[00:00.000 --> 00:02.560] [______WBAI]: South Africa, and that's what pressure we're trying to build.
[00:04.600 --> 00:13.540] [______WBAI]: Hazami Barmada, thank you so much for joining us from outside of Blinken's fortress there in the D.C. area.
[00:14.620 --> 00:15.800] [______WBAI]: Thank you so much.
[00:15.940 --> 00:16.900] [______WBAI]: Thank you guys for having me.
[00:19.020 --> 00:22.820] [______WBAI]: And the time now is 7 p.m.
[00:22.980 --> 00:24.720] [______WBAI]: Stay tuned for Off The Hook.
[00:24.720 --> 00:31.680] [______WBAI]: Coming up here on WBAI New York, 99.5 FM and WBAI.org online.
[00:32.100 --> 00:32.960] [______WBAI]: Stay tuned.
[00:44.750 --> 00:47.390] [SPEAKER_00]: This is the Sam Motel announcement.
[00:47.790 --> 00:50.430] [SPEAKER_00]: The number you have dialed has been disconnected.
[00:57.550 --> 00:59.150] [SPEAKER_00]: We're sorry.
[00:59.430 --> 01:05.510] [SPEAKER_00]: The number you have reached, 99.5 WBAI, is now Off The Hook.
[02:51.900 --> 02:53.860] [EVILCORLEY]: And a very good evening to everybody.
[02:53.920 --> 02:55.320] [EVILCORLEY]: The program is Off The Hook.
[02:55.600 --> 02:56.960] [EVILCORLEY]: Emmanuel Goldstein here with you.
[02:57.460 --> 02:59.120] [EVILCORLEY]: Joined tonight by Kyle.
[02:59.620 --> 03:00.160] [KYLEDROSDK]: Right here.
[03:00.700 --> 03:03.880] [EVILCORLEY]: And over there out in the Skype line we have Alex.
[03:04.860 --> 03:05.780] [ALEXURBELS]: You do indeed.
[03:05.780 --> 03:06.280] [ALEXURBELS]: Good evening.
[03:06.460 --> 03:17.860] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, this first show in a couple of weeks and it's not going to be a long one because we're not going to have overtime at 8 o'clock because actually a few things are going on.
[03:18.000 --> 03:20.540] [EVILCORLEY]: We are limping across the finish line here.
[03:20.780 --> 03:23.560] [EVILCORLEY]: A couple of our co-hosts have COVID.
[03:25.200 --> 03:29.000] [EVILCORLEY]: I'm going through something right now at this very moment called an ocular migraine.
[03:29.000 --> 03:29.840] [EVILCORLEY]: Look it up.
[03:29.960 --> 03:30.460] [EVILCORLEY]: It's a lot of fun.
[03:31.260 --> 03:33.120] [EVILCORLEY]: Basically, it involves...
[03:33.120 --> 03:34.940] [EVILCORLEY]: It's like a migraine without the headache part.
[03:35.480 --> 03:38.080] [EVILCORLEY]: You have a bunch of flashing lights in front of your eyes.
[03:38.200 --> 03:43.180] [EVILCORLEY]: It makes it very hard to read things and sometimes it makes it very hard to express yourself.
[03:43.520 --> 03:45.940] [EVILCORLEY]: You start saying nonsense and it feels like you're having a stroke.
[03:46.120 --> 03:50.160] [EVILCORLEY]: But I've been through this for a number of years so it's just...
[03:50.160 --> 03:53.440] [EVILCORLEY]: It's particularly unfortunate what happens right at airtime.
[03:53.600 --> 03:55.040] [EVILCORLEY]: It's happened a couple of times on my other show.
[03:55.580 --> 03:58.160] [EVILCORLEY]: And of course, Alex, you have a broken foot.
[04:00.100 --> 04:00.920] [ALEXURBELS]: Broken leg.
[04:01.100 --> 04:01.240] [ALEXURBELS]: Yes.
[04:01.660 --> 04:01.960] [ALEXURBELS]: Okay.
[04:02.300 --> 04:02.480] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah.
[04:02.580 --> 04:03.160] [EVILCORLEY]: It's even worse.
[04:03.680 --> 04:05.360] [EVILCORLEY]: And Kyle, there's nothing wrong with you.
[04:05.660 --> 04:06.020] [KYLEDROSDK]: No.
[04:07.580 --> 04:08.280] [ALEXURBELS]: That's a first.
[04:08.420 --> 04:10.240] [EVILCORLEY]: We're just so happy about that, Kyle.
[04:10.380 --> 04:11.460] [EVILCORLEY]: Very, very glad for you.
[04:11.460 --> 04:11.760] [KYLEDROSDK]: Thank you.
[04:12.100 --> 04:12.700] [KYLEDROSDK]: Glad you're happy.
[04:12.900 --> 04:13.760] [EVILCORLEY]: I'm thrilled.
[04:14.020 --> 04:14.660] [EVILCORLEY]: Absolutely thrilled.
[04:14.800 --> 04:15.280] [EVILCORLEY]: We'll talk later.
[04:16.460 --> 04:16.900] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah.
[04:16.900 --> 04:18.580] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, okay.
[04:18.780 --> 04:30.460] [EVILCORLEY]: So if I start not making sense and make ridiculously hard sentences for me to say, please take these papers from me and do with them as you will.
[04:30.720 --> 04:40.330] [EVILCORLEY]: But we've had a very active weekend trying to basically get through the Gmail wall.
[04:41.360 --> 04:42.640] [EVILCORLEY]: Alex, you know what I'm talking about.
[04:42.880 --> 04:50.560] [EVILCORLEY]: We're trying to get information out about the conference that we're holding in a few months, the one we have every two years called HOPE.
[04:52.080 --> 04:56.980] [EVILCORLEY]: And Google has decided that they don't want people to know about this for one reason or another.
[04:57.220 --> 05:00.460] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, I'm not saying people at Google have decided this.
[05:00.680 --> 05:03.040] [EVILCORLEY]: In fact, I don't know if there are any people at Google.
[05:03.840 --> 05:13.140] [EVILCORLEY]: It's some kind of an algorithm that we are butting heads with where we send out an announcement, a mass announcement to thousands of people.
[05:13.660 --> 05:17.280] [EVILCORLEY]: And Google says, nope, we're not going to send it to anybody.
[05:17.560 --> 05:18.860] [EVILCORLEY]: We'll put it in their spam box.
[05:19.020 --> 05:19.880] [EVILCORLEY]: They're not going to see it there.
[05:20.350 --> 05:22.120] [EVILCORLEY]: But we don't like what you're saying.
[05:22.240 --> 05:29.140] [EVILCORLEY]: And we're not going to allow you to talk to these people who have basically signed up to be on the mailing list in one way or another.
[05:29.340 --> 05:34.320] [EVILCORLEY]: Either they've expressed an interest in the conference or they've specifically signed up for that mailing list.
[05:34.320 --> 05:39.960] [EVILCORLEY]: So, you know, we've spent days, weeks trying to figure out ways around this.
[05:40.100 --> 05:44.360] [EVILCORLEY]: We have made sure we're in compliance with every single
[05:48.620 --> 05:50.500] [EVILCORLEY]: Internet standard that there is.
[05:50.640 --> 05:51.640] [EVILCORLEY]: There are so many of them.
[05:52.300 --> 06:07.180] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, there's DMARC, DKIM, SPF, all sorts of things that we have admins working day and night to make sure that there's absolutely nothing that makes us unacceptable as far as mailing something out.
[06:07.620 --> 06:09.780] [EVILCORLEY]: And after days of this...
[06:09.780 --> 06:14.340] [EVILCORLEY]: And this is time we really should be spending on things like the magazine, the radio show, the conference.
[06:15.240 --> 06:19.000] [EVILCORLEY]: After days of this, we realize, you know, there's nothing wrong with our end.
[06:19.240 --> 06:20.140] [EVILCORLEY]: It all works.
[06:20.280 --> 06:24.540] [EVILCORLEY]: In fact, we were getting higher scores than Gmail themselves in some categories.
[06:25.740 --> 06:26.800] [EVILCORLEY]: It's the content.
[06:27.120 --> 06:28.000] [EVILCORLEY]: It's the content.
[06:28.000 --> 06:36.620] [EVILCORLEY]: Because, you know, when we wind up sending an innocuous message like, hello, this is a test message or something like that, it goes through fine.
[06:36.800 --> 06:49.800] [EVILCORLEY]: We made a test mailing list with identical properties to our massive mailing list and set up a few Gmail accounts to receive those emails to see if they got categorized as spam.
[06:49.960 --> 06:55.000] [EVILCORLEY]: And when we sent the innocuous message, this is just a test, we got them no problem.
[06:55.140 --> 07:01.600] [EVILCORLEY]: But when we said, hey, there's this hacker conference coming in July that we'd like you to know about.
[07:02.200 --> 07:02.820] [EVILCORLEY]: Spam.
[07:03.240 --> 07:04.160] [EVILCORLEY]: Right away.
[07:04.500 --> 07:05.040] [EVILCORLEY]: Spam.
[07:05.360 --> 07:24.880] [EVILCORLEY]: We have gotten to the point where we have trusted Google with all of this information, all of this privacy, all of this making our decisions for us, that we find ourselves now in a state where they are decreeing what is acceptable speech and what is not.
[07:24.880 --> 07:29.280] [EVILCORLEY]: This is analogous to censorship on a state level.
[07:29.680 --> 07:32.940] [EVILCORLEY]: Worse, in fact, because it transcends borders.
[07:33.060 --> 07:34.580] [EVILCORLEY]: It's all around the world.
[07:35.180 --> 07:38.240] [EVILCORLEY]: Most of our subscribers use Gmail.
[07:38.600 --> 07:39.300] [EVILCORLEY]: It's unfortunate.
[07:39.660 --> 07:47.960] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, it's funny to see the snide remarks on social media platforms that say, well, you should just stop using Gmail then.
[07:48.100 --> 07:49.280] [EVILCORLEY]: We don't use Gmail.
[07:49.320 --> 07:53.640] [EVILCORLEY]: We're trying to avoid Gmail, but so many other people do use Gmail.
[07:53.640 --> 07:55.280] [EVILCORLEY]: We're trying to reach them.
[07:55.420 --> 08:00.580] [EVILCORLEY]: They want to be reached by us, but Google is saying, no, you can't.
[08:01.360 --> 08:05.880] [EVILCORLEY]: And, you know, at this point, I don't really know what we can do about it.
[08:06.580 --> 08:34.660] [KYLEDROSDK]: Well, the principal part of this, I really feel like, is this strange thing of dual meaning or a meaning of a term like hacking that has broad understanding but has different meanings and connotations in different linguistic contexts, and they've kind of just ruled it out.
[08:34.660 --> 09:01.050] [KYLEDROSDK]: The weird thing about that is, though, paradoxically, there are contexts where that term is encouraged and like the kinds of things we talk about here, there are positive attributes to the spirit of and the community of hackers and people that are passionate about figuring things out and taking things apart and understanding technology.
[09:01.860 --> 09:18.520] [KYLEDROSDK]: But, so, I think this emphasis on their protecting user bases has really thrown that term into one category with very little flexibility for the end of time.
[09:18.670 --> 09:19.920] [KYLEDROSDK]: Like, there's no reinterpreting it.
[09:20.020 --> 09:39.930] [KYLEDROSDK]: The positive connotation just doesn't fit with the kinds of security threat models they're implementing, which comes down to the body of communications, people's email, the types of things that would come through on a mailing list.
[09:40.670 --> 09:53.660] [KYLEDROSDK]: And that, to us, I think, totally crazy and a real slap in the face, especially if it's stuff that people have solicited they're interested in and we are cooperating and jumping through all these hoops.
[09:53.860 --> 09:55.880] [EVILCORLEY]: It's more than a slap in the face.
[09:55.880 --> 09:56.810] [EVILCORLEY]: It's an outrage.
[09:57.120 --> 10:00.690] [EVILCORLEY]: It should be illegal to block speech in this manner.
[10:01.620 --> 10:04.460] [EVILCORLEY]: And that is what is going on.
[10:04.620 --> 10:07.900] [EVILCORLEY]: And you believe, Kyle, that is because we use the word hacker.
[10:08.050 --> 10:14.040] [KYLEDROSDK]: Well, that's part of the distinction in the test that you've recently done.
[10:14.160 --> 10:15.970] [KYLEDROSDK]: We've done a lot of other stuff.
[10:16.120 --> 10:18.500] [KYLEDROSDK]: I haven't been as intimately involved.
[10:18.590 --> 10:25.810] [KYLEDROSDK]: I did volunteer as much information about some of the accounts that I've received mailing list mail through to try to help.
[10:25.810 --> 10:27.570] [KYLEDROSDK]: But it just doesn't seem...
[10:27.570 --> 10:35.740] [KYLEDROSDK]: It seems like it's very much directed at our particular mailing list and the kinds of things that we say in a really long, comprehensive announcement, right?
[10:35.830 --> 10:47.660] [KYLEDROSDK]: So if we're talking about get involved in a workshop or give a talk about these types of subjects, we're going to have a lot of different terms and present day threats.
[10:47.830 --> 10:50.020] [EVILCORLEY]: Wait till we start listening to the program, you know?
[10:50.140 --> 10:55.740] [EVILCORLEY]: When you see the kinds of things that are being presented at the conference, they're going to have all kinds of words in there that Google doesn't like.
[10:55.880 --> 11:04.280] [KYLEDROSDK]: If we talk about viruses or malware and that's in several sentences or listed with bullet points, how do you talk about that stuff in a safe way?
[11:04.960 --> 11:08.760] [KYLEDROSDK]: We've also talked about how URLs and other things like that are...
[11:08.830 --> 11:10.160] [EVILCORLEY]: I'll get to that in a second.
[11:10.460 --> 11:13.420] [KYLEDROSDK]: Yeah, that's important too, but it's this sort of wholesale
[11:17.060 --> 11:35.920] [KYLEDROSDK]: blocking off of our particular topics and interest group, which is totally at odds with the way this is, you know, the way that spirit and the things we really care about are actually supported in the wider industry of technology.
[11:35.920 --> 11:37.540] [KYLEDROSDK]: So we really want to...
[11:38.230 --> 11:43.500] [KYLEDROSDK]: We want some equity here because this is just totally wrong and it happens to so many other people that don't have a voice.
[11:43.500 --> 11:44.180] [EVILCORLEY]: Here's the thing.
[11:44.440 --> 11:52.260] [EVILCORLEY]: There are people who are able to get our announcements who are on gmail who have whitelisted us, which is, you know, fine, great.
[11:52.500 --> 11:54.400] [EVILCORLEY]: That solves the problem for you.
[11:54.980 --> 11:57.830] [EVILCORLEY]: You're able to see our announcements, our email.
[11:58.400 --> 12:00.120] [EVILCORLEY]: It doesn't solve the problem, though.
[12:00.260 --> 12:08.460] [EVILCORLEY]: And it's really hard to reach people to say, please, whitelist us because we're being censored if you can't reach them.
[12:08.590 --> 12:10.970] [EVILCORLEY]: If you can't email them, how do you do that?
[12:11.140 --> 12:14.080] [EVILCORLEY]: And the other thing, people don't know how to check.
[12:14.500 --> 12:15.300] [EVILCORLEY]: People don't...
[12:15.300 --> 12:17.970] [EVILCORLEY]: I'm not even sure if Google will tell you this.
[12:18.200 --> 12:20.860] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, have I whitelisted this particular group?
[12:20.940 --> 12:21.970] [EVILCORLEY]: Who have I whitelisted?
[12:22.760 --> 12:28.320] [EVILCORLEY]: And, yeah, if you don't know how to do that, then you're kind of powerless.
[12:28.800 --> 12:38.000] [EVILCORLEY]: Now, we filed a complaint with Gmail, and their typically annoying response was, we will look at this.
[12:38.280 --> 12:47.330] [EVILCORLEY]: It'll take at least two weeks for any changes to be applied, if any changes are applied, and we will not update you on anything that we do.
[12:48.420 --> 12:50.240] [EVILCORLEY]: A big middle finger from them.
[12:50.470 --> 12:52.080] [EVILCORLEY]: So that is how they operate.
[12:52.440 --> 12:53.640] [EVILCORLEY]: You can't speak to people.
[12:54.020 --> 12:55.360] [EVILCORLEY]: At best, you can speak to a bot.
[12:55.560 --> 13:01.120] [EVILCORLEY]: You are at the mercy of the algorithm, and it's really, really terrible.
[13:01.830 --> 13:07.200] [EVILCORLEY]: And, I don't know, Alex, we have to do something, class action, something.
[13:07.330 --> 13:07.740] [EVILCORLEY]: I don't know.
[13:08.860 --> 13:14.540] [ALEXURBELS]: You know, look, I think powerless here is the right word in so many respects as well.
[13:14.540 --> 13:15.820] [ALEXURBELS]: I mean, you mentioned something.
[13:16.960 --> 13:23.560] [ALEXURBELS]: And by the way, before I launch into my diatribe, let me just say, first off, I sympathize with you and your ocular migraine.
[13:23.660 --> 13:26.940] [ALEXURBELS]: I'm really sorry to hear that you're going through that, and I hope you feel better soon.
[13:27.040 --> 13:28.540] [EVILCORLEY]: Well, it's not as bad right now.
[13:28.660 --> 13:29.820] [EVILCORLEY]: Am I making sense?
[13:30.880 --> 13:31.780] [ALEXURBELS]: More than usual.
[13:31.780 --> 13:32.800] [ALEXURBELS]: Oh, okay.
[13:33.120 --> 13:33.700] [EVILCORLEY]: Then it's good for me.
[13:33.780 --> 13:34.000] [EVILCORLEY]: All right.
[13:34.320 --> 13:35.210] [ALEXURBELS]: Yeah, exactly.
[13:35.560 --> 13:37.140] [ALEXURBELS]: It's maybe somewhat of an improvement.
[13:37.620 --> 13:41.700] [EVILCORLEY]: Before you do launch into your tirade, though, can I just ask, did you receive...
[13:41.700 --> 13:42.470] [EVILCORLEY]: I know you use Gmail.
[13:42.640 --> 13:43.500] [EVILCORLEY]: You do use Gmail, right?
[13:44.210 --> 13:45.360] [ALEXURBELS]: Yeah, sometimes, yeah.
[13:45.360 --> 13:45.590] [ALEXURBELS]: Okay.
[13:46.210 --> 13:50.000] [EVILCORLEY]: But I believe you are signed on to our mailing list through your Gmail account.
[13:50.420 --> 14:01.060] [EVILCORLEY]: I think through one of them, Maybe you could check this while we're on the air, but I'd like to know, did you get our announcement from last week where basically you said on the show a couple of weeks ago that you didn't see the call for participation.
[14:01.560 --> 14:10.040] [EVILCORLEY]: So what we did was, because we're responsive to people when they tell us things, we sent the call for participation out through email so that everybody would see it.
[14:10.120 --> 14:14.540] [EVILCORLEY]: People like Alex would see the CFP, wouldn't have to go to the website to see that.
[14:15.670 --> 14:22.660] [EVILCORLEY]: And that was flagged almost immediately by Gmail in many accounts and rejected.
[14:22.780 --> 14:30.000] [EVILCORLEY]: What I'd like to know, Alex, is if that showed up in your inbox, if you even saw it, or if it wound up in your spam box?
[14:30.940 --> 14:32.300] [ALEXURBELS]: I don't think I saw it.
[14:32.400 --> 14:33.710] [ALEXURBELS]: I don't think I saw it at all.
[14:33.880 --> 14:34.160] [ALEXURBELS]: Okay.
[14:34.280 --> 14:41.800] [EVILCORLEY]: Well, if by the end of the show, you could check your spam box on your Gmail account and tell us if it's residing comfortably there, that would be something.
[14:42.400 --> 14:43.260] [ALEXURBELS]: Yeah, very good.
[14:43.320 --> 14:44.320] [ALEXURBELS]: I will do that.
[14:44.440 --> 14:46.160] [ALEXURBELS]: I will, in fact, I'll look that up.
[14:46.440 --> 14:56.780] [ALEXURBELS]: But to go back to one of your original points here, you said this should be illegal to do this kind of thing, to censor on the basis of speech or viewpoint or something like that.
[14:56.780 --> 15:03.210] [ALEXURBELS]: But you also have to remember that Google is a private party and it's not illegal for them to censor.
[15:03.400 --> 15:19.880] [ALEXURBELS]: We're sending email communications or transmitting data over their networks and they have every right to censor, monitor, do whatever the hell they want to do so long as it comports with the contract that they have with their user base because remember the Bill of Rights does not apply.
[15:19.880 --> 15:33.060] [ALEXURBELS]: The First Amendment does not apply to anything but the government, to the state or the local or the federal government and for a long time the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment and all that didn't even apply to the states.
[15:33.240 --> 15:41.200] [ALEXURBELS]: It wasn't until the Doctrine of Incorporation through the 14th Amendment actually made all of those amendments apply to the states themselves.
[15:41.200 --> 15:43.320] [ALEXURBELS]: It used to just apply to the federal government.
[15:43.320 --> 15:55.760] [ALEXURBELS]: So the idea that this is censorship or is in some way offensive to the First Amendment unfortunately is just nothing we can rely upon legally.
[15:55.970 --> 15:58.020] [EVILCORLEY]: Well, can I ask, are they allowed to discriminate?
[15:58.300 --> 16:05.060] [EVILCORLEY]: Can they say, well, you know, these kinds of people, we're not going to send their email, we're going to block them because of who they are?
[16:05.160 --> 16:05.940] [EVILCORLEY]: Are they allowed to do that?
[16:06.880 --> 16:07.330] [ALEXURBELS]: Sure.
[16:07.330 --> 16:21.090] [ALEXURBELS]: Yeah, so long as you're not discriminating on the basis of a protected characteristic like race, gender, national origin, identity, that kind of thing.
[16:21.800 --> 16:33.560] [ALEXURBELS]: But being a member of a subculture like a Packer subculture or filtering by keyword, sure, they can get away with that so long as they're doing it in accordance with their contract.
[16:33.700 --> 16:48.180] [ALEXURBELS]: But maybe that's the way forward here, which is if we acknowledge that this is an agreement and essentially a transaction between two private parties, well, we should also acknowledge that it's not really an arm's length transaction here, but the users,
[16:48.200 --> 17:10.540] [ALEXURBELS]: if we're going to walk away en masse, which a lot of people are doing right now from Google, they're moving over to Perplexity, they're moving over to ChatGPT and all these other search engines and other services, maybe there's an opportunity here to renegotiate that type of agreement that we have or level set with our expectations for these larger platforms.
[17:10.780 --> 17:25.920] [ALEXURBELS]: The other thing that comes to mind is with all of these advances in natural language processing that we have seen over the last two years in particular, these large language models, which are really just a form of advanced natural language processing,
[17:26.160 --> 17:37.240] [ALEXURBELS]: you would think that that spam filters and things like that, that type of technology would evolve in lockstep and would also be able to better judge the context of certain speech.
[17:37.420 --> 17:38.740] [ALEXURBELS]: But it certainly has not.
[17:38.860 --> 17:41.440] [ALEXURBELS]: It seems like they're just idiotically filtering by keyword.
[17:41.860 --> 17:56.800] [KYLEDROSDK]: Well, you would think that on the surface, Alex, but I think it is actually an indicator that this is not simply an inflexible policy, but rather a preference.
[17:56.800 --> 18:09.020] [KYLEDROSDK]: preference, but it's hard to say because there's so much opaque and just no information, no recourse for people that are perhaps that feel they have an exception.
[18:09.240 --> 18:20.700] [KYLEDROSDK]: And so in that is, I think, my earlier point, the irony or the sort of paradox of it is that they can have like a Google hackathon or something that addresses all the same kinds of things.
[18:20.800 --> 18:34.470] [KYLEDROSDK]: It can be totally fine and we could do the very same thing and be categorized this way just by virtue of the way they feel about the types of text in our communications or our domain or who we are generally.
[18:34.710 --> 18:59.510] [KYLEDROSDK]: Now, I mean, we are either going to have to put a lot more pressure on collectively and get cut or get really cute about our language, which we ought not to have to do because of the, I think, reputationally and that just the wider acceptance and understanding of multiple definitions of terms like hacking and and our overall mission,
[18:59.510 --> 19:22.710] [KYLEDROSDK]: which is about educating people and sharing and getting answers, you know, learning about some of this stuff and being prevented by this in this way is it's just, it doesn't, it doesn't really, it doesn't really take much effort.
[19:22.710 --> 19:38.420] [KYLEDROSDK]: for, I mean, we have to kind of redirect, as you said, a lot of attention that we would like to be doing on planning, but, you know, we can make, like, flyers with all the same information in, like, a graphic and then poison that, you know, so that it doesn't actually,
[19:39.330 --> 19:41.160] [KYLEDROSDK]: so it's not machine-readable or something.
[19:41.230 --> 19:51.800] [KYLEDROSDK]: I mean, why do we have to get so crazy creative, we have to send, like, puzzles to people just to get by their categorization of us?
[19:52.510 --> 19:54.180] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, you just gave me an idea, though.
[19:54.940 --> 19:59.080] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, we're in the, first of all, we're being penalized because we run our own mail servers.
[19:59.750 --> 20:02.380] [EVILCORLEY]: We don't sign everything over to a big corporation.
[20:02.710 --> 20:03.660] [EVILCORLEY]: We do it ourselves.
[20:03.770 --> 20:04.880] [EVILCORLEY]: It's a lot of work.
[20:04.920 --> 20:05.730] [EVILCORLEY]: It's worth it.
[20:05.900 --> 20:06.800] [EVILCORLEY]: You have a lot more control.
[20:06.840 --> 20:07.730] [EVILCORLEY]: It's a lot better.
[20:08.770 --> 20:13.120] [EVILCORLEY]: But that's one of the things that Google penalizes you for if you run your own mail server.
[20:14.010 --> 20:19.300] [EVILCORLEY]: It's, you know, all kinds of regulations are thrown at you, but like I said, we meet all the regulations.
[20:19.460 --> 20:21.580] [EVILCORLEY]: We fulfill all the standards.
[20:21.860 --> 20:25.300] [EVILCORLEY]: But what if instead of text, we just sent a big graphic?
[20:25.680 --> 20:27.200] [EVILCORLEY]: That's what you just gave me an idea for.
[20:27.360 --> 20:27.530] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah.
[20:27.710 --> 20:33.530] [EVILCORLEY]: If we send a picture that says, are they going to be able to scan the picture and say these are unacceptable words?
[20:33.660 --> 20:38.490] [KYLEDROSDK]: That's why I said it would then have to be poisoned with some of the things we've talked about recently.
[20:38.770 --> 20:44.970] [EVILCORLEY]: Because everything that I see from Gmail, we get so much spam from them, which they don't block.
[20:46.180 --> 20:49.030] [EVILCORLEY]: So much of that has graphics in it.
[20:49.140 --> 20:52.120] [EVILCORLEY]: And I'm not used to sending graphics or reading graphics.
[20:52.510 --> 20:54.660] [EVILCORLEY]: For me, email is just pure text.
[20:55.120 --> 21:00.840] [EVILCORLEY]: But virtually everything that comes from Gmail is filled with graphics and ads and all kinds of things like that.
[21:00.990 --> 21:01.990] [EVILCORLEY]: What if we did the same thing?
[21:02.160 --> 21:06.860] [EVILCORLEY]: What if we simply had a graphic that conveyed our message that way?
[21:07.300 --> 21:11.140] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, more offensive in my eyes, but probably less offensive to them.
[21:11.140 --> 21:12.140] [EVILCORLEY]: It might actually work.
[21:12.140 --> 21:18.460] [KYLEDROSDK]: I was thinking that just in the conversation here, it occurred to me that that, I mean, that is the level of cuteness we're going to have to get to.
[21:18.640 --> 21:19.210] [KYLEDROSDK]: That's fine.
[21:19.210 --> 21:20.730] [KYLEDROSDK]: We'll make our rave flyer or whatever.
[21:20.860 --> 21:21.730] [EVILCORLEY]: I would feel so cheap.
[21:22.920 --> 21:25.420] [KYLEDROSDK]: We'll do it up in the grandest fashion.
[21:25.800 --> 21:45.120] [KYLEDROSDK]: But it really is more of like making us, you know, become an, you know, art directors for wild installations that are undetectable by their their state of equipment at that particular point in time is crazy.
[21:45.250 --> 21:47.140] [KYLEDROSDK]: And it's going to drive us crazy and the rest of the world crazy.
[21:47.300 --> 21:48.470] [KYLEDROSDK]: We're just trying to have an event.
[21:48.580 --> 21:49.340] [EVILCORLEY]: Oh, we're already crazy.
[21:49.420 --> 21:50.030] [EVILCORLEY]: We're already crazy.
[21:50.320 --> 21:53.040] [EVILCORLEY]: But you mentioned something about links before.
[21:53.160 --> 21:54.760] [EVILCORLEY]: I want to just get into that before I turn it back to Alex.
[21:54.820 --> 21:55.220] [EVILCORLEY]: Oh, yeah.
[21:55.460 --> 21:59.520] [EVILCORLEY]: So this is something, this is the epitome of craziness right now.
[22:00.300 --> 22:06.200] [EVILCORLEY]: Within our text, we have links to various websites, but we also mention websites.
[22:06.200 --> 22:07.360] [EVILCORLEY]: Now, what's the difference?
[22:07.360 --> 22:15.620] [EVILCORLEY]: Well, a link basically has the entire address, HTTPS, colon, slash, slash, and then the website name.
[22:15.900 --> 22:20.880] [EVILCORLEY]: But if we're just talking about, say, the hope.net website, you know, it's part of the conversation.
[22:21.120 --> 22:22.900] [EVILCORLEY]: Go visit the hope.net website.
[22:23.120 --> 22:24.940] [EVILCORLEY]: Well, here's what happens when you do that.
[22:25.380 --> 22:28.180] [EVILCORLEY]: Gmail converts hope.net to a link.
[22:28.260 --> 22:34.040] [EVILCORLEY]: And if you just say hope.net, Gmail converts it to HTTP, not HTTPS.
[22:34.800 --> 22:35.820] [EVILCORLEY]: Why do they do that?
[22:35.820 --> 22:36.820] [EVILCORLEY]: I have no idea.
[22:36.820 --> 22:42.440] [EVILCORLEY]: They should convert it to the default, which should be the secure version, HTTPS, encrypted.
[22:42.960 --> 22:53.880] [EVILCORLEY]: Instead, they convert what they believe is a website by default to the insecure standard, and then they penalize the sender for sending an insecure link.
[22:54.060 --> 22:55.220] [EVILCORLEY]: I'm not making this up.
[22:55.300 --> 22:56.640] [EVILCORLEY]: This is what actually happens.
[22:56.640 --> 23:06.940] [EVILCORLEY]: So because we had a paragraph in there where we were referring to our hope.net website, we were penalized for an insecure link.
[23:07.060 --> 23:08.140] [EVILCORLEY]: That is how crazy it is.
[23:08.260 --> 23:17.240] [EVILCORLEY]: So, you know, if Google were monitoring us speaking now, we would have just committed some sins by referring to the hope.net website.
[23:17.400 --> 23:24.120] [EVILCORLEY]: Instead, what we should be doing is saying, go visit the HTTPS colon slash slash www.hope.net website.
[23:24.360 --> 23:26.980] [EVILCORLEY]: Every time we mention the damn website, we have to talk like that.
[23:27.400 --> 23:33.440] [EVILCORLEY]: So that is that is the level that we are dealing with now, the level of absurdity.
[23:33.680 --> 23:34.460] [EVILCORLEY]: Back to you, Alex.
[23:35.000 --> 23:36.460] [ALEXURBELS]: Are you sure?
[23:36.600 --> 23:38.100] [ALEXURBELS]: That doesn't sound right to me.
[23:38.200 --> 23:41.410] [ALEXURBELS]: That sounds really ridiculous that every single...
[23:41.420 --> 23:47.860] [EVILCORLEY]: I asked our chief admin repeatedly, and he will tell you how annoying I was.
[23:48.500 --> 23:50.060] [EVILCORLEY]: This cannot be real.
[23:50.160 --> 23:52.100] [EVILCORLEY]: This is the most idiotic thing I have ever seen.
[23:52.220 --> 23:55.060] [EVILCORLEY]: You cannot be serious that this is what is happening here.
[23:55.940 --> 24:00.860] [EVILCORLEY]: And it was later confirmed by another one of our admins that, yeah, in fact, that is what is happening.
[24:01.000 --> 24:02.120] [EVILCORLEY]: It's making an insecure link.
[24:02.260 --> 24:04.880] [EVILCORLEY]: So, yeah, that's the level of absurdity we're at.
[24:05.830 --> 24:10.600] [ALEXURBELS]: That's a massive error on Gmail's part.
[24:10.600 --> 24:11.760] [ALEXURBELS]: not your part.
[24:11.840 --> 24:13.440] [ALEXURBELS]: I'm very curious about that.
[24:13.520 --> 24:14.240] [ALEXURBELS]: That's so bizarre.
[24:14.900 --> 24:19.120] [ALEXURBELS]: It raises two things to my mind in terms of testing this.
[24:19.260 --> 24:22.420] [ALEXURBELS]: Well, actually, one way of testing and another, which is just a point.
[24:22.680 --> 24:29.200] [ALEXURBELS]: But have you tried using the word hack in other contexts as far as a test?
[24:29.400 --> 24:35.560] [ALEXURBELS]: A lot of people love to use that idiotic phrase, here's a life hack, right?
[24:35.660 --> 24:40.020] [ALEXURBELS]: You know, people call so many stupid things hacks these days that are really just tricks, right?
[24:40.020 --> 24:45.620] [ALEXURBELS]: So, have you tried sending something with a life hack in it and see if that gets flagged?
[24:45.740 --> 24:55.080] [ALEXURBELS]: Because that would test essentially the limits of the contextual type of censorship that is being implemented at the mail server level.
[24:55.200 --> 25:03.780] [EVILCORLEY]: I would love nothing more than to be able to spend all day every day experimenting with Google to see just how idiotic they are behaving today.
[25:04.360 --> 25:07.580] [EVILCORLEY]: The fact of the matter is, this is what's happening to us.
[25:07.580 --> 25:16.900] [EVILCORLEY]: We are not able to get our message out to the people who want to read it and we have to figure something else out to get to them and we have to hold them to account for this because it's absurd.
[25:17.040 --> 25:23.000] [EVILCORLEY]: I'm sure our listeners are sick of hearing about hearing us complain about this week after week but it is definitely hurting us.
[25:23.080 --> 25:24.220] [EVILCORLEY]: If you see the...
[25:24.220 --> 25:26.040] [EVILCORLEY]: And I know Alex, you have seen this...
[25:26.040 --> 25:35.280] [EVILCORLEY]: The response that we are getting from potential speakers, workshop hosts, sponsors of various sorts, people who found out about the conference.
[25:35.320 --> 25:36.020] [EVILCORLEY]: It is amazing.
[25:36.020 --> 25:58.060] [EVILCORLEY]: We are getting some really, really good submissions but there are an incredibly high number of people who do not even know the conference is happening because they haven't been able to see the announcements that we sent out and that's hurting the conference because if we're not getting enough people signing up to go to the conference then we don't have the flexibility to do more to prepare for the
[25:58.060 --> 25:58.500] [EVILCORLEY]: conference.
[25:58.760 --> 26:05.240] [EVILCORLEY]: So it's very frustrating and like I said, it's taking so much time that we should be spending on other more important things.
[26:06.180 --> 26:18.780] [ALEXURBELS]: I tend to agree with that entirely and that brings me to the second point that I was going to mention which is that I think we have to think about alternative ways of getting the message out here.
[26:18.960 --> 26:22.480] [ALEXURBELS]: I think email is becoming totally deprecated here.
[26:22.700 --> 26:43.060] [ALEXURBELS]: It's always been an unreliable means of communication now that everything is being filtered by Gmail and everybody is signed up through these massive mail services over which they have zero control and zero idea how they work or even how they can be configured to whitelist certain people.
[26:43.060 --> 26:51.040] [ALEXURBELS]: just even requiring that kind of affirmative act on the part of a recipient is going to make this a really unreliable means of communication.
[26:51.160 --> 26:55.000] [ALEXURBELS]: The email I think we have to come to the conclusion is being pretty much deprecated.
[26:55.240 --> 27:09.260] [ALEXURBELS]: I think we should really think about other means of getting the word out to interested parties that is direct and does not require any kind of mail server type of middleman.
[27:09.260 --> 27:12.060] [EVILCORLEY]: Other than a sandwich board, what do you have in mind?
[27:12.380 --> 27:15.220] [EVILCORLEY]: Because social media is dead as well.
[27:15.700 --> 27:18.460] [EVILCORLEY]: Everybody is fractured on those platforms.
[27:18.660 --> 27:20.480] [EVILCORLEY]: Nobody speaks the same language anymore.
[27:20.480 --> 27:22.720] [EVILCORLEY]: There's no instant messaging per se.
[27:23.400 --> 27:28.840] [EVILCORLEY]: What is effective in reaching people these days with all this craziness on the net?
[27:29.240 --> 27:31.000] [ALEXURBELS]: I will tell you and I think you're right.
[27:31.080 --> 27:57.320] [ALEXURBELS]: I think you cannot rely on social media anymore because it's so damn balkanized and you can't rely at all on Twitter pretty much or X whatever you want to call it for anything these days whatsoever but I think what I'm seeing a lot more organizations doing is establishing instant messaging channels on things like signal and telegram and I think if as part of hope this year we created a separate
[27:57.320 --> 28:12.180] [ALEXURBELS]: mailing list that was a telegram channel or was a signal channel we could pretty much ensure that we have end to end encrypted and encrypted communications with a Let's say hundreds or thousands of people that are going to receive those messages.
[28:12.540 --> 28:21.100] [ALEXURBELS]: For instance, the Blockchain Association in Washington, D.C., of which I'm a member professionally, they don't send out emails anymore.
[28:21.100 --> 28:25.640] [ALEXURBELS]: They just don't because they're dealing with a lot of cryptocurrency-related stuff.
[28:25.840 --> 28:28.900] [ALEXURBELS]: The terms that they're using are very often getting filtered out.
[28:29.160 --> 28:32.540] [ALEXURBELS]: They just use a signal channel to communicate to the user base.
[28:32.540 --> 28:36.440] [ALEXURBELS]: And there's one channel that only admins can communicate through.
[28:36.440 --> 28:40.600] [ALEXURBELS]: And another channel that is for the membership to chat amongst each other.
[28:41.100 --> 28:42.240] [ALEXURBELS]: Signal had potential.
[28:42.520 --> 28:43.660] [EVILCORLEY]: Signal had a lot of potential.
[28:44.320 --> 28:52.320] [EVILCORLEY]: Just today, Signal booted me off a machine that had been running Signal because it's not running a version of Windows that it likes.
[28:52.320 --> 28:53.160] [EVILCORLEY]: It's too old.
[28:53.160 --> 28:59.740] [EVILCORLEY]: So it can't operate on an older OS that's doing something relatively simple.
[28:59.740 --> 29:05.520] [EVILCORLEY]: And all these conditions, basically, they're saying you have to buy a new machine if you want to run this software.
[29:06.140 --> 29:10.100] [EVILCORLEY]: Not really the kind of thing that, you know, email, you could read that any place.
[29:10.200 --> 29:14.700] [EVILCORLEY]: You need a terminal just to connect to a machine somewhere that hosts your email.
[29:14.920 --> 29:15.720] [EVILCORLEY]: So simple.
[29:15.920 --> 29:18.060] [EVILCORLEY]: I don't think, you know, it's a comparison.
[29:18.440 --> 29:23.920] [EVILCORLEY]: I think it's... And the other thing, you know, with Signal that is so annoying, I think it intrudes upon your privacy.
[29:23.920 --> 29:36.880] [EVILCORLEY]: If you sign up for Signal, guaranteed, if you haven't done this yet, go ahead, sign up for Signal, you will start getting greetings from people saying, hey, welcome to Signal, because they will be told, if they're a contact of you in any way, that, hey,
[29:36.960 --> 29:38.220] [EVILCORLEY]: this person is now on Signal.
[29:38.580 --> 29:40.320] [EVILCORLEY]: And I find that to be just so offensive.
[29:40.540 --> 29:46.400] [EVILCORLEY]: How dare you go out and tell the world that I'm now using this platform and this is how they can reach me?
[29:46.600 --> 29:48.460] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, these might be people I'm trying to avoid.
[29:48.460 --> 29:50.440] [EVILCORLEY]: And all of a sudden, I'm getting all these greetings.
[29:50.720 --> 29:57.700] [EVILCORLEY]: No, that's not the way I really envision starting to use a private means of communication.
[29:58.640 --> 30:02.140] [ALEXURBELS]: Well, I mean, are you using Windows 3.1 or 3.11 these days?
[30:02.140 --> 30:02.580] [ALEXURBELS]: It doesn't matter.
[30:02.600 --> 30:04.460] [EVILCORLEY]: I should be able to use Windows 3.1.
[30:04.460 --> 30:07.840] [EVILCORLEY]: If it can connect to the Internet, I should be able to use it to send a message.
[30:08.240 --> 30:10.640] [EVILCORLEY]: I'm not using Windows 3.1.
[30:10.840 --> 30:15.980] [EVILCORLEY]: But, you know, I understand people, they like to use old operating systems.
[30:15.980 --> 30:19.400] [EVILCORLEY]: But these days, you know, Windows 11 is considered out of date.
[30:19.540 --> 30:20.840] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, you have to keep up.
[30:20.980 --> 30:29.980] [EVILCORLEY]: You have to have that Macintosh mentality where, you know, you buy a new machine and now you have to upgrade the software, but the software requires another new machine to run.
[30:30.200 --> 30:32.120] [EVILCORLEY]: It's just, it's a never-ending spiral.
[30:32.780 --> 30:44.140] [ALEXURBELS]: Well, frankly, you know, as a, you know, since we are a hacker show and we talk about security and things, I don't think people who are interested in security should actually even be using the desktop version of Signal anyway.
[30:44.140 --> 30:54.060] [ALEXURBELS]: I mean, you have, let's say you're using an iPhone or, you know, Androids aren't as secure as iPhones, in my opinion, but iPhone is an incredibly secure device, you know, in its inherent state.
[30:54.400 --> 30:58.540] [ALEXURBELS]: You know, why would you just, basically...
[30:58.540 --> 30:59.740] [EVILCORLEY]: Wait, can you, can you just say that again?
[31:00.610 --> 31:03.220] [ALEXURBELS]: I think an iPhone is a pretty secure device.
[31:03.360 --> 31:04.080] [ALEXURBELS]: I think it's an inherent...
[31:04.080 --> 31:04.600] [EVILCORLEY]: Oh, you heard that, folks.
[31:04.700 --> 31:06.420] [EVILCORLEY]: You heard, okay, iPhone is incredibly secure.
[31:06.500 --> 31:06.640] [EVILCORLEY]: Okay.
[31:07.140 --> 31:07.680] [EVILCORLEY]: It is.
[31:07.800 --> 31:08.640] [EVILCORLEY]: He said that in...
[31:08.640 --> 31:09.560] [EVILCORLEY]: That's fine.
[31:09.660 --> 31:10.380] [EVILCORLEY]: No, you can say that.
[31:10.380 --> 31:12.760] [KYLEDROSDK]: You said that in its inherent state.
[31:12.900 --> 31:18.100] [KYLEDROSDK]: That means not being completely taken apart and reverse engineered and, like, side-loaded.
[31:18.180 --> 31:21.260] [KYLEDROSDK]: Like, you can do so much to all kinds of this technology.
[31:21.300 --> 31:22.140] [EVILCORLEY]: China, are you listening?
[31:22.240 --> 31:23.660] [EVILCORLEY]: Russia, are you listening to this?
[31:23.740 --> 31:24.500] [EVILCORLEY]: With the right tools.
[31:24.860 --> 31:25.060] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah.
[31:25.180 --> 31:25.840] [ALEXURBELS]: All right, I'm done.
[31:25.840 --> 31:26.200] [ALEXURBELS]: I'm done.
[31:26.440 --> 31:33.980] [ALEXURBELS]: Yeah, I mean, look, yeah, the NSO group aside here, you know, targeting iPhones with zero days and stuff like that, it is, you know, pretty secure.
[31:34.100 --> 31:34.820] [ALEXURBELS]: But once you...
[31:34.820 --> 31:38.060] [ALEXURBELS]: And you have end-to-end encrypted messaging through Signal or Telegram.
[31:38.060 --> 31:49.180] [ALEXURBELS]: But then once you introduce the desktop client to that end-to-end encrypted communication, you are introducing a much greater attack surface by which your communications could be compromised.
[31:49.460 --> 31:56.060] [ALEXURBELS]: So I don't necessarily agree with using the desktop client for Signal and Telegram anyway.
[31:56.960 --> 31:59.380] [ALEXURBELS]: But that's a separate story.
[31:59.520 --> 32:01.560] [ALEXURBELS]: But I do agree with you, Emmanuel.
[32:01.560 --> 32:08.400] [ALEXURBELS]: Both Telegram and Signal sending out these announcements that you've signed up is really just idiotic.
[32:08.520 --> 32:10.080] [ALEXURBELS]: I mean, that needs to stop.
[32:10.220 --> 32:11.400] [ALEXURBELS]: I don't know why they're still doing that.
[32:11.540 --> 32:12.720] [ALEXURBELS]: Everybody's complaining about it.
[32:12.780 --> 32:14.040] [ALEXURBELS]: We've complained about it multiple times.
[32:14.040 --> 32:15.820] [EVILCORLEY]: I just like to have a choice in these things.
[32:15.920 --> 32:16.700] [EVILCORLEY]: Like, just today.
[32:16.900 --> 32:18.200] [EVILCORLEY]: Okay, you're talking about iPhone.
[32:18.400 --> 32:19.380] [EVILCORLEY]: Let me talk about Android.
[32:19.400 --> 32:20.500] [EVILCORLEY]: I have a Samsung phone.
[32:21.220 --> 32:24.280] [EVILCORLEY]: Every week or so, it insists on updating the OS.
[32:24.660 --> 32:25.160] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, fine.
[32:25.280 --> 32:25.480] [EVILCORLEY]: Whatever.
[32:25.680 --> 32:26.060] [EVILCORLEY]: Do that.
[32:26.060 --> 32:31.080] [EVILCORLEY]: So, you know, it spent a few minutes doing that today, updated the OS, and look what it did.
[32:31.200 --> 32:33.220] [EVILCORLEY]: It changed the font of my clock.
[32:33.460 --> 32:36.200] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, I have a clock on my phone at all times.
[32:36.200 --> 32:37.280] [EVILCORLEY]: It tells me what time it is.
[32:37.380 --> 32:38.020] [EVILCORLEY]: That's what they do.
[32:38.600 --> 32:39.840] [EVILCORLEY]: And now it's a different font.
[32:39.960 --> 32:44.120] [EVILCORLEY]: And I can't go back to the font I had because somebody decided that this font is better.
[32:44.300 --> 32:49.700] [EVILCORLEY]: That's a tiny thing, but it annoys me that someone's making that decision for me, and I have absolutely no say.
[32:49.900 --> 32:50.800] [KYLEDROSDK]: Can I see that?
[32:50.960 --> 32:51.200] [KYLEDROSDK]: Yeah.
[32:51.380 --> 32:51.700] [KYLEDROSDK]: Oh, wait.
[32:51.880 --> 32:52.660] [KYLEDROSDK]: Yeah, it's...
[32:53.060 --> 32:54.140] [KYLEDROSDK]: How can you take that?
[32:54.140 --> 32:55.800] [KYLEDROSDK]: What a dorky font that is.
[32:55.800 --> 32:56.820] [KYLEDROSDK]: That is not a serious font.
[32:56.820 --> 32:58.180] [EVILCORLEY]: No, it's not a serious font at all.
[32:58.260 --> 32:58.780] [EVILCORLEY]: The other one was...
[32:58.780 --> 32:59.760] [EVILCORLEY]: I think the other one was Helvetica.
[32:59.760 --> 33:00.340] [KYLEDROSDK]: If you get...
[33:00.340 --> 33:03.200] [KYLEDROSDK]: If someone sees that in, like, an important meeting...
[33:03.200 --> 33:04.520] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah, I'll be laughed out of the room.
[33:05.480 --> 33:05.880] [EVILCORLEY]: So...
[33:05.880 --> 33:06.680] [KYLEDROSDK]: Yeah, forget it.
[33:06.780 --> 33:06.940] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah.
[33:07.480 --> 33:10.420] [EVILCORLEY]: Any progress on finding that announcement, Alex?
[33:11.000 --> 33:11.620] [ALEXURBELS]: Oh, no.
[33:11.760 --> 33:14.180] [ALEXURBELS]: I've been, you know, talking it up with you guys.
[33:14.320 --> 33:14.720] [ALEXURBELS]: Let me...
[33:14.720 --> 33:17.580] [ALEXURBELS]: We'll let you go to the next topic, and we'll...
[33:17.580 --> 33:21.700] [EVILCORLEY]: Well, I'm looking at my spam box in one of my Gmail accounts.
[33:21.800 --> 33:22.500] [EVILCORLEY]: I have several.
[33:22.700 --> 33:23.500] [EVILCORLEY]: I experiment with them.
[33:24.140 --> 33:25.200] [EVILCORLEY]: I don't rely on them.
[33:25.320 --> 33:28.780] [EVILCORLEY]: They could all blow up tomorrow, and I wouldn't lose anything.
[33:29.440 --> 33:30.360] [EVILCORLEY]: And I'm just...
[33:30.360 --> 33:35.680] [EVILCORLEY]: There's a whole lot of mail in my spam box that I'm looking at now for the first time.
[33:36.220 --> 33:37.540] [EVILCORLEY]: I see...
[33:37.540 --> 33:38.260] [EVILCORLEY]: Look.
[33:38.260 --> 33:39.440] [EVILCORLEY]: President Trump.
[33:40.080 --> 33:40.820] [EVILCORLEY]: Nikki Haley.
[33:41.000 --> 33:41.660] [EVILCORLEY]: Okay, so these...
[33:41.660 --> 33:43.900] [EVILCORLEY]: Okay, these are fine going into the spam box.
[33:44.100 --> 33:47.880] [EVILCORLEY]: They're just ridiculous pitches for money.
[33:48.300 --> 33:49.880] [EVILCORLEY]: But here's SiriusXM.
[33:49.940 --> 33:51.100] [EVILCORLEY]: I happen to subscribe to them.
[33:51.260 --> 33:55.780] [EVILCORLEY]: And yeah, they're mailed to me saying my subscription is expiring.
[33:55.940 --> 33:56.700] [EVILCORLEY]: Went to spam.
[33:56.960 --> 33:57.620] [EVILCORLEY]: Isn't that nice?
[33:58.480 --> 33:59.440] [EVILCORLEY]: That's something...
[33:59.440 --> 34:00.740] [EVILCORLEY]: There's a store that I went to.
[34:00.740 --> 34:01.760] [EVILCORLEY]: That went to spam.
[34:02.520 --> 34:07.300] [EVILCORLEY]: So these are businesses, organizations that I have done business with.
[34:07.700 --> 34:13.460] [EVILCORLEY]: And Google is deciding that I should not see what they say to me.
[34:13.460 --> 34:28.860] [KYLEDROSDK]: That's actually something really worth pointing out because that's a level of filtering that's actually hurting the kinds of promotional campaigns that small businesses are doing.
[34:29.100 --> 34:37.460] [KYLEDROSDK]: And inherently, maybe their domain isn't have as long or as much of a reputation or some kind of score or whatever.
[34:37.460 --> 34:43.100] [KYLEDROSDK]: So then they're put into this basket automatically with no say, no recourse.
[34:43.460 --> 34:45.040] [KYLEDROSDK]: And they don't even really know.
[34:45.260 --> 34:46.620] [KYLEDROSDK]: Like, they're totally blind to it.
[34:46.860 --> 34:54.620] [KYLEDROSDK]: They just think they're doing their best communication to have customer retention, have people come back and spend more money.
[34:54.800 --> 35:05.720] [KYLEDROSDK]: But bigger businesses, somehow this doesn't affect them because they do larger volumes and they're taken with more credibility in this, however this is done.
[35:06.760 --> 35:12.680] [KYLEDROSDK]: But that really bolsters a certain type of business and hinders another.
[35:12.680 --> 35:14.080] [EVILCORLEY]: Here's the New York Times.
[35:14.280 --> 35:22.220] [EVILCORLEY]: I subscribed to the New York Times and there's a whole bunch of mail from them talking to me about various things in my account went right to spam.
[35:22.800 --> 35:24.520] [EVILCORLEY]: Google decided that was spam.
[35:24.780 --> 35:31.160] [EVILCORLEY]: Here's somebody who was running for my congressional seat, my local congressional seat.
[35:31.380 --> 35:35.760] [EVILCORLEY]: No less than eight of her emails went directly to spam.
[35:36.900 --> 35:49.920] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, I'm sure that people running for office would be very interested to know that their constituent, their potential constituents are not even being allowed to read their emails announcing that they're running for a campaign.
[35:49.980 --> 35:53.840] [EVILCORLEY]: Here's a phone company, a phone company that I do business with, went to spam.
[35:54.070 --> 35:56.680] [EVILCORLEY]: This is just on one page of one account.
[35:57.090 --> 35:58.840] [EVILCORLEY]: It's something incredible.
[35:58.840 --> 36:02.000] [EVILCORLEY]: But I'm wondering why I didn't see anything from these people.
[36:02.200 --> 36:04.460] [EVILCORLEY]: And that's pretty amazing.
[36:04.610 --> 36:10.720] [EVILCORLEY]: And that's probably true of just about everybody who uses Gmail, that things they want wind up in the spam box.
[36:11.040 --> 36:12.130] [EVILCORLEY]: Very important things.
[36:14.050 --> 36:14.610] [EVILCORLEY]: Okay.
[36:14.960 --> 36:18.980] [EVILCORLEY]: Speaking of important things, Taylor Swift.
[36:19.200 --> 36:20.110] [EVILCORLEY]: Have you heard about this?
[36:21.440 --> 36:21.920] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah.
[36:22.340 --> 36:33.130] [EVILCORLEY]: Remember a couple of years ago, was it, where we were talking about Elon Musk's jet and this guy that ran a site that tracked where his private jet was at all times?
[36:33.340 --> 36:33.540] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah.
[36:33.700 --> 36:33.860] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah.
[36:33.900 --> 36:35.000] [EVILCORLEY]: His name is Jack Sweeney.
[36:35.920 --> 36:41.500] [EVILCORLEY]: He's a junior at the University of Central Florida, which means he must have been a freshman when he started this.
[36:41.960 --> 36:55.980] [EVILCORLEY]: He has been running accounts that log the takeoffs and landings of planes and helicopters owned by hundreds of billionaires, politicians, Russian oligarchs, and other public figures, along with estimates of their planet warming emissions.
[36:56.260 --> 36:58.040] [EVILCORLEY]: Because, hey, you know, we need to know these things.
[36:59.740 --> 37:13.260] [EVILCORLEY]: Sweeney's accounts fueled a free speech debate in late 2022 when Twitter banned him for sharing what the platform's owner, Elon Musk, said were his assassination coordinates.
[37:13.650 --> 37:15.440] [EVILCORLEY]: That's Elon Musk's words.
[37:16.070 --> 37:17.420] [EVILCORLEY]: And not surprising at all.
[37:17.960 --> 37:23.090] [EVILCORLEY]: Now, the accounts don't say who is traveling on the aircraft or where they go once the planes land.
[37:23.590 --> 37:27.200] [EVILCORLEY]: They just say where the planes are at the moment.
[37:28.040 --> 37:30.360] [EVILCORLEY]: I mean, okay, you know, I get that.
[37:30.650 --> 37:36.800] [KYLEDROSDK]: You know you're doing good in the world when everywhere you are is your assassination coordinates.
[37:37.070 --> 37:40.720] [EVILCORLEY]: Well, yeah, you must be really paranoid one way or another.
[37:40.960 --> 37:41.840] [EVILCORLEY]: A real sweetheart.
[37:41.840 --> 37:45.400] [EVILCORLEY]: So, the website is called groundcontrol.net.
[37:45.500 --> 37:47.040] [EVILCORLEY]: And that's ground control without any vowels.
[37:47.260 --> 37:50.900] [EVILCORLEY]: So, it's G-R-N-D-C-N-T-R-L dot net.
[37:51.750 --> 37:55.650] [EVILCORLEY]: And there's two basic categories.
[37:55.840 --> 37:56.320] [EVILCORLEY]: There's a few.
[37:56.460 --> 37:59.700] [EVILCORLEY]: But the main ones are Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.
[38:00.090 --> 38:01.900] [EVILCORLEY]: Now, we'll get to Taylor Swift in a second.
[38:01.920 --> 38:07.040] [EVILCORLEY]: I just want to check out where Elon Musk's planes are at the moment.
[38:07.070 --> 38:08.000] [EVILCORLEY]: He has several planes.
[38:09.980 --> 38:17.110] [EVILCORLEY]: It's, yeah, okay, and it connects to Open Sky, and that tells you, gives you a map.
[38:18.420 --> 38:23.760] [EVILCORLEY]: And if you have decent Internet coverage, I imagine it would actually show you where on the map this...
[38:23.760 --> 38:32.780] [KYLEDROSDK]: So, we're finding out where this plane, that sometimes this particular singer, artist, songwriter...
[38:32.780 --> 38:33.420] [KYLEDROSDK]: Well, here's the thing.
[38:33.610 --> 38:36.260] [EVILCORLEY]: The story is that Taylor Swift had the same thing happen to her.
[38:36.260 --> 38:44.960] [EVILCORLEY]: And she's threatening the guy now with a lawsuit, saying that he has to stop this stalking and harassing behavior.
[38:45.570 --> 38:48.920] [KYLEDROSDK]: Oh, you were just using the site generally, not looking for any particular plane.
[38:49.180 --> 38:51.320] [EVILCORLEY]: Well, I clicked on one of Elon Musk's planes.
[38:51.380 --> 38:52.340] [KYLEDROSDK]: Oh, his planes.
[38:52.440 --> 38:52.610] [KYLEDROSDK]: Okay.
[38:52.800 --> 39:02.380] [KYLEDROSDK]: But you can select of a myriad, as you originally were describing the whole place, and it filters, or you can search sort of easily.
[39:02.550 --> 39:05.360] [EVILCORLEY]: Let me see if I can get info on Taylor Swift's jets at the moment.
[39:05.360 --> 39:06.500] [EVILCORLEY]: But there seems to be two of them.
[39:06.700 --> 39:07.130] [EVILCORLEY]: Two jets.
[39:07.400 --> 39:07.860] [KYLEDROSDK]: Okay, wait a minute.
[39:08.110 --> 39:09.360] [KYLEDROSDK]: So, what do we got?
[39:09.650 --> 39:10.320] [KYLEDROSDK]: Super Bowl.
[39:10.440 --> 39:13.360] [KYLEDROSDK]: But wait, there's this performance in Japan.
[39:14.300 --> 39:23.440] [KYLEDROSDK]: So, yeah, one's probably, you know, at home, and the other one's probably off being...
[39:23.440 --> 39:28.050] [EVILCORLEY]: Look, the thing is, if you have a private jet, this information is available publicly.
[39:28.280 --> 39:29.090] [EVILCORLEY]: It's public information.
[39:29.090 --> 39:30.300] [EVILCORLEY]: I love Taylor Swift.
[39:30.460 --> 39:32.900] [EVILCORLEY]: I love what she stands for, her music, all that kind of thing.
[39:33.520 --> 39:36.880] [EVILCORLEY]: But this is not the way to fight this.
[39:37.130 --> 39:48.780] [EVILCORLEY]: The way to fight this is to mask your identity, travel on other people's jets, maybe, but not make a big deal out of it, because it's only going to make people like me look at things that I wouldn't be looking at normally.
[39:49.810 --> 39:54.200] [EVILCORLEY]: And, yeah, it's part of the price of being a celebrity.
[39:54.630 --> 40:00.050] [EVILCORLEY]: And I hope that, you know, reason prevails here, because this is not a fight you want to be in.
[40:00.340 --> 40:04.700] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, Elon Musk, everybody ridiculed him for trying to engage this guy.
[40:05.020 --> 40:07.960] [EVILCORLEY]: And I think he lost in the court of public opinion.
[40:08.300 --> 40:10.020] [EVILCORLEY]: I don't want to see the same thing happen to Taylor Swift.
[40:10.360 --> 40:11.360] [EVILCORLEY]: She's too smart for that.
[40:11.360 --> 40:14.700] [EVILCORLEY]: So, yeah, this kind of thing happens.
[40:15.050 --> 40:17.760] [EVILCORLEY]: Maybe consider different ways of traveling.
[40:18.720 --> 40:44.500] [KYLEDROSDK]: I think those are actually really good observations and suggestions, because if you're in this level of transportation, you have these kinds of vessels, you could, for probably a very unnoticeable amount, make some very, you know, key steps to remove your identity,
[40:44.500 --> 40:54.420] [KYLEDROSDK]: you know, certain courses of action, probably exactly what Elon Musk ended up doing, or at least considered amidst all of that litigation.
[40:54.420 --> 41:11.760] [KYLEDROSDK]: But having the entirety of how these vessels are tracked and otherwise work, having it, you know, changed, the rules changed just for you, is ridiculous.
[41:12.320 --> 41:35.610] [KYLEDROSDK]: You know, you are, you're buying a certain kind of vehicle, and it is a part of a wider class of vehicle that has to operate a certain way, and by virtue of how they operate, you kind of need to know where they are, and lots of different entities need to know where they are and what they're doing at any given time.
[41:35.740 --> 41:42.740] [KYLEDROSDK]: And it just seems like, yeah, rewriting the rules, just so it's okay for you, because you can afford one of these planes.
[41:42.800 --> 41:55.130] [KYLEDROSDK]: Like you said, you could just as easily have fractional ownership or just use commercial carriers somehow, or, or deal with your entourage, maybe walk.
[41:55.320 --> 41:55.720] [KYLEDROSDK]: I don't know.
[41:55.960 --> 41:58.020] [EVILCORLEY]: Trust me, there are ways of fooling paparazzi.
[41:58.240 --> 42:01.480] [EVILCORLEY]: There are ways of fooling databases and tracking sites.
[42:02.650 --> 42:04.070] [EVILCORLEY]: Lawsuit is not the way to do that.
[42:04.260 --> 42:08.610] [EVILCORLEY]: We'd be happy to offer advice, because, you know, we don't think anybody should be going through this.
[42:08.740 --> 42:10.820] [EVILCORLEY]: But yeah, this is not the way.
[42:11.020 --> 42:12.500] [EVILCORLEY]: Alex, did you find anything interesting?
[42:12.610 --> 42:13.920] [EVILCORLEY]: You look a little perplexed over there.
[42:15.520 --> 42:33.800] [ALEXURBELS]: I'm still going here, because I was looking on my phone to determine whether or not the hope emails, which I found in Gmail, but I couldn't determine whether or not Gmail was searching all of the folders, namely junk, together with the inbox when it was returning the hit,
[42:33.820 --> 42:36.840] [ALEXURBELS]: or if it was just searching the junk folder.
[42:36.840 --> 42:46.070] [EVILCORLEY]: You have to go into the spam folder, and then in the search bar, you type whatever you're looking for next to the word spam, which will show up up there.
[42:46.630 --> 42:47.610] [ALEXURBELS]: That's what I found.
[42:47.700 --> 42:55.400] [ALEXURBELS]: But now I also realized that if you log into the web version of this, there we go.
[42:55.570 --> 42:55.740] [ALEXURBELS]: Okay.
[42:55.860 --> 42:56.720] [ALEXURBELS]: Hackers on Planet...
[42:57.200 --> 43:04.360] [ALEXURBELS]: It'll tell you which folder it found the message in, whether it was the inbox, the junk folder, et cetera, when you search for it.
[43:04.940 --> 43:07.110] [ALEXURBELS]: And it's actually in my inbox.
[43:07.760 --> 43:08.220] [EVILCORLEY]: Okay.
[43:08.220 --> 43:10.280] [EVILCORLEY]: So it made it to you then?
[43:10.700 --> 43:12.280] [ALEXURBELS]: It did, but I didn't see it.
[43:12.380 --> 43:14.570] [EVILCORLEY]: How did you not see it if it made it to your inbox?
[43:15.400 --> 43:21.590] [ALEXURBELS]: Because I get so much crap in this Gmail account that I ignore it, mostly.
[43:21.900 --> 43:23.820] [ALEXURBELS]: So that's the other problem.
[43:23.960 --> 43:27.000] [EVILCORLEY]: There are going to be so many interesting panels about this at HOPE.
[43:27.200 --> 43:28.920] [EVILCORLEY]: So many, you know.
[43:29.800 --> 43:30.260] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah.
[43:30.400 --> 43:33.110] [EVILCORLEY]: And everybody who shows up will have shown up despite all this.
[43:34.020 --> 43:34.420] [EVILCORLEY]: True.
[43:34.760 --> 43:34.840] [EVILCORLEY]: Okay.
[43:34.900 --> 43:35.700] [EVILCORLEY]: We have some listener mail.
[43:35.780 --> 43:39.860] [EVILCORLEY]: In fact, we got a lot of listener mail from our last show, last couple of shows, in fact.
[43:41.770 --> 43:48.540] [EVILCORLEY]: Dear Off The Hook, I thought you might be interested to know, the last phone books are being delivered in the U.K.
[43:48.640 --> 43:51.980] [EVILCORLEY]: The last will be delivered in March of 2024.
[43:51.980 --> 44:04.700] [EVILCORLEY]: They're usually delivered to every household free of charge, with most people either moving to X directory or providers other than British Telecom.
[44:05.240 --> 44:06.860] [EVILCORLEY]: They have become a lot less useful.
[44:07.520 --> 44:10.420] [EVILCORLEY]: In recent years, they are barely one centimeter thick.
[44:10.840 --> 44:15.280] [EVILCORLEY]: It's an end of an era, from 1880 to 2024, according to the book itself.
[44:18.920 --> 44:25.460] [EVILCORLEY]: It's an end of an era, from Cambridge, in the U.K.
[44:26.740 --> 44:30.060] [EVILCORLEY]: And, Stu, you know, what we would want, you offered us a scam.
[44:30.060 --> 44:31.480] [EVILCORLEY]: What we want is the book itself.
[44:31.940 --> 44:35.020] [EVILCORLEY]: So, anybody from the U.K. can send us a phone book.
[44:35.960 --> 44:39.080] [EVILCORLEY]: We will definitely be grateful for that.
[44:39.480 --> 44:49.540] [EVILCORLEY]: But, basically, the newsroom from British Telecom, our mission to connect for good guides...
[44:50.300 --> 45:02.380] [EVILCORLEY]: I'm sorry, our mission to connect for good guides everything we do as a business, from being more efficient and greener to providing the best possible service for our customers and adapting how we operate in an increasingly digital world.
[45:02.920 --> 45:11.520] [EVILCORLEY]: As a part of our directory services, one area we are evolving in the coming year is how we deliver the phone book.
[45:11.880 --> 45:14.980] [EVILCORLEY]: Since 1880, the phone book has been synonymous with BT.
[45:15.480 --> 45:20.580] [EVILCORLEY]: For many years, it was an essential resource and the only way to find contact information for a person or business.
[45:20.980 --> 45:22.340] [EVILCORLEY]: But times have changed.
[45:22.480 --> 45:28.120] [EVILCORLEY]: And today, it's easy to find this information at the click of a mouse or the tap of a smartphone.
[45:28.400 --> 45:28.660] [EVILCORLEY]: Really?
[45:28.660 --> 45:32.800] [EVILCORLEY]: I take issue with that because how do you find someone's cell phone number?
[45:33.120 --> 45:35.740] [EVILCORLEY]: There's no cell phone directory, is there?
[45:36.640 --> 45:39.980] [EVILCORLEY]: There's been a promise of one for decades, but I've never seen one.
[45:40.240 --> 45:46.400] [EVILCORLEY]: So, I don't think it's easy to find this information at the click of a mouse or the tap of a smartphone.
[45:47.160 --> 45:56.760] [EVILCORLEY]: With the explosion in data and choice of devices over the past decade and the increased digitization of services, the printed phone book has now become a memory for many.
[45:57.800 --> 46:11.960] [EVILCORLEY]: In fact, we still print 18 million phone books every year, but with dwindling demand and the high environmental impact of printing and distributing these hard copies, we've decided that March 2024 will see the last books rolling off the print run.
[46:11.960 --> 46:21.220] [EVILCORLEY]: It's a move that will have a positive impact on the environment, helping us save around 6,000 tons of paper every year, the equivalent of 72,000 trees.
[46:21.480 --> 46:27.720] [EVILCORLEY]: It will also help us progress towards BT Group's target to become a net zero business by 2030.
[46:28.760 --> 46:32.780] [EVILCORLEY]: This is a positive change, and it's something many of our customers have been asking us for.
[46:33.980 --> 46:37.080] [EVILCORLEY]: Your customers have asked you to stop sending the books.
[46:37.710 --> 46:39.800] [EVILCORLEY]: However, it's not a decision we've taken lightly.
[46:40.100 --> 46:43.720] [EVILCORLEY]: We know there are a small number of customers who may still rely on a printed phone book.
[46:44.200 --> 46:48.100] [EVILCORLEY]: To make sure they aren't left behind, we have consulted with Ofcom.
[46:48.360 --> 46:51.000] [EVILCORLEY]: I'm not sure what that is exactly, but it's part of the system.
[46:51.520 --> 46:55.140] [EVILCORLEY]: And are proactively putting measures in place to support these customers.
[46:57.340 --> 47:01.300] [EVILCORLEY]: So I guess for a fee, you'll be able to get a phone book in the future.
[47:02.320 --> 47:07.880] [EVILCORLEY]: But for most people, yeah, it's all going to be online in one form or another.
[47:10.440 --> 47:11.280] [EVILCORLEY]: Go ahead, Alex.
[47:12.780 --> 47:22.500] [ALEXURBELS]: Ofcom is actually the Office of Communications in the United Kingdom, and they are like the communications regulator, kind of like the FCC.
[47:24.200 --> 47:31.160] [ALEXURBELS]: It's with Ofcom that you're supposed to have a license to utilize a television in the U.K. as well.
[47:31.160 --> 47:31.920] [EVILCORLEY]: Okay, all right.
[47:33.980 --> 47:34.900] [EVILCORLEY]: Here's another letter.
[47:35.160 --> 47:37.820] [EVILCORLEY]: Just listened to the show of January 24th.
[47:38.440 --> 47:48.040] [EVILCORLEY]: And while you were discussing the anonymity of cryptocurrencies and other stuff, I was a bit disheartened to hear nothing of the massive abuse of power and electricity this has brought.
[47:48.160 --> 47:48.900] [EVILCORLEY]: And that's a very good point.
[47:49.280 --> 47:53.880] [EVILCORLEY]: I know that Ethereum is trying to solve this, proof of stake versus proof of work.
[47:54.040 --> 47:58.320] [EVILCORLEY]: But most crypto just burns energy, which would be way more useful if put elsewhere.
[47:58.320 --> 48:01.440] [EVILCORLEY]: Bitcoin alone consumes more than a few countries.
[48:02.500 --> 48:07.420] [EVILCORLEY]: Signed, Jan or Jan, I'm not sure how to pronounce that exactly, but thank you for that letter.
[48:07.520 --> 48:08.160] [EVILCORLEY]: It's a very good point.
[48:08.320 --> 48:19.440] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, I saw a news story fairly recently where people who live near a Bitcoin mine, I'd never even seen a Bitcoin mine before.
[48:19.600 --> 48:21.460] [EVILCORLEY]: It's a building, basically, that's mining Bitcoin.
[48:22.040 --> 48:23.660] [EVILCORLEY]: Bitcoin, it makes so much noise.
[48:23.920 --> 48:28.480] [EVILCORLEY]: It is loud, let alone that it's consuming all kinds of electricity.
[48:28.680 --> 48:30.320] [EVILCORLEY]: But, boy, this is...
[48:30.980 --> 48:32.380] [EVILCORLEY]: It's not environmentally friendly.
[48:32.500 --> 48:36.600] [EVILCORLEY]: I don't know how they ever were able to go down that road in the first place.
[48:36.880 --> 48:39.780] [EVILCORLEY]: Unfortunately, now that road exists.
[48:40.820 --> 48:49.100] [EVILCORLEY]: If it were me, I would say, you know, Bitcoin or cryptocurrency or whatever, you can do what you do, but don't do it on Earth.
[48:49.100 --> 48:58.060] [EVILCORLEY]: You know, get the energy on the moon or something like that and mine it there, but don't pollute us anymore because that's the last thing we need.
[48:58.180 --> 49:00.560] [EVILCORLEY]: But unfortunately, now it's become the norm.
[49:00.780 --> 49:04.420] [EVILCORLEY]: So I'm not sure what the best step is at this point.
[49:06.900 --> 49:11.060] [ALEXURBELS]: Yeah, I think it's a real problem, you know, but it's more a problem with Bitcoin.
[49:11.240 --> 49:20.440] [ALEXURBELS]: I think as the listener had identified, Ethereum was really trying to solve this by moving over to the proof-of-stake model as opposed to proof-of-work.
[49:21.240 --> 49:30.160] [ALEXURBELS]: And I've always thought that the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining is something that had been underestimated for some time.
[49:30.480 --> 49:35.960] [ALEXURBELS]: And these mines, they don't just exist in far-flung places in the world.
[49:36.560 --> 49:41.640] [ALEXURBELS]: I think China has effectively, I think, maybe even outlawed them.
[49:41.780 --> 49:44.380] [ALEXURBELS]: I remember there was at least some kind of massive regulation of them.
[49:44.500 --> 49:50.640] [ALEXURBELS]: But, you know, they exist in places like Texas and elsewhere where energy might be cheap.
[49:51.220 --> 49:54.460] [ALEXURBELS]: You might have an abundance of land.
[49:54.460 --> 50:08.840] [ALEXURBELS]: And there was a news story a couple of weeks ago about an NYU student from China who wound up being the beneficial owner of some massive Bitcoin mining operation in Texas that was driving local residents somewhat nuts, if I recall correctly.
[50:09.100 --> 50:13.680] [ALEXURBELS]: So this is not a problem that is unique to other parts of the world.
[50:13.680 --> 50:16.160] [ALEXURBELS]: It's something that hits really close to home, too.
[50:17.560 --> 50:18.340] [EVILCORLEY]: Yeah, seems that way.
[50:18.340 --> 50:46.300] [KYLEDROSDK]: Right, I think that in the, like, initial implementation, this aspect of it wasn't really something that had been considered and worked out as far as what this whole system of currency, what it would actually take to scale up and be running and functional the way it operates.
[50:46.300 --> 50:52.600] [KYLEDROSDK]: I think there's probably also, like, more sensitivity to this now.
[50:52.780 --> 50:56.840] [KYLEDROSDK]: And I am... I think I've seen... it's strange.
[50:56.840 --> 51:06.560] [KYLEDROSDK]: I think there's a lot of weird entrants and implementations of setting up these mines.
[51:06.560 --> 51:12.580] [KYLEDROSDK]: And as was pointed out, they are, in some places, pretty crummy.
[51:12.580 --> 51:16.140] [KYLEDROSDK]: Like, not considerate of where they are.
[51:16.300 --> 51:41.100] [KYLEDROSDK]: But there's also other designs that are integrated, that are co-located in interesting ways and maybe aren't as big as an ambitious, maybe some of that smaller, distributed, and put near places that make sense or with sources of power that aren't as nasty or in places that have an abundance of energy.
[51:41.260 --> 51:44.100] [KYLEDROSDK]: But it really is a huge, huge problem.
[51:44.380 --> 51:47.620] [KYLEDROSDK]: There's not a really clear-cut answer, I think, yet.
[51:48.060 --> 51:48.740] [EVILCORLEY]: Green Coin.
[51:48.900 --> 51:55.880] [EVILCORLEY]: Green Coin is the cyber currency that uses completely renewable energy to mine its crypto.
[51:56.560 --> 52:04.320] [EVILCORLEY]: Hook it up to a wind turbine or an array of solar panels and help the environment at the same time, or at least not hurt the environment.
[52:04.320 --> 52:05.220] [EVILCORLEY]: That's my invention.
[52:05.260 --> 52:06.200] [EVILCORLEY]: It's my idea.
[52:06.420 --> 52:11.220] [EVILCORLEY]: So somebody come up with the rest of it and we'll share the proceeds or whatnot.
[52:11.560 --> 52:13.460] [EVILCORLEY]: Hey, we're out of time, pretty much.
[52:13.740 --> 52:18.500] [EVILCORLEY]: Again, no overtime tonight, because we're all recovering from one thing or another.
[52:19.580 --> 52:21.160] [EVILCORLEY]: Alex, I hope you're feeling better.
[52:21.520 --> 52:23.180] [EVILCORLEY]: I think I'm feeling better.
[52:23.880 --> 52:25.760] [EVILCORLEY]: I hope Rob and Gila are also feeling better.
[52:25.880 --> 52:28.640] [EVILCORLEY]: And Kyle, whenever something happens to you, I hope you feel better as well.
[52:28.640 --> 52:35.400] [EVILCORLEY]: Well, listeners, please write to us, oth@2600.com, and tell us what's going on with you.
[52:36.320 --> 52:36.960] [KYLEDROSDK]: I'm fine.
[52:37.060 --> 52:37.880] [KYLEDROSDK]: Nothing's going to happen to me.
[52:38.000 --> 52:38.780] [EVILCORLEY]: Okay, fine, fine.
[52:38.940 --> 52:40.280] [KYLEDROSDK]: I went for a bicycle ride today.
[52:40.440 --> 52:43.480] [EVILCORLEY]: Good for you, because there's no winter this year, apparently.
[52:44.020 --> 52:47.760] [EVILCORLEY]: But keep listening to WBAI and keep supporting WBAI.
[52:48.120 --> 52:52.900] [EVILCORLEY]: give2wbai.org or 212-209-2950.
[52:52.900 --> 52:55.020] [EVILCORLEY]: We will see you next week.
[52:55.800 --> 52:56.460] [EVILCORLEY]: Good night.
[52:56.960 --> 52:57.440] [EVILCORLEY]: Bye.