[00:00.000 --> 00:03.780]  The march is sponsored by the People's Organization for Progress.
[00:04.080 --> 00:09.980]  For information, call 973-801-0001.
[00:10.140 --> 00:15.000]  That's 973-801-0001.
[00:15.140 --> 00:17.080]  The Million People's March.
[00:17.280 --> 00:19.260]  Endorsed by over 100 organizations.
[00:38.480 --> 00:45.320]  And you are listening to WBAI 99.5 FM.
[00:46.820 --> 00:52.520]  It is just about 7 o'clock, and it is time for another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
[02:10.300 --> 02:11.940]  A very good evening to you.
[02:12.200 --> 02:13.760]  The program is Off the Hook.
[02:14.000 --> 02:14.360]  Rob T.
[02:14.480 --> 02:15.300]  Firefly here with you.
[02:15.900 --> 02:18.220]  I am joined in the studio today by Mike.
[02:18.460 --> 02:18.940]  Good evening.
[02:19.400 --> 02:21.280]  And on the phone we should have Bernie S.
[02:23.080 --> 02:27.020]  Greetings from the Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center.
[02:27.540 --> 02:28.960]  I didn't even know you were sick.
[02:29.100 --> 02:29.860]  What are you doing out there?
[02:31.260 --> 02:39.340]  I'm actually out on Orient Point, New York, in the north fork of Long Island, enjoying a few days off.
[02:39.660 --> 02:41.560]  And I'm looking at Plum Island.
[02:41.740 --> 02:47.760]  I'm sitting by the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security, Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center.
[02:47.980 --> 02:51.860]  But the island itself is just over the water.
[02:52.140 --> 02:55.540]  I hear all kinds of scary research, secret research goes on over there.
[02:55.660 --> 02:56.360]  Maybe not anymore.
[02:56.360 --> 02:58.060]  I think they're trying to sell it to developers.
[02:58.380 --> 02:58.820]  I don't know.
[02:58.820 --> 03:02.560]  I guess we should point out that Emmanuel and Kyle are on assignment in Alaska.
[03:03.360 --> 03:04.000]  Yes, indeed.
[03:04.100 --> 03:05.640]  That's, I think, all we're authorized to say.
[03:05.940 --> 03:08.000]  Yeah, that's about all we're allowed to say.
[03:08.120 --> 03:15.780]  They are away going to Alaska for a mission, about which I'm sure we will hear on this program at some point in the mysterious future.
[03:16.620 --> 03:18.240]  But that day is not today.
[03:19.740 --> 03:21.540]  But a lot of things... we were off last week.
[03:21.580 --> 03:23.940]  A lot of things have been going on in the world since then.
[03:26.200 --> 03:29.740]  I'd like to talk a little bit about today, for instance.
[03:30.160 --> 03:30.340]  Today?
[03:30.580 --> 03:35.620]  Yeah, this isn't a matter of sort of national news, but I think it's a bit of interest.
[03:36.680 --> 03:39.680]  And in the interest of being a grumpy old man who yells at a cloud.
[03:41.300 --> 03:48.040]  To give you a little peek behind the scenes of what goes on here at Off the Hook and at WBAI, we archive our show.
[03:48.240 --> 03:52.080]  We capture audio of it to save forever and ever and to share with you, the listener.
[03:53.180 --> 03:58.180]  So if it's not today for you, it's because of this very archive that you're able to hear it.
[03:58.300 --> 03:58.640]  Absolutely.
[03:58.660 --> 04:00.720]  If you're living in the mysterious future, that's...
[04:00.720 --> 04:04.280]  In fact, even if it is today, but it's not right now, it's because of the archive.
[04:04.720 --> 04:05.140]  Indeed.
[04:05.560 --> 04:12.960]  And what the relevance this has is, in order to make this archive, we need a blank CD, a CD-R.
[04:13.220 --> 04:17.000]  A nice trusty old form of hard media format.
[04:17.040 --> 04:18.060]  It's been around for years.
[04:18.140 --> 04:18.940]  It's nice and dependable.
[04:19.420 --> 04:20.520]  Captures high-quality audio.
[04:21.080 --> 04:23.580]  And you used to be able to get them in every corner drugstore.
[04:24.680 --> 04:26.760]  I remember when they started showing up in drugstores.
[04:26.760 --> 04:29.980]  I remember when this was a new thing, because, you know, recordable CDs.
[04:30.000 --> 04:30.580]  That was exciting.
[04:31.720 --> 04:36.260]  But today, I needed to get one before I came here to do this.
[04:36.860 --> 04:39.320]  And there were none to be found.
[04:39.960 --> 04:42.140]  I went to chain drugstores.
[04:42.160 --> 04:47.500]  I went to, you know, various shops of different types all around Upper Manhattan.
[04:47.600 --> 04:51.880]  And I found none, because apparently people don't like selling these things anymore.
[04:52.100 --> 04:52.800]  Wait, I have a question.
[04:52.920 --> 04:58.420]  Does that mean that for the people who are in the future, they're in fact not hearing us right now because we can't record the show?
[04:58.420 --> 05:00.040]  No, we did find one.
[05:00.260 --> 05:05.540]  Actually, you found a supply of CDs after I was frantically texting you in a blind panic.
[05:07.740 --> 05:12.000]  But it wasn't in a sort of standard corner shop, was it, in which you found these?
[05:13.060 --> 05:15.620]  I'm ashamed to say the name of the shop I went to.
[05:15.940 --> 05:22.460]  It's a big box consumer electronics retail store, which I don't really understand how it's still in business.
[05:22.660 --> 05:26.320]  But there happens to be a location quite near my workplace.
[05:26.320 --> 05:31.580]  So I was able to stop in there and buy some blank CDs for the benefit of our future audience.
[05:32.980 --> 05:39.660]  And so it had to be sort of one of the last remaining big box computer type stores, a specialist store.
[05:40.460 --> 05:42.280]  They're not really special.
[05:42.600 --> 05:45.680]  No, they like to think they're special, but they're not.
[05:45.800 --> 05:47.600]  So we had to resort to doing that.
[05:47.600 --> 05:53.200]  And it just sort of drove home the point to me that the cloud is winning.
[05:53.860 --> 05:54.900]  I am an old man.
[05:54.900 --> 05:59.580]  I am yelling at the cloud because hard media doesn't seem to be a thing that the average people need anymore.
[05:59.860 --> 06:00.420]  I don't know.
[06:00.540 --> 06:01.400]  What do you think, Bernie?
[06:02.720 --> 06:04.720]  Well, yeah, the format changed.
[06:04.720 --> 06:10.600]  I remember when you could buy five and a quarter inch floppy disks in stores.
[06:10.600 --> 06:18.360]  And then they disappeared for three and a half inch floppy disks, and then CD-Rs and then DVD-Rs.
[06:18.800 --> 06:27.340]  But can't you buy physical media in the form of solid state USB flash drives and SD cards and micro SD cards at these stores still?
[06:27.780 --> 06:28.780]  See, you can.
[06:28.980 --> 06:29.520]  You can.
[06:29.520 --> 06:32.560]  But we are a radio station.
[06:32.560 --> 06:42.840]  We are a radio station in a state of flux, but we are also a radio station that still is geared toward capturing things on audio-centric formats like CD.
[06:43.560 --> 06:47.520]  And so we can't really plug a USB into anything in this rack of equipment we've got here.
[06:48.220 --> 06:52.260]  And so something about this all makes me very, very sad.
[06:52.440 --> 06:54.400]  I mean, to be clear, we record an audio CD.
[06:54.640 --> 06:58.080]  This is really, you know, some amazing technology we get here.
[06:58.080 --> 07:02.640]  An audio CD, not an MP3 CD or any of that newfangled stuff.
[07:03.080 --> 07:10.200]  No, it's an audio CD, equivalent in function to any that you would buy from a CD store if such things still existed.
[07:10.220 --> 07:11.780]  I can tell you there were actually a lot.
[07:11.900 --> 07:18.960]  I was surprised at the amount of physical media for sale in this big box store I was in, including, like, software.
[07:19.280 --> 07:26.060]  You could buy, like, office software on physical media in the store, which I didn't quite realize was still a thing.
[07:26.060 --> 07:28.300]  But apparently it is.
[07:28.460 --> 07:29.820]  Yeah, that's a thing that still exists.
[07:30.040 --> 07:32.480]  It's... but, you know, it's... I don't know.
[07:32.580 --> 07:32.960]  Hard media?
[07:33.060 --> 07:33.780]  I like hard media.
[07:34.020 --> 07:38.540]  I still have shelves full of physical CDs and DVDs and things like that.
[07:38.720 --> 07:40.720]  And books, you know, paper books.
[07:41.880 --> 07:45.600]  You know, maybe I'm some kind of Luddite or something.
[07:45.760 --> 07:48.180]  But it's something that I enjoy having.
[07:48.180 --> 07:53.920]  And also, I've had enough hard drives fail where soft media has betrayed me on occasion.
[07:53.920 --> 07:59.420]  And I, you know, I like having a backup of things to go back to and still have the things that I like.
[07:59.600 --> 08:00.300]  I mean, let's be clear.
[08:00.380 --> 08:00.720]  Hey, Rob.
[08:00.980 --> 08:01.640]  Yes, Bernie.
[08:03.120 --> 08:03.960]  Go ahead, Mike.
[08:04.380 --> 08:12.860]  The reliability of the average hard drive is probably higher than the reliability of the consumer-grade CDRs that we're using right now.
[08:12.860 --> 08:18.740]  You know, so we will make a copy of this CDR onto a computer and, you know, from there onto other computers.
[08:18.960 --> 08:22.880]  And that's why we won't lose the data, not because the CDR itself is such a great format.
[08:23.940 --> 08:24.940]  This is true.
[08:25.100 --> 08:30.860]  Rob, I was going to say that I share your addiction to physical media.
[08:31.340 --> 08:36.300]  And I think June's recently informed one of our listeners that I suffer from an addiction to physical media.
[08:36.420 --> 08:37.400]  And this is true.
[08:37.400 --> 08:43.860]  So you're recording this onto a CDR in the so-called Redbook audio CD format.
[08:43.860 --> 08:44.620]  Is that what you're doing?
[08:45.180 --> 08:46.700]  That is, I believe, what we are doing.
[08:47.780 --> 08:48.080]  Aha.
[08:48.640 --> 08:59.200]  16-bit, 44 kilohertz stereo, nice and crisp and faithful to how it sounds here, where we are when we're saying it.
[09:00.480 --> 09:11.500]  So you're saying any problems with the audio for the people, the future people, are the same problems experienced by the present people, which is probably like a content problem more than a technical one?
[09:11.520 --> 09:14.180]  We can't blame it on the CD if we say something stupid?
[09:15.140 --> 09:17.300]  I'm still willing to blame it on the CD in that case.
[09:18.120 --> 09:18.720]  All right.
[09:19.740 --> 09:23.700]  But, you know, so this is just something that I have a lot of feelings about.
[09:23.840 --> 09:25.320]  And I've had this discussion with many people.
[09:25.460 --> 09:28.420]  Some are deathly against physical media.
[09:28.420 --> 09:29.920]  They're like, no, the cloud is the future.
[09:30.180 --> 09:31.300]  Soft media is the future.
[09:32.100 --> 09:37.680]  You know, I've had people get rid of their physical book collections and in favor of e-books and things like that.
[09:37.720 --> 09:50.380]  And I don't know if I'd like to know what what you folks out there think about this OTH at 2600.com about where sort of this is the the the the the concept of the personal library is going.
[09:50.620 --> 09:51.500]  Is it hard or soft?
[09:51.680 --> 09:54.660]  So I still buy physical books from time to time and read them even.
[09:54.660 --> 10:01.400]  And but audio CD, I mean, I actually received an audio CD recently for the first time in quite a while.
[10:01.680 --> 10:13.040]  And the only thing I could think to do with it was to plug it into my computer to like dig the USB CD drive out of the closet, plug it into the computer and just rip the CD into digital media.
[10:13.380 --> 10:16.900]  Do you actually like listen to your old CDs?
[10:16.900 --> 10:20.640]  You put them in an audio CD player and press the play button?
[10:20.980 --> 10:24.820]  You know, I think I think you might have caught me out here because no, I do.
[10:24.820 --> 10:27.960]  I do still buy CDs and I do still add to my library.
[10:28.080 --> 10:30.400]  But yeah, I do take the CDs that I buy.
[10:30.520 --> 10:31.320]  I rip them to digital.
[10:31.560 --> 10:39.000]  Then I put the original on a shelf where it will gather dust unless something happens to my to my copy to my soft copy.
[10:40.580 --> 10:44.740]  All right, whatever, whatever makes you happy.
[10:46.020 --> 10:48.320]  This off the hook is about letting people be happy.
[10:48.740 --> 10:48.900]  Yeah.
[10:49.180 --> 10:51.540]  So, you know, that that was that was my little rant.
[10:51.620 --> 10:56.620]  I think I thank you guys for helping me get that out of my system as much as I need to.
[10:56.820 --> 10:59.700]  But moving on there, there are quite a few things going on this week.
[11:01.120 --> 11:02.060]  What's what's on the top?
[11:02.180 --> 11:03.380]  What's on the top of the stack there, Mike?
[11:03.380 --> 11:10.560]  Yeah, I get the story from Europe about freedom of parent panorama, which is not a phrase that I'm really used to.
[11:10.660 --> 11:13.560]  It's actually something that we have in the United States, more or less.
[11:14.400 --> 11:35.100]  But a thing that I learned is that if you take a photograph of the Eiffel Tower and publish that, you know, on your own website at night in particular, when it is lit up, then you have committed something that is illegal under French law, because the copyright in the lighting display will be violated by your photograph,
[11:35.400 --> 11:36.360]  which seems insane to me.
[11:36.620 --> 11:38.180]  The copyright of the lighting display.
[11:38.380 --> 11:38.520]  Yeah.
[11:38.740 --> 11:42.760]  That is how they shine their lights on things that are visible from a public vantage point.
[11:43.100 --> 11:43.480]  Yeah.
[11:43.620 --> 11:45.400]  They're claiming copyright protection on that.
[11:45.400 --> 11:45.400]  Yeah.
[11:45.540 --> 11:52.160]  And it is only because the Eiffel Tower is an old building that it itself is immune from copyright under French law.
[11:52.420 --> 11:56.200]  And there's some other countries, architecture can be copyrighted.
[11:56.360 --> 12:06.260]  So if you go to Iceland and take a picture, they have a big church downtown, which is sort of the name is I'm going to pronounce wrong, but it's something like the Hallgrimskirkjell.
[12:06.700 --> 12:18.240]  And if you take a picture of that, which I've done, and it's not a very good picture, but if I wish to distribute this picture commercially, so under Icelandic law, it has to be commercial use to be illegal.
[12:18.420 --> 12:24.340]  Under French law, it's any use at all that's illegal, but it's just a building.
[12:24.480 --> 12:25.100]  It's a giant building.
[12:25.240 --> 12:26.560]  It's probably the biggest building in the city.
[12:27.120 --> 12:34.100]  And if you take a picture of it, then the people who built the building, however many years ago, claim to have copyright over it.
[12:34.240 --> 12:38.480]  And well, do have copyright over it because Icelandic law controls what goes on in Iceland.
[12:39.000 --> 12:41.300]  And so I have a map of Europe in front of me.
[12:44.260 --> 12:49.640]  And France has the most restrictive laws, as does Italy and Greece and Belgium.
[12:50.640 --> 12:57.180]  There is slightly less restrictive laws, but still restrictive in Iceland, as we said.
[12:57.420 --> 13:00.040]  And, you know, I don't know.
[13:00.360 --> 13:03.660]  And some of the Baltic countries, and I'm terrible.
[13:03.820 --> 13:06.380]  I can't really tell you which one's which from this unlabeled map.
[13:06.800 --> 13:11.320]  But this seems kind of nutty to me.
[13:11.560 --> 13:12.300]  It does.
[13:12.540 --> 13:21.060]  I remember there being some sort of kerfuffle, maybe seven, eight years ago or so, where that issue was attempted in this country.
[13:22.060 --> 13:28.780]  Sort of, I think it was the Flatiron building downtown actually was trying to claim copyright over photographs of the building.
[13:28.860 --> 13:32.440]  The owners of the building were trying to claim copyright in other people's photographs that showed their building.
[13:33.040 --> 13:46.080]  And if I remember correctly, that fell out on the side of sanity, in which they did not have ultimate control over their own, over photos of their building that other people took.
[13:46.080 --> 13:49.580]  This is one bit of the copyright world where the U.S.
[13:49.700 --> 13:56.020]  seems to be for now on the same side, although I'm sure that there is someone working to change that right now.
[13:56.280 --> 14:07.140]  Yeah, I'm sure there are people in this country looking at this story coming out of Europe with, you know, nice big bloodthirsty eyes going, you know, starting to think about how they could enact something like that here.
[14:07.560 --> 14:08.600]  But so there is a...
[14:08.600 --> 14:09.040]  Mike...
[14:09.040 --> 14:09.900]  Sorry, go ahead, Bernie.
[14:09.900 --> 14:13.080]  Mike, I had a question for you about this new law.
[14:14.560 --> 14:15.480]  Would this...
[14:15.480 --> 14:41.660]  I'm guessing this might be a reach by people who do the lighting on Eiffel Tower to prevent companies that sell postcards or make movies from featuring a scene of the Eiffel Tower at night in that movie or postcard or book or advertising photo without paying them a licensing fee?
[14:41.800 --> 14:43.120]  Is that what this is all about?
[14:44.280 --> 14:48.420]  I don't know the reasoning behind this law besides to...
[14:48.420 --> 14:52.080]  I'm sure someone wants to make money and they think they can do it this way, but I want to be clear.
[14:52.220 --> 14:54.760]  We're talking about existing law in these countries.
[14:54.760 --> 14:57.240]  This is not some theoretical proposal up for debate.
[14:57.240 --> 15:07.340]  This is the law in France right now prevents you from publishing photographs of the lighting display of the Eiffel Tower or public artworks of any sort.
[15:07.540 --> 15:10.160]  It's not just a special law for the Eiffel Tower.
[15:10.980 --> 15:21.120]  But the reason this is in the news is because there's this weird phenomenon in Europe where they have more than one party, more than two parties even in a lot of countries.
[15:21.260 --> 15:21.960]  That's madness.
[15:22.180 --> 15:22.680]  It's crazy.
[15:22.680 --> 15:32.500]  And one of the parties is the German Pirate Party, and they have a representative in the European Parliament.
[15:32.640 --> 15:37.240]  Her name is Julia Herrera, another name I'm pronouncing wrong.
[15:37.440 --> 15:50.860]  But she somehow managed to get appointed to write the new EU copyright policy, which is, I don't know, insanely awesome.
[15:50.860 --> 15:53.580]  There's actually a pirate in charge of writing this policy.
[15:53.740 --> 15:53.820]  Yeah.
[15:54.160 --> 15:57.400]  There's a picture of her right now, right in front of me.
[15:57.720 --> 16:02.880]  Our audience can't see it, but the photograph is licensed under the Creative Commons BY license.
[16:03.100 --> 16:04.920]  So we could republish it if we wanted.
[16:06.700 --> 16:08.760]  And so she is...
[16:08.760 --> 16:16.260]  One of the things in this proposal, which has a chance to actually get passed, is to harmonize EU copyright law.
[16:16.260 --> 16:21.420]  And normally when you say something like harmonize EU legislation, it's like bad for everyone involved.
[16:22.300 --> 16:29.380]  But there's a proposal in the European Parliament right now to harmonize European Parliament...
[16:29.380 --> 16:41.760]  I'm sorry, to harmonize copyright law across Europe in a way that would actually protect people's freedom to take a photograph of a public building or something on the street in public and, you know, post it on their personal website.
[16:41.760 --> 16:50.400]  Or if it's public, you know, if it's a public park or something, to sell a postcard of it without paying the landscaper who originally made the park.
[16:50.740 --> 16:52.900]  And I think this is pretty cool.
[16:53.580 --> 17:03.560]  So if you're in Europe and you have a MEP, as they're called, a member of the European Parliament, then you should write them a letter and tell them to support this legislation, in my view.
[17:03.560 --> 17:04.080]  Indeed.
[17:04.340 --> 17:08.680]  And maybe if you're in Europe, keep an eye on your local pirates, because apparently they're up to some interesting stuff.
[17:09.440 --> 17:09.580]  Yeah.
[17:10.440 --> 17:19.220]  There's also... and actually what's kind of lovely is that the... there's also some MEPs from Sweden, the Swedish Pirate Party.
[17:19.780 --> 17:22.360]  I think they were the first to be in the European Parliament.
[17:22.560 --> 17:28.360]  And they are criticizing the proposals written by their fellow pirates from Germany as too conservative and more of the same.
[17:28.980 --> 17:36.120]  I don't know exactly... I guess it's because it just is... it makes these sort of nice tweaks to the system, rather than abolishing it entirely.
[17:37.200 --> 17:43.820]  But... but I love that there can be a debate where that's a position that one person takes.
[17:44.160 --> 17:44.860]  That's pretty cool.
[17:44.980 --> 17:50.200]  I wonder if the pirates disagreeing with each other, they now have to fire at each other with cannons until one of them is victorious.
[17:50.460 --> 17:52.280]  And that's... I don't know.
[17:52.380 --> 17:54.220]  I think they use, like, internet cannons.
[17:54.220 --> 17:55.500]  It's a lot safer.
[17:55.500 --> 17:55.560]  Sure.
[17:56.140 --> 18:00.020]  And, you know, I'm getting a lot of the information here from this article on Medium.
[18:00.040 --> 18:03.900]  And for some reason, the author's name did not print out when I printed it.
[18:04.100 --> 18:07.480]  But there's a lot of lovely photos.
[18:08.940 --> 18:12.040]  Belgium has these kinds of strict copyright laws that we're talking about.
[18:12.200 --> 18:17.640]  So there's a photograph of the famous atomium structure in Brussels, except you're not allowed to publish such a photo.
[18:17.640 --> 18:24.720]  So they've very thoughtfully blacked out the location where the sculpture itself would be.
[18:24.940 --> 18:28.480]  So you know that there's something there, but you don't really know what it is.
[18:28.660 --> 18:35.800]  So that is the... and that is apparently the photograph on Wikimedia of this sculpture, because they can't publish a real photograph.
[18:36.060 --> 18:39.040]  Well, it's a real photograph, but they can't publish an unedited photograph.
[18:39.320 --> 18:40.820]  There's something very dystopian about this.
[18:40.820 --> 18:45.580]  Like, we can't show you this on the radio, more's the pity, but yeah, it is very sort of looming.
[18:45.900 --> 19:01.740]  It's, you know, you can see this picture of the landscape, but where this work of art would be, there's instead just a big black blob in the shape of the artwork that's blocking it out exactly, which is... it kind of sends chills up my spine.
[19:02.840 --> 19:09.160]  I mean, it's a really lovely piece of art, ironically enough, making a statement about copyright itself, this photograph.
[19:09.420 --> 19:13.440]  But we're not able to see the underlying art, the sculpture, which is also pretty cool.
[19:13.580 --> 19:17.260]  I've seen photographs being in the United States where such photographs can be displayed.
[19:17.560 --> 19:22.640]  And to give credit where it's due, the author of this piece is Owen Blacker on Medium.com.
[19:24.000 --> 19:30.000]  Yeah, no thanks to Medium's print button team, which didn't think the author's name was an essential piece of information.
[19:30.000 --> 19:39.120]  Well, no one makes things that print out well anymore because, again, hard media, and I'll just go back onto that rant again, or we could move on to something else that's going on in the world.
[19:41.420 --> 19:48.280]  There is actually an interesting change today, not today, yesterday, that came out of Australia.
[19:50.820 --> 19:54.680]  So it came out... I mean, because it's already tomorrow in Australia, so...
[19:54.680 --> 19:58.400]  Actually, it was the day before yesterday in Australia, so I think it was maybe Wednesday last week.
[19:58.400 --> 20:03.640]  No, it was on the 22nd in Australia, whatever day that fell on or what happened.
[20:03.720 --> 20:05.780]  But they've passed controversial new legislation.
[20:05.780 --> 20:11.560]  This story comes from Torrent Freak, which allows for overseas, quote, pirate, unquote, sites to be blocked at the ISP level.
[20:11.560 --> 20:32.520]  So basically, the gist of this legislation, which has been passed, is that if sites that are not located in Australia are deemed to be facilitating or enabling piracy, the Australian ISPs will now, I guess, be expected to block them at the ISP level from their customers.
[20:33.660 --> 20:48.080]  Following intense pressure from entertainment industry groups, you know, those very nice people, late 2014, Australia's Attorney General George Brandes and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull asked the Cabinet to develop legislation which would allow pirate sites to be blocked at the ISP level.
[20:49.080 --> 20:59.440]  And in March 2015, the Copyright Amendment Online Infringement Bill 2015 was introduced to Parliament, and earlier this month, it received the green light following a parliamentary committee investigation.
[20:59.440 --> 21:03.760]  That legislation has been, has just been passed after three months of consideration.
[21:03.760 --> 21:05.500]  So that's the law in Australia now.
[21:06.140 --> 21:13.480]  Sites like the Pirate Bay and other sites which are deemed to be facilitating, and it uses the term facilitating without defining that legally.
[21:13.740 --> 21:27.620]  So it's one of those situations where the wording is now really vague, and they can use this to, they can apply this in all sorts of ways to all sorts of things, no matter how much they do or don't actually have to do with promoting what they would call piracy.
[21:28.340 --> 21:36.160]  So, uh, yeah, the net result is that in the months and years to come, sites like the Pirate Bay will become inaccessible by regular direct means to most local internet users.
[21:36.620 --> 21:38.460]  So, I mean, this obviously won't work.
[21:38.540 --> 21:40.240]  We should just say that at the beginning.
[21:40.380 --> 21:43.540]  But I have a lot of questions about how they want to pretend to make it work.
[21:44.000 --> 21:49.560]  Like, who nominates sites to this thing, and what happens when they inevitably make some mistakes.
[21:49.740 --> 21:51.680]  Like, of course they will make mistakes in both directions.
[21:51.680 --> 21:54.260]  They will put sites on this list that shouldn't be there.
[21:54.260 --> 21:58.940]  They will extend the scope of this block list once they've implemented it to block things that aren't.
[21:59.720 --> 22:02.620]  We'll just use the word piracy because I don't have time to argue about that.
[22:03.980 --> 22:06.840]  But, but they will also put sites that are not piracy.
[22:06.980 --> 22:10.160]  They will make mistakes because this system will be controlled by humans.
[22:10.480 --> 22:12.580]  How will those sites get off the list?
[22:12.980 --> 22:13.380]  Right.
[22:13.540 --> 22:19.060]  And it always comes down to with things like this, who's, who's in control of the list, who decides what's, uh, what's good and what's evil.
[22:19.680 --> 22:30.920]  Um, and when one of the, when one of the founding strengths of the internet is that, uh, people can decide what's good or what's evil or what's bad or what's, you know, constructive for themselves and, uh, then go on and access it.
[22:31.240 --> 22:38.240]  This is, uh, this is now basically the entire Australian ISP industry being, uh, net nannies to all their users.
[22:38.980 --> 22:44.020]  And, uh, and that's, that's kind of, uh, I mean, that, that's, uh, that's saddening.
[22:44.120 --> 22:44.460]  It's worrying.
[22:44.780 --> 22:45.680]  Um, I mean, okay.
[22:45.680 --> 22:46.740]  Take the Pirate Bay, for example.
[22:47.440 --> 22:50.680]  Um, you know, the powers that be have their own opinions of the site.
[22:50.820 --> 22:59.620]  And yes, a lot of the stuff that you would find, um, via torrents from the Pirate Bay is maybe not presented with the copyright owner's authorization, but there's a lot that is.
[22:59.780 --> 23:04.200]  There are bands that release their own work onto the Pirate Bay with, uh, with full permission.
[23:04.200 --> 23:08.240]  There are freely licensed things that are, that are up, uh, for download via BitTorrent.
[23:08.600 --> 23:20.460]  Um, there are, there are things that, uh, are inarguably okay to share, um, that, uh, that people will now have their access to blocked because basically they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater and blocking the whole site.
[23:20.920 --> 23:27.720]  And in, in addition to cases like the Pirate Bay, there's the whole, uh, thing of what other sites, what's good, what's bad, who makes these decisions.
[23:27.860 --> 23:31.020]  And yeah, it's, uh, I, I think it's pretty worrying.
[23:31.080 --> 23:31.600]  What do you think, Bernie?
[23:32.940 --> 23:47.780]  Well, I, I'd, I'd really like to, I, I think I share some of the concerns that Mike has, how, how is this going to work and how, uh, uh, is the Australian Senate or its government going to, uh, determine what, what sites should be blocked by IFPs in Australia?
[23:48.080 --> 23:49.860]  I mean, and how will they be nominated?
[23:50.080 --> 24:00.800]  I mean, I, you know, maybe I could nominate the coalition party and the labor party in, in Australia for their websites for being, uh, uh, suitable for blocking.
[24:01.000 --> 24:04.660]  I mean, what, and how, what, how's the whole process work with appealing this?
[24:04.920 --> 24:12.900]  I mean, I, it reminds me a little bit about the DMCA here, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, where the DMCA take them.
[24:13.460 --> 24:14.440]  This is different.
[24:14.560 --> 24:14.860]  This is different.
[24:15.060 --> 24:15.120]  This is different.
[24:15.120 --> 24:29.320]  People aren't going to be able to access the sites at all through their ISPs, which I think is a little different than how it is in this country, where the government, you at our customs department will just seize a domain name, um, as opposed to having it blocked at the ISP level.
[24:29.960 --> 24:33.140]  Um, so, but I guess we don't know how it's going to be implemented.
[24:33.320 --> 24:39.720]  Once, once these laws take effect, then, then the scary stuff happens, like how they actually put it into effect.
[24:40.900 --> 24:41.300]  Yeah.
[24:41.460 --> 24:50.920]  And, uh, the, the DMCA, we've had many comp, uh, uh, any, many, many, many complaints about, uh, that particular bit of legislation on this program since before I was part of it.
[24:50.920 --> 24:53.960]  Uh, and since, since basically it, uh, it came into existence.
[24:54.300 --> 25:04.920]  But even then, I think we can safely say that, uh, in general, um, the, the laws as they stand in this country, um, do put the responsibility in the hands of the end user.
[25:05.300 --> 25:14.840]  It's not the ISP's, uh, job to, I think, uh, prevent possible, uh, unauthorized activity or, or, or babysit what their users are doing.
[25:14.960 --> 25:29.380]  In fact, uh, the, the, uh, the telecom providers in this, uh, in this country historically have had, uh, the whole common carrier exemption where they can, you know, they're, they're just the people who provide the connections and they're not the ones actually doing what their users are doing.
[25:29.560 --> 25:35.520]  So they've, they've been very quick to, I think, push the, uh, responsibility onto the end user and work at it from that basis.
[25:35.520 --> 25:52.440]  But now even like, um, and I'm not agreeing with the DMCA or its implementations or anything, but even then it's still, I think a bit more sane if you're going to do something this insane to, uh, to peg it all on the individual, uh, user versus just making the ISP regulated for everyone.
[25:52.580 --> 25:59.320]  So I agree with you, Rob, but I, I, I want to give an example of something that we are calling more sane than the Australian system.
[25:59.600 --> 26:02.360]  Uh, this came to my attention this week.
[26:02.580 --> 26:06.760]  Um, there's a, a website, uh, well, people have heard of Tumblr.
[26:07.000 --> 26:10.840]  There's a blog on Tumblr, which, uh, this is an English name.
[26:10.840 --> 26:12.240]  I assume it's Hexiosis.
[26:12.440 --> 26:13.560]  I'm going to mispronounce that too.
[26:13.560 --> 26:19.240]  And it's got a bunch of animated GIFs of, of geometric shapes, mostly hexagons.
[26:19.500 --> 26:22.420]  It's, I, I'd never heard of it before, but I've been looking at it this week.
[26:22.500 --> 26:22.960]  It's pretty cool.
[26:23.600 --> 26:30.980]  Um, and the Tumblr received a DMCA claim on one of these animated GIFs.
[26:31.220 --> 26:53.120]  And what is unusual about this claim is that it purports to be from someone called Daryl Anka, uh, who he himself does not claim to have made this GIF, but he claims that, uh, Bashar, Bashir, who is a multi-dimensional space alien from a planet called Esasani made this GIF,
[26:53.360 --> 27:03.180]  um, and provides as evidence of this, a link to Bashar's store and, which does not have this GIF on it.
[27:03.600 --> 27:22.460]  Um, um, and, and so it's, this is obviously, uh, insane, but under the DMCA, in order to remain unsuitable, Tumblr is required to take this sort of nonsense seriously and take down the GIF in question.
[27:22.920 --> 27:42.580]  Um, and so Hexiosis, who is, as far as I'm aware, the actual author of the GIF wrote a pretty good, um, response to this where, where, you know, you're required to say a certain boilerplate that I hereby consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the judicial district in which my address is located.
[27:42.820 --> 27:55.280]  And I will gladly accept service of process from the person who provided the original DMCA notification or an agent of such person, especially if the agent is a space alien, um, which that last bit I haven't seen before.
[27:55.280 --> 28:04.520]  Um, but, but, you know, that would be fun if a space alien actually appeared and said they made that GIF that would be worth it just for amusement value alone, even if it was a lie.
[28:05.240 --> 28:11.980]  Um, and so this person appears to have the knowledge required to write the DMCA counterclaim.
[28:11.980 --> 28:20.840]  And I haven't checked today, but I, the, the post will probably come back and I doubt the space alien will actually file an actual lawsuit.
[28:21.080 --> 28:24.800]  Although if, if they do, and we hear about it, we'll be sure to provide an update.
[28:25.280 --> 28:31.100]  Um, well, and one thing that's great is that the content was removed.
[28:31.120 --> 28:45.600]  So the original author can't go look and see what the content was and, and, you know, right, this person knows their own stuff well enough to, to know that there's really no chance it was made by a space alien, but they can't actually look at the content to,
[28:45.600 --> 28:47.500]  to make sure that they're right in this case.
[28:48.060 --> 28:49.700]  Um, right.
[28:50.220 --> 28:56.940]  But, but, but, but the, the space aliens apparently a little bit active and has been sending these DMCA claims all around.
[28:57.200 --> 29:07.460]  And you, you know, you can find blog posts from someone who's like, you know, this is utter nonsense, this DMCA claim, but the, the other person he's, he's like, I'm 17 years old.
[29:07.500 --> 29:09.760]  I don't have the time or the resources to fight this.
[29:09.900 --> 29:14.220]  So that content is gone, gone from the internet forever on the word of a space alien.
[29:14.380 --> 29:18.940]  And this is the system we are describing rightly as more sane than the Australian one.
[29:19.700 --> 29:21.460]  Hey Mike, I have a question about this though.
[29:21.560 --> 29:35.060]  Doesn't this also, uh, create a first strike situation for the, uh, there's a three strikes thing where, uh, if you have something up on your website and, uh, um, you're accused of violating the DMCA theory.
[29:36.080 --> 29:37.020]  Um, and that's one strike.
[29:37.120 --> 29:40.580]  If there's, what happens if there's three strikes against you and is there a way to get a strike removed?
[29:40.780 --> 29:41.140]  Yeah.
[29:41.160 --> 29:49.480]  And so my understanding is that if you do file this counterclaim as Hexiosis did, then the strike sort of goes away unless the lawsuit comes back.
[29:49.740 --> 29:54.180]  Uh, and, and a lot of this is not, is by site policy, not by law.
[29:54.300 --> 30:01.340]  So I don't know all the details, but, uh, but in the case of this 17 year old who just is like, I just can't deal with this right now, that strike is there.
[30:01.460 --> 30:04.140]  And if two more space aliens appear, the whole blog is gone.
[30:04.900 --> 30:07.180]  Uh, this is, this is really worrying.
[30:07.240 --> 30:11.860]  And, uh, I, I took a look at this, uh, at this person's work, uh, Hexiosis.tumblr.com.
[30:11.960 --> 30:15.260]  That's H-E-X-E-O-S-I-S.tumblr.com.
[30:15.460 --> 30:20.600]  And the, this, this person actually is, uh, the original creator of their, their gifts.
[30:20.700 --> 30:25.120]  They're, I find them very beautiful sort of mathematically, uh, created, um, artwork.
[30:25.420 --> 30:36.460]  And it's very obviously not something that's on the site of this, uh, of this other person who claims to be, um, an agent of, uh, King Meepthor from the Cactus People or whoever this is, but that's Bashar, Bashir.
[30:36.720 --> 30:37.100]  Okay.
[30:37.340 --> 30:40.100]  Actually, the spelling is a little inconsistent in this document I'm reading.
[30:40.620 --> 30:49.440]  Uh, if it's Bashir or Bashar, but there might be a fault in the universal translator, but, uh, but yeah, this, this stuff, um, objectively is this person's own work.
[30:49.600 --> 31:01.380]  Um, and if this, uh, if the space alien, which first of all, I don't know how you can, uh, even apply our own copyright laws to space aliens because, you know, wouldn't, wouldn't they have their own jurisdictions and things, but I'm, I'm no intergalactic lawyer.
[31:01.380 --> 31:07.840]  Um, if there are any intergalactic lawyers listening to the show, we'd love to hear your expert opinion, OTH at 2600.com.
[31:08.060 --> 31:13.380]  But yeah, I've, I've been through this myself, um, with the DMCA takedown situation, not on Tumblr, but on YouTube.
[31:14.040 --> 31:16.340]  And, uh, it was, I had a video up.
[31:16.420 --> 31:18.000]  Somebody else claimed it was their property.
[31:18.060 --> 31:19.100]  It got taken down.
[31:19.140 --> 31:25.400]  I got the copyright strike, but I filed the counter notice and, uh, asserted that it was my own and eventually it was returned to me.
[31:25.500 --> 31:29.700]  But while, while it was taken offline, I could still see it signed into my account.
[31:29.700 --> 31:39.320]  So I knew exactly what content they were talking about and could, uh, could more completely form my, uh, counter argument based on actually knowing what the, what the heck, uh, what the heck is in question.
[31:39.540 --> 31:53.520]  So, so yeah, there, there are ways to, uh, implement this insane system, insane, insane, crazy, go nuts system that, uh, that we've got that are a little bit more functional than, uh, than it seems what Tumblr's doing here.
[31:54.300 --> 31:54.740]  Yeah.
[31:54.880 --> 32:02.920]  I mean, I agree that I guess, I guess Tumblr should spend some engineering resources on making this possible, but what, it's not really fair to them either.
[32:05.000 --> 32:05.680]  Maybe not.
[32:05.780 --> 32:06.220]  Maybe not.
[32:06.680 --> 32:11.620]  Uh, other, other things, uh, going on and, uh, you know, stories closer to earth.
[32:11.860 --> 32:15.360]  Uh, there, there are, uh, changes to domain name rules.
[32:15.640 --> 32:18.160]  Uh, this, uh, comes from, this actually came out today.
[32:18.580 --> 32:21.260]  Um, and I, I was informed of this from several directions.
[32:21.260 --> 32:33.520]  Uh, one of them being the EFF, where, uh, domain name rules, uh, are, um, there, there are changes to the rules, uh, sort of in the mulling which could place user privacy in Jeopardy.
[32:33.700 --> 32:42.060]  Now, um, every, every domain name that's, uh, that's registered on the Internet, that's, uh, whatever.com.net.org.bike.
[32:42.260 --> 32:42.360]  .
[32:42.360 --> 32:46.340]  what have you, that, uh, that domain name is registered by somebody.
[32:46.340 --> 32:51.400]  And when somebody registers a domain, in general, they have to fill out what's called the whois for that site.
[32:51.400 --> 33:01.760]  And the who is generally contains the registrant's name, their address, telephone number, email address, and that sort of contact info.
[33:02.060 --> 33:11.040]  The idea being that if you look up a website, for those unfamiliar, if you look up a website, if you look up their who is, you could find out who runs the site, how to contact them, and so on.
[33:12.080 --> 33:19.240]  In practice, not everybody likes putting their actual real-world, where-I-live contact info out on the net for all to see.
[33:20.700 --> 33:32.740]  So, this sort of system sprang up where people could have what's known by many names, it's been called, like, Domains by Proxy, WhoisGuard, those are the brand names of a couple of them.
[33:32.860 --> 33:48.600]  But what they are, are basically you pay a couple of extra dollars when you register your domain to a service that will then put their address in the who is info for your domain and forward any contact that they receive for you back to your real info.
[33:49.240 --> 34:01.800]  So, they would forward the mail on to you, or forward the email on to you, or what have you, and the end result is that your private contact information would not be online, and you would be protected, but you would still be contactable through it.
[34:01.800 --> 34:17.360]  Now, there are those who don't like this idea, the idea that people could have Whois info that is not their own seems to be in question now and in jeopardy.
[34:17.360 --> 34:20.600]  And this comes from a press release from the EFF.
[34:20.920 --> 34:22.820]  Fight for the future is also posted about this.
[34:23.720 --> 34:35.020]  There is a site called respectourprivacy.com that has popped up for this, that's now arguing against this legislation in the works to expose everyone's Whois data.
[34:35.020 --> 34:56.160]  Now, this is a very interesting issue for me because I think, you know, I do enjoy the idea of privacy and that not everybody has to have their information out there for everyone to see, especially if you're saying things that invite sort of, that might invite angry responses.
[34:56.160 --> 35:03.720]  There are all sorts of, I think, conceivable situations in which you might want to be able to put up a website without people knowing where you are physically living.
[35:05.720 --> 35:14.460]  But at the same time, like, actually, Emmanuel, who we were talking about this on our list, has mixed feelings about it.
[35:14.660 --> 35:17.240]  Since he's not here, I'll just say what he wrote.
[35:17.460 --> 35:18.100]  That's very kind.
[35:18.340 --> 35:18.620]  Yes.
[35:20.160 --> 35:25.840]  He says, what this article fails to mention is that you used to be able to register a site under any name you wish without paying someone for the privilege.
[35:25.840 --> 35:31.380]  The way it's set up now makes Whois virtually useless as every site seems to show up with the same registration info.
[35:31.500 --> 35:37.420]  He's talking about the info for these services that will insert themselves as the middlemen and put their info up for you.
[35:38.760 --> 35:46.720]  He goes on, it's important to know something about who's running a site as this, quote, anonymity is often used as a shield by companies or organizations that don't want certain affiliations to be known.
[35:47.040 --> 35:47.560]  Okay, fair enough.
[35:48.660 --> 36:00.320]  Emmanuel goes on, I'm in favor of registrants being able to use the alias of their choice, along with some sort of geographical info, not a mailing address, rather than simply hiding behind some company selling privacy or being forced to reveal their private info.
[36:02.340 --> 36:03.300]  So, I don't know.
[36:03.400 --> 36:08.880]  This seems to be, you know, this seems to be an issue with a lot of ins and outs.
[36:08.960 --> 36:10.240]  What do you guys think, Mike?
[36:10.440 --> 36:15.300]  I mean, so clearly there's like definitely some money grab going on by the domain privacy companies.
[36:15.640 --> 36:17.280]  I don't really know what I feel about that.
[36:17.280 --> 36:21.780]  But let's be clear that for large enough entities, this privacy is already available.
[36:21.780 --> 36:27.380]  If you are the CEO of Viacom, for instance, your home address is not in who is.
[36:28.140 --> 36:44.840]  If you wish to shield the fact, you know, that you own a domain and you have enough money, you can form an LLC or something, which costs maybe $1,000, and have that LLC be the owner of the domain and use a law firm or something address.
[36:44.840 --> 36:49.020]  So, if you are wealthy enough, you can have privacy.
[36:49.340 --> 36:57.060]  The question is, if we will continue to allow people who are able to afford maybe a couple bucks a year to have privacy, and there's some worrying questions there.
[36:57.880 --> 36:58.320]  Yeah.
[36:58.540 --> 36:59.320]  Bernie, what do you think?
[37:00.300 --> 37:04.260]  I've found it's really not that easy to obtain that privacy either.
[37:04.340 --> 37:10.020]  There's some of these third-party companies like, for instance, Domains by Proxy, which is owned by GoDaddy.
[37:11.640 --> 37:21.900]  Companies like them and their ilk will readily divulge the domain owner's contact information with simply a subpoena.
[37:22.260 --> 37:29.520]  It doesn't have to be a traditionally created subpoena.
[37:29.520 --> 37:35.860]  But I think there are a couple of registrars, aren't there, Mike, that you can register a domain name using Bitcoin?
[37:36.480 --> 37:42.220]  I hate it that people have to stand on their head to anonymously register domain name.
[37:42.220 --> 38:00.540]  You know, whistleblowers and a lot of other people that want to bring important information to the public's eyes should be able to do that without facing serious blowback by the parties that they may have angered by releasing what really may be public information.
[38:00.540 --> 38:09.280]  I mean, it's always possible to lie in a domain who is, and I don't encourage anyone to lie, but it is a thing that's been known to happen.
[38:10.300 --> 38:26.860]  There was actually a really funny thing that happened when one of, I think it was one of the Yes Men's early stunts, where they registered a domain in the name of the, like, the son of the head of the WTO or something like that, because they didn't want to put their own name and address on it.
[38:26.860 --> 38:36.800]  But then what happened was that whoever, whatever fake name they use, like, sent a fax to the register being like, hello, I am this name, it says right here, I own this domain, please give me control over it.
[38:37.000 --> 38:41.180]  And, and of course, that did work in that case, because, well, they own the domain.
[38:42.960 --> 38:47.820]  So, yeah, it would be cool for people to be able to be honest and still have some privacy.
[38:49.220 --> 39:04.100]  Yeah, and that's a, that's a funny thing, because historically, you know, going back to the early days of the web, people have basically been known to put whatever they wanted in the who is info, whether it be their actual address or just jokes or, or what have you.
[39:04.100 --> 39:21.060]  But, um, when it comes to, um, speech that maybe, that maybe, uh, people would have a problem with, one of the things that, uh, that I, that I remember hearing way back about, uh, happening was, um, people would complain to a registrar that, oh, this person running this website that I don't like has fake info in there,
[39:21.260 --> 39:23.960]  who is, therefore you should, uh, deactivate the domain.
[39:23.960 --> 39:35.140]  And in cases that has worked, um, I get, uh, I have domains registered and I get, uh, notes every now and then from the registrar just, just, uh, reminding me that, oh, by the way, you're supposed to have your real info, uh, written in your, who is.
[39:35.340 --> 39:47.920]  And it's, uh, it's funny because it seems to be something they're, they're, uh, it seems to be something that they think is important, but of course my registrar also sells the, uh, service to obscure this info if I, if I, uh, so choose.
[39:49.360 --> 39:59.540]  So, yeah, it's, uh, it's kind of, it's kind of, uh, uh, worrying because it's basically the equivalent of, um, you know, if you know an address of, uh, of a house, you can find out who lives there.
[39:59.840 --> 40:00.660]  That's not difficult.
[40:00.880 --> 40:09.500]  Historically, even before the web, you could go to the library and find the, what was called the Coles directory and, uh, track down who lived in a house or whose name was on the deed or, or whatever.
[40:09.500 --> 40:23.740]  And so, you know, there, there's a balance to be struck between, I think, protecting the rights of, uh, free speech of people who, um, would write certain things on, on the, uh, on the internet, uh, you know, who don't want to put themselves at, uh, at risk in real life.
[40:23.840 --> 40:25.180]  And I, I think that's worth protecting.
[40:25.360 --> 40:33.660]  I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned the real estate case because this is a precisely a case where this level of privacy is available to the wealthy.
[40:33.660 --> 40:40.840]  Um, I do not know who owns the building in which I live because it is owned by address of my building LLC.
[40:41.280 --> 40:46.300]  And, uh, I don't know who owns that LLC and, and maybe there's a way to find out, but I haven't spent a lot of time on it.
[40:46.820 --> 40:48.540]  Um, they know who I am.
[40:48.660 --> 40:49.680]  They know where I live.
[40:49.840 --> 40:51.700]  Uh, they know my bank account number.
[40:51.820 --> 40:54.960]  There's a lot, there's a lot of, uh, imbalance in this equation.
[40:55.580 --> 41:01.620]  And, um, it, it, it would be cool to, to balance that in so many cases.
[41:01.620 --> 41:02.160]  It would.
[41:02.300 --> 41:08.500]  Uh, another, another example of, uh, I think an equivalence was, uh, you know, having a non-published phone number back in the days of telephone books.
[41:08.600 --> 41:08.960]  Remember those?
[41:09.640 --> 41:10.480]  Um, you could...
[41:10.480 --> 41:10.940]  The what?
[41:11.200 --> 41:11.560]  Now?
[41:11.940 --> 41:14.260]  It was, it was a big book full of telephone numbers.
[41:14.900 --> 41:24.860]  And in order to, uh, in order to not be listed in the phone book, the, the, you know, you had that option available to you, but you had to pay the phone company some extra money for it.
[41:25.540 --> 41:31.880]  Um, and, uh, basically the idea there was that, uh, your telephone number was something that you did have the right to buy privacy for.
[41:32.300 --> 41:43.840]  Um, but, uh, I guess we, um, ICANN is now considering the, uh, the issue of whether we should have the right to buy privacy for our web domains, which are basically the online equivalent to an address, to a physical address or a phone number.
[41:44.520 --> 41:47.020]  And, uh, I think this is...
[41:47.020 --> 41:49.060]  But, uh, isn't this about, isn't this about commercial?
[41:49.420 --> 41:55.960]  Isn't this sort of, uh, this proposed change pertaining specifically to commercial, um, websites?
[41:56.260 --> 42:01.300]  But then the direct definition of commercial websites could be, you know, anything that might have an ad on it, right?
[42:01.420 --> 42:01.600]  Right.
[42:01.900 --> 42:03.220]  Um, I mean, the, the definition...
[42:03.220 --> 42:09.000]  This is another case of, uh, of a term not having so tight a legal definition that you can't misapply it all over the place.
[42:09.300 --> 42:13.560]  Um, a site could be considered commercial if you haven't, if you have any kind of ads on it.
[42:13.560 --> 42:14.300]  Google ads, whatever.
[42:14.620 --> 42:18.320]  Um, a site could be considered commercial if you're promoting your own products or services on it.
[42:18.700 --> 42:22.300]  Um, you know, it, uh, it could be taken in any, in all sorts of ways.
[42:22.440 --> 42:29.160]  So, you know, the, the commercial versus non-commercial divider really doesn't, in practice, uh, have much, uh, have much application.
[42:29.400 --> 42:33.080]  And so this, this basically puts a large chunk of, uh, what people do online at risk.
[42:36.200 --> 42:44.980]  Yeah, I mean, it's just an, another example of a rule that will be enforced, I'm sure, only when a wealthy, powerful individual or entity wants it to be enforced.
[42:45.080 --> 42:52.520]  And I almost can't get to an analysis of the actual rule because I, it's not going to be enforced evenly.
[42:53.140 --> 42:53.480]  Right.
[42:53.720 --> 43:04.260]  Um, the EFF, uh, release about this, uh, issue, which you can find on EFF.org, um, gives a couple examples of, uh, use cases in which people might not want their actual information, um, available online.
[43:04.260 --> 43:08.240]  One is, uh, somebody who runs a free community website for transgender authors.
[43:08.460 --> 43:14.450]  Um, you can understand, um, that person not wanting their, their physical address, their contact information online.
[43:15.000 --> 43:23.320]  Another is, uh, is a, this was, uh, actually a comment, um, received by ICANN, which, uh, was, uh, quote, I'm a single female and live alone.
[43:23.450 --> 43:28.740]  I don't want my personal address available to every pervert slash troll slash angered citizen that wants it after visiting my small website.
[43:28.740 --> 43:33.540]  Seemingly innocent topics like vegan cooking can spark out, can spark outrage in certain individuals.
[43:34.180 --> 43:43.160]  So, yeah, I mean, this isn't, this isn't just a matter of, like, um, important expressions, uh, versus non-important ones or, or big versus, uh, small or whatever.
[43:43.160 --> 43:51.660]  Because as anyone who's ever read the comment threads knows, people will flip their, you know, minds over minutiae, over the most ridiculous things online.
[43:51.880 --> 43:56.420]  And, yeah, some people have extra reason to keep that barrier between, uh, that and their real lives.
[43:56.420 --> 43:59.640]  So, I think we'll, we'll definitely, uh, be keeping an eye on this.
[43:59.840 --> 44:03.320]  Um, if you go to, uh, where is the site?
[44:04.060 --> 44:05.960]  You can go to EFF's website.
[44:06.100 --> 44:19.200]  Yes, you can go to the EFF's website or you could go to respectourprivacy.com where, uh, they have, uh, they have the ability there to, um, take you through phone calls or, uh, emails to the, to, uh, the people in power considering this issue right now.
[44:19.400 --> 44:22.160]  So, um, yeah, definitely worth keeping an eye on this.
[44:22.460 --> 44:25.980]  Um, apparently the, the, uh, window for a comment is very short.
[44:25.980 --> 44:27.940]  So, yeah, respectourprivacy.com.
[44:28.560 --> 44:31.500]  Uh, Bernie, do you have any news from the east?
[44:33.120 --> 44:34.140]  News from the east?
[44:34.380 --> 44:35.860]  Like the, uh, eastern part of the country?
[44:36.020 --> 44:37.480]  Or the east of Long Island?
[44:37.540 --> 44:39.060]  Aren't you east of us right now?
[44:39.180 --> 44:40.500]  You, you're in the Orient, did you say?
[44:40.500 --> 44:44.300]  I am, I am unusually, unusually east of y'all.
[44:44.880 --> 44:48.100]  I'm on the North Fork, on the very tip of the North Fork of Long Island.
[44:48.500 --> 44:51.840]  Which, which, despite having north in the name, is primarily east from here.
[44:53.160 --> 44:53.820]  This is true.
[44:53.980 --> 44:54.380]  This is true.
[44:54.820 --> 44:57.120]  You know, I have not been paying attention to any news up here.
[44:57.320 --> 44:57.500]  Oh.
[44:57.660 --> 45:03.440]  It's just kind of quiet up here, and, um, I mean, there's, uh, there's a lot of other, you know, national and international stories.
[45:03.440 --> 45:06.980]  But nothing I've heard from, uh, from, uh, out east here.
[45:07.180 --> 45:12.600]  Well, I'm, I'm, I'm from, I'm from Long Island originally, and, you know, I can confirm that there's usually no news there.
[45:12.780 --> 45:16.560]  So, uh, I look forward to your emails, OTH at 2600.com.
[45:17.200 --> 45:17.860]  Um, but...
[45:17.860 --> 45:32.940]  We did, uh, we did find that, uh, WikiLeaks, uh, uh, apparently just released, uh, hundreds of thousands of, uh, of leaked, uh, or liberated, uh, documents from the, uh, Saudi Iranian, Saudi, Saudi Arabian government.
[45:32.940 --> 45:35.560]  Saudi Arabia is in the Middle East, is it not?
[45:36.420 --> 45:36.980]  It is.
[45:37.100 --> 45:37.800]  So there you go.
[45:37.920 --> 45:38.800]  News from the East.
[45:39.060 --> 45:39.940]  Tell us more, please.
[45:41.660 --> 45:49.140]  Well, um, I, I don't know how, I mean, these documents haven't been, I may be authenticated as being Saudi, uh, government documents.
[45:49.280 --> 45:58.780]  But, uh, the Associated Press, uh, said that WikiLeaks has been publishing, uh, more than a half a million Saudi diplomatic documents to the internet.
[45:58.780 --> 46:04.220]  Um, and, um, I, I don't know what these say yet.
[46:04.340 --> 46:10.980]  They're, they're stamped as, uh, supposedly stamped as having, uh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or Ministry of Foreign Affairs stamped on them.
[46:11.660 --> 46:19.800]  Um, but, uh, I look forward to reading this, you know, as a country that, uh, that beheads far more people than any other country I'm aware of.
[46:19.800 --> 46:22.920]  Uh, I'm all for more information coming out about that.
[46:23.120 --> 46:25.760]  We look forward to your emails, OTH at 2600.com.
[46:26.420 --> 46:33.780]  Um, I mean, this is kind of interesting, uh, this story, just sort of insight into how the Saudi government works.
[46:33.940 --> 46:41.880]  They have a lot of oil money in Saudi Arabia, and I don't, I haven't actually seen anything that was, um, totally unexpected.
[46:41.880 --> 46:47.520]  But just the way they use their money to, to gain leverage is, is interesting in and of itself.
[46:47.820 --> 46:52.960]  And apparently, if you are in Saudi Arabia, you know, you're, you're forbidden from looking at WikiLeaks right now.
[46:53.100 --> 46:56.020]  Because you might learn something about your local government.
[46:56.540 --> 47:04.020]  Yeah, we can't have that, uh, in, in other WikiLeaks news, uh, they very recently, the other day, uh, actually maybe around, uh, four days ago.
[47:04.020 --> 47:18.320]  This story comes from, uh, WikiLeaks added, uh, 276,394 more leaked Sony docs to its database of, uh, documentation and, uh, private, uh, all sorts of private communications from the, uh, Sony leak that happened a few months ago.
[47:18.800 --> 47:30.340]  So, um, this is now, this, this second cache of documents has now been dumped into WikiLeaks' online search engine where you can search your way through these, uh, private Sony documents and see what they have to offer.
[47:30.340 --> 47:39.040]  I, I remember seeing, uh, one thing go by, which was, um, internal communication to the effect that, uh, Spider-Man is not allowed to be, to be gay.
[47:39.680 --> 47:47.660]  Um, you know, that, just things, uh, things like that, that, uh, happen in the, in the weird world of film production in a major studio.
[47:48.480 --> 48:04.160]  Uh, so this news from the West, uh, there was, until very recently, a law in Los Angeles where the police could come into a hotel at any time of day or night and demand to examine the hotel registry to know who's staying there and, I guess, where they're from,
[48:04.160 --> 48:05.120]  and some other information.
[48:05.460 --> 48:11.240]  But the Supreme Court in a, in a sort of rare display of, of sanity, struck that law down.
[48:11.400 --> 48:14.860]  So, now they have to get a warrant if they want to know who's staying in a hotel.
[48:15.080 --> 48:16.520]  What a crazy idea.
[48:16.780 --> 48:17.220]  A warrant?
[48:17.400 --> 48:18.040]  They have to have...
[48:18.960 --> 48:19.680]  Supreme Court.
[48:19.760 --> 48:21.500]  Is this a Supreme Court of the United States or...
[48:21.500 --> 48:22.980]  ...or the Supreme Court of California?
[48:23.280 --> 48:23.380]  Yeah.
[48:23.380 --> 48:25.620]  ... Supreme Court of the United States of America.
[48:25.620 --> 48:26.020]  Wow.
[48:26.280 --> 48:37.200]  So now hotels no longer have to abide by any state law that says they've got to keep a registry open to view by any law enforcement agency at any time?
[48:38.120 --> 48:38.600]  Right.
[48:38.780 --> 48:44.500]  I mean, and of course, probably a lot of hotels do not care so much for their guest privacy and would hand the data over.
[48:44.820 --> 48:48.140]  But, you know, a lot of credit to this hotel.
[48:48.180 --> 48:53.940]  And I'm reading the article in the Los Angeles Times, which does not appear to say the name of the hotel in question.
[48:53.940 --> 48:57.940]  Again, it's owned by Mr. Patel, is all I can tell you.
[48:58.920 --> 49:04.960]  But credit to them for fighting this law.
[49:05.160 --> 49:14.560]  I think that a lot of the laws where the government can sort of get your data at any time would be found unconstitutional under similar reasoning.
[49:14.560 --> 49:18.020]  If only the records holders and questions would bother to fight them.
[49:18.020 --> 49:25.720]  There's a blog I follow that we've mentioned a couple times before, who's really into, you know, travel privacy in general.
[49:25.900 --> 49:29.820]  And the airlines just give all your data to the government, no questions asked.
[49:29.940 --> 49:30.180]  Of course.
[49:30.400 --> 49:33.320]  And it would be wonderful to learn what would happen if they tried to stop.
[49:35.980 --> 49:36.800]  Interesting stuff.
[49:37.340 --> 49:45.080]  Well, there could be a whole new line of no-tell and motels popping up for people that want to keep their privacy.
[49:45.840 --> 49:48.260]  Or, you know, like they used to be called just motels.
[49:49.360 --> 49:51.120]  Because it wasn't a thing.
[49:51.480 --> 49:53.400]  Just hotels or motels.
[49:53.660 --> 49:59.600]  Because it was a standard thing to not have your information immediately given away, you know, on demand when you stayed somewhere.
[50:00.240 --> 50:02.560]  Or you check in as Mr. and Mr. Jones, you know.
[50:02.560 --> 50:02.960]  Yes.
[50:03.500 --> 50:03.820]  Yes.
[50:03.900 --> 50:04.720]  There's room for me and my mother.
[50:06.720 --> 50:07.600]  But, yeah.
[50:07.780 --> 50:09.280]  So, we will keep an eye on that.
[50:09.640 --> 50:10.300]  Other stuff going on.
[50:10.400 --> 50:11.460]  There's no eye to keep.
[50:11.560 --> 50:12.840]  The Supreme Court ruled.
[50:13.560 --> 50:18.160]  The Supreme Court ruled as they continue to rule sometimes.
[50:19.740 --> 50:20.620]  But, yeah.
[50:20.780 --> 50:21.240]  Moving on.
[50:21.720 --> 50:22.640]  There are...
[50:22.640 --> 50:33.800]  And I know you were talking about this, both of you guys, Mike and Bernie, about the sort of renewed, ready availability of telephone calls to Cuba now that relations are softening.
[50:34.480 --> 50:39.400]  There are news stories about things like MetroPCS adding Cuba to their international calling plans.
[50:39.560 --> 50:44.720]  Or AT&T's Cricut Wireless prepaid plans now expanding to include Cuba.
[50:45.020 --> 50:49.060]  Because we're all allowed to talk to each other again in some capacity.
[50:49.680 --> 50:54.920]  So, Bernie and I have actually a different analysis of the same facts, I think.
[50:55.540 --> 50:56.840]  So, I'm not that impressed.
[50:57.060 --> 51:03.140]  It still costs like a dollar a minute to call Cuba, which is about what it cost when Emmanuel and I went there in 2006.
[51:04.760 --> 51:09.460]  And, you know, international calling rates in general have fallen dramatically even over that time.
[51:09.580 --> 51:12.000]  They were already pretty cheap by then, but they're even cheaper now.
[51:12.000 --> 51:15.420]  You can call most of the world for less than a few cents a minute.
[51:16.220 --> 51:18.180]  So, I'm not that impressed at a dollar a minute.
[51:19.540 --> 51:22.840]  But, I do hope it's a harbinger of things to come.
[51:23.640 --> 51:23.940]  Yeah.
[51:23.940 --> 51:31.900]  I agree with Mike that calls to Cuba still cost a lot more than calling a lot of other countries.
[51:32.160 --> 51:37.320]  But, I think as the telecommunications channels open up more between the U.S.
[51:37.320 --> 51:40.920]  and Cuba, I think there's going to create more competition.
[51:41.240 --> 51:54.040]  MetroPCS, which is, I think, the prepaid division of T-Mobile, they are including 20 free minutes of calls to Cuba every month with their international calling plan, which I think is kind of neat.
[51:55.520 --> 51:59.900]  Other carriers, mobile telecoms, are charging like 99 cents a minute.
[52:00.360 --> 52:03.260]  Verizon Wireless still charges $1.99 a minute.
[52:03.340 --> 52:08.700]  But, Bernie, Bernie, Verizon Wireless still charges $1.49 a minute to call the U.K.
[52:08.700 --> 52:11.940]  So, I think we learned more about Verizon Wireless here than about Cuba.
[52:12.800 --> 52:13.320]  Absolutely.
[52:13.520 --> 52:23.440]  One thing that intrigued me about this, though, is that it becomes less expensive for people to call Cuba, maybe with landlines.
[52:24.320 --> 52:26.400]  Cuba notoriously has a restricted Internet.
[52:26.400 --> 52:32.980]  We've seen in other countries that had restricted Internet access, people find some interesting workarounds.
[52:33.360 --> 52:45.340]  How about a workaround where people could call Cuba, like an associate in Cuba, and set up a dial-up connection to the Internet by calling them, as opposed to them calling the ISP here.
[52:45.960 --> 52:53.640]  Would that then provide people with certain individuals in Cuba with less restricted Internet access on a call-by-call basis?
[52:54.060 --> 52:55.580]  My suspicion is no.
[52:55.580 --> 53:01.600]  I mean, there's a lot of restrictions on the Internet all around the world, in particular in Cuba.
[53:01.820 --> 53:06.640]  Cuba's strategy in restricting the Internet has been primarily one of cost.
[53:06.860 --> 53:10.180]  The Internet is not affordable to almost anyone in Cuba.
[53:10.420 --> 53:20.540]  And I read recently that they've opened up now like 10 free public Wi-Fi spots, which is pretty cool if you happen to be near one of those 10 and have a device capable of accessing Wi-Fi.
[53:21.220 --> 53:29.000]  But they have not traditionally put the same amount of restrictions on the Internet once you get on it as countries like China have.
[53:29.060 --> 53:30.680]  They've just made it really hard to get on.
[53:31.540 --> 53:43.960]  And I hope with the weakening of the embargo and with other things that we will build some more telecommunications cables so that Internet access can be made more affordable.
[53:43.960 --> 53:51.000]  And I think that will have a much greater impact than worrying about what exactly they do and don't censor.
[53:51.500 --> 53:53.560]  And obviously, any censorship is worrying.
[53:53.920 --> 53:56.800]  And if they care to hear my opinion, I hope they have less of it.
[53:57.160 --> 54:02.840]  But the thing that will, I think, help the most right now is just more Internet access, more cheaply.
[54:03.860 --> 54:04.440]  That'd be good.
[54:04.560 --> 54:24.160]  But, Mike, if you lived in Cuba, for instance, and you had a landline phone line, and I were to call you as opposed to you calling me, which would have been way too expensive for you if you were a Cuban, I could provide Internet access to you on a call-by-call basis by establishing a dial-up Internet connection by virtue of calling you,
[54:24.180 --> 54:25.800]  and you could access the Internet through me.
[54:25.920 --> 54:26.300]  Isn't that right?
[54:26.600 --> 54:28.300]  I guess, if you're prepared.
[54:28.560 --> 54:30.140]  I mean, you could also just read me Web pages.
[54:30.240 --> 54:31.720]  That might be faster, but...
[54:33.540 --> 54:51.740]  But, yeah, I just see, you know, we've seen similar creative workarounds in other countries, and I just think this is a trend with the embargoes, the conditions of the embargo diminishing, that more and more people will have access in Cuba to telecommunication services around the world,
[54:51.860 --> 54:56.120]  and people contacting Cuba, primarily the United States.
[54:56.120 --> 54:59.540]  Most countries can call Cuba fairly cheaply, but we can't hear for some reason.
[55:00.200 --> 55:05.100]  I mean, it's not that cheap from anywhere, is my understanding, just because there are so few cables.
[55:05.680 --> 55:08.900]  They haven't been allowed to build any to the closest big country.
[55:09.340 --> 55:11.500]  But we're just about out of time, I think.
[55:11.620 --> 55:13.500]  I can hear music playing in my ear.
[55:13.700 --> 55:14.260]  Yes, indeed.
[55:14.940 --> 55:16.320]  We are just about out of time.
[55:16.820 --> 55:17.640]  Thank you for listening.
[55:17.880 --> 55:20.460]  Send us an email, OTH at 2600.com.
[55:20.580 --> 55:23.300]  We will be back next week with another edition of Off the Hook.
[55:23.860 --> 55:25.660]  Stay tuned for the Personal Computer Show.
[55:25.940 --> 55:27.300]  For our folks, this is Rob Teeq Firefly.
[55:27.440 --> 55:27.840]  Have a good night.
[55:28.200 --> 55:29.300]  Welcome to the jail.
[55:29.880 --> 55:30.820]  Come on, what do you say?
[55:31.160 --> 55:32.420]  Come on, what do you say?
[55:44.630 --> 55:45.370]  I want you to go on.
[57:01.280 --> 57:08.520]  Listen up now girls and boys, It's time to make some noise Cause the boys are back and I're gonna raffle about some plastic toys Out the Super Smash Bros.
[57:08.640 --> 57:11.960]  sequel So fun it should be illegal Who needs real life amigos?
[57:13.760 --> 57:17.120]  One, nothing wrong with me Two, nothing wrong with me.
[57:17.280 --> 57:18.680]  Three, nothing wrong with me.
[57:18.880 --> 57:20.220]  Four, nothing wrong with me.
[57:20.380 --> 57:21.780]  Ten, something's got to give.
[57:21.980 --> 57:25.020]  Three, something's got to give.
[57:25.320 --> 57:25.480]  Yeah!
[57:48.580 --> 57:49.780]  Hey, I'm gonna run.
[57:50.020 --> 57:51.540]  We like we'll be he like party.
[57:51.700 --> 57:54.020]  Hey, I'm trying to speak to this guy.
[57:55.700 --> 57:56.180]  Maria!
[57:56.560 --> 57:59.320]  He's a big fan, fool, man, just like, Maria!
[57:59.640 --> 58:00.120]  He's really proud of what you hear.
[58:02.160 --> 58:02.640]  Maria!
[58:17.040 --> 58:22.320]  At that time, I didn't know what to do, but...
[58:22.840 --> 58:28.320]  If it's the story of the house, the truth will never change.
[58:29.600 --> 58:33.360]  I'm sorry, but I've lost it, but I can't get back.
[58:35.460 --> 58:41.800]  Until I've written, I can't get back to my mind.
[58:41.800 --> 58:44.740]  Now we are gone WE ARE TO PEOPLE!
[58:45.920 --> 58:46.060]  Is.
[58:46.060 --> 58:50.260]  You are a
[59:10.210 --> 59:20.550]  now we are- You are a now we are watching come
[59:54.630 --> 59:59.890]  The game is wear... so it is plenty in VA needs.