not pay the fifty dollars anytime and that problem has grown so rampantly
that it cost the city one hundred million dollars last year
Paul DiRienzo, New York
The previous program was Economic Update with Richard Wolff
heard Wednesdays at 6.30 p.m. here on WBAI New York 99.5 FM
and WBAI.org online
stay tuned for Off The Hook it is now one minute past 7 p.m.
Telecom in New Zealand advises that the number you have called has either
changed or is no longer obtainable
please call your international directory service
Telecom in New Zealand advises that the number you have called has either
changed or is no longer obtainable
please call your international directory service
Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep
Thank you for listening to Off The Hook
Off The Hook
Off The Hook
And a very good evening to everybody, Thurgoom is Off The Hook, Emmanuel Goldstein here with you
joined tonight by Kyle
Yes, over here. How are you doing? Over in Skype land we have Alex
We do, good evening. We have Gila
Good evening. And we have Rob
Good evening. I went backwards this time. You're all there, that's the important thing
and we're here again for another
action-packed edition of Off The Hook followed at eight o'clock on YouTube by
Overtime
where you have the opportunity to call us and berate us for all the things that
we get wrong, which inevitably we will get something wrong but we try to get
most things right
Anything new in the world of high-tech or just adventures in our
lives, folks?
No?
Just your normal sort of roller coaster ride through this
media environment in which we live. Yeah, we're all just trying the best
we can to muddle through it all
We continue to prepare for the HOPE conference coming up in July
12th through 14th. We're getting a bunch of submissions, we're getting a bunch of
workshops and speaker submissions. You can go to the webpage hope.net to get
all the information
as to how you can participate, facts about the location
activities, things like that and there's going to be more and more information
added as the date approaches. It's only January, I know, but
events like this take a long time to prepare and so much coordination so
it's something that we're quite excited about and we hope to see you there as
well. Go ahead, Alex.
I wanted to share with you guys that
I was speaking with Virgil today
our friend Virgil who is unfortunately
in federal prison for
attending a blockchain conference and presenting at it
in the blockchain conferences in North Korea. I'm sure many of our listeners, long-time
listeners know
all about the saga and I don't think we need to go into all the details now
but I do want to share with you that he's doing well
he's been transferred over to a facility in
Michigan as opposed to Pennsylvania so it's a bit more difficult for me to see
him especially with the broken leg. I hope to see him soon though.
He sends his regards and he also sent to me
a poem that is written by Richard Brodigan
in 1967 and
I think it's a short poem. I think we should read it to the listeners
because it's very interesting and I think
even though it's by this Haydn-Ashbery
poet written in 1967, it really captures the zeitgeist of what we are going through
in society right now. Are we clear for poetry on this show? Hang on a second, let's
check to make sure. I don't want to violate any rules.
I'm told if it's short and pertinent
we can do poetry but we should not make a habit of it
is what I'm told. That's true, yes. So the title of this poem
written in 1967 by Richard Brodigan is All Watched Over by Machines
of Loving Grace. Here it goes. I like to think in the sooner
the better of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together
mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.
I like to think right now please of a cybernetic
forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past
computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think
it has to be the cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and
joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and
sisters, all watched over by machines of loving
grace. That's it. I like the concept of deer
strolling peacefully by computers. I'm picturing that in my mind right now.
It's remarkably natural and I could
definitely see that. But doesn't it also sound like it might
have been generated by a large language model in
some respect? Like if you ask AI to write a poem. I hope
you didn't just read us an AI-generated poem.
I did not. This was written literally in 1967.
If AI told you that, it makes things up.
I'm going to look this up later. In fact, our listeners are
already looking this up. I'm sure they are. I hope they are.
God help you if you've deceived us here. Yes, go ahead, Rob.
I do like that this is a nice little lesson that the
word cybernetic is a lot older than a lot of people would
assume it is. People were already thinking about
this stuff 60 years ago now. 100 years ago, people
were thinking about things like this. Definitely a lot of the
mistakes that we have already made have been predicted in the past, where
we let computers make decisions for us and humans are kind of
put in the back seat, knowing all too well that we're going
down a bad road. In the end, we'll be listened to.
I like it. It's a very optimistic or sort of utopian
lens, but I think it might need a dose of
realism as far as how far down the road or wrong road we might have gone. It
takes quite a bit to reach even close to that
ideal in many respects, but I like the idea of
the empowerment or the freeing nature of these machines watching over in a
loving way. Wow, it elevates the technology
almost to like a deity or something or caretaker of sorts, but
in other words, enabling people to have a deeper connection with their natural
environment or state of being
enhanced by all of this technological good,
but I don't know. It might be a rocky road to turn your
course and change directions. Yeah, yeah, and
no doubt we will make some mistakes before we
go in the right direction. Go ahead, Gila. I loved it.
I looked it up and I found it so I could read it also because
I work better when I see stuff, and I loved the progression
of it from the sooner the better to right now please to
it has to be of a cybernetic ecology. We're free of our labors and joined back
to nature. I loved it. I love the image of this
place where we're all working in it together and the
computer is there, but it's not the only
thing. Oh my god, Alex, thank you for this. This
is a beauty I needed today. Well, you know, this isn't what we
expected to be discussing here tonight, probably, you know, poetry
sent over from Virgil, but you know, don't thank me, thank Virgil. This was
something that he found in a book that he was reading
and he shared it with me because he thought we would find this all
interesting, and to add to that, Kyle, your point
about the last lines here, all watched over by the machines of loving grace,
that's exactly what Virgil and I were discussing earlier today,
and that was his favorite line as well, and there is this notion of harmony
and peace, and it's a great poem. It's so fascinating, so prescient,
so on point. You know, I hate to, you know,
cast aspersions here, but there's something kind of chilling about being
watched over by machines. I just, you know, I'm a little uneasy
about that, but I'd like to be watching them,
making sure they're doing what they're supposed to be doing rather than having
them watching me, you know what I mean? Good luck with that.
Go ahead, Gayla. Sorry, side note because, you know, I
started as the off-the-hook research department and it never really went away.
So Richard Brodigan, his fifth book of poetry was called All Watched Over by
Machines of Loving Grace. He distributed it under copy left in
1967. He distributed it under copy left. Was there a copy left in 1967?
Apparently so. Retains copyright but grants permission to reprint any poem
in this book on the condition that magazines, books, and newspapers must be
given away free if they reprint this poem. Well,
he certainly got the gist of it, but I didn't know it
went back that far. That's amazing. Learning a lot tonight already.
That's pretty incredible. Okay, moving on to
various things that are going on in our world.
MTA. We're all familiar with the MTA, right? Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
I am. Become familiar. You know what I like about the MTA?
I like that they can tackle a problem, right? And by the time they're
finished tackling the problem, they've created a whole new problem that
made us forget about the first problem. Yeah, it's a special skill when they're
able to do that. They recently spent $700,000
installing these subway gates that are
supposed to keep out fare beaters, because apparently that's the biggest
problem that we have right now, are people
jumping over the turnstiles. So they made these
big Parisian-looking guards that enter the subway system.
If you've ever been to Paris, they have a similar look,
except these ones have a different feature
where apparently, and if you go to the Sutphen Boulevard and Archer Avenue
Station in Queens, maybe Gila and Rob, you can hop out there
during the show. It's pretty close by, I think.
And check this out. All you have to do is
walk up to the gate and then lean over and wave your hand
on the other side as if you were on the other side exiting.
And guess what? The gates open. They just open because
they assume that you're a person on the other side who wants to leave.
So apparently nobody realized that when the gates open,
people can go the other way as well as the way you intend for them to go.
And so the gate opens for about five seconds and
it doesn't even look suspicious. It looks like you just
placed your hand next to the thing and there you go, walking through the gate.
They're red-faced with shame and embarrassment.
Apparently it costs $700,000 just for this test subway station to install
subway gates. That's incredible. It costs more than most people's
houses just to install one subway station's subway gates.
Okay, they have to redesign this. But, you know,
any hacker in 20 seconds would have figured this out.
Why don't they run these things by before they install them,
you know, and have people like us show them all the potential problems?
Any thoughts? Kayla, go ahead. Well, okay, so I'm a little
embarrassed to admit this, but we saw these gates.
We walked into the subway station and it was 11 o'clock at night. We
were tired. We didn't notice that this was a possibility. So we're just like,
hey, this is spiffy, and tap the Omnicards and went in.
Had it not been 11 o'clock at night, actually, you know,
I feel like this is a train station that will help you get
to St. John's. So if people are on the fence about
going to help in person, you could go see these subway gates.
Well, I have a feeling they're going to be in a dump pretty soon.
I don't know if they're going to last that long. One never knows. Well, I mean,
it's international embarrassment right now,
basically showing that the MTA installed these things.
It's actually, it's worse. If you consider this a problem, it's worse than what we
have right now, where people hop over gates.
Look, at least when people hop over gates, they're pretty much broadcasting
the fact that they're stealing a subway fare. They're
hopping over the gate. This, it doesn't look like you're doing
anything wrong. It looks like you're just simply going through an open gate.
So they've made it, they've made fare beating a lot more respectable
and easy as well. Rob? This also seems, and we're watching the
video of this demonstration, which was put on TikTok by
an account called KingspiderTV, and there are two eyes in each eye.
Yeah, that's the only person that seems to have done it so far, because every
every news story I've read about this leads back to him, as if he's the only
one. And this really seems like something that
should have been picked up in the most cursory of product testing. This seems
like such an obvious way to get past this, and how did
they not, I don't know, set one of these up and try it before
spending $700,000 on outfitting this? This, it's,
it's really, it's simple, and it's brainless, and it's
hilarious to watch. Wow. Yeah, you know, okay, so let's help
them out. Let's think of solutions here. How
would you do this differently? Kyle, do you have an idea?
Relocate the motion sensor, like put it on the front somehow.
Okay. Much further away. Make it so it's hard to reach.
Maybe on the surface furthest away from, from the corner of the
entrance to the turn gate, and low somehow. So you'd have to reach
all the way over and down, like further than you could with, you'd basically have
to roll over it to actually get any kind of hand or object in front
of it. What if we had facial recognition for
people leaving, and their face has to be registered as somebody who had entered
before, and if it doesn't register, the gate
will not open? Why is everybody frowning? Why is
everybody frowning at me? Can we make it smell-based?
Well, we could. We could, we could add to it. What, is this a bad idea? We don't like
that? You can't limit people who exit just to
people who have been registered as entering, because that, that traps
anybody who happens to be born in the subway system. And then you have great
songs written about it. You know, Charlie and MTA. Yeah, yeah,
look it up. Go ahead, Alex. Yeah, I was thinking more
along the lines of what you were thinking, Emmanuel.
Perhaps some kind of guillotine type of situation that, you
know, if you try to reach around here to, to trigger the sensor, you receive
some kind of amputation. I shouldn't have
mentioned Paris. I shouldn't have mentioned
anything that would get you thinking about guillotines. Yeah.
Okay, look, there's, there's something else. You could, you could maybe group all
the exits on one side, and all the entrances on
another side that way. But then again, the gate's going to open,
and you can still go through the, but then it's obvious you're going through
an exit, because, but then someone has to be watching. You
know what the problem is? The problem is, there's nobody watching,
because they laid off all the employees and replaced them with machines. So,
you know, in the old days, if somebody jumped the turnstile,
someone at least could shout at them and say, hey, don't do that, and if there's a
cop nearby, they might do something about it.
Now, it's, it's, you know, you supposedly save all this money.
Well, okay, people are taking advantage of that, and
they're, they're, they're hopping gates, and there's nobody there to chastise
them. Go ahead, Gila. Oh, all I was going to say is, you
know, I'm in my 40s, so if we could not say guillotine, I would really appreciate
that. Wow, you know, I'm sorry, I didn't even realize that. I was going to say it's
guilla, guillotine, guillotine, guillotine.
Gila is older than that. All right. So, thank you. All right.
We will, we're most likely to be used more in the future.
I just want to emphasize what you're saying, because that is exactly the,
in the, like, kind of cross, uh, intersection of returns
for, like, having employees there, and then sort of
automating this, but factoring in fare evasion, and now they have to factor in
failures, and the costs to, like, redesign them.
So, that's, like, an additional full design life cycle, or something,
redesign life cycle, and I don't know. It, it's problem solving that
is about replacing supervision, because they want
supervision to be basically remote, and automated, and
only on cameras, or something. That's how this is
observed, and then they're blame, they just, they just blame the,
um, the people that are trying to get places,
instead of, maybe, maybe the cumbersome nature of the whole system, or the
expense, or other, other factors that are driving
this kind of activity. See, this is the thing I have, I have
trouble with, and I'm reading from the New York Post, so, you know,
take that for what it's worth, but they say the 8th Avenue Penn Station A, C, and E
train is, is going to be the second station to
get the new setup, and this is a quote, which cost about
$700,000 to install. Now, that tells me that every time they install this,
that's another 700 grand thrown down, you know,
into the sewer, and, um, is, is fare beating that much of a problem that you have to
invest $700,000 per station
to tackle the problem, and, you know, the answer to my question is, is a couple
paragraphs up, because they, they claim that there is 690 million dollars were
lost from fare beaters in 2022.
690, you know, I would think that was, that was the revenue,
how much was, 690 million, does somebody want to divide that by $2.90
and see how many people that is? That's, that's a lot of fare beaters.
That's more than I thought. Well, that's, that's probably repeat, that's probably
incidents, there's probably repeat offenders. Well, why shouldn't that count
twice? If they, if they, if they've, you know,
jump a turnstile 10 times, it's still 10 fares, right?
Sure, okay, I'm sorry, we're agreeing then.
These numbers are staggering. There's still a ton of people. Yeah, I obviously have no
clue as to what's involved in running a subway system. But there's other design
elements, there's other things that can be done,
I think, I think. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not a
civil engineer. Is it really, is it really that much of a crisis? I mean, you know, if
it is a crisis where, you know, more people are evading
fares than ever before, you have to ask yourself, why are more people evading
fares than ever before? Do people hate the subway? Do people feel
it's too expensive? These are the issues to focus on, rather
than pouring money into something that is eventually going to fail at some
point. I mean, even without the ridiculous wave your hand bug,
you still have the gate is open for five seconds bug, which, you know, you
need the gate to be open to allow slow-moving people to get through or
people with luggage or children. But if that's not the case, then the
gate's open for five seconds and people easily can,
you know, can piggyback onto your fare. You know, in the past, or in the
present, actually, all you have to do is jump over a turnstile. It seems simple,
but it's pretty obvious what you're doing.
And, you know, I don't really see that as
something that needs to be phased out if you're looking to identify who is doing
this or catch them in the process. Rob? The other thing about trying to
throw numbers on how much the MTA is supposedly, you know, quote-unquote,
losing to fare beaters is the number is half
imaginary because how many of those fare beaters
would have ridden the system if they had to pay? We don't know. We can only
theorize. We can only guess. And anybody trying to claim that people
who haven't paid for a service like this are actual
financial losses to the agency, I don't think that calculates.
I don't think that works. And in the meantime, there are so
many reasons that really, in a perfect world,
which this is not, we would have public infrastructure that
has things like public transportation available without cost to the user
because it would be, you know, supported enough by local government and things
like that. But, you know, the two dollars and ninety
cents or whatever that they're not getting from somebody
fare beating, I don't know if that calculates to
some kind of profit when you spend seven hundred thousand dollars on something
like this. I will say, though, it's good for
accessibility. People with special mobility needs and
things like that will find something like this a lot easier to use
legitimately. But apart from that, I don't see that this is solving a
six hundred whatever thousand dollar problem. No, a million. Six hundred
million, rather. Yeah, it's an insane number.
I just I couldn't believe that when I read it. But, you know, it makes me
think of cities like Berlin, which, by the
way, their train drivers went on strike
today. So there were no trains. But when you get on the U-Bahn or the
S-Bahn, there is no turnstile. You buy a ticket,
you have a ticket. Nobody checks it. But if they do check
to see if you have a ticket and you don't have one, the fine is pretty
pretty stiff. And people generally pay the fare. And that's true of
many European cities. I don't know why that kind of system
can't work here. You see some of it on the select buses,
you know, where you're supposed to either get your
ticket from the machine at the bus stop or you
use your Omnicard and you don't actually go
through a system where somebody is checking to make sure you paid.
But if you're challenged, you'd better have proof that you
have a ticket. Kyle, go ahead. I will say if it's seven hundred
seven hundred thousand for this trial entrance to the system,
it is this is the instance where people like us and the public are allowed
to test and play with this thing. And if it is
actually a multi-million dollar
budget liability that something like this, if
rolled out or scaled up across the system,
actually fixes, then it I guess makes sense to spend the
money, even if they have to redesign, refit it a couple times through this
process where the public actually can put hands on it and try this
kind of stuff. So I think we are actively actually a part of that right
now, definitely reporting it and people playing with it.
But, you know, who else is part of this is the rest of the
world, because this isn't the first subway system. There are lots of them
and this issue has been dealt with by others. Oh, that's a great point.
Now, how did they deal with it? Are there any where it works and,
you know, find the one where it works and try to reply to New York City, which, you
know, arguably is the busiest? I bet you, though, the place with
the lowest fare evasion, kind of like what Rob was, along the lines of what Rob
was saying, is it's probably other factors than some
gate or, you know, advanced access technology. One thing that's
unique about New York, which I certainly hope never changes, is
that you do not have to show anything when you leave.
Other cities are different and that enables them to
charge more if you're going a further distance or if you're traveling at a
particular time of day. Cities like Washington, D.C. do
that. You have to show your card on the way out as
well as the way in. That's something we should avoid at all
cost, but it would allow for more control of the people
inside. You would have to have some kind of
ticket that matched the ticket when you went in.
It's also in addition to more tracking of people, more monitoring of our
whereabouts, exactly where we are going. Now they can
tell when you enter a subway station. They can't tell where
you left and that's really important that we preserve that.
It's really important that we preserve one fare for the entire metropolitan
area and hopefully we don't give that up.
Okay, that said, more in the world of MTA fun,
I don't know if you heard about this, but there were
some break-ins recently and the MTA is planning to explore
biometric technology to prevent them. We're talking about break-ins to
off-limits areas of subway trains, yards and things like that. A bunch
of kids actually broke into a train in a yard and took it
for a little spin. I'm not kidding, they actually did this.
A 16-year-old was arrested in fact for
being a part of that. Yeah, there is a need for better locks
apparently because unauthorized people are
slipping into the cabs. In the future, they say, we will look at
technology. There's an opportunity for locks of the
biometric or a code, but what we want is a simple and fast
solution that we can implement in weeks, not months or years.
That's where they're headed right now, talking about just having more
physical locks. But in the future, we can expect things like retina scans
or fingerprints or facial recognition.
This is for employees. This is for people that should be in the cab of a subway
train. I don't really have a problem with that kind of verification
for somebody who is actually driving a subway train as opposed to
people who are entering the subway system. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it's perfectly reasonable and I'm sure they'll have a saliva-based one
where employees just spit on the train and it
opens the door. Well yeah, I guess that's a prevalence of
that. The MTA does not keep statistics on how
many times train crew cabs have been broken into, but
they've seen an increase in other forms of subway mayhem,
including reports of people riding outside of or on top of trains.
Not a good idea. I don't care how much fun you think you're having, it's not a
good idea. They blame the cab trespassing
incidents on keys falling into the wrong hands
because of theft and the duplication of keys,
former employees not returning the keys, people taking pictures of keys and
someone duplicating them based on the picture because that is a thing.
So they say what we're focused on is tightening up a process that
over time seems to have had some leaks in it. That's an understatement.
The focus on cutting off access to restricted areas of trains comes as the
MTA has in recent years experienced a surge
in social media-fueled subway surfing incidents along with nearly 1,750
instances in 2023 of pranksters pulling emergency
brakes on trains and break-ins to train crew cabs.
I don't understand what's clever about pulling the emergency brake.
A spokesman says this is yet another stupid thing that some kids probably
think is a funny prank. There's a very
significant human toll on this as well.
The spokesperson says, I implore any teenagers, find your kicks doing
something else, but vandalizing trains, stealing keys, stealing conductors'
belongings is illegal. It delays thousands of New Yorkers every
day and in the instance of the yard movement, could have put one of our
employees in danger. Not to mention the whole system if that
train actually got out onto the rail tracks.
Yes, Rob, go ahead. I can totally see the reasoning behind
something like this for the cab area of a subway
train. It's not any publicly
accessible areas that are being put behind this. It's areas for employees
only. We were recently watching a TV show
from the 90s which involved people just wailing on the door to the cockpit
of an airplane to get into where the pilots would be,
and it reminded me how that was before certain events in our
history that shored up that security because there are plenty of
very good reasons to keep people out of the
driving area of a train or an airplane or
things like that. I like that they mentioned in this
article that they're exploring locks with a biometric or a code, for
example, because just a biometric alone, that's
prone to failure. If you get a cut on the
wrong finger, your fingerprint won't scan the same way
and things like that. There are no reasons
not to protect the people in the position of controlling
trains throughout our great transit system. By the way,
speaking of trains, I guess we should probably mention this as well.
A bit of fun for people that ride the subway in New York.
You may have noticed this. You may not have noticed this, but if you look now,
you will, and that's the fact that every time a train pulls into a station,
you will see the conductor in the middle. Watch that conductor.
What they do every single time they pull into a station
is they point. They point with their finger at a particular sign. It's called
pointing and calling. It's something that actually
originated in Japan, and it's spread in various places. It
actually started in the early 1900s. Train drivers were calling out the
status of signals. Back in those days, steam locomotives
were quite common, and there was wild noises,
steam and smoke, that made cooperation between two
drivers very difficult, also made rail journeys dangerous.
Drivers had to call out loudly to hear each other, and
pointing was a way of calling attention to something that
should be observed, such as a sign or a signal.
So you'll find that working in various
countries in Asia. In the MTA in New York City,
before opening the train doors, subway conductors are required
to point to a black and white striped board. Another thing to notice on subway
platforms, every station has this, a striped board
located opposite of the conductor's window, and they do this every time a
train pulls into a station. Now, the boards are located at the
middle of the platform, so that when the conductor can see the
sign, both ends of the train have reached the platform.
It's safe to open the train doors at that point.
Now, this procedure was implemented in 1996, after a series of incidents where
doors opened in the tunnel. The procedure shows that the conductor
is paying attention. If the conductor cannot see the striped
board, they are not permitted to open the doors.
In Toronto, they also use a similar system. Before opening the train doors,
subway guards are required to point to a green triangle
installed on the platform wall, opposite the conductor's window, every time
a train pulls into a station. The procedure was implemented after a series
of incidents where conductors opened the doors on the wrong side of the train.
Always unpleasant. The procedure is used to focus the conductor's
attention. Now, you might think this is silly.
You might even be tempted to point back at the conductor when they're pointing,
which, you know, is silly and childish, but
some people do it. But bear in mind, a 1994 study by the Railway Technical
Research Institute showed that pointing and calling
reduced mistakes by almost 85 percent when doing a simple task.
Yeah, so watch where you point. Go ahead, Alex.
In fact, I actually have a poem about pointing and calling that I'd like to read.
Another poem? Yeah, no, I'm joking. Yeah, but I do, I do,
about this very subject, sometimes there are two of those zebra-striped
boards that are towards the ceiling on each, on the same side of the platform.
Can you figure out why? On the same side, facing the same
direction? Facing the same direction, on the same
side of the platform. Sometimes there are two, but in
different locations. Well, the only thing I could think of
is that there might be different length trains that go through that station.
That's exactly right, you got it. Can't get one past you.
Well, you know, I grew up on the subways, so yeah.
Gila, did you have your hand up, Gila? No, I was just, I was like, I know the
answer to that question. I was waiting to be called on.
Okay, all right, you'll get the next one.
Letter time, you can write to us, oth at 2600.com, if you have something to say to
OffTheHook here on WBAI. Hello to the OffTheHook crew. I'm
reading about how there are not enough people signing up for the HOPE
conference. At the same time, while buying my own
ticket recently, I realized that you could pay for your tickets with Bitcoin,
something which I've owned since back in 2015 and yet have never used to buy
anything ever, except to diversify into other coins
back in 2019 or so. There might be thousands, 0.15
Bitcoin at 40k sounds like thousands. I would totally like to donate some of
this to some people who want to come but can't afford it. Thing is,
I don't even know how to get the money out of my own account.
I got this all so long ago, but I have all the passwords, etc.
If you can do it, I'd love to give you like 10 tickets.
Make a thing out of it. Generate more publicity. I trust you folks because I've
been listening to your show for, damn, maybe 15 years. Just a thought.
Thank you, Alan, for that extremely generous offer.
We'll contact you for sure. It can be challenging.
It can be confusing. Oh my god. I've dabbled in Bitcoin
and cryptocurrency a bit over the years. It's incredible. You
reach both ends of the spectrum where things are so incredibly secure that
it's insane and then within five minutes you're doing something that's so
incredibly insecure that it's also insane. For instance, giving out your
bank account information password and account to a company you've never
heard of before. But yeah, you're supposed to do it that way.
That's how it's done. Sure. There's so many weird
contradictions, but it's an interesting system. It's a good
system and a lot of people have a lot of money
they don't realize about and a lot of people have lost a lot of money too
by losing hard drives, losing passwords, not getting access. It's fascinating.
It's chaos and that's kind of what I enjoy most about it. But yes,
Bitcoin is definitely a possibility here. So again, thank you for that very
generous offer. I want to just put it out there that
certainly if this is something that they want to do, we will make sure
that a contribution like that is a part of some kind of
scholarship or something for people who can't otherwise
get the chance to go to an event like HOPE. So
thank you for that idea and if that's something that
can happen. But be very careful when you're
working with these things because as E pointed out, it's
incredibly complex and you should be sort of checking your work and very
methodical about using these systems. Well, it's
we accept it and we can get tickets to people using that method.
Like I say, I dabble sometimes but I'm very ignorant on the whole process.
I'm just kind of amazed how I'm told that this is
how people do things anonymously.
But then when you want to do something involving Bitcoin,
you have to give out all this personal information and be verified and
it just seems like it's not really that anonymous.
Well, I think a lot of it happens by proxies and people
sort of diversify and do all these kinds of
things to layer. I know mixing is another thing that happens with
exchanges and currencies and a lot of that
exists because it's not a formal regulated currency in the
traditional sense. So, yeah, it's sort of bizarre by design.
Yeah, okay. And I respect that for sure. Go ahead, Alex.
Well, I think it's a bit of a misconception that Bitcoin and
cryptocurrencies are very often used for anonymous
transactions. When you have to think about this,
the blockchain is a public ledger. Everything is out there. It's public. So,
if you can associate an identity with a wallet, you know what those transactions
are. It becomes more difficult to track and trace currency if you put them
through mixers or coin swapping type systems or to track currency through
an exchange that can become kind of difficult as well. But for the most part,
there isn't a lot of anonymity here. There are certain
ways to preserve your anonymity but a lot of KYC
requirements have eviscerated that to a certain extent.
There are separate cryptocurrencies that are designed with privacy-enhancing
technologies in mind but those are accepted in far fewer places.
So, it's certainly tricky but I think the
barrier to entering this market of web 3
technologies is getting lower and lower. And, you know, quick plug here for
Ethereum and the Ethereum name service. That's, I think,
why things are getting a lot simpler because of things like ENS and the
naming system that is allowing you to have easy access to
areas on the blockchain by naming them with things like domains.
So, instead of having a long wallet address that relates to
a manual Goldstein that's ridiculously long, you can't memorize it, you can't,
you know, if you cut and paste it and you're missing a digit, you send
cryptocurrency to it, it might just be gone forever.
You could perhaps get goldstein.eth and assign that
just like you would point a domain name to an IP address to an address in the
blockchain. So, there's a lot of new stuff that's
coming out and I would say that that ENS or Ethereum is new and
but Ethereum names are new. Just to be clear, you are involved with this,
correct? Just to be clear, I am. I'm the general
counsel of it and that's something I recently
started but it's solving the type of problems
that you are exactly describing. Well, you know,
as far as being anonymous, I would think the ransomware people
would disagree and say that it's quite preferred as a method of
staying anonymous because they almost always insist on being paid in Bitcoin.
Well, they prefer that, right? And they'll often use
wallets that are associated with exchanges that have very lax or no KYC
requirements. KYC being know your customer
requirements. That's certainly the case there but it still
is trackable and traceable. You can see exactly where they put the money,
what they do with it, whether it stays in one place, whether they're edging it out
into fiat currency and very often that money can be frozen
and clawed back after a ransom payment but that's
dangerous. You can see what they do with it. I think you can even see
their balance which seems like an odd
thing to be able to see but as far as getting back something,
how would you even know who the people were?
You can watch your money disappear and go somewhere else
but how would you even start the process of getting it back?
Well, there are certain ways to use legal process to get that back if the
money ends up in a separate exchange or to use the powers of
law enforcement if you're working with them to freeze that particular currency
in an exchange and then once it's frozen essentially as the proceeds of a crime
just like you would freeze the proceeds of
some drug lord or something like that that would be in a bank
account, you can use those same legal remedies to freeze the proceeds of a
ransomware event and then once it's frozen, it ends
another story in terms of getting it back because some of those exchanges
don't do business with US persons or don't want to have any interaction
with the US government or don't respond to legal process
so that can take a little bit longer to get the money back but
knowing where it is and freezing it are the first two steps to getting
either stolen money back or money that you paid for
some kind of ransom but I will say this though, it does
very much anger the threat actors that might have been responsible for your
ransomware event if you pay them the money, they give you
the decryption keys and then you essentially burn them by freezing that
money if they have any kind of foothold in
your organization or they know another vulnerability that
by which they might be able to compromise your system. Well, they still
have your data, they could still release that and that's oftentimes more harmful.
Well, you know, according to most of the negotiations that you have with these
ransomware threat actors, one of the things you always negotiate for is the
deletion of your data. And how do you verify that? Well, you can't
really but they will give you some kind of deletion tree, right? So
they'll give you like a text file that shows
the pathway through which like a command like
rm-r had been run and that's supposed to
indicate to you that the data is deleted and you're going to believe that
you're going to believe that that's an actual
deletion. Obviously, it's pretty easy to replicate or
you know you can just have a copy of the data but these guys live and die by
their word. You know, if there's one instance
where somebody negotiated for the deletion of their data
and it wasn't actually deleted and it was subsequently released, then
fewer people are going to trust them in the future. Yeah, there's nothing worse
than being an untrusted ransomware person.
Go ahead, Kyle. I just want to say this is a really
big thorny issue that I mean Alex is speaking from one perspective
on certain particular hypothetical scenarios
and I just want to point out that the things like
like the no one is using things like bitcoin or cryptocurrency and
and honestly telling themselves that just by virtue of
transacting in that currency they are somehow completely
anonymous. I think the point here, the real
the crux of it, the thing that we're saying
in short is that it can be an aspect of a larger effort
to be completely anonymous which many actors on the internet will use.
It can become very helpful and we named off a couple of the techniques.
There are a lot more ways and I think even like
the know your customer thing, that's more of a like hey I want
cryptocurrency to become fiat or some that's an exchange thing that's like I
need to get this into cash. That isn't always everyone's
prerogative and the point Alex was making about
policing it and trying to bring the sort of law like assuming
actors care at all about that
ends up I think bottom line a multi-jurisdictional issue
because these exchanges are diffuse, disperse
everywhere and nowhere on you know out in the ocean and in space.
They're as we said bizarre by design if it's for real people trying to be
anonymous with this as one aspect of their larger effort
not the average person buying pizza with crypto.
Yeah do people still do that? Yeah there's
so much out there that people have lost access to
or I've even heard of cases where people
have this immense amount that they've gotten somehow either by investing
early or through some kind of a hack or
god knows what and they have this huge amount of
bitcoin or other cryptocurrency just
sitting around that they really can't do anything with and it's
you know it's bizarre to think of there's this
this number sitting in a wallet someplace that can be converted to
actual cash and used to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people
and you know one thing that I hope that all of us work on in the future is
figuring out how to make those little numbers those
little digital numbers into something real
that can help people you know and there must be lots of
people who are working to get to that stage because
right now it's mayhem it's complete and total mayhem
and it's fascinating as a result but I'm curious where it goes. Well in the
example in the letter I just I would just end with you know
putting that found currency towards like I kind of
characterize scholarship or just information and experience where
people can learn about and share or even present about
technology that's an interesting way I mean I
don't know if it's necessarily I mean from the angle of
carbon or whatever processing and
making that value happen for someone who would otherwise not be able to go to a
conference I don't know is it better or less
carbon than buying pizza with with that same amount of
of cryptocurrency maybe it's a lot of pizza I don't know but
it does need to be made greener that's that's for sure yeah but also
what you spend it on right like because they all it could consume a lot in
processing and then you could spend it on
your yacht made out of a precious metal like it's that in and of itself will not
ultimately be a very friendly and beneficial thing to very
many people. Do we have that kind of scrutiny on all types of currency all types of payment do we say
is this going to you know a environmentally
friendly product? No I'm saying it just doubles
the effect right versus I don't know your your handcrafted currency.
Wow any other thoughts on on cryptocurrency as we have about
one minute left in the show? Yeah where'd the time go?
Cartoon drawings of ugly monkeys are still worthless.
Oh that's true yes I forgot about no one's talking about that anymore
are they? NFTs no one's talking about NFTs anymore.
Well I think that they're they're still you know out there and
there's still something of a of a market for them but they have dropped
drastically as as the thing in itself right you know it's like that German
philosophical saying I can't remember Dvorak thing on sick or
something beware of the things in themselves so
an NFT as a thing in itself simply as a token for
being a token I think always had some sort of dubious value but
as a function of something else or as part of some other ecosystem I think
NFTs are actually going to be growing in
utility so you're going to see them incorporated
in other different types of technology not just as a record of stupid ugly
apes somewhere. All right well I look forward to that
Kyle final words. Oh I'm with like where Alex is coming from because a lot of the
original hype was about it being an investment vehicle and I think it should
be looked at more like reams of paper you know it's it's
something we have access to that can be used functionally but it's not something
that is um you know you should sew your
your um fortunes to uh
that's it I think it should just you know we we may
reinterpret what its use is. OTH at 2600.com is our email address please
write to us we are off next week but we'll be back
in two weeks and in just about nine minutes eight minutes or so
we'll be on youtube on channel 2600 or you can just go to 2600.com and click on
the link that's right there on the front page
For Afterhook this is Emanuel have a good night
Hello David
We can't help you if you won't let us in. You're lost
You're in limbo now. I thought I was heating pad
You've worked for the Contra Costa County Central Sanitary District
for 15 years
and they've just let you go that's not even me that's you
you don't know what you're going to do now but you know
as soon as you clear your throat you're going to have to kill your boss
repeating you're in limbo
yes I think you are just what do you want to do
fired from your job as well so you don't have any idea what you're
going to do and you're completely lost now economic
dire straits
David those feelings are coming back. You don't know your name anymore
All the facts are flowing together. Now we're all here to help you David
we all want to help you. Your wallet is missing at this time
also and you're in limbo right now
and you know you're going to have to kill
you're going to have to kill your boss
who still has a job in this great new world
it's poison
nobody has thoughts feelings like that
nobody's human anyway you are scared to leave your house
your house your home what is the meaning of this invasion
you let your legal identification expire
so you cannot have a doctor's appointment
if you get a legal id you will have to leave the house and they will
break in and kick your speaker
angry men destroying their engines on youtube
first time i didn't feel it dance explosion
it's time i feel it and you're completely lost
did you know that he was saying
is there anything else required from the human employees
the threat of violence is required i just didn't want to
just what do you want to do i just didn't want to
i love this it was terrible that there were children in the building
hold on please you don't even know who you are i do know who you're in limbo
limbo i don't know what i'm going to say next there is no planet
i'm all screwed up now
i know the lipstick is on upside down
it's burning continuously
just what do you want to do disciplinary causes of some kind in
return for survival yeah i'm in limbo i can't stand to see
this phone burning i gotta go look at webcams
david david those feelings are coming back
and we need someone to say this really hurts
this is ralph pointer join me and others every wednesday 8 to 9 p.m eastern time
on wba i 99.5 on your radio dial
it would appear the human movement is such that at any moment in history
there are too few that understand possibilities of existence
that would benefit all who inhabit this planet
and are willing to act on this understanding
this program will feature that few what are your views
on these issues that impact your life today
what are your views on america today what are your views on america's future
can we talk call in 2 1 2 2 0 9 2 8 7 7
wednesday 8 to 9 p.m on wba i 99.5 on your radio dial