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The time is just about 7.01 p.m.
You're listening to WBAI 99.5 FM here in New York, WBAI.org everywhere.
And it is time for another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum Diddly Bum, for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum Diddly Bum!
Bum Diddly Bum!
A very good evening to you.
The program is Off the Hook.
Rob T. Firefly here with you.
And here with me, we have Gila.
Good evening.
And out there in Signal Land, we have Alex.
Yes, you do.
Good evening, everyone.
Good to see you.
It's a small panel here today on this first edition of Off the Hook for 2026.
At least if you're listening live in U.S. time zones, it is the first of the year.
Although, Alex, you experienced 2026 a little before us, and we got a lot of fun feedback about your appearance on the show.
I want to go over to some email we got.
Find it right over here.
A listener called Cypher Cryptic Reboot wrote us a nice email saying,
Greetings regarding your New Year's Eve show and the ban list, specifically calling out Raspberry Pis and Flipper Zeros.
I don't believe the list may have been compiled by the incoming Mamdani administration, as Gila mentioned as a possibility.
Gila, do you want to recap what was going on there for folks who might have missed last week?
Yes.
So we were talking about what people were told they could not bring to the mayoral inauguration block party on New Year's afternoon.
And it mentioned a lot of stuff you typically hear you couldn't bring to an event like that.
Like you can't bring chairs or alcohol or coolers or laser pointers or Flipper Zeros or Raspberry Pis.
Those were mentioned very specifically by name.
Flipper Zeros and Raspberry Pis.
And so, yeah, as far as we know, the inauguration and the block party and everything went off well.
There were no reported incidents of people doing anything untoward with a small computer or a gadget with a dolphin on the screen.
But everything seemed to go well.
Cypher Cryptic Reboot continues.
It may have been compiled.
The list they're referring to here.
It may have been compiled by whatever company or faculty was providing security for the event and not understanding even the basics of what those items can do as well as their limitations.
Someone more than likely saw a YouTube short and had a satanic panic moment similar to the D&D scare back in the 80s, not fully understanding what anything truly is.
Just my nickel's worth since pennies are becoming rare.
Thank you very much for that email, Cypher Cryptic Reboot.
Thank you very much.
We'll get to that, definitely, this hour.
But Frank goes on to ask, do we know if anyone got picked up, harassed, etc., for having their Raspberry Pi or Flipper Zero on them at Mondani's inauguration?
So I would like to thank Frank for picking up on the proper pluralization of both Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero.
Yes, we do enjoy that.
Yeah, as far as we know, no one got dragged off for having one of those and nothing of note happened.
But I'm also curious, would someone have been allowed in, but the tech would have been confiscated?
Or I don't, we didn't hear anything about it, so I'm assuming no one tried, which does make me a little sad.
Yeah.
A Raspberry Pi and a Flipper Zero, those are both kind of spendy items to be okay with losing at an event like that.
And maybe not so easy to come by all the time.
The supplies of those things tend to ebb and flow, and sometimes you can't get hold of one for love or money.
But, Alex, how did the rest of that party go that we caught only the smallest bit of?
Oh, well, I think I sobered up from it probably just about five minutes ago.
So, yeah, it was a wonderful party.
It was great.
And it was really nice to have my friend Tony join us very briefly and talk.
You know, he's an extraordinary guy.
He's been a member of the Chelsea Arts Club for a very, very long time.
And he was one of the founders, I believe, of the Antiques Roadshow, believe it or not.
Okay.
And his wife is actually an extraordinary artist.
She makes portraits, miniature portraits.
And she actually did the portrait of the king for the official monarch's jewels.
So she's a - well, they are a really, really fascinating and interesting couple.
And Tony, believe it or not, you couldn't tell from his voice or the way in which he parties.
But he just had his 80th birthday in September.
So it's pretty awesome to be able to spend New Year's Eve with such a fun group of lunatics over there.
And, you know, people that I think very much embody the hacker spirit are alive and well and always partying over the Chelsea Arts Club.
So that's why I've made it my home away from home whenever I'm coming at you from London.
So, excellent.
And, yeah, the Martha Root hack, which is amazing, it happened at the CCC event last week or before last week, more than a week ago now, a couple of weekends ago.
But it has been making the rounds in the news, a story from TechCrunch.
Hacktivist deletes white supremacist websites live on stage during a hacker conference.
And there's an amazing picture of the hacker here.
And, Gila, how would you describe this photo?
She's the Pink Ranger.
The Pink Ranger.
The Pink Ranger.
The Pink Power Ranger.
The Pink Power Ranger.
The classic 90s Pink Power Ranger.
It does look like there's a little duct tape on her helmet.
I think that just adds to the hacker spirit of the whole thing.
Yeah, yeah.
This is the Pink Ranger at functionally a battle station.
It really is.
And the pseudonymous hacker, this from the TechCrunch story, who goes by Martha Root, dressed as Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers, deleted the servers of, and there's the name of a few.
Excuse me.
The names of a couple of websites which have been taken down.
Do we not want to share those?
We do not want to share those.
She deleted the servers in real time at the end of a talk at the annual Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany.
Root gave the talk alongside journalists Eva Hoffman and Christian Fuchs, who wrote an article about the hacked sites for the German paper, Dezeit, in October.
You got this?
Nope, I'm going to keep going.
As of this writing, a website which Hoffman described as Tinder for Nazis, a site that claimed to match white supremacists sperm and egg donors, and a sort of TaskRabbit-esque labor marketplace for racists are all offline.
Pardon me while I choke to death on the air here.
Please don't do that.
But, yeah, thank you for picking that up.
And, yeah, this was an amazing hack.
There is video of the hack.
You can find it on the ccc.de website, as well as clips have made the rounds all over.
And you can watch this being done live, these sites being deleted, the email addresses on those sites being deleted.
Basically, every freaking thing being deleted by this hacker on the spot.
Now, this was amazing.
The sites still remain offline.
And, yeah, it's really a sight to see.
It's nice to know that Power Rangers are out there, you know, working toward the public good.
And making the Internet a little safer and a little better.
I love some of the description here.
Poor cybersecurity hygiene that would make even your grandma's AOL account blush.
Yes, that's a description by the hacker, Martha Root.
And, yeah, Root said that users' images included precise geolocation metadata that, quote,
practically hands out home addresses with a side of awkward selfies.
And some of this data is out there.
You can find it courtesy of the Distributed Denial of Secrets crew at ddosecrets.com.
And, yeah, it is a sight to see.
It is about probably if you have a picture in your mind of what the users of sites and services like this from the neo-Nazi community would look like, you're probably right.
I'll just say that much about it.
And, again, I'm just, I'm so tickled by the way that Martha Root is describing so many of these things.
The dating site had 6,500 users, of which 86% were men and 14% were women.
A gender ratio that makes the Smurf village look like a feminist utopia, Root wrote.
Like, I'm just tickled by all of this and the fact that these things are all down.
Yes, words were not minced.
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, I don't think you're taking really any literary license whatsoever in describing this and looking like this person and looking like a Power Ranger.
It's really quite extraordinary.
One of my favorite quotes from Root was, imagine calling yourself the master race but forgetting to secure your own website.
Maybe try mastering to host WordPress before world domination.
I mean, it's just so typical.
So, I mean, but look, as funny as all of this is, you know, there could possibly be criminal consequences here.
I mean, even though we're talking about very undesirable people, you know, they still have a right to host their very awful views in some place or another.
I mean, laws don't just apply to people whose views with whom we agree.
So, you know, and this obviously, this happened in Germany.
So, there are data espionage and data tampering laws in Germany that could potentially apply because Martha Root had reportedly exploited vulnerabilities to gain and escalate access rather than using some kind of normal user relationship or normal access to the particular site.
And then the U.S.'s laws with respect to the CFA or the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, that could apply extraterritorially, meaning it could apply outside the borders of the United States.
So, there's some potential criminal liability there.
But this obviously was all done as a matter of some form of civil disobedience as well.
I mean, it's not as if Martha Root thought this was perfectly legal to go and delete data.
So, I think this then raises the issue of, well, if this was some kind of form of civil disobedience, should there be some consequences for those particular acts?
I mean, it was a political statement, I believe, that Martha Root was making when that person did this.
Actually, I don't really know the gender of Martha Root, really, because you can't, I don't think you can tell.
I'm not sure if it's a female, male, or it's a non-binary person.
I really have no idea.
So, I'm just trying to refer to this person by the name.
I don't know a hell of a lot about Martha Root.
But, I mean, I think this raises a real issue, too, though.
I mean, I think that the authorities might go after Martha.
And I think that she could potentially also suffer civil suits directed at her, presumably her.
Yeah, but whoever does that has to go through the PR nightmare of suing a power ranger.
I don't know what the, how do you serve papers on a superhero?
It just, it boggles the mind.
Martha Root's Mastodon presence has, seems to be inaccessible as of now.
Um, they had a, an account on chaos.social, the Mastodon instance.
But, um, while the rest of that site is up, uh, Martha's, um, account is not at, uh, at the moment.
So, we'll see, uh, we'll see how this develops.
Um, if and when, you know, anyone tracks down any further info about this, we'll keep our eyes on it.
But for now, I, I, I can, I think we can only say, go, go, Power Rangers.
I mean, I also appreciate the theatricality of the moment.
And in addition to the complicated nature of serving papers on a superhero, do you want to be the person who is standing up for this particular site?
Do you want to be the person who says, hey, I want my racist task rabbit back?
Yeah, I remember seeing some sort of chatter about the admin of the, these sites having some sort of high-priced lawyer lined up.
And who knows what will become of this?
But, uh, it, the theatricality, I think you, I think you put it perfectly.
It was an amazing thing, an amazing way for this to have been done.
Um, so often when something like this happens, you never really see or hear anything directly about it.
But, but the fact that it was in front of a packed crowd who were cheering as, uh, as this was happening, as they were watching it go by on the screen.
Um, yeah, the, the video from, uh, ccc.de is, um, it's, it's a, it's a site.
And, uh, you can also, if you find it on the CCC site, there are audio tracks of translations.
So they're speaking German, but you can hear it in English, uh, translated by real life people, actual translators, not AI or anything like that.
Um, so, uh, yeah, check it out at, uh, media.ccc.de.
Also, side note, I do appreciate that our pals at DDoS Secrets right now have not made this information completely, totally, and freely available.
If you want to get it, you have to be a verified journalist or you have to, you can't just get it.
You have to ask for it.
You can't get the full leaks.
There, there is a taste out that, uh, shows you a bunch of the photos.
But the full hundred gigs is not something you can get just for funsies.
The actual info on these people is not, uh, floating around freely out there.
So, yeah, that's, uh, that's what's going on out there.
Um, another, uh, fun story I wanted to, uh, talk about.
Um, Vietnam.
Vietnam, and so many, so many, uh, sentences start like this.
A fun story from Vietnam.
They, uh, they are endeavoring to force YouTube and other platforms to allow skipping ads.
You've all seen, uh, those unskippable video ads that you have to sit through, like old school
television commercials, like we are back in the stone age of, uh, entertainment.
And a video that's 10 minutes long, where someone's talking about protein maxing or some other.
I don't know.
They just talk and the skip button comes up after 30 seconds, but you don't know that
it's there and you wind up watching 10 minutes of some bro talking about protein maxing when
really all I wanted to watch was Bluey.
Absolutely.
And, uh, Bluey is awesome, by the way.
But, um, the, the story, which, uh, this, this copy of the story I found on India Times,
uh, the Times of India website, and it is interesting how much this hasn't seemed to
hit the Western media as yet.
But, uh, this from timesofindia.com, uh, the government of Vietnam has recently rolled out
a new law known as Decree 342 slash 2025 that forces YouTube and other digital platforms
to enable users to skip video advertisements after a maximum of five seconds.
The law is expected to come into effect on the 15th of February, 2026.
The reason behind introducing this law is to protect the rights of users who find advertisements
on digital platforms very frustrating due to their length.
And there's more to this.
The, uh, new rule would hit video adverts, um, that previously made viewers sit through
15 to 30 seconds without offering a skip.
It will also hit static image ads, pop-ups, and banners, which now need to be immediately
closable with a single click.
Um, we've, we've all seen the, the pop-over ads that, uh, pop-up that don't have an
obvious close, close button or have a fake close button that clicks the ad for you instead.
Um, apparently that will also be covered by this law.
And of course, I, I think the, the, uh, none of us live in Vietnam.
Um, I don't know how many BAI listeners do, but it's always interesting when someone is
the first to, in the international sphere to, uh, throw out something like this.
We've seen things like, uh, you know, the European Union standards, uh, forcing Apple
to bring a USB-C to their devices instead of their proprietary chargers and, uh, things
like that.
And someone has to be the first, um, things like GDPR in Europe.
And so it's interesting to see where this goes.
If, uh, if the powers that be at Google and elsewhere, um, start, uh, just serving different,
uh, kinder, gentler ads to Vietnam while leaving the rest of us with the miserable crap, or if
this affects some kind of actual change.
Sorry, I'm looking at a sec.
So the rule is not coming in.
I also love the fact that it's called a decree.
It's not a bill.
It's not a law.
It's a decree.
I kind of love it.
Um, the decree also requires that online ads include visible icons or instructions to
report illegal content or opt out of certain types of ads.
Advertising platforms, content providers, and publishers are responsible for removing
illegal or harmful ads within 24 hours of government request.
If they fail to comply, Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications can block their
content and authorities can take further legal actions.
Telecommunication and internet service providers are also required to help restrict access to
non-compliant ads.
I am so curious how this is going to be enforced and enforceable.
But yes, also what will trickle down outside of Vietnam.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, well, I think there's a lot to the story and maybe some fun to be had with it as well.
But I mean, you know, being the first to regulate, as I think you rightly point out here, Rob,
carries with it, I think, a lot of power.
And that's, you know, what's known generally, I think, is the Brussels effect, right?
Brussels always tends to be the one to regulate with respect to GDPR.
That certainly was the case in terms of the management and personal data.
But here, obviously, you know, anybody who's doing business in Vietnam, and that's pretty
much all of the tech platforms.
You're talking about YouTube, Meta, ByteDance, Google, et cetera, right?
They're going to have to have very specific Vietnam ad configurations that put some kind
of hard cap on these unskippable ads.
So they will have to make some kind of system that would allow for ads to be skipped for after
five seconds.
And they can roll that out to the entire world.
That would be nice, because it would be great to have this available to the entire world.
That would be, I think, a lasting legacy that Vietnam could give all of us.
I find, however, that some of the biggest offenders of these really annoyingly long ads aren't
necessarily YouTube, but places like CNN and others that force you to watch ads for like
two or three minutes, you know, before watching some kind of, you know, stupid, you know, 90-second
roll, something that's not even as long as the goddamn ad that you just watched.
But what I find to be quite interesting here would be if this wasn't rolled out globally,
and we all agree that this is like a great thing.
You don't want to have to wait for more than five seconds to skip into whatever content it
is that you're actually looking to consume.
So wouldn't it then make a lot of sense for VPN providers to start to create lots and lots
more servers in Vietnam?
And then whenever you're watching content, you can stream it through Vietnam so that you
don't have to be subject to these really annoying ads because of this 342-slash-2025 decree
that will come into force at some point soon, I think.
But I think it gives us a great opportunity to use VPNs to avoid these really annoying ads.
Absolutely.
Imagine if we're all scrambling to get our internet connections to bounce through Vietnam
just to exempt us from the crap that they're feeding to the rest of the world where they're
still allowed.
So yeah, another thing in the media environment to keep an eye on.
Yep.
While we're talking about the media environment, let's talk about the social media environment.
This is a story from here in New York, a story on techdirt.com.
New York orders apps to lie about social media addiction and will lose in court.
I found this very interesting.
This is a story from Monday.
And it starts, New York Governor Kathy Hochul just signed a law that's going to get expensive
fast.
Obviously, they're editorializing around here.
But let's go with it for now.
Now, the state's new social media labeling requirement, S-4505, courtesy of State Senator
Andrew, uh, Gounard's?
Is this how you pronounce this?
Um.
Sure.
Yeah.
Why not?
Forces websites to slap unscientific warnings on their services, claiming that features
like algorithmic feeds and push notifications cause addiction.
It's compelled speech based on contested science, which means it's blatantly unconstitutional,
says Tech Dirt here.
And courts have already rejected nearly identical schemes, but Hochul and Gounard's either don't
care or don't understand First Amendment basics.
So New York taxpayers are about to fund a losing legal battle whose only real purpose is generating
headlines for those politicians pretending to care about protecting the children.
Um.
Does anyone here know about law stuff in New York?
Uh.
Among the three of us.
Gilla, you?
No.
Ew.
I wish we did.
Ugh.
Alex, you're here.
Shockingly, yeah.
I might have something to say about this particular issue in this story.
This one is interesting because, you know, I think there, again, you know, to use the word
of the day here, literary license, I think there is a little bit of literary license being
taken by the author of that Tech Dirt article because, you know, look, we do know that social
media is harmful.
There's plenty of studies out there that show that social media, consuming social media and
ceaselessly scrolling causes anxiety.
So I think the author of that is sticking their head in the sand a little bit when it
comes to the issue of whether anxiety and social media go hand in hand.
The issue is whether it's generally accepted science, generally accepted, you know, research.
But, I mean, really, what is generally accepted here, either?
I mean, is it generally accepted that climate change is a real thing if there are a bunch
of people who deny it?
I don't know.
I mean, that's something to consider.
But I think when we're framing this issue, we've got to talk about, like, the threshold
issues here.
And so we have to ask ourselves, like, well, what kind of speech would this law be regulating
anyway, right?
So the statute would force platforms with, quote, addictive feeds, push notifications,
autoplay, infinite scroll, or things like like counts to display these warnings.
And those warnings would cause them to speak about addiction and mental health harms, right?
So these warnings are compelled statements.
And it is the state that is compelling a certain statement to be made by a private company about
their own products and their design choices.
So this suggests that what we're talking about here is commercial speech or commercial-like speech.
And there are certain standards that apply to commercial speech under a case called Zauderer.
And it was, oh, God, I can't remember the other party in Zauderer, but it was like Zauderer
versus Office of Disciplinary Counsel's Supreme Court case.
And it basically said that the state can compel disclosure of purely factual, non-controversial
information that's reasonably related to preventing deception or has to be related to some kind
of legitimate state interest.
And that would be here, protecting children from anxiety or mental health issues here.
So, you know, is this purely factual?
Is this non-controversial information that's ceaselessly scrolling through social media would
cause social anxiety?
I mean, I ask that to you.
I want to open up the floor up to you and Gila.
What do you guys think about this?
Is this controversial?
Is it non-controversial?
Yeah, I mean, I've been a big social media user since pretty much there's been such a
thing.
I'm still pretty enthused about certain corners of it.
Um, and yeah, I do acknowledge that, uh, there are folks out there for whom it could be considered
addictive.
It could be considered a stress source.
Um, but, uh, I don't, um, obviously things like the algorithms on sites, which use that
and services, which use that and companies, which thrive on selling advertising and, uh,
directing people's attention toward things, they thrive on engagement.
And so they will do all sorts of things to ensure that engagement.
And so, yes, like television commercials and all sorts of other ads and, uh, advertising
based, um, economical things, they are laser focused to remove you from your money or, uh,
remove you from your data, which they can sell for money.
And so, yeah, it is scientifically, um, I guess, uh, I guess stacked against the user
in that sense.
It is, it is meant to be manipulative.
Now there are social media, um, channels and venues out there which do not use these
algorithms, which do not, um, exist on ad revenue and, uh, and so on.
There are free and open, uh, networks out there which, uh, do their own thing and do it.
And I think a healthier way, but I think there might be something to this, but I don't
know if warning labels like this would be the answer.
I mean, clearly warning labels do a lot.
Don't you know, no one smokes cigarettes anymore because they've put all the warning
labels on that say that this product is harmful to your health.
And, and, you know, there's pictures of diseased lungs on the cigarette packets.
And because of that, no one smokes anymore.
This is gonna work great.
Yeah.
I mean, look, maybe, maybe, right.
I mean, I mean, like the warning labels just are, are somewhat meaningless, right.
And what people will just click right through them just like they click through all this
cookie nonsense that again comes out of Brussels and nonsensical EU regulations, right.
That are supposedly protecting us from the harms of cookies, but they're just generally
annoying everybody.
But, you know, I think, you know, if you, if you go back to what the, the article was
stating, I mean, here again is another aspect of where I think the article is just from
TechDirt is just completely off the wall and wrong is that, you know, they make the argument
in this, the author made the argument that there's correlation, not causation here.
That may be the case if you want to try to undercut a lot of the research about anxiety and social
media, but they go further and state that, well, kids are, are not actually being caused
anxiety by social media.
They are, it's a symptom rather than a cause, right.
So they're saying that kids who are anxious, who are isolated or ostracized, it's not because
of social media, but they go onto social media to try to remedy that kind of stress or ostracization
and looking for some kind of sense of community.
I mean, that I think is absolute nonsense.
I think that's totally crazy.
I mean, anybody who has children knows the harms and the anxieties that social media, especially
middle school age kids and social media can cause them.
So I think that's just total hogwash here, claiming that kids are running to social media
for community.
I mean, who really runs to social media for community at this point anymore?
I mean, we do it for doom scrolling and that's what the kids are doing anyhow.
But I think here is, you know, we've got a lot of issues that are really unresolved.
And, you know, I can argue this both ways.
I mean, on one line, on one hand, I think, you know, if your product success like these
platforms really depends on engineering kids to stay hooked, well, that's bad, right?
And you shouldn't actually be shocked when the state insists on some kind of warning label
or there's some kind of paternalistic engagement or intervention between the state and your business
model because you are addicting kids to something, right?
We know that this is bad or there is some kind of harm.
It may not be actual addiction in the sense that, you know, you get addicted to nicotine
or you get addicted to heroin.
But there are, I think, well-documented harms here.
But on the other hand, if you give the state a, you know, hey, let's help and save the children
label maker, I mean, we shouldn't be surprised when they wind up sticking that label on just
about anything that they want to regulate.
So as any good lawyer, I could argue this case both ways.
Where I think it's going to ultimately end up, though, is that there will probably be an
injunction in joining the enforcement of this particular law.
And in that sense, I do have to agree with the authors of the Tech Dirt article and that this
is mostly a dog and pony show for the governor and a couple of minor names from the state
legislature who are looking to gin up some publicity, gin up some media, make some noise, make some
hay about saving the children, standing up to big tech, et cetera.
And meanwhile, we're going to be wasting taxpayer dollars and litigating this, going through the
courts, ultimately ending up with an injunction.
And then that will be the end of this particular law or it'll be repealed.
It'll be it'll be revised or or struck down as being unconstitutional because of the compelled
speech here at at issue.
On the other hand, though, I mean, it doesn't really hurt matters to have the courts address
this. The Tech Dirt article says, well, this is well settled.
It's compelled speech.
That's not necessarily the case that they can spell the compelled speech that they were
talking about in in that article was compelled speech about porn verification laws coming out
of places that were in the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit.
The Fifth Circuit has Louisiana and that that kind of geographical area.
It's ambit.
We don't live in the Fifth Circuit in New York.
We live under the auspices of the Second Circuit.
And they may come to a completely different conclusion with respect to the general consensus
about whether or not social media is harmful or addictive to children.
And so there could end up being a circuit split on this issue if the Second Circuit has
a differing opinion from the Fifth Circuit.
And then what happens when there's a circuit split?
Well, then there's a direct line right up to the Supreme Court to address this issue.
So, you know, we might be spinning our wheels, playing around with taxpayer dollars, judicial
resources, et cetera.
I don't think it really hurts matters to have the courts take a second look at this.
And I think the Second Circuit is a great set of judges to do it.
All right.
And looking at this on the New York State Senate website, it passed unanimously a vote of 59
I, no nays.
And so that that I think is an interesting factor in this.
The powers that be just, you know, rubber stamp this and thought, yeah, great idea.
Let's let's move this along.
And maybe without a full understanding of the issues involved, those issues which will work
themselves out and through the court system, like like this editorial says.
Anyway, there's a there's talking of social media and the media environment.
There was a fun post from the Financial Times, which is not usually a paper you go to for
funds and, you know, funds and giggles and whatever.
But they put up a post on the 6th, which is entitled Who's Who at X, the deepfake porn site
formerly known as Twitter.
This this is basically just a smart a small catalog of people who work at Twitter and run
the place and some dry descriptions of their, you know, their names, their roles and stuff.
But there's a photo of them on each one.
And the Financial Times has I'm assuming these are not the original photos.
They've photoshopped them with clown face, clown makeup, clown noses, clown hats, clown
glasses, clown wigs.
Well, here's my question, because I see the way that these pictures are presented.
Did the Financial Times do the photoshopping or did it ask Grok to because Grok now is happy
to do pictures of actual people doing things.
They're happy to edit pictures of real people.
If you say this is a picture I need of this particular person who works at Twitter.
Hey, Grok, would you please do this for me?
And given the way these screenshots are presented, I think that may be what happened.
I think that's a very important deal you've picked up on there of an important detail.
Yes, these were photoshopped by Grok.
And is it even proper to call them photoshopped?
It's not really a verb.
When these photos were these images were manipulated by Grok.
These images were manipulated with no human creativity.
But they look like what they sound like.
And that's pictures of the Twitter staff as clowns.
And they're all terrifying in their way.
Except a picture of Elon Musk, the CEO at the end, just looks like Elon Musk.
Anyway, Financial Times closes this article with the sentence,
All entries are to the best of our knowledge.
We'll update with news of resignations as and when it arrives.
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, as long-time listeners of this show will know, I'm a very big fan of the Financial Times.
I think it's a great news outlet.
And it's not just financial news.
It's called the Financial Times.
But, you know, it's kind of like the Wall Street Journal.
You know, it's not just about Wall Street.
They cover many, many other stories.
And I like the international perspective that they bring to a lot of their stories.
And this one was, I think, particularly great.
I'm actually scrolling through some of the pictures now.
I mean, they even have put clown face on some of, like, the minor players over at X,
like assistant general counsels.
It's nice to see other lawyers wearing clown face every once in a while
and to know it's not just me these days.
Yes, Brock did put on one of their advisors who was wearing a tie in the photo,
added a clown rainbow bow tie over that tie, making this person wear two ties,
which is, you know, I don't think a human Photoshopper would have missed that detail there.
Theoretically, unless it's supposed to look like a balloon animal type situation.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Let's talk about something else.
There is something we celebrate on the first of the year, and that is Public Domain Day.
And the folks at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University
put up a big post every year with some of the highlights of the things that have fallen into the public domain
from pop culture, books, films, music,
things that have passed from the classification of privately owned material to material we all own.
And I get excited about this every year.
And there is a lot of good stuff that now belongs to all of us this year.
And there are some lists here.
There's a list of books.
You know, feel free to jump in, Gila, if you see something that catches your eye here,
because you're looking at the screen with me here.
But things like The Maltese Falcon by DeShiel Hammett now belongs to all of us, the full book version,
Private Lives by Noel Coward, Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot.
The first four Nancy Drew books.
And this is always something that I love.
I remember, you know, being younger and not necessarily understanding what the public domain was and how it worked,
but knowing that, you know, you could get the $5 fancy hardcovers with the pretty pictures that were functionally public domain works at Barnes & Noble,
because they were super fun.
And a lot of new stuff is passing into the public domain.
I love that.
Public Domain Day is something I look forward to every year.
And yeah, I mean, Cimarron by Edna Ferber, which I remember my mom reading when I was a little kid.
Yeah, Miss Marple is public domain now.
Her first book by Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, has passed into the public domain,
which means the character now is also public domain.
Some very cool stuff.
Going down to characters and comics and cartoons.
Betty Boop.
The debut of Betty Boop has become public domain.
A dog from Disney, who was later renamed Pluto, but the original version was named Rover, is now a public domain character, joining Mickey Mouse.
Blondie and Dagwood from the Blondie comic strips.
Nine new Mickey Mouse cartoons.
The initial week of Mickey Mouse comic strips.
Ten new silly symphonies from Disney.
And going down to film, there is some gold here.
All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Louis Milestone.
Academy Award winner.
Alex, what do you got?
Well, I wanted to say and kind of make a shout out about this.
I'm so glad you brought this up, Rob, because it's a really interesting thing that happens once a year, right?
All these new things passing into the public domain.
But, you know, our dear friend, Greg Newby, whom we lost in 2025, very, very sadly, was the volunteer CEO of something called Project Gutenberg.
Absolutely.
And Project Gutenberg was basically an online catalog of library books that are in the public domain in the United States,
as well as some other works that are distributed with explicit permission through Project Gutenberg.
But they have around 75,000, I think, or more e-books that are public domain texts whose copyrights have expired in the U.S.
And so I think this is a great way to bring our dear friend, Greg, back into the conversation for our first show.
Absolutely.
And to remind our listeners, too, that, you know, he was a great guy, great friend who will be dearly missed, but who lives on within us.
And in the spirit of all those who support Project Gutenberg and supporting Project Gutenberg was one of the things I believe his wife and family had asked people to do in his honor.
So great, great time to make a shout out for that.
Yes, absolutely.
Gutenberg.org.
That's G-U-T-E-N-B-E-R-G.org is the site.
And you can find a catalog of text-based e-books going all the way back to the very earliest days of such things,
when people were reading a book and typing it into an old text editor in maybe DOS or perhaps early Unix-based systems,
all the way up to today when you can get fully illustrated HTML downloadable e-book versions of these things.
And there's lots of fascinating stuff there.
Going back to the Duke Law page about Public Domain Day, some more films, Animal Crackers, starring the Marx Brothers,
their second film for Paramount, and one of their best of their Paramount era.
So, yeah, hooray for Captain Spaulding.
Hooray, hooray, hooray.
Absolutely.
The Anna Christie movie directed by Clarence Brown, Hell's Angels directed by Howard Hughes, Gene Harlow's film debut.
Buster Keaton's first speaking role in Free and Easy, directed by Edward Sedgwick.
Morocco, directed by Josef von Sternberg, starring Gary Cooper and Marlena Dietrich,
who very famously dresses in the tux and tails and kisses a woman in this pre-code picture.
Yeah, the energy there is great.
A movie written by Rube Goldberg and a movie written by Salvador Dali.
Yeah, there is some gold here.
Check it out on the Internet Archive, our friends over there, and at Project Gutenberg.
Go ahead, Alex.
What was the Dali movie?
Was it Un Chien Andalou?
No.
No, I think that one was already public domain.
This is L'Age d'Or, directed by Louis Bunuel, written by Bunuel and Salvador Dali.
Or Louis Bunuel, I guess that would be.
Murder, exclamation point, directed by Hitchcock.
Yeah, great stuff in here.
And a movie which I know nothing about, but I'm just entertained by it, by its very existence.
A movie called Whoopi!
Exclamation point.
This is a good year for exclamation point movies.
Mm-hmm.
Murder and Whoopi!
That sounds like a really fun double feature.
It does.
And there are all sorts of things you can do with this material now.
You can remix it.
You can make your own versions of it.
You can distribute it freely.
You can find any of these, I think, on the Internet Archive.
Musical compositions.
I Got Rhythm by Gershwin.
I've Got a Crush on You, but not for me.
An Embraceable You.
Dream a Little Dream of Me.
We all know that one.
I did threaten that if we couldn't find any news to go over this week,
I would just sing all the songs that came into the public domain last week.
It was a busy news week, or we would totally take you up on that.
Living in the Sunlight, Loving in the Moonlight, made famous later by Tiny Tim,
but originally by, I think, Maurice Chevalier.
Lyrics by Al Lewis, music by Al Sherman.
Now, the lyrics of these songs are public domain, so you can record them.
You can create new versions of them.
Sound recordings are a whole other deal.
They take longer to fall into public domain.
Okay, but I have a question.
Go back for a sec.
Yes.
Okay, so there's a song called Just a Gigolo.
Is it the Just a Gigolo that David Lee Roth later recorded in 1985?
You know, I think that is a fascinating question, and I don't know.
But, you know, it...
I don't think so.
No, it does not appear to be so.
Because I don't recall David Lee Roth ever singing,
Twas in a Paris Cafe.
No.
I could be wrong.
And if I'm wrong, you know, please drop us a note, OTH at 2600.com, let me know.
But, mm.
Yeah, I don't know.
I haven't listened to David Lee Roth in a couple of years.
More's the pity.
But there are also a bunch of sound recordings that have come in to the public domain as of last week.
And, okay, so we have Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen by Marian Anderson.
Yes, sir, that's my baby by Gene Austin.
Sweet George Brown, you've been a good old wagon, recorded by Bessie Smith.
Wow, that one sounds fascinating.
I'll See You in My Dreams, recorded by Yisham Jones with Ray Miller's Orchestra.
Manhattan, recorded by the Knickerbockers.
The basketball team?
I don't know how that works.
But in any case, there's a lot of gold out there.
There is art that belongs to all of us now.
But these are eight years older than, right?
Seven years older?
The recordings from 1925.
Okay, five years.
Yes.
Nope, ten.
I can add.
I really can't.
Yes, recordings from, so 1930 is the cutoff for the rest of stuff.
But music recordings under the 2018 Music Modernization Act, they get protected for a little longer, five more years, ten more years.
But, yeah, so make something creative with these.
Send us email, othat2600.com.
There's no off-the-hookover time tonight.
We will be returning with that at a future date.
But stay tuned.
Find us on Mastodon.
Masto.hackers.town.
We are username off-the-hook on there.
For off-the-hook.
For WBAI.
You know, we still have some more time.
I was looking at the wrong clock.
But, uh, we'll listen to this for now.
Yeah, we got some extra music here.
And, wow, I can run a radio show.
So, what you guys, what you, Alex, can't hear, but our listeners can.
There's some Power Rangers music playing in the background that we were going to close with.
We'll close with something else.
It'll be fine.
Are we going to close with one of the sound recordings from 1925?
Unfortunately, I don't think we can do that, just because we would have had to prepare it.
But.
Should I sing one of the public domain songs?
If you wanted to.
I don't really want to.
Let's talk about another story here from the world of AI.
Sony has patented the ability of a game to play with itself.
This is a family show.
I'm talking about playing the video game.
What do you think?
No, don't answer that.
AI generated ghost player assistance would help out players who can't progress in a game.
This is from a site called Video Games Chronicle.
And the idea here is that if you are playing a video game, you don't want to play that game.
You don't want to get past this part on your own.
The game would take over from you with an AI bot and, in a sense, play with itself for you.
Because we talked a couple of weeks ago about how TV is now watching itself to save you the trouble.
Video games are now playing themselves to also save you the trouble.
Okay, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Yes.
I am a notoriously bad video game player.
I can play Tetris and that's about the beginning and the end of it.
And I fail to understand how this would be a useful tool, why you would want to do this,
and why Sony needed to patent this technology.
We've seen it before.
This was in war games.
Yes, Matthew Broderick did save the world by telling the computer to go play with itself.
Right.
Spoilers for a 40-year-old movie.
Why is Sony patenting the technology that Matthew Broderick was using in 1982?
That's an excellent question.
Alex?
Well, I saw this story and I thought it was somewhat interesting.
And I think about, you know, my own sort of annoyances and things with video games and whatnot.
And I think, like, this could be really quite useful.
Now, I think in particular about certain levels and doom or something that, you know,
I have to deal with lots of jumping and holding and just, you know, manual dexterity that I just don't have at my age anymore with video games, right?
And so, like, it might be helpful to have an AI player kind of get me through these jumping areas and doom so I don't have to spend another 45 minutes doing the same thing over and over again.
But on the other hand, you know, it is kind of weird.
It's strange to have a ghost player.
And as I understand it, the ghost player is going to be trained on gameplay videos from places like YouTube and Twitch and the PlayStation Network.
And so it's going to be trained by looking at what other people have been doing and then using that material to learn how to solve the in-game obstacles.
So, I don't know.
There's something that's just, like, a little bit creepy about that to me.
And the idea of it just being, like, a ghost player, it's very, very strange.
But it's going to be using this user data that's really highly granular and therefore pretty highly regulated under things like GDPR.
So how they're going to get around this with respect to consent and data protection is going to be quite interesting to see.
Yeah. If this trains itself on data of, like, say, kids playing their video games at home, the ones who are good at it, is that data generated from children something that they would be allowed to even monetize?
The ethics around that are fascinating to think about.
But I'm also just kind of stuck on if the point of the game is to play the game, why is this a helpful feature?
Like, I understand, you know, getting stuck on one particular song in Guitar Hero that still makes me sad and break out in a cold sweat 15 years later.
We all have that one Guitar Hero song.
Right. But is it fun? Are you just going to turn your PlayStation into your own private Twitch feed and just watch the game play itself?
You know, I have this idea for entertainment where, you know, video games are a form of entertainment.
You play the game, you watch the story go by, you watch the graphics, the visuals, whatever.
What if we had a form of entertainment that was like a video game, except you didn't have to go to the trouble of controlling it?
You could just maybe turn on a screen and just watch a narrative with visuals and sound be presented to you.
Revolutionary.
I think I need to patent this.
Whatever this is.
You could call it a motion picture.
That's catchy.
Yeah, yeah.
That is catchy.
I'm smarter than I look here.
No question.
All right.
Well, team, this has been a good episode, even though it almost ended early.
But we're coming up on the end of it now.
So I will say, for real, that you can send us email at othat2600.com.
You can find us on Mastodon at offthehook at mastodon.social.
You can support WBAI at give2wbai.org.
Help us march into this new year with the ability to keep doing what we do on this program, on this station, and on this network for you.
For Off The Hook, this has been Rob T. Firefly.
Have a good work.
Have a good week.
Here we go.
Meu team.
Have a good work.
Not a moment.
There's just too much to do.
My feet are really tired.
And my back is aching too
But when I look around me, I see
Friends working along with me
I get energy, cause I know
We've got teamwork, teamwork
You have a dream, you wanna make it real
You need a team, working up steam
To make your dream work, teamwork
Working it true, working together
Whatever we do, doing it better
As a team
Alarms are sounding
We've got to move out fast
Hard work to do now
Before the dangers pass
No stopping once, the work has begun
This job's too big for one
But we'll get it done
Cause I know
We've got teamwork, teamwork
You have a dream, you wanna make it real
You need a team, working up steam
To make your dream work, teamwork
Working it true, working together
Whatever we do, doing it better
As a team
Practicing patterns
Till each move is right
Let's see some teamwork
The big games tonight
When we put it all together and see
We score so easily
And it's got to be
Because we've got teamwork, teamwork
You have a dream, you wanna make it real
You need a team, working up steam
To make your dream work, teamwork
Working it true, working together
Whatever we do, doing it better
With teamwork, teamwork
Working it true, working together
Whatever we do, doing it better as a team