[00:04.430 --> 00:06.790]  And that wraps up today's program.
[00:07.050 --> 00:09.230]  The newscast was produced by Catherine Komp.
[00:09.430 --> 00:11.250]  Today's headlines editor was Jess Burns.
[00:11.450 --> 00:12.350]  Washington, D.C.
[00:12.450 --> 00:13.570]  editor was Leanne Caldwell.
[00:13.790 --> 00:18.550]  Our technical production team at KPFA in Berkeley includes Rose Katopchi and Scott Pham.
[00:18.690 --> 00:21.130]  You can visit us online at fsrn.org.
[00:21.130 --> 00:25.730]  You can send questions, comments, or news tips to comments at fsrn.org.
[00:25.730 --> 00:26.450]  Thanks for listening.
[00:26.690 --> 00:28.450]  In New York, I'm Dorian Marina.
[00:34.230 --> 00:37.870]  And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York.
[00:38.110 --> 00:39.510]  The time is just about 7 o'clock.
[00:39.630 --> 00:41.750]  Time once again for Off the Hook.
[02:36.620 --> 02:37.720]  And good evening to everybody.
[02:37.880 --> 02:38.990]  The program is Off the Hook.
[02:39.060 --> 02:41.660]  Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
[02:42.040 --> 02:43.960]  Joined tonight by Mike.
[02:44.160 --> 02:44.420]  Hi.
[02:44.660 --> 02:44.940]  Jim.
[02:45.400 --> 02:45.620]  Hello.
[02:46.020 --> 02:46.520]  Dot Rhett.
[02:46.740 --> 02:46.980]  Hello.
[02:47.560 --> 02:48.020]  Rob T.
[02:48.220 --> 02:48.700]  Firefly.
[02:48.920 --> 02:49.240]  Good evening.
[02:49.360 --> 02:49.880]  And Rhett Hacks.
[02:49.960 --> 02:50.140]  Hello.
[02:50.560 --> 02:52.580]  And down in Philadelphia, we have Bernie S.
[02:53.160 --> 02:54.360]  Greetings from Philadelphia.
[02:55.020 --> 03:00.120]  And, um, well, here we are on, uh, this last day of March.
[03:00.880 --> 03:02.840]  Uh, oh, gosh.
[03:02.920 --> 03:03.900]  Tomorrow's April Fool's Day, isn't it?
[03:04.380 --> 03:04.540]  No.
[03:04.880 --> 03:05.060]  What?
[03:05.720 --> 03:06.780]  April Fool's, you're lying.
[03:07.800 --> 03:08.120]  Okay.
[03:08.920 --> 03:09.620]  Well, gosh.
[03:09.820 --> 03:11.860]  Uh, I don't know if we planned anything.
[03:12.000 --> 03:13.080]  Remember last year what we did?
[03:13.200 --> 03:16.020]  Last year we had the, uh, the country music thing over the radio.
[03:16.160 --> 03:17.640]  Because we were on the air on April 1st.
[03:17.740 --> 03:18.320]  And, uh, we had...
[03:18.320 --> 03:18.540]  Or did we?
[03:19.160 --> 03:19.900]  Well, no, we did.
[03:20.260 --> 03:21.180]  It was March 31st.
[03:21.240 --> 03:21.860]  You have to tell the truth.
[03:22.180 --> 03:23.140]  That was very dramatic.
[03:23.380 --> 03:24.620]  Who's crunching on the air?
[03:24.760 --> 03:25.220]  Go away.
[03:26.580 --> 03:27.300]  My goodness.
[03:28.120 --> 03:29.620]  Uh, I'm sorry.
[03:29.680 --> 03:30.180]  That really threw me.
[03:30.480 --> 03:30.620]  What?
[03:30.780 --> 03:32.360]  I thought it was some sort of weird time warp.
[03:32.560 --> 03:32.740]  Yeah.
[03:33.100 --> 03:40.080]  No, uh, April, April 1st, uh, 2009 was our, was our famous, um, um, April Fool's show.
[03:40.240 --> 03:41.920]  We went country for a few minutes.
[03:42.260 --> 03:44.120]  A few minutes too long for most people, I guess.
[03:44.700 --> 03:47.560]  Uh, and, um, um, well, this year, who knows?
[03:47.740 --> 03:48.260]  Who knows?
[03:48.400 --> 03:48.760]  I don't know.
[03:48.980 --> 03:49.780]  I have nothing.
[03:50.000 --> 03:50.100]  What?
[03:50.260 --> 03:51.480]  It wasn't just a few minutes.
[03:51.660 --> 03:53.260]  It wasn't five minutes.
[03:53.260 --> 03:53.860]  It was like 15.
[03:54.000 --> 03:54.600]  It was like 20 minutes.
[03:54.600 --> 03:54.980]  Yeah.
[03:55.280 --> 03:56.880]  It was enough for people to really start panicking.
[03:57.220 --> 04:01.140]  As long as I don't have to fake being interested in sports again, uh, whatever's fine.
[04:01.340 --> 04:01.540]  Uh-huh.
[04:02.040 --> 04:02.320]  Yeah.
[04:02.540 --> 04:03.060]  Yeah, I don't think...
[04:03.060 --> 04:04.860]  I had to learn all about car racing.
[04:04.860 --> 04:05.700]  We did a sportscast.
[04:05.700 --> 04:07.820]  We did, uh, all kinds of interesting things.
[04:08.080 --> 04:08.140]  That's weird.
[04:08.140 --> 04:09.140]  And it was, it was enlightening.
[04:09.580 --> 04:14.000]  But, uh, well, this year we're not on the radio on April 1st, but, uh, well, who knows?
[04:14.140 --> 04:14.600]  Or are we?
[04:14.920 --> 04:17.620]  Maybe the 2600 site, maybe we can throw something together tonight.
[04:17.760 --> 04:19.180]  You know, I totally forgot it was April Fool's.
[04:19.280 --> 04:19.420]  Really?
[04:24.620 --> 04:28.360]  Unless you're in the, uh, I think the UK is five hours ahead of us, so I think it's April Fool's over there.
[04:28.400 --> 04:29.440]  So I'm already too late.
[04:29.660 --> 04:30.380]  It's a possibility.
[04:30.500 --> 04:30.980]  Oh, dear.
[04:31.560 --> 04:32.100]  Well, okay.
[04:32.300 --> 04:33.420]  Always, always great fun.
[04:33.660 --> 04:40.420]  I don't know if it's the same in other parts of the world, if they, uh, pay as much attention to this holiday as we do, but it's one of my favorites.
[04:40.940 --> 04:43.020]  Um, too bad I totally forgot all about it.
[04:43.780 --> 04:46.700]  So, um, we have, um, all kinds of fun things.
[04:46.820 --> 04:49.480]  2600 meetings coming up this Friday, which is always a blast.
[04:49.980 --> 04:55.060]  Um, but, um, this week we have, uh, some interesting things to, um, uh, to talk about.
[04:55.100 --> 04:57.640]  First, some, some, um, rather sad news.
[04:57.820 --> 05:05.780]  Uh, from what I've heard, uh, people in the hacker world are probably very familiar with the name Agent Steele, Justin Peterson.
[05:06.420 --> 05:10.400]  From reports we're getting, he has passed away as of, uh, early March.
[05:10.420 --> 05:15.060]  And we don't know anything more than that, other than he was found in his apartment in, uh, Los Angeles.
[05:15.560 --> 05:25.860]  Now, um, if you, if you, uh, paid attention to the whole Kevin Mitnick saga, uh, Justin Peterson, Agent Steele was somebody who, um, um, who basically was a federal informant.
[05:26.040 --> 05:29.020]  Uh, somebody who, um, helped to turn Kevin in.
[05:29.080 --> 05:31.040]  He's not the most popular person in the hacker world.
[05:31.500 --> 05:38.840]  Uh, but still I can't help but feel, uh, uh, you know, it's kind of sad when somebody, uh, first of all, nobody's really talking about it.
[05:38.840 --> 05:40.840]  Which is, it's rather sad in and of itself.
[05:41.060 --> 05:42.400]  But, um, I don't know.
[05:42.460 --> 05:47.200]  It seemed like a, a lonely existence to, uh, to lead, uh, after, um, after going down that road.
[05:47.200 --> 05:56.040]  It seems like at least a notable event, and it's also kind of surprising that there is so, you know, little information out there about, you know, this notable thing.
[05:56.180 --> 05:59.520]  I'd like to read off his MySpace page, which I was able to track down.
[06:00.100 --> 06:02.740]  Uh, geez, I've done so many, uh, things.
[06:03.020 --> 06:03.740]  So here we go.
[06:03.830 --> 06:07.720]  I was a systems admin for adult websites years ago.
[06:07.950 --> 06:10.740]  Now I am a technical consultant for film and television.
[06:11.280 --> 06:15.740]  My character has been portrayed or influenced several, uh, movies and TV shows.
[06:15.740 --> 06:18.480]  I'm a musician, but I don't play much anymore.
[06:18.600 --> 06:22.000]  I'm a sound engineer, but I don't do as much of that as I'd like to.
[06:22.340 --> 06:23.800]  Uh, I'm an internet admin.
[06:24.300 --> 06:25.960]  I, I do that, in parentheses.
[06:26.580 --> 06:30.620]  Uh, I'm very social, but at the same time, I like my time alone.
[06:30.720 --> 06:36.060]  I'm on a first-name basis with countless people, but I don't pay much attention, yet I'm easygoing.
[06:36.400 --> 06:37.560]  I like to be comfortable.
[06:37.840 --> 06:42.080]  I get a kick out of, uh, uh, busting people in their BS.
[06:42.480 --> 06:44.880]  I'm a no-nonsense type, yet I'm moody.
[06:44.880 --> 06:47.740]  B, in closing, I've lived a wild and diverse life.
[06:47.740 --> 06:50.220]  If I died tomorrow, I'd have no regrets.
[06:50.480 --> 06:52.380]  Well, I wouldn't mind having my foot back.
[06:52.580 --> 06:55.900]  If anyone finds my foot, well, drop me an email.
[06:56.210 --> 06:56.840]  L-O-L.
[06:57.480 --> 07:02.600]  Uh, and, um, Justin Peterson, uh, of course, had one leg.
[07:02.640 --> 07:12.300]  In fact, uh, you might, you might remember, those of you who listened to the show for many years, there was, um, a program we did, uh, that centered on Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference in Chicago many years ago.
[07:12.720 --> 07:19.840]  And it was during that conference, this was, uh, um, um, put on by EFF type people, you know, very respectable people in, in the field.
[07:20.300 --> 07:24.240]  Uh, but there was, um, a series of raids by federal authorities.
[07:24.480 --> 07:28.260]  In fact, it was, it was a conference that had federal authorities speaking on some of the panels.
[07:28.380 --> 07:32.120]  However, we learned at that conference that federal authorities are always on duty.
[07:32.120 --> 07:44.120]  Even at, uh, conferences about, um, um, all kinds of, um, of, um, internet issues and, and freedom of speech issues, they're, they're still out looking for, um, uh, to close cases.
[07:44.280 --> 07:48.960]  So what they did was, they, uh, they basically knocked on three people's doors.
[07:49.210 --> 07:51.980]  They, they took one guy into custody who looked a little bit like Agent Steele.
[07:52.100 --> 07:52.920]  He had long blonde hair.
[07:53.140 --> 07:53.660]  Remember this, Jim?
[07:53.980 --> 07:59.520]  Uh, and, uh, there was, uh, another guy who looked a little like Kevin Mitnick, who was also brought in for questioning.
[07:59.520 --> 08:14.340]  And then the third guy that they knocked on the door, but didn't take him in for questioning was our own, our, our own Agent Steele, Robert Steele, who, uh, used to work with, uh, uh, various federal agencies, uh, and, uh, was our first speaker at the HOPE conference.
[08:14.800 --> 08:16.950]  It's kind of funny how the, the line of thinking went.
[08:17.080 --> 08:21.840]  They, they saw the word Steele, they saw the name Steele, so I guess they figured maybe he's the Agent Steele.
[08:21.920 --> 08:27.660]  But no, they, they never did find this guy, but they caused all kinds of a ruckus at this, um, at this conference.
[08:27.660 --> 08:30.400]  So, a little, um, post note of history there.
[08:30.920 --> 08:33.160]  Uh, Bernie, do you have any memories of, uh, of this guy?
[08:34.080 --> 08:40.520]  Well, I never met him, but, um, you know, he was obviously a, a skilled and, and, uh, innovative hacker.
[08:40.880 --> 08:48.600]  He, he, uh, apparently rigged the phone lines with, uh, with another hacker, uh, of a, of a radio, commercial radio station who was giving away Porsches.
[08:49.020 --> 08:53.340]  And he, uh, managed to, uh, take control of their phone lines to be the umpteenth caller.
[08:53.830 --> 08:57.260]  And, uh, he and his friend both won, uh, free Porsches through their phone hacking.
[08:57.500 --> 08:59.280]  But, uh, that was later discovered.
[08:59.500 --> 09:05.000]  And, uh, he was also a federal informant for the, uh, I believe for the, was it the, uh, Secret Service or the FBI?
[09:05.640 --> 09:08.960]  I, I think it was the FBI, but, you know, it could be one in the same.
[09:09.100 --> 09:10.260]  I remember it being the FBI.
[09:10.400 --> 09:10.640]  Yeah.
[09:11.020 --> 09:11.710]  Rob, you're nodding.
[09:11.720 --> 09:12.340]  You think it's the FBI?
[09:12.400 --> 09:13.140]  Yeah, yeah, I think it's the FBI.
[09:13.240 --> 09:13.360]  Okay.
[09:13.360 --> 09:20.160]  And I believe he, uh, I believe he played a role in, uh, in helping the FBI track down or capture, uh, Kevin Mitnick.
[09:20.300 --> 09:22.000]  So, uh, he's led a diverse life.
[09:22.000 --> 09:26.420]  And I think he wrote a, um, he wrote an article for 2600 about 10 or 13 years ago.
[09:26.420 --> 09:32.600]  Yeah, a very controversial article, in fact, about, uh, how, uh, I believe, how not to get busted or how to get by.
[09:32.800 --> 09:33.500]  I don't know which it was.
[09:35.000 --> 09:35.860]  It was how to get busted.
[09:35.920 --> 09:37.020]  You, you know your research, Rob.
[09:37.120 --> 09:37.600]  I'm impressed.
[09:37.710 --> 09:38.830]  Yeah, you know better than I do.
[09:39.020 --> 09:42.600]  This was all, uh, going on basically when I started paying attention to what was going on in the scene.
[09:42.660 --> 09:46.600]  And it was a very tumultual, too much, tumultuous, uh, period in our history.
[09:46.800 --> 09:46.840]  Oh, yeah.
[09:46.980 --> 09:47.450]  Oh, absolutely.
[09:47.600 --> 09:49.080]  And, um, everybody knew his name.
[09:49.180 --> 09:53.710]  That's the thing that kind of surprised me is he was, uh, well, in the hacker, uh, world, he was a household name.
[09:54.300 --> 09:57.860]  And, um, and now I'm, I'm finding out about this two weeks after it happened.
[09:57.860 --> 10:03.840]  I can't find any information about, uh, the details or anything surrounding, uh, what, what actually happened?
[10:04.640 --> 10:11.560]  Um, and, you know, knowing, knowing this guy the way I've known him, it could certainly be something that he just engineered himself, but I, I have the feeling it's not.
[10:12.100 --> 10:13.680]  And, uh, that is, that is rather sad.
[10:13.980 --> 10:14.500]  Go ahead, Bernie.
[10:14.580 --> 10:21.220]  I wanted to, I wanted to point out, uh, Emmanuel, that that article that, uh, Justin Peterson wrote for 2600, I thought it was extremely well written.
[10:21.620 --> 10:33.320]  I didn't agree with everything he said in there, particularly, uh, where he said that, uh, you might as well be a, be a federal informant and, uh, and rat out your friends and colleagues in order to get a lesser sentence, a lesser sentence.
[10:33.520 --> 10:36.220]  I vehemently disagreed with his, his view on that.
[10:36.340 --> 10:38.520]  But it was a very well written article nonetheless.
[10:38.900 --> 10:46.520]  And, and that, that, what he said there was, uh, one of the reasons the article was so controversial, but it was, it was, it was really good.
[10:46.660 --> 10:51.960]  It provided a lot of insight for people who've not been through the federal criminal justice system, but what it's like.
[10:52.120 --> 10:54.740]  And I could identify with a lot of what he said in that article.
[10:54.860 --> 10:55.500]  It was really well done.
[10:55.700 --> 11:10.320]  And he, he also, uh, in so doing opened up a dialogue that went on for, for many issues afterwards in the letter section of people, uh, who either outraged at what he wrote or who agreed with aspects of what he wrote and just basically started the whole conversation going as to,
[11:10.420 --> 11:16.240]  um, the morality of, of what he had done and the various points that he was, he was making in that, in that article.
[11:16.740 --> 11:19.560]  And I, I also think that, uh, I'm sure we have a lot of listeners.
[11:19.700 --> 11:22.020]  There are a lot of people out there in the scene who this was all before their time.
[11:22.340 --> 11:24.600]  It's definitely worth, uh, tracking down more info on.
[11:24.740 --> 11:34.600]  If you listen to off the hook from back then, if you track down some, maybe some old text files on text files.com, um, and his name was Agent Steele, S T E A L or Justin Peterson, P E T E R S E N.
[11:34.740 --> 11:35.060]  E N, right.
[11:35.320 --> 11:40.220]  And, um, I also want to stress that despite the timing, this is not an April Fool's, uh, stunt on our part.
[11:40.400 --> 11:41.060]  No, definitely not.
[11:41.120 --> 11:43.320]  That's, uh, that would not be very, uh, tasteful.
[11:43.340 --> 11:48.880]  So, uh, yeah, it's, um, it's, it's, it's interesting to, uh, to follow the history of the hacker world.
[11:49.100 --> 11:54.340]  And, uh, and, and it really does have a lot of history and Rob, I'm glad to see if you pay attention to it.
[11:54.440 --> 11:58.360]  I think if everybody paid that kind of attention, we wouldn't, uh, make the same mistakes over and over again.
[11:58.460 --> 12:00.460]  We'd learn from them and we'd actually move forward.
[12:00.620 --> 12:01.100]  Imagine that.
[12:01.280 --> 12:01.540]  Yeah.
[12:02.000 --> 12:02.380]  All right.
[12:02.600 --> 12:05.200]  Um, on to, um, various bits of news.
[12:05.740 --> 12:07.340]  Uh, this is kind of interesting.
[12:07.520 --> 12:24.080]  This, um, this reader wrote into us, was this listener wrote into us, uh, with, um, a word of a, what he calls a sophisticated new ISP level internet filtering technology, uh, developed by a company called NetSpark, which has offices here in New York city.
[12:24.300 --> 12:30.380]  The technology allows ISPs to offer a special filtering service to those subscribers that select it.
[12:30.440 --> 12:45.820]  It seems to be highly sophisticated and, um, differs from the currently used URL based filtering, uh, methods in that it does a kind of deep packet inspection of any webpage passing through the system, looking for keywords pertaining to pornography, suicide,
[12:46.420 --> 12:48.120]  extreme violence, et cetera.
[12:48.520 --> 12:50.380]  Even chats can be filtered.
[12:50.500 --> 13:00.300]  It also has a so-called quilting functionality in which certain sections of a webpage deemed to be inappropriate by certain criteria selections are removed while the rest of the webpage is left intact.
[13:00.740 --> 13:10.960]  Now, according to their website, included in the roadmap are more advanced treatment of peer to peer and torrent based applications and improved predator detection for instant messaging and chat.
[13:11.440 --> 13:21.160]  NetSpark is also working with leading academics to enhance its automatic handling of graphics and develop methods for computerized detection of pornographic images.
[13:21.540 --> 13:32.160]  Um, Robert writes to us saying, I'd be curious what the off the hook community thinks of this technology and whether it's a useful, acceptable method for families to protect their children from offensive slash inappropriate material on the web.
[13:32.320 --> 13:46.920]  Uh, it would presumably be offered by ISPs as a premium service on a subscriber by subscriber basis activated by individual customers themselves, or whether this technology could be a dangerous development, uh, that might be abused sometime in the future,
[13:47.300 --> 13:47.500]  i.e.
[13:47.560 --> 13:49.120]  by governments, censors, et cetera.
[13:49.500 --> 13:54.320]  Well, uh, we have, uh, a little bit of, uh, an excerpt from, um, from this site.
[13:54.520 --> 14:02.500]  I'd like to play, uh, part of their video and, uh, while we can't see the video, we can certainly hear the audio and, uh, get a sense as to what this, uh, is all about.
[14:02.500 --> 14:05.960]  I'm gonna just lean over here and click this button on our computer and hope it works.
[14:06.500 --> 14:07.300]  And here we go.
[14:10.890 --> 14:11.870]  Well, I clicked the button.
[14:12.030 --> 14:12.830]  It didn't do anything.
[14:12.950 --> 14:13.650]  Hang on, I'm gonna click it again.
[14:13.870 --> 14:13.870]  Ah.
[14:14.090 --> 14:23.030]  Quilting is NetSpark's process that rebuilds web pages in real time, removing undesired sections of the page, and displaying only suitable content and graphics.
[14:23.030 --> 14:29.790]  For example, an article in Wikipedia on the subject of erotica contains useful information in the text.
[14:30.110 --> 14:32.210]  But look at this picture on the right-hand side.
[14:32.450 --> 14:34.530]  This may not be appropriate for all users.
[14:34.930 --> 14:34.990]  Oh, my God.
[14:35.310 --> 14:38.170]  Here's what a user of NetSpark's solution would experience.
[14:38.810 --> 14:42.930]  Accessing Wikipedia and searching for erotica would produce the same page.
[14:43.130 --> 14:46.910]  The page is presented in its entirety with all of the relevant text.
[14:47.110 --> 14:53.010]  But NetSpark's patented quilting process is able to filter out the picture on the right and only the picture.
[14:53.010 --> 14:55.690]  The rest of the page appears just as it was.
[14:58.110 --> 15:01.030]  Let's look at a second, even more dramatic example.
[15:01.890 --> 15:08.830]  Craigslist is an extremely popular social information site that offers local information like job openings and cars for sale.
[15:09.190 --> 15:14.050]  It also has sections for users to enter online discussions with people of similar interests.
[15:14.450 --> 15:20.350]  But since this discussion is open and not moderated, sometimes distasteful entries are added into the flow.
[15:20.350 --> 15:20.970]  Oh, my goodness.
[15:21.130 --> 15:27.770]  Once again, using NetSpark's technology, users can enjoy the benefits of these kinds of online social interactions.
[15:27.930 --> 15:33.490]  But the quilting process works in the background to ensure that the level of discourse is fitting and agreeable.
[15:39.010 --> 15:40.530]  Here's a final example.
[15:40.960 --> 15:48.200]  Imagine a middle school student turning to the most popular search engine, Google, to research a paper he's writing on various types of nuts.
[15:48.750 --> 15:52.510]  Google can lead unwitting users in directions that they might not have expected.
[15:52.820 --> 16:00.340]  In this example, while searching for the harmless term nuts, the young student is presented with a link to a topless bar as the first entry.
[16:00.640 --> 16:05.680]  But with NetSpark, the unsuitable entry is filtered out before ever reaching the user.
[16:06.140 --> 16:10.620]  The quilted results do not show that entry, but the rest of the results are still there.
[16:11.460 --> 16:17.060]  Maintaining the look and feel of Google, or any site for that matter, provides a flawless user experience.
[16:18.180 --> 16:18.800]  Oh, nuts.
[16:18.820 --> 16:19.460]  What do you think, RedHack?
[16:19.740 --> 16:24.880]  So, I mean, basically, they've just taken a man-in-the-middle attack and made it look pretty, essentially.
[16:24.960 --> 16:26.010]  I guess that's one way of looking at it.
[16:26.060 --> 16:28.800]  This kind of thing is not... this kind of technology is nothing new.
[16:28.960 --> 16:31.180]  I mean, years ago, you know, somebody...
[16:31.180 --> 16:32.560]  I remember, they wrote something...
[16:32.560 --> 16:37.770]  I think they used Squid Proxy or some proxy to basically turn all of the images on a page upside down.
[16:38.300 --> 16:40.720]  So, if you access the page, everything would be upside down on it.
[16:41.900 --> 16:42.840]  Or maybe the whole page.
[16:42.860 --> 16:44.240]  I think maybe they even flipped the letters, too.
[16:44.660 --> 16:52.240]  So, you know, this kind of thing has existed before, and they've just kind of commercialized it and said, okay, well, now we can use it to filter graphic things.
[16:52.400 --> 17:00.480]  Well, I think what the listener wrote also is very pertinent as far as what could be used as ways of oppressing people.
[17:00.820 --> 17:07.060]  If you could search for the word nuts, you can search for politics of various sorts, and all kinds of evil things can happen as a result.
[17:07.060 --> 17:08.660]  Well, you can filter anything with this.
[17:08.720 --> 17:19.120]  But, I mean, it just goes to show, as if anyone didn't know, that just because you're connecting somewhere doesn't mean that there can't be somebody in the middle filtering what you see without you knowing about it.
[17:20.030 --> 17:22.530]  What if it was an HTTPS connection?
[17:22.820 --> 17:25.120]  So, I was wondering about what they do with encrypted traffic.
[17:25.290 --> 17:26.700]  And, you know, I don't know.
[17:26.880 --> 17:28.920]  I haven't looked at that site, so I couldn't answer that for you.
[17:28.920 --> 17:41.680]  I assume, I mean, in general, you can't intercept that because there are safeguards in place that, you know, have basically, if there's an HTTPS site, it's authenticated with its certificate and with a private secret that only that site knows.
[17:42.800 --> 17:44.420]  But a lot of people ignore that kind of thing.
[17:44.530 --> 17:45.440]  Oh, this isn't the...
[17:45.440 --> 17:50.080]  If it were a client side, if they attach the program there and...
[17:50.880 --> 17:54.720]  Well, then it would probably just do it, you know, something locally or in the browser or something.
[17:54.880 --> 17:54.980]  Right.
[17:54.980 --> 17:56.700]  I mean, it would, you know, I'm sure there are tricks.
[17:56.980 --> 18:00.820]  If you're on this, if you're on someone's local machine, you can do anything you want.
[18:01.160 --> 18:11.080]  But I think this is sitting on the ISP level, so to do a man-in-the-middle attack on HTTPS is gonna cause all sorts of problems, starting with your browser going, this is not the site you're looking for.
[18:11.220 --> 18:13.360]  I wonder what would happen if you went to a porn site using this.
[18:14.200 --> 18:15.270]  What would be left?
[18:15.360 --> 18:15.940]  What would you get?
[18:16.440 --> 18:17.040]  Well, would they...
[18:17.040 --> 18:20.010]  I mean, I think it probably also just does flat-out filtering, right?
[18:20.010 --> 18:21.030]  Yeah, but there wouldn't be anything...
[18:21.820 --> 18:22.560]  No, I mean...
[18:22.560 --> 18:25.060]  No, but I think, you know, it's probably half of their technologies.
[18:25.220 --> 18:27.940]  Okay, well, if you go to Wikipedia, we're not gonna block all of Wikipedia.
[18:28.120 --> 18:28.290]  Right.
[18:28.290 --> 18:31.180]  But if you go to some porn site, it probably will say, you can't go to this site.
[18:31.180 --> 18:31.480]  Oh, okay.
[18:31.740 --> 18:32.920]  That would be my assumption.
[18:33.580 --> 18:33.800]  Got it.
[18:34.100 --> 18:42.440]  Now, like you were saying, so this is basically like a man-in-the-middle attack, and the danger with that sort of thing is this kind of thing being used without the user knowing what's happening.
[18:42.680 --> 18:49.640]  And so, where our listener was asking about the danger of this sort of thing, that is the danger right there.
[18:49.740 --> 19:01.780]  You know, what happens if the government starts talking to ISPs saying everyone has to use this kind of technology now that it's more readily available and, you know, block out these various nice things.
[19:01.920 --> 19:07.840]  I'm guessing, though, that this quilting thing is probably pretty simplistic in that it probably only works on sites that they support.
[19:07.880 --> 19:10.060]  So they probably say, well, what are really popular sites?
[19:10.140 --> 19:11.780]  Let's look at, you know, the Alexa ranking or something.
[19:11.980 --> 19:14.080]  And we'll write quilting filters for all of those.
[19:14.180 --> 19:16.280]  And for anything else, we'll just say, oh, sorry.
[19:16.560 --> 19:19.080]  Or, you know, we'll remove the words or something simple like that.
[19:19.080 --> 19:22.140]  I mean, it's obvious that there are bugs in this software.
[19:22.260 --> 19:24.580]  Any sufficiently complicated software has bugs in it.
[19:24.700 --> 19:35.260]  And I think it's very dangerous that people could have the information that they're receiving be restricted and they don't know that the information they're receiving is restricted.
[19:36.200 --> 19:47.920]  If you're trying to visit a website in, you know, in China or the Middle East or other countries that block selected websites and the website is blocked, generally you know the website you've been visiting is blocked.
[19:48.020 --> 19:48.660]  You can't go there.
[19:48.740 --> 19:49.740]  You know you've been censored.
[19:50.180 --> 19:57.220]  But with technology like this where only part of a web page can be removed, you may not know that part of your web page has been removed.
[19:57.400 --> 19:59.940]  And that strikes me as extremely dangerous.
[20:00.280 --> 20:04.340]  I think the better sensor where it gets, the more dangerous it is.
[20:05.020 --> 20:07.960]  And I haven't played with this enough to know if it is, in fact, better.
[20:08.100 --> 20:09.840]  But if it is better, then it's worse.
[20:09.840 --> 20:19.820]  Yeah, and I think any time you give any sort of power or regulatory power to a machine that's not yours, you're giving away something very basic and fundamental and it's very dangerous.
[20:20.300 --> 20:22.360]  Well, couldn't you say the same about spam filters?
[20:22.800 --> 20:24.620]  But you can control your own spam filters.
[20:24.720 --> 20:26.740]  You can set them to filter or not filter, whatever you like.
[20:27.340 --> 20:30.320]  Well, how about the, what, the Orbs filter or whatever?
[20:30.500 --> 20:31.680]  You don't have control over that, do you?
[20:32.200 --> 20:35.420]  Doesn't that sort of make decisions for you and sometimes makes the wrong decisions?
[20:35.700 --> 20:37.440]  You do have the ability to run your own mail server and do whatever you like.
[20:37.480 --> 20:37.760]  That's true.
[20:37.840 --> 20:39.480]  You know how few people do that these days?
[20:39.480 --> 20:40.900]  We were discussing this a few weeks ago.
[20:41.160 --> 20:42.600]  Hardly anybody runs their own mail service anymore.
[20:42.600 --> 20:48.800]  But, you know, I think the main difference we're talking about here between this and normal filtering systems is the normal filtering system.
[20:49.040 --> 20:51.520]  I'm a parent and I want to block my kid from looking at whatever.
[20:51.720 --> 20:53.120]  I install that on my computer.
[20:53.490 --> 20:55.680]  It's something that, you know, I control the filtering over.
[20:55.820 --> 20:57.640]  And this, you're talking about putting it on the ISP level.
[20:57.720 --> 21:01.440]  So this is on a server at your internet service provider.
[21:01.440 --> 21:03.160]  You're not in control of.
[21:03.260 --> 21:06.960]  It's basically invisible to you and whoever's using the computer.
[21:07.240 --> 21:16.600]  I think the trend here that it seems like we're kind of referring to is the trend towards having cloud computing taking over people actually controlling their own systems.
[21:16.760 --> 21:21.900]  Instead of putting filters on my machine, I will have the ISP do it for me.
[21:22.000 --> 21:25.480]  Instead of running mail servers, I'll go to Google.
[21:25.480 --> 21:31.540]  Instead of having, you know, a small company start their own ISPs, we'll only have maybe three in the entire country.
[21:31.660 --> 21:34.300]  Is there anything left that we have not entrusted to the cloud?
[21:35.700 --> 21:36.720]  I don't think so.
[21:36.820 --> 21:37.980]  Soon there really won't be much left.
[21:38.820 --> 21:40.980]  Well, you can still run your own server, but...
[21:40.980 --> 21:42.000]  You can, you can.
[21:42.140 --> 21:42.620]  It's getting hard.
[21:42.820 --> 21:46.600]  But it's easier and cheaper these days to, you know, put it somewhere in the cloud.
[21:46.740 --> 21:48.760]  And for a lot of cases, it makes sense.
[21:48.860 --> 21:58.420]  You know, if you're a small business starting up and you don't want to buy server space in a, you know, a rack somewhere in some server room and put your own hardware in there, it's a great solution.
[21:59.280 --> 22:06.340]  But at the same time, you're basically trusting, you know, your business and your servers and all that to somebody else and something you don't control.
[22:06.580 --> 22:18.600]  There's also a really heavy implication for the entire ISP industry actually because once one of them institutes this system and proves that it can be done, the question I think will come up, well, why aren't they filtering all sorts of other things that are,
[22:18.680 --> 22:20.040]  you know, really undesirable?
[22:20.360 --> 22:20.960]  Slippery slope.
[22:21.160 --> 22:21.840]  Very slippery slope.
[22:21.840 --> 22:23.500]  All right, Bernie, any thoughts from you?
[22:23.920 --> 22:24.200]  Yeah.
[22:24.340 --> 22:39.560]  I mean, this would be a valuable product or service to companies who, for liability reasons, really can't have their employees viewing certain websites or words that co-workers could see and then see the company for.
[22:39.740 --> 22:49.160]  But consider this in the hands of a totalitarian regime where... let me use an analog that our listeners who aren't technical might appreciate better.
[22:49.160 --> 23:10.820]  Suppose you lived in a country where the government wanted badly enough to be able to, in real time, edit any book, magazine, or newspaper you were reading and change certain words or phrases to say something other than what they said, to what the government wanted them to say.
[23:10.820 --> 23:15.660]  And this is basically what this technology allows, only it's just on the internet.
[23:15.880 --> 23:18.880]  But when we start reading e-books and things like that, who knows?
[23:19.680 --> 23:35.400]  As Mike and others were pointing out, this really is a foot in the door to the type of power and technology that would be just a wet dream for a totalitarian regime to be able to shape people's reading.
[23:35.400 --> 23:46.100]  Or maybe a Walmart equivalent of the Kindle, where they basically just filter it all so that, you know, people in middle America can read safely.
[23:46.320 --> 23:54.080]  I think we should also point out that the concern that this software, this type of software, will end up in the hands of totalitarian regimes is not really theoretical.
[23:54.080 --> 24:08.220]  The web filtering software that is presently in use in a lot of countries, particularly in the Arab world, but also elsewhere in the world, is made by American companies and is sold to these regimes by American companies.
[24:08.580 --> 24:11.740]  And if you're in the sensorware business, it's a huge contract.
[24:12.100 --> 24:14.740]  Can you imagine a whole country is now your customer?
[24:15.700 --> 24:20.720]  So it's not something that we're just worrying about that might one day happen.
[24:20.720 --> 24:25.220]  People are also talking about these so-called totalitarian regimes in other parts of the world.
[24:25.380 --> 24:28.240]  But, you know, this is something you even have to worry about here.
[24:28.500 --> 24:33.460]  Every day you hear more talk and worry in the government about homegrown terrorism.
[24:33.640 --> 24:43.660]  You know, I can see this kind of thing like Rob said, where one ISP gets this put in place and then other ISPs by public pressure or other forms of pressure get pressured into implementing similar systems.
[24:43.660 --> 24:50.040]  And then some senators says, hey, why don't we have a law saying that all ISPs need to ban websites?
[24:50.120 --> 24:51.600]  We consider terrorist websites.
[24:51.800 --> 24:57.240]  Then people say, well, what about child porn websites and then other distasteful content?
[24:57.360 --> 24:59.040]  And where does that where will that line be drawn?
[24:59.460 --> 24:59.960]  Go ahead.
[24:59.960 --> 25:08.600]  I think on the flip side in this country, so far as I can see, we have this really big attachment to the whole First Amendment idea and all that.
[25:08.760 --> 25:14.680]  So while I can see this, you know, things like this do slip in by filtering undesirable stuff.
[25:15.220 --> 25:19.260]  I could also see a lot of backlash in this country where we do have control over the government.
[25:19.420 --> 25:20.220]  We are represented.
[25:20.480 --> 25:26.520]  Yeah, there was the major backlash recently when over the TV airwaves during the Super Bowl, a certain pop star exposed herself, you know.
[25:26.520 --> 25:28.360]  And that's true.
[25:29.340 --> 25:29.900]  Go ahead.
[25:30.020 --> 25:38.780]  There are also plenty of first world countries that use these sorts of sensorware products, maybe not on quite as grand a scale as other countries.
[25:39.000 --> 25:46.380]  But particularly in Australia, there's a big push, I know, for there to be a government block list of sites you may not visit.
[25:46.380 --> 25:57.300]  In Germany, just recently, they announced that the opposition parties are finally opposing the plan to implement a Germany-wide block list.
[25:57.480 --> 26:00.040]  But we'll see if they're actually able to stop it.
[26:01.420 --> 26:07.380]  So it's not just a concern if you live in Saudi Arabia.
[26:07.380 --> 26:10.340]  It's also a concern if you live in first world democracy.
[26:10.340 --> 26:15.800]  What's the concern if you go to school because they're always basically trying to block things from your eyes?
[26:15.980 --> 26:18.180]  They've already been doing that for quite some time.
[26:18.840 --> 26:19.040]  Of course.
[26:19.200 --> 26:25.640]  The funny thing is that people in schools then just learn how these systems work and what they block and how to get around it very easily.
[26:25.660 --> 26:27.280]  And they write an article 2600 and then get in trouble.
[26:27.280 --> 26:29.300]  Yeah, that's how it works.
[26:29.460 --> 26:32.780]  Now, here's a related story coming out of Australia.
[26:32.920 --> 26:43.340]  Internet giants Google and Yahoo have criticized Australia's proposal for a mandatory internet filter, calling it a heavy-handed measure that could restrict access to legal information.
[26:43.340 --> 26:50.120]  Their statements were among 174 submissions to the country's Department of Communications related to the filtering policy.
[26:50.220 --> 27:01.020]  Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who made these submissions public, has explained the filter would block access to sites that include child pornography, sexual violence, and detailed instruction in crime.
[27:01.020 --> 27:02.520]  That's always what we get nailed for.
[27:02.640 --> 27:07.040]  That's what they say 2600.com is all about, instructions in crime.
[27:07.240 --> 27:07.980]  It's crazy.
[27:08.460 --> 27:13.570]  Adopting a mandatory screening system would make Australia one of the strictest internet regulation...
[27:14.200 --> 27:16.800]  regulators, rather, among the world's democracies.
[27:17.100 --> 27:23.200]  And the proposal has put the country on the Reporters Without Borders annual enemies of the internet list.
[27:23.800 --> 27:26.080]  So, I don't know, Bernie, what do you think about Australia?
[27:27.720 --> 27:29.560]  I think they've got a lot of problems in Australia.
[27:29.800 --> 27:38.140]  But they, you know, a lot, as Mike pointed out, these technologies that they're implementing there are probably being sold to them by American corporations.
[27:38.360 --> 27:44.380]  So, you know, what you see in Australia may be sort of an inkling of what's to come here.
[27:44.540 --> 27:45.720]  But why can't they write their own?
[27:45.800 --> 27:46.840]  Why do they have to buy it from us?
[27:47.860 --> 27:50.060]  They're really good at writing censorware in this country.
[27:50.680 --> 27:51.280]  It's amazing.
[27:51.280 --> 27:53.760]  People in one country make something, people in another country buy it.
[27:53.820 --> 27:55.100]  It doesn't really matter.
[27:55.340 --> 27:56.800]  The borders aren't going away.
[27:56.920 --> 28:00.700]  I don't think the problem will be solved if Australia writes its own censorware.
[28:00.820 --> 28:00.980]  No.
[28:01.120 --> 28:02.080]  The problem certainly won't be solved.
[28:02.200 --> 28:07.020]  It's certainly, you know, always running to the United States to get this evil stuff.
[28:07.480 --> 28:08.120]  I don't know.
[28:08.540 --> 28:08.860]  Okay.
[28:09.140 --> 28:11.460]  Moving on to more censorship.
[28:12.240 --> 28:14.200]  The latest on Google in China.
[28:14.560 --> 28:16.760]  Google search services appear to have been disabled.
[28:16.900 --> 28:17.960]  Actually, this is an earlier story.
[28:17.960 --> 28:25.620]  Chinese censors on the mainland earlier apparently disabled them, stopping the US company's Hong Kong-based website from working.
[28:25.900 --> 28:30.500]  Web users from across China reported that all standard searches on Google's Hong Kong site were blocked.
[28:30.980 --> 28:36.560]  The development comes a week after Google announced it was moving its controversial Chinese search engine offshore.
[28:38.140 --> 28:39.120]  And you know what?
[28:39.120 --> 28:43.260]  I printed out the status, but for some reason it didn't print any of the status figures.
[28:43.360 --> 28:46.660]  So I have no idea if things have changed over the last few days.
[28:46.880 --> 28:47.200]  Redhack, do you know?
[28:47.200 --> 28:50.180]  Well, I did look it up earlier after I saw that article.
[28:50.500 --> 29:03.060]  And according to the status page, they said that although there had been problems accessing the Hong Kong page in China, it was, they, I don't know, changed some configuration and now users were able to access it again.
[29:03.260 --> 29:09.040]  So I guess the reports were coming from within China to then news sources, but then Google tried to fix it.
[29:09.200 --> 29:09.940]  I'm not sure.
[29:10.240 --> 29:11.540]  It basically had a...
[29:11.540 --> 29:12.480]  It didn't have a check mark.
[29:12.600 --> 29:14.080]  It had a little information bubble.
[29:14.240 --> 29:27.220]  I thought it was interesting how Google was just basically putting out this alert saying, well, we have indications that China is up to something and sort of making China sweat by reporting, telling on them.
[29:27.800 --> 29:32.220]  And then either it was fixed or maybe they misreported that.
[29:33.120 --> 29:39.760]  But it's just kind of a weird thing for a big corporation to be calling out a country on the other side of the world.
[29:39.760 --> 29:42.080]  And it's sort of a real battle of wills here.
[29:42.080 --> 29:44.300]  It also kind of depends on how China was filtering it.
[29:44.380 --> 29:54.260]  If they were just, say, blocking the Hong Kong search server's IP addresses, and then Google gave them new IP addresses, then okay, well, we've reconfigured our systems, you know, they're not blocking us anymore.
[29:54.400 --> 29:58.020]  A corporation and a country have gone to war before because it really seems that way.
[29:58.120 --> 30:04.680]  But this sounds like an actual cyber war, but you know, it seems like they're asking for trouble in a way because they are in Hong Kong.
[30:05.060 --> 30:05.980]  Google is asking for trouble.
[30:06.040 --> 30:09.000]  The servers that they're using, as far as I know, are in Hong Kong.
[30:09.000 --> 30:13.060]  And China's government does still have some control over there.
[30:13.520 --> 30:17.660]  It could start a whole big mess if this push comes to shove.
[30:17.920 --> 30:23.740]  I think it's easier, though, for China just to figure out how to permanently filter the servers and then call it a day, then start a war.
[30:24.240 --> 30:24.680]  Yeah.
[30:25.180 --> 30:26.040]  One would assume.
[30:26.300 --> 30:29.460]  Well, we're talking about cyber wars, not necessarily guns.
[30:29.880 --> 30:31.220]  But they want cyber wars to be...
[30:31.220 --> 30:31.400]  Corporations don't have those.
[30:31.560 --> 30:34.280]  They want cyber wars to be the same thing as regular wars.
[30:34.560 --> 30:38.240]  They want hackers to be the soldiers and people on the front lines.
[30:39.100 --> 30:39.520]  Yeah.
[30:39.740 --> 30:42.260]  But we have to show them that it doesn't work that way.
[30:42.500 --> 30:45.920]  Now, GoDaddy, the world's largest domain name registration company...
[30:45.920 --> 30:46.560]  When did that happen?
[30:46.680 --> 30:47.540]  Why did they become the largest?
[30:47.840 --> 30:49.060]  Probably when they started advertising...
[30:49.060 --> 30:49.560]  Sorry, what?
[30:49.800 --> 30:51.840]  Probably when they started advertising on the Super Bowl.
[30:52.120 --> 30:53.140]  That could be, yeah.
[30:54.340 --> 31:07.400]  They told lawmakers last Wednesday that they will cease registering websites in China in response to intrusive new government rules that require applicants to provide extensive personal data, including photographs of themselves.
[31:07.780 --> 31:17.340]  Now, the rules, according to the company, are an effort by China to increase monitoring and surveillance of website content and could put individuals who register their sites with the firm at risk.
[31:17.340 --> 31:22.040]  The company also said the rules will have a chilling effect on new domain name registrations.
[31:22.760 --> 31:29.680]  GoDaddy's move follows Google's announcement a week or so ago that it will no longer censor search results on its site in China.
[31:29.680 --> 31:34.480]  So it seems like all kinds of corporations are butting heads over there.
[31:35.360 --> 31:36.640]  It's getting more and more interesting.
[31:36.740 --> 31:36.900]  Got it?
[31:37.080 --> 31:37.220]  Yeah.
[31:37.520 --> 31:41.040]  China doesn't want anyone to be anonymous on the internet.
[31:41.260 --> 31:44.560]  You know, lots of people, you know, love the internet because of that.
[31:45.160 --> 31:50.660]  And, well, apparently China wants to do everything they can to eliminate that.
[31:51.720 --> 31:53.340]  Nobody's really anonymous on the internet.
[31:53.600 --> 31:54.660]  That's a fallacy.
[31:54.840 --> 31:55.600]  It does seem a way.
[31:55.600 --> 31:55.620]  Yeah.
[31:55.660 --> 31:58.700]  And that is definitely the point that I feel needs to be brought up.
[31:58.820 --> 31:59.400]  And I'm glad you mentioned that.
[31:59.400 --> 32:03.000]  You can be uniquely identified by the plugins that you have installed in your browser.
[32:03.000 --> 32:03.400]  Mm-hmm.
[32:03.540 --> 32:07.760]  Because a lot of them report to the web server that you're accessing that they're installed.
[32:08.240 --> 32:10.520]  And, you know, it's actually been shown that you can...
[32:10.520 --> 32:13.340]  Most users can be uniquely fingerprinted by their browser.
[32:14.440 --> 32:14.540]  Okay.
[32:14.540 --> 32:16.220]  Just by the strings sent by their browser.
[32:16.340 --> 32:17.320]  Give our listeners an example.
[32:17.520 --> 32:18.640]  Now, you go to a website.
[32:18.640 --> 32:20.040]  You think you're anonymous.
[32:20.140 --> 32:22.600]  What in your browser will identify you as unique?
[32:22.600 --> 32:23.460]  Well, there's a couple of things.
[32:23.600 --> 32:24.320]  Oh, in the browser?
[32:24.560 --> 32:25.160]  Or just anything.
[32:25.180 --> 32:26.820]  First of all, you know, your IP address.
[32:27.160 --> 32:34.360]  A lot of people, even though it's maybe dynamic by your ISP, if you haven't restarted your cable modem in a year, chances are you have the same IP address.
[32:34.580 --> 32:34.920]  Let's say you use Tor.
[32:35.040 --> 32:37.020]  Let's say you go through something that changes your IP.
[32:37.160 --> 32:37.260]  Right.
[32:37.360 --> 32:38.940]  And you think you're safe.
[32:39.200 --> 32:39.460]  Okay.
[32:39.680 --> 32:43.880]  Well, the browser, whenever you connect to a website, it sends a user agent string.
[32:44.080 --> 32:47.820]  And the user agent string is meant to identify, basically, the browser version.
[32:49.560 --> 32:51.020]  That's generally what it did.
[32:51.020 --> 32:53.620]  So it might send, say, Firefox 3.6.1.
[32:53.640 --> 32:54.740]  Tells it the exact version.
[32:54.920 --> 32:55.040]  Right.
[32:55.120 --> 32:55.320]  All right.
[32:56.020 --> 33:06.300]  On top of that, a lot of browsers, you know, IE, Firefox, et cetera, will also, if a plugin so requests, will also send the version information for a plugin that's installed.
[33:07.260 --> 33:10.320]  And so you get, you know, you have three, four plugins installed.
[33:10.440 --> 33:19.400]  Now you have this combination of your browser version, your plugin versions, and plugin names that get sent to the web server, which now then can use that to track you.
[33:19.400 --> 33:21.200]  A big thing also is the fonts.
[33:21.520 --> 33:21.860]  Oh, fonts, right.
[33:21.860 --> 33:24.800]  The set of fonts you have installed is apparently almost unique.
[33:25.000 --> 33:25.200]  It also reports the fonts.
[33:25.420 --> 33:25.640]  Really?
[33:25.740 --> 33:27.020]  Tells it the fonts you have installed.
[33:27.020 --> 33:27.860]  It doesn't...
[33:28.380 --> 33:28.640]  It's...
[33:28.640 --> 33:38.960]  The website you're visiting can write a script in JavaScript to ask for the fonts that are available to it and send that information back to the website.
[33:39.140 --> 33:40.840]  So let's say I have Arabic fonts.
[33:41.560 --> 33:46.560]  It's not so much that one specific font is more suspicious than another.
[33:46.560 --> 33:48.860]  It's that probably you have different...
[33:48.860 --> 33:50.460]  A different set of fonts.
[33:50.640 --> 33:50.900]  Mm-hmm.
[33:51.000 --> 33:55.100]  The fonts you have and the fonts you don't have may be different from anyone else on the entire internet.
[33:55.100 --> 34:02.660]  But if I have a particular type of font style, might I be targeted as a result of, well, why is this person reading this particular language?
[34:02.760 --> 34:03.780]  Why does he have an interest in this?
[34:03.980 --> 34:04.240]  Sure.
[34:04.640 --> 34:04.740]  Wow.
[34:04.760 --> 34:05.960]  It's possible, but...
[34:05.960 --> 34:08.240]  And all that just from one visit to a web page.
[34:08.240 --> 34:13.830]  But basically the information that your browser will freely send to a web server can be used to uniquely identify you.
[34:13.830 --> 34:15.040]  There's a research project on it.
[34:15.120 --> 34:16.390]  I can't remember the name off the top of my head.
[34:16.430 --> 34:16.700]  This is scary.
[34:16.870 --> 34:17.950]  If you Google around, you can find it.
[34:17.950 --> 34:19.560]  I'm not surprised, but this is scary.
[34:19.720 --> 34:19.850]  Yeah.
[34:19.960 --> 34:25.960]  And back on the issue of fonts, like I'm a graphic designer, so I've got an obscene amount of fonts on my system, including some I made myself and never released.
[34:26.000 --> 34:27.740]  But that information is now public.
[34:27.740 --> 34:31.410]  And if you made it yourself that your name is on it or some identifying information...
[34:31.410 --> 34:32.160]  Or whatever I named the font.
[34:32.200 --> 34:33.520]  They know whenever you visit their site.
[34:33.680 --> 34:33.870]  Rob's font.
[34:34.160 --> 34:34.480]  Wow.
[34:34.960 --> 34:37.720]  Yeah, it's fascinating all the things that your browser gives away.
[34:37.870 --> 34:45.260]  Anyone who begins playing around with web design at all, you can just sit down and just play and just see all the things that a browser will tell about itself.
[34:45.280 --> 34:46.540]  And it's really very interesting.
[34:47.890 --> 34:49.760]  Bernie, any comments from down in Philadelphia?
[34:50.300 --> 35:04.410]  Well, I was just thinking that whenever you visit a website, even if you think you're being anonymous going through tour to change your IP address or something, your computer could be, I guess, without your knowledge, providing a font of knowledge to someone you don't want to know who you are.
[35:05.430 --> 35:05.980]  Wow.
[35:06.740 --> 35:07.300]  Okay.
[35:07.640 --> 35:12.140]  And meanwhile, we have this other story involving the international scene.
[35:12.260 --> 35:17.830]  A Frenchman who police say hacked Twitter accounts belonging to US President Barack Obama and celebrities could face jail.
[35:18.120 --> 35:25.020]  The unemployed 25-year-old was arrested last Tuesday after an operation lasting several months conducted by French police with agents from the FBI.
[35:25.370 --> 35:29.350]  It's nice to know they really have their pulse on the important things in the world.
[35:29.350 --> 35:34.960]  The 25-year-old is said to have hacked into the microblogging website by simply guessing users' passwords.
[35:35.350 --> 35:39.620]  The suspect reportedly targeted other celebrities, including Britney Spears.
[35:39.700 --> 35:41.060]  You sort of have to target Britney Spears.
[35:41.480 --> 35:48.800]  After being questioned by police, he was ordered to appear at court in the central French city of Clermont-Ferrand on June 24th.
[35:49.160 --> 35:53.910]  Hacking into a database in France is a crime which can carry a penalty of death.
[35:54.060 --> 35:54.480]  No, I'm sorry.
[35:55.280 --> 35:56.220]  I'm reading ahead.
[35:56.300 --> 35:58.060]  A two-year jail term.
[35:58.060 --> 36:03.520]  The suspect used the pseudonym Hacker Kroll, had no specialist training.
[36:04.160 --> 36:11.060]  He gained access to Twitter accounts by simply working out the answers to password reminder questions on Target's email accounts, according to investigators.
[36:11.200 --> 36:18.950]  I saw this story on Euronews and they were very clear that he never got into Obama's account or never actually had control over any celebrity.
[36:19.200 --> 36:21.520]  So, I don't understand what the big deal here is.
[36:21.740 --> 36:23.360]  It seems like they're really overblowing this case.
[36:23.540 --> 36:25.780]  This is basically what happened to Sarah Palin's email, right?
[36:26.480 --> 36:28.950]  Well, that's different because they actually got into an email account.
[36:29.060 --> 36:32.180]  This is just simply somebody getting access to a Twitter account.
[36:32.320 --> 36:33.260]  It's Twitter for God's sake.
[36:33.260 --> 36:35.200]  No, I know, but I'm saying it's the same kind of thing.
[36:35.380 --> 36:35.920]  It didn't...
[36:35.920 --> 36:38.320]  He didn't do anything besides just get some answers.
[36:38.500 --> 36:38.900]  As far as the method, yeah.
[36:39.020 --> 36:39.720]  Answering the question.
[36:39.920 --> 36:41.300]  Answering a very simple question.
[36:41.520 --> 36:43.000]  This is a recurring theme now.
[36:43.160 --> 36:51.960]  We're just seeing, you know, passwords or the security questions just coming up as being this big weak spot in people's accounts very recently.
[36:51.960 --> 36:54.450]  You know, the thing is, you can have these questions.
[36:54.740 --> 36:58.560]  And if you forget your password, the way the system works, it sends...
[36:59.000 --> 36:59.900]  displays a question.
[37:00.080 --> 37:01.620]  What is your mother's maiden name or something?
[37:01.820 --> 37:02.960]  You can choose the question.
[37:03.060 --> 37:03.460]  And guess what?
[37:03.520 --> 37:04.860]  You don't have to give the right answer.
[37:05.220 --> 37:05.960]  That's what I do.
[37:06.060 --> 37:08.600]  I give a completely unrelated answer.
[37:08.780 --> 37:10.560]  So, you know, it says choose your mother's maiden name.
[37:10.640 --> 37:11.780]  Who knows what I'm talking about?
[37:11.780 --> 37:13.060]  Yeah, there's no penalty for lying.
[37:13.060 --> 37:14.740]  And you could say, what is two plus two?
[37:14.860 --> 37:16.200]  And the answer could be a million.
[37:16.480 --> 37:17.400]  You know, the right answer.
[37:17.600 --> 37:17.680]  Well, you could say, what's two plus two?
[37:17.760 --> 37:19.360]  And you could say, the capital of Uganda.
[37:19.360 --> 37:21.200]  It could be something completely unrelated.
[37:21.500 --> 37:22.240]  Kampala, isn't it?
[37:22.340 --> 37:23.460]  No, wait, I'm not sure.
[37:23.760 --> 37:25.580]  Or it could literally be that entire phrase.
[37:25.700 --> 37:25.800]  Yeah.
[37:26.760 --> 37:27.120]  Wow.
[37:28.120 --> 37:31.500]  It's just amazing what people think is important these days.
[37:31.620 --> 37:33.960]  But I mean, you know... The guy's facing jail for this.
[37:34.100 --> 37:39.100]  People visit these things and they say, oh, okay, I'm just gonna answer that so I can remember it later.
[37:39.220 --> 37:39.880]  That's the whole idea.
[37:40.040 --> 37:44.900]  And it's not, you know, it's no better than setting your password to one, two, three, four, five, six.
[37:45.300 --> 37:46.500]  But people do that still.
[37:46.500 --> 37:52.960]  Although, actually, when they increased minimum limits for a lot of websites, I think now the most popular password is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
[37:53.900 --> 37:55.120]  Because you have to have eight characters.
[37:55.120 --> 37:56.900]  We just keep evolving, don't we?
[37:57.120 --> 38:01.300]  Well, thankfully, some websites do actually do basic parsing of someone's password.
[38:01.300 --> 38:03.800]  So a constant string of numbers is a no-no.
[38:04.000 --> 38:04.140]  Yeah.
[38:04.380 --> 38:06.600]  I had to put a symbol in my...
[38:06.600 --> 38:08.980]  You know, I have a couple of random passwords I juggle around.
[38:08.980 --> 38:09.800]  Yeah, they make you put a symbol in.
[38:09.800 --> 38:10.620]  And they're just completely random.
[38:10.700 --> 38:11.000]  Or a number.
[38:11.000 --> 38:12.180]  But they made me add a symbol now.
[38:12.280 --> 38:12.960]  I was very upset about that.
[38:13.020 --> 38:14.200]  It screwed my whole algorithm up.
[38:14.360 --> 38:14.640]  Really?
[38:15.060 --> 38:18.660]  Well, what they do is they separate two words of the symbol sometimes on those automatically...
[38:19.840 --> 38:21.080]  Does anybody else have trouble...
[38:21.080 --> 38:26.380]  You know, when they give you the word, that you have to like spell out the word, Google does this?
[38:26.520 --> 38:26.680]  Yeah, the caption.
[38:26.860 --> 38:29.360]  I get it wrong so much because it's all like...
[38:29.800 --> 38:30.780]  It's all twirly.
[38:31.000 --> 38:33.080]  And I feel like I'm losing my mind.
[38:33.080 --> 38:34.540]  But no, that's what it says.
[38:34.680 --> 38:35.660]  And no, you're wrong.
[38:35.740 --> 38:36.800]  And you don't get to see it again.
[38:36.800 --> 38:38.560]  So you can't like appeal it.
[38:38.560 --> 38:43.300]  But I feel like I'm losing my mind with this because I went through one the other day.
[38:43.300 --> 38:44.860]  It took me three attempts to get it right.
[38:44.880 --> 38:47.660]  And I felt like I was hacking myself, doing something illegal.
[38:47.860 --> 38:49.640]  But I really was typing what I saw.
[38:49.820 --> 38:49.920]  Right.
[38:50.060 --> 38:51.640]  And it sure...
[38:51.640 --> 38:52.420]  I mean, I guess...
[38:52.420 --> 38:53.500]  Which is a problem if you're trying...
[38:53.500 --> 38:55.980]  If you stick a D next to a B, who knows what it could look like.
[38:56.020 --> 39:00.500]  Which is a problem if you're trying to buy tickets and some Bulgarian has a bot that can do it better than you.
[39:00.500 --> 39:01.120]  Exactly.
[39:01.340 --> 39:01.600]  Exactly.
[39:01.980 --> 39:05.480]  Or if you're trying to get tickets to the latest Justin Bieber concert.
[39:05.620 --> 39:05.860]  Yes.
[39:06.460 --> 39:10.120]  I've used that as a segue to get into the next story also concerning Twitter crime.
[39:10.450 --> 39:12.240]  Let it be known from the New York Times.
[39:12.400 --> 39:17.740]  Let it be known that if you are the manager of a teenage pop music sensation and can't tweet fast enough, you may face criminal prosecution.
[39:18.540 --> 39:28.180]  That is what Scott Braun, the manager of the 16-year-old singer Justin Bieber, discovered on Wednesday when he was arrested on charges stemming from a November event.
[39:28.180 --> 39:36.500]  I'm not sure people remember this, November event in Nassau County at which Mr. Bieber's fans caused a stampede during his appearance at a mall in Garden City.
[39:36.700 --> 39:42.120]  At that time, the police told Mr. Braun to send out a message on Twitter saying the event was canceled.
[39:42.420 --> 39:48.380]  A lawyer for Mr. Braun said he sent two tweets in seven minutes, but prosecutors say it took him nearly two hours to post the messages.
[39:49.040 --> 39:55.540]  A lack of familiarity with the service was presumably not a problem given Mr. Bieber's perennial presence on Twitter's trending topics list.
[39:55.540 --> 40:03.600]  Mr. Braun surrendered to the Nassau County Police last Wednesday and is awaiting arraignment on charges of reckless endangerment and criminal nuisance.
[40:03.900 --> 40:06.880]  He could be sentenced to up to a year in jail if found guilty.
[40:06.880 --> 40:09.860]  This is the most incredible thing for not tweeting a year in jail.
[40:10.400 --> 40:11.400]  We've gone mad.
[40:11.400 --> 40:15.300]  And I completely failed to see how tweeting would have helped if he managed to do it faster.
[40:15.360 --> 40:20.400]  Because if you search for this on YouTube, you can see all sorts of cell phone videos of this incident in question.
[40:20.720 --> 40:24.340]  And the people there were, you know, going nuts and looking for their favorite pop star.
[40:24.450 --> 40:25.260]  They weren't reading Twitter.
[40:25.720 --> 40:27.620]  They were being unruly in a big...
[40:28.540 --> 40:31.580]  Well, they all get Twitter feeds sent to their heads directly.
[40:31.820 --> 40:35.740]  You know, it's tattooed on the inside of their eyeballs or eyelids rather.
[40:36.240 --> 40:43.240]  But what if I was to tweet right now that Justin Bieber has been spotted on the corner of Wall Street and water and caused a stampede?
[40:43.340 --> 40:45.640]  Would I go to jail for causing that problem?
[40:45.780 --> 40:47.520]  If you yell fire in a crowded theater?
[40:47.740 --> 40:49.820]  If the theater's on fire, I should yell fire.
[40:49.960 --> 40:50.720]  Well, yeah, but if it's not...
[40:50.720 --> 40:51.220]  No one ever says that.
[40:51.400 --> 40:57.400]  First of all, nobody would see it because if he's still a trending topic, there'd be about 3,000 messages between the time you sent it.
[40:57.420 --> 40:58.340]  That's true, that's true.
[40:58.680 --> 41:00.500]  What if I hacked into his account and then...
[41:00.500 --> 41:02.380]  Oh, there, now you're talking real serious crime.
[41:02.380 --> 41:02.780]  Yes, Bernie.
[41:03.360 --> 41:12.160]  Your example, though, isn't really a good comparison because that's actually you actively doing something similar to shouting fire in a crowded theater.
[41:12.420 --> 41:18.860]  This guy, Mr. Braun, was charged by the Garden City, New York police for not tweeting when they told him to.
[41:19.460 --> 41:22.900]  So, yeah, ultimately, I think he's going to get off on this.
[41:22.900 --> 41:29.720]  But it looks like the Garden City police are really trying to use him as a scapegoat for their inability to control a crowd.
[41:29.860 --> 41:32.620]  Under what circumstances are you required to tweet?
[41:32.780 --> 41:36.060]  If an officer of the law tells you to tweet, do you have to tweet?
[41:36.160 --> 41:37.320]  Or do you have the right not to tweet?
[41:37.580 --> 41:38.600]  It's not in the Constitution.
[41:38.600 --> 41:39.380]  I looked for it.
[41:39.540 --> 41:41.420]  There's nothing in there about tweeting in the Constitution.
[41:41.760 --> 41:43.320]  This just seems very strange to me.
[41:43.400 --> 41:45.220]  I mean, if you have a situation where you don't want to...
[41:45.220 --> 41:50.980]  where the cops don't want a crowd to come somewhere, they simply put police in the area and tell people, no, this event is closed.
[41:50.980 --> 41:55.800]  Instead, they're like, we want you to use this crazy, newfangled technology we don't know about.
[41:55.960 --> 41:58.920]  Would perhaps a megaphone have been more useful in this situation?
[41:59.180 --> 41:59.360]  Megaphone.
[41:59.540 --> 42:01.180]  I think they did try to use a megaphone.
[42:01.340 --> 42:01.540]  Please disperse.
[42:01.700 --> 42:02.900]  The event is canceled.
[42:03.200 --> 42:06.100]  Yeah, that doesn't usually go over well with crowds of screaming teenage girls.
[42:06.740 --> 42:07.760]  Okay, U.S.
[42:07.820 --> 42:13.900]  Senator Arlen Specter has said that the use of Lower Merion, is that how you pronounce it, Bernie?
[42:14.400 --> 42:15.320]  Yes, Lower Merion.
[42:15.400 --> 42:20.760]  Lower Merion school-issued laptops, cameras for surveillance has inspired him to write a poem.
[42:20.980 --> 42:30.780]  No, actually to write proposed legislation, followed by a poem, that would extend similar privacy restrictions for sound recordings under federal wiretap law to pictures and video captured by cameras.
[42:30.950 --> 42:35.620]  A picture can be just as invasive on privacy as a statement.
[42:36.020 --> 42:39.860]  Specter said after conducting a Senate subcommittee hearing on technology and privacy.
[42:39.860 --> 42:54.780]  He was the only senator at the hearing of the Crime and Justice Subcommittee of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, and he quizzed a panel of law and technology experts on the implications of the school district's remote surveillance of student laptops via webcam.
[42:55.200 --> 43:04.900]  The school district is fighting a lawsuit filed by the family of Harrelton High School student Blake Robbins over the webcam's usage, which Specter and others alluded to repeatedly in the hearing.
[43:05.060 --> 43:09.120]  The incident raises a question as to whether the law has kept up with technology, he said.
[43:09.120 --> 43:19.880]  The experts largely agree, noting in their testimony that the vast expansions of electronic communications and the number of video cameras, particularly on cell phones, since privacy laws were written.
[43:20.420 --> 43:29.980]  Federal wiretap law restricts how telephone and in-person conversations can be recorded when the speaker can reasonably expect privacy, but no such law governs visual images.
[43:30.200 --> 43:41.360]  Thus, the remote use of a laptop camera to take a picture of a school-issued computer's user's home, or user, rather, at home, would not appear to break a federal law as long as no sound recording was made as well.
[43:41.660 --> 43:44.300]  Bernie, do you think this is an issue worth pursuing?
[43:44.740 --> 43:46.060]  I really think it's interesting.
[43:46.380 --> 43:51.520]  Of course, there's going to have to be all kinds of exceptions added for security cameras and that sort of thing.
[43:51.520 --> 44:11.040]  But I think our inspector has a point here that, in this case, it was a government agency, a school district, who was apparently spying on kids in their homes covertly by taking snapshots of them through their laptop-issued, their school-issued laptops,
[44:11.260 --> 44:11.740]  webcams.
[44:11.740 --> 44:14.880]  We need to make that clear because it's been misreported in many places.
[44:14.920 --> 44:17.160]  It wasn't a live webcam feed.
[44:17.160 --> 44:20.140]  It was simply snapshots taken every... how often?
[44:20.700 --> 44:25.080]  Well, I think it was like every 15 or 30 seconds or every few minutes.
[44:25.240 --> 44:29.200]  It was fairly frequently, and they were getting a fair number of snapshots.
[44:29.320 --> 44:31.800]  I think they'd gotten a few dozen pictures of...
[44:31.800 --> 44:39.560]  A few dozen laptops, computers, webcams were remotely activated, according to some reports I'd read.
[44:40.260 --> 44:44.520]  But, you know, this was all done without the knowledge of the students or their parents.
[44:44.960 --> 44:46.160]  And they could have been...
[44:46.160 --> 44:49.040]  You know, the laptops could have been in their bedrooms while they were changing clothes or something.
[44:49.200 --> 44:50.300]  I mean, it's just...
[44:50.300 --> 44:55.920]  People should be made aware of this if a government agency is doing this, and in this case it was a school district.
[44:56.160 --> 44:56.360]  What was it?
[44:56.700 --> 44:59.360]  I don't know where this law is, the proposal that this changed.
[44:59.360 --> 45:00.300]  It's really significant.
[45:00.580 --> 45:02.600]  The federal wiretapping law has always been very specific.
[45:02.600 --> 45:15.000]  It only applies to oral communications as A-U-R-A-L, like spoken words, whether it's like you and I having a private conversation in a park or over the phone.
[45:15.160 --> 45:18.240]  But to extend this to cameras is really interesting.
[45:18.360 --> 45:18.980]  We'll see where it goes.
[45:19.340 --> 45:20.580]  Now, I just want to clear up.
[45:20.600 --> 45:27.300]  Was this a district policy or a school policy, or was this some board employee who was viewing these photos?
[45:27.300 --> 45:27.700]  This was informal policy.
[45:27.820 --> 45:30.240]  This was informal policy.
[45:30.320 --> 45:31.840]  I think it was written down in some sense.
[45:32.120 --> 45:34.780]  It was even brought up at a school board meeting to...
[45:35.140 --> 45:38.000]  But the school board didn't really take that much interest in it.
[45:38.100 --> 45:40.820]  It didn't, like, ring off alarm bells in their heads as it should have.
[45:40.980 --> 45:44.960]  But it wasn't just one rogue employee doing this in the school district.
[45:45.020 --> 45:45.700]  It was a policy.
[45:45.820 --> 45:47.320]  Several people knew about it, and they were doing it.
[45:47.880 --> 45:49.980]  Now, I'm glad to hear about this.
[45:50.460 --> 45:58.600]  Because, you know, the visual medium is now an extremely accessible form of communication.
[45:58.600 --> 46:03.080]  It's, you know, now very close to the equivalent of what telephone would have been in the past.
[46:03.100 --> 46:08.280]  You see people using this kind of stuff all the time now.
[46:08.400 --> 46:10.480]  People now have these cameras on their computers everywhere.
[46:10.480 --> 46:16.040]  But I don't know, if we have a law like this, I doubt that security cameras will be a big issue.
[46:16.060 --> 46:20.800]  Because if you're in a public space, you don't really have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
[46:20.960 --> 46:22.940]  Yeah, it seems to me like a law would already cover this.
[46:23.100 --> 46:24.600]  Yeah, you know, reasonable expectation of privacy.
[46:24.720 --> 46:28.120]  Being seen in a mall on a camera, okay, you don't really expect privacy there.
[46:28.200 --> 46:32.840]  But in your own home on a laptop from the school district, it seems like some kind of law would already apply.
[46:33.100 --> 46:33.860]  Or video conferencing.
[46:33.860 --> 46:40.260]  Yeah, you know, I always worry when new laws are made because they can be misapplied in all sorts of other situations.
[46:40.700 --> 46:42.000]  And that's what worries me.
[46:42.140 --> 46:42.320]  Rob?
[46:42.900 --> 46:49.320]  Yeah, to add to what Redhacked was saying, I'm pretty sure I remember reading that it was actually one of the principals with his finger on the button who was clicking at will.
[46:49.960 --> 46:52.800]  It wasn't like some rogue extended employee or something.
[46:52.960 --> 46:55.860]  Doesn't he have better things to do than be spying on students in their homes?
[46:56.420 --> 46:58.660]  All right, our phone number 212-209-2900.
[46:58.660 --> 47:01.580]  We'd like to hear from our listeners as to any of the topics we've discussed.
[47:01.660 --> 47:01.780]  Mike?
[47:01.780 --> 47:06.960]  I think it remains to be seen what exactly this law, when Senator Spector writes it, will say.
[47:06.960 --> 47:09.040]  I think we'll be able to judge the law better at that point.
[47:09.060 --> 47:13.160]  But I do think it sounds like a major win for people who communicate in sign language.
[47:14.100 --> 47:14.540]  Yes.
[47:14.720 --> 47:17.620]  Maybe his constituents should write him submissions.
[47:17.980 --> 47:32.640]  You know, if people keep paying attention to this sort of thing and we have people writing letters and just paying attention, then, like Manuel was saying about how laws can be misapplied or little bad things you don't want can be added in, maybe that won't happen.
[47:32.840 --> 47:33.060]  Maybe.
[47:33.280 --> 47:33.540]  Rob?
[47:33.820 --> 47:37.900]  I also want to point out, you don't have to be one of our inspectors' constituents to write him a letter.
[47:37.940 --> 47:38.340]  That's true.
[47:38.600 --> 47:42.380]  Or you can also write your own congresspeople letters before they come up with ideas for new laws.
[47:42.780 --> 47:44.380]  All right, 212-209-2900.
[47:44.380 --> 47:46.020]  Let's see who's out there.
[47:46.320 --> 47:47.060]  And good evening.
[47:47.060 --> 47:48.240]  You're on Off The Hook.
[47:48.960 --> 47:49.440]  Hello.
[47:49.720 --> 47:49.960]  Hi.
[47:50.300 --> 47:50.540]  Hi.
[47:50.800 --> 47:51.440]  What's on your mind?
[47:51.760 --> 47:52.560]  Curious question.
[47:52.700 --> 48:00.220]  You were talking about being able to identify your machine by plugins and browser fonts and so forth.
[48:00.420 --> 48:08.880]  I know someone who's into computers that I met a few years ago, and he said that they can identify your computer or search for your computer on the internet by the serial number of your operating system.
[48:08.880 --> 48:09.340]  Is that true?
[48:11.500 --> 48:12.360]  I don't know.
[48:12.520 --> 48:12.760]  Sorry.
[48:13.620 --> 48:18.420]  That was one of the things he mentioned to me, that your serial number or when you set your system up.
[48:18.420 --> 48:19.340]  You mean like a MAC address?
[48:19.660 --> 48:21.020]  Your MAC address is another one.
[48:21.060 --> 48:23.960]  I think he might be talking about, say, Windows serial numbers.
[48:24.380 --> 48:25.360]  That's what he's talking about.
[48:25.360 --> 48:33.000]  And Microsoft uses that to identify their various operating systems and if it's valid and if they're allowed to get patches and that sort of thing.
[48:33.040 --> 48:37.900]  I don't know if they can find your computer using that, but I think the computer might check in using that.
[48:37.900 --> 48:45.440]  They can't, generally, like a website, a random website that you go and visit with your web browser probably can't get this information.
[48:45.860 --> 48:58.780]  But if you're installed some sort of third-party software, file sharing software, whatever other software, or an ActiveX control inside your web browser, then that software can get this sort of information.
[48:58.780 --> 49:00.780]  And yes, it can be traced back to you.
[49:00.900 --> 49:03.860]  It's a lot easier to be found than you might think.
[49:04.100 --> 49:07.880]  And I guess we'll have Steve Rambam give a talk on that sometime at Hope this summer.
[49:08.460 --> 49:09.040]  Good evening.
[49:09.140 --> 49:10.120]  You're on Off the Hook.
[49:10.720 --> 49:11.160]  Hi.
[49:11.420 --> 49:11.620]  Hi.
[49:11.680 --> 49:12.140]  What's on your mind?
[49:13.700 --> 49:30.280]  Some while back, I had asked a question about those new TVs that were going to be Skype live and how you could disable the camera from being used by someone else covertly.
[49:30.560 --> 49:36.800]  And you guys had said just turn the set off or just disconnect the set.
[49:37.000 --> 49:38.040]  I know we would have said that.
[49:38.220 --> 49:39.980]  We definitely would have said disconnect the set.
[49:40.140 --> 49:41.180]  I'm not sure about the rest of it, though.
[49:41.500 --> 49:47.140]  Yeah, but the thing is, what if you want to be watching it, but make sure that nobody's watching you?
[49:47.800 --> 49:49.740]  It would be the pain line with the laptop.
[49:49.740 --> 49:52.500]  Yeah, put a piece of tape over the camera.
[49:52.740 --> 49:53.900]  That's probably the best way, right?
[49:54.380 --> 49:54.760]  Yeah.
[49:54.760 --> 49:55.900]  And what about the microphone?
[49:57.620 --> 50:01.200]  Well, I think you can do the same with that if you can find the microphone.
[50:01.460 --> 50:02.440]  Put more tape over it.
[50:02.440 --> 50:03.060]  More tape, yeah.
[50:03.160 --> 50:05.900]  I think the answer is put tape over things.
[50:06.060 --> 50:06.340]  Start right?
[50:06.520 --> 50:14.100]  This just comes down to the problem of having a machine with software that you have absolutely no control over what's going on inside of it and have no idea what it's doing.
[50:14.260 --> 50:16.400]  You know, with closed source software, this is the problem.
[50:16.400 --> 50:22.400]  If you have open source type things or if we had more of a movement in that general direction, you'd know it's on your machine.
[50:22.500 --> 50:23.960]  You would know how to turn it off.
[50:24.300 --> 50:25.100]  You'd know that.
[50:26.240 --> 50:26.600]  Right.
[50:27.140 --> 50:28.440]  But for now, we have tape, at least.
[50:28.720 --> 50:34.260]  Ironically, a lot of these new fangled systems that do all sorts of cool stuff do run Linux inside.
[50:34.700 --> 50:35.540]  That's true, right?
[50:36.920 --> 50:44.780]  A lot of new Samsung TVs run Linux on them, and there's actually a big community that's getting access to the internals of that and being able to do what they want with it.
[50:44.780 --> 50:46.320]  All right, let's take another phone call.
[50:46.400 --> 50:47.540]  212-209-2900.
[50:47.620 --> 50:47.860]  Good evening.
[50:48.060 --> 50:48.820]  You're on off the hook.
[50:50.580 --> 50:51.300]  It's BAI?
[50:51.460 --> 50:52.060]  Yes, it's BAI.
[50:52.120 --> 50:52.780]  You're on the air.
[50:53.760 --> 50:56.520]  Hey, my question is on illegal downloading.
[50:57.400 --> 50:57.760]  And...
[50:57.760 --> 50:58.380]  It's illegal.
[50:59.540 --> 50:59.900]  Yeah.
[51:00.260 --> 51:00.380]  Okay.
[51:00.380 --> 51:02.940]  It's like just downloading movies or things of that nature.
[51:03.300 --> 51:03.660]  All right.
[51:03.660 --> 51:05.040]  How easy it is to get caught.
[51:05.160 --> 51:10.420]  Like when you go to those different websites, whether it be like many know when you're using U-Torrent and you're trying to get documented...
[51:10.420 --> 51:12.080]  Red Hat, your hand shot right up on this one.
[51:12.140 --> 51:12.360]  Go ahead.
[51:12.360 --> 51:12.440]  Right.
[51:12.640 --> 51:16.480]  So basically, in terms of downloading movies and stuff, there's obviously two things.
[51:16.600 --> 51:18.720]  There's legal things where you're buying it and you're getting it.
[51:18.800 --> 51:23.860]  And then there's going to like what you said, sites that just have torrents that connect to rips and things like that.
[51:24.040 --> 51:28.020]  There's a third possibility of content that's freely distributed with the permission of the creator.
[51:28.160 --> 51:29.140]  That you're not buying.
[51:29.140 --> 51:42.840]  But basically what happens is with the BitTorrent protocol, which is what a lot of places use because it's very fast, what's happening is that everybody in this kind of swarm of computers who has this torrent file, they're talking to each other and they're exchanging bits.
[51:43.020 --> 51:48.180]  So I might have part A and B and my friend might have D and E and we're just kind of trading that around.
[51:48.240 --> 51:52.960]  And that's why it's so fast because instead of connecting to one other user, you're connecting to a hundred other users.
[51:52.960 --> 51:57.540]  But now I'm the MPAA and I put my computer into the swarm.
[51:57.700 --> 52:05.580]  So now I can see, well, all of these other computers that I am connecting to and getting bits of the movie from, I know who they are because I'm connecting to them directly.
[52:05.780 --> 52:07.120]  And that's how they track who you are.
[52:07.180 --> 52:08.680]  Because you're basically giving it to them.
[52:08.840 --> 52:10.700]  You're saying, okay, I have these...
[52:10.700 --> 52:15.780]  The protocol itself is making you say, I have these parts of the movie, please take them from me.
[52:15.960 --> 52:22.300]  And so then, you know, anybody connecting into this torrent swarm can take it from you and then say, hey, you have parts of this movie.
[52:22.300 --> 52:23.060]  All right.
[52:23.280 --> 52:23.880]  Thanks for that answer.
[52:24.020 --> 52:24.280]  Very good.
[52:24.940 --> 52:27.940]  Let's see if we can squeeze in a couple more calls in the time we have left.
[52:28.020 --> 52:28.300]  Good evening.
[52:28.420 --> 52:29.160]  You're on off the hook.
[52:29.800 --> 52:30.180]  Yes.
[52:30.460 --> 52:30.560]  Hi.
[52:30.780 --> 52:31.580]  You've got static.
[52:31.660 --> 52:32.540]  What's your question?
[52:33.380 --> 52:35.160]  It's not a question, a comment.
[52:35.480 --> 52:41.900]  I had heard that you're also able to be tracked by the way that you type.
[52:41.900 --> 52:42.900]  I had information.
[52:42.940 --> 52:48.120]  I called into the computer show one time and they didn't seem to take to it, so I discarded.
[52:48.300 --> 52:51.140]  So I'm not giving all of it because I kind of tossed it away.
[52:51.140 --> 52:56.200]  But just wanted to mention that just even the way you're typing can be...
[52:56.200 --> 52:57.060]  you can be...
[52:57.060 --> 52:59.080]  you are detected just by that.
[52:59.240 --> 52:59.740]  There's a way...
[52:59.740 --> 53:00.860]  That's pretty scary too.
[53:01.120 --> 53:11.320]  Well, that is something that is possible to a degree because linguists can just say, look at someone's writing style, how they word things, where they punctuate things, what kind of words they generally choose.
[53:11.440 --> 53:12.420]  I think she means the speed with which you type the actual pattern.
[53:12.420 --> 53:16.680]  But if you mean the speed, then you need some software on the machine that's actually paying attention to that.
[53:16.760 --> 53:19.520]  And unless you have something there, that wouldn't really happen.
[53:19.520 --> 53:23.240]  You should also, to defeat that occasion, just tie one hand behind your back.
[53:24.000 --> 53:25.440]  It confuses the software that way.
[53:25.460 --> 53:33.860]  There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with pattern detection in terms of figuring stuff out and identifying people, identifying keystrokes, things like that.
[53:34.440 --> 53:38.460]  I mean, you know, it's very, you know, a lot of things break down into patterns.
[53:38.460 --> 53:41.000]  And if you have those patterns and they're unique enough...
[53:41.000 --> 53:42.380]  It's not hard to find some of these patterns.
[53:42.380 --> 53:54.400]  I saw a really cool research project today that basically used, if you tap on your arm in different locations, and they had a sensor, like a microphone pickup, they can identify what part of your arm you were tapping on.
[53:54.580 --> 53:59.580]  So that would be used to have, say, you could project the display on your arm and press on different parts as buttons.
[53:59.800 --> 54:00.300]  Oh my God.
[54:00.620 --> 54:06.100]  And, you know, and that's just using the acoustic pattern of, if I hit it here, it's going through this bone and this skin and this muscle.
[54:06.100 --> 54:07.920]  So how long do you think it'll be before we're doing that?
[54:08.760 --> 54:09.880]  It looked really cool.
[54:10.040 --> 54:10.800]  I want to do it tomorrow.
[54:11.020 --> 54:11.780]  I mean, it was neat.
[54:11.880 --> 54:14.020]  Well, we'll see in 10 years if we're all tapping our arms.
[54:14.020 --> 54:16.020]  Well, it's a display that you're carrying with you everywhere.
[54:16.240 --> 54:17.280]  Or an interface, rather.
[54:17.440 --> 54:17.920]  Last call.
[54:18.200 --> 54:19.800]  Good evening, you're on off the hook.
[54:21.460 --> 54:22.140]  Speak up, please.
[54:23.680 --> 54:25.180]  Okay, maybe we'll get another call then.
[54:25.620 --> 54:26.800]  Let's make this one the last call.
[54:26.860 --> 54:27.800]  Good evening, you're on off the hook.
[54:27.960 --> 54:28.240]  Hi.
[54:28.440 --> 54:28.640]  Hi.
[54:30.300 --> 54:36.720]  Yes, but this is a different comment about the keyboard detection.
[54:37.200 --> 54:53.900]  It's known that anybody who does Morse code develops their own individual styles so that people who are receiving Morse code can tell who is sending the message by the way they send it.
[54:54.200 --> 54:55.400]  It's individual.
[54:55.400 --> 54:55.580]  Sure.
[54:56.640 --> 54:57.420]  Okay, good point.
[54:57.540 --> 54:57.800]  Thank you.
[54:58.020 --> 54:59.880]  But that's one call per show.
[55:00.040 --> 55:01.760]  Because you're keeping somebody else from getting on that way.
[55:01.960 --> 55:02.760]  Let's do one more.
[55:02.880 --> 55:03.180]  Good evening.
[55:03.280 --> 55:04.000]  You're on off the hook.
[55:04.580 --> 55:04.900]  Yes.
[55:05.640 --> 55:06.280]  Not you.
[55:06.440 --> 55:06.800]  Yes, Bernie.
[55:06.900 --> 55:07.540]  Go ahead, make it quick.
[55:07.540 --> 55:19.460]  I just want to say, I think she was leading up to the fact that someone can have a microphone and listening to how you type on a keyboard and actually decode what you're typing by the sound of the different keystrokes.
[55:19.520 --> 55:24.140]  Like if you hit the letter T, it might sound different than hitting the letter R just by the echoes and so forth.
[55:24.140 --> 55:24.360]  Right.
[55:25.000 --> 55:28.840]  Pattern detection is really fascinating and has a lot of privacy implications.
[55:29.120 --> 55:29.400]  It is.
[55:29.460 --> 55:32.820]  But I'd really like to give last word to one more caller who has not called before.
[55:32.920 --> 55:33.160]  Good evening.
[55:33.320 --> 55:34.280]  You're on off the hook.
[55:34.280 --> 55:35.760]  Hey, hi, Emmanuel.
[55:36.100 --> 55:37.580]  I got cut off earlier.
[55:37.580 --> 55:38.120]  I'm sorry.
[55:38.140 --> 55:38.980]  I was on a cell phone.
[55:39.500 --> 55:45.340]  Listen, one correction on the story about the school district.
[55:45.560 --> 56:02.900]  I believe that if, and you can check this if I'm wrong, but I believe that most of the stories I see that the school district only turned on the cameras to locate missing laptops, laptops that have been reported stolen.
[56:03.640 --> 56:04.340]  That's not true.
[56:04.560 --> 56:12.280]  And they did not just randomly push a button and watch people do it.
[56:12.380 --> 56:13.760]  Okay, Bernie, you say that's not true.
[56:13.820 --> 56:15.000]  You're going to have to make that very, very quick.
[56:15.160 --> 56:27.180]  The student's family who's suing the school district, his laptop had never been stolen and pictures of him were taken of him holding a Mike and I candy, which they thought was a pill, and they started to discipline him for having drugs.
[56:27.360 --> 56:27.680]  Okay.
[56:27.680 --> 56:28.860]  So his laptop was never stolen.
[56:29.020 --> 56:32.000]  We're going to have to leave that as the last word, but thanks for that call.
[56:32.000 --> 56:33.060]  Thanks to everybody who called in.
[56:33.180 --> 56:35.540]  Reminder, 2600 meetings this Friday.
[56:36.460 --> 56:38.680]  Please don't go to the 2600 website for April Fools.
[56:38.780 --> 56:39.680]  We'll just embarrass ourselves.
[56:40.800 --> 56:48.100]  And also, if you have a song about computers you'd like to send to us, preferably if you're a musician yourself, we'd like to give you some air time.
[56:48.100 --> 56:54.580]  We're going to play something tonight, which is, I guess, a song like that by Blood of Tiger Cat.
[56:55.000 --> 56:56.080]  It's all about Facebook.
[56:56.080 --> 56:57.440]  We'll see you next week.
[56:57.520 --> 56:59.100]  OTH at 2600.com.
[56:59.260 --> 56:59.460]  Good night.
[56:59.460 --> 57:07.680]  It used to be a special place for all my college friends.
[57:08.420 --> 57:16.040]  A sanctuary in cyberspace, but every love story ends.
[57:16.040 --> 57:17.020]  Facebook.
[57:17.400 --> 57:23.320]  Why'd you have to go and lose your exclusivity?
[57:24.700 --> 57:28.480]  Now all my nightmares have come true.
[57:29.040 --> 57:32.120]  My mom just friended me.
[57:33.560 --> 57:37.960]  Since she joined, she spends all her time checking my newsfeed.
[57:38.180 --> 57:42.900]  My interests are no longer bubble butts and sticky weed.
[57:43.080 --> 57:47.680]  She whacked my ass on mafia wars and fixed her, you got mail.
[57:47.920 --> 57:52.340]  She washed the colors with the whites and posted laundry fail.
[57:52.480 --> 57:53.260]  Girls now!
[57:53.540 --> 57:55.180]  My mom's on Facebook.
[57:55.600 --> 57:58.360]  She found a new way to nag me.
[57:58.560 --> 57:59.980]  My mom's on Facebook.
[57:59.980 --> 58:03.260]  Comment, tweet, and look friends, tag me.
[58:03.420 --> 58:04.800]  My mom's on Facebook.
[58:05.660 --> 58:08.000]  She only got it to stalk me.
[58:08.140 --> 58:09.520]  My mom's on Facebook.
[58:10.180 --> 58:13.060]  My childhood photos outclocked me.
[58:14.300 --> 58:16.280]  My wall is...
[58:17.520 --> 58:25.220]  It used to be a special place for all my college friends.
[58:25.760 --> 58:33.480]  A sanctuary in cyberspace, But every love story ends.
[58:34.480 --> 58:40.740]  Why'd you have to go and lose your exclusivity?
[58:42.300 --> 58:45.920]  Now all my nightmares have come true.
[58:46.280 --> 58:49.600]  My mom just friended me.
[58:51.260 --> 58:55.420]  Since she joined, she spends all her time checking my newsfeed.
[58:55.420 --> 59:00.360]  My interests are no longer bubble butts and sticky weed.
[59:00.520 --> 59:05.100]  She whacked my ass on mafia wars and fixed her, you got mail.
[59:05.400 --> 59:09.820]  She washed the colors with the whites and posted laundry fail.
[59:09.940 --> 59:10.520]  Girls now!
[59:11.000 --> 59:12.600]  My mom's on Facebook.
[59:13.200 --> 59:15.840]  She found a new way to nag me.
[59:16.060 --> 59:17.400]  My mom's on Facebook.
[59:18.300 --> 59:20.600]  Comment, tweet, and look friends, tag me.
[59:20.600 --> 59:22.260]  My mom's on Facebook.
[59:22.720 --> 59:25.440]  She only got it to stalk me.
[59:25.600 --> 59:27.040]  My mom's on Facebook.
[59:27.860 --> 59:30.440]  My childhood photos outclocked me.
[59:31.640 --> 59:33.860]  My wall is not for email.
[59:33.860 --> 59:36.080]  Mom, you'll never get it right.
[59:36.080 --> 59:39.200]  And gifted me some sexy lips.
[59:39.240 --> 59:40.980]  Don't mean a kiss goodnight.
[59:41.320 --> 59:44.020]  She keeps on adding on my friends.
[59:44.140 --> 59:45.960]  They just think she's a joke.
[59:46.340 --> 59:50.560]  Except for Steve who says that she's a mom he'd like to pose.
[59:50.680 --> 59:51.420]  She's a milk!
[59:51.620 --> 59:55.340]  Mama read my 25 things in each and every note.
[59:55.340 --> 01:00:00.140]  Now she knows I lost a bet and hides and whacks my scroll.
[01:00:00.820 --> 01:00:05.080]  Suggest new pages every day from hugs to will and grace.
[01:00:05.300 --> 01:00:05.600]  Yeah!
[01:00:06.400 --> 01:00:07.500]  Oh, that was me.
[01:00:07.660 --> 01:00:08.540]  That was me.
[01:00:08.740 --> 01:00:10.040]  Taking all of the...
[01:00:10.040 --> 01:00:15.720]  Anyway, today is March the 31st, 2010.
[01:00:16.740 --> 01:00:19.120]  You know what that means for tomorrow is.
[01:00:19.240 --> 01:00:19.980]  But, uh, hey.
[01:00:21.260 --> 01:00:22.140]  And, uh...
[01:00:22.140 --> 01:00:23.020]  Is that tomorrow March the 37th?
[01:00:23.260 --> 01:00:23.700]  No.
[01:00:23.960 --> 01:00:25.740]  Tomorrow is, uh, April.
[01:00:25.960 --> 01:00:26.920]  The first day of April.