Happy New Year, everybody.
At a time when we turn the page on one year and look ahead to the future, I just wanted
to take a minute to thank you for everything you've done to make America stronger these
past eight years.
From the Obama family to yours, have a happy and blessed 2017.
Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.
I've seen this raw strength only once before.
Tune in for a shortcut, New Year's Eve at 11, here on WBAI-FM, listener-sponsored radio
in New York.
That was rather intense.
Anyway, here we are again.
It's 8 p.m. on radio station WBAI 99.5 FM.
Yes, we are on those FM airwaves.
We're also on WBAI.org everywhere.
The time is just about 8 p.m.
It's time for another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
A very good evening to you all.
The program is Off the Hook.
Rob T. Firefly here with you in the studio, and I'm joined by Voltaire.
Happy almost New Year's.
Happy almost New Year's.
And we are joined on the telephone by Emmanuel and Kyle.
Hey, how's it going?
Hey, guys, what's up?
Doing all right, doing all right.
So Emmanuel and Kyle, you guys are joining us live from Germany, are you not?
Yeah, we're in the city of Leipzig.
Actually, we just got back to our room about three minutes ago after getting lost in the
streets.
It's not a lively town like what we're used to in Hamburg and Berlin, but it's got its
charm.
The conference is being held here because the space in Hamburg where they usually have
it is being renovated.
So they found this enormous space, and I mean really enormous, we were in a lecture not
too long ago with I think a minimum of 3,000 people.
Rob, it's so big that there are people bringing their own forms of transportation just so
they can roll around.
I saw people, multiple people on roller skates.
We saw one person on roller blades.
There are people with couches that have wheels on them.
I saw that.
Motorized.
You see that guy?
He had like a sofa that was on wheels, like electric wheels.
It was remote control basically.
You didn't have to do anything.
He was just already on the couch.
What a nerd.
Seriously.
Who rolls around like that?
And then everybody has these oversized Razor scooters.
It's like everybody's kept their favorite toy from when they were a kid.
It's crazy.
They had to know that they could bring the scooter to this enormous convention center.
Somehow word got out that the best thing you could bring to save your feet from getting
sore and going all this stuff, bring a scooter.
Everybody has scooters.
I know they don't have guys that don't have segways.
We remain the only hacker conference that has segways every damn time.
Yeah.
No, we consistently, that's our lane.
That's what we really excel at among many other things.
We're at the Chaos Communication Congress.
It's an annual German hacker event.
It just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
I don't want to complain about it being big, but it's so big that you can't find people.
You have to be able to track them down first and arrange to meet them.
I think we ran into one person that we knew.
Usually we run into like 50 people we know because we keep passing by them.
I don't think we've seen the same person twice.
There's that many people here.
If you're going to be running into people who have their own sofas with wheels and rollerblades
and stuff, be very careful.
Maybe wear some sort of armor.
Yeah.
There are people wearing armor, too.
There's all kinds of characters.
It's your typical hacker gathering in that sense.
There are an enormous amount of really interesting talks, too.
In fact, people at home can stream them.
They can watch them.
Go to events.ccc.de.
That's D-E as in Deutschland.
You can pick one of four lecture rooms, enormous lecture rooms, but you won't really know by watching.
You can see the entire talk.
You can even ask questions.
In fact, we saw this amazing talk about China's so-called social credit system in China.
If you've ever seen the TV series Black Mirror, it's very similar to the kinds of things that go on
in that science fiction future program, except it's real in China.
In fact, in 2020, it's going to become mandatory to be part of a social credit system.
You'll be getting a score for all kinds of things that you do, your behavior.
It's basically gamifying life.
I saw that.
That's actually the cover story, I think, in this week's Wired magazine.
Yeah, it's very creepy and very interesting.
This is the season for Black Mirror, so yeah.
We were in that talk, and in fact, they turned off the stream.
All good intentions.
They turned off the stream at the end because they were concerned, I guess, that somebody would ask a question
and they didn't want to be identified by anybody on the stream.
Of course, anybody could have recorded it on their phone.
But, of course, the very first question was from the stream asking,
how can I hear the answer to my question on the stream if the stream is turned off?
And then the second question was, why is the stream turned off?
And that's when they just stopped taking questions from the stream.
So whenever you try to do something conscientious, it just bites you.
You know where.
Speaking of which, you can send us tweets, and we're keeping an eye on them during the show
at Hacker Radio Show on Twitter.
Yes, we enjoy hearing all kinds of things like that.
We're super tired because we flew in yesterday, and that's like a whole ordeal of not getting any sleep.
And then we pretty much slept a little bit, but not very much.
We went to the conference early in the morning and have been walking around all day.
So if we sound a little out of it, that's why.
No more than usual.
So what's the general atmosphere like at this event?
Yeah, I'll give you a quick observation from what I took in today.
Really, the building itself is this huge glass hanger-type thing,
and then all of the halls sort of extend on each side of it.
So it's a very long glass sort of hallway, and then it has all these venues attached to it.
And you go through these skyways that are sort of glass skyways into these halls.
And the really cool thing, a lot of them, as you'd imagine if you know about some of these events,
the lighting and art and just the spaces are incredible.
There's sort of found objects in this underwater theme that's everywhere.
There's knitted jellyfish that are sort of hanging from everything.
There's the one main room for like a hack center is all dark, but the lighting is incredible, of course.
There's RGB lasers everywhere and places to sit, spread out, hang out.
They've got benches and everything.
We didn't even really get to explore that kind of really busy area where there's all kinds of assemblies
and things going on.
Also, in contrast to these massive halls, I think the talk that he was just describing was in one of the largest rooms they have.
I think we estimated it's over 2,000, several thousand, maybe even 3,000.
I think it's 3,000 at least, but it's a weird thing when you go to see a talk in the hacker community
and there's more people at the talk than at a Mets game.
It's not really the kind of atmosphere you're used to.
It felt a little bit like you're at commencement, but not like at a graduation or something
because you have the riser bleachers surrounding everybody sitting with the chairs on the floor.
But it's so huge.
That crossed with a huge airplane hangar.
But, boy, I did notice one other thing I want to mention was the pneumatic tubes are back, of course.
That was in the darkened, really busy workshop and assembly area that I was referring to.
There's just all kinds of displays, some robotic stuff.
I think I saw basically a robotic dog that was tied to a fence post,
and people were surrounding it and it would react and come at you and stuff.
You name it, there's just an incredible wealth of things.
We barely just figured out just the layout of this massive, massive set of actually connected buildings.
It's only the first day, too.
There's three more days of this, and I'm hoping we'll be a little bit more awake.
But, again, we have seen barely anybody that we know.
So if you're at this thing, the Chaos Communication Congress,
why not tweet us either at Hacker Radio Show or at 2600, either one of those Twitter accounts.
We'll get our attention and maybe we can find you.
Definitely.
We know there are a lot of people in our community who we know who are at this
and also new friends that we haven't made yet.
I'm very interested to hear more about some of the talks you've checked out.
We've checked out a few.
We've actually done some more talks than we usually go to in entire hacker conferences just on the first day.
That's because there's been a wide variety of different talks.
I was at a talk about North Korea and about the computer operating system that they have
that has leaked out to the rest of the world, how they use Android phones or emulate Android phones,
and all kinds of weird apps and tablets and things that they actually have for sale in stores in Pyongyang
and various other places in North Korea.
And, you know, having been there, it's very different from what it was like ten years ago when I was there.
They didn't have cell phones, and now they have smartphones.
But, you know, it's a completely different system, isolated from our system.
But the enthusiasm is still there.
They're giving it out to kids, and they're the ones that are inventing new programs and new hardware and things like that.
So I think that's really fascinating to see that happening.
We also were at just up until about 1230 at night, because it's 2 in the morning here and not right now.
We were at a talk about the Apollo computers.
Yes, that was a really interesting talk.
Basically, they went into the entire structure of the source code.
They had emulators and visual aids, actual file footage of various stages as well as renderings of the Apollo mission.
And they went through each part, each segment of it,
and talked about how the computer that controlled it, it's called the AGC, Apollo Guidance Computer,
really an incredible machine.
I believe it was a 15-bit computer.
It weighed about 30 kilos, and it was this incredible thing.
And it had all these features, one of which was getting you to the moon.
So that was just incredible.
They had to go through so quick with some of the stuff, but they were going into every bit of the memory registers that,
by the way, were hand-woven with a special type of programmable memory or ROM.
So that was just really in-depth and part of a series of talks about, basically, technology that we're familiar with,
that we've always heard about.
And the really interesting thing, and they totally addressed it about this,
was that people compare, what they started to do was compare,
this smartphone is more powerful than the Apollo computer that got astronauts to the moon.
And they really broke down how it does stack up and how that evolved and then the uses of it.
I saw a talk also about BBSs in the 1990s.
And this is really interesting.
It went over all the ways that email used to be exchanged via UCPD and FIDO net and things like that,
how people used to have to access BBSs by calling up on phone lines and tying up the line.
You know, for your entire household, what it's like to be a sysop
and just how it was pre-Internet and what those first few years of the Internet was like.
And it was kind of cool hearing a European perspective of that
because they have slightly different networks.
They used ISDN in a different way in the early days.
And it just was interesting to share some of the common aspects of all that as well
and see how it evolved into what it is now, which is almost unrecognizable.
Amazing.
So while this is all going on, what other stuff is there basically to do at this event apart from the talks
and apart from robot dogs chained to walls and stuff?
Are there other events and things going on at the same time or sort of ancillary things?
There might have been a robotic ram or sheep.
I didn't get a close look at it.
But it had a tether to a fence post.
They have over 200 assemblies.
Over 200 assemblies.
An assembly basically is an organization of any sort.
For instance, Electronic Frontier Foundation is here.
Any organization you can think of that has anything to do with hacking the Internet, computers or Germany
is probably here in some context.
And there's just tables all over the place.
There's all rooms in different buildings that are filled with enthusiastic people.
And those are just the official ones.
Yeah, the assemblies are really comprehensive.
The list just goes on and on and on.
Some of them are ad hoc, just, yeah, we're these people.
We might be meeting over here.
Others got a space.
Really, that's something we're still going to explore.
We've really just scratched the surface.
We did walk around and get familiar, but we want to kind of really take in some of what people are doing with those.
But today we just dove into the talks and just got a little bit of a glance at some of the activity there.
We're definitely going to explore the depths of these huge, huge spaces tomorrow
and get a really good idea of the kinds of projects
and just everything that the people are building that they're working on.
I mentioned the pneumatic tube system, which is basically like a bunch of big plastic tubes
that people can send messages and physical objects across the hall.
And in this case, it makes sense.
These halls are huge.
So that was one thing that I noticed there.
It's just a real buzz, like just of all this activity and all these people really eager to share what they have going on.
As he mentioned, there's various groups presenting spaces, but also projects.
The Tails organization was there.
Also, the Free Software Foundation was represented there.
And a plethora, just so many others.
Really, it would be impossible to list off just all the participation that's there.
We spent a good part of today figuring out how to get there because, as you mentioned,
it's not in the city proper.
You have to take either an S-Bahn or a tram to get there, and we had to figure out which one of those
and also which one you take to get back late at night.
They actually have a 24-hour tram that's running just for this event.
So that's kind of cool.
We haven't really had a chance to talk with people at the convention because we've been kind of in a daze
and just sort of finding our way around.
But I'm hoping the next three days we'll be more social and meet some of our listeners
and some old friends as well.
So you've been going to these things for a while now.
What do you think about how the whole thing has evolved, and how does it compare now?
Has it grown? Have they kept at the same size?
Has it grown?
Well, yeah.
You may be able to tell from my questions. I've not been to this.
It used to be something that you could pretty much walk around in a couple hours.
It was about the size of what we do in New York at the HOPE conferences.
Something happened.
Something happened a bunch of years ago where they just kept expanding into other buildings.
Initially it was in Hamburg when it was very small, back in 1984, I think was the first one.
Actually, it might be the oldest Packer conference in the world.
Then it moved to an old communist building in East Berlin, actually after unification.
They outgrew that.
Then they moved to the PCC, the Berlin Congress Center or Convention Center.
And then that got too small for them.
That was a really big building.
That got too small, and they moved over to the Convention Center in Hamburg.
The CCH is what it's called or something like that.
I think you're right. I say it backwards.
Well, whatever.
But now it's here in Leipzig at the convention center they have in Leipzig.
The CCL.
Yeah.
I think every city has one of these things.
I remember when it was like 1,000 people.
Then it was 2,000.
Then it was 3,000.
I think it's well over 15,000 now.
I'm going to ask you a question.
It has grown.
It has grown quite a bit.
I can't say that's a bad thing because getting more people involved is always a good thing.
But at the same time, you do kind of lose that intimacy.
I know you can't force that.
If things get so big that you have to expand, you really don't have much of a choice.
I kind of like the fact that our conferences are kind of in the 2,000, 3,000 range.
We're comfortable with that.
But the day may come when we have to get even more space somewhere else.
We would adapt to that.
But they've done an amazing job adapting and growing into new spaces.
For the most part, keeping the same hacker spirit.
Like I said, when you're in a room with over 3,000 other people, it's a very different
feeling going to a talk.
But when you're walking through the hallways and meeting up with people there and seeing
the kind of artwork that's being put up and just the overall spirit, you realize that
that hasn't changed, at least.
Interesting.
So this goes on for how long?
Well, this is the first day.
The conference always happens on December 27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th.
So the 30th, I believe, is Saturday.
So that's the last day.
Okay.
So I remember speaking with you, I think, at this event in the past, and there were
New Year's fireworks going on and all sorts of things exploding.
Is anything exploding yet where you are?
Well, things haven't exploded yet because it's not quite New Year's yet.
Things will start exploding as the 31st gets closer.
I probably talked to you after the convention last time or at the tail end of it.
And we're going to have an interesting time because we're actually scheduled to take
a train to Budapest from Munich right about that time.
And so the city is going to be wild with celebration, and we're going to be
hightailing it out of there.
So your travels are – I mean, you've spoken a bit about your travels on the
Tuesday show you do, but you're – so have you got solid plans for what you're
going to do after this event?
No, not really, because we have pretty much planned up till Hungary, and I think
you have to go to the train station and negotiate to get further from there.
So Hungary, that's the dinner?
Yeah, we might have to harbor the organs and stuff.
Oh, Hungary, the country, not like you're waiting for dinner time or – okay.
Moving on.
So while you're at CCC and all this is going on, like, there is a lot of talk
about the conference as it's going on on social media and everything else.
Of course, they're streaming everything live.
They're posting recordings of talks as soon as they've happened, something we've
definitely taken a leaf from for the HOPE Conference.
And their site is ccc.de.
There is an English language link there for you to navigate if you don't speak
the German.
But there's also been a lot of talk about what's going on at this particular
conference, and this isn't an easy subject to raise, but certain decisions on
the part of the staff regarding things like keeping members of the community
safe.
Has there been sort of chatter among the crowd about what's going on?
Well, you have to be more specific as to – there is talk in every community
about situations like that's going on in Hollywood and various other places,
if that's what you're referring to.
But I don't have anything specific.
You've got to be more specific with what you're referring to.
Okay.
Well, the well-known hacker DeviantDolem worded it well in a post he wrote on
his site deviating.net, where he basically laid out the course of events that the
organizers of CCC have been resolute in their resistance to adopt a code of
conduct.
And in keeping with CCC's historical policy of, quote, mediating chats between
opponents as opposed to taking action to expel abusers, there was an example of a
badly mishandled report of abuse this year when apparently what happened was
someone reported to CCC back in August that a documented and verified abuser was
possibly considering attending the event this winter.
Ultimately, the CCC organizers ignored this information and all the police
reports and other evidence provided by the victim of this abuse and allowed the
attacker to attend and let the victim know when the victim was already on a plane
to attend the event.
So there's a lot of chatter about this right now.
And it's an example.
It's a sad example of an ongoing really difficult issue that's happened in the
communities as far as those who run events, those who run conferences, those
who try and keep the attendees of their conferences safe and provided for in
every way they can.
And this occasion is being seen as a failure to do that.
Well, honestly, I didn't know there wasn't a code of conduct.
I assume there was.
I haven't seen it myself.
But there certainly should be a code of conduct.
That's something that virtually every conference I know has.
We've had it for a while.
But I also can guarantee you that in any organization with this amount of people,
there are going to be issues.
And I can also guarantee that any organization that runs things, and I'm going to
include us in this as well, is not going to do enough.
We're going to fail.
We're not going to cover every base.
And the important thing is to confront those issues.
The important thing is to listen to the people that have issues.
And the important thing that the rest of us can do is show up and confront the
issues and not say, oh, yeah, we're writing you off because you didn't do what we
wanted you to do, so, therefore, there's no hope for you.
Because when you do that, you're writing off all the people that come as well who
are good people who are trying their best to make things work.
And, you know, those are the people I like to think that I know.
Of course, I know there are also people that are not like that.
And we all have to take a role in policing that.
It's not just something for the staff.
It's for the attendees as well.
Obviously, the staff have to take action and make decisions.
And if they haven't been doing that, they need to get on top of that.
But it is up to the rest of us to make sure they do that and to spread the word.
I think it's important to note that, especially if you're a survivor of assault, you
might not be in the position where it's easy to say, oh, you should have courage and
go to this event and face your accuser.
But if you had a traumatizing event, that's a lot easier said than done.
So I think people that are fortunate not to have been assaulted have to be the ones that
stand up on behalf of those that have.
This is true.
We have to be aware of situations in order to be able to do something about them.
And certainly any victim of any kind of situation should not be expected to have to
confront their accuser and make sure they get justice.
But when the rest of us are aware of this and we are not ourselves traumatized, we have
the power to actually do something on behalf of that person.
And I think that's the obligation we all have.
People who are victims have every right to escalate and pursue justice, as difficult
or expedient as it may be.
And I think there's an emphasis, definitely, about inclusion and a safe experience.
And there's, I mean, down to some of the printed materials.
You guys might recall the phrase, be excellent to each other.
That's front and center.
That was something, I believe, the Hacker Space, the Hacker Passport had written in it.
And I know our good friend Mitch was encouraging people to stand for that.
And when I was reading about some of the policies on the wiki, I guess others can totally check
through and see what they think of it as well.
And I'm sure they will.
I noticed some comments about also attendees being aware.
And, in fact, there's an awareness team now for the event.
But they also encouraged people, attendees, who witness harassment or someone who is impaired
or not, you know, their behavior or they appear they're not okay or need some help,
definitely that kind of sensitivity and people acting instead of just willfully accepting things,
that's sort of, I think, the direction they're encouraging people to go.
And just some of the things they said directly, like in the printed materials,
everyone's handed when you walk in is the Chaos Computer Club is a galactic organization
that welcomes all life forms.
As such, we are dedicated to providing a safe, secure, and enjoyable experience for everybody,
regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, origin, or physical appearance,
which I think is something that we all strive for when we're at these events.
And just like the gist of the awareness team, just to put that out there,
they're supposed to provide a point of contact for people to process experiences,
mediate conflicts, and to create a safe and enjoyable atmosphere,
especially for underrepresented groups.
And I think that really hits on kind of where we need to focus.
And I really hope people are taking advantage of that.
And people who are there, the last thing I'd say is if you feel uncomfortable,
please reach out to them.
And they have a hotline that people can call as well.
But, you know, like you guys say, there needs to be more.
I agree. There does need to be more done.
And I would probably say that in any organization because there are always things that are missed.
There are always things that are trivialized.
And that is very unfortunate.
And our community is not immune to that.
And I think very few communities are.
I feel like the attitude of, like, be excellent to each other and, like, welcoming teams,
it's really insufficient because people, like, that's nice in theory,
but it can't just be, like, be excellent to each other.
You have to have the next step, which is, like, if you're not excellent to each other,
we're going to kick you, ban you.
Like, you can't just have a positive statement.
You also have to have repercussions for things, other things.
People have gotten out of their way to point out that be excellent to each other is very inadequate as a code of conduct.
And people that say, like, oh, our code of conduct is be excellent to each other,
it's basically implicitly saying that the people that say that doesn't go far enough, we don't care about your views.
Well, I think what we're learning from this and the events like it and the situations like it,
of which there are far too many, is that it's all of our responsibility, as you said,
as not only people who run an event of our own, but people who attend other events
and people who are part of this community, it's on all of us to be better.
And it's on all of us to listen and learn and take what's out there, see what needs to be changed,
see what needs to be improved, see how we can do it.
That's the Hacker Way, I think.
And if you know the organizers of events like this, whether it's CCC or Hope or DEF CON,
if they're doing something wrong, call them out.
I know at Hope, I've been very proud of how much good steps we've taken with code of conduct
and recently banning a certain member who's been documented to assault people.
And that's made me really proud.
And I know if Hope did something, say, like, oh, well, there's not enough evidence,
or something similar, I would want to call them out.
So if you know these organizers, call them out.
Yeah, well, I mean, the reason I think things work better at Hope is because
it's not the organizers of Hope doing it all.
It's the attendees that are talking to us saying, you need to take care of this,
and our organizers listen, and we respond in kind.
I think, you know, with regards to CCC, if people feel that the things that we read are inadequate
and that they need a more comprehensive code of conduct or they don't have one at all,
they should put something together, a suggestion, and put that forth and see how that's received.
And if that's rejected, well, then that's known, and we can talk about that.
But, you know, the community has more power than I think sometimes we even believe.
I think that's very true.
And on that note, I think – sorry, go ahead, Kyle.
No, I was going to say the notion of being excellent was not at all,
and I did not mean for it to be a stand-in for a hard code of conduct.
That was not what I was implying.
I was reading the printed material that everyone is handed when they walk in.
Yeah, it's really just a nice thing to say to people.
I've never heard that criticized before.
Yeah, I guess, you know, we've got to be careful about everything we say.
But seriously, there are all kinds of good feelings around you.
I don't want it to seem like it's a lot of misery and chaos, no pun intended.
There are serious issues, and we need to focus on these serious issues.
And I hope that people continue to do that and that we learn and grow together.
Absolutely.
And I think that's a good note to let you guys get back to your evening.
It's a silly o'clock a.m. over there,
and we look forward to hearing about the rest of your adventures at this event
when we get in touch with you next week.
Oh, we're being terminated. Is that it?
Okay, I see how it is. I see how it goes here.
Well, actually, we have to go to sleep. We're very tired.
Okay, well, thank you very much for joining us, Emanuel and Kyle,
and have fun in Germany.
And again, if any of you—
Thank you.
Happy hacking.
Happy hacking.
Bye.
If any of you listening are at this event
and would like to track Emanuel and Kyle down and say hello, please do so.
They would enjoy it.
Also, send us email, oth at 2600.com, or tweet at us at Hacker Radio Show,
and see if you can arrange getting in touch somehow while they are out and about.
So there's a lot of other stuff going on this week,
and now it's just me and you, Voltaire.
The Rob Show.
It's the Rob Show.
And our top-secret, off-the-hook studio audience who is joining us today.
But there is a lot going on.
I want to read a bit of email that we got about our last episode.
John Kin writes us,
Hi, Rob's telling his hack of searching used storage media for previous owners' data files hit a nerve.
For those unfamiliar, this is when I mentioned as my Hack of the Week last week
that it's a hobby of mine to buy old storage media like flash drives, USB sticks, hard drives, that sort of thing,
and see if I can undelete anything from the mysterious previous owner's use of the device.
So John Kin goes on to write,
On December 27th, that's today,
my LA public storage locker that I'm hopelessly behind payments on goes up for auction
and amidst the pile of goods I never got around to selling are personal papers, photographs, home movies,
and mementos I hold dear.
Steal my identity.
That's very unfortunate, and we wish you the best in this situation.
John goes on to write,
P.S. You got a hack where I can listen to radio streams while getting free Wi-Fi at places like Dunkin' Donuts or Burger King,
which block radio websites.
I don't do phone apps.
This is an interesting question,
and something we've been asked by people who want to listen to our show live or listen to other radio stuff.
I think there's a couple of methods for this.
Maybe you know about one of these.
There is a Pacifica radio app.
I've not used it.
I don't know how dependable it is in these situations,
but there is a Pacifica radio app out there that lets you listen to reportedly all the Pacifica stations,
of which we are one.
So if you search for Pacifica radio on your app store of compatibility,
maybe you'll find that, and that can be useful to you.
You can also use Tor sometimes to bypass site filters.
If your computer or other device can use the Tor network from where you are,
then chances are you can use that to get around, I think, website-specific filters.
Also, some radio streams.
If you get on a radio website and they have to listen now,
they have a file that you download that ends in .pls for your software player of choice.
Often you can save that on your device,
and then when you're connected somewhere else,
maybe that won't let you go to the website.
You can just open up that file and hear the live stream again.
But apart from that, I don't know.
Do you know any other ways around this stuff?
They probably block ports,
so you might have to do port forwarding if you want to get Tor working or VPN.
It's a possibility, and that's a whole subject in itself.
But if you need help getting Tor or VPNs working,
there are many resources out there to help you out with that,
which you can find on your web search engine of choice.
But that was very interesting,
and thank you for writing, John,
and best of luck with everything you're going through.
There was also something else that I wanted to mention.
I saw this come up on Twitter from a Twitter user.
I'm not going to pronounce this correctly.
Claire Nied.
It's C-L-A-I-R-E-N-I-E-D.
Claire tweets,
I'm looking for female-identified programmers
for the first season of my podcast, Well Technically.
If you're interested, please email welltechnicallypodcast at gmail.com,
and let's get an interview set up.
I think this sounds like a cool project.
I wanted to boost the signal a little.
So if you are or you know female-identified programmers
who would like to participate in such a project,
get in touch with Claire at welltechnicallypodcast at gmail.com,
or get in touch with her on Twitter at C-L-A-I-R-E-N-I-E-D.
So with that out of the way,
there's a lot of other things in the news.
One thing I really liked,
this comes from a site called Bleeping Computer.
It's about an organization that went through data dumps
of leaked usernames and passwords and login info
to basically compute what passwords are most common.
Does anyone in this room want to guess what the top password
among the millions of clear text passwords
exposed in these particular leaks might be?
According to the movie, it's sex, love, and God.
Good movie, but not quite.
Someone in the studio audience is raising their hand.
Yes, ma'am.
Is it 123456?
It is.
It is 123456.
Yes, the same combination I have on my luggage
is for the second year in a row,
the top password among the millions of clear text passwords
found in these leaks.
The post on Bleeping Computer goes a little further
into how the list was dominated by names,
proper names were in there,
sports teams were in there a lot,
makes of cars,
but the top 25 were posted in a list,
and I love these, so I'm just going to read them
because we've got some time.
I don't know if this qualifies as a hack of the week.
I mean, they didn't really do the hacking.
They grabbed the sort of end result files
as a result of the hacking, but I don't know.
What do you think?
Does this qualify as a hack of the week?
I guess so.
It'll do in a pinch.
All right, then I get to press this button.
The haunting hack of the week theme.
I love it.
So this password list, okay,
if you have any of these passwords,
chances are you should change them.
You don't have to be a technical expert.
You just have to be aware of sort of what's going on
in these passwords.
The top one is 123456.
The number two common password is,
ready for this?
Password.
Don't make password your password, guys.
Number three is 12345678.
Number four is QWERTY,
as in the top line of your keyboard.
Number five is 12345.
Number six is 123456789.
Number seven is LETMEIN,
which is fun.
Just let me in.
Number eight is 1234567.
Number nine is FOOTBALL.
I don't know if that's American or European football,
but that bears further investigation.
Number 10 is ILOVEYOU.
That's nice.
Number 11 is ADMIN.
If you're adminning anything,
don't make admin your password.
Number 12 is WELCOME.
And while you type that in,
say it in the AOL guy voice.
Welcome.
Number 13 is MONKEY.
I don't know.
That's pretty great.
Number 14 is LOGIN.
Your password is LOGIN.
What's your login?
Password?
Number 15 is ABC123.
Number 16 is STAR WARS,
because that's all the rage again
with the new Star Wars movie the kids are into these days.
Hey, don't knock it.
I won't knock it.
I liked it.
Number 17 is 123123.
Number 18 is DRAGON.
Kids these days, they also like dragons.
Number 19 is PASSWORD,
but the O is a numeral zero.
Oh, how elite.
So it's PASSWORD.
Number 20 is MASTER.
Nice.
Number 21 is HELLO.
Hello.
Number 22 is FREEDOM,
which you're granting to your account
if that's your password.
Number 23 is WHATEVER.
The word WHATEVER.
Number 24 is QAZWSX,
which is another little keyboard pattern
if you go down the left side of your keyboard
in two columns, you'll get that one.
And number 25, this is a classic.
TRUST NO ONE.
T-R-U-S-T-N-O and a numeral one.
That was Fox Mulder's password on X-Files.
X-Files came out, what, 20 flippin' years ago now.
I think we need to move on from using that as a password.
Once a fictional character is using your password,
you pretty much gotta get rid of it.
Yes, Voltaire.
I want to give a very contrarian take
on this whole article and the premise of it
that the users are dumb for reusing these passwords.
I think it's less of a case of users being dumb,
and more of a case of it just shows that
the reason people chose this weak password
is they don't care enough about the service
that it's provided to want to keep it secure.
I'm sure there are lots of us here
who, for accounts that they share with others,
have purposely weak passwords,
let's say to Netflix or something like that,
so that they can share it all they want.
Richard Stallman, actually, in his early days
hacking at MIT, he actually campaigned
against the use of passwords
because they would privatize everything
and take away people's ability to share stuff.
So I think the password freedom
is kind of operative in some ways.
Not in all cases, obviously,
you want to be able to keep some stuff secure,
but a lot of things that we're forced
to have passwords onto might be better
if they were shared and more communal.
There's certainly stuff to think about there,
but at the same time, passwords are something
that are foisted upon us,
whether we like them or not.
We'll have passwords at work or school or whatever,
and if you're going to use one,
maybe put a bit more thought into it.
Maybe use a password that is not also in use
by millions of other people.
Well, no, I think if you're being forced
to use a password against your will,
you should purposely use a very weak password.
It's a great form of trolling.
It's also a great way to get fired, I think,
in many ways.
Yeah, so that's going on there.
There's also an interesting development
in the Library of Congress.
Some years ago, 12 years ago to be exact,
they started collecting all the tweets.
Not 12 years ago.
They didn't start doing it 12 years ago.
They started doing it,
I want to say maybe 9 or 10 years ago,
but I don't remember offhand,
but Twitter started 12 years ago,
and they were collecting,
the Library of Congress was collecting
all the public tweets out there,
just archiving them,
just because it was something that was happening,
and it was something that was socially relevant.
And the Library of Congress this week
decided they're done.
They don't want to do it anymore.
They've been archiving 12 years of Twitter,
and they've pretty much decided
that that little experiment is over,
which is interesting.
In some ways, the decision of the Library of Congress
to find everyone's tweets everywhere,
well, not everyone, just the public ones,
interesting enough to archive
in some sort of permanent manner,
that was seen as a bit goofy at the time by some people,
a bit silly.
I think we joked about it on this program.
But now they're deciding not to do it,
and that's raising other questions.
They've decided to keep archiving
only what they call newsworthy accounts,
what they call prominent accounts,
historically significant accounts.
For instance, the account of the fellow
that currently lives in the White House sometimes.
Yeah, I think it's rather unfortunate.
They gave a really lackluster justification,
saying that, like, oh, it's the fact that,
it's like, oh, well, we can't keep up,
because now it's 280 characters,
and a lot of people attach media,
and obviously we're not archiving that.
It's like, yeah, but that's the,
the best, the good situation,
where it's like, there's so much interesting things
you can do linguistically from, like, 280 characters,
and if you have that from, like,
every Twitter user in the world,
there's so much interesting social science
you can get from that,
and now we're losing access to that.
That's true.
And our off-the-hook research department
has informed me that it was seven years ago
they began archiving,
but they were archiving the whole 12 years of tweets.
But, and our friend of the show, Jason Scott,
who works at the Internet Archive,
has also let slip the information
that Twitter is not cooperating
with the Internet Archive's desire
to keep archiving the public tweets,
because to do this would require
API access to the fire hose and everything,
and to set this up to,
so they could do it in some manner
more efficient and simpler
than just going online and grabbing the public website,
which would take forever and a day.
They could help the Internet Archive continue this,
but they're not interested.
So that in itself is kind of interesting.
Someone pointed out that the tweets of the president
were already recognized by the administration
as presidential statements,
so they themselves certainly bear archiving,
because that's what you're supposed to do
with presidential statements.
That's a historical record of an element of a presidency.
But, yeah, it's interesting that the Library of Congress
once decided it was important enough
and now has decided that it's finished being important enough.
Maybe they're going to move on to Mastodon or something.
I don't know.
But it is interesting.
I mean, if you go to textfiles.com,
which is Jason Scott's site,
he's got message boards, message threads,
from BBSs, from past eras,
and it's not just the files that people posted there,
but the messages as well and the conversations that were going on.
And looking those over is fascinating now
as an element of the online conversation of a previous age.
I think the tweets that are happening now
will be similarly interesting for students of future history,
assuming we survive to have any future history.
But I guess they won't be getting it from the Library of Congress,
which ostensibly exists to preserve that sort of history.
Also going on, there is a...
I wanted to get this mentioned.
And Voltaire, you sent us...
You found this story,
where there is an internet service provider
that is sending...
When they send notices to their customers
who basically receive DMCA takedown notices
and have been apparently, allegedly caught breaking copyrights,
this notice has an interesting new element.
Do you want to talk about this a bit?
Yes, they imply that if they use a web-connected thermostat
as the winter comes, they might lose access to that
if their internet gets disconnected
for having too much copyright infringement.
I love this.
I think it's interesting from a lot of perspectives.
Obviously, it was a horrendous PR move,
but it also makes us think about
how necessary the internet is to our lives,
that people who are connecting
need to access a thermostat to the internet.
It just goes to show how much of a necessity it is.
It's batty that this is an issue now,
but it's funny that we've gone so deep
into the Internet of Things era,
we as in society,
not maybe we as in those of us in this room,
though I'm not judging,
but people basically have this as part of their lives now
in so many ways.
The internet is not just where you send your emails
and upload and download things,
but it's also now for many people
how you control the temperature in your home
or how you control the lock on your door
or how you control the burglar alarm
or other things that are going on
in your physical world,
in your physical space around you.
If now internet service providers can send nasty grams
to users who get DMCAs,
that, hey, if you keep messing with this,
you might have to get up and walk across the room
and turn the thermostat dial yourself
in addition to losing the email and everything else.
This is now a thing.
This is now a thing people are being told.
This story comes to us from Tarrant Freak.
The Internet of Things.
So many things.
What else is going on in the world?
I think just a previous side on that,
I think it's important.
A lot of people in the higher community
make fun of customers of Internet of Things
and say, oh, they're superfluous, they're insecure,
and these are all true.
But a lot of times when people buy things,
especially when it comes to smart TVs,
which are internet connected,
they're being foisted upon people.
Most TV companies don't sell non-smart TVs anymore.
And the reason they're foisted on people
is not because it makes people want to buy them more,
it's because it's another data source
for them to get information to target ads better on you.
So I think it's important not to blame the victors,
the customers of things that are foisted on them.
Indeed.
While we're all playing with our new Internet of Things
that we might have gotten for certain holidays
over the past week or two,
it behooves us to know exactly what we're risking
the more of our lives we attach to them.
Got a note from Twitter.
Gonzo Deman sends us a tweet saying,
what about using God as a password?
Yeah.
Anyway.
There are other things going on.
The head of a major cryptocurrency exchange
has been kidnapped in the Ukraine, apparently,
because our digital crypto space money
now are real monies enough to
basically bring forth this kind of behavior
when it comes to shady dealings
and criminal undergrounds.
A story on Russia Today
talks about a Russian IT specialist and managing director
of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges,
Pavel Lerner, has been kidnapped in Kiev.
The programmer was dragged into a Mercedes-Benz veto car
by unknown persons in dark clothes and balaclavas
and taken away in an unknown direction.
We're hearing a lot about the Bitcoin.
The kids are still into the Bitcoin.
I don't have any Bitcoins.
You would say that if you didn't want to be kidnapped.
That is true.
What if I did want to be kidnapped?
Because if I claim to have Bitcoins that I don't have,
then they kidnap me, then they find out
that all I've got is...
Dogecoins.
I've got Dogecoins.
Such coins.
They're just going to get angrier with me.
If they've already kidnapped me,
I don't think I want that to happen.
In any case, be careful out there.
This is another thing.
It's easy for people on one side or another
to snort about and say
the whole Bitcoin thing is silly,
the whole Bitcoin thing doesn't matter,
or the whole Bitcoin thing means everything
and I'm naming my first child Bitcoin.
It's real enough.
It's real enough for many people
and some of those people
are not people that you want to be getting into
Mercedes-Benz veto cars with.
So be careful out there.
On that note, this is our closest show to New Year's.
It's the end of 2017
and I'm assuming as our official 2017 correspondent,
Voltaire, you've prepared a full year in review?
Not quite.
Ask me next week.
Wait a minute, was that my job?
Damn it.
Well anyway, so the end of 2017.
What would you say if you just wanted to
make a short statement about maybe
this past year in the news and the hacker world?
I'm optimistic.
2016 was obviously a really bad year in a lot of ways.
Lots of awesome people died.
A really awful person got elected.
But this year we've seen a lot of exciting developments.
People have been really organizing
and being active.
The Me Too movement has been great.
I think people, going forward,
we realize how bad this situation has gotten
and we're starting to come together
and fight for something better.
I think that's all very valid.
I think the only thing I would really add to that is
as I said before,
it's our job, it's our responsibility,
not only as hackers, but as people,
to keep finding out how we can be doing better.
And that's not just in certain subjects,
but in all things.
I think that's what hackers are all about.
That's what we here at WBAI are all about.
So just keep your eyes open,
keep learning, keep fiddling with things,
keep seeing how things work,
and keep learning about how you can be doing better.
And with that note,
I'll sign us off.
Send us an email,
oth at 2600 dot com.
Tweet at us,
at Hacker Radio Show.
And follow the adventures of Emmanuel and Kyle.
And get in touch with us if you'd like to.
If you'd like to pop up in their travels
as they move about that part of the world.
Just have a very happy new year.
I hope you all,
and those of you who had relevant holidays
this past couple of weeks,
had good ones.
And yeah.
I think be excellent to each other.
Party on dudes.
And...
And call all the people that aren't excellent to others.
Exactly.
Don't be afraid to call people that.
For Off The Hook,
this is Rob T. Firefly.
Have a very good night.
Off The Hook
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