Tales of a New York City cab driver.
Saturday night, June 23rd.
Me too.
Oh really?
The great Malachy McCord is a special guest star.
I know, I can't wait.
Show starts at seven.
Tickets are available at wbai.org.
I got my tickets.
Me too.
Off the Meter is a benefit performance for WBAI.
I know, I don't want to miss it.
You won't, but first.
But first what?
Don't miss the bus.
If you miss the bus to John McDonough's Off the Meter,
take a taxi.
And, you know, I've heard of bus in Luxembourg.
They don't sound like that.
You are listening to WBAI New York.
It's eight o'clock, and that means,
if it's Wednesday, it's time for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cough.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Von Diddley Bonk for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Von Diddley Bonk.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening,
joined tonight by Kyle.
Hi.
Alex.
Good to be back.
Welcome back.
Thank you, sir.
We'll talk about where you were in the minutes ahead.
Voltaire.
Hey.
And our special guest, Dent.
How's it going?
Do you have a microphone?
I'm sharing.
You're sharing?
Okay, we might want to move it a little closer,
that way you can hear your voice as well.
And here we are on another action-packed edition of Off the Hook,
talking about all kinds of hacker-related things.
Hey, I've got a big bit of news that I'd like to share with people.
Tomorrow the HOPE site will be displaying pretty much all the talk,
maybe 95% of the talks, maybe 90%.
I'm not really sure.
A lot of talks, about 100 talks that we'll be having at the HOPE conference.
They will be announced tomorrow at hope.net,
so get your browsers fired up.
I am so amazed and impressed by the caliber of speakers
and the variety of talks that we have this year.
It's going to be awesome.
It's going to be really, really amazing.
I've got a question for you.
Is it also going to have the schedule, or is it just the talk?
No, the schedule comes afterwards.
Right now we just have all the –
the schedule is basically a very complex mathematical formula
that involves balancing things
and taking all kinds of other issues into account.
But that will probably follow within a week,
and plus it has to be approved by multiple people and all that kind of thing.
But we figured, why hold back on what we've got reserved so far?
So it's really going to be amazing.
So sometime tomorrow, probably early afternoon,
hope.net, you will see what we have scheduled.
Yeah, so far I've been sort of taking your word for it.
I'm really excited for everyone else to be able to share in that
after we release some of that information
so that people know what the content of the conference is going to be like
and get sort of an idea of where their interests are
and what they really, really want to check out and so on.
Absolutely.
So Alex, you were overseas, I believe?
Yes, your belief is correct.
Okay. Your email is bouncing all over the place, by the way.
Listeners have complained to us about this.
If you write to us, eventually you'll get a bounce message from Alex's provider
because they don't know what they're doing, right?
That's true. It's a 101 domain and they are being a real pain.
Wow. So there's nothing wrong with your computer
or with off the hook or anything like that.
It's just Alex's provider.
That's right. Me and my Icelandic domain name.
Icelandic domain name. Wow.
Anything that ends in .is, so you have to make that clear.
It's Icelandic. It's not the Islamic State.
Okay. Well, maybe you get the Icelandic football team to handle it.
They can't do anything wrong, so maybe they can handle this as well.
Or the chess team.
Yeah, they have such a thing.
So you were overseas.
I believe you were in the same place that Kyle and I were at a year ago in Italy.
That's right. I was in Milan.
I was at the Radio Popolare conference and it was absolutely fantastic.
It was actually, I think, a really big change from what you had experienced the year before
because my understanding is that you guys were actually in the Radio Popolare studio.
Yes.
And this year it was not in a studio.
It was a gigantic party that was held outdoors at a beautiful park
next to a disused psychiatric hospital in Milan.
See, I've spent a lot of time outdoors in big parks next to psychiatric centers.
I've seen that. That studio is really awesome.
Is that right?
Did you not see the studio?
I didn't see the studio at all.
They made the outdoors, they made the whole park the studio.
Well, yeah, they can do that.
They can just make anything into their studio.
But they have this amazing setup and they have all this listener support
and it's something that I think we can learn so much about.
I thought about this the entire time I was over there.
There is so much to learn from Radio Popolare and how they energize the community,
how they bring the listeners together.
And the way that they support the station,
and I think we've gone over this several times on the air,
is basically like the WBAI buddy system that we have here
so that they know they have a certain amount of income coming in every year.
They increase that listener base every year
and they can do cooler and cooler things like throwing a gigantic outdoor party
in a park next to a disused psychiatric hospital.
It was absolutely amazing.
I mean, the last day there, Marina Cattucci, who's a friend of our station here,
she did a live outdoors version of their famous show called Sunday Blues.
She and actually another participant on which I was on a panel,
apparently the Sunday Blues show was really popular
because they talk about kind of irrelevant things.
It's just anything that floats up into their mind.
It's a really popular Sunday evening show.
They did this outdoors. They had a band out there.
They had the entire community incredibly engaged.
One of the things I thought was really cool was that there was this older woman
who seemed to call into almost every show on Radio Popolare,
and they brought her up on the stage, and she was a celebrity for a day
because everybody that listens to that station knows her.
They have never met her in person.
And there she was out there on the stage, live on the radio,
without being on the telephone.
I mean, I think if we had a party at WBAI,
we'd have to have, I guess, somebody like Tom from the Bronx coming up on stage
and being a part and meeting people and energizing the entire crowd.
It was a really, really great experience.
Yeah, I was going to suggest Tom from the Bronx as well.
I wonder if he speaks Italian too.
He might. You never know.
But it was a really fascinating couple of days over there.
The first panel that I was on had to deal with cybersecurity, privacy,
what's going on under the Trump administration, what rights are under threat.
We talked a lot about net neutrality and how that will possibly impact Europe
and what's going on to resist this in the United States.
But before the panel was scheduled to go on the stage,
the mayor of Milan was speaking.
And at the end of his particular talk, just sort of randomly,
about 15, 20 protesters appeared in the audience,
holding up signs, chanting, yelling, screaming,
and they were complaining a lot about squatters' rights.
And the issues that they were apparently addressing,
from my limited understanding of the language,
was that they were living in these buildings that were also disused,
like the psychiatric hospital next to the party.
And law enforcement of Milan was kicking out these families.
And a lot of them were immigrant families and they were poor families,
even though these buildings were supposedly earmarked
for these particular families.
They weren't being used.
There were a lot of issues, and this went on for a long time,
about 15 minutes or so.
And then the organizers came over to us and said,
well, your panel is going to be delayed
because of this particular protest going on.
And with the mayor there,
and I guess with members of the city council present,
the organizers of the Radio Popolare conference decided
that they would actually give the protesters time on the stage
to speak their piece,
so they didn't have to yell and scream over everybody.
And I thought this was just an incredibly civilized way
of addressing these issues, because here in the United States,
the police would have been called, and if they didn't stop,
people would have very likely been arrested.
But instead, in Milan, they gave them the stage
and they got up there and they spoke for probably about 7 or 8 minutes.
It was a man and a woman that got up and made their piece
very passionately and very directly
about what they thought was wrong with this particular policy.
And the whole audience was incredibly engaged.
And then afterwards, my understanding is that
they actually met with the city council
and were discussing these issues for about an hour and a half,
possibly two hours, which is just an incredible outcome
when you think about how this could have turned out differently
if that had happened here in New York.
Or anywhere in the States, really.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So it was an eye-opening experience.
I love that that happened right before our panel went on,
because I just sort of thrive on pandemonium and chaos,
much like you guys do, I would imagine.
And a totally different experience, I think,
than you guys got the year before in studios.
That was something you didn't experience.
I suspect it's a different experience every day at that place.
I would imagine so. I would imagine so.
But it was fantastic.
We got to spend a couple of days outside the city,
over at Lago de Gorda and Lake Como.
It was tough to come back to New York, let me tell you.
Yeah, it really was an inspiring experience for us.
And to just experience the station, be invited,
and see how they thank their own members and supporters.
So that actually had been partly why we were really pushing,
along with the station, for more BAI buddies.
Because that system, we saw a great example of that working
for a massive station like Radio Popular.
And I just like how the running of the station itself is not political,
but it can exist and take on the political.
And I think that's an important lesson, something we can look at.
I think they have a minimum amount of €100 a year that people donate.
And they have so many people that commit to that,
that the station never has to beg for money on the air.
And I just wonder, can we achieve that here with the BAI buddy system?
I know by having good programming we can get there.
That would be amazing.
We can look to these people to inspire us.
Well, I'll tell you, based on the party that I was at,
I think that the listeners are going to be extremely energized
and extremely generous to the station
because they really brought people together.
One interesting observation I had about the demography of the listeners
that were there was that you had a lot of young people,
I would say in their early 20s to late 20s,
and then a lot of older people in the sense of, let's say, over 60 or so,
and not a lot in between.
So it was an interesting absence of people, let's say,
in their mid-30s and 40s.
And I thought this was interesting
because it seems like it was such an important dialogue to have
between younger people and older people at this particular station.
Maybe us in our late 30s and early 40s
don't really necessarily matter all that much,
but it just seemed like there was a lot of communication going on
between generations that was brought together
because of the radio station, and that was incredibly cool.
There's also a phenomenon we have in the States within activist circles
where an organization I'm part of, Democratic Socialists of America,
they have the memberships are either like hippie generation
or like millennials that are growing up with Bernie Sanders,
so it's very similar here.
Interesting.
But it was a fantastic way to bring all the listeners together.
If we could do something like this at WBAI,
it would be because of the WBAI buddy system
because you can count on that particular revenue coming in
over a certain period of time,
which is why it's so incredibly important to support the station like that
when we ask for it.
Give to WBAI.org is the website, so go there
and help bring us a little bit closer to how they do things overseas.
Hey, I want people to hear something right now.
♪
♪
Wow.
♪
That piece was created by Dent here in the studio.
That was amazing.
Thank you.
Wow.
Yeah, if we haven't mentioned it before, Dent is a musician,
and he's actually working on what we call,
what do we call it, intermission music at the conference?
Yes, inspired by the Posen music in Germany,
but basically it allows us to distribute our videos
without having any copyrighted music,
and we asked Dent if he was interested in composing some stuff.
We had sort of a contest where people contribute stuff before,
and this time he expressed some interest,
so these are really great.
I mean, so far this is really interesting.
This is unlike anything I've heard of your work,
so thank you for offering or helping us do this.
Is that one of the intermission pieces,
or do you have something else lined up for that?
Well, basically my creative process just consists of making as much as I can
and then cherry-picking what's the best for certain events.
Wow.
That's pretty cool.
Well, you know, I think that piece,
I kind of want to stay and listen to it.
Maybe I wouldn't move.
Maybe I wouldn't leave the room.
Would you still describe your stuff as more like experimental?
I mean, do you like that as a comfort?
I mean, labels in general are kind of fraught with problems,
but would you say you're into experimental composition?
I'd say so.
I mean, I always had trouble finding a certain genre to put it in,
so I guess experimental is the oddball category.
Kind of gives you a wide range.
Cool, cool.
Let's hear another one, if I can get this program to work.
Here we go.
♪
♪
See, this one I could see working,
getting people to march in an orderly fashion from one room to another
as the talks change.
Is that what you had in mind when you thought of this?
This is a marching song.
A marching song, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, a little disorienting, too.
That's perfect.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
You know, I would like to have this playing during my talk.
Is that possible?
You want to have music playing during your talk?
Is it too late to have an hour-long piece commissioned for Alex's talk?
We could just do this on loop.
This would be perfect.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, how about every single talk has its own theme?
That's a great idea.
That would be a great idea.
Yeah, I'm sure.
Got to start planning a little earlier, guys.
It's easy, easy stuff, right?
Wow.
See, we've done this in the past,
and we've been inspired by our friends over in Germany
who've had really good music between tracks,
and I think we just keep getting better and better,
and this certainly is an indication of how we're progressing.
Yeah, it adds to the production value.
It makes sort of the transition from a formal academic
or other kind of presentation to sort of talking
and sort of an actual intermission activity milling about.
What kind of equipment do you use?
It's just my laptop.
You do this on your laptop?
Yeah.
Wow.
I feel if I can block an ad on Firefox, I've accomplished something.
And look what this guy's creating.
That's amazing.
Yeah, are you using some of your own samples, though, as well?
Are you recording ambient or natural sound,
or do you draw from different sources to get your instrumentation?
One of the files in there is some sample I did,
but I don't know which one it is.
But yeah, most of what I sample is old music that I really like,
and certain parts of it I just want to make it into something else.
Great, great.
No, that's really cool.
What software do you use to edit it?
I use Ableton to produce everything, start to finish, yeah.
Wow.
What's it called again?
Ableton Live, Ableton Live 9 specifically.
I've never heard of that.
That's, I think, a sequencing or some kind of music composition.
Yeah.
There's like the top three or four applications that people use, right?
Yeah, there's the big ones, which are like Ableton and Logic and FL Studios,
and then some people use like Cubase and stuff.
There's a whole bunch of programs.
Well, let's listen to one more, then we're going to get into some stories
and maybe even some phone calls.
Cool.
Cool.
So, you're not offended if I talk over this, are you?
No.
Okay, I don't like offending artists.
Yes?
This is extremely cool, and it sounds great.
Do you have formal musical training?
Sorry?
Did you study music?
Do you have formal training in music?
Yeah, I've been playing piano since I was five,
and I picked up other instruments, and producing was just another thing I did.
Five?
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
It took a while, but I learned something.
It took a while, right, of course.
Oh, my God.
He's seven and a half now, so it hasn't been that long, all right?
This is just an amazing display of what the hacker community is capable of producing,
people with such talent musically, program-wise,
and I think it's represented in the talks that we'll be presenting at the conference.
You'll see all kinds of skill sets from people of all ages, so that's really amazing.
Now, Alex, you had a point.
Yeah, you mentioned that part of the reason why we have this music
is to have something sort of during an intermission without running into copyright violations.
Yeah, because what happens is we post it on YouTube,
and then all of a sudden Van Halen or somebody is claiming credit for the music we're playing in between,
not that we ever played Van Halen between, although it did get people out of the room.
Or would we?
Yeah, but the point is not to have that hassle to worry about,
but also to create something from the community, something local, something truly unique.
Well, I mean, it's interesting you say that,
because there have been some rather interesting copyright developments just today
when it comes to copyright law and content filtering on the Internet.
I don't know if you've heard about this Article 13 nonsense in the EU.
This is the scheme from the EU that's—
That's right, yeah.
Can you describe that a little bit?
What is exactly—what's going on?
What are they implementing?
Well, it's an extremely controversial proposal that was voted on today by this committee called JURI,
which is essentially the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Union Parliament.
And this Article 13 proposal required something really crazy and beyond the pale, and it actually passed.
What it does is would require—now, if this goes to a plenary vote of the European Parliament,
which would be the next step, and if it passes, this would be memorialized,
my understanding is, in a directive that would be then applicable to all of the countries in the European Union.
And it would require any content that a user uploads to the Internet
to then be run through some kind of content filtering system to determine whether or not it violates an existing copyright.
Wait, wait. Stop, stop, stop. Just stop. Hold on.
Now, I know when you post something on YouTube, it goes through all that garbage where it basically—
I don't know how they do it, but they very quickly are able to scan the video and the audio
and tell you if something is copywritten in one way or another.
What you're saying is that any time you upload anything to the Internet, whatever that means,
we'll get into that in a second, the same process is going to happen according to this EU directive?
That's exactly right. And Google does this with YouTube quite efficiently through their content ID system.
And this would make that particular type of system applicable to possibly every other medium on the Internet.
It's not clear right now as to which types of businesses or which types of websites it would apply.
Some particular sites or some mediums may be exempt from this particular requirement,
but that's not at all clear right now at all.
Who's behind this? Who's pushing this?
That's a good question. I mean, obviously, it's copyright holders.
It's people that represent publishers and authors.
Well, I hold copyright. I'm a publisher. I'm not in favor of this.
Nobody asked me. Of course, I'm also not in Europe, but still.
Well, that's a very interesting point you make, too, because one of the arguments against this is that,
like any kind of blocking or filtering technology, it's likely to overblock things that it's not supposed to block
and underblock that which it's supposed to block.
So you have situations where you're having an automated algorithm make a legal analysis
as to whether something is or is not copyrighted.
And if you think about things like 2600, if you don't care about copyright,
you don't mind if people distribute things this way or that way.
It's kind of the point of making it so that people distribute it,
so that people spread it around and read and listen.
That's right, and that's another point, too.
But to go back to my original point, which you interrupted, by the way,
is that these particular types of systems, they may not be able to determine something like –
do you remember Bruce Sterling's book, The Hacker Crackdown?
Yes, I do.
Way back in the day, it was a great book, really excellently written, great anthology of what happened.
Stuck it on the internet for free.
Exactly.
So that would probably be blocked if it was being distributed, let's say, on a website,
because is this algorithm going to be able to identify a copyright that existed but which is no longer enforced?
So copyright holders may have their copyrights enforced against their will,
which is a kind of crazy thing to think about.
And they don't benefit in any way from this?
No, not necessarily.
I mean, I couldn't see it.
But you bring up one other point, which I think is very important to note,
which is that the point of creating these works is so that people can read them and access them
and build on top of them, right?
I mean, you think about the history of Western civilization, it's about building on top of ideas.
Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants.
It's about criticism, fair use, parity, freedom of speech.
All of this may be impeded in the European Union.
If this actually goes to a plenary vote and passes.
Yeah, these algorithms can't take into account freedom of speech or fair use.
So like with YouTube's content ID, people like things like The Daily Show,
they can't exist if you want to create your own because it will automatically get taken down.
Because even if you're using clips as fair use to parody them or make commentary,
the algorithms can't tell that.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And there is this kind of conflict as well that doesn't seem to be necessarily resolved
because I think it's Article 15 of the e-commerce directive or the InfoSoc directive of the European Union,
which essentially states in its law already that European Union member states cannot put a burden
onto Internet mediums to police or monitor or filter the content of Internet users.
So this, if it passes, would seem to be directly in conflict with that particular provision itself.
How this is going to be resolved, we're not necessarily sure.
There's this weird thing that happens now because this was voted on and passed, I think, by 15 to 10 votes today.
So it was somewhat close.
But now it was also voted to go through this thing called a trilog negotiation, which is kind of bizarre.
And this is where the European legislators themselves, the members of the European Parliament,
will actually meet with the member states and discuss the legislation and try to iron out the details.
And if that actually happens, this is much more likely to be passed in the European Parliament than fail.
So that's kind of scary to think about.
And it's also somewhat undemocratic when you have these types of meetings going on behind closed doors,
not subject to public scrutiny.
So I think that's kind of scary.
But on the other hand, the Internet has really been rallying against this.
European citizens are really concerned about this because it obviously has impact on freedom of speech,
freedom of association, the right to parity, all of the things that you had mentioned, Voltaire,
that just aren't taken into account by a particular algorithm.
And hopefully when this comes to a plenary vote, maybe in December of this year,
maybe in early 2019 at the latest, it will fail.
Let's hope for it.
But real luminaries, people like Vint Cerf, the EFF, they filed a letter against this, I think, several days ago.
And that letter seems to have been ignored.
And they brought up a lot of the same issues.
Would they pay attention to the EFF in Europe?
They should, quite frankly, because they always have a great take on the issues
and a good way of slicing away the fat on these particular arguments.
They're not just concerned about U.S. citizens' rights.
They're concerned about rights of all Internet users.
So I think that they would take it into an account.
And I think the EFF has a certain amount of influence on European Union citizens as well.
And it's really up to them to start mobilizing,
because otherwise you're going to have a situation, perhaps,
where content providers may deliberately exclude the EU from their services.
And that's not good for anybody.
That drives businesses out of the European Union.
It decreases foreign direct investment in these particular companies.
It could have a real backlash.
Yeah.
Another problem with this bill is that it's not just about the mandatory filtering.
It also has a link.
Article 14 is about the link tax,
which requires anybody that posts a clip of a news article to basically pay a tax for that.
So that basically will put small independent blogs and stuff out of business.
They can't afford that.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm not entirely sure what the vote was on that
or if it was separate and distinct from the Article 13 vote.
But I haven't seen a lot about it.
But you're right.
It was a kind of bizarre thing that I learned today.
You see a theme here, though?
The independent people, they're the ones that are always being shut out.
And the big corporations are the ones making the decisions.
You see it all the time with Google and YouTube.
It's harder and harder to do things independently, such as running a mail server, Alex.
Yes.
All kinds of things that you're encouraged not to do yourself.
Let some big corporation do it.
But then when you do that, they impose these rules and regulations and restrictions,
and you wind up paying the price for it.
Thankfully, there's still time to fight this.
So if you're in the EU, you should definitely contact your member of EU parliament
and go to saveyourinternet.eu to find out more about how to contact your representative.
Now, here's an interesting story concerning Medium and GitHub.
Medium, of course, the blogging platform.
GitHub is a cloud repository.
They have just suspended posts containing the LinkedIn information of immigration
and customs enforcement.
Those are the people at ICE, the ones that are tearing up families
and raiding homes and businesses and things like that.
Both the post and the database, which was first removed from Medium
and then from GitHub, were created by data artist Sam Lavigne.
I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Twitter also suspended Russell Nice's bot account
that was automatically tweeting information from the database.
Now, basically what Lavigne did was scrape and download names, job titles,
and city-level locations of ICE employees and posted that data to GitHub,
which is a website that hosts code repositories
and was recently acquired by, guess who, Microsoft.
Now, he wrote a blog post about the project on Medium,
which linked to the database on GitHub.
Now, his project was in response to the increasingly explosive situation
at the U.S.-Mexico border where news reports are emerging daily
about children being separated from their parents and detained
and all kinds of other horrors that we're finding out about.
Now, what Medium has said is Medium's rules don't allow posts
that name specific individuals for the purpose of targeted harassment or shaming.
They said the post violated its rules against doxing
or the aggregation of publicly available information to target, shame,
blackmail, harass, intimidate, threaten, or endanger.
GitHub said in an email that it removed the project
because it violates our community guidelines,
which includes policies against use of GitHub for doxing and harassment
and violating a third party's privacy.
Now, the data has since been copied to a publicly available Google spreadsheet,
and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News,
which is where this story comes from.
Now, in his original blog post,
Lemini said the data set he downloaded contains the names of 1,595 people.
While I don't have a precise idea of what should be done with this data set,
I leave it here with the hope that researchers,
journalists, and activists will find it useful.
I find it helpful to remember that as much as Internet companies
use data to spy on and exploit their users,
we can at times reverse the story and leverage those very same online platforms
as a means to investigate or even undermine entrenched power structures.
Now, on Twitter, supporters of his project have spread the link to the data.
One said the list should be used to locate ICE employees
and deny them employment, services, and friendship.
Of course, others feel the scraping and downloading of LinkedIn profile data
was unfair to the workers.
Now, LinkedIn does not provide an easily accessible API,
and they have previously sued individuals who have scraped their data.
In a statement regarding the ICE employee data,
the spokesperson said,
we do not support or condone what immigration authorities are doing at the border,
but we can't allow the illegal use of our member data.
We will take appropriate action to ensure our members' data is protected and used properly.
You know, it's interesting because, first of all,
I get so much spam from LinkedIn.
It's insane.
But if you're on LinkedIn,
if you subscribe to them or have your profile on there,
it seems to me you can share the information you see with anybody you please.
Am I right on that, Alex?
No, I think you're right about that.
I mean, it's somewhat idiotic for these federal employees
who are in sensitive positions to be posting their employment status
and their jobs, duties, and responsibilities on LinkedIn.
You know, that's a separate issue, I think.
But once you do that, that data does become somewhat fair game.
But yet, on the other hand,
if it's just LinkedIn data and that's being spread around, that's one thing.
But if it's more personally identifying information,
then I tend to agree with Medium and GitHub for taking this down.
Because not every ICE agent that was listed on this
was responsible for this type of deplorable behavior on the border
when it comes to separating children.
And I don't think they all deserve to be docs just because they work for ICE.
Yeah, and some Nazis just did paperwork, I know.
But right now, they're part of an organization which is doing horrible things.
And I think they all should be exposed.
I disagree with that. I disagree with that.
Because I think there are some very good people that work in the federal government.
On both sides?
Yeah, on both sides.
Very fine people on both sides.
There are very fine people on both sides.
I can't be quoted on that.
All right. All right.
But, you know, my point here is that, look, I used to be a federal employee.
I used to work in the intelligence community.
I wouldn't have appreciated being docs when I worked.
We already have all the data on you that we need.
That's true. Yeah, you got it from my mail server.
Here comes another joke.
Okay, here we go.
But my point being, though, is that sometimes it is easier to affect change
from within an organization than from without it.
It's easier to do or to make change.
I'm happy to go within it then.
I'm happy to go within it and make change.
I'm sure ICE would love to hire you.
Well, no, I don't plan on being hired.
I just plan on being inside their organization and affecting change one way or another.
I see.
Look, there comes a time where you have to step up and do something.
And anybody who does something at this point is doing good work.
Not necessarily.
Okay, if that's the case then, right, then perhaps what should have been done
in a more responsible manner was to do the legwork to identify those people
who were stationed at or near the border who had some reasonable likelihood
of being involved in this deplorable separation of children from families
rather than posting the names and addresses of ICE agents that might work in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Yeah, it's the same thing with war crimes.
These people are protected.
The same thing with NYPD.
The same thing with the border agents.
They're all protected.
They can go out and be thugs and then they come back
and then there's all this blue line crap.
Well, they're not necessarily all thugs.
That's my point.
They work for a thug organization.
Yeah, they work for a thug organization.
And it's a choice.
Yeah.
Right now, look, I'm just saying it's time for the other side to strike back.
And it just seems like the other side is way too polite and never does anything.
It's simply filing things in court.
Meanwhile, so many people are suffering.
It's just nice to see a reaction of any sort.
And this is a reaction.
Yeah, you know what?
You don't want to be associated with ICE?
You don't want your name out there?
Then don't put it on your LinkedIn profile, which people can read.
How about that?
That's a fair point.
And that goes back to my original point,
which is that it's idiotic for these people to have posted this in the first place.
Yeah, they're not the most clever people in the world, I know.
I agree with that.
I'm glad you agree.
But they don't necessarily deserve to be harassed in this particular moment.
Nobody deserves to be harassed.
Nobody deserves what's going on.
That's the whole point.
David Hogg got swatted.
I mean, hello.
These aren't—calling it a doxxing is such a loaded term,
because this did not include addresses.
It just included names.
And it was something that was already publicly available.
It's like Xeroxing the phone book and putting a check next to people who work for ICE.
Okay, well, look.
If it doesn't necessarily include personally identifying information that is over and above that,
which you can access from LinkedIn,
then that's a different situation, I think.
But it would require some kind of compilation of sorts.
I still think, however, that some legwork should have been done
so that these names of people who were posted
actually had a likelihood of being responsible for some of these deplorable actions.
How do we find that out?
Do they put that on their LinkedIn?
By the way, I'm responsible for separating kids.
Geographic areas.
So you're basically saying everybody in Texas is guilty of this,
but not people in New York.
I mean, I would support that.
Look, they're all involved in raids of one sort or another.
They're all involved in things that most of us consider reprehensible.
So I don't know.
We can sort it out.
Let's get the names, and maybe we can contact them on the phone and ask them,
hey, are you responsible for this?
No?
Maybe you could slip a note under the door of your supervisor and say,
hey, this really sucks.
Stop doing it.
I don't know.
Just little steps.
Yeah, it's not just the employees that are associated with jailing a family
that should be disbanded.
Ice in this entirety should be disbanded.
It hasn't always been around.
It's only been around for five years.
They should be melted.
Ice should be melted.
No, I want bumper sticks that say, melt me some ice.
How about vaporize?
Well, no, because it's ice.
You don't vaporize ice.
You melt ice.
Even watch the Wicked Witch of the West.
Okay, fine.
You go right to steam, though.
Well, look, I'll argue your point for a second, too, on this.
When I lived in Vermont, people don't realize this.
It borders Canada.
I know this.
Well, that's true, but because of Senator Leahy's sway in the Senate
and his ability to roll pork back to Vermont,
Vermont actually has, and I believe it still has,
one of the biggest ice law enforcement support centers in the country,
in Williston, Vermont.
Do you have the address of that?
Well, this is where, let's say, if you're a police officer
and you make a stop and you want to check the immigration status of somebody,
you would call into the law enforcement support center in Vermont,
and it's those people that would check the immigration status
based on an ice database that's located in Vermont.
Williston, you said?
Williston.
That's right.
It's just south of Burlington.
I see it here.
I'm looking at it.
You got it?
Satellite view of it.
Got it.
Absolutely.
It's a nondescript office building.
Oh, there it is.
I got it.
I see the flag.
So, look, at this point, arguing my counterpoint,
is lending some credence to the idea that, yeah,
maybe it's not just people at the border who are involved
in this particular type of situation that they're handling.
Oh, I know that.
I would argue if their organization is so noble and worthwhile,
why do they have to hide?
And why, after the fact, in a retroactive way,
are they having to hide from an alleged backlash or whatever?
If they're stupid enough to put their information there,
yeah, okay, that's going to happen.
But not anticipating that and, you know,
going so far as to hide them because what they're doing is atrocious,
I mean, that seems like really convenient.
I don't know.
I don't know what else to say.
This is more the story is more about GitHub and Medium,
Microsoft, and how they're reacting to data being spread around,
not so much ICE.
I know that's where we're going with this right now is, you know,
why this happened in the first place.
But I think that's what's interesting here is that the facts,
the fact that, hey,
this person works for ICE is something that these companies are saying,
that data belongs to us and you can't spread that around.
Yeah, and it's worth noting that Microsoft owns LinkedIn,
and they just recently bought, they're starting to purchase GitHub.
So they own two of them.
Who owns Medium?
Does somebody own Medium that's huge?
No, it's self-run.
Yeah, how long is that going to last?
But anyway, the problem,
it's almost like Microsoft has incentivized GitHub to take it down,
and they had ramifications for InfoSec researchers,
who a lot of malware samples and stuff are posted on,
or exploits are posted on GitHub.
And now with Microsoft buying them,
Microsoft has tons of exploits about them,
or they can censor, force GitHub to censor that.
Well, I don't know.
But here's a story from Boing Boing, which came out recently.
Back in January, Microsoft announced they were proud to support ICE.
Honestly, what company would not be?
A U.S. federal contract, no matter how large your coffers
and corporate reach might be, is a good get,
due both to the amount of American money that you'll pocket
and the visuals that come from being, okay, et cetera, et cetera.
But it's not January anymore,
and Microsoft in June 2018 is looking a lot like IBM back in the 1930s.
I'll leave you to interpret that reference.
Under the Trump administration's direction,
ICE and other homeland security entities have been busy breaking up families,
emotionally scarring thousands of innocent kids,
driving their anguished caretakers into cages, or worse, to suicide.
And now, according to Gizmodo,
a number of Microsoft employees who prefer to remain anonymous
in the interest of protecting their careers
have stepped forward to report
that the computer technology company's relationship with ICE
has led to growing dissent among the company's workforce.
And that's something that, you know,
we're going to see more and more of in the tech industry,
people stepping up saying,
I'm not comfortable with your position here.
Yeah, I mean, Microsoft has massive government contracts.
And I mean, to say that this is a Microsoft medium GitHub thing,
like, hello, I mean, do you don't think,
you think that they just care all of a sudden
because Microsoft prerogative is not to sell you mixed reality crap
for the next 10 years?
I mean, I'm pretty sure that they got a little bit of a phone call,
maybe a little email, you know,
a little courier from the government saying,
hey, we got a thing here.
Are you guys riding with us or not?
And they're like, oh, yes, I'm sorry.
We're your lapdog, whatever.
But like, I don't think it was some sort of internal altruism
that Microsoft just happened to, you know, pull out of nowhere.
I think this works as a transitional type of music.
Is that what you had in mind when you made this?
I don't know what I had in mind when I made this.
Yeah, that's the best kind, isn't it?
I like this bassy feel to it right now
because you know from playing this music
that we're going to go to the phones now.
And you know that the phone number is 347-335-0818.
Come and join the conversation here on Off The Hook
and share your point of view with us
and tell us why we're wrong
because we love to hear that all the time.
Well, you know, speaking of...
Not you, Alex. Don't tell us we're wrong.
I think, you know, we're laying a little bit of blame here
on the foot of Microsoft
when you've got to remember they're a corporation.
They're responsible to their shareholders.
They're not going to say no to a gigantic government contract.
Absolutely. Absolutely not. That's what I'm saying.
It's like, I don't think it's squarely with them.
I think they have pressure because of their interests,
their own self-interest, but also externalities
and, you know, bureaucratic, et cetera.
People, employees, they also have, you know,
have obligations to humanity to speak up
and to their conscience to speak up.
So I think that's what they're doing.
And, you know, this goes to the issue of whistleblowing lines
in the United States, you know,
for employees to blow the whistle
on unethical business practices of a particular organization,
which we don't necessarily have by law in the United States.
And when I was chief compliance officer
of a gigantic conglomerate in Europe,
I was in charge of manning the worldwide whistleblowing line.
And, you know, this is something that's mandated in the EU,
and we could really learn a lot from that particular practice,
and it could give employees a voice,
a way to express their dissent internally
without having to, let's say, dox a whole bunch of people
that they may or may not have, you know,
any involvement in a particular project.
All right. Well, our front line remains open,
347-335-0818.
One day I'll be able to memorize that phone number.
We have a couple of other news stories
that have appeared on our radar.
Here's one.
Four things that put you at risk online,
according to a hacker.
Yes, not kidding here.
It's almost impossible to avoid being hacked
if someone really wants to do it.
But the idea is to make it hard enough
that they'll skip over you
and go for some other schmuck who's easier to hack.
I love the articles people send us.
Someone talked to an actual hacker
about things people do that put them at risk online.
An actual hacker.
This person talked to an actual hacker.
Okay, here are four big ones.
One, not changing your password regularly.
You've probably heard it a million times,
but it's that important.
If you've been using the same password for five years,
change it, especially if you use the same one
across multiple websites.
And here are some suggestions on passwords you can use.
And it goes on into...
What about if you're using a friend's password?
Wait a minute.
A, B, C, D, E, F, no.
Posting a photo of your house key.
Yeah, we all do that.
Some people do this to celebrate
after they get a new place.
Have you ever moved into a new place
and say, hey, I'm going to celebrate
by taking a picture of my key
and posting that on the internet?
Hopefully I don't get robbed here.
I've seen that.
I have seen that.
Really?
Yeah, I've seen people dangle their keys,
you know, with a nice artistic shot
of their ranch home on Long Island.
Do they work for ICE,
these people that did this?
I don't think so.
Wow.
I don't think so, but it's possible.
If you do work for ICE,
though, dangle the ICE main office key
and put that online.
I dare you.
All right.
But hackers can use that photo
to make a copy of your key and break in.
Only hackers can do that.
Burglars can't
because hackers are the ones responsible
for all the bad in the world.
If the photo is geotagged,
they can find out exactly where you live.
And if you don't know what that means,
you're already doomed.
Number three, you're a teenager
posting a photo of their new driver's license.
Now, Dent, you're a teenager.
Dang it.
Oh, God.
Now, have you posted your new driver's license
up on the internet for all to see?
Nah, I'm just going to stick to the subway.
Well, yeah, you can take a picture
of your MetroCard, I guess.
Yeah, MetroCards are good.
I think that'll work.
As dumb as it sounds,
this happens all the time.
Hackers can use it to steal their identity
or steal your teenager's identity
or go after you
since you're the one with the money.
Wow, they really get into our brains, don't they?
That's how we think.
Okay, and finally, number four,
not looking at what's in the background of photos
before you post them,
like taking a selfie at your desk
and not realizing your passwords
are taped up behind you.
Hey, how about this?
Don't tape your passwords up behind you
regardless of whether or not you're taking a selfie.
That's a stupid thing to do.
This is like a list of my attitude
towards social media for like 10 years.
Also, be careful about things like paychecks
and what's on your computer screen.
Yeah, I guess you don't want to take a picture
of your paycheck if you're taking a selfie.
Hey, pictures are a thousand words.
People got to remember that.
They get a little careless, you know.
They think their group is just their friendly little group.
And that came from a site called Valdosta Today.
I don't know what that means.
Dot com.
But thank you.
Thank you, people, for sending that in.
Let's take a phone call.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook.
Yeah, hi.
Hi, what's on your mind?
I saw this merger between Microsoft and GitHub
or Microsoft buying GitHub the other week,
and it really confused me.
I know this isn't a finance show,
but does anybody know how GitHub actually makes money
and why Microsoft would want to buy them?
Because that's kind of like the reason
why companies buy other companies.
You know, I ask that kind of question all the time.
Like, you know, why did AT&T want to time Warner?
What's in it for them?
You have a theory?
Yeah, they do make some money by having premium features
such as private repos
and event collaboration features for businesses.
This is largely a defensive move for Microsoft.
Like, if Google, like, as an entity,
GitHub would not have been able to survive by itself
because it doesn't get enough income through those services.
But, like, as part of a larger organization,
it helps them, like, with their strategy
with attracting developers and stuff.
Yeah, and this also is a change in the way Microsoft
looks at open source technology,
particularly, like, the switch towards Linux
and other platforms
than the sort of historical thing Microsoft is known for,
which is proprietary software and closed systems
and so on and so forth.
A lot of their enterprise stuff,
a lot of their cloud and all this mixed reality,
whatever their future is,
they know firmly, very, very well,
that it is not going to exist without open source technology
and GitHub is a huge, huge development platform
that a lot of people use,
especially open source projects.
Does that help to answer your question, sir?
Well, yeah, I mean, I've used GitHub to post stuff
and certainly download other things
and I've never been asked to pay anything by the company,
but to me, I really see it more as insidious
to sort of stop development rather than foster it.
I don't know, that's...
It definitely could be used to guide development
and then that's something to watch,
much like we're watching ownership
in consolidation of media corporations, for instance.
That's why it's always such a good thing
to remain independent whenever it's possible.
I mean, to make a contrary point,
if they were going to use this
to really cease or halt some kind of development
or collaboration for open source and whatnot,
people would just find another medium.
Somebody would create another repository
and perhaps that's what people are going to do anyway.
But, Sally, there is a network effect
because GitHub is not just the Git protocol.
It's all the social features and commenting.
It's a social network, basically,
so with network effects, those are de facto monopolies
and it's very difficult to escape those.
Thanks for that phone call.
347-335-0818 if anybody else is out there
who has questions or comments.
Here's something that is another story someone sent us
off thenextweb.com.
I love these sites.
The word hack is meaningless and should be retired.
Yes, the word hack used to mean something
and hackers were known for their technical brilliance
and creativity and now literally anything is a hack.
Anything to the point where the term is meaningless
and should be retired.
The most egregious abuse of the term hack
comes from the BBC's Douglas Shaw.
I think this is a British site,
so I won't know half the references.
In a recent video of his called My Lunch Hack,
Shaw demonstrates that it's cheaper
to make your own sandwich each day
than it is to buy a prepackaged sandwich
from the supermarket.
Wow.
Well, you know what?
That's good enough to qualify for Hack of the Week.
No, it's not.
It really is not.
Let's continue with this story here.
He calls that a hack.
I call it common sense.
That's not nearly the worst example.
I haven't touched on life hacks yet
and you know what?
We don't have time to touch on life hacks
because there were just so many crazy examples here.
Turning a Pepsi can into a key ring is cool.
It's a stretch to call it a hack.
There's all sorts of abuses of the word.
There's honestly, as much as this might not be popular,
we understand what you're saying,
but there really isn't a barrier for entry
to call something a hack.
I don't think that, you know,
it's really about the spirit of hacking
and I think a lot of these ideas embody that
and are exemplatory of that,
but it's not something that we would be quick to say
you have to be able to do X to be considered Y
and I don't think any hacker anywhere would agree.
Well, basically this article ends,
I regret to inform you the word hack is now bad
and should be avoided.
What to replace it with, I'm not sure.
Thank you, Matthew Hughes, for writing that article
and coming up with no suggestion
on what to replace the word with,
but people have been talking about this since the 80s.
You know, hacking is abused.
What should the word be replaced with?
And no one has a good solution for this.
Hey, by the way, just so people aren't confused,
that bit of music we played is not one of Dent's,
so I don't want people to be confused by that.
We do have a couple more pieces that we're going to play,
but we also have somebody on the phone.
Good evening, you're on off the hook.
Go ahead.
Hello, okay.
GitHub is not on the stock market yet,
and they don't expect an IPO for quite a while.
Never.
I imagine Microsoft is doing exactly what somebody just said
about it being a defensive move
to kind of gobble them up
before they cause any damage to Microsoft.
So that's one thing.
I was going to grab a few shares
if they were on the big board or the NASDAQ,
but they're not there yet.
See, the thing is, when some of this happens,
what stops people from just starting something else,
something else that's independent?
If you don't like where Twitter is going,
have a different social media network.
I'm sorry?
Network effects.
There are things like Mastodon,
mastodon.social,
you can host your own Twitter alternative
and federate them,
but because it's a collective action problem
of everybody transitioning to that new service,
we've been talking forever about,
oh, what's the new open source Facebook going to be?
Is it going to be Diaspora?
Is it going to be Status.net?
They're great from a technical perspective,
but there's a collective action problem
of getting all your friends to transition at once.
It's about establishing critical mass.
That's why Facebook is now in the position it is.
If it was MySpace,
they would be the ones testifying.
See, I don't understand
why things like Facebook are popular in the first place.
Every time I go onto Facebook,
I wind up shouting and being upset at something,
mostly the interface,
but a lot of times the people.
They're popular because they have the people.
Yeah, I know.
From a technical perspective,
they have awful user interface and stuff.
Terrible user interface.
I never could understand the allure of that.
Hey, we have another Dent piece here.
Tell us what was going through your mind
when you made this one.
Just adding reverb to different instruments
and seeing what it sounded like
and building on it.
Wow.
Very, very cool.
Do you have advice?
I'm sure there's a lot of listeners right now,
probably a lot of young listeners
who are experimenting with music
and trying to get started.
Anything you could tell them
that might encourage them to keep going?
Yeah, when I started...
Sorry, the music's too loud over here.
Let me turn you down a little bit.
When I started producing,
I spent a lot of time getting frustrated
because I couldn't make it sound
exactly the way I wanted to.
And so that stopped me for a while from continuing.
But my advice would be to just keep going
and revisit the old stuff later
once you've acquired the skills to perfect it.
Wow.
Does it ever wind up exactly
where you expected it to wind up?
Not really.
That's a good thing, though, right?
Isn't that a good thing?
It is a good thing.
Sometimes you'll be happy with it
and then you'll listen to it the next day
and you'll hate it.
But don't ever erase it.
Yeah, that's the key thing.
Don't delete your old stuff.
Back it all up.
You know, there's so many parallels with writing.
I tell people all the time,
you're better off writing,
even if it doesn't get printed someplace,
than not writing
because you will always have something that way.
And always hold on to your early works
because you learn so much about yourself.
This stuff is really fantastic, Dent.
Is there someplace where our listeners could go
to find more of your music, perhaps?
Well, definitely a Hope Conference.
That's one place to go.
That's true.
Yes, you can find it at Hope.
And I'm also on SoundCloud.
I post all my half-finished stuff up there.
So if you want to check it out,
it's soundcloud.com slash sad vibes only.
Sad vibes only.
But they're not just sad vibes.
They're happy vibes.
Yeah, there's lots of different vibes.
I think it's ironic.
We'll post a link to that on our Twitter page,
which is Hacker Radio Show on Twitter.
That's right.
You can tweet to us,
Hacker Radio Show on Twitter.
You can write to us,
oth at 2600.com.
That's our email address.
We love to hear from our listeners.
And send us stories.
Send us tales of woe or tales of triumph
that you personally have experienced,
suggestions, feedback of all sorts.
And this reminder again,
coming up tomorrow on Hope.net webpage,
we will be announcing our speaker lineup,
most of our speaker lineup.
There are still a few more that we're working out.
But you'll see just the amazing lineup that we have
for the Hope Conference coming up.
Someone told me today the hotel was sold out.
I'm not sure if the hotel was sold out.
You might want to check into that
by following the links that are also on that page
for special deals and all that kind of thing.
It's happening.
It's a month away.
Literally a month from today is when it begins.
Think about that.
Oh my God, I am not ready.
I am so not ready.
All right, we're going to go out with one more piece, Dan.
Walter, you had something?
I wish everybody a happy pride.
Oh yes, happy pride.
Oh yes, happy pride, absolutely.
And this is the final piece.
It's only a minute 24,
so we're going to have to get out of here quickly.
But anything you want to tell us about this piece
before I hit the button?
I made this.
This was one of the first ones I made.
I named them all chronologically.
So this was, I think, Dopebeat8.wave.
Dopebeat8.wave, yes.
Yeah, so it's an oldie,
but I vaguely remember the creative process.
Okay, well, again,
dense music will be featured prominently at the conference
in between every single talk.
So you'll find yourself walking to the beat
and hopefully walking at a good pace
because we really need to move people from room to room.
We will be back next week at this,
well, at the same time we'll be leaving,
but next week, an hour earlier, we'll be here.
And we would very much like you to join us then.
And that's going to do it for us here
on this particular edition of Off the Hook.
Stay tuned for the Personal Commuter Show.
Good night.
Greetings, this is Savion Glover
and you're listening to WBAI in New York.
Enjoy.