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It's Wednesday evening, eight o'clock,
time for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall. ♪
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call. ♪
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would. ♪
Bundledly bound for the best, expect the worst. ♪
I hope that's understood, bundledly bound. ♪
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 Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Kyle.
Hey, what's happening?
And Voltaire.
Hey.
Welcome back from Vegas.
Thank you.
We'll talk about some of the things that went on out there
in the hour ahead.
And we'll be taking phone calls in just a little bit, hopefully.
So, anybody else lose their security clearance today?
Well, it's not a surprise.
I mean, you know, I saw it coming.
But, yeah, just don't criticize and you'll be all right.
That's what we learned.
I wish he lost his clearance as punishment for his torturing people
and being, instead of like for going against President.
But you can't lose your clearance for torturing people.
That's the job.
When you're head of intelligence.
The job isn't to torture people.
Well, I mean, it's kind of been understood over the past few years.
It's hard to root for him.
But in this scenario.
It is.
Yeah.
I hear that.
I fully hear that.
And, you know, if you close yourself off to intelligence leaders,
evil or good, you're kind of driving without your headlights on.
And that's probably not a good idea.
Speaking of driving without headlights on,
anybody else notice a problem with, well, I guess you guys didn't notice.
You don't drive.
But Waze.
Boy, there's something up with Waze today.
I'm not really sure how it is installed on my phone.
We use Waze occasionally just to see.
Sometimes it takes us down the back streets of Brooklyn, you know, to save traffic.
How many times have we gone through, what's that?
Bold-faced liar.
We are so dependent.
We can't not navigate without it.
No, we totally can.
It's like a permanent part of our, no, I'm just kidding.
The BQE is fairly easy to navigate.
But when you need it the most.
Sometimes.
What's that industrial area we cut through sometimes, which is really awesome?
Not Elmhurst.
I'm trying to think of the name.
It'll come to us.
Yeah, it'll come.
If you're in Queens, you know what we're talking about.
Queens and Brooklyn.
Sometimes it guides us down these one-way streets, and it's a lot of fun.
It can be fun, yes.
Today, though, something was different.
First of all, there's all these network issues.
Whenever I try to get bearings, it can't find the network.
You're in the middle of a city, and you can't find the network.
It doesn't make any sense.
Eventually, though, it found the network, except instead of the usual clip,
British accent woman that we have giving us directions,
it turned into this really rough-sounding male voice,
which scared the crap out of me, but only for one sentence.
And then it went back to her.
And then something else happened, where apparently a comma's been
redefined as 10 seconds, because she'll say things like,
in 300 meters, and then pause 10 seconds, and then tell you what to do,
except you've already passed it by that point.
So something weird's going on with that.
I don't know if it's inside my own phone or if it's something network-wise.
Yeah, there's lots of ways to look at it.
It could be the way the operating system on the phone itself is working
with the network or being handed off in the progress of using those kinds
of applications, and I think we probably do to test some other ones,
compare, get some perspective on how these sort of online ones
that are run over the network versus other standalone ones
that you sort of program in advance, and then it's sort of already
got the map.
It seems like this is having communication difficulty
with whatever service it's hosting.
I like ways.
I like ways because it's always changing.
It'll tell you about traffic and route you around.
What I don't understand about ways is they want you to be social.
They want you to be chatting with people while you're driving,
and I don't know how you're supposed to do that safely.
I also don't even know how you're supposed to report things safely
while you're driving.
People are constantly doing it.
I mean, there's one cop sitting on the side of the road, and all of a sudden,
there's 50 people that have reported him, which is kind of cool,
but I don't know how to do that safely without that swerving.
Yeah, there's invaluable information there in that social aspect
because those things can be significant.
If someone sees something that fell off a truck or whatever,
the obstruction in the roadway is getting that information so quickly.
I think it would be very hard to get that from, like, an AM radio
or another traffic news source, even if they're flying above you
or whatever in their news copter.
Right, right.
No, an AM radio is not going to tell you there's a car, you know,
on the shoulder ahead or there's an animal on the road,
which is the kind of thing that ways can do.
But it is weird having that on your phone, not exactly knowing how it works.
And just a couple of weeks ago, my phone, in the middle of Waze, in fact,
went black and did an update.
Now, usually, you know, phones are supposed to ask you,
do you want to do an update now?
Do you want to do an update at all?
Didn't get that. It just did it.
And when it did it, it screwed up all my settings.
It changed the font on the clock.
It did all kinds of things I didn't want it to do.
Privacy settings, gone.
Switch back to show me, you know, everything about you.
Really resented that.
It's a lot of the antithesis of, I think, how the Apple system works.
I'm not pushing one or the other, but I am saying that this is a distinction
in how switching from device to device is managed
and, you know, upgrading and that kind of thing.
You would ideally want those settings.
You don't want new fonts or new sounds in your operating system.
So it is an undesirable, I think, side effect
of just how, I think, cumbersome the Android updating method,
although it's gotten better, but I would also blame a little bit
T-Mobile in how they're implementing that overall
sort of from a general perspective.
But there's certainly a lot of room for improving the way these things work.
It just seems to me that the manufacturer and the mobile provider
would be very interested in service and the reliability
of sort of the basics of the operating system
instead of loading it up with all this extra stuff
and doing these really cumbersome and lousy, poorly implemented updates.
That's not in the interest of providing the service.
I've noticed a trend in operating systems and phones
to sort of leave the consumer behind.
You don't matter as much. We have to do this, deal with it.
And everyone's doing it. We'll force it.
It's like the sysadmin who would say,
we're rebooting the system now.
Not giving you any warning whatsoever.
No choice. You lose your files, whatever.
That's just the way it goes.
So, you know, I have this happening with the phone
where I lose settings in inconvenience
without any permissions being asked.
And, of course, all my settings are reverted back
to what they want them to be.
And features are added that I didn't ask for,
and features are taken away that I needed.
And when you talk to people about this,
well, that's just the way it is.
It's not the phone you bought.
No, it's now a different kind of phone.
And you just have to adjust.
Same thing with operating systems on computers.
Windows 10 is a perfect example of that.
Ooh, prime suspect. Yeah.
It does not function nearly the way you might expect
coming from, say, a previous version of their own operating system.
Like XP or 7 or 8.
All of a sudden, 10 starts doing this stuff
where it's basically taking control,
taking a lot of the power out of the administrator
and doing things that are completely unexpected
and very disruptive.
Well, through no fault of my own,
I have a machine that runs Windows 10.
And I have to tell you, it is the biggest pain in the ass
because it just reboots on its own.
If you're in the middle of something,
because it decides it wants to do that.
Okay, yeah, you can set it so it doesn't reboot on its own
so it nags you.
You can't ever make it not reboot,
but you can have it say,
okay, I'll do this tomorrow
and then nag you the next day, etc., etc.
Except sometimes it just does it anyway.
And that is the trend that we're seeing
with operating systems where, like I said,
the consumer is left behind.
You don't get a say.
And we're going to have to reboot every now and then.
I've used machines for a year at a time
without rebooting them,
having projects open, all kinds of things like that.
That's how I work.
Apparently that's something
that's not going to be considered
for operating systems of the future.
And what you're going to see more of, too,
are just the equivalent of dumb terminals
where everything is in the cloud.
Every damn thing is in the cloud
and you don't have control.
I mean, we see that with software.
Software as a service is a trend
that has found its way into operating systems
and was very convenient for smartphones in general,
but it is a big part of graphic design software,
video, Adobe.
How has that changed over the years?
You used to be able to just buy it, right?
It's absolutely changed a whole lot.
And this is the same with Photoshop,
which thankfully has a really healthy variety
of alternatives right now.
But video software in general
was something that you owned.
You had a copy of it.
And you were coaxed and encouraged,
hey, come along to the next version.
We'll add these features and we'll shore it up.
But you can keep your old version if you want.
It's your choice.
But this has been slowly taken away
from something that the consumer
in an effort to make it sort of easier
and more approachable to their consumer base,
but also for their own management.
It's much easier for them to just push stuff to people
and force them through
and have everybody come along with you.
And now you pay a monthly fee
and you're kind of locked in.
And I think the same thing is going to happen
on almost everything that we use.
You won't actually own it.
You won't actually control it.
You'll just have a virtual presence someplace.
Well, and with production software in particular,
the companies that use that have a massive account
most of the time with these organizations,
and they're willing to buy all sorts of licenses
and have it managed that way.
And it's really not at all a problem to budget.
They're going to buy $100,000 worth of Apple products
and outfit their newsroom or whatever it is.
But the smaller producers,
the people who are making and innovating
and doing a lot with these technologies
that have been so democratized,
they're kind of in the lurch
because they can't possibly wield this
and pay like $1,200 a year or $2,200 a year,
whatever the commercial rate is
because you're not a qualified educational institution
and so on.
You're left to basically only use old software
that may still be something you can sort of own
with a serial or other kind of software authentication key,
but no way can you afford to climb onto
their new model of hosting it as a service.
And for whatever reason,
whatever their rationale is,
it's your only option
because everything else is older or depreciated.
With all these companies like Microsoft
trying to force you to buy their cloud products,
Apple's doing it too.
It's Microsoft 365 or something?
Yeah, and Apple's been doing it too
with the purposely low storage they provide
to make you buy their cloud stuff.
It makes it more important to be able to run your own stuff.
And on the Linux side of things,
there's been a lot of progress made
going in the opposite direction
where Windows is requiring you
to install their OS updates whenever.
With Ubuntu in the newest version,
you can live patch a new kernel update
without having to restart your computer.
Yeah, the capability is certainly there.
Yeah, but it turns out that the companies
that make this software really like money.
And they like taking more of it from you
than they're perhaps entitled to.
They like being able to automatically
get more money from you on a regular basis
because they could sell you something in a box
that will do what you want
and you just take it home and do it.
But if they sell you a membership
in something else that you need them for,
that you need to continue using them for,
that's a whole other thing.
And of course, they're going to go that way.
There's also the issue of privacy.
When you run your own computer system,
you control your files,
you control what you make public
and what you don't.
You take the responsibility for that.
Whether you keep a backup or not,
that's really something that is up to you.
When you're in the cloud,
you kind of lose that.
Now, I saw this story the other day,
the stories you see virtually every day
of some teacher someplace
who was caught with hundreds of images
of child pornography on their computer.
Okay, here's another one of those.
In this particular case,
I just saw this paragraph and it intrigued me.
This guy started uploading hundreds of images,
as I said, of child pornography
to the storage feature of his Google account in April,
federal prosecutors said in court papers.
Google officials, following both federal law
and the company's policies,
suspended the teacher's account
and notified law enforcement.
Now, if you go over to Google Drive
and you ask them the question,
is Google Drive secure?
They say when you upload files to Google Drive,
they are stored in secure data centers.
If your computer, phone, or tablet is lost or broken,
you can still access your files from other devices.
Your files are private unless you share them.
Well, I think this guy currently in jail someplace
would disagree with that.
And, you know, here's the problem.
When it's dealing with somebody
who's either in prison
or a suspect in child pornography
or even somebody in the military,
regular people tend not to care as much
because, well, they knew what they were getting into
or they deserve it or something like that.
But this is very, very relevant to everybody
because we need to know,
if you upload something to a service
that says it's private
and then you upload the wrong image
and all of a sudden the cops are at your door,
obviously it's not private.
Obviously it's being scanned and looked at and analyzed.
And believe me, it can get a lot more insidious
than illegal images.
This can be about words.
This can be about conspiracies,
about who you associate with.
All that information, no longer private.
Rob?
And maybe a sexual predator
isn't the best use case to hold up,
but we saw it happen a few years ago
when there was that massive leak
of private images of celebrities
because they were using iCloud,
something which just came with their phone
and they just used it without thinking
that this was something that was open to other people
who were able to wrangle their way in,
download images that they weren't expecting to share.
But in that case,
didn't somebody hack their password at least
to get the images?
This is Google saying,
hey guys, we got something here,
go get this guy.
And we may say,
okay, that's the right thing,
they should do that,
but we don't know they're doing that
until something like this happens.
And that's kind of the red flag
that I see being waved here.
That's true.
And there's an old saying in the IT world,
which is like,
there's no such thing as the cloud,
there's just other people's computers.
There's computers you don't control.
Yeah, and I think their enforcement
and policing of that content
is something that would quell creativity
in a lot of ways.
And you say you have a documentary
or something that's going to release,
expose corporate malfeasance,
some controversial issue,
if some algorithm or some unknown entity
at an organization that's hosting
some of the materials that you're using
to produce that content,
if they're looking at it
or somehow it's being exfiltrated in advance,
how would you be able to have
any kind of element of surprise
or release that?
And were the right interests involved,
your entire story
or something you could be breaking
to the public that is in the public interest
is then collapses
because of this kind of industrial espionage
or otherwise disruptive policing
of something that you, in your opinion,
feel is important to people
and that they should be able to judge.
And it's not just your private data like that.
There are people nowadays
whose entire email presence
is wrapped up in a Gmail account,
which is run by Google,
which is a company that sells advertising
for a living.
You say this like it's unusual.
Almost everybody I know
is completely wrapped up in Google.
It is, and this is a company
that is giving you free stuff
that's easy to use
and convenient and all that,
but they're using this information
that they gather about you
through your use of the product
to fuel what they actually do for a living,
which is sell you things,
which is sell other people things about you,
your info, things like that.
Rob, not just sell you things,
sell you.
They are selling you
to various companies.
Yes, you become the product
by using these.
Exactly, exactly.
Voltaire?
Back to Kyle's point,
a lot of these systems
are basically taking hashes
of your files you upload
and what we were talking about
a few weeks ago
with the EU policy
of the mandatory filters,
Article 17,
those things can't,
algorithms can't decide
whether or not something is fair use,
but they can still prevent you
from sharing a link to a video file, say,
if you're a documentarian
and you're doing fair use with that.
It's like they can't determine that.
There's a lot in there,
and if you measure
and you sort of cut out stuff
with that kind of a course
that level of granularity,
you really remove a lot of possibility
when it comes to imagery or content
and so on.
Basically, these entities
who are acting as hard drives
ought not to be,
ought not to have a say
in necessarily what the content
of what you're producing is.
It's never been the case,
but now in giving them that stuff,
you have the possibility.
You're open to the possibility of it.
Algorithms, yeah,
they may be looking
for very narrow things.
As I described it,
I think that's a very coarse,
cumbersome way to,
in some way,
censor the ability of people
to express themselves.
You need humans involved in that,
and you need to give people
the opportunity to produce
and express themselves.
Before we move on,
what's the solution?
Because we can tell people,
yeah, this is a problem.
You're going to be compromised.
You're going to lose all your privacy
if you keep things in the cloud.
But obviously,
people can't all run
their own mail servers.
They can't all run
their own Unix systems.
What is it that we should
suggest people do
instead of buying into this?
Volter?
Collective political action.
Demanding tougher privacy laws
and contracting the surveillance data.
Demanding things is great,
but it doesn't always work right away.
I'm saying,
what can you do next week
that will make you more secure?
Rob?
I think it's just a way
of looking at the data
that you're using
and that you're moving around
and being cognizant,
and a lot of people are not,
being cognizant
that that photo you're taking
and putting up on your cloud account
here or there
is something that is being placed
on a network
that is hooked up
to basically the entire world.
I'm not advising child pornography
connoisseurs to do that.
You guys continue
to use the cloud all you want,
but that's how they keep
this kind of advice
from reaching people
because, well,
we have to protect everybody
from the really evil people out there,
and if you don't go along with it,
you're enabling those people,
and that's something
we have to detach ourselves from
because that's not the case at all.
No, I want to reiterate,
that's my point,
is that it's all the things
that get swept up
in this hysteria.
The fear, the hysteria
is the bait,
but it is not actually
addressing the issue.
Right.
Now, if you know
that your files,
your email, whatever,
are not as private
as you want them to be,
at least you know that,
and maybe that's okay with you,
but I just don't want people
to be surprised
when they think
that they're doing something
that's secure
and it's absolutely not secure.
At least know that,
and then, once you know that,
if it's not okay with you,
then you can look
into other solutions,
maybe a service
that has a better reputation,
maybe you learn
some basic computer skills
and do things locally.
The important thing
is to be educated
and to know
if you're living in security
or living in insecurity.
Yeah, it really depends
on your threat model.
If you're a threat model,
I feel like a dissident
or a journalist,
your threat model
might be the surveillance state,
whereas if you're
just a more average person
without technical skills,
I think you're actually
better off with Google
than with locally hosted things
because a lot of people
in real life,
their major threat model
is about an abusive partner
or something,
and if they have local access
to your files,
then that's dangerous.
I like to think
the average person
is a dissident right now,
but maybe that's just a pipe dream.
But I think we all benefit
from education,
from learning how these things
actually are working.
Yeah, and think about
creative ways to do this stuff.
You don't have to do,
I guess, necessarily
what everyone sort of does
as a solution,
and there are a myriad
of alternatives
and pieces of alternatives
that could be part of the whole
that is a much better solution
or more attractive solution.
So definitely supporting
cool projects
that are related to storage
or they're related to video editing,
whatever it is.
There are bits and pieces
of that that are non-commercial,
and leveraging those things
as much as possible
against the enormous
for-profit versions
is always a good source
of, I guess,
dissent and inactivity,
and it pushes you
a lot further away
from only having those alternatives
that are hosted for you
and so convenient.
In a kind of related story
to both my phone and this,
it turns out that Google
is tracking your movements
whether or not you tell it
to track your movements.
According to the Associated Press,
Google wants to know
where you go so badly
that it records your movements
even when you explicitly
tell it not to.
An Associated Press investigation
found that many Google services
on Android devices and iPhones
store your location data
even if you've used
a privacy setting that says
it will prevent Google
from doing so.
Computer science researchers
at Princeton confirmed
these findings
at the AEP's request.
And for the most part,
Google is upfront
about asking permission
to use your location information.
An app like Google Maps
will remind you
to allow access to location
if you use it for navigating.
If you agree to let it
record your location over time,
Google Maps will display
that history for you
in a timeline
that maps out
your daily movements.
Who wouldn't want that?
Storing your minute-by-minute travels
carries all kinds
of privacy risks
and has been used by police
to determine
the location of suspects.
Imagine that.
Such as a warrant
that police in Raleigh, North Carolina
served on Google last year
to find devices
near a murder scene.
So the company lets you
pause a setting
called Location History
in case you need
to commit a murder.
You pause it there
and then resume it later.
I don't know what exactly...
It tells them exactly
what range of time
to look in other sources
to find out where you were.
Right, right.
Google says
that will prevent the company
from remembering
where you've been.
Google's support page
on the subject states
you can turn off
Location History
at any time
with Location History
off the places you go
are no longer stored.
But that is not true.
Even with Location History paused,
some Google apps
automatically store
timestamp location data
without asking.
It's possible,
according to this article,
although laborious,
to delete it.
You have to jump
through all kinds of hoops.
Now, for example,
Google stores a snapshot
of where you are
when you merely open
its Maps app.
Automatic daily weather updates
on Android phones
pinpoint roughly
where you are.
For some reason,
my phone thinks
I'm in Connecticut now.
I don't know why,
but I love it.
I love when it gets things wrong.
Some searches
that have nothing to do
with location,
like chocolate chip cookies
or kids' science kits,
pinpoint your precise latitude
and longitude,
accurate to the square foot,
and save it
to your Google account.
The privacy issue
affects some 2 billion users
of devices
that run Google's
Android operating software,
and hundreds of millions
of worldwide iPhone users
who rely on Google
for Maps or Search.
Now, storing location data
in violation
of a user's preferences
is wrong,
said Jonathan Meyer,
a Princeton computer scientist
and former chief technologist
for the FCC's
Enforcement Bureau.
A researcher from his lab
confirmed the AP's findings
on multiple Android devices.
The AP conducted its own test
on several iPhones
that found the same behavior.
If you're going to allow users
to turn off something
called location history,
then all the places
where you maintain
location history
should be turned off,
Meyer said.
That seems like
a pretty straightforward
position to have.
Google counters
that it's being perfectly clear.
There are a number
of different ways
that Google may use location
to improve people's experience,
including location history,
web and app activity,
and through device-level
location services,
said a Google spokesperson.
We provide clear descriptions
of these tools
and robust controls
so people can turn them
on or off
and delete their histories
at any time.
But people aren't buying that,
and in fact,
some lawmakers
are pursuing this as well.
But wow,
that's kind of a big deal,
don't you think?
Yeah, and again,
it's not in Google's
financial interests
to make it easy
for you to take control
of your own
stored history.
You know,
they're going to throw it
in a disused lavatory
behind a cabinet,
behind a door that says
beware of the leopard
because they like that.
They like that data.
They like keeping that data.
They like selling that data.
They like using that data
to sell you things.
And yeah,
they'll give you something
to click to make you happy,
but really,
they just,
they like it.
Isn't it enough
that I bought the damn phone?
You know,
I mean,
it's a huge amount of money.
And I also,
I came up with a theory
over the last week.
Back in the old days,
I don't want to keep saying
it's back in the old days
because I'll turn to one
of those people,
but back in the old days,
when you got angry at things,
you could slam them down
like a phone.
And if I get angry
at something,
excuse me,
on my phone,
then I can't slam that down
or I have to invest
another 700 bucks
in another phone.
And I think
what's happening today
is that people
are being very careful
with the way
they express themselves physically.
They no longer smash things
or kick things
because they're expensive.
And you know,
if you hit something
the wrong way,
it's going to break
and you got to pay
all this money,
so they're bottling
all this rage up inside them
in unhealthy ways.
I think we need
to bring back phones
that you could slam down
on the receiver,
slam down on the switch hook
and maybe we'll be
more mentally healthy.
And those old phones
were robust as hell too,
weren't they?
I still have.
It's a nice big,
heavy piece of equipment.
You could slam it down
satisfyingly,
you know,
goodbye slam.
And you'll see it
in old movies,
TV shows,
whatever,
and those of you
who weren't around
to experience that
in real life,
you're missing out.
I am not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
I'm not ashamed
of the fact
that I have a phone.
...
depending on how
it's structured
and arranged.
So
I would not
actually,
personally,
be participating
in this
on behalf
of someone else
because
they're not
taking the risk.
You're lost.
The rest of us
are going to be
piling up cash
and trying
to sort it out
later.
But it's crazy.
That's what people
think
hackers do.
We all go out
to the ATMs
and
It's an amazing concept, but it's true.
Okay.
I'd say, yeah, we have more an interest
in keeping our resources
than doing something fleeting like this.
Yeah, complaining about technology
and figuring out ways to break things
and fix them again and make them better.
That's pretty much what being a hacker is all about.
I like being a hacker.
I also like not going to jail for bank robberies.
But that's not the reason why you don't rob a bank.
It's because it's wrong.
Well, there's that too.
You know it's wrong.
It doesn't feel right when you do it.
Not that I know that,
but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't feel right.
But it shouldn't be that we're gobsmacked
the criminals are using technology in what, 2018?
I mean, it's innovative, yes.
It's interesting and exciting.
And yeah, maybe even a little more boring,
less like Butch Cassidy or whatever,
like a train robber style.
But it's certainly, it should not surprise us
that the tools and techniques
that hackers were sort of onto first
or aware of how those systems work
and how to exploit them.
It should just not be a wonder that,
yeah, crime is going to advance
into the 21st century as well.
But in the news, the instant a criminal uses
some sort of technology in the commission of their crime,
then they're labeled a hacker.
It's like if everyone who used a car in a crime
was labeled a mechanic, it's fascinating.
You know, we've been having this conversation
since the 80s and I don't think
we're ever gonna progress past it.
Not through fault of ours,
but it's just the way the media
and the way basically people understand this kind of thing.
But here's something on the subject
of bank security or bank insecurity.
I was dealing with an issue over the past week
involving, after every conference,
a ton of bills that have to be paid.
It's inevitable and credit cards get maxed out
and we had a credit card that was completely maxed out
that we needed to unmax and we did,
you know, made a hefty payment.
And yet, the week afterwards,
sales were still being declined,
charges to that credit card were still being declined.
So I called up the credit card company.
I said, hey, what's up?
You know, we paid you.
They said, oh yeah, we don't have confirmation
that this was paid.
And I'm like, oh my God,
we don't have enough to pay this.
All kinds of nightmare scenarios.
So I had to access my bank's records
and sure enough, a week earlier, it was paid.
So I called them back and I said,
okay, well, we need to get verification
from the bank that it was paid.
Even though right there, there's a record of it
that it was paid, they need to talk to the bank.
So they basically made a three-way call to the bank
and I had to enter information,
I think it was social security information or something,
to get access to the account.
And then with the representative sitting on the phone,
the automated recording read off the balance
and all kinds of other options.
And eventually, they wound up talking
to a representative from the bank.
So I had two representatives talking to each other
about our account and all kinds of information
was being passed around, which really,
I don't think should have been passed around.
And that is considered normal.
You call a bank and you say you're calling
from a credit card company
and you have the customer on the line.
All the usual questions they ask you,
such as, okay, I'm gonna give you a list of three streets,
which one did you grow up on?
And those are always fun,
always seem to be the same question too.
Instead of doing that, they just basically believe them
and all this information is passed along.
And the second that they were able to verify
that the charge was paid, everything was okay.
And again, in the other direction,
you could have easily pretended
you were a representative saying just that
and the credit card company would have believed you.
So yeah, we have a long way to go security-wise
for things like this.
Rob?
Yeah, and credit cards have been a mainstream thing
for something like 40 years now.
We've had time to figure this out
and we've had time to move beyond
this easily exploitable way of doing things
that people were social engineering comfortably
in decades past.
Like I said, it's the same conversation
we've been having since the 80s.
I look at articles that we print in the magazine
and basically, people are talking about
Internet of Things devices that have default passwords.
And botnets and things are formed because of that,
because default passwords are used
and it's relatively simple.
The same lessons aren't being learned
and it's really incredible.
So yeah, that's a little bit of what's been going on.
Now Voltaire, you were at a big hacker conference
that took place over the weekend, DEF CON.
Yeah, you might have heard of it.
It's 10 times bigger than Hope
and boy, I can't even imagine what that must be like.
But how was it?
It was a lot of fun.
At DEF CON, it kind of has, among activists there,
it has a notorious reputation of being kind of bro-y or...
Yeah, like...
Bro-y, that's the word?
Oh yeah, like people drinking too much alcohol,
more like infosec than hacking.
Well, it is in Vegas.
Yeah, you gotta keep that in mind.
I think, because it's so large,
as you mentioned, there are lots of...
It's like many conferences within a conference.
So some are more alcohol-focused
and people are not just worried
that there are other breakout conferences that are...
Like I went to Crypto and Privacy Village,
which I especially liked.
That had the most Hope-like feel to it.
So I really liked that.
Yeah, if you had to compare,
other than being 10 times bigger than us,
I would say they're more security-focused
and more focused on exploits and things like that.
And we have, I guess we're more of an activist direction.
And that's probably why we had the problems we had
with alt-right infiltration
and various other unpleasantness.
And also the challenges that we have to tackle.
But I know I heard some reports
about things that were happening at DEF CON
that were a challenge of a completely different nature,
also related to our changing society.
And in this particular case,
whereas I think with Hope, we can do a better job,
I don't really think there's anything they can do.
I don't think they can be faulted
for anything that happened here.
It's basically hotel policy now in Vegas
seems to allow for random searches.
Well, it's not hotel policy in Vegas for at large.
It's the hotel policy of these specific hotels,
the ones that are hosting it.
Now, this has something to do with the guy
who went on a rampage
and was shooting people in Vegas last year.
Nominally, yes.
It's basically that the addition of the policy
is that now if you reject room service
and you put the do not disturb sign up
for like too many days,
they'll force somebody to send into security
and like take a look around.
And the official, so this isn't a new law.
It's just their policy.
And their official policy is like,
they have a security guard go in and look around
to see if you have any guns or anything,
but they're not allowed to touch your stuff.
And they're supposed to like identify themselves.
But that in a lot of the reported cases,
they broke those rules.
They didn't identify themselves.
So it could have obviously been
somebody social engineering their way into it.
And yeah, and they also touch people's stuff
and like started looking through their belongings.
Because if you go into a hacker's room,
you're gonna see things that are interesting
and possibly suspicious.
And hackers are the people that would object
more than anybody to random searches
and having their privacy invaded.
And I think that the only solution really
is for them to take their business.
If they can, DEF CON organizers have announced
that they're gonna go and like basically try and negotiate
and get this policy changed for them.
But the problem is like,
the only way to stop this
is to take their business elsewhere,
which is difficult because there's so much concentration
and the four hotels surrounding the Caesars
are all owned by the same company.
So it's like, I saw people on Twitter saying like,
oh, well, if you don't like the policy,
just like stay at a different hotel.
It's like, yeah, but-
You're mocking people on Twitter now.
Wow, I never thought I'd see that.
Mocking people on Twitter on the radio.
But no, but the problem with that is like,
because Vegas is such a maze,
like any hotel within a 20 minute walking distance,
I'm only exaggerating slightly,
but any hotel within like a 15 minute walking distance,
it's owned by the same corporate outlet.
So like you don't have a choice.
How did that happen?
How did all the hotels wind up being owned
by the same people?
Capitalism.
Wow, that's, well, you know,
when you have 25,000 hackers,
I know there's some experience
because I've seen it happen with 3,000 hackers
in the Netherlands and Germany,
villages can be built.
And I think what, I know this is silly,
but you just go out into the desert and you build a city,
you build a hotel of your own.
And I don't know, I know that's not gonna happen.
That's how Vegas started with the mafia.
That is how, okay, well, we don't know that.
But the thing is when you have that number of people
and when you have that kind of publicity,
you can affect change.
And we totally stand behind whatever change
they decide to make as a result of this.
Because this is, you know,
it's not just hackers being affected,
it's everybody being affected.
I mean, the guy went nuts and killed a bunch of people
and nobody knows why to this day,
so much for your mental health screening.
And the way they decide to deal with that problem
is to invade people's privacy
for completely unrelated reasons
and not do anything about actual guns.
It's nonsense.
One thing I noticed following what was going on on Twitter
is that hackers being hackers,
somebody started circulating the code
to dial on your hotel room phone
to flag your room in the system
as having had their room service already.
How is there a code for that?
Why do they even have that?
Apparently it was a thing and it got out.
So if the people that do the room service
could just dial it in while they're in,
when they finish a room,
makes it easier for them.
Wow.
What if, you know,
you just like did like a long-term rental of a place?
You sort of have like your own apartment complex
and they kind of just rent it out on their own terms
for, you know, a weekend or a week or something like that.
I don't know, there's all kinds of creative
possible solutions.
Yeah, I would just reiterate or elaborate
on what you were saying about access to other venues.
I think like a motel probably wouldn't,
but because these events are at a resort,
like, you know, a highway motel
is not gonna be that concerned
if you're saying do not disturb,
but a resort like this accommodating an event like this,
especially given the proximity to the Mandalay Bay event,
or incident, is a concern.
And I think hospitality, like you said,
in general across the industry
is definitely a lot more vigilant with this kind of stuff,
especially like large amounts of luggage.
I remember seeing some notices,
I won't really elaborate very much more,
I mean, it doesn't matter,
but, you know, we have access to some of the staff areas
and there were definitely notices for the hotel
about large suitcases, that same kind of issue,
but as far as how they implemented it and enforce it,
we didn't have anything like that
or rooms were being searched or anything,
not that we're aware of.
But I think maybe that's just a distinction
of the like sort of stratification of the industry.
And again, the proximity in Vegas
seems to be understandable,
perhaps not reasonable, but understandable.
Again, like what we were talking about before
with everybody going to the cloud,
we cannot let this be normalized,
we cannot let this be something that,
oh, that's just the price of living in a free society
because it's not a free society when you do things like this
and we need to stand together
and make sure this does not become the norm.
And hopefully we'll have more updates on that.
We have phone calls to get to,
actually we don't have any yet
because I haven't given the phone number out.
347-335-0818 is our telephone number.
Yes, 347 is the area code, 335-0818.
Someone said we were going to install
all kinds of new phone lines here.
I don't see them yet,
but you noticed a box or something, Kyle?
I actually, I don't know if it's new.
It's like a panel in the wall here.
That sounds pretty solid to me.
It's locked though.
I couldn't actually open it.
I'll have to get some picks or something,
but no, of course.
I would never do that.
Do you have picks on you right now?
We're hackers for God's sake.
Actually, I might actually have some somewhere,
but not in my hand.
All right.
And I would never pick a lock at the radio station.
I can't believe you even suggested that.
I mind the rules.
I don't know how we got into the building then.
And policies of WBAI.
People know not to let us in.
Good evening, you're on Off the Hook.
Hey guys, how you doing?
Pretty good, how are you?
Pretty good, glad to hear you.
So you guys were talking earlier about
what can be done with the general public
and education on how do we solve this stuff,
the software, the service, software, the service,
and all that.
Yes.
In my job, I have occasion to interact
with the general public quite a bit
with respect to their personal tech.
And I'm sad to say, the vast majority of them,
at least what they express, they don't seem to care.
You're right.
It's sad, but I meet a lot of people
who would rather have free Gmail
and decline full disk encryption
because they're worried about forgetting their passwords
or therefore lose their decryption key.
I don't know.
And when I hear you guys talk about this stuff,
I sometimes wonder if you guys ever have occasion
to talk with the general public about this stuff.
Oh yeah, yeah.
And in our own heads, I think we have the conversation too.
Hey, I've got nothing to hide.
Is it really that much of a sacrifice?
And what a hassle it is to encrypt everything
and to maintain all these privacy standards.
I mean, Kyle, you set up SecureDrop for us at 2600,
which by the way, folks, we have SecureDrop at 2600.
So if you have something to leak,
like tax returns or audio files of people saying things,
go to our SecureDrop page at 2600.com
or go to the list at SecureDrop.
But for that, to set that up,
the levels of privacy that you need,
encryption, all kinds of things like that,
it would drive the average person nuts to set it up,
which is probably why most people don't do that.
But I think the solution to this
is to make a certain level of privacy, encryption,
what have you, the default and make it simple to implement.
Of course, this is something
that the government would never support.
Sure.
Another aspect for us is just to be able to speak about it
because we don't want to be insulated.
We don't wanna just talk to hackers
who are all crazy about their cryptography and privacy
and they're all on point with it.
The average person isn't, like you said,
and I think that's absolutely, it's critical to understand
because if we feel it, we get insulated sometimes
and every now and then, I use the example,
we are introduced to people who are still afraid of hackers
and for us, we only, having spent so much time
talking about hacking and that kind of thing,
when we go to Maker Faire, we go to an event
and evangelize and talk about hacking to people,
it's critical to make those introductions
and say, well, yeah, that's partly what is said about us,
but we're really into this.
And that's why asking the question
and having your feedback is really brilliant for us
because it's real, it's authentic.
They're afraid of us
because we're about to clear out their bank accounts
and everybody knows it.
I agree with your point, Emmanuel,
that the best solution to this
is making it easier to use privacy tools
and also making these big services,
requiring them to have secure policies,
but I don't think that that can only happen,
I don't agree with your defeatism about politics,
that it's always gonna be,
that the government is never gonna change this.
I look at things like,
even though the national government right now
is not that great,
like Europe, they just passed the GDPR, which-
Pick a country, pick a country that gets it.
Well, California, it's not just country-wide,
it's local initiatives,
California just passed a law requiring a pro-privacy law,
which is pretty good.
Latvia.
Okay, all right.
Care to expand on that?
I don't know, aren't they voting online now?
That's supposed to be good?
I don't know, I'm not saying it's good,
but that's bad.
Is it Estonia?
Okay, Latvia and Estonia.
No, but I think that like,
our caller is expressing a point about privacy,
a sense of privacy defeatism, which is understandable,
but I think we should also not have a sense of government
or politics defeatism either.
Well, there's a certain ironic,
it's a little ironic because
we're all used to talking about this,
we're comfortable talking about this,
we like talking about this,
so the tools to keep our stuff private,
TrueCrypt and so on, SecureDrop, you mentioned Emmanuel,
we're used to using these tools,
we're comfortable using them,
and yet, I don't know, it would be great
if a player emerged to normalize encryption.
Absolutely, yes.
Make it so that it's not just for the hackers, right?
And including the processes and procedures in place,
that workflow as a habit for everybody,
just like, yeah, we work in our home office
or with machines in general,
having that be ingrained as a part of how you use these tools.
I think the thing that we need to keep in mind,
it doesn't have to be completely perfect in every way,
because there's always gonna be something
that we're not satisfied with,
and I think we're always holding out for something
that has this particular level of security,
et cetera, et cetera, as long as it's improved,
as long as it's significantly better
than what we have right now,
which is virtually no security, that is a step,
and I think we need to take that step
before we take the next step.
It's kind of like politics,
because you need to take a step
before you move in a good direction.
You can't just get there in one step.
Well, maybe another aspect of this
is perhaps not to just immediately say no to the cloud,
and maybe that's ultimately the answer, no to the cloud,
but maybe there's more traction to be gained
from normalizing questioning the cloud,
questioning how does this company store my information?
As they say it's secure,
what's their track record been with situations in the past?
What kind of encryption do they use?
Is my connection to them encrypted?
Who has the keys, so on and so forth?
Maybe arm people with, well, the comfort
that has to exist before they can start
asking those questions.
I wonder if saying no to the cloud by policy,
and there's this personal policy I mean,
is necessarily the most effective way
to get people on board.
I mean, it's here.
Well, I'm not saying no to the cloud,
because the cloud is very useful for a number of things,
but at least know what you're getting into.
Right, right, and normalize this questioning rather than.
Yes, I like that, normalize the questioning.
That should be our motto.
Well, there you go.
All right.
Hey, thanks for the call.
Yeah, my pleasure.
Thanks for being on the air.
Take care.
Good call there.
Yeah, it was really good.
I just thought maybe we need a cloud rating system.
That would be something, I guess.
Let's get another call, 347-335-0818.
We only have a couple of minutes left,
and we'd like to hear from as many people as possible.
And I think we only have the one phone line still.
So if we have more phone lines,
they have not yet been hooked up.
Either that or only one person called in.
But I think that's the case.
I think we only have the one.
I saw different lights than usual.
It looks like it's improving or at least changing.
Yeah, they might change the color of the lights,
but that's about it.
Well, it was on one side.
I think it's been on the other before.
Yeah, but they move it around sometimes.
347-335-0818, you can be the lucky person
to get through to that one phone line until we get more.
We used to have 12 phone lines.
In fact, we still do on this phone here,
but only that one works.
So let me read a letter.
We're getting more letters than ever before,
which is awesome.
I guess people have strong feelings
about the things we've been talking about.
Dear Off the Hook folks,
I wasn't able to come to Hope this year.
Just learned about the MAGA trolling.
I listened to the post-conference Off the Hook as well
and wanted to tell you I support the slow
and contemplative way you're handling it
and totally love that you can say
the bastards got the better of you this time.
Tyranny is easy.
Free speech and open societies are hard.
And it was great to hear Bernie S on the radio again.
Thanks RH for that email.
And you can send your email to oth at 2600.com.
Here's another Dear Off the Hook.
This is in relation to last week's show.
We had a pretty spirited discussion about Alex Jones.
Freedom of speech has its limitations.
For instance, you cannot call fire in a crowded theater.
What Alex Jones, actually,
can we just put a big asterisk there?
Because nobody ever gets this.
If the theater is on fire,
you can yell fire in the crowded.
I just want people to understand that.
I'm sitting in a theater, it's burning,
but I'm not allowed to say fire.
No, in that particular situation, you are.
No one ever pens that.
It's always bugged me.
Anyway, yeah.
What Alex Jones did to parents of the children
murdered at Sandy Hook falls into that category.
He declared the whole episode to be staged
by the US government to limit the right to carry firearms.
After his announcements,
his supporters made life for parents of the children
so miserable that many of them, including Mr. Posner,
the father of one of the murdered children,
had to leave Sandy Hook.
They were attacked and threatened by phone and by mail.
Mr. Jones also attacked a pizza place in Washington,
accusing them of torturing children,
and those crazy accusations caused a man
to arm himself with a gun with the intention
of shooting the owner and liberating the children.
Thank you, Cass, for your insights on that.
Yes, there are situations where calls to violence
and spreading falsehoods that hurt people,
such as Holocaust denial and things like that.
You have to draw the line someplace.
Good evening, you're on Off the Hook.
Speak up, please.
Nobody there.
Okay, well, somebody called in, so I'm gonna hang up
and hopefully somebody else will call in who is speaking.
347-335-0818.
I can read another letter, or Rob, you have something?
Yeah, the thing I wanted to say
about the Alex Jones thing is it's not censorship
if it's a private entity saying you can't use our service.
Like, I have a blog, and if someone leaves a comment
I don't like, I'm allowed to delete it
because it's my venue.
It still is censorship,
it's just not a First Amendment violation.
Although, I would argue that.
Wait, wait, I mean, if we edit an article in 2600,
is that censorship, then?
Because we're cutting out a word.
Yeah, it's censorship, but it's not as bad.
I don't think editing is censorship.
I think it's clarity.
What if we throw a MAGA hat out of a conference?
You know what, I'm cutting you off.
There, I guess it is censorship in a way.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening, you're on Off the Hook, go ahead.
Good evening.
I'm just wondering, has your community
been following the Unity for Jay movement
that's to rally in support of Julian Assange
not being extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy in London?
Well, we've been taking that position for years now,
so I'm not sure, other than what he's doing,
I don't think much has changed.
Well, there's a movement online under Unity for Jay,
and they're trying to do a lot of spreading of the word
and mobilizing the community
in all types of different activities and support,
and they've been having these marathon sessions
where they will, vigils is what they're calling them.
They've had about three or four so far,
and they're all accessible under Unity for Jay,
but I'm trying to help in my small way
by spreading the word.
Okay, and can you just give out the website again?
Unity for, number four, Jay,
and I would imagine just a Google search
will pull that up.
And as I say, they're all kind of vigils
that you can go on YouTube,
and they've had 10 and 24 and 15-hour vigils
and all types of people, including Kim.com,
who's amazing, have come on and spoken out
for hours and hours,
and they've had these marathon vigils,
and it's been very informative and very energizing.
Okay, well, thanks for giving out that information,
and hopefully people will be aware of it.
Thanks for calling. Okay, thank you.
You know, I didn't want to get into an argument
on the air about this,
but I know, Voltaire,
you have something to say about this as well,
but I do know that Barrett Brown
was kicked out of the Courage Foundation
because he criticized Julian Assange,
and Kim.com is one of these pro-Trump people,
and I just go on for a long, long time
about the various things that bother me about that.
Yeah, but I agree with you on those points,
but I think that we should be fighting
against Julian Assange's prosecutor for journalism.
And that has never changed.
That's never been the, of course.
Well, there are some people that take that line,
and we should be-
Well, those people are wrong.
Exactly, we should be articulating
a stronger middle ground,
where we're protecting Christian speech without-
To be kicked out because you criticized somebody,
which is what Barrett Brown did to Julian Assange,
that's wrong.
That is as wrong as anything,
and this is something that we also need to speak up about.
You can agree on one thing and disagree on another,
and I think that's kind of our overall theme.
At least he didn't take a security clearance.
We don't know that yet.
In fact, I haven't checked on you guys yet.
You might have lost yours-
Oh, darn.
For saying the things you said.
Okay, hey, we're out of time.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com,
and we will hopefully see you back again next week.
Good night.
The fire burning in my heart ♪
Reaching to feel it, it is bringing me out of doubt ♪
The scars of your love reminding of us ♪
It keeps me thinking we almost had it all ♪
The scars of your love keeps me breathless ♪
I'm so tired of thinking we could have had it all ♪
You're my witness, you've never had sanity ♪
Tears are going up, rolling in between ♪
You're my witness, you've never had sanity ♪
Tears are going up, rolling in between ♪
Baby, I have no story to be told ♪
But I've had one on you and I'm gonna make your head burn, whoa! ♪
Think of me and what you're gonna spare ♪
I'll go on and let my job be shared ♪
The scars of your love reminding of us ♪
It keeps me thinking we almost had it all ♪
The scars of your love keep me breathless ♪
I can't help thinking we could have had it all ♪
All I need is you holding tight in my hand ♪
And I want you to play this to the beat, baby, we could have had it all ♪
All I need is you holding tight in my hand, boy ♪
And I want you to play this to the beat, to the beat, baby, we could have had it all ♪
You're my friendship, never had sanity ♪
Tears are falling, but rolling in the deep ♪
You're my friendship, never had sanity ♪
Tears are falling, but rolling in the deep ♪
On this air, ain't no mountain high enough ♪
Ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you, babe ♪
On this air, ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you, babe ♪
We could have had it all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all,