of a new and different system and how and why we ought to be talking about that. 
This is Richard Wolff. 
Hope you found this interesting, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. 
All right. 
In the previous program was Economic Update with Professor Richard Wolff, heard Wednesdays at 6.30 p.m. 
on WBAI New York, 99.5 FM and WBAI.org online. 
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You are listening to radio station WBAI 99.5 FM here in New York, and it is time for another exciting edition of Off the Hook. 
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall. 
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t firefly here with you and i am joined in this studio by gila hello and on skype land uh we have alex alex are you with us you are muted hi rob hopefully you can hear me i'm uh i'm uh you you are uh joining us from parts unknown and also joining us from other parts also unknown we have emmanuel and kyle are you guys there emmanuel and kyle kyle and or emmanuel uh yes hi um this well yeah we're having a little bit of difficult here um i don't know what that beep was but uh we are uh here in the yukon um where they do have phone service but it's it's um it's kind of a toss-up sometimes uh i'm here with um greg newby our friend who lives in whitehorse say hi greg hi everyone it's great to be here on off the hook what we're doing is we're connecting through starlink which is uh elon musk's idea uh not that we do that tonight but that uh that's a good way to communicate and you know it works for the most part right you use starlink all the time yeah it's really been remarkably reliable since they put up some additional satellites about two months ago now to uh to handle the higher inclination polar orbit so we ended up getting pretty good coverage we had started out in october with somewhat poor coverage sometimes unusable networking and now it's actually quite solid we have these periodic short dropouts which are mostly due to trees on the ground here rather than being a problem with the satellite and otherwise it's rock solid and pretty good bandwidth and not even a bad price so you might experience some dropouts with us where we mysteriously disappear in the middle of a sentence um that's either us in deep thought or um the uh peril of starlink we we will do our best uh i think since this is uh an elon musk thing like are you not allowed to say the word cisgender over starlink connections or um i don't don't know how that works i heard that rob you know on our i don't know we wait till the end of the show we'll be carrying that i think the people that use are pretty happy that elon musk has been so focused on twitter because he hasn't had the opportunity to mess up starlink exists and that you know the space launches are happening that's space x you know this is a you know space launch vehicle component of the enterprise and those are just proceeding if you follow the space x launches they're doing several launches per month and for the most part they were using the uh the main booster phase so they're actually you know not only efficient but they're they're um uh you know being a little bit more sustainable as we approach but you know we actually have several ways that we could communicate tonight from here uh in the outskirts of whitehorse uh in a house that is not on the grid at all um we have the starlink system uh we also could use one of our cell phones because greg has a booster signal booster that will allow our our cell phones to actually work but we have something else which is really cool called a radio telephone and describe how that works greg sure i mean the thing that's magical about it is it works just like a telephone we have e911 service on the phone we don't get caller id and we don't have a lot of the caller features but i think that's just northwest hell not choosing to package that stuff together but what happens is if you go outside our house there's a an antenna looks a little bit like one of the old style television antennas and it's pointed towards the city of whitehorse and so when we pick up our phone we press the green button to pick up the phone signal and we get a dial tone and we dial and it connects just like any normal phone so it's kind of neat because it's not using wires not copper not fiber not do it none of that stuff it's just using radio waves to communicate back to the mothership at the northwest cell office in whitehorse that's very interesting do we know what uh what um where this is on the spectrum i knew you were going to ask that me too and i didn't look it up let's see if i can find it now greg's going to look that up and see if we can figure it out i'm sure by the time our show is over one of our listeners will have the answer for us but yeah it's a good question where that is on the radio spectrum but it is fascinating to be able to use radio telephone it just sounds so so different yeah i'm seeing indications that uh rob that it's uh often in in the rural radio telephone service the longer name for this is in the 152 to 159 megahertz and 454 to 460 megahertz and uh someone could probably tell us whether those are licensed areas of the spectrum or not i don't know is that is that united states or canada or both it'll be both yeah it'll be both for the most part uh this is from the sec site that i'm looking at here sec.gov but for the most part that we're so close the uh the licensed and unlicensed and utilization of the frequencies are are really exactly the same now i want to ask is it very expensive to use radio telephone you would think so but uh but no it's about 60 bucks a month so it's about what you would pay for landline up here with uh with basic service and we have of that i think 15 a month is for unlimited canada to u.s calling so not that different than a typical landline i almost would prefer to have a radio telephone than a cell phone i'm not sure i can get one in new york though it does have pretty limited bandwidth you know in those frequency ranges you're not getting a lot of uh capability like you could use a modem for example you're not getting a lot of capability to do uh you know uh data communication anything that requires higher can you connect to facebook on it no no no no modem no digital uh traffic at all i definitely want one now that it'll it'll absolutely and uh listeners uh we will not be doing off the hook overtime tonight so if you would like to get in touch with us maybe uh to tell us uh your your thoughts about something we're talking about live um we are keeping an eye on our on our social media so uh find us hacker radio show on twitter uh off the hook at hackers.town on mastodon or send us an email oth at 2600.com and i just um point out people might be asking why uh kyle and emmanuel in god's name are you in the yukon and that's a very good question and i'll answer it um we came here to be part of a support team for greg because he was um involved in a really really exciting challenge in the state of alaska which is next door to the yukon it's quite a drive though it takes about seven hours to get there and by the way we saw a grizzly bear two grizzly bears on the way and uh and some moose that's that story for another time uh he was uh running in something known as the denali 135 uh what that is um there's a highway in alaska called the denali highway it's not really a highway it's just it's a road it's not really paved it's it's uh gravel um and uh it goes for 135 miles and about 13 lunatics from around around north america um decided over a 48 hour period to run the length of it 135 miles this is a part of an annual challenge and greg was one of those people and when you do something like that you need a support team and we happen to have an rv at our disposal so we had a place we could stay we had a place we could stock supplies and what we did was simply uh follow greg and and go five miles ahead of him wait for him to catch up to us give him what he needed at that period in time and then go on the next five or ten miles down the road and did that for almost a few days that's uh that's quite a that's quite a journey and uh i i won't describe what you and kyle were doing as cheating in this race but uh you know it it i'm sure greg appreciates the help greg what got you interested in doing this oh well i've been a runner for a long time and i've done some marathons and even some of these hundred mile ultra marathons and so this was the next step beyond and because it wasn't too far from my house uh you know within driving distance not uh flying distance i signed up and um was really uh lucky to have emmanuel and kyle willing to make the big journey to yukon and help me out with this so i think it was just a general interest but also uh keenly interested in in this particular route you know just a beautiful route not that far away from where we are and don't let greg fool you uh he's quite the athlete and this was an amazing uh experience and crewing itself is sort of a thing with uh you know being able to stay up and support somebody like this and we learned about and used a lot of different uh communications and geolocation tools to uh make sure that we were in touch while we were so far flung um we were even keeping in touch with uh people back here in whitehorse to make sure they were updated if anything was going on and uh it was really um a kind of a combination of being connected but also being totally away from any kind of connectivity or cell phones or anything um as we go along the denali highway yeah there there's no connectivity out there at all we're completely cut off from the world yet we were able to communicate with people back home perhaps greg could explain how that worked yeah yeah this was uh using some pretty standard technology a lot of outdoor people use in fact people doing skiing tend to use these we had uh something called a garmin in reach mini which is a two-way communication device so you connect it to your phone your phone has an app it talks to this little device and that in turn talks to the geosynchronous satellite of the um you know the uh garmin uh uh cohort up there in the sky and we're able to send and receive sms messages over this thing which is pretty cool we can also do our uh gps functions so we have a little map and that shows us where we are and how far we have to go and how fast we've been going and stuff like that and furthermore it has an sos function so if we ended up being in trouble we could press the sos button which is um not something that's easy to prep by accident you have to work a little bit at it and that uh essentially alerts the uh first responder in whatever area you happen to be in so it's a pretty handy little device to have in addition to that that was our two-way device i had a spot tracker that i wore on my shoulder and this was just a one-way gps oh no no i'm sorry i take it back it was it was actually two-way but what it's doing there is it's communicating to the satellite just where you are so it's not for sms or anything but it's just uh communicating up to the satellite where that little um satellite transmitter is and then that in turn feeds into a website that they use for all kinds of different sports the the one that we this one is the same website that they use for the iditarod dog race which is another pretty remote race that happened in the springtime in alaska so this uh two-way signal is a way that people sitting at home like like um a wonderful wifey uh alana could uh keep track of where we are and uh and also know if uh if maybe we stopped if maybe uh we're getting passed by another team you know so sort of keep track of the race that's only updated every 10 minutes so it's not like watching a live you know formula one race on tv where you know exactly where everyone is but it's really uh reassuring because she was able to know where both of us were uh uh independently and um uh where we were in relationship and of course if we had an issue or needed something we could alert her and and uh vice versa um that that combined with a walkie-talkie system where we were able to talk to greg directly uh it had a pretty good range as well so we were never totally out of touch but it was like nothing i'd ever been involved in as far as uh managing all that stuff and then letting your friend off that that they're gonna go for this uh this run and and uh kind of be a bit exposed and away from everything for a little bit it it really was um it was a challenge and uh really quite a a good endurance thing for for us as well i think but greg did so much out there it was quite the experience and we really were quite the little wired uh rv out there because we also had a satellite phone an iridium satellite phone so if we had trouble and for example needed to call a tow truck you don't want to be doing that negotiation by sms right so we have satellite phone we didn't end up needing we also in the rv had an inverter so we could plug it into the 12 volt system which were batteries and those were recharged from the motor and uh and get um i think it was i can't remember now maybe 50 watts there wasn't a whole lot of watts but we we had enough power around 100 yeah maybe 100 watts yeah when the engine's running right to uh to run our you know charger charge not my i wasn't running with the laptop no we had it in there but yeah to charge the laptop and also on top of this we had the satellite radio so we were really you know yeah i think we might have overdone it because at one point the battery died we couldn't start the rv and we were there in the middle of nowhere and we had no idea what we were going to do but eventually it just started that's how things worked out there but uh just to give you a sense of what greg accomplished here uh the new york city marathon as as most marathons is is 26.2 miles what he ran is the equivalent of five marathons in a row without sleeping although he did take a brief nap at one point um that is just simply incredible i've never heard of anything like this before and i hadn't seen it in my own eyes i wouldn't have believed it this is amazing uh alex uh how um how are you doing out there uh i'm very well but i'm amazed greg i mean that's i did the math well while you guys were yapping and that's 5.15 marathons that's extraordinary congratulations man what what an accomplishment have you ever done anything like this before well thanks yeah i've done something similar which are 100 mile races so a marathon is 26.2 that's pretty standard you have people doing half marathon 5k 10k uh marathon is pretty standard and then anything beyond that is an ultra and so i've done the 50k ultra which is about 32 miles and i've done a 100k ultra which is a little over 60 miles but i've also done a number uh just a small number a handful of 100 mile races so uh this is the first time i've run a race that was substantially beyond 100 mile at 135 and in practice i can tell you that i did manage to run pretty well 100 plus miles like a reasonable pace but slowing down over time and i did walk about uh probably that last fifth marathon was was fucking and that was that was actually what a lot of the uh other runners on the course did as well people tend to slow down because it's it's um it's challenging you need a fair amount of training obviously you need uh to maintain nutrition make sure you're hydrated stuff like that on the course um but also unless you're really a super champion which i'm not i'm not competitive in this sense uh but unless you're one of these super champions uh you're going to spend a fair amount that i mean that that's amazing to me it really really is i i i used to run cross country when i was younger and and you know we would do 15 16 miles a day sometimes and they were you know training and i felt like i was going to die so i can't imagine either 135 miles it's really extraordinary um and i was going to say i i bet you the 2600 rv would break down before you did but you guys beat me to that story yeah meanwhile i had to go to manhattan from queens this morning to run an errand and i was exhausted at the end of that i mean i was just gonna say i did not run cross country when i was younger i run if something is chasing me um and that's pretty much it but how long did this go how long without sleeping how long i mean a nap but still how long are we talking here we lost our signal oh we may have lost oh we lost canada uh very uh very sad to inform you that uh we lost the skype connection to canada but i think we'll be uh i'm sure we'll be getting them back at some point soon uh meanwhile alex uh you you also are abroad you're in parts unknown um how many marathons have you run uh you know i actually have not run officially any marathons i i never did it i never did a marathon in fact we were not allowed to run marathons when uh when i was a cross country runner because it it would screw up your training it would make you really tired for a while and and egrade your subsequent performance and things so our our coach actually or uh forbid us from from running marathons which i thought was uh it was kind of funny um but i am in parts unknown and i am talking to you guys from the chelsea arts club in london and uh i've been here for a couple of days i was here for the chelsea arts club annual summer ball which had a heaven and hell thing this year and that was on saturday it was an extraordinary amount of fun and uh i'll be here for a couple more days i've done i've done the show i guess since the beginning of the year since i started teaching at uh pinks college in london that's believe it or not a law professor um i i feel like i've done the show at least four times or so in the chelsea arts club now so it's uh it's great to do it again during the british summertime that's much more uh uh favorable yeah that that leads into my question and it looks like we've got canada back are you guys with us yeah we're here i'm not sure how much uh you heard what we were saying nothing we heard nothing um we've been to you guys for a couple minutes okay well um yeah so let me do that another shot there because uh um yeah we basically were telling people how um this is an amazing part of the continent um uconn alaska alaska is really a fascinating state it's uh it's worth just exploring and and meeting the people and all that one thing that we do uh kyle and i whenever we travel we drop in on radio stations because we're fascinated by radio now in whitehorse we've done that twice we went over to uh cbc whitehorse and uh met the people there it's um a really friendly operation um not very many people as you would expect uh they're right in the middle of uh of the city as most cbc outlets are and they were very interested they know about wbai uh and and always like seeing fellow radio people uh and then we also visited chon now chon is a very interesting radio station in whitehorse it's at 98.1 fm um it's uh native run native home and uh they focus on native issues um throughout the course of the day around 24 hours and they have translator stations a translator station being a lower power station at a different frequency that retransmits your signal they have translators at the frequency of 90.5 all over uconn so basically chon is almost like a uconn network that you can get virtually any place in this massive territory and in fact even on the highway you see blue signs that list radio stations that are available and chon is always one of them so it's just this incredible resource um and we we dropped in on them uh the other day and they had a really beautiful studio overlooking a river uh and the city and um this very spacious studios and so much potential so many things going on they're really trying to uh to build things up and focus more on native issues right now they play a lot of country music because apparently that's what people want to hear and they have all other programs as well but they also play native music and focus on native issues um and then uh when we were in this um this fascinating place called palkeetna in alaska uh it's just this um uh this refuge of a village where people just walk around the streets and go to various shops and it's it's said to be the um uh inspiration for northern exposure i don't believe that but that's what people say um they have a radio station npr station there uh ktna and we uh dropped in on them they're in a little log cabin they have this uh this really uh interesting little studio there uh broadcast a lot of npr material but also local material when we were there uh there was a woman doing a show uh what was the name of the show kyle music i like music that makes me happy yeah music that makes me happy it's a song that she likes and make her happy doesn't necessarily make other people happy but uh what she wants to hear and it's it's pretty awesome just to meet the various characters uh we talked to the police director as well um and it's it's interesting to hear the um the challenges they were having a challenge literally with trees getting in the way of their satellite signal they were having trouble broadcasting npr because there was tree growth in the way of the satellite we were trying to help them figure out where the trees were and also um uh we're kind of frustrated because um in the past state era democracy now but there are a few conservative people in town that managed to put pressure on getting off the air so these are the struggles that these radio stations have to deal with uh but they all have similarities as far as being part of a community um wanting to provide something different and just being open to all kinds of ideas being presented over the airwaves that's uh that's really fascinating excuse me um so uh what's uh you know one one thing that's uh definitely i think on people's minds when they hear canada right now yes um is the um wildfires that are ongoing and the air quality or are you guys coming up against uh any of that where you are old news rob we talked about this a month ago come on get with it that's that's it's it's still happening is it's still happening because you would never guess it out here out here in the it's uh it's pristine it's uh the air is clean in fact it's always light at midnight it'll be it'll be bright outside there's no night here uh so that's kind of weird but uh right now at least in this part of the country there there is no smoke which is definitely a good thing there's definitely the fire danger notices uh in full effect and uh on the roadways and uh throughout our our travels in alaska the notices indicating it was very high or a high um likelihood of fire uh was a part of every every road we we went through so i mean it it's definitely warmer than than average uh feels maybe a bit dry uh but for the most part uh no we we've been spared smoke that's good to hear um we we are not i think the warnings are starting up again for us uh here in the new york area and it's happening very significantly in the midwest i think um iowa minnesota wisconsin illinois um you know a few weeks ago the worst air quality in the world was here in new york now it's in chicago well it's not a competition i'm not hearing about what it kind of is because i'm not hearing about american wildfires usually that's what you hear about and um they're the ones that are spreading out of control this year it seems to be canada getting all the attention and uh where are the wildfires in america i mean i'm sure they're happening we we our fires i think in america are metaphorical at the moment chiefly um but uh moving on okay so we'll get even with canada later i don't mean to be flippant about this but what else are you going to do at this particular point on alex in england is there any any kind of um effect from from wildfires now or in the past no no not at all we we don't have any of that here i think there's just a general level of pollution in london that um uh you know that that would excite all of us really right it's um you know now it's actually it's been really quite nice here skies have been blue it's barely rain and even when i was flying in to uh to to london last week uh but it really struck me i mean usually every time i fly into london you you're just struck about how burdened and green the the english countryside is but i i did notice that it was substantially more yellow and far less green this time and there just hasn't been a lot of rain which is a very weird thing and it's been really hot here in london so hot i had to go and buy buy shorts i mean when i lived here in the 90s it was you know the british summertime was a bit of a joke you know you really had to continue to wear a sweater and have a jacket around it's just not like that anymore i'm telling you there is there's something going on i think this type of extreme weather is really becoming the norm now well very fascinating and elsewhere in the pan arctic the impact of climate change are magnified i think we read about this in the newspaper paramount and hear a lot about it from the old timers and even people that have just been living up north for five or ten years for um you know maybe 10 or 20 years they are able to remember much colder winters much drier winters much cooler summers as well and now with the uh magnified increase of uh of climate change we see winters that aren't as cold which makes them more snowy which is what can lead to uh spring flooding which has been another issue because you get more snowing and end up with more water and then in the summertime you end up with temperatures here in the yukon today it's uh in the 80s and that's just unusual it's more typical in the yukon that you you are in the 60s and don't get out of the 70s or into the 70s too often so seeing temperatures in the 80s and uh last summer we actually hit a low 90s is uh is literally unprecedented like it's out of human memory that this has happened previously yeah meanwhile a listener informs us over mastodon uh adam says air quality in central illinois is in the purple unhealthy for everyone stay indoors if possible um they escaped the smoke until just yesterday so uh and and it's also in the uh in the cbc news there's an article here about uh toronto other end of uh canada from where you are but uh it's ranked uh the sixth worst in the world the sixth today it's um scroll down a little bit thank you um chicago detroit dubai delhi minneapolis and toronto after 6 p.m tonight so not a club to be in really that's uh you know the air quality club is one that you'd like to be far away absolutely speaking of canada uh and cbc i've got a cbc story here which might be of interest uh headline canadians will no longer have access to news content on facebook and instagram that's right social media giant meta has confirmed it will end access to news on social media sites for all canadian users uh and that's because of something known as bill c18 the online news act um now basically that law will force tech giants like meta and google to pay news outlets for posting their journalism on their platforms so rather than do that uh meta is going to block news for canadian users over the next few months and um i don't know what google is going to do but it's interesting to see that that kind of a reaction but when you think about it um they basically use that content and um don't pay a penny for it and make a mint from it yeah what fascinates me about this story is how does meta define news i mean everything is news on social media up to you know uh my my little billy is graduating this month or you know it's granny's 97th birthday or you know something's going on in the world regarding geopolitics and uh are they are they are they going to block just professional news outlets um that would like to be paid for their content or is it just is it is is news in general just verboten and how do we figure out what that line is well i guess that's up to them to decide how to define it i would imagine uh we're looking at newspaper websites and um other uh news agencies as opposed to blogs and uh and personal websites uh justin trudeau uh is calling this bullying bullying tactics from meta uh he says the fact that these internet giants would rather cut off canadians access to local news than pay their fair share is a real problem and now they're resorting to bullying tactics to try and get their way it's not going to work um of course people can always just go to the website themselves and leave facebook out of it and just use facebook to spread gossip and hatred and that's what it's for well that's the thing if the news if the legitimate news outlet you know professional news outlet so places like cbc or or pronto star things like that or uh it's not just uh u.s based it could be cnn you know if all of these are off then the ones that aren't considered to be professional news outlets will be allowed to proliferate and that uh likely to i would think tend towards uh greater disinformation yeah and and mimic news sites in that way well i mean you have to ask meta well how can you consider this to be news but not that you know you should be cutting that side off as well because it's in your definition news interesting times uh alex is there you have a legal perspective on this yeah i i think this is a really fascinating development too and i and i think that the reaction of these of the tech companies the big platforms and how they deal with these types of potential new fees essentially for this local content is going to define how we use and and view the internet for possibly decades to come because if if they just pull out of these local areas and decide not to pay the fees well um that's not great i mean the the point of this is that we think that by driving eyeballs with local content to the platforms and generating data data that's been used and sold and packaged and repackaged and compiled other data for advertising purposes that the tech platforms are benefiting so they should pay for that type of benefit i mean that's the argument here but uh if they just decide to pull out entirely from all of these markets that have established these types of rules that that's going to be really problematic in terms of people accessing this type of local content and the platforms themselves have argued that there is a benefit to these local providers and and papers and journalists uh because their content is included on these platforms it has a much wider reach and that generates eyeballs for them and maybe maybe there there is some component of that but i do think that there is a in my personal opinion is that there is a disproportionate benefit to the tech platforms now what will really make the difference here is if a jurisdiction like new york or california or the united kingdom let's say where we are right now passes a very similar law because i i think right now when we're talking about canadian content things it it's it's a very small percentage of their of their annual revenue or or or any revenue stream whatsoever if these larger uh uh jurisdictions are passing very similar laws and facebook and and these other platforms just decide to pull out well then they're they're cutting off the nose to spite their face so to speak uh i think we need others to join in demand this type of revenue and that will will cut into the profits of these tech companies but i think it will distribute money in a fairer more equitable way during the story and i just did a quick check to confirm that australia had a similar activity in 2021 and the government backed down in australia from facebook and google but the exact same thing and here in canada looks like almost the exact story which is the government says uh uh the big tech has to pay and um and this in this case the law actually got passed but now we're in the fallout what does it mean period in australia the law got passed and then more or less backed off from so that case google said okay uh the government said uh australia said oh just kidding google said okay we'll get enough uh some clauses in law that said if uh charges were to be reenacted then uh you have to give a fair notice so we can threaten you some more i guess i think we can go back to negotiating table so i was reminded and i confirmed that it was february 2021 that the same story occurred in australia with a different outcome well this is definitely going to be something to keep an eye on uh in a media statement the the canadian radio television and telecommunications commission uh which is tasked with overseeing the online news act said it will soon share its plan for implementation and quote set up the framework for mandatory bargaining between these parties so it uh it remains to be seen exactly what the uh what the plan is here for enforcing this so wait a minute i have a question yes so they're saying payment for posting links is what we're talking about it's so i saw this interesting story i want to share it with you here you go here's a question yes if we're talking about anything that lands at a newspaper so i don't know the toronto sun times which i know is not really a thing but i'm inventing you live in in toronto or your family lives in toronto and you have a death in your family and you want to link the people you know to your family member's obituary in the toronto sun times is that no longer allowed under c18 very interesting uh question and i guess i guess we'll find out well i i think yeah i think it would be allowed i just think that it might be something that the platform would have to pay uh for i think one of the objections from the tech platform to respect this particular proposal was that it should be charging for news content as opposed to links uh and and that's an interesting argument but i think that inevitably when you're linking to something you're also providing a little bit of content uh you're you're nobody sees just their urls anymore in these days that just that just doesn't happen there's always a bit of a preview and you know maybe an image or something like that and so yeah you're you're these platforms are pulling down some content but um yeah that's uh it's just a very weird time and i and greg i think you brought a really great point too by the way with regard to the australian law and i think that would have cost a tech platform something into the tune of 200 million a year if i recall correctly uh and so it's not it's not an insubstantial amount of money either but it's a different distribution of of these particular funds and if the jurisdictions just back down these types of laws will will have no effect i got to ask now the communications teams at google and facebook uh hastily putting together talking points around the type of thing that gila mentioned it's like oh without sharing oh what about sharing local soccer club news and oh what about uh the fact that maybe you can't get that news in this part of the country or this part of the world aren't we doing a service by channeling uh not just the headline or the url but also the blurb and the photos from the uh you know from the story so and those are those are legitimate points i mean i think there's value in having that shared and at the same time there's uh clearly a lot of voices held there's also a reason to compensate companies that are you know that are paying salaries and writing these uh articles to do that but anyway and the story though is that during the negotiation phase australian government backed out back down so it'll be really interesting to hear what happens here in canada i i think we're talking about two different things though because it's um if you go to facebook to get news that's radically different than somebody on facebook saying look at this story you know because that legitimizes facebook as a source of news using the work of the new york times or the washington post to do that uh and by the same token then they can add other less reputable news items and put them side by side and make them seem legitimate as well so there is there is more involved when um what went when the purpose or the result is for um facebook to be seen as a source of news itself as opposed to just a place where people are talking about what's going on yeah and i think even more so if facebook actually had like a news division and was providing some kind of news or reporting function themselves and then curating or offering or editing the um available articles from other sources within whatever kind of news product they were actually uh trying to provide but they don't really have a staff department is that that is that is parallel in reputation and and integrity as as like some of these outlets so them being the arbiter of it it is um is is dangerous and that whomever is there whatever entities are there are going to be be what the users of that platform are exposed to so if you take away these um state institutions and and respectable uh news organizations like was said i think by greg is that the other sort of clickbait will fall in and fill up that space vice versa you um take out all all the alternatives you have sort of only one or two news sources or just facebook news telling you everything yeah and uh yes alex so i i want to i want to i want to throw up what cal just said and also i think an important point that that greg brought up too which is that there is a benefit to both parties here there's a benefit to the local news organizations that i also mentioned that uh they're getting links promoted on these platforms and then there's a benefit to social media platforms but who's sharing these things who's looking at them who's clicking on these stories all this generates data but as it as as the system stands currently the entire benefit of of the data that's generated and the um uh and the money that's made essentially from the social media platforms promoting this type of local content it's going to the social media platforms you know the the vast majority of it is there's some i guess monetized um monetized data that would it could come from these social media platforms from those particular clicks but most of it is coming uh or rather uh going to the the platforms themselves so you know i see this as as the platforms having to strike a different bargain for certain types of local access and if we think about the the idea of local content it's really really important to communities and there isn't a lot of local content in in places like east africa or west africa or even you know parts of canada and things and you know these these social media platforms should be sharing i think a portion of of this of this money that they're generating on their platforms from this particular content so this is not striking a fairer bargain to me than than anything else and it's not about well there's some incidental or ancillary benefit to these guys uh it's about the money itself over the long term and what's fair and i i see there being a very strong reason for governments and local governments and state governments to to really hold on and push this issue because uh i think it it's we're going to see this 10 years from now as a matter of fundamental fairness indeed and uh that's not even uh accounting for the um when you post a news link to social media you get uh the social media engagement you get that comment thread you get those uh comment pages where um tons and tons of people can all be terrible to each other over whatever the news article is about and uh that that i think is a large problem i'm i'm guessing is a large significant part of uh the social media engagement in general but uh we'll we'll have to keep an eye on this but i did want to i did want to get to this other story before uh we run out of time which is a fun pair of stories actually one of them on abc 7 news uh bonnaroo crowds accidentally trigger 9-1-1 calls through the iphone's new safety feature and uh this is this is very entertaining because the new uh the new iphones have a safety feature which is supposed to detect such uh movements and uh jarring uh experiences as when you've been in a car crash there are motion sensors in the phone and if the phone thinks you've just been in a car that has crashed it will automatically call the emergency number for you 9-1-1 here in the united states um at the bonnaroo music and arts festival in tennessee um the local 9-1-1 switchboards were getting flooded with fake calls because people rocking out to the bonnaroo music were setting off the car crash detection feature in their new iphones um it got uh it got to the point where bonnaroo themselves had to tweet heads up bonnaroovians let's work as a team to resolve this you can take action by going to settings uh emergency sos and deactivating the crash feature um so yes uh this uh this this feature which uh apparently a lot of people didn't know about um let alone know that they that they should be disabling it when they go to uh to a rock concert this is uh this is i'm sorry they say that on stage they say that on stage in the middle of the show okay everybody go to settings and scroll down and if so i want to hear that yeah you know what that is that's the modern equivalent to the brown acid announcement exactly what it is this is actually a replay of a story that was a winter story where spears were having the same exact problem they were going down the hill and doing mobile and stuff like that and they were setting off the uh the alert in their iphone and uh crash yes so the moral of the story is if you're going to get into the mosh pit turn off crash indicator on your phone first they go in a mosh pit safety first that's what's on everyone's mind at least don't take your phone or at least if you're not if you're going to take your phone turn off the crash indicator but that does dovetail nicely with another new story does it not it does indeed there was another uh story this one on ars technica um last week about uh android's emergency call shortcut um which is also flooding dispatchers with false calls so your android users uh you know make fun of the iphone users but uh it's happening to you too exactly it's happening in the uk right now so um emmanuel we have to congratulate you for being ahead of the curve because this happened to you a couple months ago and now it's happening widely in the uk because as you found out if you hit the power button on your android phone five times in a row your phone will automatically call emergency services um so apparently 999 in the uk is being completely overrun with pocket dials that people don't know they're making according to the bbc one department received 169 silent 999 calls between midnight and 7 p.m on one sunday alone um google says it's working on a fix yeah this is an android 12 the latest version of the uh of the os i was pranking the police uh months before this happened unintentionally uh and it all started because i'm trying to play a youtube video for somebody in a bar and i wanted to turn down volume and i thought i was hitting the volume down button but instead i was hitting the button below that and hitting that five times summons the police i didn't know but i found out um do you have time for one more quick story we do okay um this is something that really uh struck um got my attention the city of fort lord has said it's been targeted by a group of hackers because of the state's stance on gender affirming care so the officials say the hackers stole information from a website used to track city work orders but no sensitive information has been released uh they say the city of fort worth has confirmed that the posted information did originate from our computer systems however the data came from a website that our workers used to manage their maintenance activities uh they believe uh the hackers stole credentials to log into the website used by workers um now uh basically the uh uh city of fort worth believes the group uh siege sec is behind the attack uh the group posted the information the telegram and twitter and fort worth said the post indicated uh the post that was announcing the hack indicated they believe the information was posted in an attempt to embarrass the city uh what it said was we have decided to make a message toward the u.s government texas happens to be one of the largest states banning gender affirming care and for that we have made texas a target the post said and you know i say all power to them you know when you consider all that texas has done to hurt people this does not hurt them nearly as much and it certainly sends a statement compare this to what happened in dallas several months earlier where there was ransomware and all kinds of things were frozen it was all about money this is about sending a message this is about getting attention and yeah maybe it was uh inconvenient maybe it was embarrassing maybe fort worth was even the best target but we're talking about it and it got out there and this is kind of like a war you know we have to get the message out one way or another and the things that states like florida and texas are doing uh to the trans community uh and and and to um to all kinds of people it's not getting enough attention in the media so we need to go to websites we need to go to uh activist uh type actions we need to do whatever we can and we need to support each other when it happens we absolutely do this is uh this is an unprecedented time in human history for uh new threats to members of the lgbtqia plus uh community and uh this is pride month so yeah pay attention speak up and uh do whatever you can and we will have to leave it there because um we are just about out of time but uh do send us email oth at 2600.com uh find us on twitter at hacker radio show for as long as that keeps being a thing find us on mastodon um off the hook at hackers.town and uh take care of uh take care of those close to you and have a very good week uh thanks again to greg newby and our uh panel from uh parts all over the place uh thanks to everyone everyone have a very good week bye and happy birthday mr kaminsky