Okay, now, this time, this time, Off The Hook is ready to do a program.
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And a very good evening to everybody. The program is finally Off The Hook.
Welcome, welcome. You know, just so you know, Kyle, you've been tearing your hair out.
I want to apologize. It's just blame me.
But it wasn't your fault.
Well, there's a little bit on my end, but I also want to thank everybody on the engineering end at the station for their patience and helping us troubleshoot.
And I don't know if you communicated. We're going to try and go a little longer so that we make up for all the time we lost.
Yeah.
Maybe instead of 55, we'll be out at 58. How about that?
Okay.
Please don't cut us off over there.
Trying to communicate. You guys, you don't talk on the phone. You text each other. Why do you do that?
You're having a technical crisis, and you're going type, type, type, type, type, instead of talking to somebody directly on the phone.
Where did that skill go? Why don't we have that anymore?
A mistake I made. Also, the phone wasn't working quite the way I was expecting, the one that I was monitoring.
But suffice it to say, it was a little bit of a back and forth.
It's a show about technology. You know that, right?
We've been off the air for a couple weeks.
This is our second show of the year. It's the second month of the year, but it's only our second show of the year.
We got the cobwebs out, and hopefully it should be smooth sailing from here.
Joe Biden, you were supposed to make things better. What's going on?
We have other people joining us. Hopefully I can do this without making a horrible noise.
Let's see.
Okay, looks like we have Alex. Is that Alex?
Yeah, that's Alex.
It is I. Good evening, everyone.
Look at you. Wow. Okay, welcome.
And Rob T. Firefly?
Good evening.
How you doing?
Hanging in there. Hanging in there.
All right. And Gila, is that you? I think I see you.
Greetings and salutations. Yes, it's me.
Awesome. Wow. Okay, so we're all together finally.
Off the Hook, the show about how to do technology properly and get things working smoothly.
You're listening to WBAI in New York, in case that didn't become obvious.
And we are here to talk about the latest in hacking and privacy issues and things like that.
Actually, can I take a moment and just kvetch about a few things?
Because I've been kind of holding this in for the last three weeks.
We haven't been on since, gosh, since before the inauguration.
This is our first show after Trump, our first post-Trump show. Do you realize that?
Yeah, that happened. I was forgetting that.
But there are still problems, still quite a few problems,
and problems specific to me that I just would like to deal with.
I've been going nuts trying to resolve situations now for, believe it or not, over a year.
You remember a year or so ago, we went to a part of Quebec called Shefferville,
which you get to by taking a train that's run by the native community.
An amazing trip. We were hearing about this thing called the coronavirus
that was spreading in China as we were going up there.
It was just about a year ago.
Quite a road trip, too, in driving snow. It was incredible.
You don't just go there. We went through Montreal and Quebec, which was great,
but then you had to drive almost a full day from Quebec to a place called Sept-Ciel.
It's in that particular community that I had an issue because I booked a place for us to stay,
and I went through this website you might have heard of called Hotels.com.
As is the case when you go to hotels, even after booking with various online services,
they ask for your credit card so that in case there are any incidentals
or you trash the room or something like that, they have something to hold you accountable.
I did that when I went there, and lo and behold, when I got back
and I checked my credit card statement, because that's what you should do,
I noticed that I was billed by Hotels.com and by the hotel for the same stay.
For the whole last year, I have been emailing Hotels.com trying to get this fixed.
They've been emailing me back saying,
yes, we're having trouble contacting the hotel, they don't speak English, they're not responsive.
I've been so patient, and I'm wondering,
how is this my problem that they can't communicate with one of their own clients?
Now it's gotten to the stage, a year later, where I'm saying,
okay, guys, come on, give me back my 70 bucks or how much I spent to stay in this place,
and just not getting any answers whatsoever.
Alex, do you have a solution for me?
Perhaps.
All right, let's hear it.
I'm going to ask a series of questions here.
Oh boy, the lawyer begins.
Okay, go ahead, go ahead.
Let me square myself in.
When you booked the hotel, did you use a credit card?
Yes, of course I did.
What, do you think I paid cash over the internet?
Well, sometimes you can make a reservation without using your credit card,
like with a car reservation.
Yeah, that doesn't always work, but that's another story.
When you went to the hotel, did you use the same credit card?
I'm not sure if it's the same credit card.
It might have been a different variation, like under the same credit card company,
but a different credit card, maybe.
And did the hotel and Hotels.com charge the same credit card?
You just asked me that.
And I said I'm not sure if it was the same credit card.
Hotels.com and the physical hotel itself billed the same card.
Okay, for the third time, I don't know for sure if it was.
I feel like I'm on the stand.
I don't know for sure if it was the same credit card.
It might have been a different credit card, but it could have been.
I think Rob just dove out.
It could have been two credit cards run by the same company, you know, as in. . .
I'm not going to name credit card companies because then I'm giving them free publicity.
But you know what I'm talking about.
Have you paid the balance on these charges, or are they still outstanding?
It's January of 2020.
What do you think?
Do you think I have an outstanding balance for over a year?
Well, look, under the Truth in Lending Act, if you don't pay the balance of your card and it's still on your card,
then you can put the charge into dispute with the credit card company, and it becomes their problem.
You shift the burden by not paying the actual balance.
Okay, you're telling me something well over a year after it happened that what I should have done.
And I'm not sure that would have worked anyway.
Well, this is the first time you asked.
You can ask for advice if you need it.
I am a hostile witness.
I really feel that right now.
I haven't even gotten to my second.
I have four different things to get off my chest here, and it's going to take this long for each one.
Okay, the second one is network solutions.
Now, for some reason, for some reason, I have been billed for something called professional email,
and it happens every year.
They bill me for this, and I contact them, and I say, stop billing me for this, and I don't get responses.
You know, I'm pretty busy, so I don't have time to constantly follow up.
I emailed their support line, support at networksolutions.com.
Guess what I just discovered prior to airtime?
Support at networksolutions.com doesn't answer.
It's one of those email addresses where they say, if you look at the very bottom,
they say don't send mail to this address because it's not an address that receives mail.
So all this time I've been emailing something called support that is as unsupportive as you could possibly imagine.
So I'm trying to get this auto charge taken off my card from Network Solutions,
and what you have to do is you have to call them, but in order to call them, you have to wait online.
It's going to take you a couple of hours probably,
and I don't have time just to get a minor charge taken off my card.
So year after year, they're billing me for something that they have no right to bill me for.
And the other crazy thing about this, on that same trip up to Shefferville,
I lost my credit card on the train to Montreal, so I had to change my credit card number.
Network Solutions got very upset by that because when they were trying to bill me fraudulently last year,
they didn't know my credit card number because it had changed.
And at the time I figured, this is good, I'm not going to tell them.
They somehow found out my new credit card number because the bill showed up on my next statement,
even though I had never told them my new credit card number.
So somebody ratted me out at the credit card company, or they're just very good at guessing.
Okay, you got something for me now, Alex?
Always. I mean, same type of thing.
I mean, you can put this charge in dispute and then shift the burden, have your card issued,
or contact Network Solutions for some kind of justification that the charge is valid.
You do that, it's also kind of annoying to them because you are making them spend the time
instead of you spending the time trying to get a $7 charge or whatever the hell it is taken off your bill.
But the corollary to this is I find somewhat fascinating.
Because let's say, Emmanuel, you've got a million dollars under your desk right there right now, hypothetically.
I know you've got close to that sitting there. I see the cash.
I don't know where all that cash is coming from every week.
It's counterfeit, but let's not get into that now.
Okay, yeah, let's talk about that off.
Maybe on Off the Hook Overtime or something when we're off the air.
Yeah, we're not privy to the same rules.
Very good.
But let's say somebody steals a million dollars.
It's worth trying to fight to get that back.
It's worth throwing some money at that to go through legal process, to hire a lawyer,
to make a claim for conversion, theft, fraud, whatever.
It's worth fighting for a million dollars to get it back.
But if somebody steals $4.95 from you every year or every month or whatever the hell it is,
and it's a small amount of money, it's just not worth fighting for.
It's not worth your time.
This is what you said.
So the way to steal a large amount of money and get away with it most of the time
is by stealing a small amount of money from a large number of people.
Yeah, it's like skimming off a bank account, taking a fraction of a penny,
nobody notices, and you have a million dollars before you know it.
Well, that's true.
Or charging $1.99 to 100 million of your customers every year.
Are all of them going to dispute that?
The vast majority of them are not going to do that.
But this is why things like class actions were developed in the law
so that you could recoup that money so that it made sense for lawyers
to bring these types of actions against companies that were stealing small amounts of money
or had questionable billing practices for small amounts of money
dispersed over a large number of people.
But for you to spend four or five hours trying to get this charge off your bill is just crazy.
But if it has been dispersed over, let's say, 1,000, 10,000, maybe 100,000,
maybe a million people that Network Solutions is doing this to,
possibly even more given how many domain names for which they act as registrar.
So maybe there is something.
I'm not saying they're intentionally going out fraudulently billing people.
What I am saying is they're making it ridiculously hard to communicate about it.
I can't even email them.
I'm emailing an address that's called support, and it doesn't go anywhere.
That is insane.
I don't want to have to call them on the phone and spend a lot of time explaining the situation
and then waiting for a resolution and hoping, crossing my fingers,
that they're going to give me back the pittance that they're ripping me off for.
These companies need to be accountable.
This conversation is already more than enough time that I want to spend on this particular issue.
I'm sure our listeners agree with that.
Let me just get quickly to the other issues that have been driving me crazy.
Some close friends have had some COVID issues.
I've been trying to get them some N95 masks or even KN95 masks, and I ordered some.
I actually found a mainstream news article that pointed to a site through Amazon, and I ordered this.
I paid for overnight shipping, and they gave me a tracking number.
One day went by, two days went by, three days went by.
The tracking number in the USPS website said,
yeah, we know about this tracking number, but it hasn't been given to us yet.
It's called pre-receipt or pre-delivery or something like that.
A week goes by.
I've already paid for overnight shipping, and this thing hasn't even been received by the post office yet, let alone delivered to me.
Now I'm complaining to Amazon.
Amazon says, not our problem because this is a third party.
We have nothing to do with that, even though we're the ones that billed you.
You're going to have to try and work it out with them.
If you file a dispute and two days go by and they don't get back to you, then maybe we'll tell you some other way we can't help you.
I did that, and then I tried to post a review on the Amazon website about how when you order something,
you generally assume that it's going to arrive.
In this particular case, it doesn't, so don't fall for that.
That was rejected because you can only review things that are products.
You can't review something that you didn't get.
Because they didn't send it to me, I couldn't review it, so I couldn't criticize them for not sending it to me.
That was frustrating.
Then one day, just suddenly, I received a notice from USPS saying,
Hey, your parcel is here, without any kind of tracking whatsoever up until that point.
USPS joined in on this by not actually updating me at any stage except when it was received.
It was still a week later.
I still paid for overnight shipping, and it's quite possible these masks are counterfeit
because that's what everybody who is posting reviews seems to be saying.
But it was recommended by a mainstream news site, and I just kind of fell for it, I guess.
That's a bit annoying.
The final complaint I have is from my own phone.
I get spam constantly from Samsung because it's a Samsung phone.
They're always trying to sell me the new phone.
I get these pictures, and it's just so annoying, and you can't stop it.
Now, my phone is complaining to me saying that Galaxy Store is using battery.
That's the Samsung Store.
It's complaining to me that this app is draining my battery.
I'm trying to get rid of the app, but you can't get rid of that app because it's Samsung's app.
It's stuck there.
I'm stuck having my battery drained from an app that's sending me spam that I don't want to receive.
Samsung, why would I ever buy another phone from you?
Explain that to me.
Okay, I'm done.
I feel better.
I don't really have much to offer in form of advice for that one, Emmanuel,
but I think based on the last two, you should just give up.
Oh, no, you never give up.
The important thing is to vent.
The important thing is to not listen to people who tell you don't complain.
Complaining is good.
No, complaining does a lot of good.
It really does.
It does.
It's somewhat cathartic, absolutely.
I've had some similar complaints about apps that are not removable under the default OS.
Are you going to complain now, Kyle?
Well, I find that that is really irritating, and I think this is something that maybe when you're customizing the packages on your phone
or you're routing it or otherwise modifying the operating system,
I guess that's one of the perks of doing that where you can get around software that's otherwise kind of baked in
and doesn't seem like it can be removed.
Because if we've learned anything in discussions here, it's that none of this is really set.
It's just they want it to be that difficult.
They want it to be there, a window into selling you more products and using your own data to do that.
They're using a resource that you pay dearly for to send you those images and that content.
So certainly it seems to me that you shouldn't have to change the OS or be in some developer mode or something
just to have control over the software on a cellular phone.
And that is one of the distinctions between these operating systems and the way they're integrated
and the way you're supposed to use them.
And like a general computer, like a Linux distribution or other operating system that allows you a lot more freedom.
Very true. Very true. Rob, go ahead.
Part of the deal about choosing Android as a platform is it's supposed to ostensibly be an open platform
in the sense that it's based on Linux.
Anybody can develop for it and so on and so on.
But Samsung, it's been a long time since I had a Samsung phone and it's precisely because of this behavior of theirs.
They're basically like the Apple of Android where they want to lock things down.
They want to use the platform to get their own junk to you over letting you just use your own device the way you wanted to.
And yeah, I abandoned that brand hard.
But I think you mentioned alternative OSs and I think projects like Lineage OS that are open and free operating systems for smartphones,
I think they pretty well support the Samsung line.
So it might be something to look into.
So it would work on the hardware but you could easily jettison the sort of OEM stuff that they bundle with it when you buy it new?
Well, I'm not a big fan of constantly buying phones.
They're immensely expensive.
They're great.
They do amazing things.
But people are shunning out more than $1,000 for new phones.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
You should be able to make technology last longer and use things for many years and build upon those things before replacing them entirely.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, I totally agree with that, Emanuel.
The phone race, I feel like, was at its height when the iPhone 6 came out.
When was that?
Back in 2014, I think it was.
How many iPhones are there now?
What are they up to?
I don't even know.
Twelve?
The fact that we all know this is part of the problem.
But everybody I know who has an iPhone has bought every single one of them.
What does that say about the quality of the product?
Well, it is ridiculous to do that.
I mean I had an issue with my phone right at the outset of Hope this year.
In fact, for readers of the magazine, I wrote a column about this.
I guess it was a summer column that became the fall issue, whatever that was.
Do you use an iPhone?
I do, yeah.
Oh.
No, go ahead.
Go ahead.
No, go ahead.
Continue.
I'll just sit back.
I had the iPhone 8 Plus and then had to upgrade at that particular time.
It was such a frustrating situation for me because the screen had cracked.
I needed a phone.
I had really tried not to upgrade my phone for so long because I was so sick of the phone rat race.
It worked perfectly fine for me, so I didn't need a new phone.
It was secure.
The hardware was supported.
Finally, I had to go get a new phone.
They wanted to charge me well over $1,000 for it.
Then finally, when I went in the middle of this pandemic to a store, a mall, so a store within a store,
at least within a space, to get this new iPhone, they then tell me,
we only have 64 gig versions here.
We don't have anything higher than that, anything that you have to order online.
I said, well, then why the hell did you tell me to come down to the store?
I'm waiting in there 20 minutes with this mask on.
There's some family with 12 different issues and 17 different phones ahead of me,
and I'm sitting there sweating.
At any event, I ordered the phone, but I felt like I got really, really ripped off at that point
for spending over $1,000 for a new device that I didn't want.
Then on my way back, driving back from this mall, I said, you know what?
This is just ridiculous.
I'm going to see if there's someplace I can just fix the screen.
I found a service that actually was able to fix the screen.
They came to my place here in the Poconos in the middle of this pandemic
and did it without leaving their car.
I just handed them the phone.
They fixed the phone in the driveway, gave it back to me, and then I could cancel the order.
But canceling the order became a huge, huge ordeal with T-Mobile,
and that was really what sparked me to write that column for the magazine.
But, yeah, it's extraordinarily frustrating.
This whole notion of having to get a new phone and being locked into it is ridiculous.
It's great to be able to complain like this.
We could fill the whole hour.
Folks, if you want to complain about something, you can call us at 8 o'clock.
We'll be doing overtime on YouTube, the YouTube channel called Channel 2600.
One word.
It starts at 8 o'clock.
Our phone number is 802-321-HACK.
It's 802-321-4225.
Don't call it now.
Call it after 8 o'clock, and we'll put you on the air, I guess, in quotes,
because it's not over the radio, but it's over the Internet, and it's also archived.
Go ahead, Gila.
Oh, I was just going to say I am also an iPhone user.
Oh.
Sorry to say.
I didn't know that either.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
Hi, Gila.
Wow.
I feel like you just lost respect for me.
Thank you, Kyle.
But I'm also just going to complain a little bit.
My phone, I bought it through my phone provider.
I have two payments left, and it is now beginning to act up in a very significant way.
It knows.
It knows.
I know it knows, and it's fascinating and frustrating, but the thing I was going to
say about the apps is I am not clever enough to jailbreak anything on my phone, but what
I did do was create a folder and hid everything that came preloaded on my phone into it so
I never touch it.
I just hid everything, so I'm never tempted to use any of those apps.
That's smart.
That is smart.
Yeah, you've got to.
But on the other hand, they're hidden in a folder, but if one of them decides it wants
to start using your battery a lot, like the Samsung store, then it's still going to be
doing that.
For sure, but at least I can remind myself that I don't want to use Apple Maps.
I want to use a different map app, and I'm not tempted to use Apple Maps, which is not
good, but the app, not the fact that I don't want to use it, just to clarify.
I think we've gotten a lot of this out of our systems.
I do want to focus some attention on the Parler story.
We've talked about it a little bit before, but this is really kind of inspirational,
Parler being the so-called free speech site where all the conservatives ran off to.
Not really that much of a free speech site.
I registered an account there.
I know other people who did, and it was almost immediately deleted without us saying anything,
apparently just because of who we are.
So to call it something where free speech reigns, no, it's just basically a site where
you might feel safe doing things that aren't allowed on other sites that have rules.
So Parler was basically kicked off the cloud.
It feels good to say that.
And basically, do they have a home?
Are they up?
I haven't checked.
Does anybody know?
I think they're up-ish, I think.
There's some sort of Russian component to it, as far as I understand.
What's that scary man, Robert Monster, was that his name?
Oh, the guy, yeah, we talked about this.
The guy whose name is actually Monster.
He's the CEO of Epic, which is their registrar.
That was in Washington State, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Well, anyway, the point is, they basically couldn't have handled it any worse.
And once they were deplatformed by AWS, Amazon Web Services, Google, Apple,
they were basically erased off the network.
But then a lot of their information suddenly became available,
56.7 terabytes of data that just magically started to appear.
Now, the quick thinking of a self-described hacker by the name of Donk Enby
and a host of amateur data hoarders preserved most of that data
and have been using it to piece together what happened
on January 6th and the weeks and months leading up to it.
Now, Donk Enby was able to scrape and capture and archive
nearly the entire content of the website after it became clear
that hundreds of Trump supporters had uploaded potentially incriminating photos
and videos of themselves to the platform,
many filming from inside the Capitol itself.
Now, when news of Donk Enby's archival efforts broke,
several viral tweets, Reddit posts, and Facebook posts claimed
that she had captured private information,
scans of driver's licenses and IDs and other highly sensitive information.
She said those posts are not at all accurate.
Everything we grabbed was publicly available on the web.
We just made a permanent public snapshot of it.
Very Jason Scottish of you.
Nevertheless, with the FBI, state and local law enforcement,
and open source investigators looking, I like that, open source investigators,
looking for media from the attack on January 6th,
the archive could be highly useful to a whole host of people.
She says, I hope that it can be used to hold people accountable
and to prevent more death.
I think people should be allowed to have their own opinion
as long as they can act civilized.
And on Wednesday, we saw what can happen if they don't,
Wednesday, January 6th.
Yes, Gail, what do you think of this?
Well, there's that, but there's also been a really recent development with Parler.
I actually found out about it about five to ten minutes
before we were supposed to go on the air,
and I asked Rob to share it with everybody because he's got a computer,
but the CEO of Parler has been fired.
That news broke about an hour and a half ago.
Is that a good thing for him or a bad thing for him?
Unclear.
He said, the board decided to immediately terminate my position as CEO of Parler.
He wrote a memo to the staff.
His name is John Matze.
I don't know how that's pronounced, Matz, Matze, either way.
He's blaming Rebecca Mercer, who is the chair of the board.
His last name is Matze?
M-A-T-Z-E.
What does that rhyme with?
Interesting.
You can't write this stuff, can you?
You really can't.
No, no.
Things are obviously still developing there.
Apparently, he's saying that he was pushing for freer speech
than the board was willing to permit is, I think, the way he's trying to spin it.
I'm sure that means a lot of Marjorie Taylor Greene type things.
I can only imagine, yes.
I see this as a save by the investors to try to say that the activity
that this led to was an anomaly.
This is a way to save face.
Okay, we're going to temper the activity, and it's basically a PR strategy
to make the investors seem like this is not what they condone,
even though we know it is, and that it just simply got out of control
and that they're taking steps now.
Of course, the most irksome phrase, taking steps.
Of course, Facebook was led to take steps forever without accountability,
and this is much the same thing.
Doesn't it just protect the board?
I don't know, Alex, maybe you would have an insight.
Yeah, I think this is an interesting development for Parler,
but the CEO making these statements going over and over again,
he had nothing to do with this decision.
Of course not.
You got fired.
He worked for the board as a CEO.
That's the way it goes.
Frankly, I'm surprised at two things.
Number one, that they didn't fire him sooner, and in fact,
immediately after the insurrection that a lot of this chatter had supposedly
sparked on January 6th or around January 6th, and number two,
why he didn't resign.
It would have been a much more dignified exit for somebody who had been
fighting these battles over content moderation, over free speech,
saying he spent countless hours working with the board,
and then he suffered this really embarrassing issue.
Look, the buck has to stop somewhere, and, you know,
sometimes you know what rolls uphill, as it should.
And what happened with these Internet archivists,
the open source investigators having the ability to completely snapshot Parler
as there was this cascading failure of security features,
first with Twilio and then Amazon AWS about to take them offline.
They had no authentication in place.
They had this idiotic or this sort of monument to stupidity system whereby
every single post was iterated by the number one,
meaning that all you had to do is increment by one,
like the number of the thread or the number of the posts so that you could
archive everything.
All of these are gigantic failures for a CEO running what is ostensibly a
security-focused and privacy-focused free speech platform.
That would have been a failure back in the 1980s.
That would have been a failure back then.
And, you know, in 2020 to have that kind of failure, it's unforgivable.
Well, they were off to the races.
They had their growth.
And so why scrutinize it?
Who's going to look?
Well, it turns out when things go wrong, it matters.
Well, you know, before we move on,
if I could make one further point to bounce off of something Gila had
mentioned earlier, and I think it also goes to your question and point as
well, Kyle, is if you look at Parler now as it stands,
and I just looked at all of the DNS data for this particular site,
and it's something I've been watching for several weeks now as they were
taken offline and tried to find a new host.
So we'll get a little bit technical here for those who like the technical
talk on our show.
If you look at the host right now, the host, the IP address of parlor.com,
it's a company by the name of DDoS Guard Corporation.
The IP address is 190.115.31.151.
That's an IP address that's located in guess.
Turkmenistan.
Take a guess.
Well, close.
Tajikistan.
Wait, what'd you say?
Belize.
It's actually located in Belize.
But this company, DDoS Guard,
which is the host and owns that IP address and assigned it to Parler,
DDoS Guard is a really interesting animal.
It's rather curious.
Actually, it's a host platform that operates very similar to CloudFlare in
that it's a content distribution network and prevents you from being DDoS'd,
right, from suffering a distributed denial-of-service attack.
But it's rather strange because it's a hosting platform with an address in
Edinburgh in Scotland,
and it has telephone numbers that ring to Russia and ring to the
Netherlands.
As we mentioned,
the IP address that DDoS Guard assigned is actually located in Belize.
The abuse contact details for that IP address actually relate to a physical
location in Ecuador and an email address in Russia.
DDoS Guard itself has two languages on its website,
Russian and English.
And the domain name registration for DDoS Guard's site actually links back to
Russia as well.
It was created in 2011 with the Russian domain name registrar, reg.ru.
So another rather curious decision was made by Parler.
Oh, boy.
Probably because they couldn't find anybody else to pick up the tab for their
services or anybody to even treat them as a client that would take their money
after the insurrection that happened,
that they went with this company that's located in Russia.
Now that raises so many problems, so many issues.
I mean, obviously the connection to Russia is a big red flag,
you know, no pun intended.
I know somebody was going to mention that, Emmanuel.
You know they're not communist anymore.
So the red thing doesn't work anymore.
Yeah, but they still do.
Yeah, their flag is red, white, and blue.
So there you go.
Rob, go ahead.
That's true.
Well, like their word for beautiful, it comes from their word.
Okay, no time for Russian lessons.
Rob, go ahead.
And we just got a shout-out again, the excellent work by Don Kenby.
If you go to twitter.com slash D-O-N-K underscore E-N-B-Y,
her display name is Crash Override, which we also appreciate.
But this project is ongoing, and even now as we speak,
she's continuing to post archived information that people are making available
that is just what the insurrectionists were willingly putting out there
during all this.
And it's a mess, and it's fascinating.
And if you haven't checked it out, you have to have a look.
I want to thank people who have been combing through our archives
and telling us interesting things.
We had one listener who told us some Donald Trump references
that were made on a different radio show back in 1991.
I just want to play an excerpt from that,
because I found this really kind of interesting and a bit funny.
Take a listen.
Okay, all right, we've got another Miss America bulletin.
Then we'll try the number one more time.
Donald Trump.
Oh, okay.
Wait, you want to talk about Donald Trump?
Did you see the piece in the newspaper today about Donald Trump?
It's disgusting.
Donald Trump was seen in Kmart.
He was seen shopping in Kmart with his wife, Ivana.
Okay?
Who cares?
Who cares the fact that he's in Kmart with his wife
shopping for his stupid kid?
I don't care.
Listen to this article on Newsday.
We knew times were bad, but really, darlings,
and they spell it the stupid way,
we had no idea they were this bad.
Yes, that stricken-looking couple is Donald Trump,
erstwhile billionaire, and ex-wife, Ivana,
shopping at a Kmart in Sanatoga, Pennsylvania.
How humiliating.
It's been a hard year for the Donald.
First, there is the divorce.
Then, he had to give up the 282-foot yacht.
Then he put the Taj Mahal into bankruptcy court.
And now he's hitting the bargain basement.
Next, we suppose that Martha Stewart
will be wielding her hot glue gun at the plaza.
The Trumps, according to a spokesperson, are not broke.
They were just shopping for back-to-school supplies
for their son, Donald Jr., 14,
known to intimates as Donnie.
Excuse me.
It seems that Donnie is attending the Hill School,
an exclusive boarding school in nearby Pottstown,
which boasts alums the likes of Secretary of State James Baker,
movie director Oliver Stone,
and the son of World War II General George Patton.
The Trumps drove him to school this week
and stopped by Kmart on Wednesday
to pick up the normal things that a child needs
when he's starting school.
Onlookers say the doting parents emerged
pushing two shopping carts full of, among other things,
sheets, comforters, shampoo, pencils, and a house plant.
Nothing fancy.
The plant was, according to photographer John Strickler
of the Pottstown Mercury,
just a little plant in a little thing.
You know, just a plant.
And that's a quote.
Strickler said he staked out the Kmart parking lot
after getting a call from a tipster,
one of our subscribers.
Small towns are like that.
But I never expected to find him.
In yet another folksy touch,
the Trumps personally loaded the stuff
into the trunk of their dark blue Mercedes.
They really went into detail on this.
Mary Harax, assistant store manager at the Kmart,
said the Trumps shopped alone
and were not accorded any special treatment.
Harax declined to say how much they spent,
but she did say that Donald tried to pay by American Express
and was politely turned down.
We don't take American Express at this particular Kmart.
And so he paid cash.
What page do you think that was on, folks?
43, 57, 122?
Page 3.
Page 3 of Newsday.
Hang your head in shame.
Justice Thomas was on page 7 or something like that.
Ah, yes.
Donald Trump took ex-wife Ivana to Kmart,
but this makes the AP, too,
but took fiancé Marla Maples to the Miss America pageant.
The couple had front row seats for the Miss America pageant
in Atlantic City last night
and appeared early in the national broadcast
with hosts Reggie Philbin and Kathy Lee Gifford.
Gifford noted that the couple announced their engagement
on the host television show Live
with Reggie and Kathy Lee.
Who cares?
At one point, Philbin pressed cash in Trump's hand,
insisting that the owner of three casinos here
stop bugging him.
Trump and Maples smiled but didn't speak.
Trump was a judge for the pageants finals two years ago.
And then they go into a story about the Kmart incident.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable what the priorities here are.
Okay, we're going to try Nazis again.
See if we bought enough time there.
Dialing for Nazis on Brain Damage.
Oh, boy.
That was the name of the show, Brain Damage.
But I love how, even back in 1991,
the logical segue after talking about Donald Trump
is to see what the Nazis are up to.
Wow.
Thanks to the listener who brought that to our attention.
And, yes, all of our radio shows can be found
in the radio section of 2600.com.
Oh, and exciting news.
We're going to have a lot more audio being posted this year.
We found a treasure trove of old material
that we're processing right now.
Along with the voicemail segments, which at a later date…
We're working on that, too.
We're working on that, too.
Exactly.
More to share about those recordings, as well.
But that particular excerpt from the September 15, 1991 show,
what did you guys think of that?
I mean, my thought on it immediately
was that your tension for complaining
has only increased in 30 years here.
I mean, I feel like you've gotten better and better
at complaining over time.
Well, that was a different radio station.
That was a different radio station,
but the complaining pretty much follows me wherever I go.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
I thought it was great.
Rob?
My thought is I know I had a couple of friends
who were writing for Newsday back around that time,
and I think I want to call them and ask them
what the deal was with this.
Yeah, I think maybe you should.
Maybe you should.
Now, sticking to that topic somewhat,
a website belonging to the Patriotic Brigade Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan,
an organization affiliated with the white supremacist clan,
I guess,
was hacked by an anti-fascist Israeli organization
exposing pictures, names, and personal information
of many of the organization's members.
While the website originally consisted of white supremacist imagery,
as well as a link to join them,
the hack completely altered the entirety of the webpage.
In an exclusive statement to the Jerusalem Post,
the hackers identified themselves as an anti-fascist collective
by the name Hailem Almanim,
which is Hebrew for anonymous soldiers.
Yes.
Wow.
That's pretty awesome.
Our objective...
I love this quote here.
Our objective is to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of humanity.
I'm putting that on my wall.
Neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups
believe that Jews have an all-seeing eye.
Our desire is to make their fantasies a reality
and exploit their conspiracy theories as a form of psychological warfare.
We want them to know, wherever they are in the world,
that we will find them and expose them.
We will destroy their lives,
and we will bathe in their tears
and mock at the gnashing of their teeth.
There is nowhere that is beyond our reach.
The hack also revealed the supposed leader of the Patriotic Brigade,
a Texas resident named Kevin James Smith.
This included...
He's not the one who made the films, right?
No, I don't think it's the same.
This included Smith's face, address, phone number, date of birth,
both email addresses.
Both? He has two. Wow.
Proof he paid to operate the website
and a link to his page on the Texas Public Sex Offender Registry,
where he has a very prominent entry, apparently.
The organization will also be giving updates of their activities
via the Twitter account Justice Underscore Jew,
which told the Jerusalem Post it was acting as an information relay
for Hailem Almanin to draw attention to their activities
and find operatives on location.
And further updates will be given on their website,
jewishantifa.com.
That's right, jewishantifa.com.
I love it.
Stories like that give me a little bit of inspiration.
Gail, how was his pronunciation there?
I'm sorry about the wincing, guys.
Hailem Almanin.
Okay, all right, fair enough.
I couldn't figure out how to pronounce Regis, apparently, in 1991.
Yeah, Reggie, Reggie Hilden?
Well, I guess he wasn't a star then, at least not in my world.
New York treasure, Reggie Hilden?
No, the WBAI engineer let him know.
Thirty years from now, people will be laughing at the way we pronounce things,
I'm sure of that, maybe 30 minutes from now.
Actually, 30 minutes from now, you can laugh to our faces
by tuning in to our YouTube channel, Channel 2600,
and joining us on Off the Hook Overtime.
Again, the phone number 802-321-4225, 802-321-HACK.
And no, we're not in Vermont.
It's just a Vermont area code that we happened to get
to make the number spell something cool.
So there was a bit of panic, I guess,
when Facebook signed everybody out the other Friday.
People were thinking they were getting hacked,
that their information was being stolen,
that privacy settings were being reset.
People were prompted to log back in.
I'm surprised that people stay logged into Facebook,
but I guess that's what most people do.
I make a point of not being on Facebook
and just logging in when I need to check something
and then logging the hell out as quickly as I can.
But apparently, a couple of weeks ago,
the end of January, everyone's Facebook account was,
everyone got booted and they had to log back in.
And this is what they worry about.
What, you're still logged in from all that period of time?
Yeah.
Okay.
Is this on the website or on the app?
Both.
Hmm.
I did not get logged out.
Well, apparently you're the queen of Facebook.
Apparently I am.
It's good to know.
Well, I guess...
Does that make you the king of Facebook?
Does that add to the conspiracy then,
that this only happened to some people and not others?
Well, okay.
But this is something that we can't deny.
Apparently, 84% of people post on social media every week.
Is that true?
Oh, wait.
Hold on a second.
No, this is...
I'm sorry.
I should have read the first part.
This is part of a survey of 4,000 professionals in the UK and US.
And they found that 84% of them post on social media every week
with two-fifths, 42% posting every day,
openly sharing huge amounts of information about their hobbies,
interests, relationships, and locations.
Half share the names and pictures of their children.
Almost three-quarters mention birthday celebrations,
unknowingly giving away information that helps hackers and criminals
to, by the way, launch a successful social engineering
or account takeover attack.
This is not helped by the fact that 55% of people surveyed
have public profiles on Facebook.
Just 33% have set their Instagram accounts to private.
An overwhelming 93% of workers also update their job status on social media,
while 36% share information about their job.
And while these posts may seem harmless,
hackers and criminals will use this information to select their targets
and method of attack.
It's common sense.
It really is.
Basically, those out-of-office messages that you put on when you go on vacation,
they give out information on how long you're going to be away,
how long you're not going to be minding the store, not home, not at your desk,
and all kinds of possibilities for social engineering
and basically identity theft and other things are quite possible.
Alex, I'm going to give you the last word because we are almost out of time,
but we're back at 8 o'clock on overtime.
Go ahead.
On both of those stories, there are really two sides of the same coin.
The latter story that you mentioned, people oversharing, intimate details,
hobbies, things like that on social media,
they give rise to a security issue is one thing, right?
And the ironic thing is those very same people
were the ones that were probably so incredibly skeptical
that their Facebook login session had ended and they needed to re-login.
But on the other hand, the fact that they were skeptical,
that they were concerned, and they did suspect
that maybe this was some kind of phishing attempt or credentials harvesting attempt
means that people are thinking more.
They're thinking about cybersecurity.
We're doing our job.
We're getting the word out there.
I see that as actually a good thing.
All right.
Hey, write to us, oth at 2600.com, and tell us what you think of the show.
Any information you want to share with us, please feel free to send that on in.
We were preempted last week.
We weren't expecting to be preempted last week,
but as a result of that, we won't be preempted as scheduled later in February,
so we'll be on for a good period of time now.
And we will be on in a couple of minutes, 8 o'clock, on youtube.com slash channel 2600.
And you can call in at 802-321-4225 during that period of time.
Otherwise, we will see you next week, 7 p.m. here on WBAI.
Good night.
All right, here we are, on Overtime, did everybody make it smoothly?
Kyle, are you there?
Yeah.
Okay, good.
And, Alex, I see you.
I still have some whiplash from that transition, it was a little harsh this time.
And Rob and Gila, are you there?
We're here.
Okay, I'm not sure this is working, because I'm seeing numbers of zero for viewers, and
I know that we're public, it's a public thing.
Can you guys verify that we are actually on YouTube?
Can somebody check?
We are.
Okay.
So maybe we just don't have anybody watching.
I'm not really sure.
But again, the phone number is 802-321-4225.
Again, sorry about the rough start to the actual radio show, Kyle, I believe you wanted
to take credit for that?
Is that what you were telling me before?
Yeah, I wasn't really ready, and basically forgot to turn on the Wi-Fi for something.
Okay, all right, that's fine, that's fine.
But then, after restarting some of the software and doing a bunch of that troubleshooting,
it seemed like it was the station that was having trouble, but I just kept doing that,
and eventually it was blaring in our engineers' ears.
You know, something is wrong here.
I can just tell, because usually our numbers are much higher than this, and now, Rob, if
you're connecting, you're the one that I'm seeing.
And now it's two.
Okay, great, but usually it's like 60 or 70.
So what happened?
I don't know if your numbers are lagging or something.
Well, something's not right.
Don't pay attention.
Well, I'm looking at the YouTube station, and there's 26 watching now.
Okay, but there should be more than that.
And also, we need people to know how to use YouTube better than we do, because apparently
nobody can see this until it goes live.
We need for it to be seen before it goes live, so people know about it before it actually
starts happening.
So, oth at 2600.com?
That's our email address.
Yeah, write to us and help us out with these things and various social media and podcast
issues that we are constantly...
We don't want to be YouTube experts.
We just want to be competent.
Yeah, we want to get it right, and we don't have to waste a lot of time thinking about
it ourselves.
That seems fair.
What do you have there, Alex?
You made a great show of holding it up.
You asked me a question as you see me putting the drink to my lips.
Well, why did you make a big display if you didn't want me to call attention to it?
I was just saying cheers.
That's all.
That's all.
I'm having a Cronenberg, actually.
A French beer.
Oh, that's a good Pilsner.
That's nice, right?
It is.
That's a good beer.
It's Wednesday.
It's after 8 o'clock.
What the hell?
Yeah, exactly.
Now, Kyle, did you plug the phone back in?
You didn't, did you?
Yeah, it's set.
Okay, so our phone number is open.
802-321-4225.
If there's something you as a listener want to complain about or talk to us about, this
is your opportunity.
This is why this particular part of the show exists, so that you can have your say.
We can't do this.
You saw the trouble we had just getting on the air.
Imagine the trouble of dealing with calls at a remote studio that are on delay.
It would just be way too much for, I think, anybody to handle.
Well, don't build it up too much yet, because when they connect, we may have to adjust some
of the chewing gum and the tape that's holding everything together.
Why can't this just stay the way it is?
It's been a couple weeks.
We might have had some jostling.
There may have been a...
Oh, we have our first call.
We have a phone call, but I think you still have to pick up the phone and press 1, because
for some reason, Google makes us do that, and we should look into that as well.
Is there a caller on the line?
Yeah, I'm on the line.
Great.
Hi.
How you doing?
Okay.
I was curious to know what brand phone Rob has, since he said he switched away from
Samsung, because I know they're the 800-pound gorilla in the cell phone market.
So I was curious to know what phone he uses.
Yeah, Rob, tell us all about your phone, what kind of phone it is, and all the details.
My phone is a Motorola phone, and I got it, I want to say, three, four years ago, because
at the time, it seemed like Motorola was actually opening up their attitudes toward people repairing
their own phones, and things like right to repair, and making a phone that you can take
apart if you're expert enough, and put together yourself.
So I went with them.
It's a Motorola phone.
Oh, okay.
That's good to know.
Just one other question.
The photo on the YouTube page, where exactly was that taken?
I'm glad somebody finally asked about that.
I don't know.
I don't know where that was taken.
Obviously, somewhere in Europe.
That's a mailbox.
It's a green mailbox.
And maybe this is something our listeners can help us with.
Where are their green mailboxes?
What part of Europe has that particular custom?
Very arresting image.
It is.
Thank you.
It's a picture I took when we were scrambling for the first edition of Overtime.
We needed an image, and I just jumped into the first directory I found, which happened
to be pictures I took while traveling once, and grabbed that one.
That's literally the story behind it.
So now it's up to the listeners to tell us the rest of the story behind that.
All right.
Well, I look forward to getting an answer from one of your intrepid listeners.
Thanks.
And may we ask where you are calling from?
Calling from Nassau County.
All right.
Nassau County.
How much snow did you guys get?
About 15 inches.
Awesome.
Wow.
Still digging out.
Uh-huh.
We all are.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
Thank you.
Have a great night.
802-321-4225.
802-321-HACK to talk to the folks at Off The Hook while we decompress from the radio show.
Phones are lasting a little bit longer.
I mean, unless you need the best features ever, and I think this is true with laptops
and other machines, you might have noticed that you don't need all of the latest processor
speeds unless you're doing something particular.
Most people can get by with refurbishing something or taking something that maybe needed some
components, a little more RAM.
And you can do amazing stuff with some of the contemporary hardware that's even half
a dozen years old and not for very much money either.
And I've noticed this with phones too.
The ones that are harder to repair, and this has come up with right-to-repair conversations
as well.
There's Cottage Industries for cracked screens, as Alex was talking about.
I've been watching someone who actually works for Apple on social media.
She fixes phones, and it's really interesting to see how you have to heat and remove processors
and the steps involved with repairing circuits.
It's really fascinating stuff.
So there's a lot of people working on this so that people who are not interested in upgrading
their phone but willing to spend a couple hundred bucks on it or 50 bucks for a screen
or something cheap that will just keep it going longer, it's perfectly worthwhile to
repair it instead of upgrading just for features.
8023214225.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, there is a site called iFixit.
It's ifixit.com.
And they host really good community-created guides and teardowns and things like that
to repair all sorts of devices.
And Motorola actually went to work with them for a bit, so there are some really good guides
on the Motorola phones.
So what I did was I went on ifixit.com slash Motorola and looked there to see what phones
they have guides and stuff available for and made my selection that way.
We have a caller on the line.
Go ahead, caller.
Oh, is that me?
That's you.
Great.
Hi.
I'm just wondering, is no one speculating why the rioters, since they are terrorists,
why they haven't been talking about them going to Gitmo and sending them off there?
Well, I don't know if we send domestic prisoners to Gitmo, do we?
The sticky thing of the U.S. citizenship might be partly why that's not one of the first
options they're going with.
But it's a good question.
It's a quandary, because really, what is the distinction other than that with a domestic
or international terrorism case?
I mean, for the record, I don't think anybody should be sent to Gitmo.
I think we should be closing that place down and giving it back to Cuba.
Right.
No one should be there, really.
But since they're keeping people there for God knows how many years now.
It's a valid point.
Alex, I think you have something to say?
Yeah.
I mean, Gitmo was really for enemy combatants.
That was the reason for its existence.
Well, these are enemies.
They're combating, for sure.
But I take your point.
True.
But yeah, non-U.S. citizen enemy combatants.
I mean, it's also not the exclusive place where we would hold anybody on terrorism charges.
If you think about it, there are plenty of terrorism charges brought against people in
the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York, and they're
held in the Metropolitan Detention Center and sent to federal prison.
So they don't all have to go over to Gitmo.
But if they were enemy combatants...
Well, they don't seem to be sending anyone anywhere except for one guy.
Yeah.
They are releasing a lot of people on their own recognizance or for affordable bail or
things like that.
They're definitely not treating them the same way they would treat other people, for sure.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah.
That's true.
But let's go back to Gitmo for a second, too.
Oh, God.
Let's not go there ever.
For things that they said they were going to do and not do.
I mean, President Obama campaigned on Gitmo in 2007 and 2008 and claimed that he was going
to shut it down.
Yeah, but...
And yet he did not.
Okay.
Again, what is it with people wanting to just point and say that somebody didn't fulfill
their promise without exploring all the facts?
Okay.
People are saying, Joe Biden lied about the $2,000 when, if you do the math, $1,400 plus
the $600 we already got is $2,000.
He's not lying.
It's just somebody didn't understand math.
But the Obama thing, I take exception to that, too, because he wanted to shut down Gitmo,
but Congress got in the way.
The Republicans got in the way.
How does he get the blame for that?
Yeah.
How do you throw that at someone's feet and just, like, you're dumbfounded?
Obviously, you understand that there are two other branches of government.
Yeah.
If the Republicans had gone along, Gitmo would be shut right now.
I mean, I'm all for shutting it with what we have and maybe taking a stronger stance
and maybe not even getting cooperation from Republicans.
Fine.
Because since they've lowered the bar so much, maybe that's the only way to get things done
now.
But I don't doubt his sincerity as far as closing Gitmo.
It just was one of the many things he wasn't able to do.
Your responses are all premised on this erroneous assumption that politicians don't have to
work with the other side of the aisle, and you can just blame the other side.
You have to make a convincing argument.
This is about argumentation.
It's about persuasion.
We elect people to government because they're supposed to be persuasive representatives
of the people.
So when you say, OK, Obama campaigned and said he was going to get Gitmo closed down
and he failed to do it, well, that's something he failed to deliver on because he failed
to be persuasive.
That's how I view it.
You know, I think that we need to hold people accountable to their campaign promises.
But look, that's neither here nor there.
More importantly, I got an email from a colleague of mine with whom I've worked for a number
of years right now, and he believes that the letterbox is actually originating in Ireland,
that it was a picture taken in Ireland.
OK, that's certainly possible.
One way to verify that would be to see what direction the cars are going.
I might have to see if there's an expanded view of that picture.
But that's a good theory.
Yeah.
You want me to give the phone number out?
OK.
You know, you can just say that.
You don't have to write a picture of the phone.
The phone number is 802-321-4225.
I wasn't sure if she was still on the phone.
That's why I didn't give the number out.
Phone line apparently is open.
All right.
Good.
So, yes.
What else?
I just don't think that you can work with people who say, oh, yeah, closing that down
is off the table.
That's not a negotiation.
And being any more convincing with people that say something is off the table,
I don't know.
I just don't find that as constructive as you're making it out to be.
I feel like you're greenwalding a little bit here.
And you know what I mean by that.
Basically, you just attack.
Is that a verb?
It is now.
It is now.
He blocked me for criticizing him.
Don't get me started on that.
But basically, people are so eager to say, aha, the Democrats are just as bad.
No, they're not just as bad.
Are they bad?
Yes.
Are they politicians?
Absolutely.
But to say blame Obama for not having the kind of health care we want, no, that's on us
for not backing up the kind of health care we got and pushing for more.
Instead, we said, nope, not good enough, not going to support it, and add my vote to the
Republicans that don't support it as well.
And then the majority of people don't support it, and you get nothing.
That's what happens when you don't take a proactive interest in actually pushing your
chosen candidate to do more.
And you can disagree with them, but you can still support them.
And I think a lot of people just don't know how to do that.
Look at how people treat de Blasio.
Look at how people treat Cuomo.
And people are going to treat Biden the same way.
And guess who's going to march in and take over when that happens?
Anyway, we have another phone call.
Let's go to that.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Just wanted to say, if you look up those 10 digits on that green mailbox, it is an Irish
tracking service.
Uh-huh.
And where are you calling from?
Queens, New York.
All right.
So you know what you're talking about.
So Ireland, I guess, is confirmed.
Can we say the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland?
Northern Ireland is probably the Republic of Ireland, right?
So this is a lot of it looking it up.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
That's all I know.
Okay.
Anything else you want to say?
No.
Thank you for the show.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
All right.
Phone number 802-321-4225.
802-321-HACK.
And this goes to show that if you ask for information, people are always willing to
find out and give the information.
Alex?
I have a suggestion, if I may, for off-the-hook overtime in the future.
Perhaps what we can do every week is change that photograph.
And this can be the basis of conversation every single week.
Find that photo.
Where is it?
I think it would actually be kind of cool.
Oh, and who's going to do that, Alex?
Who's going to rifle through all the photos and put it up every damn week, huh?
Just give them more homework is what you're doing.
How about this?
I have an even better idea.
I'm going to take a random photo from the parlor leak and post that.
Yeah, there you go.
And those are being posted, right?
Yeah, they are.
Where can people see those?
That's a good question.
I mean, you can find a whole bunch of them on Twitter, right?
And then there's a lot of these repos.
Rob, are you more aware of where you can find these repos?
I don't know about the centralized repos, but yeah.
Follow Duncan underscore NB on Twitter.
D-O-N-K underscore E-N-B-Y.
And there are links to all of these being posted.
There's also a fascinating account I've been following called Parlor Takes,
which allows you to see this stuff without having to actually follow it yourself.
Okay.
How do you spell that?
It's fascinating.
How do you spell that?
It's just one word, P-A-R-L-E-R-T-A-K-E-S.
On Twitter.
Parlor Takes.
Great.
Thank you for that.
We have a caller.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook overtime.
Hi.
You sent me the call and complain, and I wanted to complain about Parlor.
Okay.
Hey, you're in the right place.
This is complaining about Parlor Central.
So my problem with Parlor is, like, it's a giant grift, right?
We already have these frameworks for, like, decentralized social networking,
like Paloma, Mastodon.
There's tons of ways to do it.
And they just, like, created a crappy Twitter clone
and fundraised off of it.
And it's just, like, I'm going to ignore the whole content of Parlor,
but, like, the whole thing.
They're just making money off people, and it's crap.
Go ahead, Rob.
They don't care.
Yeah.
One really interesting aspect of why, you know,
people might ask why didn't they just start a Mastodon instance.
And that's because I don't think they were interested in the federation
aspect of it.
They didn't want to put up something that ticks from outside could still get in.
They wanted their own little club, their own little walled garden,
and that's why they just cloned Twitter and put that up.
Alex, go ahead.
You know, I was actually itching my arm.
You were raising your damn hand.
I figured you wanted to say something.
This is like, you know, you would make the worst auctioneer.
You'd have people buying things.
No, you would make the worst auction goer,
or whatever they call people that go to auctions.
Yeah.
But, look, I think that Kohler's point underscores the point that I made
during the main event, during Off the Hook on WPI,
which is that this thing was a crappy instance from the beginning.
There shouldn't have been fundraising.
Perhaps, you know, as I think that Kohler intimates,
it may have even been part of some kind of fraud.
I mean, the fact that they raised money to support some crappy instance
and that they claimed that they had this state-of-the-art cybersecurity,
that they valued privacy, when they certainly and obviously were not.
But, Alex, of course it was fraud.
I mean, Steve Bannon raised money for a wall that was never built
and pocketed the money.
Trump himself, raising money after the election for God knows what,
kept all that money.
So, yeah, this is what they do.
Yeah.
This is what they do.
But when you claim, when you're a business and you raise money
and you take money from the public
and you have services out there for the public to use,
but yet you are not doing on the back end what you claim to be doing,
this is the kind of thing where the FTC may get involved,
or they may look into you,
or they may launch an investigation for something like unfair
or deceptive trade practices.
But what if you're registered in Belize and Russia and Turkmenistan
and all these other places?
Who looks into you then?
Well, they certainly were not,
and they're offering services to U.S. citizens.
They're taking U.S. money from investors, I would imagine.
So they have all of these requisite connections to the U.S. forum,
to the U.S. jurisdiction for the Federal Trade Commission
to launch some kind of investigation.
And I think deceptive trade practices would certainly be something,
if I were on the FTC, I would look into that.
Yeah.
They're definitely on the defensive in sort of a crippled state,
or they want to kind of hold on to it
or let it incubate in its relegated status.
So it exists.
It has a destination, as we pointed out.
But it's, I think, a lot, where I was going with it,
it's a lot of, like, management, crisis management-type stuff,
but without letting go of what they feel is a network
and good money in the sense of a grift, right?
Carla, did you have anything else to say?
Yeah.
It just felt like a more palatable, like, institutional-backed gab.
Because gab did the same stuff, and it's just a repeat that, you know,
people like the Mercers could dump all their money into,
and it just irritates me.
Because there are things like, you know, the Fediverse
that could use that kind of money.
We could do amazing things with it.
But, you know, they're just grifters and stuff.
Well, I think there's more awareness now, so maybe there's hope.
Maybe there's hope that that money will go to the right places in the future
because people are aware of this now.
I hope so.
That's all I had to say.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
Getting good calls tonight, I have to say.
You can be one of them.
802-321-4225, 802-321-HACK.
Alex, were you scratching yourself again or raising your hand this time?
I was not raising my hand.
I was itching.
What's going on over there in Pennsylvania?
Sounds like you need lotion or something.
Yeah, seriously.
Scratching like you're in the gorilla cage at the zoo.
Thanks.
Okay.
We're getting a lot of calls, which is great,
and our viewership is going up, which is also nice, I guess.
And let's take this call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook overtime.
Go ahead.
Hello.
I'd like to talk.
Just about the DDoS card being business-based in Edinburgh.
This is a company formation called the Scottish Limited Partnership,
and over the last few years there's been investigations into them.
One of the investigations identified about £1 billion in cash
that had been transferred from kind of former Soviet bloc states
through these partnership companies.
They are an absolute scandal,
and that's one of the reasons where they're able to get this lack of transparency with it.
So it seems to me that, you know what I mean,
across the world we have a duty to actually kind of go
and fight against these injustices and shut down these avenues,
but it has to be done, you know what I mean, across the world.
Agreed.
Are you by chance calling from Scotland?
I am.
I'm calling from Edinburgh.
It is half past one in the morning, and I've been tuned in.
If I can give one suggestion,
I would love if we would be able to get more interaction through the IRC channel,
because without having YouTube comments on,
it's not a very convenient time to be talking on the phone,
so it would be good if we could kind of converse by text.
Okay.
We'll take that into consideration.
You can understand, though, why we perhaps chose not to have comments on YouTube,
but we'll look into it.
If there are moderators and things, yeah, it can be manageable.
Alex, I know you have something to say.
Yeah, I think this is such a great call to have received about something we said on the air,
and it just really underscores to me why we do this off-the-hook overtime right now
and the interaction with the callers and why it's so important as well,
because I had no idea about that.
I don't think anybody really knows about those interesting investigations
that have been happening in Scotland into DDoS guards,
the money transfers that seem extraordinarily irregular,
and the fact that they're using Scotland as a home base
or at least having telephones that ring into Scotland is a nexus to that jurisdiction
that allows those investigators and those regulators to make those types of inquiries,
and it sounds like they're doing it.
It sounds like they may get it somewhere,
and I would love it if the caller could continue to update us about those particular investigations.
So definitely stay in touch, whether it's IRC, whether it's off-the-hook overtime,
because I do think that the connection, this DDoS guard connection,
there's something incredibly underhanded and shady about it,
and I will say as well that one of the things that I did
when I saw that they had transferred their hosting over to DDoS guard
was I looked up their NS records, and I found every single domain name
that DDoS guard was hosting, every single domain that had NS records,
name server records that related to DDoS guard,
and I'll tell you there aren't a huge, huge, huge amount of them.
What I found was slightly over 6,000,
but I wasn't looking in all of the country code top-level domains.
We know that they host a lot in Russia, so there may be a whole bunch of .rus
perhaps that weren't available,
but what I did see was that there were 6,000 or so, which is not a big number,
but a good portion of those were domain names that were cyber squatters
or domains that were registered that could only be used for illegal, malicious,
or fraudulent-type purposes as well.
So DDoS guard itself I think is hosting a tremendous amount of content
that it probably knows to be either borderline unlawful or unlawful itself,
and that's something else I think should be looked into with respect to this host,
and it says a hell of a lot about Parler that it had to go to DDoS guard
for another hosting arrangement.
Thank you very much for that information, Culler, and definitely stay in touch.
Yes, and I really miss Edinburgh.
That's one of the first places I want to go when all this ends.
Well, we'd be happy to have you back.
That's right. We could go, Culler, if you're still on the line,
we could go to the espionage bar.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, love it.
Uh-huh, definitely.
And I want to visit the guy—
Sadly closed at the moment due to lockdown,
but I'm sure they'll be opening it up in the next few months.
I want to visit the guy in Shetland who got my bottle in the middle of the ocean
and drifted over to Shetland.
And I think you can get there pretty easily from Scotland, correct?
Absolutely so. You can get the ferry or take the plane.
Wow. Okay. Awesome. I'm there.
All right. Thanks again for the call.
All the best.
Keep listening.
And we say one more call?
Do one more call.
All right. 802-321-4225.
So good connecting with our listeners again.
It's been too long, you know, and I really miss the studio.
I really miss the street.
I really miss going out afterwards and just doing the things we all took for granted.
Maybe we'll never take them for granted again.
Let's hope so.
802-321-HACK-802-321-4225.
I figured I'd do that just for entertainment.
I'm sorry.
Apparently when you hit that button and there's no call—
I'm up.
That's how you know there's no call.
I'm up.
Wow.
So if there is a call, that doesn't happen.
If there isn't a call, that does happen.
Please don't do it.
I'm learning.
This is—OK, we have a call, so that won't happen when I do the exact same thing.
I wanted to take this call.
See, that's the Google lady.
That's the Google lady.
OK, got to press 1.
Don't press 1 for too long, otherwise you'll annoy the person.
OK.
Go ahead, caller.
You're on the net, I guess.
Off the hook overtime.
Go ahead.
Oh, thank you so much.
I'm wondering if you get a current iPhone with facial recognition on it,
if you're more likely to be tracked?
Well, one of you iPhone people answered that.
I don't have face recognition, so I can't tell you.
Alex, how about you?
It seems that's the kind of thing you would like.
Well, I mean, it depends on what you're talking about by tracked, right?
I mean, are you concerned about setting up facial recognition,
having that data then transferred over to some third party,
and then it sent over to law enforcement in some way or another,
and then tracked that way?
No, I wouldn't intend.
You know, my reasoning for getting the phone in the first place is for
convenience and for the camera, and I wouldn't be using the facial recognition.
So I'm wondering about getting a model that doesn't have it.
Because when I called Apple, they said, oh, no, it's only about, you know,
logging in, and you don't really even have to use that.
But I'm thinking about the new reset and how we're going to be, you know,
spied on even more.
It's interesting, Quandary.
I know kind of where you're getting at, and I think you've got to be a little
bit careful going forward because there are going to be some new technologies
that we're going to want to talk about, and they're going to seem pretty
futuristic.
And I really hope that conspiracy and sort of unfounded stuff doesn't take
over because it's really in the interests of the people that are unrolling
these technologies for people who talk about the technology to come off as
conspiracy theorists so that the actual functions aren't evaluated and looked
into and talked about with seriousness.
So there's a little bit about handsets and hardware going forward and stuff
that is going to have a lot of implications.
And so it's important to find out as much as possible as consumers.
And for, like, an instance like this, it would be where is the information
that is used to create a sense of recognizing my face?
Where is that stored?
And as Alex said, you know, it could be something that's held elsewhere.
Then if it's in sort of a data escrow like that, who is in charge of it?
And is there some mechanism for law enforcement or some other authority,
a government or a private entity that sells that facial recognition information?
Those are all important questions.
As far as from what I know or would guess, I would say that that is not
stored off the device, and Apple is being as honest as they might be as a
corporation when they say, no, it is just to unlock your phone.
It is probably held in the hardware on the phone in a chip that is not easy
to exfiltrate data from.
But I'm not an iPhone person, so I don't really know that.
But absolutely, these questions and stuff, without getting into, like I said,
unfounded stuff, we've got to ask this stuff.
We've got to know as consumers.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, and speaking of which, you know, further to Kyle's point,
and to your point as well, Cole, which is that you spoke to Apple and they said
there was nothing untoward happening with that particular data,
which seems to really underscore Kyle's point.
But the issue then becomes if they are not doing anything untoward with it now,
what if they change their policies?
What if it becomes much more profitable to share that information
with third parties or to share it with some third party who is using it
for some kind of innovative purpose, something like that?
Then their policies are always going to change.
What they're doing now may not be what they're doing tomorrow,
may not be what they're doing in a month or a year or five years from now.
But then again, that being said, you know,
what we're talking about is pictures of our faces, right?
And for most of us and many of us, you know,
we willingly put that information out there on LinkedIn or on Facebook.
And so there are many other instances or data out there by which you could be
tracked already.
So I see this as somewhat low risk,
but the data surrounding your face and what they're taking in,
how you use your phone, when you log into your phone,
all of that information is metadata that could be surrounding that particular
image that could also be really interesting to some third party advertiser,
malicious actor, law enforcement, et cetera, at some point down the road.
So I think you're right to be skeptical.
One last thing I wanted to mention is I'm reminded of a sign I used to see at a
cafe that I went to and it was just something I'm sure people have seen and said
all over the place, but it was, we reserve the right to confuse service.
I would encourage you if you're around one of these technologies,
reserve that right.
I know Emmanuel says it all the time, you know,
maybe your dog's face unlocks your phone or,
or a particular knothole in a tree or something, you know,
do what you can to mess with things as much as possible.
That's something we always want to remind people that they have the power to
do.
Right. I hear you. And, and I did say, and he did,
they did tell me that I could still use a code to unlock my phone,
which is my preference.
But I'm wondering if just having that facial recognition capability on the
phone can be accessed by say, you know,
police or whoever to interface with my phone,
unbeknownst to me.
The way I look at it, if that is possible,
it's going to happen and we'll find out about it and it's not going to make
them look very good at all.
And they are, they're putting their business on the line.
They're betting their business in a lot of ways on privacy.
If you've seen a lot of Apple's ad campaigns, they're,
they're really trying to reaffirm people's trust in a lot of the ability to
have compromise in, in,
in the regular environment or with in the case of law enforcement,
they've not been cooperative in a lot of ways because they stand by the security
of their devices.
And we've reported stories about law enforcement having to use other,
other third party devices to gain access and with whatever level,
varying levels of success to do their work.
But it is not in Apple's interest to appear as though they are giving this
willingly without consent in any way,
let alone selling it in some way or so forth.
All right. Thanks. Thanks for your phone call.
Thank you for your show.
All right. Take care.
Bye.
I'm glad people are asking questions or they're so right to ask those questions.
Our viewership goes up as the show goes on.
But you know, we, we, our energy is being depleted. We have to,
we have to call it a night.
You can't take one more?
No, we gave out the number.
I think we, I think we, we've taken, I mean, you know, people insist, but
It's a good 40 minutes, 45 minutes. How, how long is over time?
Well, it started out like 10, 15 minutes.
I think the first one we did was like 20 minutes.
And then people got more and more involved and you know,
it could be all night. That's what's going to happen.
We were making up for a little time because the show ran a little,
a little late. So that's true, but we made up for that time already.
Yeah, we did.
I think we should take another call. Like we can do one more, one more call.
All right.
One more, one more.
Well, then you give out the phone number. How about that?
802-321-HACK.
In numbers?
4-2-2-5.
Thanks.
All right. Well, we got a call.
So, but next time I expect you to say the whole thing, all 10 digits.
Not counting the one.
Country code one, and you need a one anyway.
Good evening, caller. You are our last caller. Where are you calling from?
Oh, great.
New York City.
Oh, cool. That's pretty close.
Yes.
I love the show.
I went to Hope one year, a couple years ago. I had a blast.
Uh-huh. Cool. And hopefully there'll be another Hope soon.
Cool. Cool.
My question is about WhatsApp.
What's that?
I heard that they were going to back down off of the invasion of our privacy with the new update.
Do you have any information about that?
I haven't heard this. Does anyone else know?
Or can you tell us a bit more about the story you found?
It was going around on the internet that the new update since, you know, what's-his-name bought WhatsApp,
that he's going to now start selling ads and using information to, you know, push ads towards what you're looking at, what your interests are.
Just to clarify, we're talking about WhatsApp, not WhatsApp, right?
That's what I'm trying to make sure. WhatsApp. Okay. Got it.
Right. So the invasion of your text messages and everything and what you're looking at is going to happen.
And he started backing down because he saw people exiting, going to like Signal and Clubhouse and things like that.
I think, Alex, you've got something?
Yeah, there was quite, I think, a bit of press over this issue the last couple of weeks or so.
And I think you're right, Collar, too, that originally Zuckerberg said, especially when he was going through the due diligence process and the government review process for the acquisition of WhatsApp,
that that data would not be cross-pollinated with other Facebook data.
They started doing that. People started calling them out for it and then migrating from WhatsApp.
And what was interesting about this was that a lot of researchers and a lot of people had put together these infographics about the data that WhatsApp collects compared to the data that something like Signal would collect.
And you would see these massive data points, massive amount of data points, rather, that WhatsApp was collecting and then sharing with third parties, whereas something like Signal wasn't doing any of that.
So you had a massive migration of, I think, around 40 million users or so over to Signal within the period of a week, which was extraordinary and also caused a lot of annoying notifications for everyone on Signal, seeing that all these people are popping up, people coming out of the woodwork.
I hate that feature, by the way. I really hate that feature where you're told preemptively that people, I'm glad to complain, absolutely, people that you know have joined Signal.
Well, maybe they didn't want you to know that they joined Signal. It's like you're advertising with a megaphone, all these people are on Signal now, and you start getting welcome messages from people you don't even know.
It just seems like an invasion of privacy for a service that you're using for privacy.
I agree. It really is stupid. It's so stupid that they do that.
What have you been hearing?
No problem with the new update. Because I didn't do it, and I've been shut down until I do it. So I didn't do it yet. I'm trying to find out something.
So the update itself is supposed to alleviate some of the stuff that was integrating ad systems or ad networks into the application. Do you know anyone who has tried the update themselves?
I haven't done it. I don't know if anybody else has. But what are you hearing? What's the reaction been from what you've been hearing?
Nobody I know is being forced to update. I seem to be the only one that I know of that has to do it right now.
I wonder why they're treating you differently.
And they don't know it, and they're not paying attention, but I don't have what it matters. I get prompted, and I said no, so I've been shut down temporarily.
Well, somebody should try it. Understandably, people are a little bit nervous, and they backed off. As Alex was talking about, 40 million, that's a lot of people to step away from something like that.
But it should be something that they're a little bit more transparent about. Of course they won't be, because there's so many things like algorithms and stuff under the hood that they want to keep closely guarded.
But if they did change it, and they removed this, it should be something that we can verify. How do we know? You shouldn't have to be concerned. You should be confident as a user.
And it's in their interest. If people are uncomfortable, they're not going to be really interested in coming back. I think that's kind of the point you're making, right?
If a service you're using treats you in such a hostile manner as to prevent you from using it unless you upgrade on a mandatory upgrade, maybe look at a different service. Maybe that relationship isn't going anywhere.
Especially when they lead it that way, and they trust us. Well, if you let us down before, we're not going to just dive right back into that. We actually want to know.
Yeah, they kept warning me. Three days you're going to have to update. Two days you're going to have to update. So on the day of, like 12, high noon, it was like, you didn't update. Your service is down.
Just like that.
It was never supposed to be about that. You just want to talk to people.
These are bullying tactics. They're literally—well, not literally, but shoving you into a doorway, forcing you to accept their terms or be miserable. I just don't think that's a good premise to continue with. Alex, go ahead.
I have a theory about the caller and why he was singled out for updating as opposed to everybody else. I think that the caller is rightfully skeptical of lots of different things, updates included, and he has failed to install several updates to the application, meaning that he is about to be on an end-of-life version of the actual app itself.
And that's what's forcing him to do the update. So maybe, caller, can you tell me if my theory is right? Have you done all of the updates recently? When was the last time you updated the app?
The last update probably was mandatory also, but the thing about the privacy and selling your information wasn't going around, so I didn't. I didn't want to, but I did it. There was no threat of breach of privacy, so I went on ahead and did it. If I didn't have to, I wouldn't have, but now maybe I'm going to go to Signal.
Yeah, maybe that's a better idea. I have to say, Signal annoys me because half the time there's a big dialog box that says, there's an upgrade to Signal, and you can't read your messages because it's there sitting over everything, and that happens like every week, so they're all kind of annoying. Sometimes I'm just happy with what I have, and I want to leave it the way it is.
You're talking about the desktop?
Desktop, yes, desktop. I'm sorry.
You guys ever use Clubhouse, anybody?
No, I haven't.
No, okay.
I haven't either. I see a lot of people talking about it. I just don't want another thing to look at on my phone. I'm trying to unclutter rather than sign up for more things.
You need a second phone, then.
That's funny.
All right. Caller, thank you for your call.
Thanks, guys. Appreciate your show.
Thank you. Take care.
Great to hear you. Have a good night.
You too.
All right. I'm glad we took one more call. That was good.
So, folks, I guess that's going to do it for us here tonight. We'll be back again next week.
Again, you can listen to all prior episodes, not only of Off the Hook, but of all our shows, and shows I was involved in before Off the Hook even happened, before 2600 even happened. Wow.
And you can listen to us on WBAI at 7 p.m. every Wednesday for Off the Hook and, of course, Off the Hook Overtime following, which you can get at 2600.com or wherever the hell you get your podcasts.
We will be back. And write to us, OTH at 2600.com. Any last words from everybody out there?
Yeah. We were talking earlier of things we used to be able to do that we can't right now, and among those things is 2600 meetings, which are still suspended.
But a lot of local meetings are still doing meetups virtually to mitigate the loss a little bit. We're doing that in New York, so if you'd like to join in on Friday, go to nyc2600.net. All the info is there.
I also saw on the 2600 subreddit, actually, that there's going to be a worldwide virtual meeting.
Okay. I don't know anything about this. Okay. Well, great.
Hang on. Let me…
How do you connect to a worldwide global 2600 meeting?
I'm going to tell you as soon as this loads. Okay. The Hispogatos Collective, who did the Anarchist Hacker Village at Hope, are running a thing at matrix.hackers.town.
And they are through Mozilla hubs, apparently, and you don't need to have VR, but you can. And that is a worldwide 2600 meeting that is occurring on Friday.
Is there a time?
I don't know.
Zulu time?
Yeah, it's kind of an important part of all this. Or just a place where people can find out more info.
Okay. 530 Eastern.
Okay. All right.
So…
Yeah.
If you can figure out all that stuff, then by all means, do that.
Yeah. Hispogatos.org, apparently.
Excellent. We do like Matrix. We've used it.
Yeah, that's what we used during Hope.
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that we used for Hope.
It was very, very successful. Alex, it looks like you want to say something.
Yeah. Kyle, did you call that out as Zulu time? As something that was going to be Zulu time?
I was requesting in Zulu time, yeah.
In Zulu time. Is that a shout-out to last week's show, or whatever the hell it was?
Yeah, we had a good talk about it.
Three weeks ago, and yes, we did talk about Zulu time a bit, and I learned a lot about it.
We did. So that would be 1030 Zulu time.
So, on the subject of meetings, if you are currently involved in a meeting anywhere in the world,
we suggest you follow the Twitter account, 2600meetings,
and also update that account or the email address meetings at 2600.com.
Let them know if you intend to continue your meeting after all this craziness is over,
because I understand we're going to just be rebooting the whole thing,
so that all the meetings need to, I guess, re-register,
or at least let us know that you're out there and still having meetings.
Check in with us.
Yeah, I know what's going to happen.
A lot of people won't do this, and we're going to go down quite a bit,
but I think that's necessary.
I think we have to double-check, make sure people still are interested in having the meetings,
or maybe they've been replaced by other meetings.
So, sometime before we actually go back to having in-person meetings,
and who knows when that will be? Hopefully in the next few months.
Might be longer. We're not sure.
We'll have a comprehensive list, and it'll be great. It'll be really amazing.
If you're eligible for the vaccine, please get that vaccine,
so that we can start bringing these numbers down,
and hopefully this will be history, something we think back on.
Maybe not so fondly, but maybe we'll learn a lot from these experiences.
I have.
Me too. Last words, guys? Anything?
Welcome to the Biden administration.
You know, I've gone entire days now without thinking about who the president was.
It's been such a tonic.
I'm sorry for playing that clip, which probably brought it back.
But it was a gem, and I felt we should share that.
Okay, until next week, then. Good night.
Have a good night.