Or call 845-475-8781.
This has been your WBAI Community Bulletin Board.
at WBAI.org.
And the time is just about 8 p.m. on a Wednesday evening.
You're listening to WBAI 99.5 FM, WBAI.org, on the web.
And it's just about time for another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
Off the Hook.
Off the Hook.
A very good evening to you.
The program is Off the Hook.
We're Lean Studio tonight.
Rob T. Firefly here with you, and I am joined by Voltaire.
Good evening.
And we'll have a guest joining the two of us in a moment,
but of course there's so much going on.
A lot happened this past week or so,
and first we're going to talk about Hawaii.
For those of you who may not know,
a little something interesting happened in Hawaii this past Saturday
at around 8.07 local time.
People in Hawaii found themselves the recipient of warnings
on their mobile phones, emergency alerts
of the type that you only are meant to get in emergencies.
This alert warned people, warned the citizens of Hawaii,
and I'm going to read this verbatim.
Emergency alert. Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii.
Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.
For our listeners, I'd like to remind them that this is a drill, actually.
Yeah, this actually is a drill.
If you're listening to us in Hawaii, you've already had enough aggravation.
We're not here to bring you more, but we're here to talk about things.
So this happened, and, of course,
there was not actually a missile threat inbound to Hawaii.
We were not playing global thermonuclear war,
but what was actually happening was the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency
was doing one of their routine tests.
They were supposed to test the emergency alert system that they have there,
and this is done.
Apparently, one of the steps of this process, and this came out afterward,
is selecting what you want to do from a pull-down menu,
and there are multiple options on this pull-down menu.
One of them is to test the system.
One is to actually use the system to send out a real alert.
In this case, the operator selected the wrong menu option,
according to HEMA spokesman Richard Raposa
in an article in The Washington Post on Sunday.
So this raised a lot of questions.
Among the people in the sort of communications world
who are interested in not only how these alerts are set up to go out,
but what kind of fail-safes are in place,
and this has been our first real taste, I think, on a big scale
of being shown that maybe not enough fail-safes were in place
at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.
But to talk about this with us, we are joined by Trey Forgaty.
Am I pronouncing that correctly, Trey?
You got it.
Excellent.
And could you tell us a little bit about who you are
and why we're speaking to you about emergency alerts?
Sure.
I'm Director of Government Affairs at the National Emergency Number Association,
or as we like to call it, the 911 Association.
I'm also Director of Information Security Issues,
so it's my job to know a few things about how emergency systems work
across the U.S. and Canada, and also how we can better protect those
and better make sure that they work the way they're supposed to
when they're supposed to.
And in this case, they sort of didn't work when they were supposed to.
Well, the good news is that for the most part,
the system actually did work the way it was intended.
When someone selected, you know, send a ballistic missile alert,
a ballistic missile alert was sent to the majority of the people
that should have received it.
So that's the good news.
The system actually worked in that regard.
Now, the one part of the system that seems to have broken down
are the fail-safes that exist to prevent false alerts.
False alerts are not a good thing because the public comes to not rely on alerts
if they see a lot of false alerts, and so we work very hard to prevent that.
Of course.
In this case, for a couple of reasons, that didn't happen.
Now, false alerts are a concern.
Actually, it's funny this comes up because only last night,
someone I know of I think who listens to the show
had a carbon monoxide detector go off in their home
and were able to get out and safely evacuate their household.
But as he mentioned when I was communicating with him about this,
his first reaction was annoyance because we've evolved to a point
where we hear alarms all the time, car alarms and things like that,
and the immediate response now is to just get aggravated by it,
kind of ignore it, hope someone takes care of it.
But this is a system in which we are meant to have a big degree of faith
and for very good reasons.
So what actually went wrong in the equation this time?
Was it just the human part of the equation?
I think there are really two parts of the equation that went wrong here.
First is an issue that's been around for a long time.
Public safety systems, software in particular, are very low volume,
mostly proprietary systems.
There's not a lot of money to be made in selling them,
and so as a result of that, they've suffered a chronic lack
of quality user interface and user experience design.
In this case, it was really easy to click the wrong alert.
Now, we have processes in place to prevent that.
Folks are supposed to double-check their work
and make sure they've clicked the right thing before they send an alert.
In some places, it actually takes two people to originate an alert.
But in this case, you had both of those pieces that went wrong at the same time,
and unfortunately, those cross-checks, the user interface,
and the double-checking rules didn't work out in our favor,
and we didn't stop an incorrect alert.
Great.
Yeah, people, listeners to the program,
may be familiar with the whole two-keys thing from the docudrama War Games
where we had a couple of soldiers, and they each had their own key,
and they had to turn it at the same time.
But in this case, it was, and the screenshots of this were going around
among the members of the community familiar with user interface issues,
user design issues, UX,
and saying this is maybe something that's more important to put
than to just throw in two options of a pull-down menu like this
that are very close together.
So what factors go into sort of designing a system like this
to help prevent the sorts of things that we've just seen happen?
So there are two critical components of this.
First, you have to strike the right balance between the ability to easily
or quickly originate alerts when you need to,
and the ability to make sure that alerts are reliably not sent when you don't need to.
So that's the first factor that interface designers and system designers,
because it goes beyond the software, have to worry about.
The second thing is whether you implement multi-person control,
and that goes to the same balance.
Sometimes you'll have two people around, sometimes you won't.
Maintaining that's very expensive for local governments and state governments,
and so it doesn't always happen.
So in your work, how do you deal with issues like this when you're presented with them?
So my work is primarily on the 911 site, so we work with the inbound call systems.
But they suffer from all of the same issues that the alert origination software does.
Again, lack of quality UI and UX design, low volume,
so it's hard to get changes like that made,
and a lot of ingrained work practices that mean it's difficult to push through a change
in a user interface even if you know that you need it.
So a lot of our work focuses on the change management process
and the ability to introduce new software with new features like these
in a way that is not disruptive to the workflow,
but nonetheless still adds critical new features like the ability to prevent someone
from doing something you don't want them to do by accident.
And mentioning the sort of emergency number systems and 911 and things like that,
there was a story in the Wall Street Journal recently asking the question,
why can Uber find you but 911 can't?
And that goes into issues like we all have these apps on our phones now,
or most of us do, where you can pinpoint your location to a service that is sending you a car
or a pizza or things like that,
but yet 911 operators and systems seem to be working a generation behind in the technology sense.
Is this something you find to be the case?
So the reality is the 911 systems don't have control over what location data they receive.
That ultimately comes down to choices made by wireless carriers.
And the carriers have several choices between older network-based technologies,
newer handset-based technologies, and a variety of emerging systems like Metropolitan Beacon Systems
and the National Emergency Address Database,
which will be a system of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth access points that are at known locations.
So let's say I register my access point with my home address.
That can make it easier for the system to determine my location if I'm at home.
But all of those changes on the 911 side, we're simply recipients of that data.
When we request location, we get the best thing that the carrier has.
Right. And, of course, obviously with these other smartphone apps,
you're granting these other companies and entities permission to use the GPS tracking functionality on your own device
versus trying to rely on any existing infrastructure to send along this information on the technical side of things.
That's true, though we are privileged in the 911 space that during an actual 911 call,
we can get access to any location data that the carrier is able to and has chosen to take from the user's device.
So we can actually, the handset software actually automatically overrides location privacy for purposes of a 911 call
on the understanding that, look, if you're making a 911 call, you probably want to be found so that you can be helped.
Do you have access to people's IP address if they're connected over Wi-Fi?
Generally, no. For the most part, because making a 911 call if you're connected over Wi-Fi, for example,
is usually either a VoIP call or Wi-Fi calling through your carrier, which is a flavor of a VoIP call.
But typically speaking, we can't get that automatically in today's 911 systems.
We are working towards systems in the future where you can get that automatically.
And there are processes in place so that 911 systems can contact a carrier to get an IP address.
Interesting. Where do you see this going in the future?
Do you see us learning from what happened in Hawaii and taking immediate steps to address these things,
or do you see these things remaining sort of vulnerable and uncared for more than they should be?
So the user interface and user experience design issues are always going to plague public safety
so long as we use one-off, expensive, rare systems.
But we've learned some things already that can help.
So from just the Hawaii system issues, they're starting to add canned false alarm messages
that can be quickly pushed out if a false alarm is accidentally initiated.
And on the broader 911 side, we're actually moving the nation toward an all-IP, next-generation 911 system
that supports not just legacy voice, but also video and text and data and pictures
that can really enrich the ability of responders to provide services in an emergency.
How is the telecom industry working with you on this?
Because we're seeing things like lobbyists from the telecom industry basically putting off the adoption
of newer technologies or newer rules, kicking these things forward.
If I can find the story here, there was a piece of legislation that wanted to, in September 2016,
these rules were enacted by the FCC, not legislation, FCC rules,
which required telecom companies to increase their maximum message length of these emergency messages
from 90 to 360 characters to allow for clickable links to phone numbers and websites to send pictures or videos.
And these were enacted in 2016, but due to lobbying by Verizon and by the wireless telecom trade group CTIA,
this specific regulation has been kicked forward and it does not go into effect until March 2019,
which is about 30 months after the regulations were adopted.
In the world of telecom, that's actually relatively quick.
So our organization works very closely with all parts of the industry.
So the public sector, the 911 centers, the carriers, equipment vendors,
and more recently a lot of very innovative sort of software providers
who aren't really part of the traditional telecom infrastructure.
But I'll tell you this, with the tens of thousands of cell sites that there are around the country
and the millions of older telephone devices that are out there, handsets,
that you sometimes have to wait for turnover on,
advancing a system that has to be universal like Next Generation 911
isn't always as fast as you could want, even in the public safety sector.
Sometimes for really good technical reasons, and other times not necessarily.
So when it comes to, you talked about how the procurement process with these things are very small,
are very slow because you have just a few people that buy the software
and the state government doesn't have a lot of money.
Is it something that your organization is working on when you're advancing this procurement software?
Are you interested in making sure that the software itself is open source
or is that just not part of the purview at the moment?
So there have been a few different open source efforts in the public safety community
over the past several years.
Unfortunately, there hasn't been a really fast adoption of open source software
in the public safety community, in part because requirements vary so much.
Every single county, town, jurisdiction historically has had the ability
to procure one-off systems for their emergency service software.
So things like computer-aided dispatching and 911 call taking.
And the result of that has been there hasn't been a large enough community
around open source software to successfully produce products in the space.
Would it be possible for them to demand that any contracted software is open source?
Or is that more of a collective action problem where you have so many small actors
that they don't have bargaining power?
I think it would be a very complex sort of thing, in part because some governments
have policies around contracting that would complicate the use of open source,
and in part because it's not clear that there is market space for that.
In other words, that there are developers out there who would invest in these low-volume products
if they knew they had an open source requirement.
I see.
So how might members of the open source community in particular
who would like to contribute to things like this,
are there channels for them to go about this at present?
That's a great question.
There absolutely are ways for open source developers
and folks in the free software community to get involved.
So if you take a look at the main standard for Next Generation 911.
It's published by our organization.
It's called the I3 standard.
It's based almost entirely on IETF standards, track protocols, and data structures.
And the great thing about that is that it means that we need reference implementations,
and in many cases, preferably open source reference implementations,
to advance that standards work.
And so there's all kinds of things, location information servers,
and emergency call routing, emergency services routing proxies, and so on,
that all need to be developed.
And having an open source option out there is kind of a really cool product or process
that I don't think anyone has really tackled yet.
Interesting.
Well, this is certainly a lot for all of us to think about.
And we've enjoyed speaking about this with you.
Trey Forgitty, where might people find you online
and be able to learn more about what you do?
You can check out our organization at www.nena.org,
or you can reach me on Twitter at T Forgitty.
Excellent.
Trey, thank you very much for joining us this evening.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Thanks, guys.
Excellent.
Have a good night.
Well, certainly a lot for all of us to think about there.
And, yeah, a lot for Hawaii to think about while they're decompressing.
One other fun aspect of this story that I'd like to mention.
Warning .2.
Is that currently the password to anything that you've got going on?
I mean, I shouldn't ask you this on the internet.
Well, let me change it and then answer that.
Okay.
Because I noticed that Post-it stuck to the monitor of your laptop there,
and I just want to...
Oh, wait, that's not your Post-it.
That's from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency,
who in an Associated Press photo taken in July,
which has since been making the rounds after this Hawaii story.
In this photo, you can see an employee
and some of the cool computer screens that they've got around,
and big clocks up on the wall showing the time in different areas and things.
But there's also a Post-it stuck to one of the computer monitors.
And zooming in on the photo,
you can see that it says password warning .2.
So let's hope they've changed it by now.
If they haven't changed it already, they probably should.
Anyway, a lot of other stuff going on.
Let's talk a little bit about some news that we had this past weekend
at the HOPE conference,
that little hack or do that we like to throw every couple of years.
Did it happen already?
In midtown Manhattan.
Oh, it didn't.
No, the conference didn't happen already.
No, that happens in July, this July 20th through 22nd
in the Hotel Pennsylvania in midtown Manhattan.
But what did happen is we opened up the ticket sales,
and they are going briskly.
We had put up some early bird batches of tickets earlier,
and they went within seconds.
But now there's a large batch of tickets available.
They're still up.
You can find them at hope.net or in the 2600 store.
But also we have put up the call for participation,
the call for papers,
the call for people who wish to speak at the conference,
share things that they're into from all sorts of hacker-type subjects,
whether they're the sorts of things you might expect at a hacker conference
or might not expect at a hacker conference.
At the end of the day, the conference is there for the talks,
for the speakers.
And we've been doing this for many years now
and have had the most amazing things presented from members of the community,
from things like hard security and hardware, software,
things like that that you would expect.
There are also political talks.
There have been talks on food.
There have been talks on human sexual relationships.
There have been talks on just, I think, caffeine
and all sorts of cool things.
All sorts of cool things.
I mean, really, really, the sky's the limit.
And you can apply the hacker mindset and the hacker curiosity
to just about any subject that is important to you in your life.
So if you would like to speak at the Circle of Hope,
which is what we're calling our 12th conference,
then go to hope.net and click on the speakers link.
And all the tips for submission are there for you,
some examples of subjects we've had in the past,
some info on how you might like to frame your presentation,
prepare it for us,
and then those of us on the Hope Speaker Committee
will start going through them
and talking about which ones would be nice to have.
So get in touch with us as soon as you're able.
Hope.net.
And you can get all that info there.
You can also register for the conference.
As I said, there's information on the venue, on traveling,
on the code of conduct, all sorts of good stuff.
Hope.net.
Or if you're being fancy, xii.hope.net.
XII, of course, being the Roman numeral for 12.
They're not letters, they're a numeral.
So that's some cool stuff going on.
I'd also like to talk a bit about our premiums here at WBAI,
where we've got an update on that situation.
We've started hearing from listeners
who have been letting us know
that they've been receiving their paintings
that I did for the most recent couple of pledge drives
with historic data storage devices.
And I've heard back from some people.
I've seen some photos of the paintings on display
in people's homes, and that's a big thrill.
But there's something else that happened with this.
We've also heard from one or two listeners
who have not yet received their paintings.
So, you know, keep the faith.
They're probably on their way to you.
But there is a complication,
a complication about which we must be open
with you, our supporters and listeners.
And the complication is that due to a mishap here at the station,
they actually committed to sending out a few more paintings
than I had committed to give them.
And so the limit that I gave the station
was accidentally not honored to the tune of a few extra paintings.
So that is fine.
I am working on those.
But there's a chance that the first batch of paintings,
all the paintings that I had committed to have gone out.
They should be on the way to their new homes.
But there are some that are going to take a little longer
because I've got to make them and then send them out express
because those are going to homes that have waited far too long for them.
But transparency is key.
So thank you to everyone who has gotten in touch with us
with the info that they've received things,
that they haven't received things.
If you're still waiting on stuff, you know, like I said,
you might get your paintings within the next week or so.
But if you don't, get in touch with us, oth at 2600.com.
And we will work out who has gotten theirs, who hasn't,
and we will make it right.
Meanwhile, a couple other listener emails.
Mary writes into us.
Okay, this is interesting.
Mary writes, I sent in an inquiry to my local listserv asking
who do I contact to get the old phone boxes I don't use off my house.
I'm getting work done and they dangle along with the wires hanging off the house
and neither cable nor contractors can or will touch them.
For some reason, a responder sent me to your website,
though it looks like a radio program and not someone with info on who I call
to deal with the superfluous obsolete phone boxes.
But if you have any clue, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
And if she doesn't know we're a radio show,
she might not be listening now for her answer.
She can find us as a podcast.
Well, that's true.
So if you're not listening to us right now on the air,
listen to us later as a podcast.
So go ahead and prepare to do that.
But Mary, what can we tell Mary?
If she's got phone boxes hanging off the side of her house that she does not want,
I would imagine it's the responsibility of whatever entity put the boxes there.
Chances are it's an entity that no longer exists under that name
because the telephone company in the landline era in this state
has changed names and controllers and things a number of times.
But I think it probably, if it's a telephone box,
it probably leads to the company now known as Verizon.
So I would recommend getting in touch with them.
So maybe I'll write that up to her in text as well on the off chance
that she's not listening to us right now, which is kind of inconsiderate.
A lot of other stuff going on this week.
There's been endless debate here at the station over a word used by the president,
which we cannot say.
In fact, there's a poster up on the wall, and it definitely contains part of that word,
so we cannot say it.
We're not going to because even if we could get away with it,
we like to keep things.
This is a family show, basically.
Yeah, I don't think we can afford the fine at this point.
The FCC already has us on their blank list, I think.
But talking of this word, it's very interesting because it made waves
around the net, as these things do.
There are stories of it being projected on Trump's own hotels and properties
with video projectors or image projectors.
There are stories of it being used in coordinated efforts to fill the Yelp reviews
of Trump's hotels and Mar-a-Lago and other properties.
So I think it seems kind of appropriate.
I must admit I've not stayed at one of his establishments,
but I'm willing to bet that maybe it would apply somehow.
But yeah, that's going on.
You're raising a lot of interesting questions about who can say things, who can't.
Cable News, I think, was the first to break the taboo and use it openly
because, of course, they're not subject to FCC regulations,
not being broadcast entities in the over-the-air analog sense.
Although no one's over-the-air analog anymore.
It's all digital.
But in the over-the-air sense, those are the stations subject to FCC rules,
such as us here at WBAI, such as your local network TV stations
that you could still get with a plain old antenna rather than a cable box.
But broadcast media has been sneaking it in here and there
with many warnings and in news settings.
So it's interesting to see where this particular bit of discourse is taking,
I guess, how these regulations are applied.
Does obscenity, or what is generally thought of as obscenity,
not count as obscene when the president does it?
If when the president does it, it's not obscene, that sounds a bit Nixon-y.
But maybe I should just leave that where it is.
Meanwhile, other things going on.
Talking of politicians, Chelsea Manning.
Chelsea Manning.
Who has my vote.
He has your vote for United States Senator of Maryland, which is important.
I guess if you need help moving so you can live there by the time the election happens,
I'll help you lift your furniture.
But Chelsea Manning has filed to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland.
He is now a political candidate.
Chelsea, of course, the former Army soldier who was convicted of leaking classified data to WikiLeaks,
who got out on a sort of pardon
and has gone on to become a major activist and all sorts of things,
is challenging Democrat incumbent Benjamin L. Cardin,
who is in his second term in the Maryland Senate and up for reelection in November.
The primary happens in late June.
The election proper will happen in November.
And it's very interesting.
He's not said very many specific things, I don't think, yet about why she's chosen to run.
But it's definitely interesting, I think, with a capital I, that she's doing this.
And we will be keeping an eye on him and seeing where this goes.
And it's been kind of fun watching the Democrat establishment come out of the woodwork
and accuse him of being a Russian bot and stuff like that, or Russian agent.
And they wasted no time doing that.
Yeah, absolutely.
The sorts of immediate character assassination that goes on in these situations,
it's kind of fascinating to behold.
It's like watching a supernova happen.
You know what's happening.
You know that everything's going to basically make a big mess,
but you can't turn away.
So if any listeners of ours are in Maryland and have particular feelings about this, get in touch.
Send us email, oth at 2600.com, or send tweets at us, at Hacker Radio Show.
And we'll see where this goes.
Last week we reported on Kodak, the company that used to make the camera things,
what spit out bits of paper.
They got into the crypto world, or the cryptocurrency world, or the blockchain world,
and announced their own cryptocurrency at CES.
And there wasn't much info about it yet, but of course since they said blockchain out loud,
that drove their stock up and got people talking about them.
And this story turns out to be even weirder than anyone had thought at the time.
A story on Gizmodo was talking about how they'd announced that they were forming their own cryptocurrency
called KodakCoin, which, you know, what name do you think came in second?
But as happened next, the blockchain that they've got, their KodakCoin blockchain,
will contain the blockchain-powered KodakOne rights management platform.
So some sort of digital rights management attached to a blockchain generated by the company Kodak.
And it gets even weirder than that, because they also, on a completely different line,
announced that they're going to be renting out Bitcoin miners.
Bitcoin miners, for those unfamiliar, are tiny computers basically dedicated to churning out new Bitcoin.
And it's something that used to be vastly profitable, today is far less so.
But Kodak wants to rent you out a Bitcoin miner for the low, low price of $3,400 US dollars up front.
And then over the course of two years, you'll have this thing chugging away on your electricity and connectivity.
And Kodak will get half the Bitcoin it generates.
Kodak claims that if Bitcoin averages $14,000 for a Bitcoin for the next two years,
the miners will generate $25 a day or $700 a month, of which the client would get $375.
So if you're looking to spend $3,400 to pull down $375 a month, or what might be that,
depending on the price of Bitcoin not fluctuating, which we know it does every day, in all directions.
So the reaction to this has been interesting.
A columnist on HowToGeek called it the dumbest... Oh, there's that word again.
I'll just say the dumbest blank I've ever seen at CES.
A researcher called Nicholas Weaver noted that the cost estimates are insanely wrong,
assumes no increases in mining rate or power cost.
So basically, this is looking like a big box of hope and dreams and maybe weirdness that won't exactly deliver on its promises.
But it's Kodak.
It's the company that used to smear chemicals on paper so that you could see things on them.
And it's just fascinating to watch them go.
Some years ago, Cory Doctorow, the speculative fiction writer, wrote a book called Makers,
in which, in this book's fictional world, Kodak and Duracell had basically mutually decided that their business models were obsolete
and so chose to merge and call themselves Codacell and make 3D printers and all sorts of other stuff.
I thought that was pretty weird when I read the book, but truth is stranger than fiction.
You could not make this blank up.
We should also note that we had Cory Doctorow on the show to discuss this.
Yes, we did have Cory Doctorow on the show to discuss the book Makers.
Much later, we had Cory Doctorow as a keynote at Hope after trying to do so for years.
By the way, Hope, you can get the info on that at hope.net or hopeconf on Twitter.
We're rather excited about that.
What's going on in the rest of the world?
The UK.
There is an interesting story coming out of the UK where there will be new laws coming into force in April,
which will mean compulsory ID checks on all porn sites.
Talking about digital strangeness.
There have been shades and threats of the UK trying to do various things to regulate online pornography.
This latest bit is apparently going to try and legislate that all porn sites operating in the UK
should have the user's ID cards on file to prove that they're old enough to be looking at what they're looking at.
This, of course, is really interesting privacy-wise.
The users of these sorts of sites, that's probably one of the most private things about them
that they would not want other entities to have record of.
This new system will be apparently policed by the British Board of Film Censorship,
whose day job is basically what it says on the tin.
They are the ratings equivalent to the Motion Picture Association of America.
They decide what's safe and what's not.
The MPAA here is a private organization, whereas over there it's actually tied to the government.
Right, that's an important distinction.
They're actually an official agency rather than a private organization like the MPAA.
The online ID checks will mean people will have to prove they're 18 before viewing any porn online
and are part of the Digital Economy Act 2018.
This comes from a story on the UK's Yahoo News site.
This, I don't know, this seems to open up so many cans of worms.
Not in the least because not every adult site is one that you have to use forms of payment for,
so the possibility existed that you could use them somewhat anonymously as these things go.
But it looks like the British government does not like that and is going to try and quash it.
So we'll see what happens with this.
If you're affected by this, if you're in the UK, or if you're in the industry,
or if you just have feelings about this, let us know.
oth at 2600.com
Do you think you'll need to show a credit card to be able to get a goat seed?
That's a thing too.
You can find yourself looking at things online that you didn't mean to
because that's the way the net works.
You type the wrong thing or you look at the wrong thing
and suddenly something you maybe weren't specifically looking for is shown to you,
like say the Rick Astley video or things of that sort.
But what are the legal possibilities of this sort of thing now?
Anyway, more on this as it develops and we will keep looking at this.
What else is going on in the world, Voltaire?
We have some updates on the Section 702 amendment that's going through the House and Senate,
which basically gives NSA carte blanche to conduct surveillance without warrants.
So the last project is about to go through the House.
There's an amendment to make it more amenable to privacy and it failed, sadly.
But the good news is that the majority of Democrats voted in favor of the reform amendment,
which is a change from the past when they would have been too worried about being assaulted on terror.
And it kind of shows how the momentum, even though bad laws are still being passed now with surveillance,
it's the momentum since Snowden has been towards reform.
And then in the Senate, there was a filibuster by five senators, three Democrats and two Republicans,
and that the filibuster was overturned by a vote of 60.
And unfortunately, in both houses of Congress, a lot of the leadership, such as Nancy Pelosi,
voted for the surveillance and against the reform.
But the positive development is that all the people that are prospective Democrat presidential candidates,
such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and even traditionally conservative people like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris,
who actually used to be a prosecutor and thus very, quote unquote, tough on crime,
they all voted against the passage of the bill, voted against the closures, so against surveillance.
So I think that's a good sign that the direction is towards surveillance reform.
Yeah, but although, of course, this has not been by any means along party lines, this debate,
the information went around last night that the deciding vote on cutting off debate for privacy amendments to the NSA spying bill
was cast by Claire McCaskill, Democratic senator from Missouri,
who later went on to tweet about, who had just tweeted about how much of an honor it was to march with a bunch of African Americans
to celebrate Martin Luther King Day in St. Louis.
Good thing he was never surveilled on it.
Yeah, right before helping to move along measures to warrantlessly surveil American citizens, just as was shamefully done to Dr. King.
It's really gross how many so-called hashtag-resistant people voted for the surveillance to continue.
And they handed Trump the ability to have an even stronger surveillance state.
Yeah. Well, today, Claire McCaskill is tweeting about how she has the flu, so maybe that explains her vote yesterday.
Karma.
Perhaps.
Karma is something I cannot say on the air.
Indeed. So, yep, this continues to be a major problem in both sides of the political spectrum and everywhere in between.
We should also say, even though the filibuster was stopped, there's still a chance it's stopped in the Senate,
so go to act.eff.org and find out how to contact your senator, tell him to vote against this.
Exactly, eff.org, and we'll see where this goes and how much hope we might have left.
Some other fun things going around. We had the company XBT.
The company XBT is selling their domain name.
They're a tech firm that was referred to in material published by BuzzFeed in the—what is it called?
The dossier detailing—Fusion GPS is what it's called.
The Fusion GPS dossier compiled by a research firm called Fusion GPS,
which contained info on allegedly agencies that were hacking the DNC, that were doing what at whose behest, and XBT was named in this.
So, basically, they are finding themselves not very popular in the tech world and have resorted to selling their domain name,
which is XBT.com.
XBT just happens to be a common abbreviation for Bitcoin, so they're auctioning it off only for Bitcoins.
It's only 20 Bitcoins, which is really cheap right now.
Actually, they've set the minimum price at 200 Bitcoins, which as of today, according to Bloomberg Technologies, is about $2.9 million worth.
So, we'll see where this goes.
It looks like they're looking to cryptocurrency cut and run, which I can't say I actually blame them all that much.
I mean, it would probably cost at least that much in PR to get their goodwill back if they had any.
Yeah, and they really lucked out because they started the business before Bitcoin became such a big thing,
and it was a coincidence that they chose the acronym XBT.
Yeah, so that was just a sheer coincidence.
They happened to own what became a desirable acronym.
But moving on, let's have some good news.
Let's have some news that'll maybe lift your spirits a bit about terrible things that are going on in the world that seem unstoppable.
Our own Attorney General, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, had announced late last year his intentions to do this today.
Did it?
Filed suit to stop illegal rollback of net neutrality.
ag.ny.gov is the site of the Office of the Attorney General, and this is a press release there.
The long and the short of it is Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman led a coalition of 22 attorneys general in filing a multi-state lawsuit to block the FCC's illegal rollback of net neutrality.
The coalition filed a petition for review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit,
formally commencing the lawsuit against the FCC and the federal government.
You can read the petition on the Attorney General's site,
but also interesting to note all the attorneys general from states all over the country that joined in on this.
The lawsuit is led by Attorney General Schneiderman and filed by the attorneys general of New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Washington, D.C.
So, 22 attorneys general, that's almost half the attorneys general in the country, have all thrown in together on this.
And that makes this a really interesting lawsuit, one which hopes to roll back the efforts by Ajit Pai's FCC under the Trump administration to kill net neutrality, dead, finally, after many, many administrations have tried to roll it back in the past.
So, yeah, keep an eye on this, ag.my.gov to keep an eye on what Attorney General Schneiderman's up to.
And maybe contact your own state's attorney general.
If you're in New York, say thanks.
If you're in one of these other states that are thrown in on this, say thanks.
If you're in a state that hasn't, maybe ask your attorney general if they might be interested in joining in.
Because this is a very interesting occasion and a bit of a fun attorney general party.
I mean, we need to let them out and romp and frolic among their own kind for, you know, like when you take your dog to the dog park, you've got to let your attorney general maybe throw in on a massive attorney general fun time lawsuit.
Yeah, and the fact that almost half the state's attorney generals are signed on to this is really going to put weight on the judges when they make a decision.
Like a lot of people like to think that, oh, judges are totally impartial to politics and they don't care about public opinion.
They just care about the law.
In fact, they overwhelmingly do.
And if there's lots of people in power or lots of people in the public that have a strong opinion, they'll take that into account.
Right.
Well, we'll keep an eye on this.
And I think we've got a little bit of time left.
Maybe we could see if we could get some phone calls coming in.
We can hear from some of our dear listeners out there.
So if you would like to give us a call, that number is 347-335-0818.
And you can reach us on the air and tell us what's on your mind, whether it's about something we've been talking about, something else you'd like to speak your mind about.
Give us a call at 347-335-0818.
And if you have comments or questions, you can tweet at us at Hacker Radio Show.
You can indeed.
So while we wait for those to start rolling in, what else is going on in the world?
Oh, here's another fun story about politicians trying to do the right thing.
U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, have introduced the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act to hold large credit reporting agencies like Equifax accountable for data breaches.
And we've talked about the Equifax breach a lot, so has every other news outlet in the country.
But this is maybe a step toward holding agencies accountable for screwing up in that manner.
We'll keep an eye on that.
You can find Senator Elizabeth Warren's post on Medium.com to learn more about this.
In the meantime, it looks like we've got a phone call.
Caller, are you there?
Hello?
Speak up, please.
Hello.
Yeah, what's up?
How you doing?
Okay.
Yeah, I've got a question.
I had—I was sitting here listening to y'all years ago.
Actually, let me go in the room and turn the other video down because it's echo real quick.
Please do.
Yeah, we like listening to our own voices, but not that much.
Yeah, okay.
So check it out.
This is what I wanted to ask you.
What's up?
One more time, y'all just said the TVs, when they came, they had the technology that they could see you or they can listen to you or something.
And then you said which TVs.
I think it was like two or three of them that did not do that.
In other words, they had the capability.
But when you bought it, it was disengaged, and you would have to engage it.
In other words, it was actually engaged.
And how many people even know that?
And that was a few years ago.
But I'm just thinking about that, and I'm just wondering if I can update on that now on which TVs.
And even maybe—well, I don't remember laptops because I pretty much buy Apple.
But that's where I'm really specifically concerned with, that Apple product, Samsung, a laptop.
Like if there's something engaged where people can watch you or hack into it or do their products come disengaged, and I would have to engage it.
Right.
So, yeah, we mentioned this.
There was a story about a specific television manufacturer.
I don't remember which one off the top of my head.
I believe it was Samsung.
I think it might have been Samsung.
I think you're right, Voltaire.
That had actually microphone capability and was monitoring the audio in users' rooms and in some way collecting that data or sending it back to Samsung
and basically TV watching you instead of the other way around, which is how it's supposed to be.
And I don't believe there have been any major updates in this sort of situation except that smart TVs, which are the kind of TVs that are basically computers—
And they're the only ones you can buy now.
Are the only ones you can buy now.
You used to be able to just buy a TV that would simply do its job decoding video signals, showing them to you, and that was it.
But every TV now has other functionality, has computer functionality on board to do things like let you watch online video services or play games or do whatever.
But this comes at a cost.
So smart TVs—
But even if that wasn't so, I'm just saying, is there a way we could push back and say, OK, got fine.
It's a smart TV.
But, however, that's something that I don't want.
Let's just say, hypothetically, we would be able to make them—or at least some of the carriers would say, yeah, this is the principle.
We don't have five.
We put the capability in.
However, we don't sell it engaged.
But on page, let's say, of the big, thick booklet that no one ever reads, but let's say page 154, it tells you how to engage this if you wanted to.
So that's something that—you know what I mean?
So because I think we buy smart TV, that's where the technology is.
It's not like it should have to be a given that it can listen to us or invade our privacy.
I think even under the privacy laws, isn't there some room for us to be able to try to correct that?
One would hope.
I mean, I would say the only real choice a consumer who wants to go buy a new television from a store now would have is to find out first, will this TV work offline?
Will this TV work if you don't hook it to the Internet, if you don't hook it to your Wi-Fi, if you don't hook it to your router?
Because, of course, if you don't do that, you won't be able to watch Internet stuff on it like your Netflix or your Amazon or what have you.
But if your television is not connected to the Internet, it can't send data over the Internet.
So if you have it set up, if you have it only connected to, say, your video devices, your video players or your cable box or what have you, then you might have a chance there.
But I think that is a question that's between you and your television dealer.
So it's going to be interesting to see for how long we can get televisions that will still be televisions if you don't hook them up to the damn Net.
Right, right. Because I have a TV where it's a Sharp. I'm only drawing a blank because I'm on the phone.
But basically, I have Netflix and all that on it.
But this one's been a couple of years, so it's not the latest smart TV. I think it may have been the first version of smart TV.
It's pretty thin, but not a little or even thinner.
But the point is that I can go through the settings in certain ways and connect my exterior antenna, let the antenna hang out the window or position it in a certain place, and it picks up its channels.
Now, you don't get what the cable gives you, but they tell you what show you're watching and all that type of information for the most part.
It just gives you very, very little.
But you can pick up all different types of shows and things.
And some days it's better than other days, sort of like with the satellite dish.
But the point is that the TV picks up channels and stations.
A lot of people don't even know their TVs do that.
And that's just with a regular $20, $30, whatever, maybe less.
I've never had one less, but $30 antenna, exterior antenna.
So my question relates back to what I was saying before.
Let's say I have this hooked up that way, not a cable, and I'm just pulling channels with the antenna.
But yet it is a smart TV.
If, however, I'm watching channels through that and not using my Wi-Fi, then again, that would be the same as where you said it's offline right now.
So that would disengage that capability.
Am I correct?
Yeah, I would say that's correct.
If you don't give your television a way to send stuff over the Internet, it won't be able to send stuff over the Internet.
So if you're that concerned about your privacy and you still want to buy a TV, then, yeah, that's what you would have to ask.
Will this work offline?
Will it still let me watch things or play my game console on it or whatever it is you want to do without trading off whatever data might be sent about you over the Internet?
And as more and more television happens now over the Internet and more and more of the award shows are being taken up by productions by online entities rather than television broadcasters or cable channels or anything like that, this is the direction things are moving.
And it behooves us to be aware of this and really consider the choices we're making when we decide as a society that, yeah, this is okay for my television to do.
This is okay for my game to do.
This is okay for my console.
That's the case, right?
I'm sorry?
I mean, our laptops and our phones do it, too, then, if that's the case you're saying.
In as much as we can still control any of that.
But this has been interesting.
Thank you very much for your call.
All right.
Thank you.
I appreciate the time.
Thank you.
I appreciate y'all.
And thanks.
I'm always watching your show and I tell people about it, too.
You guys do great work.
I really appreciate it.
Excellent.
We appreciate you.
All right.
Okay, thanks.
Bye-bye.