The previous program was Economic Update with Professor Richard Wolfe, heard Wednesdays at 6.30 p.m. right after the WBAI Evening News.
Stay tuned for Off The Hook, coming up, it is now 7 p.m.
Your party is not answering. Please try your call later. We're sorry, but your call will now be disconnected. 0718.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall. I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Funding it won't, but the best expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Funding it won't.
Funding it won't.
Funding it won't.
And a very good evening to our program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, joined tonight by Kyle.
Yes, indeed.
And I believe we have Alex in Skype land.
You do, indeed.
Well, it's been a while since we've been on. I think it's been a couple of weeks, and before that it was a couple of weeks.
And guess what? We're not going to be on next week, which, by the way, suits me just fine because next week is Hope Week,
and we always have this mad scramble the Wednesday before Hope where we forget we're on the radio, and it's not good for anybody.
So being preempted next week, it kind of works out for a change.
So that's it for us until two weeks, and we're not going to have an overtime tonight because we're so frenzied with Hope preparation and things like that.
But how have you been, Alex?
I've been pretty well. I've been pretty good, spending a lot of time in Pennsylvania.
Haven't gotten that better microphone, have you?
I certainly haven't.
Something's up. You're stepping on yourself somehow. Maybe get a little closer to it?
Yeah, we can try. How's that?
Well, if you have to speak longer sentences so that we know if it's working.
One or two syllables, it works fine, but after that, it gets confused.
All right, I'm going to try something different here on the air. I'm going to try to insert a headset.
Two years we've been doing this. Two years, and haven't gotten any better at it.
Kyle, how are you?
Oh, great.
Okay. Well, that's good. You're in the same room, so I pretty much know how you are.
Yeah, so Hope is coming up in another nine days, I guess.
That's true.
Wow, single digits right now.
As Alex prepares to reconnect himself to something. Are you back, Alex?
I'm back. Is this any better?
Much better.
All right, very good.
Can you keep that on your head? Don't take it off.
I will say something, though, because I feel like I need to defend myself in some small measure.
Nothing on this side has changed since the last two weeks. I configured nothing.
I mean, you guys are always the ones that are fussing with something or another.
Yeah, and somehow we have a control that just affects your voice and nothing else.
He got us.
All right, you know what? We only have a few minutes, literally.
Only on until 8 o'clock tonight.
So we have a lot of things to talk about.
But just to update people, first of all, Rob and Gila are not here tonight.
Guess what they have?
No, it's not company from out of town.
Well, maybe it is, actually.
But yeah, it's the thing.
It finally hit all of us.
And you're looking baffled, Alex.
You didn't read the mailing list?
No, I did.
I did, but I was still surprised not to see them here.
For some reason, I felt like eons ago, but there you have it.
They said there'd be so much coughing.
Honestly, I think that would be good radio.
But I know when you're in the midst of it, that's the last thing you want to do.
So I totally understand that.
But that means everybody affiliated with the show, in some way, seems to have gotten it by now.
I don't know if that's a good thing, a rite of passage or what.
It just shows that it's not over.
It's not over.
A few weeks ago, actually, from the beginning, we've been telling people that with our conference,
we're going to be requiring a vaccination proof because we don't want anybody in there who's not vaccinated.
And it's possible that there will be social distancing or masks.
And we confirmed a couple of weeks ago that, yes, in fact, we will be requiring masks indoors at the conference
and continuing with our vaccination proof in the form of a card or in the form of an app
that your particular state or country issues, whatever the legal form is, we will accept that.
And that's for everybody's safety.
And it turns out, since we did that, New York City actually hopped on board.
And they are now, because of the newest high transmission levels of COVID-19,
they're saying masks should once again be worn in all public indoor settings as well as crowded outdoor settings.
Hopefully, it won't be crowded outside at St. John's University where the whole conference is taking place.
But inside, it could be a little crowded.
So we want to make sure that people are safe.
It's a very small price to pay to stay safe and to stay healthy.
But if you had any doubts about the wisdom of what we were saying a few weeks ago as far as how to stay safe,
well, now, you know, unless you don't believe in what New York City says as well,
I think common sense is prevailing here.
The virus is coming back.
A lot of people are getting sick.
Let's do what we can to stay healthy.
A few weeks ago, there was another conference, the RSA Conference on the West Coast.
Look at this headline from PC Magazine.
While preaching security, RSA Conference becomes hotbed for COVID-19.
And a lot of bad feeling, bad sentiment there.
But basically, people weren't wearing masks.
Everybody was walking around without masks, a lot of people.
And so many people got sick afterwards and didn't have to happen.
And we don't intend for it to happen.
Now, you know, we've been sending out notices on a regular basis.
And invariably, invariably, we get indignant replies from people saying,
how dare you require me to prove that I am vaccinated.
It's not something that we're just pulling out of the air right now.
It's something we've been saying all along.
But even if we hadn't been saying it all along,
if you listen to what we talk about and how we talk about it
and just have a sense as to the hacker community,
it shouldn't be a surprise that we want people to do what science backs up
and what the facts are supporting.
And we are not going to be the people that get you sick, you know,
by allowing you to come in.
If you want to go out unvaccinated and do various things, you have that right.
You have that freedom, you know.
But we also are running an event, and we intend to keep people safe.
And I'm sorry if that makes us unpopular.
But to us, it's common sense.
To us, the facts have proven themselves over and over again.
There is a rising caseload, and this is happening all over the country.
We're seeing it everywhere.
And this is how we have an in-person conference.
This is how we are able to do this safely.
Now, of course, there are people who have gotten sick.
We've heard from them, and it's unfortunate,
and they're not able to attend as a result of that.
We do have the virtual attendee, which we can swap your passes for a virtual pass.
It's not as good as being there in person, I know, but it's the best we can do.
It's the best we can do.
These are tough times.
This isn't our idea.
This isn't something that we did.
This is the reality of the situation.
I'm really sorry it's happening.
I'm really sorry it's still happening.
2020.
We thought 2021 it would be over.
It's 2022, and now we're talking about fall and winter and preparing for that.
I got to say, and it's just my opinion,
I think if more people had gotten the vaccine, it wouldn't be spreading as much right now.
It's just my opinion.
I don't know if that's backed up by science or if this is just something that is inevitable.
I do think there's always a logical way of dealing with these things,
and what we're doing right now is dealing with it as logically as possible.
Another thing we're doing, we're capping attendance.
We're not going to have more people than we're comfortable with,
and that's a decision on our part to basically maybe have less people around
but have a conference where we're healthy and we're able to benefit from it and have a positive experience.
It's going to cost us to do that because we don't get the same thing from renting the space.
We don't get the same thing from renting equipment that we need.
You don't get half off if you have half the number of people
or two-thirds the number of people or anything like that.
It doesn't work that way, but you have to make choices at certain times.
You have to make sacrifices, so we're all doing that.
Please keep that in mind.
With whatever inconveniences or hassles you might be facing, we're doing the best we can.
We're all volunteers.
We're all trying, and I think it's going to be an awesome event.
The program is out.
We have about 100 speakers, which is really incredible because when we started off, it was kind of lackluster.
People were kind of getting into gear, and I felt the same way.
It took some doing, but we really had some fantastic submissions.
We have more workshops, I think, than we've ever had before, which is great,
and all sorts of other activities.
We have space that we didn't have before.
It's all going to be new and different.
It's in a different location.
It's in the middle of Queens, which is an awesome borough.
There are challenges, challenges on places to stay, challenges on how to commute, but we're hackers.
We can figure all of this out, and it's going to be awesome.
It's going to be history, and we're going to do everything we can to make damn sure it's safe.
Yeah.
The one thing we do not want you to take away from this event is one of these variants or another kind of disease.
Just the information.
That's the important thing, the experience.
Those are the things we are working very hard right now to put together and provide for everyone in attendance.
That is really now in the people who go.
It's in their hands.
They make the event.
We do our best to assemble everything and create this environment.
We're inviting a huge amount of people to come share space with one another.
We're really hoping that these steps will help make it a comfortable and safe experience.
We've talked about this before, but basically, you might not have symptoms.
You might not get sick, but you still could be a carrier.
If we were to open things up so that you could more easily become a carrier, then you can give COVID to somebody else who gets much sicker,
or maybe they give it to somebody else who gets much sicker, or maybe they go back to their state or their city, and other people get infected as a result.
We can't live with that kind of guilt, that kind of feeling of irresponsibility.
We have to do everything we can within reason.
This is certainly within reason.
It really is.
We survived wearing masks for a couple of years.
We can survive a couple of days if we get a good conference out of it.
It's as simple as that.
If you're not vaccinated, you shouldn't be going into crowded rooms indoors where the infection rate is going up.
That's just common sense in my view.
Yes, Alex, go ahead.
I tend to agree with that.
I just think it's important to make the point that even though for many of us that are vaccinated, boosted, maybe even double-boosted,
maybe we've had COVID relatively recently, it may seem like overkill, but for a large number of people, COVID is still a really big issue,
and it still can be a life-or-death issue.
I think we have to be empathetic to them and respect their needs.
I wanted to focus on one other difference here too.
I don't think that you brought this up, Emmanuel, and I think this is a big change from any other HOPE since 1994,
which is that because you're capping attendance, there's not going to be any tickets sold at the door.
You can't just show up to HOPE.
If you want to come, you're going to have to get a ticket ahead of time.
Yes, advanced registration is the only way to get into the conference.
That was a tough decision because we're happy to see people just showing up, being surprised by last-minute attendees,
but we can't have the unpredictability of how many people show up.
Basically, we have to cut it off.
Go online, go to hope.net, 2600.com.
All the details on how to do that are there, and it's going to be amazing.
Of course, it's all going to be recorded and documented, and it'll be something.
But boy, it's been a lot for the last couple of years, actually.
Think of it, the last time we got together was four years ago, so it's a huge deal.
I hope it's a positive experience for everybody.
All right, let's talk about less pleasant things, Twitter.
Alex, I'm going to ask you some questions about this because you're the only one, I think, who can kind of get your head around it.
Elon Musk has decided that he doesn't want to buy Twitter after all.
First of all, under the terms of the contract, he'd have to pay, I think, a billion-dollar penalty in what they call a breakup fee.
What Twitter wants, though, they want to drag him into court and force him to buy their company.
I've never heard of anything like this before, where a company is forcing somebody to buy them.
But to me, what that says is Twitter is realizing that they are way overvalued and that this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and they'd better not let it go.
Nothing is saying that more clearly than their actions, that they are desperate.
They want to unload onto him and get $44 billion for whatever it is they are.
Is that an accurate assessment in your eyes?
Well, I think there's a lot going on here as well.
One thing to note, too, is that actually Twitter did, in fact, yesterday sue Elon Musk in a Delaware Chancery Court for the exact reason that you mentioned, for reneging on the $44 billion deal that he himself proposed.
So this deal had a drop-dead date of the 24th of October.
So Twitter is also using that to justify its request for expedited proceedings over in Delaware, including a request for a really quick four-day trial, which is a pretty fast trial on these issues in September.
So that could be coming up, but I think that this is going to take quite a lot longer.
So Twitter, in its motion for these expedited proceedings, also accused Musk of doing various things like dragging his heels to stop the deal, demanding increasingly detailed information from Twitter, secretly scuttling his financing arrangements, and things like deliberately failing to respond to some operational questions from Twitter.
But this whole lawsuit is really about whether Musk can walk away from this deal.
And if he does walk away, whether he has to pay that $1 billion termination fee, that breakup clause.
So central to this case, as you noted, Emanuel, is something called a specific performance clause.
And first-year law students suffering through their contract law class are inevitably learning that specific performance is an equitable remedy under contract law.
That involves a court ordering a party to a contract to perform some kind of action to, in essence, make good on the contract.
It's a way of the court saying, it's going to force you to do what you promised to do.
So in this case, the agreement between Musk and Twitter contains something called a specific performance clause.
And Musk could be forced to actually complete this deal.
So specific performance, as you suggested or guessed, Emanuel, is pretty common in real estate transactions, but not so common in massive deals like this.
It's been used before, and deals have been forced through because of specific performance clauses.
Really big deals, but deals that were probably about 10 times smaller or more than this specific deal.
So I think with this, generally, a court is going to order specific performance if money is something that can't compensate the injured party for its harm.
And really, that's what Twitter is alleging here, that the stockholders, that Twitter's employees, and that Twitter's businesses will be harmed in a way that money cannot fix because of the way that Musk had initiated the deal and then walked away from it.
But can't Twitter be harmed in a way that cannot be repaired if Elon Musk is the person running it?
I mean, aren't there people there that still have that opinion?
I mean, there certainly were when this started.
They seemed very hesitant to accept his offer.
But then once they did, it was all in and no chance of any reconsideration, even when he was acting erratic and it just seemed like a really, really bad idea.
They just seemed desperate.
Well, it is.
And the share price, I think it was $56 or $54.20.
I think it had the 420 reference in there.
And the share price, I think Twitter was actually trading at around $33.
So this is a massive increase in the estimated value of Twitter.
So, yeah, so this very well could be a once-in-a-lifetime deal here.
But on the other hand, if you force the deal through and Musk becomes the owner of Twitter and he's at the helm of Twitter, this is a company that he's already bruised pretty badly.
He's already trashed it in the press.
He's already said horrible things about the ratio of spam bots to humans and things that could really harm its advertising revenue.
And so I think you may have a really demoralized workforce that is under the direction of somebody who doesn't really want to be there in the first place as well.
Could it not also be the case that the Twitter board itself may not be in complete agreement?
And so maybe there's a small majority that is, as E said, like, hey, let's just do this and work on some other projects or something.
You know, just they're ready to get out anyway.
And whomever is dissenting from that on the board just doesn't have enough votes or however that is structured.
How does it work?
I mean, does the board disband if he buys the company?
Do they still stay in power?
Do they make a lot of money personally?
Well, personally, they would make a lot of money if they owned a lot of shares.
And so this is in one sense about shareholder value here because this, as you suggested,
Manuel, is an opportunity for the shareholders to maximize their value because Musk is paying a massive premium on the value of Twitter to acquire it.
But what would happen to the board when he comes into pole position there?
That's something that we don't know.
That would be up to Musk.
As the owner of the company, the board could be reconstituted.
Certain board members could be asked to leave.
I imagine the board would probably have some measure of consistency to it.
It probably wouldn't be entirely thrown out, but a lot of people would probably voluntarily walk away as well.
But they certainly stand to benefit quite a bit, especially if it's overvalued.
If they get an offer for $44 billion for a company that they think is only worth maybe $10 billion, they're going to want to take that offer.
And if that offer is changed, they're going to scream bloody murder and do everything they can to get what they thought they were being promised.
So it just seems rather transparent to me what it is that they are doing.
Yeah, I mean, it is about money, right?
I mean, this is a deal.
It's about money.
It's about a lot of money.
And Twitter, I think, is in a bit of a crunch right now too because of what Musk had said specifically about these bots, right?
So Twitter really has claimed that despite Musk's statements that he was intent on defeating these spam bots,
that he never actually saw any representations from Twitter about how many bots and false accounts were on the platform.
And Twitter claims that Musk even sweetened the deal after making these statements by removing things like due diligence clauses
and making the deal easier to complete and harder for him to walk away from.
Now, the problem here is because – and here's where I think the irreparable harm could come because bots are not humans.
Humans respond to ads, not bots.
Ads pay for Twitter's operations.
So if there are more bots on the platform than Twitter had acknowledged, then when calculating the price of ads,
arguably advertisers were overpaying, and advertisers going forward are going to want to pay less.
So this whole bot discussion has the ability to really severely impact Twitter's bottom line.
I just take exception to a couple of things you said, though.
I think bots can be programmed to respond to ads, and I don't know a single human who responds to Twitter ads.
Well, intentionally.
Well, yeah.
I mean –
It may be a subconscious thing.
That's right, Kyle.
Or accidentally you tap the wrong thing.
Yeah.
Well, bots, they might respond to ads, but by responding to ads, I mean with a wallet, spending money.
I don't think I've ever done that.
I've seen something pop up on my screen and say, oh, yeah, I want that.
I'm going to click there.
Yeah, I've never done that.
Honestly, I don't know.
Yeah, you haven't done it, Kyle?
You've never done it?
Oh, no, I've definitely done it.
You've done that?
Well, I've probably been nudged by ads for sure.
Really?
Yeah.
Pop-up ads?
Probably.
On Twitter?
I don't know about Twitter, but definitely on social media and online.
I'm not going to say I haven't.
Alex, you still know that intervention guy that makes house calls?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do think – I think Kyle's on to something, though, right, because he used the word nudged,
and I think that Twitter – what Twitter is selling here isn't just ads for whatever
it is, the last thing that you search for, sneakers or telescopes or something, right?
They're selling promoted content in a sense, too, and that's where I think you could
have the psychological nudge because it's almost like seeing an ad in a New Yorker on
a full page and you start reading it and you realize, wow, this sounds a lot like an ad
and not an article.
It's this embedded content kind of advertisement that I think can nudge you psychologically
in one way or the other, and the extent to which we are being nudged and have been nudged
in certain directions I think remains to be seen because nobody really knows the extent
to which advertisers have been manipulating us in one way or another based on the data
from these types of platforms.
What do you think is going to happen next?
Well, I think – if I were to guess, I think that forcing the deal through because of the
specific performance clause would probably be ill-advised.
When there's a $1 billion break fee, if I were a judge, I would see that break fee
as something that could compensate the company, could compensate the shareholders and the
employees in a way that specific performance couldn't.
That specific performance here, forcing Musk to take over Twitter could actually end up
harming the company more than not allowing the deal to go through.
But they don't care.
It's not their company anymore.
It's his company.
So if it harms the company, then good luck and goodbye.
True, yeah.
So with the break fee, the termination fee, whatever you want to call it, as opposed to
the specific performance and the fact that specific performance has never been used in
a deal that's this large before.
It's been used in deals that, like I said, I think were around $3 billion or so.
But there's another somewhat instructive case that we could look to that happened during
the pandemic.
LVMH or Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy was about to purchase Tiffany, the famous jeweler with
all the fancy rings and things like that.
Then during the downturn of the pandemic, I think in around September or so of 2020,
LVMH started to rethink this deal because the world was going to hell in a handbasket
pretty quickly.
So it tried to pull out.
I think there was a specific performance clause in that agreement as well as part of that
deal.
But it never actually reached the court because what the parties did was they negotiated for
a lower sale price.
So that's very possibly what could be happening here is that Musk could be kicking up a massive
amount of dirt because Tesla has lost a huge amount of value over the last, let's say,
nine or ten months.
It's lost about $100 billion in its market cap, I believe.
That's where a lot of Musk's net worth is tied up in Tesla stock.
So he could be trying to essentially undermine the business operations of Twitter to try
to get a lower sale price here.
I think he would want to avoid losing $1 billion in the termination fee.
I think he would want to avoid a protracted legal battle in the Delaware Chancery Court.
By the way, that's a court that does not have jurors.
It's decided by judges that have particular expertise in this area.
So this verdict wouldn't be swayed by the vicissitudes of public opinion, so to speak.
So I think that he's going to try to negotiate for a lower sale price and will pay the break
fee or come to some kind of settlement, some kind of private settlement about a break fee.
Wait.
Those are two different things.
So he's going to negotiate a lower price and he's going to pay the break fee?
It's got to be either or.
Disjunctive, yeah.
Or I think he's going to try to negotiate a lower price, something that's more in line
with what the actual value of Twitter is.
Maybe it'll go down to 44 share or 45, something like that.
Even just knocking four or five bucks off the share price is going to make a huge difference
in the overall sale price.
So I think he'll try to do that.
And if need be, I don't think he'll pay that $1 billion fee.
That's a lot of money to pay.
I think they would negotiate a private settlement for a break fee.
All right.
Well, I guess we'll see what happens in this ultimate Twitter war that we're seeing here.
Moving on to some other quote-unquote hacker news.
Let's go out to Arizona for the second time in 24 hours.
An electronic roadside message board was hacked.
I air-quoted the hacked because basically it's not really hacking so much as just pressing
some buttons, which I guess is what hacking is.
But you know what?
Let's just continue with the story.
It was hacked to display a profane message to motorists driving by.
The message condemns Russian President Vladimir Putin, who declared war on Ukraine, obviously.
A mystery prankster with unauthorized access to construction traffic signs along Interstate 17
was the person behind this.
And apparently this newspaper, the Phoenix New Times, can say that word.
I can't.
But it was a suggestion for Putin to do something.
Wow.
So yeah.
So basically this happened, and then they fixed it, and then it happened again.
I suspect the reason that happened was because these signs are very easy to access.
Sometimes they have remote-controlled devices with no password.
Sometimes you just have to plug a keyboard into them.
There's different models, different varieties.
But they're not hard to get into because they're not supposed to be hard to get into
because you want people working on the roads to be able to type little messages.
And custom ones at that, ones that are very specific to whatever the traffic or construction scenario is.
What Putin is up to at the moment.
Yeah.
They're meant to be reprogrammed like that on the fly.
So they're working.
They're functioning.
They're just being programmed by someone who isn't necessarily as concerned with traffic.
Or maybe they are.
They're just playing the long game.
Yeah, that's true.
So if you see a sign, a construction sign that has been quote-unquote hacked,
take a picture of it, send it to us, and we'll maybe report on it.
But it's not hard to do.
I don't know if I'd consider that hacking.
It's basically typing onto a keyboard with no password.
Where's the hack in that?
It's taking advantage of stupidity, which oftentimes is the default.
I'm surprised.
I've seen more messages like that around than I ever thought.
We saw one on a wall out in Long Island.
Yeah.
That's old school, you know, painting graffiti on a wall.
That's not hacking, although it's the same basic thing.
Oh, there's elements of it.
There's definite parallels.
Someone left a wall unattended with no password.
Yeah.
Just wrote on it.
Just wide open access.
All right, here's another hack.
This is over in the U.K.
Yeah, James Chalmers was issued a whopping 100-pound penalty
for overstaying three hours in a car park.
That's how they say parking garage over there.
And he had never parked there.
He cleverly, though, relied on his Google Maps location history on his phone
to appeal the costs.
According to the Mirror, the shocked man,
and you know it's the Mirror because they use the word shocked and put it in quotes,
he had been out celebrating his 21st birthday.
He knew he hadn't parked his vehicle there, let alone even used his car on that day.
He then appealed against the charge, where he managed to prove his whereabouts
and managed to get the charges dropped.
Location history allows users to review a timeline of their location in past days,
weeks, and months through the Google Maps app.
And that's how he was able to prove his innocence.
After tracking down his history, he sent proof of his location to the company
that charged him, and they subsequently revoked it.
He credited the phone's technology as his savior from the hefty charge.
Yeah, the thing that's interesting to me, I mean, this isn't a hack.
How is this a hack?
All he did was use a feature.
But basically, monitoring your location is being reported as the savior here.
This is what prevents you from being charged unjustly for something you didn't do
by being tracked.
Yeah, how about being wrongfully accused of having parked someplace?
How did that happen?
Where's the critique there?
Yeah, how did that happen in the first place?
Where's the culpability?
Where's the responsibility on that entity?
Oh, yes, sure, they begrudgingly reversed or revoked the charge
after looking at some informal evidence.
But it's ridiculous to, I mean, sing the praises of tracking yourself
to save a few bucks in fines from some egregious or overbearing parking garage.
I'm sure that's not what he had in mind at first, but it's basically,
if you want to stay safe, make sure you're tracked.
That's the message I get from it.
Sure, and just technically, how did that happen?
There should be an explanation or some kind of inquiry into it.
Was it that he had walked by and maybe some sort of payment kiosk
detected his phone and sent some message?
I mean, what is going on there?
He said he was there for three hours after the – it doesn't make any sense.
Okay, so it's a fluke.
Somebody entered the wrong license plate or something?
Well, do they enter it manually?
I don't know.
Alex, do you have a theory?
No, I just think it's such an excessive fine for three hours.
I mean, it's just absolutely ridiculous.
But I wanted to say it reminded me of something that –
well, some shenanigans that I used to get up to in college at Stony Brook.
By the way, State University of New York at Stony Brook.
So I used to be a Latin teaching assistant in the humanities building.
And as you will probably recall, Emanuel, behind the humanities building is a parking garage.
And the parking situation over at Stony Brook was just horrendous,
especially for commuter students.
You'd have to park all the way on the other side of campus
and take this bus over into the campus.
Can I just say the statute of limitations for Stony Brook parking tickets is 50 years.
So just so you don't dig yourself in.
Okay, continue.
Watch what you say.
Well, if I had any parking tickets, they wouldn't have given me my diploma.
So they hold that over your head.
But here's how I avoided the parking tickets and the whole situation.
So I used to use that parking garage behind the humanities building
and I just drive my car right into that.
And what I would do is I would take the ticket to pay for the daily parking,
which was an exorbitant fee.
I don't remember what it was back then, but it was still pretty high.
It was economically infeasible for me to pay it as a student.
But what I did was I used to get a monthly subscription for the parking garage,
but only to park at night, so for night parking, which was maybe one-tenth of what the price was.
And that was actually well worth it because then you didn't have to deal with the whole parking situation.
So what I used to do was I'd take the ticket to go in,
but you could only use your card to swipe out if you used it to swipe in.
That was the security feature on it.
So what I used to do then was walk over to the kiosk,
swipe the card manually while I was standing there and not in the car,
and then I could use it to swipe out.
But every once in a while, because I can be somewhat absent-minded and I was a student,
I would forget to pay the monthly fee.
So I would go to get the car out and then my card wouldn't work.
And it would be 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning when I'm trying to leave,
and the turnstile arm wouldn't go up.
So my car would be stuck in the parking garage.
So what I realized was, and this is something that you could never get away with anymore,
I would always keep a socket set in the back of my car in the trunk,
and I took out the socket set and disassembled the arm for the gate,
took the gate arm off, drove through,
and then reassembled it and put it back together and then drove out.
So I just recalled these fond memories of garage hacking from way back in the day.
I rode my bike.
That's how I avoided it.
That's how I avoid that now, yeah.
Wow, that's something.
Well, maybe now they can finally close the book on that mystery they've been trying to figure out,
the MacGyver hacker it was on the campus.
Yeah, the cold case in the Stony Brook garage.
But you could never get away with that anymore, right?
Because you'd be on CCTV.
There'd be cameras, there'd be all kinds of sensors,
there'd be all sorts of neighborhood watch people that would report you before you even got out of your car.
Contact info when you get in there.
Yeah, yeah.
In fact, you might even hear something from this from all the do-gooders out there.
Right now, starting the paperwork to have you prosecuted.
Okay, let's move on to another story, though.
Let's go to Disneyland, where vulgar posts have filled their Instagram account after another quote-unquote hack.
Yes, the iconic theme park's Instagram account was hacked overnight and filled with vulgar and racist posts.
CBS Los Angeles reports four posts and one story were added to the account
by a hacker who called himself David Du before they were eventually taken down by Disney officials.
I don't have any more details on that.
I'm sorry I don't.
That's all they decided to share.
I can say the Instagram account currently has 8.4 million followers
and usually posts material featuring items from the Southern California theme park.
But not that night.
They did something else.
And that makes the news.
That's a news story.
Basically, it's the same thing as hacking a traffic sign, really.
You're just changing something because of poor security
and putting a message there that obviously doesn't belong.
And that's what we wind up talking about and calling it hacking.
Yeah, I have a problem with that.
I know I'm contributing to it by talking about it,
but I'm kind of studying the reason why this is so fascinating to people.
I think because they don't understand the technology.
Yeah, it's just an insane amount of focus on something
that just really tells me that there's some very confused people
and have kind of mixed up priorities about what is news
and what is something really novel versus just sort of carelessness or haplessness.
I think very often what happens with these so-called hacks
or breaches of Instagram accounts, Twitter accounts, et cetera,
any massive social media platform for a big brand that has a huge following
generally doesn't just use the ordinary and original interface for the platform.
They will very frequently manage the social media account
through some third-party interface that connects into Twitter through some form of API.
And that API session might not expire.
And if you can breach that third-party company that's used to manage these accounts,
that's how accounts like Disney have been taken over.
And this had happened with sports leagues a couple of years ago.
I don't know if probably some of you remember when I was over with the NFL
when I was the acting assistant of the NFL.
This happened right before the Super Bowl.
And it was a breach that related to a third-party issue on the platform.
And what had happened was that there were numerous other sports leagues and teams
and things like UFC and ESPN that all seemed to have these strange messages popping up.
And so in a sense, I think it's more newsworthy than the signs
and more skilled than connecting a keyboard to an interface
because you do need to do some recon and some planning
and some poking around in order to get into these things,
but they do need better security.
You need to know the password. That's it.
You just need to know what the password is.
Maybe, but sometimes they're very often obfuscated or they're difficult.
They should have a higher measure of security.
Yeah, two-factor. They have two-factor, but people have been getting around that too.
Well, I think it's probably more like some sort of key or certificate exchange
if it's using some kind of API like you were alluding to.
And that software scheme would allow them to not have to enter a password or be prompted.
It would just basically be connected through some kind of protocol
that allowed the third-party software to manage the account.
But I think it really tells you a lot about how unsocial social networking is.
Yeah, the people or bots, as some of our other news stories have referred to them,
are not actually people.
They're giant corporations that are populating most of these networks
because that's how people communicate now and are brands included
amidst all the other advertising.
It's very weird.
If you step away from it and think about what this is actually about,
that like, oh, these breaches and unusual posts
from otherwise trustworthy sage brands that we interact with
and think of as personalities and people on a social network,
it kind of makes us look insane.
We're concerned about Disney having an episode,
like they lost control of themselves
or did a Roseanne and took too many sleeping pills or something.
Give me a break.
This is social?
This is the height of anti-social.
People should not take these things so seriously.
It's like, oh, the robot broke again.
It all comes down to bad security practices in the end.
I lose track of all the different social media companies that harass me day by day.
I'm pretty sure this was Facebook.
Every now and then Facebook freaks out and claims that my account was hacked
when actually it's an app that's trying to access a particular feature of Facebook
that Facebook decided to have a fight with and not allow access.
So they say, oh, your password was compromised when it never was,
but then I've got to make a whole new password as a result of that.
Then when I ask to see the evidence, they say, oh, there's nothing wrong here.
I have to have a whole new password every couple of weeks when this happens.
It's really silly, and that's one of the reasons why I don't use Facebook.
But I recall this happened a few weeks ago.
They said I had a high-profile account, which is funny because I never use it.
And as a result, I needed to have two-factor authentication.
There was just no way around it. I had to have it.
So, okay, fine. I went through all the steps and installed two-factor authentication.
And then at the end, they say, would you like us to remember this computer
so you don't have to even enter a password from here?
What happens if I lose that computer?
What happens if my laptop is stolen out of the backseat of my car, which I never leave it in?
But, you know, something could happen.
They've just given away my account because I don't have to enter a password from that machine.
I mean, how stupid is that? That is their security practice.
Yeah, and on the other hand, for these accounts that are not flagged as high-value accounts,
if they're taken over and subsequently deactivated because, you know,
some spammer or a threat actor took over your account
and is using it to spread links to counterfeit goods websites or something like that,
it becomes extraordinarily difficult to get your actual account back.
And that account may be connected to your photos, photo albums going back possibly to 2007,
maybe even 2006 at this point.
And so, you know, for people that are locked out of their accounts,
they have almost no recourse and lose a good chunk of the memories of their lives
that have been stored on these profiles with nobody to go to for any recourse.
You see, I have little sympathy because what in the world are you doing trusting a company like Facebook
or Flickr or any of them with your memories as the only copy?
I mean, you know, you had to put them there from someplace else, right?
They came from something.
So, you know, keep that computer or a photo album if you did a scan of those particular pictures,
but never, never rely on some other company to keep something that's precious to you safe.
You know, yeah, have it there, but always have a backup.
Always have something local that you can fall back on when they disappear
or completely screw something up because they will.
I think part of the answer to that is the content is generated and directly uploaded or posted.
From your phone, yeah.
Yeah, so you might have a proxy or like a duplicate on that device,
but people's sense of having stored it in some kind of directory structure,
it's just not the same thing.
They're like, this is my profile, I'm adding to my profile, and that's kind of it.
And the fact that the phone is keeping copies of photos is probably an afterthought to most users.
The other thing I want to ask is the prompt you got with Twitter.
It was like, make this as a part of two-factor enabling that.
Facebook, it was Facebook.
Oh, it was Facebook.
It could have been Twitter, but it was...
Making this like a trusted device, like you...
Yeah.
You cannot do that, though, right?
And it would still prompt the fallback from you not making it a trusted device
but still enabling two-factor authentication would be it using a second method to send you a key or something, right?
Yeah, it would basically send me a text on my cell phone.
Right.
That's two-factor authentication.
Which is more like true two-factor, which you would expect.
Yeah, what it was offering to do was, on this machine, you don't have to do that,
and you don't have to have a password.
I recognize this machine, this machine is safe, and why would you do that?
Because machines can get lifted and in other people's possessions.
People should be warned, yeah.
I mean, it wasn't like they were saying, only this IP.
It works on different IPs from that machine.
It's just really bad, really bad idea.
Or if it expired, maybe more frequently than never, like making a machine a...
But again, that then changes the user experience.
The user forgets, they go away, and then they get reminded, it's deactivated, it turns into a whole hassle.
If you're going to make me do two-factor authentication, at least make me do it.
Don't give me a shortcut of round it after I've jumped through all the hoops.
That's fair.
Yeah, I mean, what are we talking about?
Are we serious?
Hello?
I don't think we are.
But then again, it's only social media.
I don't really care, but I know a lot of other people do,
and I know a lot of companies, for some ill-advised reason, put a lot of stock into these things,
and they can really get hurt by it because people take it too seriously.
Thank you.
So yeah, if you see all kinds of animal porn on Disney's Instagram account,
it's probably not them doing it, it's probably somebody having a laugh.
Maybe you should have a laugh too and move on.
Or it could be their next release.
It could be some other business proposition they're planning.
Okay, what else?
A hacker claims to have obtained data on one billion Chinese citizens.
Now that's interesting.
The hacker has claimed to have stolen the personal information of that many people from a Shanghai police database
in what would amount to one of the biggest data breaches in history, if found to be true.
The anonymous hacker, identified only as ChinaDan, posted on hacker forum breach forums last week,
offering to sell more than 23 terabytes of data for 10 bitcoin.
That's equivalent to about, well, it doesn't matter because it's gone down since I said that.
On May 22, the Shanghai National Police database was leaked.
This database contains many terabytes of data and information on billions of Chinese citizens.
That's according to a post from the hacker.
Databases contain information on one billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records,
including name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, and all crime slash case details.
The identity of the hacker is not clear.
From the Guardian, they were unable to verify the authenticity of the post,
and several numbers in the sample database were no longer in use when contacted by the Guardian,
and officials in China have yet to respond.
But boy, a billion people, that's one hell of a database.
Don't know what you do with it exactly, but somebody done messed up.
You get a lot of names.
Yeah.
Yeah, lots of names, addresses.
You could cross-reference that with lots of data.
Yeah.
Data breaches become valuable in connection with other types of data from other data breaches,
and when you cross-reference and pull that all together,
you can begin to create a pretty accurate map of people's movements, their likes, et cetera.
So it can be scary what can be done with this type of thing, especially that massive amount of data.
You know what's scary?
How fast the time goes by.
Yeah.
We're out of time.
OTH at 2600.com is our email address.
We'll see you in two weeks.
Thanks, everybody.
Bye.
Hi this is Jake Aftersuff Nuraski, former
Talibire Wetlands Preserve. When I'm not driving my gas-guzzling SUV, texting my friends on my handheld mobile device, or listening to
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