As people forced to live in poverty day in and day out, as residents of Flint who are
still being poisoned, as children texting their parents goodbye from under a school
desk, as kids being detained and separated from their families at the border, as people
forced to protest as a means of protecting their own humanity, I'm tired of writing poems
about oppression, and that is why I keep writing them.
This is listener-sponsored, non-commercial WBAI New York.
And you are listening.
You are listening and I'm not hearing.
What's going on here?
Are listening.
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We're there.
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You are listening to radio station 99.5 FM WBAI on the web at WBAI.org.
It is Wednesday night.
It is 8 p.m.
All these factors converge to make it time for another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
But if they could, they would, on Diddley Bound for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood, on Diddley Bound.
A very, very good evening to you all.
This program is Off the Hook.
Rob T. Firefly here with you, and I'm joined in the studio by Alex.
Well, hello.
And by Voltaire.
Happy Wednesday.
And by a special guest, Neo is here.
Get me out of here!
And we'll be talking about all manner of things.
Emmanuel and Kyle are away on assignment, and yeah, there's a lot going on.
We're talking about, we're still talking about Hope, because that's still pending.
It's just less than, just under a month now.
July 19th, 20th, and 21st?
No, I think the 20th, 21st, and 22nd?
20th, 21st, and 22nd.
Can I get a ruling from the referee?
The Off the Hook studio audience agrees.
It's 20th, 21st, and 22nd of next month,
where we'll be having our Hope conference in central Manhattan at the Hotel Pennsylvania.
And we do it every couple of years, and it eats all our lives for a few months proceeding,
and it's all worth it, because it comes up to be something really special in the end.
And we're going to talk about a bunch of stuff that we have going on for Hope.
But one thing I'd really like to mention is a lot of things that have been going on in the news.
Now, if you've been looking at the news today, whether voluntarily
or because you just want to know what you need to be panicking about next,
I would like to make a little public service announcement first.
And sentiments like this have been posted around social media today.
I'm going to read a tweet that's by someone I follow named Donya Ruttenberg,
which is, you remember how the airline safety videos tell you to put on your own oxygen mask first
and then assist others?
If you're too busy having a panic attack to plan your next move for justice,
get yourself calm and cared for, and then, when you've had a moment, schedule for the fight.
And I think this is something important to get hold of, because it's really common,
especially in the sorts of communities that we have here in the hacker community,
here in the activist community, here at WBAI,
and elsewhere where people are trying to make certain changes and get things sort of on the right track.
It's very easy to get burnt out.
It's very easy to get panicky.
It's very easy to get overwhelmed by everything that's going on.
And the thing that we all need to remember, I think, is that it's not the responsibility of any one of us.
And we do have community here at BAI, in the hacker community,
elsewhere in other sorts of communities that you have, both personal and public.
So keep hold of that. Don't lose sight of that.
And make sure you're taking care of yourself.
BAI cares.
Anyway, so now that we've got that going, let's talk about a couple of things that have been going on.
I'd like to get to a couple of news stories, and then we'll talk a little bit about hope.
But the bill to save net neutrality, which has been in the news.
I think we mentioned it on this program over the past couple of weeks.
There was a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, and it's still 46 votes short.
The petition to force a vote on this bill is 46 votes short in the House of Representatives.
And Ars Technica posted a story about it, and you can, from there,
find a list of all the Congress creatures who have so far signed the petition.
Basically, down the line, it's all Democrats.
And I checked up on the ones from New York, since that happens to be the place what we are in.
And, yeah, we have a grand total of 17 signatures on this petition from New York Congress creatures,
and they are all Democrats.
So if your local representative is not one of the following,
then it's not one of the ones that have been confirmed to sign this,
so you know you need to start harassing them.
The signatures include Congressperson Sean Patrick Maloney, New York District 18,
Nita M. Lowey, New York District 17, Joseph Crowley, New York District 14,
Yvette Clark, New York District 9, Gregory W. Meeks, New York District 5,
Carolyn Maloney, District 12, Jerold Nadler, District 10,
Elliot Angle, District 16, Hakeem Jeffries, District 8,
Nydia M. Velazquez, District 7, Jose Serrano, District 15,
Paul Tonko, District 20, Adriano Espaillat, District 13,
Thomas Suozzi, District 3, Brian Higgins, District 26,
Grace Meng, District 6, and Kathleen Rice, District 4.
If you did not hear the name of your New York Congressperson in that list,
then your New York Congressperson has not yet signed this petition,
and you need to get on that as their constituents.
You need to get on that.
You need to contact your Congress individuals
and tell them to basically sign this petition,
to force a vote on the bill to restore net neutrality,
because we need 218 signatures on this bill to force a vote.
That's also enough to have the vote succeed and have this restored.
So, yeah, there's your call to action for the day, or one of them,
because we're all getting several of those a day now.
You can only fight evil one at a time.
Pick one evil. We've got plenty to choose from today.
Very, very true.
So, yeah, what do you guys think?
Does this have a chance in hell?
I think it does.
I think there's a lot of support here,
and I think that it's sort of a bipartisan issue as well.
I think once we get Republicans on board,
this will definitely have a chance of succeeding.
And even more to the point,
I think this could end up becoming a midterm issue as well.
People want to try to energize their constituents
before a midterm election like this,
and net neutrality is something that's actually a very, very popular issue
that crosses the spectrum of Republicans and Democrats.
So, yeah, I think it's got a really good chance.
I think it has a better chance than the state legislation
that we've seen in places like Oregon and California
in combating net neutrality, frankly.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's theoretically a very bipartisan issue,
but in practice, none of New York's Republicans have signed this yet.
So we'll see.
We'll see if we can bring this in a little.
Yeah, and let's not forget the Democrats weren't in on this all along.
When Obama first came into office,
he appointed a former telecom lobbyist as the head of the FCC.
People literally had to blockade his house
to get Tom Wheeler to endorse net neutrality.
Absolutely.
So more on this as it develops.
Talking of net neutrality,
California, as you mentioned, Alex,
was already set to enact a tough new net neutrality law.
Things looked good.
It had support.
And then AT&T happened,
and you can kind of guess where it went from there.
A story on tech dirt from Thursday, the 21st.
In the wake of the FCC's ham-fisted net neutrality repeal,
more than half the states in the county
are now exploring their own state-level net neutrality protections.
California's proposal, Senator Scott Weiner's SB 822,
was seen as particularly promising,
and it was.
The EFF was trumpeting about how excellent it was.
I think the ACLU was as well.
And AT&T, who just spent $86 billion to acquire Time Warner,
harbors dreams of using its combined dominance
over broadband and media content.
So basically, during a Wednesday morning hearing,
AT&T managed to convince California Assemblyman Miguel Santiago
to introduce a series of last-minute, secretive Tuesday night amendments
that were then voted on without debate
during a Wednesday morning hearing.
This is a quote from the article.
The committee, led by Assemblyman Miguel Santiago,
a Democrat from Los Angeles,
issued amendments to the bill late Tuesday night.
Among its recommendations were to permit
a controversial internet service provider practice called zero rating,
where some websites and apps don't count
against a consumer's data allotment.
Opponents view zero rating as a backdoor way of discriminating
against online services that don't strike free data deals
with broadband and wireless companies.
So this is basically the very thing that net neutrality was trying to prevent,
trying to protect us from, and here it is.
Well, to an extent, I think.
I mean, this is sort of like if T-Mobile tells you
that streaming Netflix isn't going to count against your data plan,
then you're going to be more likely to use Netflix
as opposed to Amazon or Hulu
or whatever other nonsense is out there for you to stream.
So in a sense, yes, but on the other hand,
it's a private agreement between a company and another company,
and it's not something that is necessarily forced by the government.
So I see that the zero rating stuff is a little bit less pernicious.
But what was going on in California, though,
was a little confusing to me, though,
because there were actually two bills in California.
There was SB-82, and then there was something else.
And so the whole thing was really confusing.
Look, it's hard to get people interested in state politics
and state legislature's business anyhow,
and when you have two conflicting bills about something like net neutrality,
people are going to get confused, and things are going to get lost,
and you're going to have the opportunity
for last-minute, under-the-table deals like we saw here in California.
But I think even more to the point,
this state legislation could all be doomed anyway
because the federal net neutrality regulations,
the Restore Internet Freedom Act that was passed,
that glaring misnomer,
because it has nothing to do with internet freedom,
has to do with the freedom to bill you
and to charge for fast and slow lanes.
But that legislation specifically mentioned
that it preempted state legislation,
and federal law trumps state law all the time,
especially if it explicitly preempts state legislation.
So all these state methods of combating net neutrality
may ultimately be ruled by a federal court
to have been null and void
if they did in fact contradict the federal law on net neutrality.
This is all very interesting.
I feel like the wording of these state laws
could be done in a strategic way
that it classifies net neutrality as a consumer rights issue
and prohibits contracts that state levels are able to enforce.
Yeah, that's different too
because that's wielding some kind of economic power
as opposed to legislative power.
So the federal government has legislated in a way
that says states, you're not allowed to do this.
And there are certain...
The federal preemption doctrine is something
you learn in constitutional law class in law school
and you really quickly forget it.
But it's pretty nuanced.
But one thing that I definitely do remember from my con law classes
was that if something explicitly states that it preempts state law,
it definitely does.
But wielding economic power by saying something like,
if you are a telecommunications provider
and you want to have a contract with the state of Oregon
and you engage in practices
that are against the principle of net neutrality,
then we're not going to award you a contract.
That should be perfectly legal.
I believe that's how the wording was.
At least in the New York proposal, that's how they wield it.
I have one of these crazy questions.
But what about states that would perhaps relabel
these communications departments as like public utilities,
say that the internet is a public utility that everybody uses,
that everybody relies upon?
Would that change the context of this whole debate?
That's a good question.
I really have no idea, to be honest with you.
It's a crazy question, though.
But I think that if the intention behind the legislation
would be to somehow modify or alter the federal rule,
which it seems like it probably clearly would be,
then I think the preemption doctrine would probably prevail.
Wasn't that the common carrier designation
that people were fighting for over the last administration or two
and that we were celebrating the passage of some time ago,
and that rolled back under the rug with the current administration?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Rob.
And that's why this net neutrality debate
can actually be some sort of soporific type of discussion, too,
because when we're talking about the classification of common carriers,
it's not really the most exciting and sexy topic.
But yeah, that's essentially what it's all about.
Absolutely, and we're already seeing history being written by the victors
or rewritten, for that matter.
There was a recent interview with the site Marketplace.org
where they interviewed Ajit Pai, head of the FCC,
during which he was doubling down on the inaccurate fact
that the repeal of net neutrality had enormous public support
when, in fact, the direct opposite seems to have been true.
But there were so many comments, right?
There were so many comments.
So many comments from so many robots and dead people.
You can read this interview.
TechDirt also has a story linking to that.
But it's on the site Marketplace.org,
during which basically the interviewer is asking him flat out,
you know, this is not a popular decision.
Millions of people have written in opposition to it.
And he's just steadfastly insisting,
no, public opinion was not against us.
If you look at some of the polling,
if you dig down and see how these polls were constructed,
it was clearly this and that.
And just saying that, no, really, this is what everyone wanted
is the current state of affairs.
And it's really, for those of us who know better
or for those of us who are paying attention
or for those of us who can look up actual facts,
it's really frustrating to see this being trumpeted as fact.
Well, I mean, to him, maybe it is a fact, right?
He saw these comments.
You know, he just tuned out all the criticism
about the fact that all these comments were fake
and tuned out, essentially,
several investigations from state attorneys general,
including our own attorneys general,
and perhaps, to his mind,
these were all just so many comments
that were in favor of net neutrality.
I mean, it really is, frankly, appalling
that they can just flout the truth in such a flagrant manner.
Yeah, I'd be doing great if I just ignored
everything negative that anyone ever said or did regarding me
and just paid attention to the good stuff.
People say negative things about you?
I couldn't imagine that.
I'll show you the list later.
In any case, yeah, so that's kind of the state things are in now.
We had a bit of good news from the Supreme Court recently,
some time before the current loads of bad news
out of the Supreme Court.
But earlier in...actually, late last week,
the Supreme Court ruled that, yes,
the government does need a warrant
to get your cell phone location data.
So your location data in a 5-4 decision
issued Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that
if the government wants to collect
a suspect's cell site location information,
detailed granular data that shows where a person is every few seconds,
it needs a warrant to do so.
This from the site Ars Technica.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion,
accordingly, when the government tracks the location of a cell phone,
it achieves near-perfect surveillance
as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone's user,
something that we've been trying to drive home
on this program for many, many years now.
Also, it's interesting to note that around the same time,
I believe Verizon, AT&T, and I believe also T-Mobile
disavowed that they would retain any sort of location information.
Now, I don't know if this is in conjunction with Cambridge Analytica
because of their following of cell phone users
or whether it was in conjunction with this particular ruling.
We know that that's not true because Verizon just bought AOL and Yahoo
basically for their location-based advertising technology,
and AT&T just recently purchased a company
whose focus is on tracking the user's location
and tying it to users so that they can sell advertising data.
So it sounds like the cell phone providers backed away as quickly
as they could seeing the wind from this decision,
and yet under closer expansion,
you see all this amassed infrastructure
that is being used for explicitly the purpose of targeting you.
Yeah.
But we're also seeing further in the Ars Technica article here,
the court notably declined to overturn the controversial third-party doctrine,
which is the 1970s-era legal precedent that found
there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in data collected
by a third party such as a phone company.
Now, that's true to an extent, though,
but I think there is a modification of it, too,
because the court also addressed the issue of voluntariness
and voluntariness of actually releasing or disclosing
this particular information.
And so if it wasn't a voluntary release of the information,
then it wouldn't necessarily qualify as something
that would be subject to release without a warrant, right?
So this issue really does, I think, hint at the third-party doctrine
because we're talking, again, about business records
that are voluntarily disclosed to a third party here.
One thing I think that the court said
that was actually very interesting in this case,
it was called Carpenter v. United States,
was that cell phone location information, and this is a quote,
cell phone location information is not truly shared
as one understands the term.
And I think that that's a critical point,
and that carrying a cell phone is indispensable
to participation in modern society.
And so you don't have to go back to an old Nokia phone
that doesn't track location in order for you
to have some kind of expectation of privacy
to the extent that you would expect law enforcement
to have to obtain a warrant to get your location.
But, you know, again, this raises a separate issue
that Neo had raised as well, which is, you know,
are these telcos going to voluntarily stop tracking location information?
They mentioned that, but they didn't mention
the other plethora of data that they all track together,
and they didn't mention historical location information.
This particular case deals with real-time location information,
not necessarily historical information.
And what about all these third-party data brokers
to which data has been sold by the telecommunications carriers,
and what about the back-end data mining
that telecommunications carriers perform on their own data sets
in order to make them more valuable to advertisers?
Yeah, the scary thing here is, like, even now,
the police might not be able to get location information
or they'll need a warrant for some information,
but they can just go around and just buy it up
from these advertising companies.
So it really shows the limits of, like, a libertarian approach
to just worrying about government surveillance
when we have corporate surveillance as well.
Right, and then on the other hand, you have the telcos coming out
and saying, well, you know, to the extent that we do track location information,
it has to deal with emergency services like 911 or OnStar
or whatever the nonsense is that you push a button in your car,
and as the commercials show you, you just missed a deer on the road,
you go off the road, you hit the OnStar button,
and they know exactly where you are and send help.
Things like that, they're claiming, well, that's the only legitimate use
for tracking your real-time location information.
But you would think that information would be encoded into the cell site itself,
because I know when I cross state lines, when I cross county lines,
if I have to dial 911, I always end up with the same 911 operator,
which is in the wrong district.
I have to ask them regularly to redirect the phone call
to whatever area code I happen to be in.
You sound like you're calling 911 a lot.
There's been a couple of incidents over time, but it's been 10 years.
Interesting.
Yeah, but going back to the third-party doctrine stuff,
I mean, that was all set into place when the phone company basically,
they had a device in your wall and that was it.
They weren't tracking your real-time location out in the world,
in real space, second by second.
And so that seems to have led the court in this case to basically conclude
that, yeah, it's nothing to do with all that because cell phones are different.
They're basically a different device than your ancient telephone.
Yeah, absolutely.
Your ancient telephone was completely different.
But on the other hand, we're also talking about metadata,
and we were talking about metadata back in Smith v. Maryland
with the third-party doctrine as well.
And this was always the justification for the reason why law enforcement
could introduce something onto a telephone line like a pen register
that tracked your DTMF tones.
And for those of you old enough to remember,
that stands for dual-tone multi-frequency, your touch tones,
the numbers that you dial on your phone were recorded by the phone company
for billing purposes.
That's the only way that they could generate a bill and charge you
based on the quote-unquote message units that you used to use way back in the day.
And since the phone company was recording that information,
you were necessarily creating a business record in the possession of a third party.
That third party was the phone company,
and therefore you had no expectation of privacy with respect to that particular data
to the extent that law enforcement did not need to obtain a warrant.
So I think things are changing in the right direction.
We've got Justice Kennedy retiring.
We've got Trump potentially appointing another Supreme Court justice.
Who knows where this is going to go?
Yeah, we're all just gripping our armrests and watching everything go by.
Take deep breaths, folks.
Breathe in, breathe out.
It's worth talking about this Carpenter case because what actually happened in it is
there was a man convicted of six robberies in Michigan and Ohio,
and basically law enforcement were able to obtain 127 days
of his cell site location information without a warrant.
So basically the authorities were able to just snap their fingers
and make six months or so of his real-time movement a piece of evidence
without any due process there.
So that's what sparked all of this,
and that's the right that we're all worrying about losing as a result of this.
Well, that's true, but we have to also remember we are giving away our location information
not just to our telecommunications companies but also to all these different apps
that are on our phone that are tracking perhaps our location.
Maybe while we're using it, maybe while we're not.
And any one of those repositories of location information can be subject to legal process,
namely a subpoena, and that can come by way of a grand jury.
It can come from a prosecutor.
It can come from a divorce attorney.
So we really have to think about the wisdom of placing all of this information
into the hand of any third party.
Actually, what did I say, six months?
It's more like four months.
But anyway, yeah, we'll be keeping an eye on all of this and whatever else happens.
Send us stories in the news that you think are of interest,
and in our wheelhouse, oth at 2600.com, or tweet at us at Hacker Radio Show.
What I'd like to talk about and why I brought our friend Neo here.
Who, me?
Yeah, it's you.
So Neo, which is spelled X-I-O.
Long story.
Long story.
Is one of the presenters at our HOPE conference coming up next month.
Oh, yeah, that's right, I am.
You are.
I forgot about that.
You've spoken at HOPE before, and your current talk, I think,
is a continuation and extension of the same sort of work.
It is definitely an extension of the previous one, which was, well, I'll put it this way.
At the end of the first lecture I gave, which was when VGA is not your standard output,
there was a lot of positive feedback just from the room, from the rest of the talk,
and I figured, okay, so I've got two years to make this better and proper and everything.
But in that two years, accessibility, which has been the thrust of the talk,
has become more than just a buzzword.
It's actually starting to take traction.
And that is impressive.
What do you mean by accessibility, for those unfamiliar?
Okay, if I can remember my 60-second speech from like two years ago,
but accessibility is essentially this.
It's not about spoon-feeding information.
It's not about dumbing down your interfaces.
It's not about simplifying things to the point where even a bot can figure out how to use it.
It's about allowing the user to interface with whatever system you have
without the use of an intermediary.
So I'll put it simply.
You don't need an interpreter.
Wow.
I think I got it down to 30 seconds.
Nicely done.
So who in particular is this work directed toward?
This is more directed towards people who have a notion of what the word is
but have no idea where it fits in their business
or where it fits within their IT department or how to get a hold of it.
One of the things that I've noticed is that among professionals, among people in the field,
is that they always say, well, awareness is a necessity.
Awareness.
People have to be aware of accessibility before they can begin to tackle it
because they don't realize what problems they may have,
whether you have a blind user, whether you have a user who has epilepsy,
whether you have a user who has ADHD or autism
and can't follow a screen that keeps changing on them.
Simple things.
Even age.
I mean, we're all going to get old at some point.
Hopefully, we have nice, long, healthy, fun lives.
But there comes a point when you are learning so many new interfaces
that you just can't take it anymore and you break down.
You basically need something that's simplified and accessible that you can get to.
So let's take a look like in the last 10 years of operating systems.
We went from XP went to end of life.
7 is going to be end of life at some point next year.
We're now at Windows 10.
Those are three different radically different interfaces to the end user.
So that's three learning curves piled on top of each other every three years.
That's a little too much to ask for.
Same thing with some of Google's services.
They keep changing their interface on a regular basis.
You don't know what's a button.
You don't know what's actually a drop menu when you click on that button.
You don't even recognize what a drop menu is.
All of these complexities,
all of these basically pushes to enhance the user experience
have come at the detriment of the user interface,
that simple interface that we have been trying to teach people for, what, 30 or 40 years since 1980-something,
since Palo Alto and Xerox PARC.
That was based around just a simple notion that you have this four icons.
It's going to be either a document, a program, a folder, or a device.
And from that, you can get your menus.
Your menus are your verbs.
And you can select them.
And it's so easy to display pages on a screen.
Well, now we've gone off from the paper and ink interface into you're only on a phone.
Everything is touch-based.
Everything has an animation to it.
And every website wants to tell you how they use their cookies,
as if we didn't know you used cookies.
Give us something that's useful.
And there are some gimmicks and gotchas that do interfere with the ability of the user
to just focus on what's in front of them and do what they want to do.
And that causes them to think about how they want to work with a program
and how they have to relearn an interface because, again,
some branding may have taken place and everything changes.
And their internal map of what a site looks like, what a program looks like,
the functions that they used to use, they have all changed underneath.
As you're saying this, this may sound strange,
but I'm having these images in my head, tropical drinks, palm trees, waves, the beach, surf,
and early warning systems for nuclear ballistic missile launchers.
Funny how you caught me on that.
That was actually going to be one of my opening salvos, if you'll forgive the use of the word.
One of the craziest things is that if you change an interface so much faster
than you can learn that the interface has changed, you're going to have these situations.
I mean, Craigslist I could laugh at because it was LHTML 3.2, but it was consistent.
You could use it.
You could navigate it because you could recognize, okay, this is going to be the header bit,
this is the body bit, and at the end, you know, you've got your metadata information and contacts.
Now I know why you're calling 911 so frequently.
Oh, absolutely.
You're spending too much time on Craigslist.
That's perfectly logical.
Yeah, all three seconds of it, probably.
But also, I'm trying to remember where we get, but you brought up another point,
which is I'll get to it when it comes back to me.
One of my biggest pet peeves, like with the fad that started with Windows Mobile with a flat design,
everything is flat, and because there's no gradients, you can't tell what's a button and what's a...
I'll take that even one step further.
I'm trying to remember who it was that brought it to my attention about a month ago,
that the reason why, for example, oh, that was it.
In fact, this links together.
One of the jokes at the time of the EBS alert was that, okay, so somebody probably clicked the button.
Well, we all know that Android has a caching problem,
that it displays icons based on the contents of the cache, what you most recently used.
Now, that's something that changes regularly, but it has to be loaded at the same time.
The share sheet.
Exactly.
So, for example, the share sheet, let's imagine that you had this really nice picture of yourself
that you want to send off to somebody who you want to impress.
Well, the last person you want to send some kind of photo probably you shouldn't have taken,
but you really want to impress someone with, to your mother,
because when you put your finger to the screen, that icon to the person you want to impress
has just moved out of the way, and it ends up going to the wrong person.
Thankfully, this is being fixed in the latest version.
Exactly, but these are in the latest versions.
Most of the support, most of the versions of Android that are out and available right now,
and probably people will call up and correct me,
but the last I checked was everybody's running a version that is at least two years old,
that is not supported anymore, those updates are not coming through the telcos,
because the telcos don't want to take the responsibility for these updates,
and you have a user interface catastrophe.
Especially with those of us who don't have a phone made in the last couple of years,
so we don't have the option of upgrading even if we wanted to.
Yeah, it's in the phone company's economic interest to force you,
rather than shipping software updates, to force you to buy a new phone.
Exactly, and depending upon how, you know, between net neutrality,
between whether this is a utility, whether who's got the responsibility for security updates,
are security updates available, do you actually own the phone?
I'm willing to bet that at some point we're going to see a challenge to ownership versus rentals,
because there are a lot of people who pay them off on a lease or on a prorated basis over their bills.
That's going to be part of the problem.
Fortunately, it's beyond my capability to espouse about, but it's part of the problem.
And also with material design, well, everybody's adopting material design,
but the people who are adopting it do not have that base understanding
of why icons were created in the first place,
that they were supposed to be visual representations of blah, blah, blah, blah.
You mentioned Xerox and Parkin, the early Macintosh.
There's a great editorial from the creator of App Image, a Linux app distribution format,
where he's complaining about how basically everything that we're redoing,
people know him and are trying to reinvent the desktop.
And all of these things have been, like, if you read the Xerox Park document
or Steve Jobs' documents about what was going on with the original Macintosh interface,
he basically said they compared the usability studies and they compared everything,
and they found that the standard Wimpy interface is most straightforward,
and yet we're moving away from that.
Well, you can see this, actually.
I have a personal gripe against Windows Server 2012 and 2016 because it has that effect.
It is clearly designed for larger buttons, larger spaces, which is a touch interface.
A touch interface does not belong in a server room.
Please stop doing this.
Microsoft, if you're listening, one, I'd like to work with you guys to fix this.
Not work with you guys just to work for you, but to fix this and get it right
and understand that there's an appropriate place for these interfaces.
A phone is a good interface. A tablet is a good interface.
It does not belong in a server room or on a desktop for people who are power users,
people who expect that certain commands are going to be in certain places,
and you can always rely on them.
When the changeover to the Ribbon interface in Office came out,
there was a lot of controversy at the time.
There are people who have had to literally relearn the entire Office suite just to do commands.
That would have been maybe two key clicks or two key combinations.
And because I'm working with mostly people who are using screen readers,
they have to have the screen read back to them, and that's a loss of time.
That's productivity wasted.
I mean, we know that you can go to the File menu, select Save.
We know that you can hit Command-S or Control-S or whatever.
Key combination floats your boat.
But if you start changing those things, you can't rely on them,
and it stops being a human interface and starts being a,
well, we felt that it looks better this way.
Yeah, and we've seen a lot of that in programming in general and in software in general
where the people making the software, they might be brilliant at coding this,
they might be brilliant at coding that,
but they might not have someone on staff or around who understands the needs
of maybe a user who is visually disabled or auditorially disabled
or something else where they would have more individual needs
that are not being served by the interface of what they're using.
Programmers will program for programmers.
Yes.
They do not program for users.
They spend very little time with the end user trying to figure out
how they go about their business.
A great book by Jeff Raskin, The Humane Interface,
this is maybe 20 years ago he wrote this book.
The whole point of it and the whole crux is
you want people to focus on what they're going to do.
Let them work.
Don't make them think about how they're going to work,
but just let them work.
Interesting.
Yeah.
This is why I use the command line.
Well, even the command line, I mean, I prefer the command line
because it's blunt, it's straightforward,
but even so, some things you do need a crutch for.
I mean, I should be using SOX, Everyday Sound Exchange,
just by command line or ImageMagick just by command line,
but we also rely on GIMP or Photoshop or Audacity, Sound Exchange.
All these programs are part of the toolkit that makes us powerful.
So if we have to think about what we're doing
or how we're going to do about it,
those are two different trains of thought and they do collide.
And the more frustrated you get with it,
the less patience you have with it
and the more you want to find an alternative.
So I'd like to throw some questions around the room
about backing off from this individual talk for the moment.
Let's talk about Hope in general.
Cool.
You've obviously been going for a long time.
I believe it's now 12 years.
Yeah.
I went to my first Hope 18 years ago in 2000.
I was at the first one, 1994.
You're the elder statesman here.
I am indeed.
In the term of Hope attendance.
And Voltaire, were you there in 1994?
No, I was just being born.
Oh, my God.
So you had other things to worry about.
But when was your first Hope?
I can't remember.
I believe it was the sixth Hope.
Yes.
So we've all been going for, I think,
in our own scales a long time.
But also a couple of us are involved with the planning,
those who aren't here with us today.
So many people behind the scenes coming together
to make this all happen.
And it's a hell of a ride, let me tell you.
Just being part of it all in these final weeks
before we get the thing going.
And it's really an event that I can't say enough about.
Even above and beyond the fact that I'm part of the staff,
it's always been such a wonderful conference,
even before I got involved with things behind the scenes.
It's been something that has just meant so much
in the sense that I've been to a lot of conferences,
but this one, Hope is basically put on by the community.
For the community.
It's not the work of some entity that's us saying,
here's our event, and we're going to show you things,
and then you're going to watch the things,
and then you're going to go home and leave.
It's basically come and be part of this
and learn from each other.
And I think that's the right way to do this sort of thing.
And it's something that we're always working on.
None of it's perfect.
We're always adapting and adjusting
and figuring out new and better ways to enable all this.
But I think that's the goal we're working toward.
I want to take a contrary position here.
I'll make one major gripe about Hope,
frankly, since the beginning.
It's just too damn hot.
I really wish you guys would try to deal with that issue,
because it's always the most humid,
hottest weekend of the summer,
where you take three or four thousand hackers,
cram them into one hotel with a series of three or four,
no, there's more than that,
but there's like five or six elevators in there,
and that ride to the 18th floor on Sunday,
everybody's pretty ripe by that day.
Speak to yourself, because I sit at the info desk.
We will be dishing out disinformation,
and we are stuck under the air conditioner.
So I will gladly trade with you.
We have a deal here. Deals have been made.
Yeah, but more seriously,
I've been there since 1994, and I've seen it progress.
And it's always been fantastic.
I always think back to when I was 15 in 1994,
and I went to the first one, and it's just awesome,
and it really just keeps getting better and better,
and larger and larger,
and this is going to be the first Hope
under the Trump administration,
and I think our attendance is going to be skyrocketing,
and I think the talks that we have lined up
are going to be very interesting,
pertinent both technologically, sociologically, and politically.
And I'm very, very interested in seeing
how the community comes together, rallies around,
and really sort of builds out
what we are calling the Circle of Hope this year.
Absolutely.
Yeah, you mentioned all the sociological
and political aspects of Hope,
and I think that's my favorite part.
Hope, it's like a hacker conference,
whereas I feel like in the States,
most conferences are more InfoSec-focused
and more about the business side,
whereas Hope is focused on the hacker ethos.
It feels European in a way,
that people are focusing on constructing cool things
and helping each other,
as opposed to just breaking stuff.
Well, the few conferences that I have attended
that weren't Hope,
because I usually tend to remain within the New York scene,
they tend to be more directed
towards a particular theme or goal.
Like you were saying, InfoSec is the main theme,
or cryptography is the main thing,
or medical devices are a main thing.
Here, Hope is a little different.
I find it more of a,
I joke about this, but I say this sincerely,
it's a family reunion.
The people come back, it's communal,
it's individuals meeting with their friends,
haven't seen each other for a long time,
they have projects, they have talks,
and good friendships do come out of this.
And I don't see that from many other conferences.
I mean, I see affinity for the conference,
but not for the individuals.
Another great thing I like about Hope is that
a lot of conferences, you can get in,
it'll be expensive, but you can get in for free
if you volunteer,
so that just incentivizes people to volunteer
and then do their bare minimum to volunteer
and just get in.
Whereas at Hope, it's like,
we have tons of volunteers,
an entire volunteer run,
but the volunteers still have to pay their way in,
so it's like the people that are volunteering,
they're there because they want to be there,
not just for your ride.
Absolutely.
To go back a little,
I think the humidity issue can be solved by something
that I try and spread the word about
when I'm emceeing between talks and stuff.
But a lot of cons,
and this comes, I think, from other conferences,
and sort of the anime comic con sort of scene,
there's been a bit of a common sense rule
called the 3-2-1 rule,
which is very important,
and I'm seeing some thumbs up and some confused faces.
But the 3-2-1 rule is basically
the bare minimum of certain things you want to get
on every day of a conference or an event like this
that you go to.
It's 3-2-1 rule because every day,
you want to get at least three hours of sleep,
at least two square meals,
and at least one shower.
And that leaves you with zero problems.
Or at least fewer problems.
Talking about the talks and everything and the variety,
we did, as was mentioned on this program last week,
we have posted not the schedule
because the actual timing of these things
needs to be figured out.
But if you go to the schedule page on hope.net,
what you will see is a list of talks,
and I think it's maybe 95% of the talks
that are going to be there.
We're still sorting out the last few.
But you can see basically most of the talks
that have been accepted for this conference,
things that you can see,
people who will be giving the talks,
the speaker's page is up,
and you'll be seeing Neo's talk
as well as many others described there,
and start planning on things you want to check out.
It's hope.net.
You can find us on Twitter, hopeconf.
And, yeah, we'll...
We're basically...
As you can hear through my voice,
I think we're sort of burning the candle at both ends
to make all this happen in a few weeks.
That's a good point, too,
because we're talking about hope
as if it's all fun and games,
but it's a gigantic amount of work
for people like you and Emmanuel and Kyle
and the speaker's committee.
I mean, it's like the work never ends.
Once that weekend comes to become the present,
then it's just sort of exhausting, right?
By Sunday night when hope is over,
everyone is just completely exhausted.
And so all of this is done and created
in the interest of bringing together the community,
bringing together ideas, presenting ideas,
and also done, we have to remember,
a great personal sacrifice of all the people involved,
and yet it happens every other year,
and every other year it gets better and better.
Well, we're all doing our best,
and I think that we'll come out of this with probably...
Like, every time I say this, and it's a cliche,
but every time I've been part of this,
and I've been part of hope behind the scenes
for, like, ten years now,
and every time it's better than the previous one,
every time things are run more smoothly
than the previous one, I think,
behind the curtain and in front of the curtain,
and every time we have just more going on
and more ways to do things,
and, yeah, it's a constant process.
We're constantly improving, and we're trying our best.
I know, Neo, you've done volunteer shifts
at the Info Desk a lot.
Oh, I've done both sides of the desks.
I've done sides of the talking.
I've been on team panels, individual panels.
Radio Statler is now going into its 10th, 11th, 12th year.
It's all a blur. It's all a blur.
But I will say this.
You know, if you're speaking,
and you're doing your preparations for that talk,
you know what you're putting in for one particular talk.
So focus on it.
And, by the way, guys,
you should have your rough drafts ready by now,
because the clock is ticking.
We should hope.
We should hope.
But on the back end, I know that you guys are organizing,
what, like, 100 talks for three days,
hoping everything works out.
And then during the conference,
I've seen you running around like a lunatic.
I've run around like a lunatic.
The volunteers run around like lunatics.
The Gophers run around like lunatics.
Everybody's running around like lunatics.
But it keeps getting better and better and better.
So either we all need roller skates,
or we're doing something right.
Also, there's a lot to be said
for the quality of our particular lunatics, I think.
It's a great crowd at Hope.
Extended family.
We all have basically extended family
that we see every two years at this thing,
and it's a joyous reunion every time.
It is.
Well, Rob, I think you had something interesting
with respect to ICE that you wanted to mention.
That might be...
Yeah.
There's been a hell of a story going on about that.
It's been reported by many sites.
We have a story from Vice Motherboard here
where ICE had modified its risk assessment software
so that it automatically recommended detention.
Hmm.
So basically, ICE had this tool
that was supposed to analyze basically immigrants
and people they were concerned with
and see if they had criminal history,
if they had other factors that were supposed to influence
whether or not it was something
that this particular three-letter agency
would consider, quote-unquote,
a good person or a bad person,
someone they want to deal with
or someone they want to deal with.
And they tweaked it.
They tweaked it and basically made it into something
that just flagged everybody.
So no matter what they wanted to do,
they could say, well, our software flagged them,
so they were a person of interest.
And this is quite a move on behalf of this agency.
I mean, is it really?
I mean, on the other hand, I sort of disagree here
because what else are they going to do?
I mean, what I find most interesting
about this particular story
is not the fact that they were flagging everybody
because that was the federal policy.
The federal policy was to detain and prosecute
every single person who illegally crossed the border.
What's interesting to me is seeing the reduction
of federal policy into source code
being implemented on individual devices.
That's something that's really fascinating to me
and I think is sort of a brave new world
in terms of the convergence of federal policy,
legislation, and idiotic IoT devices.
Yeah.
I think you have a wider point of the use of algorithms,
especially for like judges will use them for sentencing
and people assume that just because it's like an algorithm
that is neutral, it's a value neutral,
when there's like studies of algorithms
that show that they're like wildly racist.
And yet the judges can just say like,
oh, well, it wasn't my decision, it was the algorithm's.
Like be like pilot and like wash their hands of responsibility.
Yeah, exactly.
The algorithms here too,
if anything should ever be open source,
it's this kind of thing, right?
Because how are we, the public,
going to scrutinize this particular policy
if we don't know what kind of variables
are being assigned to these people?
What's the data that's going in?
How is it being weighted?
If this kind of thing was open source,
perhaps it could be subject to further revision
by the community, by politicians,
who would obviously need some help
interpreting the particular source code,
but there's plenty of us out there
who would help them do that.
But yeah, I think the conditional statements
that go into if this, then that,
if this variable exists, then this,
is also opaque that that becomes particularly problematic.
Yeah, fortunately there's legislation in New York.
New York is the first city that had a proposed legislation
requiring any algorithm used by the city
to be open sourced.
And the New York City Democratic Socialist
of America Technology Working Group
is something that I'm involved with
that has been working on that bill.
So it's currently in committee.
I think it's just a little odd
that we're making policy based on
quantifying qualitative issues
and coming up with a perfect number
or a single factor of consideration.
It's a big issue,
and we're going to see that continue to increase
as years come along.
Yeah, and just to break this down,
I mean, algorithm is kind of buzzwordy.
It's thrown around a lot,
and not everyone knows what that is.
An algorithm is basically just a math problem.
You know, if this, then this,
or this cross-referenced with this equals this.
And it's basically just a bunch of,
like, what particular data are you feeding into this program
that causes it to churn out one result or another?
It's not something, like, esoteric.
It's just a simple chunk of code.
It's a simple concept, really,
that is being used to dictate.
And I think you guys touched on this last week
where we were talking about, basically,
computer algorithms, artificial intelligence,
whatever you want to call it,
starting to take a legal opinion.
And, Alex, you had something about this sort of thing.
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And the other thing,
and I think it was last week that we spoke about,
was that a lot of times
when people are picked up by law enforcement,
they call into this ICE Law Enforcement Support Center,
which is located, at least for a long time,
over in Williston, Vermont.
And then a determination would be made
about the particular person
who's being detained's immigration status.
But, you know, this particular software, as well,
just seemed to be really poorly put together
because my understanding from the article
was that it would add hours and hours to the detention,
and that these series of questions
had to be done and redone,
and that it would just take a ridiculously long time
to spit out a determination.
And it just seems like it was a bad idea from the outset.
And even ICE and DHS has been saying this
from, I think, since at least 2015.
So it's, you know, a big issue.
But, you know, Rob, speaking of big issues,
the issue of family separation is something that, you know,
we really haven't addressed on the show,
but it's something that I think communities are rallying around.
And my law firm, Blackstone Law Group,
has been, I think, you know, very generous with our time
to the hacker community and things.
And I'm very proud to announce tonight
that last week we had actually made a unanimous determination.
We had an emergency partnership meeting on Friday morning,
and we have voted unanimously now
to offer pro bono legal services to whistleblowers
and to detainees who have been separated
on account of this deplorable and tragic border control policy
being implemented by the Trump administration.
And so if you are a whistleblower,
you can contact us at help at blackstone-law.com.
That's B-L-A-C-K-S-T-O-N-E-law.com.
And if you know somebody who is detained,
if you know a family who is detained,
if you have a child that you need to be reunited with,
we are here to help.
We're here to help you fight deportation.
We're here to help you fight prosecution.
We're here to help you find your family, wherever they may be.
And if you're a whistleblower,
we're here to help you communicate securely with the media
so that your identity can be protected
and you can remain anonymous if need be.
We're here to protect those communications
using legal privilege, using technology,
and we're here to help you navigate
the complicated federal law
when it comes to making what's known as protected disclosures
to organizations like Inspectors General,
the Office of Special Counsel, et cetera.
So I'm very proud of our partnership
in basically making this a non-issue,
that we are going to support this particular endeavor.
And here we are,
and the public has been tremendously supportive.
I mean, within ten minutes of releasing this out to the press,
we had banks calling us,
telling us that there were entire floors of people
willing to come to our office and photocopy
or run down to court
or do whatever they needed just to help.
And I think this is the kind of community engagement
that we see in the hacker community,
that we see with Hope,
and that frankly gives me great heart
that together we can do things
that we wouldn't be able to get done alone.
Excellent.
And where can people contact you once again?
That would be for...
If you're a whistleblower,
if you need legal representation
with respect to a detainee or a detained family
or a missing child,
that's help, H-E-L-P,
at Blackstone, B-L-A-C-K-S-T-O-N-E-law.com.
Excellent.
There is another story
that I wanted to get into more deeply,
but the time is running out on us,
but the New York Times published a very good piece
on the 23rd called
Thermostats, Locks, and Lights,
Digital Tools of Domestic Abuse.
And this was by Nellie Bowles,
published on the 23rd,
and it basically goes into...
I highly recommend using one of your free
New York Times articles of the month on this.
It goes into basically the use
of Internet of Things devices
by domestic abusers
to affect their victims.
And it's a...
I think it's a take on this
that has not been talked about enough
and something that really
requires more looking into
as more and more of our lives
are attached to devices
that are actually controlling
things in the real world for all of us.
I mean, this was a really fantastic article
because it touched on technology,
touched on domestic violence issues
and harassment and control
of victims of abuse.
And my wife is
a prosecutor and has been prosecuting
domestic violence for basically the bulk
of her career, and she's dealt with some really
horrifying cases that deal with
the control of devices inside
a house. And what I think we need
to begin to realize is that
orders of protection, protecting victims
of domestic abuse, just
in the same way that
people against whom orders of protection are issued
have to hand over firearms,
they should also begin to
have to hand over passwords to IOT devices
to tell the
other spouse or the person for whom
the order is issued, you know, passwords
to give them control over the devices
in their lives so that they do not have to
feel isolated in their own homes.
It'd feel terrible if we didn't get this one word
in, but everything that we worry about, about Big Brother
and our society nowadays, we all
have that in the little society with these
IOT devices. Absolutely.
We'll be following this story.
We absolutely will.
So much going on. I want to thank
Neo for joining us tonight. Thanks for the invite.
Be sure to check out his Hope Talk.
Is there somewhere else people can
go for more of your work?
Just Twitter at xionyc
or just
follow around. I'll be around.
Absolutely. And stop by the disinformation
desk. We'll make some coffee for you.
Quite so.
Send us email, oth
at xionyc.com.
Send us tweets at Hacker Radio Show.
Send us other
things.
And really, thank you all
for the stories you keep contributing.
That Internet of Things
story, I want to credit the submitter
of that who was a listener of the show
who is also married to me.
And
I want to just throw out
there, yeah, anything you think
we might be interested in. I want to hear about
projects you're working on in our
wheelhouse, things you've got going on.
Let us know, because we want
to talk about them. Hacker Radio Show on Twitter
or oth at 2600.com.
How many listeners
are you married to? Just the one.
According to Arbitron.
According to Arbitron.
Good night, everybody.
Thank you all for listening. Thank you for your support.
And keep letting us
know if you haven't gotten hold of your
premiums from past fundraisers, because we are
reading those emails that you're sending.
We are keeping track of them, and
we do want to know, because that's
something we're still working on making right for everyone.
So, for
off the hook,
for apps and friends,
for those no longer with us, this has been Rob T. Firefly.
Have a very good week.
Have a good week.