Thanks to you.
Thank you for thinking of me.
And I thank you.
Let me say thank you to all you people out there.
I want to thank each and every one of you for coming by.
And while he's thanking those folks, let me take this opportunity to thank all of you,
our listeners and support staff, our contributors, our interns, the volunteers, producers,
and the entire crew that works countless hours to bring WBAI into your lives.
Thank you, people.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
I came out wrong.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
It's 7 o'clock.
You're listening to WBAI New York.
It's time once again 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.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum-diddly-bum.
Bum-diddly-bum.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Alex.
It's good to be back.
Welcome back.
Thank you, sir.
And Kyle.
Yes, I'm here.
Howdy.
You're here.
Okay.
It's another Wednesday night, and we're here to talk about technology and hacking and all
kinds of other exciting, fun things like that.
And we have a lot to talk about this week.
Of course, first of all, the big breaking story is that Beta O'Rourke turns out to have
been a member of the cult of the dead cow.
I can't believe I'm saying these words, but it's true.
It's kind of funny.
Actually, it's very funny.
But, you know, I think it's a good thing.
It turns out there's a book that's coming out.
I don't know how this was kept secret for so long, but members of a group famous for
hacktivism, and this is a good hacker group, by the way.
Many friends of ours have been to a lot of our conferences.
Members of a group famous for hacktivism have come forward for the first time to claim him
as one of their own.
And he has admitted that, yes, in fact, he was a part of this.
And it's really something.
I am never surprised by the fact that certain things are kept secret about politicians until
way late in the game.
For instance, you know, the governor of Virginia, his yearbook photo being kept secret for such
a long time, not in any comparison to this.
This is a badge of honor, being a part of the cult of the dead cow.
People would actually line up to become members of that group.
They were frustrated they were not accepted.
To become a member of CDC, the other CDC, is something, it's an accomplishment.
It's reserved for intelligent people that have standards, that are not destructive,
that are not stupid.
And I am impressed.
I am duly impressed.
Of course, I realize that a lot of America won't be, a lot of America will be pointing
fingers and saying, aha, you're a hacker.
And that means that you're bad.
What do you think, Alex?
You think that's going to be the prevailing sentiment?
You know, I've given a lot of thought to this as well.
And I think there's two sides to this, you know, if you think about Beto's position.
And I think, and frankly, the CDC's position on this and keeping it so secret for so long
and feeling the need to keep the secret for so long.
Like you said, this should really have been, I think, a badge of honor.
I think this is something he should have been upfront about.
But when you listen to political strategists and they talk about your vulnerabilities politically,
you know, you tend to listen to them because this is something that could technically be
a chink in his armor here.
And his opponents could capitalize on this.
But we haven't seen it yet.
We haven't seen people really come down and bring the hammer down on him for being part
of a hacker group in the past.
In fact, I think that, you know, at least the coverage I've read, the Reuters coverage
by Joseph Menn has been, you know, pretty laudatory and why he was a member of CDC.
And if you think about what you just said about CDC, the cult of the dead cow,
one of the things that they looked for in members was intelligence
and wasn't necessarily all about hacking.
It was more about writing.
They wanted people to write text files.
Remember, this was in the age of BBSs where way before there was full Internet access
that was available to people.
And so people like Beto and other members of CDC used to write text files that Jason Scott
probably has all entirely archived in textfiles.org.
And some of these text files are probably why Beto kept this secret for so long
because some of them are a little bit disturbing, you know.
And I think we should talk about those too.
I'm going to go into my Fox News mode here and interrupt you.
Sure.
And ask you if, in fact, this is the kind of presidential candidate that you are looking for
to represent this country.
These are the words of your Beto O'Rourke here.
One day as I was driving home from work, I noticed two children crossing the street.
They were happy, happy to be free from their troubles.
This happiness was mine by right.
I had earned it in my dreams.
As I neared the young ones, I put all my weight on my right foot,
keeping the accelerator pedal on the floor until I heard the crashing of the two children on the hood
and then the sharp cry of pain from one of the two.
I was so fascinated for a moment that when I had stopped my vehicle,
I just sat in a daze, sweet visions filling my head.
You're a candidate, Alex.
Explain yourself.
Fifteen years old, I have to say that.
I like this. This is fun.
Yeah.
I could do this.
For a 15-year-old, I think, when he wrote that, that's pretty damn good writing, I have to say, frankly.
And I'd rather have a presidential candidate who dreams up inflicting harm on children
rather than a president like we have right now who actually inflicts harm on thousands of children.
Yes.
Well, you know, to the people who are passing out now or in shock at hearing those words
that actually came from Beto O'Rourke's keyboard, it's called fiction.
Exactly.
Read a Stephen King book.
You know, read anything that involves horror or taking on the persona of somebody who is not you
and then go investigate and see if he actually was a person like that.
I think you'll find that he was not.
Well, and I think it's these text files and the fact that they're archived
and the fact that he was well-known to be the psychedelic warlord.
That was his hacker handle from back then.
Psychedelic, Alex.
So drugs.
We're now embracing drugs in presidential candidates.
And warlord.
Wow.
Okay.
That says all kinds of things as well.
It definitely does.
I'd rather have a psychedelic warlord.
Is there an opening at Fox?
Because I could do this.
Than a vegan.
It's a head rush.
It really is.
It should.
Absolutely.
You probably could get some kind of job there.
Don't talk while I'm talking.
I'd just like to say that that was taken out of context.
And you have no idea how rotten those little kids are in his story.
And I, for one, I'm well aware of how wretched and rotten small children can be.
Okay.
Mellow Kyle, this is a combative talk show.
You need to shout and interrupt people.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I would like to interject and comment.
I can't do that seriously.
That's a lot harder.
I just wanted to say, it's been said and pointed out before, but just to add to the discussion
a little bit, I think really what this says is it's more that he is a younger candidate
than really the proclivities of the group necessarily.
I mean, for us, maybe it lands as a cool thing.
And maybe it's scary to some people in the country.
But given how much we depend, and this goes to other conversations we've had in the last
couple of weeks, but given how much technology, how pervasive it is and how much we depend
on it, I would like someone who is young enough to understand the technology and even have
had the opportunity to participate in a hacking group such as this, given the fact that most
often our candidates, only affiliation with a group would be like the Civilian Conservation
Corps or the other CCC because they're ancient.
And this, I think, should be looked at as a generational milestone that we're in an
era where young candidates like this can represent the entire country.
And building on that, I really want to see how this plays out.
Beto raised, I think it was $6.1 million in 24 hours, beating even Bernie Sanders when
it came to fundraising.
That means that right now he's got a lot of sticking power.
He's going to be in this race for quite a while.
And whether his fellow Democrats attack him on this basis and the basis of his writing,
well, that remains to be seen.
We're going to see that as a primary shakeout.
And I think we're all going to be very interested in how this is weaponized or not
weaponized during the primaries as they play out.
The other thing that I think is interesting here, too, is that it was kept such a secret
for so long by so many people, and this almost seemed like an outing.
You know, like he was outed as a former hacker.
This wasn't something that he bought.
It's weird.
It happened right after the campaign was announced.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It came out of there.
And I don't know if you know this, but the reporter, Joseph Menn, he was at Hope this
year as well.
In fact, he came up to me after I gave my talk on cybersquatting on the Hope campaign.
And we've been in touch since Hope, actually.
And then when I saw him publish this article, I said, wait a second, is that the same guy?
And Beto O'Rourke was at Hope as well.
In fact, 1997 is one of the years that they're referring to.
That's the first event.
No, the second.
It's where a panel of CDC members occurred.
So you can look at that panel.
It's on Channel 2600 on YouTube and watch.
You won't see Beto O'Rourke, I don't think, on that particular panel.
But there might be some kind of reference because they're talking about their membership,
what the group is all about.
And 1997 is when he was a part of it.
Yeah.
I mean, and I remember actually from the first Hope, 1994, going home with a whole bunch
of Cult of the Dead Cow stickers that I put all over my notebooks.
I mean, it's amazing.
You didn't put them on.
They put them on your notebooks.
That's how they operate.
They put stickers all over you.
Yeah.
We had some similar stickers placed on our Club Mate vending refrigeration machines.
You find them in the weirdest places.
Yeah.
And we basically had to protect it.
We considered it like a blessing more than anything else.
My only other memory, or my memory specifically of that group, is at, I believe, Hope No.
6, Cult of the Dead Cow did a presentation on off-the-record encrypted communications
for, I believe, AIM and, in particular, the client Pigeon, which is actually still maintained
to this day, surprisingly.
But I remember they did a presentation on basically a module that they had developed
for that particular chat client that would allow you to do off-the-record and anonymous
and otherwise encrypted communication.
They have done some of the most intelligent panels, I think, of any organization.
And I kind of shy away from hacker groups because it tends to bring out the worst in
people.
Not in this case.
CDC has always been intelligent.
So if any hacker group is going to lay claim to a presidential candidate, let it be CDC.
I'm quite happy about this.
And the way Beto O'Rourke owned up to it immediately, just like he owned up to other
things from his past as well, that says something, too.
And that's something I think people should weigh when considering, is this a good thing
or is this a bad thing?
Well, if you can not dance around the issue and confront it directly.
The only thing I have a problem with is he says he's not proud of those days.
I would be proud of those days.
I'd be proud of what you wrote because you wrote fiction as a kid.
And that's more than most kids do.
Sorry.
He's been way too apologetic just in the last week in general.
But I think we shouldn't have campaigning be an apology tour for who you are.
It should be about getting to know who you are.
And that, I think, is getting lost in all this hair splitting over different gaffes
or statements or life circumstances or things he's done or encountered in his life.
I'd like to know, because I'm not aware of a procedure where you lose your membership
in CDC.
He's still a member of CDC.
He might still be.
In fact, these things lie fallow for a while.
He might still be the treasurer for all we know.
We have to check into these things.
So if anyone has information on that, maybe he could encompass it into his campaign somehow.
It would be a good thing.
Another thing that's been mentioned, I think, time and again when it comes to Beto
and his hacker days is that he takes certain positions politically now that do seem to
jive with the hacker community and others that don't.
And some are more libertarian than we would otherwise think.
But if you think back, I mean, I say this all the time when we're at dinner, not necessarily,
and oftentimes on this show, but my own political views were shaped very much by what we did
back in the 90s as hackers.
And philosophically, it defines you as a person.
And if you think back to the 90s when the term, quote, unquote, cyberspace was just
being bandied about and you had all these manifestos about how information wants to be free,
this was really a very anti-regulation time.
It was very laissez-faire.
This is a space that is beyond borders, that is beyond recognition when it comes to governments,
and it should be very, very hands-off.
That sort of lends itself to a very anti-regulation philosophy or framework.
And that's what we've seen, I think, with Beto, and not to mention he comes from Texas,
which is another very kind of libertarian-style state in a lot of respects, much more libertarian
than, let's say, Massachusetts or New York.
But I don't necessarily think that we can measure his political stance on issues now
by who he was 25, 30 years ago, and I think this is exactly what Kyle was saying,
and I'm just building on that now.
And whether we see other candidates trying to use this past against him,
or political action committees trying to use his past against him,
I think is going to be very interesting to a lot of members in our community,
myself included, who may have further designs in life to do similar things.
You know, as an exercise for the listener, explore the history of this guy's childhood.
Look at the kind of kid he was, and then go and look at the kind of kid Mike Pence was.
Compare the two.
Which one would you rather hang out with?
Which one do you think has more of a future as an individual?
And your answer may vary, but I think the person who makes some mistakes,
experiments with various things, and reaches out a lot,
I think that's the person that will actually be more mature.
And somebody who was interested in actually learning.
I mean, some of the quotes you see in the Reuters article itself
are about how he found it so great to be part of this community of smart people
where they were interested in learning how the world worked,
learning how things like the telephone system worked.
I mean, this is what we talk about every week.
It's that curiosity that you have as a child.
If you maintain that childlike attitude into adulthood,
you know, you're somebody who's going to be a lifelong learner.
That's the exact opposite of what we have in the White House right now.
We have gotten some, not a lot.
I'll give the media credit, not a lot,
but some inquiries as to whether or not Beto O'Rourke was a subscriber to 2600.
We will never, it doesn't matter what you entice us with,
we will never give out that information.
So was he a reader?
Well, you can speculate on that,
but we are certainly not going to tell people who reads our magazine and who does not.
Even if the whole Trump family is reading the magazine,
we're not going to reveal that information.
So stop asking.
I just want to add that I wouldn't take our comments here
as necessarily any kind of particular endorsement,
I feel kind of pretty confident,
or I feel very strongly about what you said about him
maybe not having some of the policies that you agree with.
I certainly don't agree with him on everything,
and I'm not endorsing him at all.
That's a good thing, though.
But I think that it's really, it's of concern,
or of interest to our community and how this is characterized.
Also, what you both were saying going forward,
how this is used, how it's characterized,
it will be interesting,
and it also is instructive about some of his policies.
This will be in the back of our minds.
This will be in the back of a lot of people's minds
when things like, oh, I don't know, FCC policy, neutrality policy,
whatever it is, next-generation networking,
or whatever computing or privacy issue comes up,
we'll want to know perhaps where he fits and why
and how he has evolved because people do change.
The fact that he even knows about these things, I think,
is well ahead of most other candidates.
It might be that that makes him very well suited
for the kind of future we're going to be experiencing,
and I think that goes back to the age thing I was commenting on.
Yeah, absolutely.
And just to build again on what Kyle was saying,
my comments, as laudatory as they were about Bateau in his past,
or really about his past, not his present,
certainly not endorsing him as a candidate, not yet,
but look, everything is going to be weighed and measured
as things unfold, and let's see how this progresses.
It's going to be rather interesting.
Bateau O'Rourke was a misfit teen in El Paso, Texas, in the 1980s
when he decided to seek out bulletin board systems.
Those are the online discussion forums we talk about a lot on this show.
At the time, they were the best electronic means
for connecting people outside the local school, church, and neighborhood.
When Dad bought an Apple IIe and a 300-Baud modem
and I started to get on boards, bulletin boards,
it was the Facebook of its day.
You just wanted to be part of a community.
O'Rourke soon started his own board, Taco Land,
which was freewheeling and largely about punk music.
We should ask Jason Scott if he has any BBS printouts of Taco Land,
or if anyone out there has printouts of Taco Land.
We'd like to see them.
Email us, oth at 2600.com.
This was the counterculture.
Maximum rock and roll, the magazine.
We were a part of that as well.
Buying records by catalog you couldn't find at record stores.
The more I hear, the more I like, because this guy gets it.
He's part of that culture, and it's such a valuable and important part
of everyone's culture, I think.
He then connected with another young hacker
in the more conservative Texas city of Lubbock
who ran a bulletin board called Demon Roach Underground,
known online as Swamp Rat.
Kevin Wheeler had recently moved from a university town in Ohio
and was having problems adjusting to life in Texas.
Like O'Rourke, Wheeler said he was hunting for video games
that had been cracked or stripped from digital rights protection
so that he could play them for free on his Apple.
Every kid was doing this.
Also like O'Rourke, Wheeler wanted to find other teens
who enjoyed the same things and to write and share
funny and profane stories that their parents
and conservative neighbors wouldn't appreciate.
It was a good-natured resistance to the repressive humdrum around them,
a sort of footloose for those just discovering
the new world of computers.
So yeah, that's what we're looking at right now.
Very, very interesting.
Did not see this coming.
Yeah, let's see how this plays out.
I mean, you know, it's incredibly fascinating
to learn that Beto O'Rourke was a where's kitty, basically.
It is so interesting that this club,
it is that club in particular.
It makes sense, it's fitting, but it's so interesting
given how few large clubs and organizations
there are in the U.S. versus other parts of the world
we've talked about before.
But it's pretty poetic and kind of cool
to have others acknowledge and to learn about.
Okay, so we have other stories to read as well.
And they're kind of interesting, they're kind of monumental.
You hear about what happened with MySpace?
They accidentally deleted everything uploaded before 2016?
Yeah, this is the kind of thing
that we've been warning people about.
But apparently, if you have music that has been on MySpace
more than a couple of years old, it's no longer there.
As a result of a server migration project,
any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded
more than three years ago may no longer be available
on or from MySpace.
We apologize for the inconvenience
and suggest that you retain your backup copies.
Wow, nice way they kind of transfer the blame over.
But you know what, they're not wrong.
You should have backup copies.
You should not be depending on any cloud-based service
to store your material.
You should always have a local copy
because this is the kind of thing that's going to happen.
We've been warning people about this for so long.
And companies go out of business, people make mistakes,
and people lose all sorts of things they should never lose.
I mean, think about this in the context
of where people store their photos, right?
I mean, what if Google Photos just decided to disband
or became too burdensome for them to continue
to store all these terabytes of photos
that people are uploading continuously all the time
and just one day announced, well, sorry, it's all gone.
All those memories of you and your children
for the last decade and a half, they're just poof.
They're gone.
You didn't back up your phone locally or all those photos?
Sorry.
But I mean, the long and the short of it here too is, yeah,
again, this is something we've been telling people many, many, many times.
But I don't think there's really going to be
any major repercussions here for MySpace.
I don't know if they made any representations or warranties.
I didn't even know they were still around.
Well, I knew they were around because they've been pretty popular
from what I hear as a music sharing site
or a place where you can find new music
and artists use this to get their new music out.
MySpace? They use MySpace?
Yeah, it's kind of transitioned over.
It's after Justin Timberlake bought it
and it turned into a music sharing or promotion platform.
But I believe his pop stardom was supposed to be the infusion of culture
to a platform that was really waning in popularity
and usefulness.
It's sad, I think, and my heart goes out to whomever was responsible
for doing this migration.
And frankly, we're their backups, firstly.
And secondly, for a platform that has turned into something
that is primarily focused on music,
why did you lose people's music?
Exactly, yes.
I didn't know that's what they were mostly designed to do now.
But if you're going to do that, protect it.
It's like if SoundCloud was like,
oops, sorry, you know, all the recordings and albums
and links you wanted to share,
well, we can't really help you with that
and we don't have backups because it's not our department.
That could happen too.
So if you're on SoundCloud, keep backups somewhere else as well.
There are some theories about why this perhaps happened,
and maybe it has to do with operational expenditures or OPEX,
that the platform isn't bringing in lots of money,
it isn't bringing in lots of visitors,
it's not selling tremendous amounts of ads,
it's extraordinarily expensive to keep all these terabytes running.
And if you just get rid of them, your OPEX goes down
and your cash influx all of a sudden becomes positive.
It's a theory.
I totally hear that.
I'm not going to go so far as to say that it was intentional.
It's convenient maybe in that light,
like if you look at it that way.
But I would say that definitely that may have been the impetus
to reconfigure and otherwise meddle with the infrastructure.
In other words, you've got racks and racks and racks of stuff
that's basically a whole lot of overhead with power,
data and uplinks, maintenance, repairing raids,
or whatever the heck is involved in the operational side.
So they may have been trying to move or consolidate stuff
to less racks, to different sites where the bandwidth or the power
is more affordable.
That could be across country, could be across town.
It could even be a cloud host provider a la AWS
and all those usual suspects.
So wherever this broke in the planning,
it's both I think convenient going forward in the ways you described
but also quite disruptive.
They may have been in good faith trying to make their business plan
more workable, and this is a casualty of that process.
I do think MySpace might deserve some credit for protecting
its users' data by deleting it and not sharing it with anybody else.
Unlike Facebook, unlike many other social media platforms,
you're safe on MySpace.
Nobody's going to see you.
Yeah, you won't be shamed for using their platform?
Oh, no, you'll be shamed.
You'll definitely be shamed.
It'll be harder to identify.
Nobody's going to see it anymore.
So I don't know.
Where do they go from here?
What does Justin think about his purchase now?
How are they going to market that to people?
I have no clue.
I don't even know.
He may have changed hands even further, but that was the last I had heard
of what was going on when a lot of these sort of disintegrating
Web 2.0 platforms needed to hit the chopping block.
Well, I'll tell you, I mean, my prediction here is that inevitably
there will be lawsuits that will be filed against MySpace
for the deletion of this particular data.
What kind of lawsuit?
I mean, it's free.
You don't pay for it.
So what kind of lawsuit could you possibly file?
Somebody will come up with some theory of how they're damaged by this.
I guarantee you that there are scores of class action plaintiff's lawyers
right now going through all the terms of services,
the historical terms of service, the terms of use,
any kind of representations or warranties about the storage of data
or the mechanisms they use to protect their data, things like that.
They're going to try to hang their hat on that,
file a class action probably over in California state court somewhere.
Yeah, but we were just talking about BBSs that Beto O'Rourke might have
called into back in the 80s or 90s, and those are free.
Now, he was running aboard Taco Land.
What if he decided to take down Taco Land?
Would we be able to sue Beto O'Rourke for deleting our private material
that was in our account on his BBS?
How is MySpace that different?
Well, the difference now is that there's a lot of money to be made
by these particular lawsuits, not necessarily in litigating them
to the end of a trial and jury verdict,
but litigating them to encourage settlement.
If you get a class action certified by a federal judge,
that's basically money in the bank for the plaintiff's lawyers
that would be bringing these particular actions.
They're going to try to find class representatives,
maybe some artists who lost their recordings,
their materials that detrimentally relied, that's the magic word,
detrimental reliance here on MySpace recording and maintaining
and storing these particular files for a number of years.
Let's say they relied on them for a decade and claimed to rely on them.
Now, all of a sudden, poof, it's gone.
They lost all of this investment in their recordings,
and now they're going to sue for millions and millions of dollars worth of damages,
but not just them.
All these other artists are going to join into that class action.
You get that class certified,
the lawyers are going to have a pig's breakfast on that settlement.
I would add, and what comes to mind for me,
is this is similar to at-will employment or something,
and I'll tell you why.
I think that there is a lot of similarity,
but the distinctions here are that, A,
the types of people that were using that system were probably,
or you might argue, are hobbyists,
and perhaps their understanding of equipment failure
might be a bit more understanding,
and their expectation of things lasting forever
or it being like a permanent home for different files or other things
may have been a lot more tempered than the kinds of consumers
that are using the platforms we're talking about in the modern sense,
like MySpace, their expectation that it will work in a certain way,
and their lack of skill,
maybe them being not of the hobbyist persuasion.
Maybe they have more consumer rights from that perspective,
and I would add to that,
and really the sort of technical thing
that is maybe a little bit like a legal term of distinction
would be that perhaps the BBS days would have articulated
the use of that system as something that is as-is or without warranty,
whereas these systems are giving you pages and pages of legal documentation
saying that, yeah, it will work,
but this is how we're going to protect ourselves if it doesn't,
but it's still ought to work this way.
People were very upfront with BBS as being as-is or software,
like software programs that do not warrant you using it,
especially the case with privacy software and other things
where you basically are using it knowing that it very well may fail
and you have zero recourse.
I think you are absolutely right, Kyle.
There's a huge difference in expectations of the users of BBS's back in the 90s
where these things are running off of a single phone line
and a 10-meg hard drive, if there even was a 10-meg hard drive.
You're not going to sue a 13-year-old kid, though.
Well, some of us would, but.
The resources of that kid to maintain it are like what?
He's going to go get another paper out to buy a hard drive?
If necessary, yes.
Exactly right.
We live in this era of very, very large damages
coming from class-action lawsuits,
and people's expectations are totally different now.
I think you're completely right in every single thing that you said there.
It's going to be interesting to see if and when these lawsuits do happen,
the names of the bands that claim they were destroyed
because they put all of their music onto MySpace and no place else.
I just think it's going to look kind of ridiculous.
Well, think about that from a publicity perspective.
If you were that band who had a minor following,
let's say somewhere in the Southwest or something like that,
and now all of a sudden you're the named class representative
in this lawsuit against Twitter?
You're not famous for your music then.
You're just famous for your litigation.
But the unintentional but foreseeable consequence
is that your music then gets out to the world.
Does it, though? Does it really get out to the world?
I don't know. It's still going to suck.
That's when you change your band name to the Angry Litigants or something.
Exactly.
Or Swamp Litigants.
If the Angry Litigants lost all their music, that might be the perfect lawsuit.
No doubt. No doubt. I completely agree.
Let's move to Florida.
No!
No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that the way it sounded.
No, there's a story in Florida that I'd like to move to,
and I just want to read this because of the way it reads.
It's from mycbs4.com,
which tells you right away all kinds of things.
It's a story about a Florida teen whose phone was hacked.
Many iPhone users have received a notification saying
you need to change your Apple ID.
And most of us change it without a second thought.
But for Lisa Simmons from Dunnellon, Dunnellion?
Okay.
Her teenage daughter had no idea that notification
dot dot dot was from a hacker.
She says her daughter didn't notice it immediately
until her phone started acting strange.
She would say,
My battery life was four hours.
I can't connect to the network.
I think there is something wrong with Sprint.
Okay, none of those things are necessarily abnormal.
There's always been something wrong with Sprint.
Battery life sucks and networks are never able to be connected to.
I don't know what the big deal is.
It wasn't until her daughter tried to FaceTime her friend
when she knew something was horribly wrong.
And not because she was using FaceTime.
That would be a clue for me.
She said,
He's on my phone.
He's on my phone.
He's on my phone.
I said,
Calm down.
Tell mom what's going on.
She says the friend received several FaceTime calls from her.
But when she answered,
it wasn't her.
It was Laura from the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks.
No, no.
But, you know,
if David Lynch got a hold of this,
I think we could get a good story out of it.
Her friend says,
I answered one of them.
It was a grown man sitting behind a computer monitor.
And that's when the friend hung up.
So she was never able to pursue that story
and find out what the rest of what was going on there.
Someone says Apple helped her change all her passwords,
but the family still felt unsafe.
They increased battery drainage with phones doing things you're not expecting.
Yeah, that's a sign that something is compromised.
According to Matt Gockel,
Gainesville Police Department's digital forensics detective.
And that's a guy you want to get drunk in a bar.
Really,
you'll get all kinds of stories.
He says hackers can get information from your phone fairly easily
when you're on a public Wi-Fi network.
Not necessarily as easy as that.
You have to do a couple of things.
Using a public Wi-Fi network in and of itself is not where the hazard is.
Right.
I mean,
and this was an Apple ID.
So she was on an iPhone,
which are,
you know,
they're pretty damn secure.
Right.
You know,
it just this,
this story just seems so poorly thought out and so poorly written.
And capitalizing on this fear of hackers,
you know,
that we've been seeing at least for the last 30,
35 years,
probably.
What this story says to me is a hell of a lot less about the,
the hack itself and more about the dearth of quality local news stories
coming out these days and the slashing of budgets of these particular local
stations where they're churning out crap like this,
you know,
that just seems completely half baked where you're getting one side of the
story of a teenager who's complaining about,
you know,
her battery draining and then quotes from a,
you know,
a police officer who probably,
you know,
in look,
I'm not,
I'm generally in favor of law enforcement and what they do.
And,
you know,
they all do great work and whatnot,
but maybe not the world's foremost authority on zero days when it comes to
iOS.
Well,
the story is not finished yet.
So,
Oh,
it goes on.
Right.
He says,
hackers can get information from your phone fairly easily when you're on a
public wifi network.
When you connect to a public wifi,
when you connect to a public wifi,
you are putting yourself at risk for someone else who is connected to the
network who can actually see what you are doing.
Well,
it's not true.
I mean,
they have to,
they have to gain access through either somehow getting your,
your ID,
getting you to change it or,
you know,
a number of other ways,
but,
but it's not because they're using a public wifi network.
No,
not necessarily.
I mean,
it depends upon,
you know,
look what I think what he's getting at there is that people can be packet
sniffing,
but you know,
that's why you have SSL certificates and you have encrypted connections to
the sites that you're going to.
I mean,
it just,
it seems very rudimentary for him.
It's an oversimplification of an attack vector that could yield a specific
login and,
and credential and,
and so on.
And dated as well.
This is a very dated and simplistic view.
Right.
Same thing can happen on a private wifi network as well.
If they gain access to it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I also,
I mean,
I think device,
one thing I read recently,
the devices are getting so secure that it's really routers and,
and those access points that are more vulnerable stuff.
It's not maintained stuff.
It's not updated.
Yeah.
Wow.
You can take that for worth a grain of salt.
But it is,
it is more likely that you'll,
you'll do something like click on something or,
or otherwise be duped by,
by,
by email scams and stuff like that.
Than being a victim of,
of somebody who's,
who's monitoring a vulnerable switch or router in a,
in a public setting like that has wifi.
The Gainesville police departments,
digital forensic detective suggests using complex passwords,
not repeat passwords for every website.
Always a good idea.
If you do that,
when you get one account hacked,
the rest of your accounts are hacked.
It doesn't take much to figure that out.
It's got nothing to do with the kind of network you,
you connect on though.
As for the Simmons family,
Donaldton police say this is still a very active investigation and hope they
can track down this potential hacker.
I am not going to stop until this situation is resolved.
And enough people know this is possible.
That's a,
that's Lisa Simmons saying that the kid's mom.
So she's going to be relentless and figuring out what's going on,
but you won't find it in this story though.
So that was the mother saying that not the police.
They're,
they're not as relentless.
Okay.
Cause I was going to say,
if they're going to devote a significant amount of resources to this one
particular crazy case.
I mean,
I imagine there's more pressing things going on in Gainesville,
but you know,
at least we now know that this particular digital forensic detective,
I guess his name is in Gainesville has a,
a firm grasp of the obvious when it comes to password maintenance.
That's good to know.
Here's another story,
a more local in nature,
also revolving around some things that we talk about concerning technology
is a group of frustrated residents.
They're suing their landlord in their hell's kitchen apartment building
because they don't want to use an app to get into their building.
They just want keys.
Tenants used to use latch on theirs.
Oh,
actually they need to use latch on their smartphones to get into the west
45th street building.
Now we all know where it is.
Basically.
Here's a quote from a artist,
Mary Beth McKenzie.
She's 72 years old.
She's lived in the building for nearly five decades.
We just want a key.
We've always had a key.
Her 93 year old husband doesn't even have a smartphone and has become a
shut in because of the new system.
He cannot use a cell phone.
So for him,
it's really important to have a key.
Latch is used in at least 1000 apartment buildings across the city and many
newer tenants of the 45th street building.
Don't mind using the app to access the building,
lobby elevator and mailboxes.
It works so well,
said Anna some Bayo,
a tenant of just one month.
I don't have any concerns,
but the lawyer representing the residents who filed the suit against the
landlord says the app is a harassment tactic to force out rent regulated
tenants.
Interesting.
It's an attempt to survey,
surveil the tenants by forcing them to use an electronic key system that
includes GPS functions that track their whereabouts and require them to
provide sensitive conditional personal information to use the system.
That's according to the lawyer.
What do you think,
Alex?
You think there's some merit in that?
I do.
I think this lawsuit actually has legs.
I mean,
about fundamental right,
the fundamental right of access to your apartment and giving you,
you know,
essentially what is the equivalent of a key?
I mean,
they have that land.
When you have a lease,
the landlord has to give you access to that particular apartment.
Generally,
what we've known for literally centuries is that involves a key,
right?
And a landlord cannot monitor when you enter and exit that particular
apartment.
This is all done anonymously.
If you have to use an app for this particular type of,
of entrance and exit,
it becomes very problematic.
You know,
again,
and I think the lawyer is absolutely right that this could become a
harassment tactic that is designed to push out the elderly who may be in
rent regulated apartments.
You know,
they,
they're either rent controlled apartments or they are rent stabilized
apartments.
And let me tell you this,
these,
if you're in a rent controlled apartment,
that is an extraordinarily valuable commodity in New York.
If you're in a rent stabilized apartment,
not as valuable as rent controlled,
but extraordinarily valuable as well to the tune of literally about half a
million dollars.
If you,
if that owner of that building,
what I don't,
I don't know how many units are in this particular building,
but if the owner of this particular building wants to sell that building,
let's say to a commercial real estate developer that wants to raise the
building and knock them out,
the cost of buying out these tenants is going to be factored into that
particular sale price.
And the landlord will be able to get a greater economic benefit to himself.
The owner of that building,
if he has less rent regulated tenants in there,
putting in a system that harasses the elderly like this and causes them to
become shut-ins could very well have the intentional consequence of forcing
them out.
And if you force out,
let's say 10 tenants,
that's a $5 million windfall for you.
It's worth a shot.
If you are a building owner,
it's an interesting twist that this is being used as a means to get rent
control people out.
But I think this is something that we will see even buildings that don't have
that because people are so eager to embrace technology blindly and say,
wow,
this is so much more convenient than handing out keys.
We have apps and we can,
we can change when necessary.
If somebody moves out,
we simply turn that account off,
but there's also significant potential for control of a negative sword.
People can be locked out as,
as punishment for one offense or another,
but also when there's a blackout or when phones are lost or when networks go
down,
you can't get into your building.
Why would you ever agree to not have a key?
It's,
it's,
it boggles the mind.
Yeah,
I think it should.
I hope they win.
I hope they just,
you know,
eat their lunch with this case.
My first question I think is just how many tenants in this building,
if it was just a couple,
I would lean more towards the theory that Alex put forth,
but if it is a,
a large number of people in a building,
I could see there a pos,
there being a possible case for lowering the overhead,
Allah embracing a system like this,
where you basically don't have to provide a whole bunch of metal keys to
everyone.
But I,
I also,
I don't agree with that.
I think exactly what you just said was,
was spot on that.
Yeah,
this may be,
you know,
more cost effective from,
from a management perspective and more dynamic and,
and flexible for different circumstances.
But the case for emergency situations as well as a vulnerability,
I think you could,
you could argue that,
that though this may be more convenient and more affordable,
it's probably less safe.
The technical means to,
to infiltrate a building like this,
especially with like commercial commodity type access control,
which of which this is probably one of those types of products,
like from a hardware store,
it's probably not got layers of,
of protection or anything you might expect in an industrial setting or
something that's classified or rated at,
you know,
for,
for more security.
I would argue that,
and I would suspect people could make the case that this,
this just basically opens up more vulnerabilities and prevents people,
like you said,
in an emergency situation and why it couldn't have both perhaps the option
of using an app or an electronic means,
but not going away entirely from a keyed backup.
I think that would be a more fair introduction of something like this.
Sure.
Requiring people to have a smartphone is unfair.
Even requiring people to have a phone line period,
you know,
those buildings where you have to dial somebody's apartment and then it calls
a phone number.
Well,
you know,
the,
the possibility that somebody didn't have a phone,
a phone line,
or didn't want their phone number touch toned out for all to hear in the
street.
That was a valid concern when these systems were introduced back in the
nineties.
This is equally as much of a concern.
Think about forwarding to,
you know,
it goes to a number and then that number gets a dial touch tones sent back
to,
to open a gate.
If that number is forwarded somehow or messed with in,
in some of those old legacy systems,
you,
you right there have a vulnerability that isn't really breaching anything
unless you,
you know,
you're,
you're getting into the attributes of,
of changing a forward.
But if that's accidentally done or done,
you know,
from that person,
the premise,
you know,
how would you,
how would you look at anything or if it was misconfigured or,
or maybe they had a super or somebody doing maintenance that then was
compromised in some way.
And it wasn't any of the people living there that wasn't their fault at all.
There's many avenues.
It's great to play with new technology and sometimes it'll be extremely
convenient for some people,
but to blindly jump into it and to make it the only way it's almost always a
mistake.
And,
and we have to remember to hold on to those older systems as well as,
as they serve to be a really important backup.
Hey,
I found an editorial on the hill.com want to read a little bit of it because
it's,
it's a topic that I think we should discuss as big tech censorship of
conservatives becomes even more flagrant and overt.
The old arguments about protecting the sanctity of the modern public square
are now invalid.
Our right to freely engage in public discourse through speech is under
sustained attack,
necessitating a vigorous defense against the major social media and internet
platforms.
I certainly had my suspicions confirmed when Instagram,
which is owned by Facebook accidentally censored a post I made regarding the
Jesse Smollett hoax,
which consequently led to me hearing from hundreds of my followers about how
they've been having problems seeing liking or being able to interact with my
posts.
Many of them even claim that they've had to repeatedly refollow me as
Instagram keeps on following me on their accounts.
While nothing about big tech censorship of conservatives truly surprises me
anymore,
it's still chilling to see the proof for yourself.
Of course,
that editorial coming from the,
the,
the,
the,
the,
the son of our president,
Donald Trump Jr,
who joins many conservatives in,
in claiming that there is some kind of,
of discrimination occurring on social media platforms against conservatives.
Alex,
what do you think?
I mean,
you know,
this is,
I think a perennial issue that comes up with these conservatives.
They're always feeling aggrieved here.
I think this lends itself to also a,
a dual discussion here of this lawsuit that Devin Nunez filed against Twitter
as well,
because this is,
this is part and parcel of this.
Is that what I think?
Okay.
I see nothing but conservative viewpoints on Twitter on certainly on
Facebook.
If I have a look at Facebook and I imagine on Instagram as well.
So what are they complaining about?
Well,
it's this feeling of victimization.
I think they feel as if,
you know,
they're,
they're urinating in the wind,
you know,
their viewpoint isn't carrying the day.
So therefore there,
there must be something wrong with the platform.
That's not getting the message out there,
right?
It has nothing to do with the invalidity or the idiocy of their particular
arguments.
It must be that somebody is conspiring against them to prevent this from,
from actually getting out to the masses,
right?
I mean,
that's part of where,
where all of this is coming from,
but look,
you know,
other people,
perhaps people in this room as well have complained about certain platforms
that,
you know,
are not,
are not getting the message out.
And I think that's,
that's,
yes,
absolutely.
I mean,
that that seemed like,
you know,
there's some kind of something going on with an algorithm that's preventing
the word from getting out.
And look,
well,
I can tell you,
you know,
if,
if,
if you tweet something and three people retweet it and you have,
what?
10,000 followers,
something's wrong because someone else tweets the same thing and they get,
you know,
a hundred thousand retweets.
Yeah.
It's,
it's impossible to talk to Facebook.
It's impossible to talk to Instagram.
Yeah.
There,
there,
there,
there is a problem here,
but it's not,
it's not directed against somebody politically.
It's,
it's directed against individuals period.
Yeah,
I think so.
I mean,
I think it's a problem,
frankly,
with the platforms themselves and some things are amplified and some things
aren't.
And it goes back to what we talked about in 2016,
ahead of the election,
that all of these platforms are designed to give you and feed you more of what
you like.
It's about stimulating those,
those areas of the brain that,
that,
that are interested in pleasure.
It's a pleasure seeking platform.
So it creates this echo chamber and you don't get hit with ideas that are,
are different and interesting to you.
And you know,
you're not going to have a dialectic on these particular types of platforms
are designed just to feed you more of what you like,
not to be a platform of debate or,
or a dialectic on the electoral college.
You know,
none of this is what they had in mind.
They haven't mind selling ads and mining data and figuring out your
psychology,
the intricacies of your psychology so that they can sell that to advertisers
who will better know how to market to you.
You know,
the people who are complaining about this and feeling entirely victimized
because of their political persuasion,
I think are missing the entire point of these particular platforms
themselves.
I,
I get what you're saying.
I agree with a lot of it.
A couple of things that we were just talking about,
I thought,
you know,
slow down.
I mean,
just a,
not a week or two ago,
we were talking about the conservative Yelp.
I mean,
I thought they just make their own,
you know,
hate Twitter or whatever platform of the day they need.
They just go ahead and,
and spin up their own copy and,
and they're happy to just be left to their devices over there.
Or,
or was that maybe that was a white supremacist.
Okay.
I get them confused sometimes anymore.
But the other thing I was thinking is actually,
one point you made,
I would push a little bit back on the engagement is really the rule of the day.
I've read a couple of things about this and,
and it's not necessarily always that those platforms are wanting to cozy you
up to people that you only agree with.
It's a very often the case they're channeling stuff that'll really anchor you
so that you're more,
you engage with trolls and do that kind of thing.
So engagement can be a funny thing.
It's not necessarily that you're only going to get served good stuff.
You may get a whole lot of good and then a dump of bad to get you to post more
stuff and cause other people to rage.
And then that rage continues to serve ads and so on and so forth.
Oh my God.
While we're talking I've received a Donald Trump tweet on my phone.
It just shows a video of him talking to a massive amount of people.
It's propaganda video.
Yeah.
He's at the tank farm as president.
See,
we all know this.
We all know this.
It's got 118,000 views,
almost 3000 retweets,
almost 10,000 likes.
This all happened just now.
How are these people complaining that their message isn't getting out?
Nothing but their message is getting out and it's really,
really annoying.
You know,
other people don't have the same kind of chance.
Okay.
You're talking about our,
our piddling complaints.
You look at somebody like Jared Kushner who has never even tweeted and his
Twitter account instantly verified and legitimate.
We've been trying this for years.
2600.
Nope.
You're not valid.
My account,
not valid.
Hacker radio show,
not valid.
Hope conference,
not valid.
It's ridiculous.
That,
that is,
you know,
definitely favoring one thing over another.
If,
if you are a secretary who works in the white house,
yeah,
you're legitimate.
You're considered.
And the reason this is important is because on Twitter you can weed out
everybody who was not listed as verified.
So you don't even hear the,
whenever I look at my,
my Twitter screen it shows me the people who have talked since I looked last
and I have it in,
in time order,
not the best tweets for us.
If you do that,
you'll only see the celebrities,
but in an actual chronological order.
And every time I do that,
I only see the verified people.
I don't see anybody who was not verified.
And according to,
if I,
if I don't look at it for say 15 hours,
I only see celebrities saying something and everybody else that I follow who
is not a verified celebrity person has said nothing.
And I know that's not the case,
but that is how it's portrayed.
And I'm sure that's how we,
as unverified people and entities are also portrayed.
And it,
it just keeps going on.
Do you know on,
on Twitter,
for instance,
because we are called 2600,
we're not allowed to have a hashtag.
You can't have a hashtag.
That's a number.
It doesn't make any sense.
I mean,
it makes some sense.
Number one,
number two,
you don't want that to be a hashtag,
but number 2600,
please.
The letter a can be a hashtag.
Single digit letters are okay,
but not numbers of any sort.
Instagram.
We want to get an Instagram account.
We're not allowed to,
we're not allowed to use our name.
We have to call ourselves something else,
even though there are other accounts that are all numbers.
No,
we won't let you do it.
So things like this,
this is what people are fighting about.
It's not about ideology.
It's not about whether a conservative or liberal,
it's just about how individuals are,
are made to dance to the tune of whatever these social media masters dictate.
Well,
it goes,
you know,
full circle back to what we were talking about initially with respect to my
space.
You know,
you cannot rely on these particular platforms and people have come to rely on
Twitter to become their official source for news or Facebook for their
official source for news or dialogue.
You know,
even things like weather and you cannot trust them because they are in,
they are inherently fallible.
They have biases.
These algorithms are programmed by human beings that make mistakes all the
time.
None of these things are,
are going to be here in perpetuity and we shouldn't rely on them to feed our
brains with the,
the knowledge and nutrition that they need to survive in this particular
polemical culture in which we're,
we're living right now.
Well said that they all do provide services and they all something that we can
benefit from.
But if you rely on them entirely,
you know,
if you rely on Facebook to get all your news,
you're not going to be informed and a lot of people will suffer as a result.
No doubt.
I mean,
I completely agree.
I mean,
all of these are cautionary tales.
All right,
we are out of time.
It's a,
this spring.
So we're going out with a suitable bit of music for that.
Um,
right to us.
O T H at 2600.com.
We'll be happy to read your email,
maybe even on the air.
We'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions.
Follow us hacker radio show on Twitter or listen to any one of our radio shows
at www.2600.com slash off the hook.
We'll see you next week.
Good night.