His strategy to keep jobs in America relies on busting unions, keeping wages down, deregulating
everything in sight, and cutting taxes for the wealthy.
So on Labor Day, we'll build bridges amongst the workers to unite, raise their wages, and
build it like it is.
Trump's declared a war on the workers, and it's time to fight back.
Tune in to our Building Bridges Labor Day special, Monday, September 4th, 6 to 10 p.m.
Produced by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash.
Don't give up the fight.
And you are listening to radio station WBAI in New York, where so much is going on over
these airwaves.
Wow.
Well, it's 8 o'clock now, and what's going to be going over these airwaves at this time
is off the hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
Von Diddley-Bohm for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Von Diddley-Bohm!
I hope that's understood.
You go to certain parts of the world, certain parts of the country, and you feel trepidation,
and then you go there, and you realize that there's so much that we have in common, so
much that we can share and benefit from if we just talk and hang out and do fun things.
So we need to do more of that.
Can I ask you a question?
Yes.
Last week, I think it was, you mentioned that you were in the Bay Area, and you said, I
believe it was that Oakland was one of your new favorite places.
Is that right?
Did I get that wrong?
If I'm right about that, I'd love for you to explain that.
Okay.
No.
Oakland is definitely one of my favorite places now.
We spent some time there.
Turns out there's this place called Jack London, what is it, Square?
Jack London Square.
Yeah.
Okay.
And I'm not really sure what Jack London's relationship to Oakland, I guess he lived
there or something.
He wrote about the Great North, sled dogs and things like that.
A writer, I believe.
Yeah.
Not many.
He was a writer.
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump might be calling him, though.
Who knows?
But yeah, there was just this part of Oakland that we literally got off the train, and the
train goes down the street.
It goes down, the Amtrak train and the freight trains, they all go down an actual street
that cars also drive on.
It's the most incredible thing to see.
So I fell in love with that right away.
But just the mood of the town was just kind of down to earth, rebellious, and progressive.
I really liked that.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
I wasn't expecting that.
It's been true for a number of years, actually, in Oakland, I do know that, but I hadn't given
it a chance.
I assumed Berkeley was the cool place to be, which it's also cool, but I think Oakland
is kind of surpassing it now.
Yeah.
There was definitely less foot traffic and attractions and more of your sort of everyday,
well, there's a distribution for all kinds of fresh fruit and vegetable, produce distribution.
This activity of hard work and grittiness, we really like these sort of off the beaten
path industrial areas.
And we found a bunch of them just by wandering around, looking up where the cool coffee place
is to go, and then where the cool neighborhoods are, such as East Nashville.
East Nashville is a really cool place to hang out, Germantown.
We went to a place in Tennessee called Franklin, which has this incredible mall that, how would
you describe it, Kyle?
It's like an old factory.
It's an old factory that has been remodeled and basically turned into a shopping complex.
But it's interesting because there's a lot of local sort of small businesses, not a lot
of chains.
I didn't see any chains, other than local chains.
It's definitely in the vein of arts and crafts and local flair.
And it used to be, I believe, a stove factory, where they made all kinds of old stoves of
various models and makes.
So that was fascinating, just bumping into that.
And so there was a coffee roaster there that we wanted to see.
A lot of good craft coffee, we noticed.
But of course, it was something we always seek out.
It's a great thing to do while you're traveling.
It's a good start.
It sort of sets the tone.
And if there's a good coffee place, odds are there are other cool things around the neighborhood
as well.
We spent a lot of time just walking and just exploring.
We went to Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
That was kind of nice.
We did.
Didn't really explore it that much.
That had a lot of chains, a lot more strip malls and stuff.
But weird chains, different chains than what we were used to.
This was the point in our trip where I was looking for the famous Eclipse goggles, and
there was, I think, a chain called Action Sports.
Never, ever heard of that at all in my life.
But just a lot of funny stuff like that, you notice.
But it is the sort of necessary part and active part of people's lives.
That's where they go to get things done and go out and be prepared with whatever sport
equipment they need.
That kind of stuff is something everyone there is used to because it's the closest places
to patronize.
Pretty much every place we went, there was a cool section to go to and to talk to people
and not feel like you're going back a century or in fear for your life or anything like that.
I think that's kind of something that we instill in ourselves.
Yeah, there's evil and bad and prejudice and all kinds of things out there.
But there's also a lot of smartphones and people tapped into all kinds of modern amenities
that are not unlikely.
We can maybe forget that on the coasts, but information technology has been very pervasive
and is as prevalent there as it is here, which is cool.
There's a lot of activity.
It's not just the information technology.
I mean, yeah, that's a good thing.
It's a good sign.
It's an example.
Bad people can use that as well, and they will and they have.
But I just think that the sense that we got is that the country is a lot more woke than
we give it credit for sometimes.
No, seriously, I felt good about it because I see a lot of local actions, and we tend
to look at the country on an obviously nationwide scale.
But if you go to the communities, if you go and talk to people, you realize that everyone's
doing their bit, and they're trying to get through whatever crisis they're facing.
And most of the time, even if we disagree with them, most of the time they're good people.
And lots of times there are people who we do agree with who are in these situations.
Imagine being in Mississippi, in Tennessee, in Texas, in Louisiana, and not New York City,
not where it's easy.
I think it means more when people speak up and stand out, and I saw a lot of that.
Yeah, there's still a huge cross section of American culture, and you can find that pretty
much everywhere you go, which it was heartening.
It was a lot of cool spirit in all the places we went.
Plus the people on the train that we met.
When you go on the train, what happens is you have three meals a day.
If you have a sleeper on the train, you get your meals included.
And three times a day, you get seated at a table, and if there's two of you, like there
were with me and Kyle, you get seated opposite two other people who are complete strangers
you've never seen before, and you have a conversation with them.
It's not required, but it's unavoidable, really.
And unlike an airplane, where I'm the most antisocial person in the world, I will not
say a word to the person next to me, usually, for the entire trip.
I will start conversations on the train because we're on a train, for God's sake.
We're seeing things going by the window as we're sitting there.
We're all in this together.
We're there for a couple of days sometimes, and you wind up meeting some really, really
cool people.
We met some people from virtually every state we had traveled to.
We met people from Houston, and I hope they're okay in the storm of 500 years they're going
through for the third time.
Yeah, that was not even something we were aware of when we were speaking with them.
Well, we couldn't have been.
We'd have to see the future.
It was weeks ahead.
Yeah, there wasn't even a forecast of a storm, but foreshadowing, though, since Houston was
indeed in the news this week.
Well, we spent time in New Orleans, and New Orleans is a city that really touches me.
I can't even really explain why.
It just does.
It's something about the mood in that place.
There's so much tragedy, so much poverty that the city has seen being forgotten so many
times, but people there have this spirit of survival.
And to see, on the day we were leaving, to see people stacking sandbags again in preparation
for what might be another major storm, it was heartbreaking.
And, of course, the storm didn't hit them, not directly, but went straight for Texas.
And our thoughts and concerns, obviously, are focused on them and the people we met
who came from these places.
And it's just an incredible set of circumstances to go through all these places, to see these
people, to visit different cities and different communities, and come back here and realize
that it's all attached.
It's all part of the same thing.
I mean, excuse me, I think a lot of what you're talking about here is so important, and we
often forget this because we live in New York, and if we're not in New York, we generally
live online, and we live online in these sort of social media echo chambers where we see
what we want to see.
We're fed more of what we like.
And we often forget that there are other people with many differing views, and when
you force yourself and you expose yourself, and I don't mean that in the obscene sense,
of course, but when you expose yourself to these other people, you begin to realize that
even though you may have very fundamental differences, and even though you may differ
politically, religiously, sentimentally, from most of the people with whom you were consorting,
let's say, in Mississippi or New Orleans or anywhere you were in the South, you respect
them.
You understand their views.
They respect us, and that's important.
And that's important.
And this country was founded on a bedrock of tolerance, of religious tolerance, of political
tolerance, and we often forget that these days.
We are so polarized, and the political process is so polarizing that we forget that we are
not the lowest common denominator of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, that we are
fundamentally people.
And so I think you're speaking to a really important issue, and it speaks to the importance
of getting out there and traveling, and no amount of time that you spend online will
ever be a substitute for that.
You know, it's interesting.
On the final train we took back, a train called the Cardinal that goes from Chicago, it takes
kind of the long way around.
There's the Lakeshore Limited, which goes directly from Chicago to New York, and then
there's the Cardinal, which goes through D.C.
And by chance, this was completely unplanned, it stopped in Charlottesville, and as we were
going into Charlottesville, I just saw this banner hanging out a window saying, no room
for hate.
And that was just an incredible thing to see things like that out the window, and to realize
that you're going right through the heart of that community.
It was really something else.
But one thing we did want to talk about that is very specific to what we are focused on
on this show, is the transit systems of the countries, of the cities, it feels like countries
almost.
Yeah.
Transit technology.
Yeah.
Transit technology that one day, hopefully, will come here.
Starting with ORCA, but you've got, what do you have in your hand there?
I have cards.
Souvenirs?
What are those?
They feel like credit cards.
You have the ORCA card, that's why I don't have it, because you basically, you're from
Seattle, you have an ORCA card that you're still able to use, and you simply put me on
your ORCA, it's hard to say ORCA card for some reason.
ORCA card, ORCA card, ORCA card.
Okay, fine.
You're from Seattle, I guess it's easy.
But basically, can you describe what that card does?
That card is like a wallet, or a thing that I can top up through a web portal.
Okay, it's not like a wallet, because you can put things in a wallet, it's like a virtual
wallet.
An e-wallet, yes.
Okay, an e-wallet.
In their system, as it were, and you basically can spend from that and coordinate with the
entire system, including buses, light rail, regional rail, and so on and so forth, which
is a pretty massive system.
You can also add special rides, I don't know, you paid for things in advance.
There are ways you can add special trips, if you want, but it's a pretty flexible system,
it's contactless, meaning you just wave it in front of a sort of beacon, similar to contactless
payment.
Anyway, it activates the gate, checks your balance, and off you go into the system.
It's very clever in so far as calculating what you actually owe, and will allow you
to do multiple transfers.
But there's ways around it, it's funny, because there's little quirks, like if you have two
people and you want to double tap, you can do that in advance for some lines, but the
normal mode is, say for instance, like with the MTA, where you swipe and then swipe again
for someone else, it's not as easy for the drivers, and often on the buses they'll just
wave you past.
Well, what's interesting, okay, you brought that up.
Functionally, it's weird.
You brought that up with swiping twice on the MetroCard here.
There's a bug in the system in New York, where if you do that, and then you get on a bus
for a transfer, you automatically get two transfers.
In other words, people can't split up, they have to always travel together, and if you
have left one of them behind, you're going to get two transfers, and you can't just give
one to somebody else.
Yeah, and another thing that you find with these contactless systems is where exactly
you tap out is sort of, well, it's up to you, but there's different strategies around that,
and always tapping out, it doesn't necessarily always serve you.
Sometimes you can get charged like two full trips, and there's other idiosyncrasies to
that that you have to pay attention to, otherwise you can really charge a lot.
I think a driver charged me full price at one point because I mentioned that I had already
paid for two.
Well, you know, there was supposed to be the OysterCard in London, which I have here.
That's a similar system, and that's very smart because what it does is it calculates, figures
out what the best pass for you for the day is.
If you spend more than a day pass, it'll just give you a day pass for that day, and I think
Seattle is similar.
It is, but it doesn't work exactly the same, but fundamentally it's structured the same
way, but like I said, there are some subtle differences.
I think the tube Oyster system is a little bit more on top of it, but this is a really
interesting system.
There was another technology I want to get to was just parking, which is another interesting
thing, but we've got how many of these cards now?
We've got a few, but let's slow down for a second because I wanted to mention what you
said in Seattle as far as buses.
We could not find a single bus driver who knew how to process two people on one card,
so without fail, and folks in Seattle try this, without fail, if you say you have two
people, they'll just wave you through.
That's literally what they did, and I don't know why it's so difficult.
You're supposed to hold the thing in front of the reader.
I don't know why you can't just hold the thing in front of the reader a second time, but
apparently that's not how it works, and they will wave you through.
Either that, or they just don't know how the system works themselves.
Yeah.
From my understanding, what it seems like is that it's not that easy.
They have to take time to perhaps type in a quantity of adults or something on their
keypad, and meanwhile, people are lined up trying to get into the bus, so these are moments
that drivers really don't want to be spending with finicky buttons and fiddling around
like that, so it's easier, I think, for them to just say, okay, look, you have this guest
with you, and maybe they don't recognize you as somebody that's abusing this every day,
so they just have that sort of wide latitude to say, just get on.
We'll get out of here.
You have to have an honest face.
Yeah.
Somehow, we've managed that.
It helps.
We definitely bring the honesty with us.
Now, Alex, you lived in London for a while.
I did, indeed.
Did you have access to the Oyster card?
I did almost every single day.
I'm a big fan of the Oyster card, as a matter of fact.
I have a friend who actually had his tailor weave into his suits various Oyster cards
so that he wouldn't even have to take them out.
He could just literally wave his hand over the turnstile and open the door.
Like Jesus.
Just like Jesus.
Wow.
Because he never paid for transit.
No.
Well, not that we know of.
He always got a ride somewhere.
He didn't always work out, but he always got a ride somewhere.
That's true.
Honestly.
Maybe you could explain this to me, Alex, because I have the Oyster card in my hand.
When you get the Oyster card in London, you pay a deposit.
And then when you're done with it, you get your deposit back.
Literally, I paid for this on a credit card and I got cash back.
I thought that was really cool.
Yes.
But look, I still have the card.
I could still keep the card.
What was the deposit for?
That, I have no idea about.
That's a good question.
It says the same thing.
Nobody has any idea.
I've never done that.
I have a card to get my deposit back.
Here I have a card that I don't know if it can be used ever again.
They probably deactivated it, but I really don't know the answer to it.
To go back to it, I think the Oyster card system is really fantastic.
It sounds very much like the system in Seattle.
And it's great that you can use it on buses pretty seamlessly.
I mean, you pretty much have to use an Oyster card on a bus in the transit system now, well,
on a bus specifically, because there's really no way to pay a driver.
You can't have a ticket.
You know, you need an Oyster card to do that.
You can get a single ride if you're just going into the tube.
But it is much cheaper.
It's much more effective.
And there's a lot of incentive.
It's expensive.
A single ride is expensive.
It certainly can be.
It can be very expensive.
And it's distance based as well.
It's not like New York where the subway was designed to be this equalizing system that's
very egalitarian that you could come from, you know, the bowels of Queens and go all
the way into.
Why the bowels of Queens?
That just came into my head.
I grew up in Queens.
That was a, you know, nobody's perfect.
I'm sorry about that.
But, you know, we can talk about that off the air if you want to.
Speaking of nobody being perfect, you know, I grew up only a couple of blocks away from
where Donald Trump lived as a kid.
That doesn't surprise me either.
I mean, that's just insane.
And also, and you want to know this, that crazy white supremacist guy from, that was
featured in Charlottesville.
Mel Gibson?
No, no, no.
Somebody else.
Okay.
Gotcha.
He lived two blocks away from me on Long Island.
Really?
Yeah.
So I don't know what's going on here.
Suffolk County is a weird place.
There are buzzards circling around.
Anyway, let's get back to mass transit because I think that's a lot cooler.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Rob, you had something.
Well, talking about a lot cooler, I'd just like to say that I live in Queens near where
the Ramones are from.
So I'm enjoying that.
But the thing that strikes me about all these-
You know that fiber optic who used to be on this show, used to live in the same building
as Joey Ramone.
So there you go.
More coincidences.
Awesome.
Oh boy.
I insulted a lot of people tonight.
And I interviewed Joey Ramone once.
And Johnny Ramone.
May they both rest in peace.
Indeed.
The thing that strikes me about these cards, the Oyster card or Kyle's, what was it, Kierkegaard
or-
Orca.
Orca card.
Yes.
I can't say it, but I can remember it.
These contactless systems are so much more robust.
I mean, in New York, we're stuck with these flimsy magnetic stripe metro cards that every
time you use them, they have to be read and rewritten to and read again to confirm the
rewriting.
And it's just this whole system with so many more points of failure than something you
could just use contactlessly.
And I think the heavy lifting data-wise is done on a remote server.
Well, well may you say that, Rob, now.
But in the year 2022, you might not say that.
And that's what we're getting to, is what's going to happen here in New York in a few
years.
Because what we're looking at, these are other systems that I think do it better, that are
more sturdy, that I think just make more sense.
And yeah, the flimsy magnetic stripe of our metro cards will soon be a thing of the past.
I remember, you know, back in the early days, the first HOPE, in fact, 1994, our own gym
was part of this, basically an expose on the metro card, which was new.
It was just coming out.
And we were very dubious, doubtful that it would ever succeed, that it would be used
in bad ways.
I think some of that might have come true.
But for the most part, the system sort of works.
But we all were kind of mourning the loss, the eventual loss of the token.
And have you guys all used tokens at one point or another?
Sure.
Absolutely.
Kyle, you weren't here in time for that, were you?
No.
Yeah.
Well, it was a little coin that you would put into the turnstile.
And remember those big turnstiles that you would push?
Absolutely.
Oh my God.
You still have the token system in Philadelphia.
That's right.
Yeah.
Philadelphia, you still have this really old archaic system.
I think you have to buy two tokens, which kind of sucks if you only want one ride.
That's right.
But anyway.
Okay.
So let's continue moving down the coast here.
San Francisco was our next stop.
And they have something called the Clipper card, which also, Kyle, would you say this
is the same type of system, contactless?
Yes.
All right.
It basically, it works on the BART system.
It works on the Muni system.
Muni is basically buses and streetcars in San Francisco.
BART goes through Berkeley and Oakland and San Francisco.
It's kind of like a LIRR type system.
And it also works in San Jose, believe it or not, on a completely different system.
It's weird because you can't buy a ticket for the BART system and use that same ticket
on the Muni system.
They're separate, independent, but you can store multiple systems on one card.
If you can wrap your head around that, you're basically having a fare of BART, then you're
having a fare of Muni, then you're having a fare of the ferry that you might take from
one place to another.
Yeah.
It works on boats.
Yeah.
It worked on a lot of places.
Which I think some of the newer ferries in New York, you also can use your MTA card.
But it's exactly like that except contactless and part of this inter-agency single card
system.
Yeah.
Can you hold that card up again?
That's an interesting looking card.
Let me see the card.
You know what?
Let me see that.
It looks like a door card at a cheap hotel.
This is an interesting technology and this is a good time for people that have saved
these up.
If you have a bunch of these, it's time to hack them, to take a look at how they work,
what's on them, and share information.
Can you imagine one day when you have one card that works on every transit system?
Yeah.
Maybe a day that we see with the similarities and the ability for a card like this to work
on multiple systems.
Could you imagine one that works on an entire tri-state transit network or on the entire
West Coast?
Why not just have a card that you have all your expenses, all your travel, everything
is on that card.
That card is you.
And that way everything you do is monitored and tracked for the convenience of the state.
Well, I'm just fantasizing.
I can dream.
But yeah, that's probably where we're heading.
Every single one of these things has privacy implications.
And there is a site someplace where you can access, where has this person gone?
And if you're accused of a crime or something like that, it's a great way to gather evidence
or even prove your innocence.
So it's something that we have to keep in mind.
We also saw the use of apps that can query these cards.
I believe that was what you were just speaking to.
There's software and ways that they can be interrogated, perhaps even without you knowing.
Literally the balance and anything readable can be energized from a distance and shared
or otherwise scrutinized, which is part of that whole process, the implications.
Is this alarm something I should...
That's some idiot ringing the doorbell downstairs.
Max just went running by with one of those things that you cook pasta in, boiling water.
We cook pasta in the back and he's running to the window with it right now.
So if you're the person doing that, you don't have long.
It sounds like someone trying to start a car.
Oh boy, it's unbelievable.
But anyway, yes.
So can I just say one thing though?
We're in the Bay Area right now.
We're talking about Bay Area mass transit.
And there's good and bad.
There's a lot of bad.
There's a lot of bad because when you come from New York, you're used to frequent trains.
You're used to things that make a degree of sense, even if it is gritty and hot sometimes.
It does work.
The system does work.
But there you find yourself waiting for trains for way too long.
There are too few trains, too few stations.
And there are just things that somehow don't seem to make sense.
And one of the things, I actually have a recording of this right now.
For some reason, the BART system has recordings that I think were recorded by Stephen Hawking.
Oh yeah.
Take a listen to this.
You notice how the voices are different?
I think they have three different voices.
There's a female version, but I don't think I got that.
But that's what you hear, and that's normal.
Because they've been hearing this, it must have been since the 70s, they've been hearing
that voice.
Mind you.
Why don't they update that voice?
This is the epicenter of the high-tech capital in the Silicon Valley itself.
The epicenter.
And it's still being run on a Macintosh or something.
Stephen Hawking could update his voice any time.
He could sound like the guy that does the air train.
But that's his identity.
He's keeping that voice.
But BART doesn't have to keep that voice.
In fact, it's confusing because you think Stephen Hawking is telling you where to go.
That's not right.
So what's the utility of the different voices?
Do they talk to each other or argue?
No.
I think actually they just make sure the same voice doesn't go twice for different trains.
So you might have a different voice announcing your train five minutes down the road.
It's not one voice attached to one train.
But it just kind of annoys me because it feels old and antiquated and not maintained.
And at San Francisco, as Kyle said, it's the Silicon Valley area.
We can do a lot better than that.
One of my favorite things about Barcelona was very similar.
The transit system there, the metro, the way in which they announced the stops was, I thought,
really interesting and sort of funny to me.
It was this combination of feminine and masculine voices to announce the next stop on the subway.
So you'd have the situation where they'd basically be saying something like, the next stop is
Diagonal.
So it would say in a female voice, the next stop is La Proxima Estacion.
And then in a very masculine voice, Diagonal.
So it was this kind of bizarre combination.
But I appreciated the yin and yang of it.
La Proxima Estacion, Catalonia.
It was really fantastic.
Well, OK.
So any more memories from the Bay Area?
The fact that it worked in San Jose as well on a different system I thought was really
cool.
And it works on Caltrain as well, which is their commuter line.
But again, way too few trains.
And it just, they can do a lot better.
They're building more.
They're building more lines.
But I think they just need, they need to expand.
It's certainly an improvement over the bus network.
And it augments it.
It definitely helps with buses.
But you really do realize that the frequency of these do matter.
And well, yeah, it's tough to argue for not being in a car if both the bus and light rail
takes an hour or two to get from one part of town to another.
You have to realize also cities are very, very spread out on the West Coast.
LA and San Francisco, I believe LA is next.
Yes.
Los Angeles, they have the TAP card.
It's another credit card type card, contactless.
Works on their expanding metro system, which actually they've been expanding that fairly
rapidly.
And I'm impressed.
Again, though, they need more and they need to publicize it better.
We took a bus all the way out to Santa Monica and we were looking for the, we knew there
was a line on the subway that went back to Union Station or in that area, and we couldn't
find a sign for it any place.
We had to finally just look on the internet to see where the entrance was.
And once we got to that entrance, it was great.
There was a light rail that went all the way back.
But they need more things like that.
They need the system to be utilized better.
Yeah, definitely in the vein of advertising, I would say signage is a big thing.
There is some of the displays, the LED displays that update and give you pretty good information
about when.
Did you, I just remembered the odd numbering for minutes till a train arrives in the Bay
Area.
That's right.
That was the other thing in the Bay Area.
It's very funny.
It's so weird.
They'd say it would be basically next train to, what's a destination?
I'm trying to think of a believable destination.
Fisherman's Wharf.
If that's a final destination.
But it would say two comma 11.
And it's like, okay, two minutes and 11 seconds.
That's really precise.
Why is it so precise?
And then it would stay that way.
And then you realize that basically what it was doing was it was telling you the next
two trains with a comma between them.
And it was minutes.
So two minutes and 11 minutes.
The comma is separating.
That's right.
And so it took us a while to actually decipher that.
And we realized it was used on both multiple generations.
In other words, when they upgraded to TV or monitors that are higher resolution, they
kept the same thing.
The canonical comma between the two times, which we thought was very interesting, even
when you go out to the airport and places where there is a lot more signage.
But general basic signs, I think, are undervalued and could be a lot more deployed and a lot
more visible and numerous in numbers as far as just blanketing the system with identifiable
stuff.
You know what else got me in the Bay Area system?
More unneeded information was how long the train was.
This is a seven-car train.
Basically they only have a couple of lines.
And they're wasting half of it by telling you how long the train is.
It doesn't matter how long the train is.
The platform will pretty much serve you no matter where it stops.
Maybe mention that once.
It doesn't need to be a main thing.
But I have these criticisms for so many things in the local area as well.
If you ever take a New Jersey transit, for instance, from New York Airport, they tell
you the number of the train.
Nobody cares about the number of the train other than the person driving it.
It doesn't make any difference to the passengers.
You ever notice they have a number in the front?
That's not the route number.
It's some other number for internal use only.
It's on the lower left.
And that's the one that you see before you see the route number.
So why do we have to have this information?
All kinds of other things with the way that information is displayed in the subway system.
Who cares when the next L train is?
Why would you let the first one go by?
You don't need to know the next one is 25 minutes later.
The long and short of it is that the system, once it's in place, it's great that it's all
there and there's a lot of emphasis on actually installing things and getting it right as
far as functionally having people pay for things and the ebb and flow of commuters.
But definitely information and signage should be an entire department and really have a
lot of thought put into it.
But in most cases, our experience was that it's like an afterthought, which isn't so
good for people, especially those that aren't everyday commuters, maybe, or a visitor, somebody
who's traveling and completely unfamiliar.
Things ought to be more intuitive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I like systems that make sense, that are intuitive, that you can understand if
you're speaking a different language.
And that's something we have to work on locally because a lot of it doesn't make any sense
and there's, you know, stupid things that are emphasized.
Yeah.
Little exceptions.
But yeah, the details are overlooked as far as ergonomics and things being intuitive and
logical.
Okay.
So New Orleans was our next stop and there we used an app, an app to get a day pass.
And okay, I've recently started using the app on the Long Island Railroad here.
It's very, very similar and I'm curious how that app works.
Maybe one of our listeners has information on the technical aspects of it.
In New Orleans, what happens is you get what's known as a jazzy pass.
That's the day pass, or that's a pass in general.
It's the best deal.
You've got to look out for these things.
It really is.
You want to, you know, explore for just a certain amount of time or you want a 24 hour
pass, instead of, you know, paying for four or three individual trips, it costs you an
arm and a leg when you actually do the math.
So these are great deals.
So we found it and explored it and actually it was really useful.
It starts, it lasts for 24 hours from when you activate it.
So it's not something that just ends at midnight.
If you activate it at nine o'clock at night, it'll last until nine o'clock at night the
next night, whether or not anything is running overnight.
And the St. Charles streetcar does run all night, which is kind of cool, but not much
else.
But what you get when you, when you activate this, you pay for it and you get an account
and then you click the activate button and then this, it says active on your phone.
So it's a timestamp or a timer.
Yeah.
It's a timer.
It tells you how much time is left, but also it gives you a four letter word.
No, no.
It gives you a four letter word that I think one of them was epic.
Yes.
And then the next day that word turned to, I think it turned to the word fear or fail.
No, it wasn't fail.
I don't think they would use that word.
I'm surprised they used fear.
But basically what I think happens is you show that to the driver and they look at it
and they see the word of the day.
It's going back and forth, left to right.
And they say, okay, that's, that's valid for today.
But on the Long Island Railroad, what it does, it has three colors.
Now the time goes back and forth.
It basically lasts for as long as, as the ride lasts.
They tell you to activate it before you get on your train, right before you get on your
train and it lasts for, I don't know, a couple hours or whatever.
But the thing is they, they just, every time I've used this, they just look at it and say,
okay, but they're not reading anything.
So I don't know if they're actually confirming the three colors change too.
But if you watch them for five minutes, those colors slowly change into three other colors.
So it's not like the color for today is red, white, and blue.
It's basically three colors that, that slowly change and a time that bounces back and forth.
There is a barcode.
You can click read barcode, but no one has ever asked me to do that.
So I'm just wondering how secure are these systems as far as confirming the person actually
has paid for a fare?
It's likely that people have tried maybe to, to predict or keep a catalog of what colors
or what words as in the New Orleans system are used.
I know in Seattle, the paper transfers were coded with a letter and a color every single
day.
Yes.
And there were people that would keep track of or keep, keep all of their transfers and
try to come up with a predictable pattern that's used on the paper transfers.
This is very similar, except as you can imagine, it's, it's easier to change.
And I think the way the easier to change an update and, and synchronize being that it
is digital, the conductors to also have smartphones and barcode scanners.
So what I think is they have a sense they're given an update or some channel that's in
their administrative app that updates them as to what the word or the color of the day
is.
Not so much.
I don't know.
Well, there's no color of the day in the L.A.R.R.
because it changes.
Well, yeah.
You noticed that it was fading, but it's three bands of color.
So I'm not sure if, if the band moves, it's like animated and that's a part of the security
that that animation continues in a predictable way.
But you said you noticed a little bit of the color change.
This has to be studied more.
Every five minutes, it's slowly like yellows change to green.
I haven't stared at it.
I haven't looked at the colors.
But you can only look at it while you have an active ticket.
That's the thing.
You have to buy a ticket and then look at it for two hours.
That's something new that you noticed.
But I definitely, I think that that's all they're really doing is confirming the date
and the time and then that it's some semblance of this color.
I honestly think they're confirming the date and time and that's basically the whole thing.
So I don't think it would be very difficult to, to fake this app and get free rides.
Let me ask you this.
What happens if you have a conductor who's colorblind?
Well that's the thing.
I don't think they're looking at the color.
I think they're just looking at the date bouncing back and forth.
Maybe they're not looking at anything.
They just wave you through.
They look you in the eye for about 30 seconds.
No, it's scary.
They always do that.
It's kind of like that Larry David thing where it looks you up and down and they can tell
if you're lying.
So LIRR conductors, don't mess with them.
I agree with that.
Our final city, Chicago, where they have a pass known as the Ventura Pass.
And Alex, I know you took Latin.
What does Ventra mean?
Ventra?
Ventra.
Allegedly.
Because it might not mean that.
I don't...
Off the top of my head I'm not sure.
Ventra.
V-E-N-T-R-A.
Yes.
Couldn't, couldn't tell you right off the top of my head.
Okay.
Ventra.
I mean it could have something to do with the wind, but I don't think so.
Yes, you got it.
Windy.
Okay, there you have it.
It's supposed to be windy.
The Windy City.
Yeah, ah, that makes sense.
The Ventra Card.
Yes.
The Windy Card.
But we didn't get a Ventra Card.
We didn't get a Ventra Card for the entire day.
Now, the interesting thing about Chicago is it's run by Cubic.
Cubic makes the MetroCard system, same basic system as New York.
So what they are doing is likely the kind of thing that we will be doing in the future.
Which is retrofitting that very system with the contactless system, basically removing
the mag stripe parts of it and adding this RFID system.
Starting in 2019, the MTA here in New York is starting, planning to start superseding
the MetroCard with a new form of fair payment technology.
Now basically the MTA is saying that MetroCard remains too expensive to maintain.
Their latest capital budget report, they estimate that the total cost of overhauling the system
will be around half a billion dollars.
Now they want to switch over to an electronic system that would get rid of the need for
separate cards.
A new fair payment system based on a form of technology for payment, which is technically
known as RFID or NFC for near field communication type of payment.
It's really common in Europe.
You can pay for taxis with it.
Hasn't gotten as much traction here, but it has overseas.
So that's your first key right there that it's going to catch on eventually.
I remember doing a show from overseas where I was telling people about text messages,
which nobody here was doing, but over there it was a big thing.
So yeah, that's going to be a big thing here as well.
Now what we noticed in Chicago was that you could load your fare onto a contactless credit
card or bank card if you wished.
I didn't happen to have any of those.
Yeah, we were noticing signage that encouraged you to use this technique, which is really
interesting.
I guess it's a built in part of the specification with contactless credit cards where you can
actually load a portion of that memory for that particular chip and use it with the system.
I remember them trying out some contactless thing here in New York maybe a couple of years
ago, two, three years ago, and I don't recall if it was to work with these cards or some
other RFID type thing that they would give you.
That was part of the six month trial that they had?
I think so.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's really cool because the plan is to have this done by 2022, and basically instead
of swiping a magnetic metro card, you would tap a credit card, you'd tap a smartphone
or a key chain, anything that has that particular chip embedded in it and just goes straight
through.
It seems like they're almost skipping this whole credit card thing and just giving you
the info that you put on your credit card.
In fact, I have one of these contactless cards in my hand right now.
I can snap things on the table too.
How about that?
It's different.
It's got the chip in it, but the chip isn't what does the magic.
It's got the mag stripe.
That's not what does the magic.
Yeah.
There's some sort of magic in here somewhere.
You've got so many things in that credit card.
It really is.
Yeah.
This is one of my cards from London, as a matter of fact, and you could use this for
the tube as well.
Wow.
As long as you connected it to your Oyster card account, you just swipe that over and
you're all set.
It sounds complicated, and it is complicated, but once you start using it, you get the hang
of it.
Well, this is really convenient too.
Aside from connecting it to your Oyster card, but the contactless cards become really convenient
if you're at a pub, you don't want to take out cash, and you don't want to slow the bartender
down by having to swipe a card, do the whole thing, put it in.
He just brings the machine over.
You literally tap and you pay for your round of drinks in literally milliseconds.
It's very convenient.
Yes.
We've seen this in science fiction shows in the past, and now we're finally catching up
to them.
It's a great time to be live.
It is.
It is.
In some ways, it is.
Okay, but that's pretty much our documentary on various transit systems.
But yeah, don't be surprised if there's an uptick in exploitation of these.
If everyone is using them, what do you have?
You have a ton of people that could be potential targets to have anything from their balance
swiped to cloning and on and on, maybe tracking you.
There's a myriad of things that come to the imagination when you really start thinking
about this system, once it's in place, functionally.
Yes.
If you have information or questions you'd like to send to us, our email address, oth at 2600.com.
We'd love to hear from you.
There are other things going on in the world.
Alex, I think you'll get a kick out of this.
An alleged Russian hacking group has been permanently banned from hacking Microsoft
computers or using their trademarks after Microsoft won a major U.S. court victory.
And now the tech giant is legally entitled to command and control the hacker's domains.
Fantastic.
Listen to that.
But I don't understand why they have to go to court to tell people not to hack their
systems.
That seems a little bizarre.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee ruled in favor of Microsoft in a lawsuit
against a hacking group known as Fancy Bears.
You can't make this up.
That's right.
APT 28.
APT 28 and Strontium.
They have different names.
Just to confuse everybody.
In the ruling, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia permanently
enjoined Fancy Bears from sending malicious software or code to infect Microsoft or Microsoft's
customers without authorization.
Again, does that mean we can?
Because we're not Fancy Bears?
At least not that I know of?
Not necessarily.
I think you would probably still suffer the consequences of a computer fraud and abuse
act.
As a lawyer, why did they take this to court just to tell them they can't do something
that's already illegal?
Well, it is kind of bizarre to me.
Without seeing what the actual filings were, it's difficult to say why they did this.
But they received an injunction.
They were awarded an injunction from this federal district court judge who has an amazing
name.
And that means that, look, if they violate the injunction, then they can be held in contempt.
So perhaps maybe Microsoft knows where some of the assets are.
Well, interesting that you say that.
Under the order, Microsoft was granted the ability to take over command and control domains
the hackers used to manipulate malware installed on victim computers.
Now, through the lawsuit, Microsoft has been able to take over at least 70 different command
and control points from the hacking group since August.
Instead of taking control of physical servers, Microsoft has been taking control of the internet
domain names that route the servers Fancy Bears rent from data centers.
Microsoft has taken over domain names such as MicrosoftInfo365.com and LiveMicrosoft.net,
which the company can use to observe the hackers' activity and stop them from controlling infected
computers.
So I think that's what this court case allows them to do.
That actually is very interesting, too, that they filed this in federal district court.
I guess they wanted to get the injunction for some particular reason, because there's
a much faster and much more economical way to take control of those domain names.
It's called the UDRP process, which is a little bit of a misnomer.
We've discussed this before on the show, but it stands for the Uniform Domain Name Dispute
Resolution Policy.
If somebody is infringing on a trademark or perhaps a name, like this Shkreli character
did this week with journalists where he was registering the domain names of journalists
to essentially harass them, if somebody is infringing on a commonly used name, a famous
name, a well-known trademark, and if the domain names at issue had the trademark Microsoft
in them, and it seems like they did, then Microsoft could have pursued a UDRP action,
which is a little mini-arbitration that happens on the papers.
Generally the respondent doesn't respond, and it all happens in a matter of weeks.
And it's incredibly economical to file these things.
We do them all the time, and our fees usually range between $4,000 and $10,000, depending
upon how complex the case is, whether there's multiple respondents, et cetera, that require
the collection of different evidence.
But Microsoft, for some reason, wanted to go to federal district court probably to get
this injunction, perhaps because they know where some of the assets are, such that they
could go after them if this injunction is violated.
It's also a bit more of a show of force to go into federal district court and make these
claims and put them on the record, as opposed to what you would put into a UDRP.
So it's an interesting way to take control of a domain name.
Wow.
You know, I have to say, nine out of ten of the stories that we've been getting lately
have to do with this whole stupid Game of Thrones hack of HBO, and how HBO is being
held hostage by a bunch of evil hackers someplace who are threatening to leak episodes and scripts
and things like that.
Does anybody else realize that this is tremendous publicity for both the show and the network?
And I don't know a single person who has canceled their HBO subscription or hasn't gotten the
show the way they normally do, just because somebody somewhere got an advanced copy of
it.
So it's, you know, I think it's a real win for them.
But the latest story is that, well, at least the story before they aired the finale, was
that HBO was holding firm and not paying, what was it that they wanted, $6.5 million
before it was reported that they had changed something, and that they had paid something
rather.
And I guess they decided not to do that again.
But basically, they said, we are not in communication with the hacker, we're not going to comment
every time a new threat is issued or a new piece of information is released.
It's been widely reported there was a cyber incident at HBO, the hacker may continue to
drop bits and pieces of stolen information in an attempt to generate media attention.
That's a game we're not going to participate in.
Well, you are HBO, so I think you are participating in that game just by having this stuff available
in the first place, and basically having this scandal, this quote unquote scandal, taking
place and dominating the headlines for so long.
I agree.
And I think there was a little bit of a back and forth between HBO and these alleged hackers
were criminals that had stolen the data.
And then that seemed to be some sort of a ruse, and they offered them, they lowballed
them with some, I think it was like a $250,000 offer to shut this down.
And they balked at that.
So there's been some back and forth, but it seems like HBO just wants to turn the spigot
off in terms of the media attention that they're getting from this.
Well, the episode has aired, so I don't know if they need any attention, any attention
is good attention.
Well, now the next one is curb your enthusiasm, I guess, to go back to the Larry David reference
that's coming up.
Oh, boy.
Okay.
Well, you know, whatever.
A quarter of the members of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, whose purview includes national
cybersecurity, have resigned in a group resignation letter that, as far as I know, doesn't spell
out anything cool.
Like, you know, some of them spell out resign or resist or things like that in the first
letter of every paragraph.
This one, not that I know of.
But they cited both specific shortfalls in the administration's approach to cybersecurity
and broader concerns that Trump and his administration have undermined the moral infrastructure of
the U.S.
And their resignations came on Monday.
They were acknowledged by the White House on Tuesday, and several of those resigning
were Obama-era appointees, including former U.S. chief data scientist D. Patel and former
office of science and technology policy chief of staff Kristen Dorgelo.
Not surprisingly, then, the issues outlined in the resignation letter were broad, faulting
both Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords and his inflammatory
statements after the Charlottesville attacks, some of which came during what was intended
to be an infrastructure-focused event.
"'The moral infrastructure of our nation is the foundation on which our physical infrastructure
is built,' said the letter.
The administration's actions undermine that foundation."
You know, I think it says a lot when groups, organizations, committees refuse to participate,
to coordinate with somebody that they object to.
You might say that if you're a part of this, if you're close to the person, you might be
able to make them change.
It hasn't worked so far.
So I think maybe this is the best approach.
Maybe.
I mean, I think this is a bit of a double-edged sword as well, because we need good people
in government.
And sometimes you can do more good from within than from without.
And I understand they're making a political statement by resigning and withdrawing, but
I wonder if they could have done more good if they stayed in their current positions.
I mean, as you know, and as probably many of our listeners know, I've spent quite a
few years in federal agencies myself, places where I didn't think that I would have necessarily
ended up as a 15-year-old hacker.
But I do honestly believe that there is great good to be done by good people within government.
I mean, ultimately, I left government, but it wasn't on the basis of a resistance or
anything like that.
I see it both ways here.
I really, really do.
And I think that they have very legitimate gripes, and I think a lot of these people
were Obama holdovers as well.
And the fact that they're resigning means that they've been marginalized, that their
voices aren't being heard, and there's really critical issues.
I mean, I read this article as well, and they spelled out some really major concerns.
I mean, things like the sound advice to avoid a quote-unquote cyber 9-11 just was not being
listened to.
And this raises the question that one of our good friends of this show, Lorenzo Franceschi
Bicchieri, the reporter over at Motherboard, raised when Giuliani was appointed to this
bizarre position of being some kind of cybersecurity advisor.
Where is he?
What has he been doing?
Or rather, to whom has Trump been listening from time to time, if at all, when it comes
to quote-unquote the cyber, as he refers to it?
Yeah, I can really give them the better for the doubt on this, because here we are.
We're eight, nine months into this administration.
These people have had time to do what they could to, I guess, work within the system
to try and effect change from within.
And what they were finding was they were not being granted the opportunity to do that.
I think by resigning like this publicly and making their concerns known, I think that's
a very effective—it's almost like a sort of whistleblowing, really, except their actual
identities are attached to it.
But had they done this as a whistleblowing operation secretly, I think they would have
been up for all sorts of punishments and things.
So I think this is really the best way they had available to them to accomplish what they
wanted to do.
It's a brave move, and it's something that I think is laudable.
But at the same time, yeah, I don't think they came by this decision lightly.
I mean, I think this is a story that deserves a lot more specifics.
It would be great to talk to some of these people to really understand where they're
coming from, what concerns specifically weren't addressed, and what they plan on doing next.
Well, perhaps since they have more time on their hands, they can come on the show and
we can ask them these questions directly.
That'd be wonderful.
At some point, though, no matter how much you think you can effect change—don't you
agree, Alex?—it becomes pointless, and you have to basically either be a collaborator
with them or somebody working actively to prevent this from continuing.
Yeah, I agree.
Look, everything comes to a point.
Everything is to an extent, right?
And you have to work at it, and I'd love to understand what they did, what were their
actions inside that were ignored, and did that justify their departure?
I'd love to know more specifics about this case.
I think you're absolutely right.
It becomes a point when it does become fruitless, and the best thing for you to do if you can't
do your job effectively is not do it at all.
All right.
And with that, we're going to end things for tonight.
If you want to write to us, oth at 2600.com is our email address.
Rob, this looks like you have something to say.
Yep.
Check out your local 2600 meeting this Friday all over the world.
2600.com slash meetings.
Yeah.
Special shout-out to the Houston meeting.
Hopefully, don't risk your lives to get to the meeting, folks.
But we're thinking of you, and hopefully, you guys get through this okay.
Everyone else, as Rob said, meetings this week, and we'll be back again next week.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
Follow us, Hacker Radio Show on Twitter.
Good night.
Hey, radio, hey.
It's the sound of a brand-new world.