And the previous program was Economic Update which is heard Wednesdays at 630
p.m. right after the WBAI Evening News and this is WBAI New York 99.5 FM and
WBAI.org online. Stay tuned for Off the Hook coming up it is 7 p.m.
And a very good evening to everybody it's 7 p.m. you're listening to WBAI
New York it's time once again for Off the Hook.
Now I can't make a call. I couldn't get much worse. But if they could, they would.
Funding is bound for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Funding is bound.
And a very good evening to everybody it's 7 p.m. you're listening to WBAI.org online.
And a very good evening to everybody the program is Off the Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you joined tonight by Kyle.
Hello.
And out there in Skype land we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
Good evening.
Alex, look at you all countryed out there. You got a hunter cap on. You've got your flannel shirt.
Looks like you just hunted a raccoon or something. What is that?
Splitting wood.
Yeah, you look really cozy in there. You've got a cup of something.
Yeah, I have an espresso. And to be clear, this isn't a Masio cat. I don't want people to get the wrong impression of me.
This is a Marpat camo pattern, army field hat.
But yeah, I mean, look, I've been outside stacking wood. It's cold out here. There's snow on the ground. The lake is frozen.
It's starting to feel a hell of a lot like winter.
Wait, is the lake really frozen?
It is.
It's like 40 degrees in New York. Is it really that much colder one state over or two states over?
Yeah, but also I'm about 2,000 feet above you as well. So I'm in the mountains. So it's quite a bit colder here.
So it's been freezing or rather below freezing for just about the last week.
And the last time I actually went out on the lake for a nice kayak here was the night of Thanksgiving.
And then the next day it started to freeze over.
So it seems like the lake will be frozen here probably until March. And it's kind of sad.
Is it really wise to go out on a kayak when the water is almost frozen?
Probably not. Absolutely. In fact, I had to tear it through a little bit of ice.
But the sunset was absolutely beautiful. It was definitely worth the risk to get out on the lake one last time.
And by the way, I hope everybody had a happy Thanksgiving.
I hope so too. I hope so too. We are on the air tonight. We are not on the air next week.
So this week we're doing overtime at 8 o'clock.
And we look forward to hearing from our listeners who we have not heard from in a while.
Please write down the phone number. It's 802-321-4225. Don't call it now because nobody will pick up.
But at 8 o'clock we will have a broadcast that goes over the Internet.
And you can share your thoughts, experiences, and comments with us at that point in time.
I'm not sure if people saw this. There was a tweet that just came down from 2600 Central,
which has to do with Hotel Pennsylvania and the region.
Some kind of webinar that's happening right now because everything always happens Wednesday at 7 p.m.
I don't know why that is. But this, the topic, I don't really know what this is to be honest.
The topic is Empire State Coalition. Demolishing our cities doesn't make them better.
Civic groups in the Empire State Coalition and guest speakers will respond to the imminent demise of the Hotel Pennsylvania
and other noteworthy buildings as well as Governor Hochul and the Empire State Development Corporation's
continued support for the construction of an anti-urban, uber-dense Hudson Yards East,
the self-proclaimed Vornado Campus at Penn Station.
Now, I can't give the link to this out over the radio because it would take me about 20 minutes to read it,
all kinds of letters and numbers and symbols and things like that.
What I can do is advise people to go to twitter.com slash 2600, 2600,
and click on the link that shows up in the latest tweet there.
I think that's really the only way to give that out without wasting a whole lot of time.
And perhaps people can attend this and report to us at 8 o'clock during overtime
and let us know what's going on or how it's going because we certainly would like to hear about that.
To update people, Hotel Pennsylvania is slated for demolition.
If you call them now, Pennsylvania 65,000, 212-736-5000,
you'll hear a recording saying they are permanently closed.
And then, oddly enough, they have a link for human resources and various other things
that you would think wouldn't be open if they were permanently closed.
Hotel Pennsylvania has been our home for pretty much all the HOPE conferences except one.
We had already made plans to go elsewhere for the next HOPE,
which was supposed to have taken place in 2020. We know how that went.
And despite that, we still want to save the building from being destroyed by greedy landlords
and power brokers who want to build office towers that nobody will be in,
as opposed to a huge hotel with thousands of rooms that travelers from all over the world could afford.
It was a great gateway into New York City. It hurts the city to not have these travelers visiting us.
And it's also a huge bit of history. Yes, Gila, go ahead.
I was confused for a minute, so I just wanted to clarify for people that this is not the meeting
where public comment is invited. That is next Wednesday, one week from tonight.
And conveniently, we are preempted, so you can attend the meeting about the plan.
And you can potentially comment. All the information about that is at tinyurl.com slash save the hotel.
Thank you for remembering that. Yes, because I got confused, too.
Do you know what time that particular meeting begins?
Give me one moment. I'm sure it's 7 p.m.
Five. Oh, five. Oh, OK. Well, five to eight.
I am corrected that not everything begins at seven o'clock on Wednesdays, but most things do.
Yes, but this is good.
So all the information for getting on that meeting is available, again, at tinyurl.com slash save the hotel.
And different to the webinar that's happening right now.
Yeah, and I'm not even sure next week they will be discussing Hotel Pennsylvania or anything of interest to us,
but it's worth checking out anyway.
This, obviously, the one that's happening right now, the webinar, is talking about that.
I'm not sure who's running it. I'm not sure how many people are there.
But I am advising WBAI listeners who are interested to check it out.
Obviously, that means you have to tune away to do that, but, you know, it's a sacrifice you might have to make.
Again, the latest tweet at Twitter.com slash 2600 will get you the link to get into that.
It's going from now until 9 p.m.
I don't know if you guys saw this story.
It was kind of a wacky story that moved across our wire.
Scientists warn that marketers are trying to inject ads into dreams.
Now, I know that sounds completely crazy and bizarre, but so much of today's society is crazy and bizarre.
So maybe it's not so fictitious as we might think.
Researchers and sleep experts are ringing alarm bells.
Not very nice if you're trying to sleep.
About a new marketing tactic, injecting advertisements into your dreams.
A trio of researchers at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Montreal have published an essay on dream hacking that,
according to a recent survey, 77% of marketers plan to use dream tech advertising in the next three years.
Okay, they got a cool word out of it, dream tech.
That's neat, but what exactly is this?
Multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and drive purchasing behavior through sleep and dream hacking, the team writes.
The commercial for-profit use of dream incubation, the presentation of stimuli before or during sleep to affect dream content, is rapidly becoming a reality.
Two of the essay's authors previously worked on an MIT device designed to communicate with sleeping subjects and even hack their dreams,
lending them credibility on the topic.
Now, you know, if any of us have ever had a TV set on while we're falling asleep,
have you ever noticed that sometimes what's on the TV somehow gets into your dreams and you start dreaming about things,
or maybe you hear a newscast as you're waking up and you just concoct some bizarre set of circumstances that's your dream,
but it's based on something that you're hearing in the background.
I imagine that's what they're trying to develop, and I cannot believe that this is the direction that people are openly moving in,
and I don't want to use the word nightmare, but that's really what this would be. Do you guys agree?
Absolutely. I mean, sleep quality is something that is still not very well understood,
and the mechanism by which we sleep and dream and everything, there are whole fields of study dedicated to it,
but it's agreed that it is important. It's important to your general health and well-being,
and I like most of my dreams. Some of them are pretty nightmarish.
I don't know if people want to be branding those particular ones, but yeah, this is pretty dystopian.
I mean, tons of fiction has been written on the subject.
There's a lot of fiction on the subject. It wasn't Inception kind of about this. That was, what, 11 years ago now?
But I don't know. I mean, I think it's also interesting that as society has decided that we're going back to normal now,
the pandemic is over and we're going back to normal and people can be back in the office all the time,
and we're getting back to that culture of grind, grind, grind, never sleep,
and if you have to sleep, we're going to take advantage of the time that you're asleep to try to sell you things.
It's like you have your office that's always with you.
You have your cell phone or your tablet, and you must always be on call.
Well, now they figured out how to make you be on call even while you're asleep. Kyle?
There are places that have outlawed that practice with employees specifically, after hours communications and so forth,
but I really think that it is a domain where if there are techniques, there are technologies that allow this in a really easy way
that can be directed without any kind of consent or control from the person actually doing the dreaming.
It begs the question, where is the private domain?
Like we were saying here, all of our time needs to be dominated by consumer-driven interests and purchasing things.
That would somehow be something we were consenting to collectively.
It's a huge step. That's something society would really want to know the ins and outs of
instead of just letting these techniques be used with absolutely no interest from the consumer themselves, right?
As a child, I always had interesting dreams.
Recently, I had a two-part dream, literally, where I woke up a little bit, and then I knew it was going to conclude after I went back to sleep, and it did.
But as a child, I would dream about telephones. Yeah, big surprise.
One of the dreams I had was that I was listening to a phone ringing, and in between the rings, there was an advertisement.
I even heard the guy's voice. It was the same guy that did a movie phone, and he was advertising things in between.
Actually, it wasn't a movie phone because I wasn't a child when that was out.
It was the guy that did sports phone or whatever, one of those dial-up services.
Just the concept of having an advertisement in between rings, I think they've tried to pursue that, but it was long after I had that dream.
This has always been something that's been on my mind, and that's not necessarily hacking your dreams or getting into your dreams,
but it's dreaming about ways that they can get to you in the most innocuous activities, just listening to a phone ring.
From the story, though, a particular concern was an ad campaign by Molson Coors before this year's Super Bowl,
which promised free beer in exchange for participation in a, quote, dream incubation study involving a video with dancing beer cans
and talking fish and pop star Zahn Malik.
Yeah, the scientists pointed this out.
Coors used the phrase targeted dream incubation, which was a term coined by two of those very three researchers in a 2020 paper,
meaning that advertisers are indeed keeping an eye on academic work on dream hacking.
You know what?
We should just stop talking about this because they're listening to us, and they might get ideas.
Alex, do you want to help them or stop them?
I just want to let out a big sigh, really.
I mean, I find the whole idea, the whole notion of this, the concept just utterly abhorrent on so many levels.
It's not enough that everywhere we walk, we see ads, we see billboards, we see signs, neon lights.
Almost every inch of public space in New York has got some kind of advertising-type media on it.
You drive around the country and you see these country roads and the interstates all littered with billboards.
There's really just no end to the lengths advertisers will go to try to get some kind of product,
some kind of advertisement in front of our eyes.
And now, even when our eyes are closed, they're going to be trying to do the same thing.
The concept of it, I find, is just so intrusive and horrible on so many levels.
But more importantly, and I think critically here, if you think about what's been happening,
especially with social media platforms and misinformation, disinformation, election interference,
all of these terrible things that have been happening, primarily through the use of targeted advertisements,
targeted political ads, media, selected content on a lot of these platforms,
I feel like, and I've said this many times before on this show,
that we've all been part of this global experiment with our minds when it comes to these social media platforms.
And advertisers and political candidates and political organizations have been playing with our minds
and have been manipulating us through social media platforms for some time now,
through ostensibly all of these targeted advertisements.
And I think it's done – well, I think it's had a massive amount of adverse effects on our personalities,
on our ability to socialize with each other, and I think on our psychologies in general,
especially when it comes to children.
So the idea that we're going to now allow advertisers to venture into our subconscious
and our REM states while we're sleeping just seems like a horribly bad idea.
Well, Alex, who owns your subconscious? I mean, has this been tested in court?
Well, I don't know who owns it now. I mean, I think it's been transferred several times since I sold it.
I think one of the really important things to remember about dreaming, though,
is that it's your mind creating this, and I really don't think there should be external stimuli while you're sleeping.
I think also the many things we do see are a part of memory, and you do process it in a certain way,
but the playfulness and the unique aspects of what your mind is doing during sleep is one of the best parts of dreaming.
So why augment that? That's, I think, another aspect of this.
There's money to be made.
Let's ruin dreams.
Go ahead, Rob.
Well, and dream hacking has been a thing, sort of a thing, for a long time.
There's the concept of lucid dreaming, which is something that a lot of people have a lot of fun with,
and that is basically learning how to, while you're dreaming, recognize that you're dreaming and take control of it,
and you can use that to work out whatever fantasies you want or better understand your own mind,
the things you're dealing with, basically a self-care thing, and there's entertainment value as well.
And there is so much written on that.
There's all kinds of stuff online you can find if you look up lucid dreaming,
but that is still, when it comes down to it, you're working on yourself,
and it's not somebody else basically working on you in what really seems like a terrifying way.
Yeah, this is something that has been explored in science fiction as far back as I can remember.
I know there was a prisoner episode having to do with affecting people's dreams.
It's always been a fantasy, but it could turn into reality with the help of technology.
But here's the thing.
Whenever something like this happens, there's always something good that's tabled,
and what they're saying is that dream incubation has practical uses, such as treating PTSD,
but it's only a matter of time before tech companies that make watches, wearables, apps,
other technology to monitor our sleep start to sell that data for profit
or use those tools to hack our dreams while we slumber.
But worst of all, you probably won't remember it.
You won't even remember it.
Daily Smokers referenced a study that found mixing bad smells with cigarette smoke
while Daily Smokers slept reduced their smoking the next day,
but they couldn't remember smelling anything.
So it's fascinating, I'll say that, but so many negative things are fascinating to study.
There's no doubt about that.
But yeah, that's a frightening study, something to look out for in the future.
Now, Rob, you posted something on our list over the past few days about some fired employees over at Google
who are suing them because they are breaching the Don't Be Evil part of their contract.
Yeah, now, as you might know, Don't Be Evil was famously Google's motto for years.
The company moved away from the motto after renaming itself Alphabet in 2015,
but Don't Be Evil is still part of the company's official employee code of conduct.
Remember, don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right, speak up.
That's the final line of Google's code of conduct.
Employees are expected to sign the contract as a condition of their employment at Google.
Now, this new lawsuit, which alleges a breach of contract by Google,
comes as part of drawn-out legal proceedings between Google and three former employees
who were fired within minutes of each other on November 25th, 2019.
Google claimed to fire the workers for leaking confidential information to the press
because they engage in systematic searches for information outside the scope of their job.
But the software engineers said they were fired for protesting Google's decision to sell cloud computing software
to Customs and Border Protection, which at the time was caging migrants and separating parents from children.
They circulated a company-wide petition requesting Google affirm that it would not collaborate with Customs and Border Protection or ICE.
The three workers, Rebecca Rivers, Paul Duke, and Sophie Waldman,
are now suing Google for allegedly violating its own code of conduct as well as California public policy.
It's an interesting story. Do you have any thoughts on this, Rob?
I have a lot of thoughts.
I mean, it's fascinating that this may well end up, you know, if it goes to court and everything,
this may well end up being a case in which they have to decide on the legal books whether something is or isn't evil
and whether Google broke their own rule about this.
I also want to mention really quick that this story, I found this on Vice,
which itself is having its own sort of issues coming to terms with their own organized workforce.
If you go to Vice Union on Twitter, you can keep up with everything that they're going through.
And it's important to look at that.
But, yeah, I mean, don't be evil.
It was one of those things in the early days of Google.
It was still that early startup phase, and it felt like something that was really sort of feel good.
And, you know, over the years, as things got less and less human in their sort of corporate structure thing,
yeah, a lot of people would say they've kind of lost sight of it.
And these are people that were whistleblowing something they felt was evil,
which is Google basically hooking up with defense and making tools that would be eventually used to kill people,
which, you know, you could say that's evil, I think.
I certainly feel like it is.
Yeah, you know, if your slogan is don't be evil and you get rid of that slogan,
doesn't some alarm bell ring in your head saying, wait a minute, this isn't a good move.
It's certainly not a good look.
But basically what happened was in 2018, Google backtracked on its don't be evil motto.
I mean, you should never backtrack on don't be evil.
I just don't get the thinking.
But it quietly moved don't be evil to the very end of the code of conduct.
And I want to read this part.
This was a section that was deleted.
Don't be evil.
Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users.
But don't be evil is much more than that.
Yes, it's about providing our users unbiased access to information,
focused on their needs and giving them the best products and services we can.
But it's also about doing the right thing more generally, following the law,
acting honorably and treating each other with respect.
The Google code of conduct is one of the ways we put don't be evil into practice.
It's built around the recognition that everything we do in connection with our work at Google
will be and should be measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct.
They deleted all that.
According to Vice, they deleted all of that from their code of conduct.
And I have to wonder why and what are they thinking and what is the future slogan of Google going to be?
What is it now? Do we know?
I don't know if they have an official slogan.
Did they change it to something or try to be nice?
Increase shareholder value.
I don't know if they actually put a new – it's not in the story.
But don't be evil, apparently they're moving away from that.
I could see the allure of working for the defense contracts specifically being something they wrap in a sort of national pride
as they're executing this business decision.
And then the follow-on effect of their workforce having to grapple with that decision
that might not recognize what it really means for humanity instead of just that business decision.
Go ahead, Rob.
I'm just curious, Alex, as a law-talking dude,
what are your feelings on whether something like don't be evil could hold up in court?
Well, with the caveat, of course, that I'm not much of a labor and employment law lawyer.
But that being said, this is a really fascinating case because it seems to be some kind of standard
that's included within an employee handbook.
But on the other hand, it's hardly a legal standard or something that can be objectively defined.
What is it to be evil?
One man's evil is another man's goodness, I guess.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, right?
So it's a very tricky standard I think that the court will have substantial difficulty holding a company to account to.
But more to the point though, I see this lawsuit as much more about the publicity that the employees are trying to bring
to the practices of Google and what they're trying to bring to light rather than actually having merits on its own.
I would be really surprised if the lawsuit survived a motion to dismiss because it's, again,
a very amorphous standard to be able to claim that Google has to adhere to something like that.
So I think we should watch it.
I think it will be fun and I'm really curious about what the pleadings are going to look like in this case.
Gail, go ahead.
Do the right thing.
What? That's their slogan now?
Yeah, apparently when the reorganization happened and Alphabet became a concern,
their motto and beginning of the Alphabet Code of Conduct became do the right thing.
What did Spike Lee have to say about that?
I know he sued the Spike Channel, so I imagine he's going to come after Google.
But the other thing that fascinates me about it is the imperative of don't be evil versus do the right thing.
Because what you're told to do versus what you're told not to do is very interesting.
And I'm just looking at it from like a sort of a linguistic point of view.
And, you know, the right thing is subjective.
Of course. But so is don't be evil.
So I'm very curious about it.
And also because, like, people could argue that some of the things are evil.
But you could find people who argue on either side that whatever it is, is the right thing.
It could be the right thing by shareholders to do something that makes a lot of money.
Exactly.
But even in these days, evil can be subjective as well.
We think of it as an absolute.
But, you know, look at the people around.
Look at what we face every day.
And there are people who are actively cheering for things that are evil and thinking that they're good.
Now, I just wonder with that slogan, do the right thing,
which one is closer to the ultimate slogan of follow orders?
Because I think that's where they're heading.
Alex, did you have something else?
No, I'm good on this story.
I think we can move on.
Okay, let's do that then.
We have a letter from a listener from the discussion that we had last week about OBD2 systems and interfaces.
They said the discussion was very timely.
I'd installed and used an OBD2 interface for the first time only hours before listening to the episode.
That's pretty good timing.
In answer to the question about how feasible it is for a layperson to use one of these devices,
I can report that it is indeed very feasible.
I was able to connect the interface device to the onboard system,
connect it to my phone via Bluetooth, read an error code,
and find out what the code meant by way of a link generated by the app in less than 15 minutes.
That's including a few minutes of futzing around with Bluetooth connectivity issues,
which have become a real thorn in my side, but that's the subject of a different email.
I hear that.
The OBD2 interface device I purchased was about $20,
and the Android app known as Torque, which communicates with it, cost $5.
I would recommend this process to anyone who's looking to learn more about how their vehicle works,
do their own maintenance, or avoid getting ripped off by walking into the mechanic slash dealership, etc.,
armed with some knowledge of what's actually wrong with their vehicle.
Thank you, PRD, for that amazing letter, which basically outlines what so many of us are interested in.
Alex?
Yeah, I think I should take the prize.
I think it was I who brought up the OBD2 port last week,
so I don't know if I get some kind of prize in the mail.
I'll give you my mailing address after the show, Emanuel,
but I'll be expecting some kind of sapphire or diamond ring.
Oh, you're going to get something.
Yeah, it's on the way already.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Okay, all right, so fantastic.
But I think that the listener is absolutely right, and his letter is right on point.
It goes to exactly what we were talking about last week, which is it's kind of fun, too,
to connect these devices into your OBD2 port in your car,
diagnose what's going on without having to go to the mechanic.
And I think it had direct relevance to what was going on at McDonald's
with these crazy Taylor machine diagnostic systems that have become such a proprietary mess and nightmare.
And so this is all part and parcel of, I think,
the hacker mentality when it comes to sharing information
and being able to diagnose and fix your own machines yourself.
And that's really all we want, right, Kyle?
We all just want to be able to fix our own cars, our own machines, just have access.
Yeah, and eliminate waste, maybe learn something along the way,
and add some life, some reusability, and, yeah, support repair.
People that repair all kinds of older things and help keep them out of the waste cycle,
that's an entire cadre of different kinds of businesses for all types of machinery
and modern equipment that we run into.
And as the types of materials and things that are made out of change,
we have to sort of change the way we allow and moderate sort of access and availability of tools.
You're listening to Off the Hook here on WBAI.
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We're going to spend the rest of the show talking about things in Asia.
Yeah, why not?
How about this?
Hackers are peeping into apartments in Korea, South Korea, that is.
A media report stating that smart controlling systems installed in newly built apartments are vulnerable to hacking.
It's triggering concern that footage of residents' private lives could be stolen and sold to shady online business operators,
including porn sites.
Yeah.
IT Chosen, which is a news outlet specializing in IT,
recently reported that video recordings of ordinary households in Korea are being sold on the dark web,
which are web pages not indexed by search engines, and that have hidden IP addresses.
The hacker it contacted, I'm going to put hacker in quotes there if you don't mind,
the hacker it contacted claimed that they had hacked most intercom systems with cameras in Korea's apartments
and that the footage had been extracted and sold.
The hacker presented thumbnails as evidence, including shots of naked people in their homes.
The hacker requested 0.1 bitcoin, or a bitcoin worth around 8 million won,
for the video footage from one day in someone's home, according to the news outlet.
The systems installed at apartments first started as intercoms,
but now enable controlling various home devices, such as lighting and heating,
and some new models even include cameras which appear to be open to hacking to capture video footage.
If a hacker succeeds in breaching the security of one home,
they can also access footage of neighboring apartments connected through the building's network.
The news outlet reported that the hacker sent a list of hundreds of apartment buildings
that have access to obtain video footage of people's private lives around the country.
I am astounded by this.
What kind of a system would anybody want where there's a camera focused on you
from the outside world under any circumstance?
I'm trying to think of it.
First of all, what's wrong with just buzzing somebody in?
Rob Giler, I hear your buzzer often enough that I know that's the system you have.
And it works, right?
Somebody's downstairs.
Maybe you talk to them.
Maybe you say, who are you?
But you don't need to see them, and they certainly don't need to see you.
So who is it that says, yeah, that's a good idea.
I want an image of me to be transmitted to somebody outside.
And then it's only a matter of time before somebody figures out how to do that without your permission.
And then all of a sudden, you've got your private life being displayed to everybody
in yet another avoidable way.
Too many features.
I think we're just this overwhelming abundance of components
for some of the systems that are being built into different complexes,
and, of course, very large complexes.
You have to manage a much larger amount of data and connectivity.
You look for shortcuts.
There's ways to eliminate overhead.
There's always aspects of it that might not get as much attention
because you're trying to scale it up so much.
But then you end up with these huge breaches because everything is the same,
and it's centrally stored.
So that scale, I guess, or the massiveness of urban centers that this stuff is installed in,
I think becomes its own vulnerability.
Well, it's basically a lot of the consumers, the residents of apartments,
they don't have a choice because it comes with the building.
So they're forced to use this bad technology.
That's a really stupid idea, and they're the victims in the end.
So if you see something like that, if it's being forced upon you, tell somebody.
Tell us or tell a newspaper or a TV station or somebody to get the word out and stop this nonsense.
Otherwise, yeah, your images could be all over the dark web and all sorts of places.
Don't blame hackers, though.
Hackers are the ones that will tell you how to stop it and reveal it in the first place.
Yes, Alex.
I find this whole thing mystifying as well.
I don't understand in what galaxy somebody thought this was a good idea.
It's very strange and bizarre to me.
I will say, though, in my apartment in New York,
we have a buzzing system whereby we have a camera focused on the outside at the door
so you can see who's out there, and then you buzz them in.
But you can also talk through this intercom system.
But what's kind of interesting when I realized this is that the intercom system,
it's a completely open circuit so that if you pick it up, you can hear what's going on outside.
So long as you pick up the phone, you can always hear what's going on outside.
And regardless of whether or not somebody buzzes you,
whatever you say through that phone will then be broadcast out to the street.
So when there's people passing by, you can say something like,
Hey, yo, watch out. Come here.
And they'll turn around, and you can see them in the camera.
If you're really bored at night, pre-pandemic when there are actually a lot of people walking down my street,
it was something fun to do.
I mean, you could just mess with any passerby.
You could do that with Ring.
But it's a one-way system.
You could do that with Ring.
You see all the TV commercials for somebody who's coming up to your door,
and you're three states away.
You're able to talk to them and get them to run away.
And that's considered a good thing.
It probably is a good thing, but it's bad when it's reversed.
Generally, you know if you have a camera.
You know if you have a camera on your end.
If you do, cover it up.
There's no law requiring you to use your camera, at least not in democratic countries.
I just hope they put more of that, more resource and design emphasis into reliability and durability
instead of just more flashy, whiz-bang stuff that will sell.
Maybe that's alluring to the consumer.
Maybe they're maybe not security-minded or thinking necessarily how this might impact them once they live there.
But it's needless.
It doesn't help the feature.
Like you said, it just could be a simple intercom with a buzz and unlocking mechanism.
Old technology.
Oftentimes, old technology is all you need.
You don't need to improve something.
Your refrigerator doesn't need Wi-Fi.
There's all sorts of things.
That's what I mean by abundance.
We just have too much of the stuff that isn't really making these products last.
Abundance of uselessness, yes.
That's what we're at.
On to the Philippines.
The website of Senator Bongo was hacked on the same day the senator announced his withdrawal from the presidential race.
Pinoy Greyhats, which is a Filipino cybersecurity group, informed MB Tech News that a team member found a severe vulnerability on the senator's website.
After a few hours, there was an update that personally identifiable information of volunteers for Go's presidential bid could be exposed and that the site was defaced.
Pinoy Greyhats, however, claimed that the hack was not a targeted attack.
The site appeared to have multiple vulnerabilities in the automated passive scanning performed by the group.
After finding the security vulnerabilities, the group then exploited the misconfigurations in the website, conducted SQL injection attacks, and installed a backdoor to have complete control of the site.
Now, a member of the group also informed MB Tech News that they have no plans of exfiltrating the site's contents.
They even put measures to secure the server and its contents from other hackers who might try to download the sensitive information.
What do you think about that?
We fixed the broken access control issue that allows any user to bypass and access endpoints even without proper authorization, a member of Pinoy Greyhats told MB Tech News.
While we did not specifically target Senator Bongo, we believe that he is the right person to listen to our concern once we show him that we are doing this for good.
We hope that as we show the good senator the dangers of the vulnerable site in exposing personal and sensitive data, the government would support cybersecurity professionals by pushing vulnerability disclosure programs for government websites and servers.
Yeah, that's how you do it. That's what hackers are all about.
Going out there, finding a vulnerability, publicizing it, maybe embarrassing somebody, but ultimately doing good and making things better. Am I wrong?
No, that's something I remember fondly from the heyday of the early web and people's sites getting defaced, but the people who got in there playfully fixing the errors that let them in and writing,
this is how I got in. Hey, guy, fix your thing, somewhere on the page. It was all in fun, but also, yeah, it's an interesting way to get a message across.
Okay, over to Malaysia now. A construction site supervisor's mobile phone was hacked after he tried to apply for a personal loan.
Mohamed Zakaria, Mohamed Sebly said he saw a money lending advertisement about two weeks ago and contacted the number listed. One of my workers needed to take a loan, so I tried to help him get a...
Okay, does anybody know the currency of Malaysia? It's... no? It's... you know, Gila, it looks like you perked up there, no?
It's somewhere. I just... no.
Well, the initial is RM, which is kind of cool. A 300 RM loan. It's known as the Malaysian Ringit, which is also kind of a cool name. You ring it like you ring a phone.
So, 300 Ringit loan is what he was trying to get. When I called the number, the person on the other end of the line told me to download an app called Easy Do It to apply for the loan.
That's Do It spelled with a U. I followed the instructions and he told me the loan had been approved, but only for 150 Ringits. He said he rejected the loan and told him to cancel it and assumed that was the end of it.
Then, I started to receive phone calls demanding money, even though I never took a cen from them.
Now, I should probably point out at this point, cen is the 100 units that are in a Ringit. It's spelled S-E-N.
Later on, I received calls from my friends telling me that they have received messages claiming that I had a loan that I had not settled and that my MyCAD and intimate photographs of me with my fiance were also attached.
I don't know what MyCAD is. M-Y-K-A-D. Anybody know? No? Okay, we'll find out, I'm sure.
I suspect that the syndicate hacked into my phone. Oh, boy.
Not them.
That is the only way it could have accessed my contacts and photos, he said, adding that he lodged a police report on the matter.
He called the cops in the syndicate. Oh, boy, that's going to be a problem.
Meanwhile, Samantha Chin claimed she lost 4,255 Ringits after her phone was hacked while she was trying to book a cleaning service.
I found the service online on November 17th and contacted the number via WhatsApp and was sent a link to download an app in order to make an appointment.
I was instructed to pay a 20 Ringit deposit, and I tried to make payment by keying in my banking username and password.
Big mistake. The screen went blank, so I attempted to use a different bank to do so, and the same thing occurred.
Adding the next day, she found an unauthorized money transfer of 3,655 Ringits and 40 Sen was made through one of her banking accounts.
She said when she checked the other bank accounts, she found 600 Ringits had been transferred.
I lodged a police report that same day, as I suspect someone had hacked into my phone when I downloaded that app.
Meanwhile, Department Head Datuk Seri Michael Chong said he had received six such complaints this year.
If you are unsure of the application, do not download it into your phone, he advises, because you could give full control to a hacker.
Okay, well, to Datuk Seri Michael Chong, I would just say, please don't call them hackers. These are criminals. These are thieves.
These are people that take advantage of others and steal money. Not what hacking is about.
Well, for anyone curious, one Malaysian Ringit right now is worth 24 US cents, so they're very roughly four Ringits to the dollar.
I also looked it up, and a MyCAD is the Malaysian Citizenship Card, if I could quote from Wikipedia,
besides the main purpose of the card as a validation tool and proof of citizenship of the birth certificate,
MyCAD may also serve as a valid driver's license, an ATM card, an electronic purse, and a public key, among other applications,
as part of the Malaysian government multi-purpose card initiative, if the bearer chooses to activate the functions.
Interesting. Thank you, Kayla, for that helpful information.
My pleasure.
Learning so much. Let's go over to Thailand now.
A Thai rapper has vowed not to be silenced.
What rapper is ever going to take a vow to be silenced? Seriously.
A Thai rapper has vowed not to be silenced after he and at least five other government critics received messages from Apple
warning them that state-sponsored hackers could be targeting their phones.
It's kind of bizarre.
Apple sent a warning to this rapper in Thailand saying that some state-sponsored hacker or hackers are targeting them.
The US tech giant warned the Thai activist that if successful, the hackers could remotely access their data
and even the camera and microphone on their iPhones.
Now, these warnings came as Apple filed a lawsuit against NSO Group.
We've reported on them in the past.
The Israeli spyware maker at the center of the Pegasus surveillance scandal.
They're seeking to block them from targeting iPhones.
Dekathorn, quote, Hawk Hacker, is his nickname.
Bangrungmung. You know, Thai names are awesome.
Every single one of them is unique.
We have to study this someday, but just look up Thai names.
They're always different and very long, and I can never remember any of them.
But Dekathorn Bangrungmung from the Rap Against Dictatorship Group posted a screen grab of the message to his Facebook page.
Apple believes you're being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID, the message warned.
These attackers are likely targeting you individually because of who you are or what you do.
You know, getting a message like that from Apple is a real badge of honor, I think, and certainly holds true here.
Dekathorn, who had previously been arrested for sedition, but was later released, said he was appalled by the hacking attempt.
We, meaning Rap Against Dictatorship, will probably write a song about this.
I would expect nothing less.
I want to hear that song.
I want to learn Thai so I can hear that song.
Yes, Gila?
Do we know these emails were actually from Apple?
Because this just sounds like a really intense fish.
Well, you know, it could be, but Apple does send out these messages, from what I understand.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, I bet it was a legitimate email, Gila.
Apple is known to send these messages.
So is Google.
So is Yahoo.
I have several friends that have received such messages in the past with respect to their Yahoo accounts.
One of them is a human rights lawyer that works with the United Nations, and he's gotten several of these messages in the past.
And I think it's really quite interesting and good of these platforms and services to be tracking this type of APT or advanced persistent threat telemetry
and letting users know about this, as well as certain security precautions that they should be taking,
things like activating two-factor authentication, which more crafty state actors and generally bad threat actors are figuring out ways to get around.
So this is all, I think, well and good for them to be sending these out, and I'm looking forward to that song.
Rap against dictatorship took a high-profile role in the youth-led protest that shook Bangkok last year,
demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayachand Ocha, who came to power in a 2014 coup.
Asked about the messages from Apple, Anitra Burapachasri, who is Deputy Secretary General to the Prime Minister,
said, if it is authentic, the digital economy and social ministry will look into this.
Boy, that sounds ominous.
Writer Sarini Achavanutakul, Tamasat University political scientist Prajakankarati,
filmmaker Ilya Fofi, who I suspect is not Thai, and Ying Cheep Atchanant, who works for a human rights law firm,
all shared the same warnings on their social media page.
The sixth target was believed to be a human rights lawyer, while local media reported that a further two activists and academics had been affected.
Well, to close out, and as thanks to the people who battle this kind of crap all the time,
I'd like to play a song from Rap Against Dictatorship, and I'm told by Amazon that it's a clean song.
We're going to go out with that. We will rejoin you on youtube.com slash channel 2600.
I know, Rob, you have something to say about meetings this week. Make it quick.
Yes, indeed. We have 2600 meetings going on this week, this Friday, 2600.com slash meetings,
but also the local meeting, the New York City meeting, we're going back to Citigroup this week.
They've remodeled the interior. We're taking the meeting back to where they originated.
So, Citigroup building, 53rd and Lexington, this Friday evening.
First time in many years that we have been at the Citigroup building.
Okay, look forward to a report on that.
Again, we're not on next week. We'll be on in two weeks, but we are on in a few minutes on channel 2600 on youtube.com.
You can follow the link on the main 2600.com webpage, and we will see you then.
Here is a piece from Thailand wrapped against dictatorship. Good night.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, 
Pingapoy.
I am ready to close the chapter.
Waiting for the people to have the right thoughts.
Waiting for the wind to wash away or create a broken land.
I am a group. I am a group.
At last. At last. I promise. I promise.
I will build a wall to protect my hands.
Art is a philosophy. The more you know, the more you grow.
Art is a heritage. My country is valuable.
I am here to hold your hand.
I am a group. I am a group.
And welcome, everybody. It's overtime here on YouTube, where we always have to wait a few seconds to make sure that we actually are on YouTube, which hopefully we are.
Joined again by Kyle, Rob T. Firefly, Gila, and Alex. This is Emmanuel.
And we are going to be hearing from listeners, hopefully, because we haven't talked to listeners in a while. We are on YouTube, which is great.
Okay, our phone number, 802-321-4225. We have a new digital system that's installed that will silently and seamlessly ring the phone so that we will light up and we'll be able to take phone calls that way.
That must have set you back a little bit there.
Well, you know, the salesman said that this would do everything that we need, and we wouldn't have to listen to all the, you know, the noise that comes with the old system.
Again, 802-321-HACK, 802-321-4225. Yes, Gila, go ahead.
Did the package you were arriving for, excuse me, waiting for, did it ever arrive?
The package that I was waiting for. Was this a complaint of the past that I had forgotten about?
Yes.
Okay, I do believe it arrived. Yes, it did arrive. It just arrived days late. And I never got a refund for it, though.
I never got a refund for paying for overnight shipping for something that took a week to show up.
So, yeah, that's because FedEx says, because FedEx, that's silent. Wow.
Okay, well, that's good. Let's pick up that call, Kyle. And we have yet another amazing use of technology here. The phone is still ringing. Did you lose the call?
No, I picked up.
You picked up. How'd you pick up? I didn't see you do anything. You picked up with your mind?
I have certain control.
Okay, so we have a caller?
I pressed the button.
Caller, are you there?
I'm here.
Oh, great. What's on your mind? And how did we know it would be you?
How did I know you would be there?
Yeah, let's just say that.
Okay, well, for one thing, I looked up off the hook over time and typed in the date. And for another, you announced it at the beginning of the broadcast show.
Write this down, Kyle. This is important.
What?
We're learning. We're learning a lot. So what's on your mind?
I was wondering whether you had heard anything about how I can save my copper line.
Nothing good. And I hear that you have a bad home on your line, too. So they're doubling down. They're trying to put the pressure on. They're trying to make it so you have to give in and get that fiber line from them.
Yeah, this is the heavy-handed tactics they use. It's textbook.
Yeah, when I had a DSL line, and it was through a different company, but Verizon still owned the actual phone line that was used, they would disconnect it regularly.
And I feel no hesitation in saying that they would do this deliberately week after week because everybody in the industry said this is what they do.
This is how they conduct business. And I'm not surprised to see them be completely unhelpful here as well.
So you have not been able to find or be told about any company that I could switch to that would take care of the copper lines?
Well, the thing is, there are companies that use the copper lines, but they don't take care of the copper lines. That always falls to Verizon. They will still have to maintain.
For instance, if you had one of these companies and you had a problem with your phone line, you would report it to them.
But then they would contact Verizon, and Verizon would have to fix it. And then the company that you pay would get back to you and say that we fixed it, even though they basically just talked to Verizon.
It's basically adding a step. But Verizon isn't going to cooperate with them any more than they're going to cooperate with you.
It's a shame. It's a travesty. I think they shouldn't be allowed to do this, but they are, and they're getting away with it.
So I have no hope.
I hate saying that, but it doesn't look good. I know if you hold on to your copper line, it will annoy them. I love that. It helps in any way.
But they said that I had 20 days to tell them what I was going to do, and if I didn't do anything, they would disconnect my phone.
Well, I would say call their bluff, but I don't think they're bluffing. I think that's what they're going to do.
And it's true that they're really trying to push people away from what had been a money-making system for them.
I think your right to want to continue to use the system as you have it, it will get attention if people talk about it,
and if you're able to contact some of the public utility and other entities that might advocate or be willing to listen to how this is affecting people,
because that's the real oversight here, I think.
They may be making a business decision purely just because of some numbers that need to move around on a spreadsheet,
where in the city, in the community, the place they're supposed to serve, the effect is having entirely different implications and maybe unforeseen ones.
Can I ask, are you in an apartment building?
Yes, I am.
Do you know your neighbors?
One or two.
Well, if you knew a couple of neighbors that had a similar problem, and you were able to raise, say, three or four voices from the same location,
that might buy you some time, that might embarrass them a bit, especially if, say, you got some local coverage,
if there was a newspaper that serves your area or, dare I say, a TV station.
While we will certainly advocate for this sort of thing, we do this all the time, almost to the point where we just get ignored as much as a consumer gets ignored.
They expect us to be fighting with the phone company, but if, say, Channel 2 did it, it might embarrass them enough where they have to take some sort of action.
And the repair might become a larger project than being characterized as just one customer who's perhaps being uncooperative with what they envision for this network.
If a coalition of people in this particular service area had something to say about it, and you got some advocacy around it in the broader context of telecommunications and what's needed now in the city,
you could find that there is a lot of support for it.
But we get blue in the face trying to advocate for keeping multiple modes and types of systems working, even at a basic or an emergency level.
There are a rash of shutdowns going on with different mobile systems, older mobile systems, and even types of mobile systems.
Blackberry's completely shutting down in January.
So we're tracking this stuff, and we really want to share, but we need help, too.
We need more voices.
To share another story, a friend of mine in New Jersey spoke to Verizon to actually have a copper line installed.
And this flies against everything that we've been told.
They said, yeah, we'll send somebody over to install a copper line, regular copper line, no problem at all.
The day came, the guy showed up, and when my friend said, you're here to install a copper line, the guy had no idea what he was talking about.
Verizon can't even communicate with their own people on this.
That's how pathetic it is.
So even if you get somebody to say, yes, we can do this for you, the person who actually is supposed to do it for you will have no idea of any such thing, and it will go against their policy.
Hi.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Just don't give up.
Don't give up hope.
Well, it kind of sounds like we're telling her to, but, yeah, you know, don't give up.
You're right.
The important thing is to keep speaking out.
Well, I have to tell them at the end of the 20 days.
No, you don't have to.
Either that I'm switching to another company or that they should install Fios or they'll just cut me off.
Yeah, well, I mean, can you survive a day or two without a phone if they do cut you off?
I'm disabled.
This would not be wise.
OK, then don't do that unless you have a cell phone already.
You shouldn't be cut off completely.
It just what they're what they're doing is really ill advised and very, very shady, I think.
But, you know, the only thing I assume you've you've you've contacted the Public Service Commission.
If not, you should do that and see if they will offer any support.
Have you tried the Public Service Commission that oversees the phone companies?
No, I haven't.
Oh, no. Contact them and see what they say.
That not if you still have phone books, that number is in the front of your phone book.
Otherwise, you can just look it up online.
Public Service Commission for New York state.
You're in New York state, right?
Hello.
I'm here.
Are you in New York state?
Yes, I am.
OK, so it's the Public Service Commission.
Contact them.
They have a toll free number and and explain the situation to them.
Don't expect much, but maybe you'll get lucky and find somebody there who will take an interest in the case.
And you could spearhead an entire movement.
OK, I will.
All right, because I know you're not alone.
There's so many people that want to keep their copper lines.
There really are.
So it's not something that that is that much of an oddity.
Yeah, not that many people want copper lines, but enough do where, you know, I think it's it's it's completely legitimate to want them to be preserved.
It's it's it's, you know, really important to when there are power failures during a storm, during a blizzard or or something that will just cut off the cell phone towers or or have an extended power outage where your fiber optic line won't work.
Copper lines go through the central office where there are massive generators that will last for months.
And to to basically turn away from that kind of technology.
Yeah, it's slower.
It's it's clunkier than what we have now, but it also will survive things that our current technology won't.
OK, I hope we helped as much as we can do, I think.
Alex, did you have something as well?
Yes, sure.
For the caller, if you wanted to check out the Public Service Commission, you can get there via DPS as in Delta Papa Sierra dot NY dot gov.
That's through the public.
The Department of Public Service is where the commission lies in the state of New York.
And and also through that website, you can even file a complaint.
Well, tell me they still have a phone number.
They didn't lose their phone line, did they?
I certainly hope not.
I certainly hope not.
I've been looking for something, though, but you can't find the phone number for the Public Service Commission.
Wow.
You can lodge a complaint about that, I guess, through the website.
They don't have a phone number.
I can't imagine us back in the 1990s listening to the future, a time when when copper lines and pay phones are being disconnected and we can't contact the Public Service Commission by phone and all sorts of other nightmares.
I got I got a phone number.
You got a phone number.
This is contact us line for issues relating to gas, electric, water, phone and cable TV services, as well as billing complaints.
And that would be one eight hundred three, four, two, three, three, seven, seven.
That's one eight hundred three, four, two, double three, double seven.
And, you know, something else, the attorney general of New York state, when when you're not happy with the Public Service Commission, that's always an option.
Right.
Alex, would you give it a shot?
They may respond.
They may not.
It all depends on what their initiatives are, whether it crosses over with other issues that they're examining of the day.
So if you get the right person and you are able to explain the situation in a way that they understand and are sympathetic to, who knows?
I mean, you know, other things have happened with much less of a chance of success.
So, again, don't give up.
I agree with that.
But please let us know what happens.
What?
Let us know what happens.
I will.
All right.
Good talking to you.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye bye.
Wow.
That's something, right?
Loud and clear.
Loud and clear.
Well, except for the hum.
Every time we've run into this, I think I've been kicking around this idea.
There is a solution here.
And I really think we have to come up with something collectively or whatnot.
I think the digital system has another call coming in.
The phone number, by the way, which will now not go to us, is 802-321-4225.
Let's see who we have on the phone line now.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Yes, hi.
Could you turn it up?
It's Rebel.
Oh, my God, Rebel.
How are you doing?
Yeah.
Can you turn it up a little louder?
Let's see.
The volume is all the way up on my terminal, and I still can't.
I mean, I can hear you.
Are we particularly low?
Is that a common complaint?
People need to tell us.
In the stream, it's just low.
I wonder why that is.
How about on the radio?
Did you listen to us on the radio?
I didn't listen to you on the radio.
Oh.
Well, you know, yeah, it could be a YouTube issue.
It could be a hardware issue, a software issue.
Well, when you post to YouTube, you have the option to, I think, a volume option or something.
I mean, you have like 7,000 subscribers, and very few people leave comments.
But anyway.
Sure.
They're content.
They don't need to say anything.
That is the comment.
Exactly.
I mean, you haven't been on for a while, but I'd like to mention there's been, you know,
as you know, things are going up, you know, prices and things like that.
And, you know, particularly like gas for cars and things like that.
I think there would be an interesting project for hackers and people who are social engineers
You know, the people at the gas stations, they don't make the prices, but they just,
you know, set the prices that the pump, you know, says that you have to pay.
And maybe there's a thing where you can hack that, where you can get them, maybe social
engineer them to make it like instead of $3 a gallon, $2 a gallon or something, only at
the pump, not at the sign that says what the price is, but at the pump.
So when you're pumping it, it'll, you know, you'll be pumping at $1.50 a gallon, but,
you know, nobody else will know.
But, you know.
I think the person who runs the gas station might suspect something when all of a sudden
he's not making any money and is spending more than, I mean, what you're asking for
is how do we steal fuel and lob some dollars off of it?
You know, if you want to change the price, change it at the source, you know, change
it where one of the oil companies or OPEC or somebody determines the price.
Change that and you've got my interest.
Right.
Okay.
Let's see.
What else?
I don't know.
You can always change the sign.
That's easy to change.
But then you'll annoy people because they'll be paying more than they believe the sign
says.
Rob, did you have a suggestion?
Right.
Yeah.
I would also confirm that the person working at the gas station pumping your fuel or running
the cash register or whatever is the last person that would have any access to do any
changing of that.
And also, they're probably having a crappy day at work anyway because it's not a very
rewarding job.
So, like, leave that poor person alone.
Yeah.
It seems like those systems are managed from inside, but they're probably extensively
logged or some kind of paper receipt is created as things are changed or fluctuate.
But it's interesting to know.
I know we've had interest before in articles.
People have been curious about how these different machines work.
A lot of them have TVs now.
Oh, my God.
The TV's at gas stations.
Wouldn't it be...
Yeah.
You're right.
That would be...
Yeah.
I want somebody...
Okay.
Open up the floodgate here.
Slow down, everybody.
I want people to hack that damn TV set because when you're standing there pumping gas, you're
to some idiot who's trying to sell you something else when you're already buying something or
just giving you entertainment news that you couldn't care less about.
Boy, you know, other than shooting the thing, I'd like a way of disabling it.
If anyone has something to share.
That's where we connect.
Well, actually, in elevators, too.
You know, the...
Or, hold on a second.
I have another idea.
Or you simply hack it like they did in hackers.
You know, where they put their own TV program on?
Put that on and make them a captive audience to your programming, to something that you put together.
Yeah.
I'd like that, too.
Go ahead, Rebel.
That's a good idea.
Yeah.
The company is actually called the Captive Network.
Are you kidding me?
They're called Captive?
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
The Captive Network.
They have the TV advertising in elevators.
I want a piece of them.
I don't know if the Captive...
No, I want a piece of this company.
Not an investor piece.
A piece where...
Ooh.
Yeah.
That gets me so angry.
Captive.
Captive.
They're celebrating it.
The Captive Network.
But it's...
Yeah.
The Captive Network in buildings and elevators.
Not the gas station.
That's the gas station television.
Yeah.
That's actually...
I don't know.
That's true.
It's distinct, I think.
Anything else, Rebel?
Let's see.
What else?
Let's see.
Most people write it down before they call us.
They have it...
Yeah.
I know.
I used to do that.
But you haven't been on for a while.
So I just...
I did want to say something, but I forgot.
Yeah.
Oh.
Okay.
Yes.
What is it?
A fundraiser?
It might be.
It's a week off for us.
That's all I know.
Okay.
Anyway, good hearing from you.
Let us know your...
Okay.
Oh, by the way, the 2600 meeting is this Friday.
Is it going to be at the city?
The new...
What do they call it?
The Hue or something?
Rob, you want to take this one?
Yep.
Yep.
It is, in fact.
It is.
It is.
It is.
It is.
It is.
It is.
It is.
It is.
It is.
It is.
Yep.
It is in fact back at the City Group Center.
The food court there now has a name, and the name is The Hue.
The Hue.
Wait, what?
H-U-G-H as in the person's name, as in Hugh Stubbs, I believe, is his name, who's the architect
who built the place.
How do you spell it?
Hue.
H-U-G-H.
The Hue.
That's what they're calling the food court, The Hue.
Yep.
Weird.
And you need ID to get in, by the way.
There are big neon signs with the name and there is a lovely bunch of restaurants and
great seating, and it's going to be a good place to have the meeting. It is really, really lovely.
Really, really lovely. We've gone and checked it out, and it is lovely.
Well, I like lovely things. Now, Rebel, you were saying something?
Yeah, you have to have ID now and be vaccinated. Yes, you have to be vaccinated, and they are
checking. The security staff is checking at the doors, as they are in other public places in New
York City. So this is what we have to do to, you know, deal with the situation we're in.
And, you know, I advise folks to be cool about that because, yeah, it's for all our sakes.
You know, it's a very different thing if they check IDs of people going to a food court when
there isn't a pandemic. And I'll be first online to protest that if that's what's happening.
But here, we need to make sure people are vaccinated. And the way to do that,
you know, when we were in Seattle a few weeks ago, King County, they had started doing that,
where they asked to see your vaccination card. It's such a simple thing. You show them a
vaccination card. Usually that's enough because they figure, is this person really going to go to
the trouble of making a fake vaccination card? Then they're probably going to figure out a way
to get in anyway. It's not really worth the hassle. But a few places ask for a matching
ID of some sort. It could be a credit card, could be a license. And if the name is the same,
that's enough to, again, fairly easy to defeat. But why would you want to? The point is, you know,
asking for that kind of verification doesn't have to be a big deal unless you make it into a big
deal. And that's just- And also, I'm sorry, also with the issue of privacy, though, like,
they look at your Excelsior Pass, your phone app, or your vaccine card. They look at your ID,
but they are not logging this information. They have not been when I visited the place
a couple of times recently. So, you know, in terms of privacy, they will not remember you're there.
They'll just, you know, check it out to make sure you're coming in, you know, in good shape.
Yeah, if you find somebody who is logging that information, that's something that we'd be very
interested in exposing, because that's not what should be happening at all. Yeah, yes, Alex,
go ahead. Yeah, just an observation. I went out last night to a bar that I regularly frequent,
and I've been there many times since the pandemic started, and since I was vaccinated,
and since they were- since this whole notion of checking vaccine cards had begun.
And one of the things I noticed is that every time I go in, the manager knows me. It's not
as if my vaccine- and I thought about this a lot last night, so don't jump to conclusions, but
the manager knows me, and he has checked my vaccination card probably, you know,
half a dozen, maybe a dozen times since I've been vaccinated. But every time I go in there,
he still insists on checking my vaccination card. It's not like I could travel in-
back in time and decide not to get the vaccine. However, I thought about this a bit last night,
and I began to appreciate it, because I think just as a show to everybody else in there that
everyone is checked upon arrival, regardless if you've been there in the past, it makes, I think,
everyone feel more comfortable, even though, you know, you're spending an extra 15 seconds
and getting the picture up and whatnot on your phone than them checking it, even pro forma.
Just that simple act, I feel like, was somewhat reassuring to me when I thought about it in
hindsight.
Well, two reasons. Again, to comfort those people who are already there,
everybody's treated the same, but also imagine that he's being looked at by somebody, either
his boss or maybe, you know, somebody- this is New York City, I take it- somebody from the city
who is basically in charge of that kind of thing, or just in charge of reporting people who violate
the policy. If you just wave somebody by without checking, then, you know, you're obviously not
doing the job, even though you might know inside your head that the person has a card. Or you could
be an identical twin. You don't know that either, you know, it's entirely possible.
That's true, yes.
Rebel, are you still there? Rebel is not there. Okay, so that means our phone line is open.
802-321-4225. 802-321-HAC. Please give us a call as we're here this week, won't be here next week,
and we want to hear from our listeners. Yes, Alex, go ahead.
Speaking of Rebel, I, you know, I'm glad that he's called off the hook again and started calling
again. I always enjoyed his phone calls when they happened. I guess, as the first caller,
every single episode of Off the Hook back in the 90s, and it seems like we have another call now.
I hope he keeps it up. And I also wonder how many years it's been between calls for Rebel.
That was actually my question.
That's a good question. The phone does seem to be ringing. I can hear the digital signals.
Can we pick it up, Kyle? Thank you very much. Good evening. You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
Good evening, Off the Hook Overtime.
All of our regular callers are calling in. Bobson from Bulgaria, how are you?
Well, getting sleepy this time of night, but I'm only seven hours in the future from New York.
So that would make it what time in your area?
Well, the time slot after Off the Hook is 3 to 4 a.m.
So it's about 2.30 in the morning.
Yeah, well, at night. I mean, morning is after it gets lighter.
There's no 2.30 in the morning in the daytime, as I'm aware of.
Well, okay. Before noon, then. Anyhow, I was listening to the calls and the thing about the
dollars that are set at gas stations reminded me to figure out what the situation is from here to
there, and it turns out the gasoline here costs something like $5.74 per gallon or something.
And, you know, I think it should cost that here as well, because I think
fossil fuels should be discouraged as much as possible. And, you know, I would tell Rebel,
if you're going to hack anything, hack the price in that direction. It might be
more advantageous for the environment to do that.
I'm not going to argue with you.
I appreciate that. Thank you.
Well, the thing is, the difference in price is paid with the blood of the kids that
your government sends to war on the oil in different parts of the world, if you think about it.
You don't have to think much about it, but yes, that's certainly true.
Something else. Oh, there's news on this side of the ocean. The EU is on a good way to get rid of
daylight, the use of daylight savings time from now on, which is...
So everybody is targeting daylight savings time. Wait, are they getting rid of daylight savings
time, or are they getting rid of the other time before daylight savings time, the standard time?
Well, as far as I know, we're getting
rid of the summertime, which is the one that has nothing to do with geography.
So the daylight savings time is going to be gone if things go according to plan.
Do you know during the war, they had double daylight savings time one year, when I had two
hours? Look it up. They had this in some places.
Yes, I've read about the history of it, and yes, there's a lot of things going on.
Yes, there's silly things happening, but the silly thing that has been happening for the past
40 years or so is no longer going to be happening in the EU as far as...
It's all because people want the longer days, right? And I'm sure there's a way scientifically
we can think of, you know, the sun rises at a certain time in the winter and a different time
in the summer. But what if we simply had the hours that were dark go faster? Okay, so a dark
hour goes faster than a light hour, and a light hour is maybe like an hour and a half, and that
way your days are longer. You see what I'm saying, Alex, right? I mean, that's a good idea.
The ancient Greeks had...
Maybe.
You look very confused now. Look, it's simple. It's science. You know, it doesn't...
Who says an hour has to be 60 minutes? Nobody. That's just the government telling you
that an hour is 60 minutes. You don't have to follow that. You can make your own hours.
You can have a blockchain hour. We'll talk after the show.
A blockchain hour?
Why not? Yes, that's what I said. That's what I said.
Oh, God. Oh, no. Somebody's going to get blockchainhour.com any second now.
I have pamphlets that I can show you. I'm sorry, Bobson, go ahead. I'm trying to...
There was some historical precedent with what you're talking about with ancient Greeks or
something, or some of such, using 12 hours every single day of differing length.
There you go.
Sunrise to sunset was said to be 12 hours, and you figure out how many minutes each hour is
for the day according to the calendar.
Yeah. I mean, how about this? In Singapore, pretty much the sun rises and sets the same time
every single day of the year, which is fantastically boring. But imagine if you
had the sun set at a particular time every day, but the day got longer in the summertime,
even though the sun still sets at the same time. The hours just are longer. So you're up for longer.
And to people who run businesses, you're paying your employees by the hour,
okay, but they're working more because it's summertime, you see?
They're working an hour and a half, maybe an hour and 45 minutes,
but it's an hour, so you pay them the hourly rate. You see how this can benefit us? It's a good system.
Yes, Alex, you have feedback on that?
You know, yeah. What you're mentioning about hours and these changing conceptions of times,
I have to say, it is really interesting. And there's a book that is almost exactly about this.
It's called Einstein's Dreams, and it's by a professor from MIT. I think he was a professor
of humanities at MIT.
Can you imagine if you were able to insert advertisements into Einstein's Dreams?
Think about that.
Oh, my God. Could you imagine? Yeah, good reference back there, by the way.
But it's a book by this guy, Alan Lightman, I believe is his name. And each chapter is
about this tiny little town, Bern, in Switzerland, where Einstein was from,
and is a description of what is happening there, but all based on a different conception of time.
If we didn't have this 24-hour day, if time was measured in different increments, or
if time was felt in different ways as well. And I have to say, it's absolutely a beautiful book,
wonderfully written, really accessible too, and makes you think about how absolutely enslaved
we are to the concept of 24 hours, and doing what we're supposed to be doing all on the basis of
this inhuman, arbitrary, and contrived concept of time. Everything runs by it.
Speaking of the concept of time, there was a period, maybe some of our listeners are old
enough to remember this, where there were no time zones, where time was pretty much decided by
village. And it would be a little bit later, or actually a little bit earlier in New York City
than, say, on Long Island, and where you are in Pennsylvania, it would be earlier still.
And I think it was the railroads that came along and made time zones, because they couldn't figure
out when trains should arrive with all these different time zones and different villages.
I guess probably our listeners aren't old enough for that, because that was probably a
hundred or so years ago, at least. But still, an interesting concept, the kind of chaos that
that world must have brought forth is fascinating to me.
And a whole set of language around converting, right?
Yeah.
We think we're converting from one or the other unit now. That would have been one village time
to another village time.
If they even talked to each other, I mean, how would they talk to each other? There were no
telephones. It was just, I guess, mayhem. I'm sorry, Babson, you're still there.
Yeah, I have a question for Alex, if I may. The book you mentioned about Steinstein's
Dreams, does it have pictures in it, or is it just reading stuff?
Is it a deal breaker if it doesn't have pictures?
Well, it sounds as if it was well-illustrated, it might be a good read.
It's an excellent read. I don't believe that it has pictures.
You guys are talking at the same time. You have to listen to each other. Alex, go ahead.
Oh, I don't believe there's any pictures. It is a fantastic read.
And there are portions, however, that are scratch and sniff.
Oh, boy.
That's worrisome.
My listenership just plummeted. Did you see that? Wow. In half.
Hey, Babson, I've got to follow up with something with you specifically as well. I don't know if
listeners will recall, it was probably about two months ago now or so, but Babson and I had
an exchange about a Bulgarian grocery store that I had frequented here in Pennsylvania,
and I'm wondering if Babson has given any further thought to the idea of doing a weekly segment
about Bulgarian groceries that we review on both sides of the Atlantic here.
Well, I haven't considered it much, I must say, because it sounds a bit...
You can say it.
Well, it sounds silly, not in a good way.
We call that stupid or dumb or ill-advised or moronic.
I wouldn't go that far, but...
Thanks, Babson.
You know, there's good silly and not-so-good silly, and this is the not-so-good silly thing.
We've had a lot of that recently.
I entirely disagree, which is why I think we should do that segment.
It would just be so much fun.
Do you have a single Bulgarian food item in your possession right now, Alex?
Yeah, I do.
I have those wafers as well, the Vafna.
The same ones you had a couple of months ago when we last talked about this.
No, no, no, no.
Those would have been very, very stale by now.
But you got the same product, again, is what I'm saying.
You didn't get something...
I did get the same product.
A can of beans or something would be kind of cool to look at, at least for us,
and to hear about for Babson and maybe one other person.
All right, well, you know what?
We'll explore this idea of yours.
Babson, anything else from you?
Well, I'm just hoping that no one in March tries to set up DST again around here,
because that would be really, really ungood.
Set up what again?
Daylight Savings Plan.
Oh, yes.
So there's a movement against it, a strong movement against it.
No, the European Parliament in March of 2018 voted to get rid of it in 2021.
And as far as I know, it's going to, according to that plan, but...
Okay, I didn't know that.
So they actually voted to do this and it's set for next year.
No, no, no.
It's set for this year that's passing.
Oh, that's right.
This is 2021.
So the last period of DST was this summer.
Okay, hang on a second.
So you're not keeping Daylight Savings Time.
You're keeping Standard Time.
Since the end of October, yes.
All right.
But aren't the people in the United States that want to stop this?
Don't they want to keep Daylight Savings Time, not Standard Time?
Do I have this totally backwards?
Keela, you're nodding.
Now you're shaking your head.
Which is it?
Sorry.
No, you have this right.
You don't have it backwards.
Okay, so we're doing it differently.
People in the United States want to maintain Daylight Saving Time
throughout the whole entire year.
They want to get rid of Standard Time and basically make all time Daylight Saving Time.
And people in Europe want to do the exact opposite.
Bob, if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like they're doing the opposite in Europe.
Is that true, Babson?
Well, as far as I know, the plan was if people wanted to keep the DST throughout the year,
the last change of clocks would have been last March.
And if not, if they change it back to geographical time at the end of October,
then they want to keep the geographical time.
And that's how it stays from now on, as far as I'm concerned.
So that will mean that there's either an extra hour between us or one less hour between us.
And of course, how about the UK?
What are they doing?
I don't remember if they were still part of the whole EU thing back when it was voted on.
What if we all just kept the same time zone,
and it was eight o'clock in one place is different than eight o'clock in another?
You know, this is getting too complicated.
And why do we have to fix this?
Yeah, well, because we broke it, I think.
It's not my fault.
No, no, it's never anybody's fault.
Babson, always good hearing from you.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you for the radio show.
After hour or what have you.
Overtime.
Overtime, yes.
And Alex has one concluding thought, I believe.
Yes, Babson, one thing I forgot to mention last time.
I don't think that we talked about this yet or not, though.
But it is something I bought from the grocery store.
And I am curious about your thoughts on it.
It's called kvass.
Have you ever had kvass?
No, not yet.
But since we talked about it, I was planning on getting some from.
There is a Russian store in the neighborhood, but I never got around to going to.
You got to check it out.
Yeah, I don't recall if we talked about the kvass.
Yes, you mentioned the fermented beverages.
We discussed a bit of it.
And you mentioned the brand name of kvass that I don't remember anymore.
Yeah, I don't remember it either, unfortunately.
But when you do check it out, call back in and we'll hear your thoughts about it.
I don't envy you, Babson.
Why?
Because you've got to have this Russian fermented drink now before Alex will talk to you again.
Well, let's know how that goes.
That's not what he said, but I see where you're coming from.
Babson is listening very closely.
All right, we'll say hi to everybody in Bulgaria for us.
We will talk to you again soon.
All right, have a wonderful evening, everybody.
All right, take care.
And our phone number is 802-321-4225.
I'd like to hear from somebody maybe who went to that meeting or the webinar tonight.
It is scheduled to still be going on.
Yes.
It was scheduled to end at nine.
Right, which is when we end, generally.
So it was carefully crafted to keep us out.
But maybe somebody else has gone to that thing and can report to us.
But regardless, if you have something to say, 802-321-4225, 802-321-HACK.
We're on for a few more minutes and we'd love to hear from our listeners
because we haven't heard from you in a long time.
I guess we have another phone call.
Go ahead.
You're on the air on overtime.
Go ahead.
Good evening.
This is the AT&T operator.
I have a collect call from Bernie.
Will you accept the charges?
No, this is Rebel again.
And one call per program.
Good hearing from you.
None of this foolishness.
802-321-4225.
If you call once, don't call again.
That was Bernie, wasn't it?
I don't think it was, no.
Yes, any other stories people want to share while we wait for that other phone call?
Sure, I've got just a personal anecdote.
I got my booster shot today.
We got our booster shots.
When did we get those?
Earlier in the week.
Yeah, it was about a week ago.
Oh, right.
Did you feel any adverse effects?
It was actually Friday.
Well, yeah, our arms hurt pretty good.
Kyle, your arm hurt faster than mine.
But when mine started hurting, it hurt pretty good as well.
Yeah, it's sore for a little bit and then it goes away.
I think the phone's ringing.
Yeah, well, that's amazing how you can tell.
Let's take this phone call.
I want to hear your story.
Go ahead.
You are on overtime.
Hello, this is Phil from Missouri.
Good to hear from you guys again.
Good to hear from you again, too.
What's on your mind?
Um, well, I was thinking about the abortion law in Texas.
Is there any way you could, like, sue the governor, lieutenant governor,
and the state of Texas for facilitating roads to allow abortions to happen?
I mean, that's an interesting.
Well, right.
So the maintenance of infrastructure.
I don't know if you can hear the caller, but you're talking over the caller.
Let the caller talk first.
Go ahead, caller.
Well, anyway.
OK, so you sued the state of Texas and you sued the governor and the lieutenant governor
for maintaining the roads that help facilitate an abortion, right?
Wow.
The state of Texas has no choice but to defend that in court.
And what's their defense going to be?
Well, you can't constitutionally sue us for doing something like that.
We're not just, like, in the law there if they appeal.
Well, OK, so speaking as the devil's advocate, meaning in this case, Texas's advocate,
I would say that how would how would they know that this person traveling down the road
is on their way to an abortion?
You would have to prove that they knew that this person was being
was using a road to get to that particular location.
I would say maybe maybe a better case would be
they should not maintain any roads that go to abortion clinics.
So if if OK, how about that?
It doesn't snow in Texas.
But if it did snow in Texas and they they cleared the snow outside of an abortion clinic.
Aha, right there.
They got you got them there because they're making it so that people can get there.
But we can we can we can come up with something.
That's what I'm saying.
I mean, then the state would have no choice but to defend on the fact that
you can't constitutionally do that or something.
Right, right.
Which would take that long and just.
Kind of proof that when it throw throw it right back at them.
Yeah, I mean, we have to think of things like this, because when Republicans come up with this,
these absurdities and fly in the face of democracy and the Constitution,
too often we just say, oh, my God, how horrible can you believe it?
And that's where it stops.
You know, I was I was super happy today to see so many people demonstrating outside the Supreme
Court, you know, because that's the only thing that is really going to make an impression
on on politicians, on members of the Supreme Court, on the public.
But there has to be so much more that people have to take an active interest.
They have to be loud.
They have to be obnoxious.
You know, just sitting back and be moaning our fate constantly.
That doesn't work.
It just makes it worse.
Yep.
Even if they redistrict everybody, you can still show up and vote.
And chances are you're still going to.
You know, outnumbered Republicans calls, you know, their base is so small, you know,
on the subject of redistricting, on the subject of redistricting and gerrymandering and all that,
you know, I'm I'm I'm wondering if hackers might be able to come up with some kind of an app.
Right.
Basically, if a district is gerrymandered, what is needed in order to change it back?
Like this, many people need to move over to this neighborhood.
And once that happens and they they can turn it back to Democratic control
if the Republicans have stolen it through gerrymandering,
it would require all kinds of data, obviously.
But I feel like there must be a mathematical solution to this.
What do you think, Alex?
I think I think what the caller proposed with respect to suing the
the suing the state for maintaining the infrastructure that could reasonably be
be used in the future to to facilitate an abortion.
It's so fascinating.
It really is.
And I think it's wonderful, creative thinking.
It's the it's the exact type of argument that you would call in philosophy reductio ad absurdum.
Right.
You know, this is a method of proving that something is false or wrong
by showing that the logical consequences of it are completely absurd.
And and I I think that, you know, we all know that the that this Texas law
where you can sue somebody for facilitating an abortion is absolutely insane and crazy.
And in thinking about it this way, I think is exactly what we need to do.
You know, from a legal standpoint, though, I think the difficulty would be
proximate cause you have to show that something is
there's a connection between the two events and they can't be too disconnected.
You know, if they're not proximate and the cause is too remote,
then you can't be held legally responsible for the action.
There is a really interesting case about this that everybody in law
school reads on proximate cause called Palsgraf v.
The Long Island Railroad, actually, LIRR.
So it's it's very, very famous case about causation.
Wait, what does the Long Island Railroad have to do with any of this?
Oh, my God, you're going to make me the facts of Palsgraf are
really, really weird off the top of my head.
And I'm not looking at the case.
But if I remember from the tourist clusters, the guy standing on the platform
of the Long Island Railroad waiting for a train and somebody either he was
holding a box of fireworks or somebody else was was was had some fireworks.
Somebody gets off the train.
There's some bustling and just anyhow, some fireworks go off.
I think it might have been his fireworks, something like that,
that went and hit something remote, like some kind of weighing station
thing that was hanging in the station.
And it fell in and caused damage.
And I think it hit somebody.
And so the question is, you know, was it foreseeable?
You know, was there a proximate cause between the.
The fireworks going off and and the damages at issue in this particular case?
Well, first of all, fireworks are illegal on Long Island.
So there's that.
Well, I don't think they were back then.
Really?
They probably had.
Yeah, this is a this is a really old case.
I know I'm going to find exactly what the.
Yeah, well, that's definitely interesting.
Interesting case to find.
Yeah, I mean, this is this is a classic law school case.
But where the hell was it?
OK, so I'm going to read you the facts of the brief here.
A plaintiff ticket holding passenger, Helen Palsgraf,
was standing on a platform of defendant Long Island Railroad Company.
A man carrying a package jumped aboard the car of a moving train.
At a nearby platform.
You can't do that.
Yeah, right.
A guard in the car reached out to help him in.
And a guard on the platform pushed the man from behind.
The package was dislodged onto the fell onto the rails and exploded.
The shock of the explosion caused the scales to fall.
The scales.
These are these things that, you know, they had hanging, I guess,
caused the scales to fall onto plaintiff passenger.
Helen Palsgraf, who filed this lawsuit for injuries due to defendants alleged negligence.
The trial term court entered a verdict for plaintiff and
in 1927, Supreme Court Appellate Division affirmed that judgment.
The two lower courts held that the negligent acts of the railroad's employees
caused the package that contained explosives to be thrown under the train where they exploded.
Defendant Railroad sought appeal.
And yeah, there we go.
That's it.
Wow.
That's quite a story.
Just as an aside, you know, that trains used to go faster back then than they do now.
A hundred years ago.
To get to the city, it would take less time to get to the city from parts of Long Island
than it does now.
That's pretty incredible.
Yeah, that's our system.
Are you curious about how this case came out, though?
Because the court found that there was no negligence of the Long Island Railroad because
the Defendant Railroad could not have reasonably foreseen that its employees conduct would
have resulted in that injury.
Well, what's with all the guards pushing people and things like that?
That seems...
This is in Japan, right?
It sounds a lot like the Japanese subway.
Uh-huh.
Well, they don't.
They mostly just squish you into the train.
Interesting.
Right.
Interesting case.
Alex, do you have any thoughts on the gerrymandering idea of some kind of mathematical
solution to that?
Because it seems like we just keep taking it and never actually doing anything to fight
it.
Yeah, I know.
I think it's a very wonderful idea, actually, that can have equitable consequences.
But it would be fought tooth and nail, unfortunately.
Well, it's not legislation.
It's simply calculating where does somebody in an opposing political party need to move
to in order to affect the outcome of an election in a district that's been created by the other
party?
Oh, I see.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I misunderstood the whole concept there.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely fascinating.
It would be very complex, but I know of people who have moved to other states in order to
help influence the results of state elections, but that's a much bigger geographical area.
Whereas this, you could actually flip some districts.
Yeah, you very well may be able to do that quite easily, just swapping out addresses
and things, moving around short term.
It would be really fascinating.
And it really is an interesting idea, because so often now, these local elections decide
so much, and they're by such small margins that they're won.
Yeah.
So yeah, it really could have an effect.
Yeah.
And if the computing power can be put to work to redistrict in one way, it could easily
be employed to narrow to the low hanging, easily done, like this is only a matter of
10 or a few residences that would allow the switching of those districts or re-switching,
switching back to at least be a lot more attainable than trying to do it in impossible
places on the districting maps.
Caller, anything else from you?
Well, yeah, I was watching the original movie Hackers last night, and it just got me to
thinking that ransomware is nothing new.
It's just the name we put on it is new.
Because the whole plot of the movie is like, they have a worm, right, to steal money off
the company, and they plant a virus to get the heat off of them and put it on the hackers,
right?
So it's holding the company hostage for money, which actually, there is a ransomware attack
in St. Louis right now with a community college where they just cancel all classes and everything.
Wow.
That's where they get it sorted out.
I don't know why you need to cancel the classes.
I don't know why you just show up.
Yeah, I don't get that.
Okay, so your computers aren't working.
You still have something to say to your students, I think, right?
Yeah, yeah, I know.
But, you know, it just got me to thinking that a lot of what we explain about online
and everything is just rehash.
I mean, everything is rehashed.
If you watch All in the Family or MASH, they talk about the same issues we're talking about
right now.
That's true.
That's very true.
And completely, nothing has changed.
It's just all rehashed.
And because somebody's got a blog or somebody's popular, they coin a phrase like something
like ransomware, which the threat of a cracker, whoever, going in there and holding your company
hostage for so much money, that's been around forever.
You raise a really good point there.
I mean, you raise a really good point.
We keep having the same conversations.
For instance, that Peter Jackson documentary just came out on the Beatles.
If you look at the first part, by the way, I recommend that to everybody.
If you watch the first part, you'll see by the end that the song Get Back, which is what
the documentary is called, was actually written as a protest song against white supremacists
that are marching in England and being anti-immigrant.
Yeah, the same conversations were being had back then, and the smart, thoughtful people
were fighting against it, as they always have, always will.
Yeah.
But, you know, if you're popular enough, you get a coin a phrase, and everybody acts like
it's something brand new.
That's true.
That's true.
The OK symbol, whatever, you know, these guys use now, well, wasn't that like a cyclops
symbol way back in the 30s and everything for the KKK?
I'm sure it's been used for many, many things.
Yeah.
I don't think we should let them have it.
I mean, I see, you know, in the NBA, when a guy shoots a three and he makes it, he
throws it up.
No case.
I'm sure there's a picture of me as a kid making that symbol, but I can assure you I
was not a white supremacist as a kid, not knowingly, anyway.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's a rude symbol, and there's a rude meaning behind that.
I'm sure there is.
When you're a kid, yeah, you know.
There's all kinds of things with fingers you can do.
I know.
Carl, did you have something, Carl?
Yeah, sure.
Just the premise of using what tools we can and, you know, the rehashing thing, I just
hear so much there.
I think there's some things that have been lost.
In large part, the hostage, sort of holding people's data hostage has become less elegant,
I think, in some ways.
The systems are highly automated, and it's quite impersonal and a bigger problem, more
pervasive problem.
From just the screenplay, it seems so quaint, sort of adorable, from hearing the plot line
to the movie, where something is actually working within the company's networks instead
of just locking it up and asking for payment.
So there's slight changes, but so many parallels, as you pointed out.
Yeah, the idea of crime and, you know, basically holding something over someone's head, that's
always been around.
It's just the technology changes.
Anyway, thank you so much for your call.
We're going to try to get one more in, but we hope to talk to you again in the future.
Okay.
All right.
Take care.
Have a good one, okay?
You too.
And one more time, our phone number is 802-321-4225.
We're going to basically hold it open for another minute or two, and if no one calls
in, we'll sign off for the night.
802-321-HACK is our phone number.
It's good to hear from listeners again.
It's good to know people are out there.
Slowly, we're becoming reacquainted with people, whether it's through 2600 meetings or phone
ins or even conferences.
Yeah, they're starting up again.
And I think we're on the verge of getting back to normal.
It's a nice thought.
It's a nice thought.
Hopefully, it's true.
Again, Alex, you were about to tell a story, I remember, a few minutes ago.
So why don't you tell that story?
Do you remember your story?
I'm sorry.
You were on the verge of telling a story.
I totally missed it.
Yeah.
You were about to tell us a story, and you got interrupted by the phone, just like you're
being interrupted right now.
All right.
Try to remember the story, and we'll take this call, and then we'll end with your story.
Go ahead.
And good evening.
Yes, touch tones.
You're on the air.
Go ahead.
Or you're on off-the-hook overtime.
Go ahead.
Speak up.
Anyone there?
Is that you, Kyle?
Are you pressing buttons?
No?
Is somebody there?
OK, I don't read touch tone.
You know what?
That's it.
We'll give it one more chance.
Alex, start your damn story, and let's see what somebody calls in.
I love it.
I mean, these are the old toners coming back from the mid-'90s.
Oh, they never left the mid-'90s.
They're just trapped there.
Yeah.
Look, I can appreciate a throwback reference.
If you don't start your story, another person's going to call in, and we're going to interrupt
you again.
Yeah.
What was my story?
Right.
So I'm going to get my vaccine over there.
And I have to say, this one, I felt like it hurt a little bit more going in.
I don't know if it was the woman was particularly vindictive, or she didn't like my face, or
maybe I offended her in some way.
You felt pain as soon as she jabbed you?
Yeah.
It hurt.
This one really hurt, I have to say.
I didn't feel anything until a day afterwards.
And then my arm started aching.
It lasted for about a day and a half.
At least you did it on purpose.
I don't think they can make it hurt.
I don't know.
Let's take this phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the cuff time.
As much as I think that we have some opportunities for this technology as we move into the future,
it's got to prove itself out with customers.
If it doesn't, it could do 1,000 different things in the future.
But we have to wait for the first one that came along that customers would accept before
we deployed the technology.
Thank you for your card call.
I volunteer to help out.
What do you want me to do?
Please say the last card card.
Thank you for your card call.
It really makes you think, doesn't it?
I cut him off.
I was hoping they'd give away something.
But that was fantastic.
That was fantastic.
That wasn't really.
I don't know.
I don't care.
All right.
That's it for phone calls.
Phone calls are closed.
We're done with phone calls.
Alex, if you have more of that story, which I really hope you do, share it with us now.
Yeah.
Well, I'll save it for next week.
Don't save it.
First of all, we're not on next week.
We're not here next week.
We need this now.
No, I can't possibly last that long.
It's two weeks at the minimum.
And I hope your story is more than the shot hurt.
I mean, that's not a story.
Well, no, it just turns out that the person getting their shot at exactly the same time as me
was somebody that I had as a friend of mine that I hadn't seen in a long time.
Wow.
And so we had this reunion over booster shots.
Okay.
So a couple of questions here.
This was in New York or Pennsylvania?
Pennsylvania.
Okay.
Is this somebody who lives in the area?
He does.
He's from New York, but actually moved out here.
Did you know that he moved out there before you ran into him?
Yes, but I hadn't seen him in a long time.
A long time being a year or more than a year?
Probably more than a year.
All right.
It's a mildly interesting story, but not that fantastic.
You did run into people who live near you.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I wasn't really intended to be a story.
It was more just intended to be an observation or a fact that I got the booster as a way to
generate conversation.
You sort of made me make it into a story.
Well, I was disappointed by it because I thought it would be going out on a high note,
and instead of kind of like limping out.
You asked for it.
Why would people tune into this again?
Next week, I gave a perfect exit strategy for you, but you pressed it, and your disappointment
is your own fault, Matty.
Look, you told us a story about how a nurse jabbed you and it hurt, and you ran into somebody
you knew and tried to make that into a story.
A story is like, is there a chase involved?
Is there something of intrigue or mystery or just excitement?
That's what we need in a story.
Okay, Rob.
Rob's got a story.
Go ahead, Rob.
No, the high note to your story, Alex, is now you have a bunch of antibodies swimming
around in your system that are protecting you from terrible things.
So there's your chase.
They're chasing away the virus, and you're going to be around and healthy, and we appreciate
that.
Gila, maybe you have a story to end on.
Well, I was going to say, Alex, this is one of those stories that you would end with,
and then I found $20 because then at least something interesting happened in the story.
But I was curious for all of you, actually, now that the guidance has been updated so
that people can mix and match their boosters, did you each get boosted with the same shot
you'd had previously, or did you cross the streams?
I did.
I did.
You did what?
Oh, I didn't mix and match.
I had the same, Pfizer all the way.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wait, wait.
Hold on a second, Alex.
You didn't get Pfizer the first two times, so you can't say Pfizer all the way.
No, I got Moderna again.
But here's what's interesting about Gila's observation, is that when my friend and I
sat down in the chairs, the pharmacist brought out two syringes, one with Moderna, one with
Pfizer, and she said, all right, you're going to have to tell me who is who because he had
Pfizer, I had Moderna, so she had one of each.
So at that point, we could have easily switched.
I thought you were going to say she came out with a Pfizer, Moderna, and a coin, and she
was going to flip.
That would have been interesting.
That would have been a good story.
That's a good story, Alex.
It didn't happen, but that's a good story.
No, that would have been really, really good.
All right.
Any final thoughts?
Rob, you're going to the meeting, I take it.
Yes, indeed.
I'm looking forward to seeing folks again.
I'm looking forward to hanging around in Citigroup with a bunch of hackers.
Go to nyc2600.net if you need the details, or just show up at the Citigroup building
in the food court on 53rd Street on Lexington Avenue this Friday evening.
Of course, there are other meetings taking place all throughout the world.
For more information on that, go to 2600.com slash meetings.
If you have a meeting that you'd like to restart or start from scratch, email us,
meetings at 2600.com, and we will help you with that.
Kyle?
Just encourage people to be curious and hack some stuff, and use the network.
Use the phone network before they take it away from you.
It might disappear.
3Gs going away, and landlines being ripped off the side of buildings.
It's the disappearance of what was this incredible physical connection.
Share that.
Share that with people, and share what you learn about how it's changing as well.
It's weird, because hackers and phone freaks have always been into the phone system,
and one could say they own the phone system.
Well, now they may very well own the phone system, because the phone company doesn't
seem to be interested in it anymore.
It's something that people have taken for granted, and I think it should be preserved.
I've kicked around the idea of a 501c12 cooperative telephone company.
There's plenty of creative, cool ideas.
I think it will never go away, as much as those companies want the old landlines to go away.
We'll share ideas.
If people have cool ideas or projects about that stuff, or things they're hacking on
with telecommunications and computers, let us know.
Write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
Another question, too.
If they do demolish the Hotel Pennsylvania, and please, if you were at the webinar tonight,
write to us, OTH at 2600.com, as Kyle said.
But if they do demolish the hotel, who gets the phone number?
Who gets Pennsylvania 65,000?
Who would own it, then, if there's no hotel?
I'd like to put in a bid.
Well, not money or anything like that.
I would say, just give it to me, and I would like that.
We'll hold it.
We'll hold it for them.
Or us, the community, obviously.
The hacker community should preserve it, because nobody else will preserve it.
Nobody else really sees it as something that matters.
Final thoughts, Rob, Gila?
I've got something.
Which, first of all, Happy Hanukkah to all of our listeners, for whom that is a thing.
Yes.
But I just wanted to say something about today, which is, in addition to today being World
AIDS Day, there were also the oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court today, in a
case that could very well change the face of a lot of rights in this country.
And today has been hard for a lot of people.
But I want to remind everybody that we fight together.
We keep fighting.
And we bring light in darkness.
And no one is alone today.
We're all doing this together.
And the community that we're building, the communities that we build all over the place,
are what sustain us.
Also, I wanted to say that I had a first during tonight's show, and that was that my contact
lens fell out in the middle of the program.
So that is an advantage to broadcasting from home, because had my contact fallen out at
the studio, I would have had problems for a long time.
But here, I was just able to walk over and get my glasses.
But yes, fight, support communities, donate to abortion access funds if you can.
And yeah, keep fighting and care for people.
Yeah.
And I think what you say is so important.
You're not alone.
You might feel like you're alone at many times.
We all do.
You're not alone feeling that.
But you're never actually alone.
There's always people to talk to, always people who support what you do and who you are.
And sometimes you just have to say that to yourself.
Sometimes you just have to remind yourself of that.
So thanks for that.
All right, guys.
I'll miss you next week.
But see you in two weeks, eh?
All right.
Good night, everybody.
Good night.
Good night.