like that, right?
It's personal, yes, and it would be hugely, I guess, inconvenient for that to be all over
the internet, and it would maybe, quote, ruin your life a little that week or whatever.
But I guess the line of thought I could understand, if you're behind one of these kinds of leaks,
is that this site itself is morally depraved, not so great.
So by releasing stuff, I mean, ethically, are you really in the wrong, given that the
site itself is sort of compromised from an outside view?
I guess it's like outing someone for parking violations in front of a strip club or something,
or I don't know.
I'm trying to come up with a parallel there, but it just seems like that's the line of
thought that whomever did this was going along, and maybe just some for laughs kind of thing, too.
Well, that's why I hate to see morality attached to this.
These people are revealing the cheaters and the liars in society, and that's what makes
them ethical, and they're less ethical than anybody who's on that site, I would put forth.
If it was like Doctors Without Borders or something, or like, I don't know, some-
Doctors Without Borders who were cheating?
Altruistic, yeah, some altruistic, I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud.
The thing is, if you're going to go on a website to organize cheating on your spouse
or significant other or whatever, that's something I have a lot of trouble understanding,
because it just seems so dramatically dumb.
Why would you do that?
Why would you put yourself on the record as saying, yeah, I want to do this?
Imagine a real crime.
I'd like to steal a million dollars, and you mean it, and there's a website for you to
sign up for information about how you might be able to pull that off.
You know, some things, including cheating on people, I think should be left to the individual
and not be part of some massive group of 36 million people.
That's just my thought.
Mike?
I mean, I think it doesn't really require us to understand what's going on in the heads
of the people who use the site, because it's none of our business.
There may be some exceptions of politicians who can be exposed as hypocrites or whatever,
but I think in 99.99% of these cases, it is none of our business that people were on
this website.
And I think that's the point.
I don't think it's our business, even when it's a politician.
I mean, their private life is their private life.
I think in general, you're correct.
I think if there's a politician who is arguing for stricter adultery laws and they're on
this site, then the hypocrisy issue becomes a public matter.
But I think in the general case, you're completely correct.
Well, I assume by default that politicians are hypocrites.
So more evidence for that, I guess, doesn't really surprise me.
But the fact is, the information is out now.
We can say that it's none of our business, but it's out there.
How do we deal with that?
How do we deal with how hackers are being blamed for this?
How do we deal with people who might be affected by this?
There are questions actually also being raised.
Is it illegal to download the Ashley Madison hack data dump?
Almost everybody I know is downloading it from someplace.
And people, the quote-unquote hacker squad behind this, known as Impact Team, they uploaded
the email addresses, credit card data, addresses, other account information onto the dark web,
unleashing a torrent of previously private details about 36 million people's private lives.
So now there are actions being taken both by Ashley Madison and by all kinds of other
lawyers everywhere, whether it be divorce lawyers or whether it be people trying to
quell the release of information like this.
The question does get raised if this information is out there and you have it.
Have you committed a crime?
Bernie, what do you think?
Well, it's funny you mention that because the Avid Life Media actually filed a Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, TMCA, takedown request for a website called Check Ashley
Madison dot com.
Right.
It was one of these search engines that was set up specifically to search through the
data for 36 or so million Ashley Madison dot com users.
And we just have to stay in their company name or give them advertising.
But in any case...
Do you think advertising is going to do them any good at all at this point?
You're probably right.
They're definitely done after all.
But I mean, how many of us imagine that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would have
been abused?
Well, a lot of us actually thought that it would be abused.
But in new and creative ways to protect really embarrassing information about your own company
from being exposed, it's pretty interesting that they're using the DMCA to squelch information
about their company being released.
Bernie, there is nothing that the DMCA cannot do or cannot be used for.
I mean, you're wrong.
This is a thing the DMCA can't do.
Mike, let me introduce you to sarcasm.
But I don't think it's particularly surprising that a company like this or many other companies
would try and use the DMCA to get this content removed because it is far and away the easiest
way to remove content from the web.
And unless the content poster is willing to sign a declaration and enter a small amount
of legal process to keep the content back, then the content will be gone regardless of
the legitimacy of the claim.
So I'm not surprised at all that they tried this.
Here's what the Check Ashley Madison site says now if you go to them.
Since our site is down, go to ashley.cynical, as we mentioned before, to see if you've been
compromised.
During the creation of this site, we made it clear that we wanted to give Ashley Madison's
users the ability to check if their accounts have been compromised due to the seemingly
faulty and thoughtless work done by Ashley Madison's development team.
We have given several users who have contacted us information about the leak, and we tried
our best to help them understand the situation.
In every single case, we have removed information from our server on request by the user.
Nonetheless, Ashley Madison's legal team has served us with the DMCA takedown request,
forcing us to shut down this service.
We hope that Avid Life Media will follow up in the coming days with some sort of help
to their user base and a formal apology rather than try to sweep it under the rug.
It truly shows how much the owners of the site care about their users.
We also hope that all of you affected by the leak will be able to find some sort of comfort
in the near future after the immense effect this will likely have on many of your personal
lives.
P.S. to Ashley Madison's development team, you should be embarrassed for your train wreck
of a database and obviously security.
Not sanitizing your phone numbers to your database is completely amateur.
It's as if the entire site was made by Comp Sci 1XX students.
I guess 101.
All the above statements are the opinion of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
fact.
All right.
I think they got their two cents out there.
It's really pathetic how the company has dealt with this.
I think if you go to their site, there's no mention of it.
There's no mention of it at all.
There's one of the news stories that I saw before had the funniest headline.
What's next for Ashley Madison?
What's in their future?
I think it would be a great thing if one of our listeners or just somebody out there in
the community just called Ashley Madison and applied for a job.
You know, hey, are you hiring?
What do you guys have planned down the road?
I'd love to see just what the mood is over there, what these guys are actually up to.
It's the real disservice is a company that allows for this sort of thing to happen in
the first place by not protecting confidential information, by encouraging people to give
them all sorts of incriminating information.
And I think one of the things that they offered was the ability to completely erase information
for a fee.
And apparently that didn't quite work.
And that's I heard and I'm not sure this is true.
One of the reasons these quote unquote hackers, leakers, whatever you want to call them, released
this was because of the fact that they were ripping people off.
A lot has still is still yet to be uncovered on this.
And I'm sure there are a lot of nervous people out there now.
But like I said, there are 36 million accounts here.
There are bigger things to worry about.
There are bigger things that you should be concerned about.
But it is an important issue.
How do we deal with this?
How do we protect the hacker name from being further tarnished by being associated with
people that would that would affect so many others out there in such a negative way?
Emanuel, I'm amazed that that's that's more.
That's more accounts or members than one third of the U.S. population.
Of course, it's a global site.
It is still a lot of people.
It's a lot of accounts.
I think your math is off.
It's about a tenth of the U.S. population.
OK, one tenth.
I'm sorry.
You're right.
It is one tenth.
But it's still a lot of people.
I don't think Bernie was counting children.
Oh, well, OK.
There you go.
Mike's right.
It was one.
It's still more than it's more than one tenth the U.S. population.
It's a lot of people.
It's a lot of people out there.
I mean, it seems reasonable to believe that some people had more than one account.
And apparently some of these accounts are not associated with any human beings at all.
But it's still a lot.
Yeah.
All right.
Again, if you have opinions and thoughts on this or any other topic that we discuss,
oth at 2600.com is our email address.
And we'd love to hear from all of our listeners.
Please let us know what you think about this particular story.
OK, you know, we talked about this guy a couple of times over the last few weeks,
this guy, Junaid Hussain.
And this is kind of what I'm talking about when I say that just calling somebody a hacker
makes you into somebody evil.
This guy supposedly was allied with ISIS.
But when you looked at what it was that he is accused of, he's accused of basically
using Twitter, hacking, praising people that do evil things.
Couldn't really find much.
I mean, some of those things are bad, no question about that.
But, you know, usually when you target somebody for assassination, it's because they've
done something truly horrendous.
They've killed people, they're leading armies, whatever.
And this guy is basically a computer hacker from Birmingham in England.
And that was enough.
That was enough for many people to say, yeah, that makes him an enemy of the state.
He should be assassinated.
Well, supposedly he was in the last week or so.
U.S. military and intelligence community is in the final stages of confirming that
a U.S. drone strike this week killed Junaid Hussain, who is linked to the Garland, Texas
cartoon contest attack.
And by linked, basically they mean he praised it on Twitter.
That's the link.
We have a high level of confidence he was killed.
One U.S. official told CNN Wednesday, referring to the British-born ISIS recruiter and hacker
that the U.S. believes was heavily involved in inspiring attacks.
I'm not sympathetic to people who inspire attacks of any sort, but this guy is described
as a hacker, a hacker and somebody who inspired a recruiter and a hacker.
Is that enough?
Have we actually transgressed into a society now where we just have to call somebody a
hacker who works for the wrong people and recruits people and praises people?
That's enough for a drone strike.
I mean, I think it's been clear for some time that the standards for being struck by
a drone are not terribly high.
And yeah, I mean, the U.S. government should be ashamed of itself in this case and so many
others.
Well, this is the first time I can recall that someone who is simply considered a hacker
and again, the word is being misused, I think, because basically this is somebody who was
on Twitter and had some savviness on the net and was able to communicate with people in
various ways.
I see nothing to indicate he was actually a computer genius or somebody who could manipulate
technology other than running a Twitter account.
But that's enough calling somebody a hacker.
This is what I'm worried about, the demonization of the word.
And I don't think you can get more of a negative effect than having a drone go and strike you
because you're considered a hacker for the wrong side.
I mean, people have been drone struck for less is all I'm going to say.
It's not the point.
The point is we're talking about hackers.
This is a hacker show.
And now hackers who are in the wrong country or for the wrong side, just call them a hacker.
OK, drone is on the way.
Yeah, I know lots of innocent people have been killed by drones.
That's not the point.
Bernie, any thoughts on this?
I agree with you and Mike in this respect that if the U.S. is going to start murdering
people who are allegedly hackers for people they don't like, the American people need
to stand up and say, this is really what we want our government to do in our name.
I don't want our government doing that in our name.
OK.
Also, continuing with the conversation about the importance of communication, email, Twitter,
whatnot.
Well, here's something that might open up some eyes regarding people who communicate
in other ways.
Twitter has shut down an account, various accounts actually, several accounts, that
log politicians deleted tweets.
Yeah, you might wonder why such a thing exists.
Well, occasionally politicians say things that they wish they hadn't said, and then
they delete them and pretend Orwellian style that they never said them.
But there are some Twitter sites or Twitter accounts, rather, that have taken to collecting
these and displaying them.
Well, Twitter has decided that that is not within their terms, and they have started
deleting those sites and making like the politicians want it to be.
These things never happened.
Now, again, you know, not to drag this out, if you were to save emails, they would be
your emails.
You could save them.
You could do whatever you want with them.
When you trust another company, they have the right, especially if you're not paying
them anything, they have the right to do whatever they want.
They can delete you.
They can delete what you say.
Right now, it sounds like everything is tolerated as far as controversial speech, but that can
change.
It can change in a country.
It can change in a corporation.
It can change overnight.
Now, Friday night, Twitter blocked 31 accounts owned by the Open State Foundation.
They're a digital transparency group.
They logged deleted tweets from politicians and diplomats around the world.
Now, we already knew Twitter didn't take fondly to those types of accounts because it removed
the Sunlight Foundation's Palitwoops, Palitwoops, I think I'm pronouncing that properly, their
U.S. account.
It monitors the revisions and gaffes of American politicians.
They took that down in June.
The company told the Open State Foundation it had considered its decision carefully and
said in a statement, imagine how nerve-wracking, terrifying even, tweeting would be if it was
immutable and irrevocable.
No one user is more deserving of that ability than another.
Indeed, deleting a tweet is an expression of the user's voice.
What a load of crap, and you can quote me on that, and I won't delete it.
If you say something, you've said it.
You can't go back and unsay it.
You can say, I wish I hadn't said that.
You can say what I meant by saying that was, but you can't pretend it didn't happen.
And Twitter, by doing this, is basically buying into that and saying, yeah, you can rewrite
history and pretend something didn't happen, and if you run an account that calls attention
to this, you're the one that is violating the terms.
This to me outlines the danger of this kind of trust that we seem to be blindly running
into, and it's nerve-wracking.
I'm glad we're able to report on it, at least.
I think this is precisely the risk of the centralized communications infrastructure,
and look, there's some great advantages to it as well.
Twitter is able to control spam a lot more effectively than any one email provider can
because it can see the whole network and notice the patterns in the spammers, but the downside
is they control the entire thing, and anything they don't like, anything that they think
will make them less profitable, will get shut down.
Right, right, and that's something people need to remember.
Bernie, any thoughts on that?
Well, I just think it's scary that anybody who publicly says something in any medium
can expect their words to be, can expect, can say, oh, just delete their words and expect
everybody to believe that they never said it, and to have a company that publishes their
words and the deletion thereof be able to crack down on anyone who would say, no, you
did say this, see, here, that's insane.
To be fair to Twitter, they're not going after people who are publishing this information
on other websites, they're shutting down Twitter accounts that are documenting deleted
tweets.
Okay, that was my next question, and I didn't even think that they could do that, but yeah,
another competing Twitter-like site could simply tie into that and just not have it
on Twitter, have it someplace else, but do you think it actually, a lawyer somewhere
might actually convince them that they should go after an external site that did this?
Well, I don't know, maybe they could invoke a DMCA, I don't know if Twitter's copyrighted
everything on their site or not, but we'll have to see if that's the next step, it wouldn't
surprise me, frankly.
So I tweeted something the other day in German and I realized a couple hours later that my
grammar was just horribly wrong and I was ashamed of it and deleted my tweet, but I
don't, anyone who saw it in the intervening time when it was up, they saw it, I don't
know, I don't expect that I have the right to be able to do anything about that.
Yeah, that's the point, that you said it, okay, it was wrong, you corrected yourself,
if you want to scrub over it and say, okay, you know, you can't see this anymore on my
account, but don't prevent somebody from exposing it and saying, yeah, but you really
said this.
You know, if it's a trivial thing, it doesn't matter, who cares, but if it's a politician
saying something, you know, imagine Donald Trump's latest views and he wants to revise
those, although he never seems to do that, he seems to just make it worse, but imagine
him trying to cover up something he said and this is completely allowed and if you say
what he said, what he actually originally said, you're somehow in the wrong, that is
very unhealthy.
Yeah, I mean, your anecdote would go better with someone who appears to be capable of
actually feeling shame, but I take your point.
Yeah, I don't know many people in the political world now that can do that.
Jeb Bush comes to mind, he basically had this interesting statement on Tuesday saying,
encryption makes it harder for law enforcement to track down evildoers, called for a much
better, more cooperative relationship with Apple, Google, other tech companies that are
building uncrackable private communications apps into their new products.
If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job.
I want to say that again because I think it's worthy of repeating and I hope he doesn't
erase it in the time that I say this.
If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job
while protecting civil liberties to make sure that evildoers aren't in our midst.
We need to find a new arrangement with Silicon Valley in this regard because I think this
is a very dangerous kind of situation.
Thoughts?
I mean, what he's asking for, which is what the FBI and other people have been asking
for for quite some time, is impossible.
Let's be clear.
You cannot create crypto that is crackable only by the government.
If you create crackable crypto, other people are going to crack it too and our entire financial
system will disappear.
Did you just say create crackable crypto?
Yeah, I did and I won't say it again.
You cannot change the rules of math by demanding that they be changed and I think it's very
unfortunate that we have such demands coming from prominent people, not just Mr. Bush.
Oh, I think it's very fortunate that they are coming from people like that and that
we're able to discuss them and spread them around to show the world what they really
think and what they really stand for and react to it and do something different.
I think that would be great if we did that more.
I think it's a little short-sighted of him, kind of along the lines of economic
problems like the financial system and so on and so forth, but he's a moron and an idiot.
So I kind of expect him to come up with that.
You might want to erase that statement because that could come back to haunt you.
He's so much better on Espanol.
We should stay like that all the time.
Maybe because we don't understand what he's saying when he's speaking Spanish.
But regardless, one final, I want to end on an up note, all right?
And what better up note to end on than this?
There is a new crayfish species named after Edward Snowden.
That's right.
German researcher Christian Lukhoppe is a pretty big Edward Snowden fan,
so he decided to name a new species of crayfish after the former NSA contractor,
the Chirag Snowden.
It doesn't really bear any resemblance to Snowden.
It lives in freshwater tributary creeks in Indonesia.
So go look that up if you ever make it out there.
Hey, write to us, please.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
Even if you don't believe in email, tell us why.
We'll be back again next week with another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
Emmanuel for Off the Hook.
Stay tuned for a personal computer show.
Good night.
I am love
And I am free
I am a child
Of envy
I am a child
Of envy
I am a child
Of envy
I am a child
Of envy
My heart beats electrically
My brain computes programming
I am complicated, let me be
I am new programming
This stripped reality is mine if you let me be
I am love and I am free
I am a child programming
I am a child of envy
I am a child of envy