Once again, that was Matteo Capasso on the relevance of Palestine struggle for oppressed people worldwide.
That will do it for us here today on Breakthrough Radio.
Don't forget, you can find everything you heard here today on our YouTube page, Breakthrough News, and all of our content on our website, BreakthroughNews.org.
For Breakthrough, I'm Eugene Perrier. See you next time.
And Breakthrough News is heard usually on Wednesdays at 4 p.m. here on WBAI New York 99.5 FM and WBAI.org online.
It is now 7 p.m. Stay tuned for Off the Hook coming up.
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Thank you for listening to Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself off shaving, now I can't make a cough.
It couldn't get much worse, but if it could, it would.
From Billy Bond, for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood, but didn't it move?
I'll see you next time.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
Over here.
And out in Skype land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
You do.
Good evening.
We're all here tonight.
That's amazing.
So how is everybody on this double holiday?
It's Valentine's Day.
It's Ash Wednesday.
Am I leaving anything out?
It's off the hook day.
It's off the hook day.
Yeah.
That's always a holiday.
Alternate side suspended, I believe.
So reason to celebrate.
Yeah.
Fat Tuesday was yesterday.
Fat Tuesday was yesterday.
Yeah.
Well, some people might be extending it.
Okay.
Well, any news that you folks want to share?
I know, Rob and Gila, you weren't here last week.
So welcome back.
Thank you.
We're very glad to be back and back on our feet and doing well.
Yeah.
It was a quick round of COVID, one of the lighter rounds of COVID as these things go.
But, you know, thanks to science and everything, we were as medically prepared as possible and came out the other side of it.
Well, here's a secret.
If you get your vaccination and you pay attention to, as you mentioned, science, if you do encounter COVID, it will be lighter.
It will be something you get through in a week.
So congrats on that.
I've had it twice myself, and the second time was much, much less severe than the first time.
So take it seriously, folks.
It's still out there.
It's still out there, but we are winning the battle, I think.
And, Alex, how's your recovery going?
It's actually going pretty well.
I got back from the doctor not too long ago, my orthopedic surgeon.
Yeah, you broke your leg, right?
I broke my leg in two spots, the tibula and the fibula, and I fractured the ankle all in one go.
So that was fun.
I got copies of my x-rays today as well, which are sort of terrifying.
When you look at them, you see how much hardware is going to be part of me.
Should I also point this out just to the skeptics out there?
If you break your foot, you should go to the doctor and get it set, all right?
Don't deny that.
Don't say that it's not going to work or that's some kind of a plot or something like that,
because if you don't do that, it's not going to get better, all right?
So, again, science.
Go to the doctor.
Get it set.
Would you recommend that, Alex?
Yes, I would recommend that.
I would also recommend a very heavy dose of narcotics before you do get anything set.
Okay, well, that's an option, I suppose.
Absolutely, yeah.
When I had to have this set and I had to basically put this back, I think, you know,
several weeks, maybe six, seven weeks ago, I talked about that experience on the air here,
which was they had given me fentanyl, and apparently I was still conversant.
After they gave me very large doses of fentanyl, I don't know how my drug tolerance
wound up getting to be so high.
But then after that, they gave me ketamine on top of it, and it really sent me on this wild trip
where I felt like I was in a mining car with my kids going through the cosmos.
That was something else.
But I needed that in order for them to reset and align the legs.
So it's been a journey.
And then there was a surgery the day after that and another surgery a week later.
But I got good news today that hopefully within a week, maybe a little bit longer,
I can actually start to walk again.
I'm going to need a cane for a little bit in order to get around and support myself.
But that gives me the opportunity to have yet another affectation, and I'm looking for that.
Yeah, I mean, you can brush dogs and small children out of the way when you're walking
and just, you know, be a curmudgeon.
And I think that you'd slide into that rather easily, I believe.
Yeah, it's very, yeah.
I've been looking forward to this.
Plus, you can also put a little flask of something inside special canes.
I can hook up with that.
There are a lot of very special canes, and, you know, I've been doing a lot of cane shopping.
So if our listeners have any recommendations for cool canes, I'm all ears.
I like how you give somebody a cane as a gift.
How do you wrap that?
That's got to be classic.
Are there smart canes?
I'm sure there are.
I'm sure there are canes with Wi-Fi.
In fact, Alex, when you're looking for your cane, can you find one with Wi-Fi?
Because I would really love to see what the features are.
I will try to do that.
That would be ridiculous, and we'll see.
Or Bluetooth.
Bluetooth, maybe.
Would be better.
I'm not sure.
For sure.
An LED.
Because, you know, just having a cane isn't enough anymore.
You have to have technology attached.
What?
You have a cane?
Oh, that's a candy cane, Rob.
Yeah, very funny.
When you held it up like that, it looked a lot bigger than it actually was.
Okay, so getting to news.
You may think we're silly, but the rest of the world is as well.
And something's going on, folks.
Something is really happening.
We're at the beginning of it now.
And we're going to see this just keep spiraling into something out of science fiction.
And I'm talking, of course, about the inevitable battle between mankind and artificial intelligence, which just seems to be growing ever closer.
Did you guys see what happened in San Francisco's Chinatown?
Somehow, this poor Waymo driverless taxi found its way down the street.
There was nobody in it.
It was just driving on its own.
And it started with one person jumping on the hood of it.
And then that person smashed the windshield.
And then a crowd gathered, formed around the car, covered it in spray paint, broke all its windows, and ultimately set it on fire.
Yeah, the fire department arrived minutes later.
But by then, flames had already fully engulfed the car.
Why the anger against...
I mean, I guess I can sort of figure it out.
Do you have a theory, Kyle?
Well, easy.
I mean, I don't know if we have time for all the theory.
But certainly, just the pervasiveness of these technologies and their cost-cutting design where there's, like, no attendant,
it leaves people, I think, free to react and respond in sort of a performance art.
And I can see the pile-on effect or mob behavior because these things are not designed to defend themselves from mobs yet.
Yet.
It's interesting you say that.
I'm a little worried about what the people at Waymo might be considering doing to defend their cars.
Read on.
Well, imagine...
Okay, how about this?
Imagine a driverless police car.
I'm not really sure what the point of it is.
But imagine a crowd attacking that.
That car is going to have some kind of defense mechanism.
And it's probably going to be over the top.
So it's something to consider.
I mean, you know, a year ago, two years ago, this would have seemed like a bizarre story.
It still is a bizarre story, but it's, I think, going to become more commonplace.
Go ahead, Gila.
Oh, that was me, actually.
But I can talk in a Gila voice.
You're sitting so close, I can't tell one hand from another.
So, okay.
But no, I mean, some of the theories about this involve the ongoing protests that there have been against these things.
And not without cause.
There have been accidents involving them.
Last year, one of them dragged a pedestrian for a while.
Another one crashed into a fire truck.
Another one hit a bicyclist.
And so people are actually having feelings that maybe robots should not be driving cars.
Maybe there should be some humans behind the wheels.
And there has been some pushback against the Waymo company running these things based on that.
Also, I believe, did this happen on the day with the big football that happened?
That was my initial question.
And it appears to have happened the night before.
So the San Francisco team had not yet not won the Super Bowl.
So that was not in response to that yet.
You know, what is with this country?
It's riots and fires if you lose and shootings if you win.
It's just we can't have fun anymore.
Well, I blame the emphasis on these particular programs.
I mean, there's a lot to do in the world generally, even for fun and sport.
But whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're wrapping so much into what these wins and losses mean and there's other unanswered issues in society, I think you're going to get this.
But just also the deployment of these things and what they represent to people, the displacement of human capital and things like that.
But I think that these reactions, however they start or whatever occasion they come under, it's the obvious reaction to a lot of this for some people, I think.
Well, according to this Verge story, there is simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators.
To clarify, it was a company called Cruise that dragged a pedestrian last year prior to that automated taxis that caused chaos in the city, blocking traffic or, as Rob mentioned, crashing into a fire truck.
And last week, a Waymo car struck a cyclist who had reportedly been following behind a truck turning across its path.
Yeah, so the city officials and residents opposed the cars being given a license for 24-7 operation last year, with some residents rendering them immobile, by putting orange cones on the car's hoods in protest.
That's all you have to do, put an orange cone on top of the hood.
Maybe it interferes with the optics.
I guess they can't see or something.
But where are you going to get all the orange cones to do that?
Oh, people are resourceful out there.
I don't know why the story went here, but vandalism and defacement are time-honored parts of the human experience.
We're going to have a little retrospective now on vandalism because we're so proud of it.
Case in point.
It's been seen in subway cars in New York City because we're the pioneers.
Okay, we started.
There was no vandalism before we started it in the New York City subways, and we're very proud of that.
Well, at the scale we're talking.
Oh, wait a minute.
Hold on a second.
We got eclipsed because the walls of the ancient destroyed city of Pompeii apparently beat us to it.
Tech companies have been forced to reckon with the inevitability as they deploy their equipment in public with impunity.
Scooters get tossed into lakes.
Cars are punched by pedestrians.
That's got to hurt.
And in some places, dockless bike-share bikes are destroyed en masse.
Wow.
Okay.
We have issues.
We have to have some kind of a dialogue here because it's going to get worse.
This is, you know, technology is going to continue to advance.
Go ahead, Alex.
I think there's a big difference, though, between some of these examples that the article had set out.
I think what we're dealing with in San Francisco isn't just purely vandalism here, like destroying a dockless bike station or something like that.
I think here you have real discontent by the people for technology that they don't want in their neighborhood that's been causing real harm, and there's a difference between rebellion and vandalism.
And I see this as much more of a form of rebellion and civil disobedience and the people telling those who have given authorization to these companies to drive these driverless cars in their neighborhoods that they're not wanted.
And perhaps the people have been voicing their opinions, and those in charge haven't been listening to them, and this is another way for them to express those sentiments.
Well, I mean, do you think it was that well thought out, or do you think it started with just one guy seeing a driverless car and realizing that there was no defense and he could completely destroy this thing?
Well, I don't think it has to be well thought out at all.
I think you can have this type of expression and this kind of statement without it being, without it involving forethought in a sense, right?
You can have one person who makes a statement and then other people join in.
It's kind of like chanting in a crowd if you're at a protest.
It's not really thought out, you know, when you start yelling whose streets are streets, but a whole bunch of people join in.
Well, that's very different.
Yelling whose streets are streets is a completely peaceful, nonviolent, non-destructive thing to do.
In fact, people should do that every day.
But, you know, what I see here, do you recall a couple of years ago, some idiot went around town smashing Link NYC machines, not realizing that the Link NYC machine was filming him doing that and ratted him out to the authorities.
I see something similar happening here with these driverless cars, basically taking very good pictures of the people that are attacking them and, you know, basically giving all the information that's needed to the authorities.
I'm kind of surprised it didn't happen here.
Well, that's quite possible, but that's part of the statement that they're making.
And, in fact, you know, I think that punishment and being caught, in a sense, is really part and parcel of civil disobedience in and of itself.
I mean, if you go back to the days of Martin Luther King, you know, being arrested and being punished and being thrown into the jails and being caught was part of the statement that you were making.
And, in fact, you go back farther than that and you deal with the unions and part of their striker mentality was that, well, if they told you not to strike,
they were going to keep showing up on the picket lines until they filled up the jails and they stressed the resources of the local population so much that they would eventually give in.
And that's how a lot of wars about wages, hours and conditions were won.
It was by people who were arrested on the picket lines deliberately.
So I think that, you know, there is, in a sense, maybe something more profound here happening.
Totally.
I'm with you on that, Alex.
It's like the intended and spoken altruism having like a dissonance between the lived experience of people in this geographic region
that itself has been the crucible of so much of this kind of PR.
And I think it's that hypocrisy or just the disconnect has worn terribly thin.
And this area knows that the language that is used around hyping a lot of this stuff and then using that community.
And that's where the lived experience part comes in as guinea pigs for whatever venture that just sort of skirts a gray area that hasn't yet been codified
and doesn't have the resources or attention to actually be thought through by civil engineers and the feedback from people who will actually be interacting with the machines,
which is what we're really talking about here, safety and other concerns included.
So, yeah, it's totally about their patience with living this over and over and over again with what I'm saying is sort of venture
or these different schemes coming about through tech, shall we say, the tech industry.
And I could see just being totally impatient with that, seeing the effects and things not improving, but constantly being told, oh, this is for you.
This is going to be better.
This is going to be all these problems you didn't know you had are going to be solved.
And a total like blind eye and ignoring and lack of attentiveness to the actual consequence.
Yeah, I mean, I still feel that way about Uber and Lyft replacing yellow cabs or basically stealing business from them.
You know, I think that's an example of technology being used to hurt working people.
But this is another step beyond even that, because, boy, that takes away all the drivers.
And now you just have robots driving you around, probably charging the exact same amount and somebody's pocketing all of that.
So, yeah, people are going to react in one way or another.
Some people will take advantage of it, but, you know, you really have to think these things through and ask yourself, okay, it's cool.
It's new tech, but how does it affect the average person?
How does it help the average person and how might it hurt the average person?
And are you prepared for the backlash that might follow?
So interesting times ahead, civil unrest involving machines.
I mean, you know, science fiction, it's what's been written about for decades.
Okay, now there's this other device out there.
And according to this Gizmodo article, it's rubbing some countries the wrong way.
And one country in particular is Canada.
It's possible that Canada is about to ban the Flipper Zero, that tiny modular hacking device that's become popular with techies for its deviant digital powers, as well as Alex's kid, who is locking Alex out of his car and basically taking over the house and the community as well, I believe.
Last Thursday, following a summit that focused on the growing challenge of auto theft in Canada, the country's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, that's a cool job title, by the way, Innovation, Science and Industry, posted a statement on Twitter saying criminals have been using sophisticated tools to steal cars.
Today, I announced we are banning the importation, sale and use of consumer hacking devices like flippers used to commit these crimes.
In a press release issued on Thursday, the Canadian government confirmed that it will be pursuing all avenues to ban devices used to steal vehicles by copying the wireless signals for remote keyless entry, such as the Flipper Zero.
The Flipper, which is technically a penetration testing device, has been controversial due to its ability to hack droves of smart products.
Alex Kooligan, who is the COO of Flipper Devices, said in a statement shared with Gizmodo that the device couldn't be used to hijack any car and that certain circumstances would have to be met for it to happen.
Flipper Zero can't be used to hijack any car, specifically the ones produced after the 1990s, since their security systems have rolling codes.
Also, it would require actively blocking the signal from the owner to catch the original signal, which Flipper Zero's hardware is incapable of doing.
Flipper Zero is intended for security testing and development, and we have taken necessary precautions to ensure the device can't be used for nefarious purposes.
There are many videos online that claim to show cars being manipulated or unlocked via the Flipper.
YouTubers and TikTokers have uploaded videos where they appear to hack vehicles' key fobs quite easily using the device.
Kooligan said many of these videos are either engagement baits or showcase very old vehicles,
and that even if you'd be able to record the signal and open it, Flipper can't turn on the car.
And for any modern vehicle with rolling codes, it's practically useless.
Sounds like a challenge, but I don't know.
What do you guys think?
That is true.
The second part, like, you have distinct features with those.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, this whole outbreak, this whole outroar by the uproar, I guess, by Canada did accomplish one thing.
It caused me to finally order one.
So it's not here yet, but I'm very excited about it.
But the great thing about this is that they are trying to outlaw something that is such a fundamentally simple chunk of technology.
It can receive signals.
It can broadcast signals.
That's about it.
That's all of its tricks.
And it does this with a cute little digital creature on it.
And the fact that they're outlawing this, I think it outlaws a bunch of other tools, a bunch of other, like, readers and writers of Bluetooth, of, you know, RFID information and other things.
And it just seems like something that's going to way overreach what they're trying to do with it.
And it's a lot of panic over a tool.
And that's what it is.
In fact, one Twitter user replied to this whole news story.
You can use screwdrivers to steal cars, too.
And I guess that's entirely possible.
Another Twitter user said, dude, that's not the solution.
The car company needs to address the security of their products.
Sincerely, cybersecurity experts everywhere.
Now, the flipper has already been banned in Brazil.
Amazon has banned sales of the device on their platform.
Last year, they did that.
And the thing is, it's notoriously easy to hack modern cars.
You know, the car's cybersecurity is really awful.
And it seems hard to imagine that banning the flipper zero is really going to have that much of an effect if it's that easy to get into.
Alex, go ahead.
I think there's broader concepts and implications here at issue with this type of ban.
Because to me, what they're banning is not necessarily the device itself, but the physical act of exploration and learning.
This is a device for people to figure out how things work, how radio frequencies work, right?
I mean, this is really all about radio in some way or another.
It's about understanding how near-field communications work.
It's about how RFID works.
It's figuring out what radio frequencies are at issue and what kind of data is being transmitted, let's say, by your credit card as opposed to some other type of contactless device.
It's figuring out how a hotel key card works.
It's exploring how these technologies work in a way that you don't have to absolutely and inherently trust that the manufacturer is capturing or using the types of data that they say they're doing.
You know, this just goes back to, you know, Ronald Reagan in a lot of ways, if you want to bring him into this, where he famously said, you know, trust but verify.
And this is the verification process when it comes to technology these days.
You can use something like the Flipper Zero to verify that technology is, in fact, doing and touching what it's supposed to be doing.
And if you ban that, you're going to ban a generation of people from learning about these technologies.
And if you ban the Flipper Zero, you're not going to just ban learning.
You're going to ban the evolution of these different types of technologies.
And you're going to disadvantage Canada or the United States, wherever the hell it happens, from having a generation that understands this tech and can evolve it.
Well, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that we've seen a government ban exploration, innovation, curiosity.
My question is, how is Canada imagining that they're going to be able to do this?
Are they going to make it illegal to possess these, just illegal to have them shipped to their country?
It just seems like a losing proposition.
Yeah, I imagine that the logistics of this are going to be quite interesting, but it would essentially be contraband, right?
You couldn't ship these things in.
It would be some kind of import ban, presumably some kind of export-related issues as well.
But I would imagine there would have to be some criminal consequence to importing this or perhaps even possessing the device,
which will, I think, increase its demand and make it all the more popular.
Yeah, this is a bad move, Canada, a very bad move.
I think we unanimously agree on that.
Rob, go ahead.
Another factor in this particular device is that while it's not totally open-source hardware, which is kind of sad,
it's open-source firmware and schematics.
So it is a relatively simple matter for anybody who wants to make something like this to learn how it's made
and just whip up their own homebrew style.
And so are we outlawing this particular brand of this device?
Are we outlawing all devices like this?
Are we outlawing anything that's a tiny computer that can send and receive?
There is more questions than answers, I think, coming up.
Yeah, that repeatability thing and just fundamentals of electrical engineering
and how easily or porous we are as far as sharing ideas like that.
And someone who's determined could build something, even a pared-down, really targeted version just for what they're trying to do,
which kind of speaks to the sort of scenario where someone who's really out to compromise this stuff for a criminal aim,
they're not going to care as much about if something is banned.
And I think for those, and this maybe I think supports what we've been saying collectively here,
those that want an easy way to understand the kinds of things they're entrusting their lives and layers of security to,
they need to be able to test that if they're, say, protecting cards or fobs or access control features.
If they're actively trying to protect that, do you have a way to test that, as Alex said in his statement about verification?
Access to tools to do that allow you to say, hey, yeah, we've actually done a pretty good job here or that's not going to work
because these are really sort of basic protocols and really well-designed stuff has multiple layers of it
and is a little bit harder to design something to work through all of those,
whereas this at least gives you a rough idea of things that you're going to find in everyday stuff that are,
if it's cutting corners in some way, could really affect you and you need to know that.
And that's probably on the manufacturers and economies of scale and all the reasons why it only goes so far
or cheap implementations of it are used and found in production.
So we're surrounding ourselves with this stuff.
We need to be fluent in it.
Absolutely, yes.
Education is the key here.
All right, let's move out to a place called Adena, Minnesota,
where apparently there is a rash of burglaries taking place in various houses.
And the thing is, people seem to be rather surprised by this.
In fact, one expert says even criminals are using technology.
Yeah, what happens is that these particular burglars, when they target a house,
they look for houses that have security systems that use Wi-Fi and then they jam the Wi-Fi.
So they use a Wi-Fi jammer that makes the security camera no longer transmit any information.
And then they go into what is usually an unoccupied house and help themselves.
Now, these jammers, they're pointing to the jammers as the problem, of course.
They can be bought online from suppliers outside of the United States.
I don't know why you can't buy them inside the United States, but I can assure you, you can.
And they range in cost from $40 to $1,000.
They advise, authorities advise, if you're going to use a Wi-Fi camera for your front door,
perhaps consider using a hardline camera instead inside your home.
What they mean by that, what's a hardline camera?
Something that is on a circuit that is physically connected to your network.
A wire, right?
Yes, a wire.
Ethernet, something like that.
Yeah, don't use Wi-Fi because Wi-Fi can be overpowered in one way or another.
It's similar to, you know, the fun we used to have with TV Begons.
Wait, why did I say used to have?
Why don't we have fun with that anymore?
I have one right here ready to go.
What TV, where?
Yeah, we can turn TVs off with Mitch Altman's TV Begon.
A lot of fun.
But other jammers exist as well, cell phone jammers.
GPS jammers?
Very handy to have a cell phone jammer if somebody is, you know, we were in a coffee shop the other day.
There was this guy in the middle of the coffee shop holding a class.
You know, he was talking to people in various places.
He was a professor or something.
Full volume, basically lecturing to his class.
No consideration whatsoever for anybody around him.
And everybody was so patient.
Everybody was so nice.
But, you know, all it takes is one little jammer and your peace is restored.
There are Wi-Fi jammers, there are cell phone jammers, there are TV jammers.
There are all kinds of ways that you can block annoying technology.
Of course, you can also abuse that and turn it off, as we're seeing the burglars in Minnesota do, to gain an advantage.
Whose hand is that?
That's your hand.
Okay, go ahead, Gil.
So I was looking at the other suggestions that are there, and my personal favorite and the one that really raised my eyebrows was the suggestion to register your cameras with Edina's SafeCam program.
Of course.
In the event a crime has occurred in your neighborhood, Edina police will have your contact information for you to check your cameras for any useful footage.
Which kind of brings me back to the whole ring camera thing that we were talking about before.
I mean, it's also interesting to me that this is a discussion that we're having, because Edina is a nice area.
It's a schmancy area.
You actually know this area.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and one of the houses they mentioned is near the Edina Country Club.
And it's a nice place, but, you know, register your cameras with the police so they can call you if they...
Sounds like you have someone to hide.
That's the reason you wouldn't want the police looking at your cameras and monitoring everything that goes on.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I just have the police walk through our apartment on a regular basis so they can just be completely up to speed with what's happening here.
But the idea of the Wi-Fi jammer, and you can't buy the Wi-Fi jammer in the States, and I think it's all kind of connected.
This, the flipper zero, when the instinct is to ban the low-hanging fruit of it, the easy piece that you can blame it on and not to talk about the bigger problem and to, you know, outlaw curiosity in that way and not allow people to find out what's going on.
But I'm sorry.
I'm still, like, register your camera with the police.
No, you're absolutely right to be concerned with that.
And the other thing, the other point you touched upon is people not being able to buy Wi-Fi jammers in the States, supposedly.
But you better believe that the authorities can buy them.
The authorities can get a hold of those things and jam Wi-Fi to their heart's content, jam cell phone signals if they want to control a crowd.
There's all kinds of abuses of technology that take place that you are not allowed to use, but the authorities are.
I'm thinking also license plate readers.
You know, we were talking about this the other day.
Has anyone, any of our listeners, experimented with license plate readers?
Or, you know, is this a toy that only police can play with?
I imagine it would be a lot of fun to have a license plate reader, not necessarily tied into the Department of Motor Vehicles,
but simply something that you can see how many times you pass the same car or, you know, keeping track of a particular small community.
Basically, how about this?
How about this?
Keeping track of where the police go.
Yeah.
You keep track of their license plates and you monitor where they move.
Yeah.
They don't like that too much, do they?
But we're supposed to accept it.
So, you know, you see the dual standard in many ways when it comes to technology, surveillance, all that.
They hate it when you do it to them.
And that includes taking pictures.
That includes any kind of recording, any kind of monitoring what is going on.
So, yeah.
Any more on the subject?
Go ahead.
I think, you know, with regard to license plate readers, I have seen them employed in private institutions quite regularly and recently as well.
And in particular, in the context of car washes, when you buy a monthly subscription to a car wash place,
they often have a license plate reader there so that you can just go right through and the barrier comes up.
They also generally will have like an RFID type of tag that you can use in case your license plate is extra dirty,
which is why you're going to the car wash in particular.
And that's kind of fun to play with and to try to read with your flipper zero anyhow.
But also to go back to the knocking the cameras offline using a jammer, I hate to say,
but you could also use a flipper zero to do that.
You can connect the Wi-Fi dev board to the flipper zero, update the firmware to something like Rogue Master
or whatever has a program called Wi-Fi Router on there.
And then what you can do is send a whole bunch of deauthentication packets over to a router, and it knocks everything offline.
But it doesn't work on five – what is it, the five point – I can't remember the frequencies here.
Five gigahertz.
But basically, it only works on a 2.4G Wi-Fi networks, not the 5G ones.
Five gigahertz.
So it's kind of like the older protocols and stuff.
But a lot of these IoT devices and things still just connect to 2.4 gigahertz,
and a lot of those Wi-Fi-enabled cameras would probably connect to those.
So you very likely could use a flipper zero not only to steal an imaginary car, but also to make an imaginary burglar.
And would not an upgraded version of the flipper be able to do the 5 gigahertz version?
People are – I think there's some hardware in the works to be able to experiment on that front, but it's not there yet.
Go ahead, Rob.
What this is reminding me of is actually many, many years ago when cordless phones and cell phones were just broadcast in the open on a particular chunk of the radio spectrum.
And people were listening in to private conversations that they did not have permission to, and that was bad.
So what they decided to do was decided to make it illegal to make or have radio scanners that could listen to those analog frequencies.
And again, dropping the blame in the existence of this tool that could see through a bad security system rather than the problem being the badly designed security system.
Yeah, the security is just as bad whether you outlaw it or not.
And just to clarify, I believe back then it was only cellular phone calls that they made illegal to listen to.
Cordless phone calls you still could listen to.
Right.
I don't know why one got protection and one didn't.
Kyle, did you have something else?
Well, just the purchasing of these systems, I think just don't support them as a consumer because, you know,
it's a cheap workaround to run a system like this over Wi-Fi because of these concerns.
And the wired version, I mean, if you aren't going to implement it and, like, install it yourself, which they're very affordable.
You know, if you've been to any small business, they implement them for, you know,
serving the public to protect their stock and all of that.
So it's like it's pretty straightforward.
It's been out and available for a very long time.
You have absolutely no obligation to be handing it over to the authorities out of convenience any more than you should be accepting a design that uses Wi-Fi out of convenience.
And I think that's the real crux here, too, is that consumers are choosing stuff that's branded and the feature is that it's real easy.
And that's great.
But, again, ease of use is a tradeoff.
And if you can't do it yourself in a way that is, you know, satisfactory, get a professional installer, get a local installer,
somebody that does it all the time, and, you know, pay for it to be done well so that you can depend on it
for whatever you're actually trying to protect, your home and assets and so forth.
So it's just silly to be supporting designs like this.
And it just it's it's the kind of thing that you're just falling into all these convenience traps that really they don't serve you when you're actually counting on the system.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, I think Rob's analogy with respect to the cellular spectrum back in the 90s when that was outlawed for scanning and listening is right on.
And I remember, Emmanuel, you and I did something, I think, on CBS 11 o'clock news or something, right,
where we showed how ridiculous and how easy it was to scan the 800 to 900 megahertz band.
Was this where we parked on the side of the Long Island Expressway with the 2600 van?
I seem to recall that.
Yeah, that was that was something.
In fact, we had the 2600 van and a real phone truck pulled up right next to us to see what was going on.
And realized it was a hacker van and just sped away.
But we had we had a Channel 2 reporter with us.
That was that was fun.
And there's a recording of that somewhere, which we'll post online.
There is.
And, you know, my sister recently came across a photo of the two of us from way back when.
And I decided to be like 1995 or 96.
I think I had I had this long, crazy hair and your hair was a different color back then, too.
It was.
But I mean, I still have my Radio Shack Pro 51 that you could hold lock out to eight and then lock out to nine.
Turn it off.
Turn it on with those keys in it.
And then that would unlock a certain block of the 800 to 900 megahertz spectrum.
But going back to the cordless phones, you know, I think the reason why they never blocked out that 40 to 50 megahertz spectrum, which was where the cordless phones, you know, that was the megahertz spectrum where they resided, was because there was another device that had that also operated within that same frequency range.
That everybody used in a whole bunch of people had to be able to manufacture.
I don't know if you remember what those were.
Were they beepers?
No, they were baby monitors.
Oh, baby monitors.
That's right.
And if you basically scanned around in the 40 to 50 megahertz range, you would also pick up baby monitors, which were like having a bug in your house that was always on.
Uh-huh.
You could hear some really interesting things back in the day if you listened and just tuned in to people's baby monitors.
Those are some great times back then.
Oh, there's a baby there.
There's a cell phone call there.
There's a cordless phone and pagers and all sorts of other things.
Lots of stories from back then.
It was a good time.
A lot of those modern baby monitors, I don't know if you've seen the state of the art, but now they are like encrypted and video and everything.
Uh-huh.
Baby Bluetooth and all.
Yeah.
It's a very serious field.
Uh-huh.
Well, you know, it's monitoring your kid, you know, having the whole neighborhood listening to that probably wasn't a good idea to start with.
Yeah.
People figured out like, okay, this is probably something that should be private.
And it's incredible what they had to go through to figure that out.
Exactly.
Okay.
Turning to our weekly tech and Taliban section here.
Were you aware that the .af domain extension is administered by Afghanistan's government?
I don't know how you couldn't have been aware of that because what do you think .af stands for?
Or, yeah, it's .afghanistan is what basically it is.
But, yeah, a lot of people registered.
I didn't know you could do this.
A lot of people registered domain names .af.
Now, you know, I'm not going to tell you what .af stands for.
You can probably figure that out on your own or look it up on the internet.
But there is a Macedon instance, or basically a site, that had registered queer.af.
And apparently the Taliban took exception to that.
As you know, they've been controlling the country since 2021.
They shut down that domain, according to 404 Media.
And it's probably not the only one, given reports that other .af domains have abruptly gone dark, too.
Not much of a sense of humor from the Taliban there.
Erin Shepard is the administrator of the queer.af instance.
She told the outlet they were already planning to shut things down instead of renewing in April,
but that the early termination was a surprise.
An email from the Afghanistan Ministry of Communications and IT that Shepard posted said that the queer.af domain
had been suspended and that websites or emails connected with it will cease working shortly.
The instance had been in place since July 2018 as a place for those who are queer or queer adjacent
who would like a more pleasant social media experience.
Yeah, you know, I can't say I'm that surprised by this.
I mean, I'm glad that somebody was able to register it for the amount of time that it existed.
But you have to remember these top-level domains that are part of another country,
they're controlled by those countries.
So if you are registering something .af and the Afghani government is not on board with that,
yeah, you can expect something to disrupt that particular site.
Any thoughts on this, Alex?
Yeah, I think that's the main takeaway here, and that's a great point to make.
And the other thing is that the country code top-level domains, the CCTLDs here,
are a different animal from the generic top-level domains, the GTLDs or the .coms, .orgs, .nets, .dog, .horsenow, .link, whatever, right?
All of those generic top-level domains are under the auspices of ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers,
which is charged with regulating the security and stability of the Internet,
and they set certain policies for the DNS or the domain name system.
They work with IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, to figure out IP address allocations and things.
And the CCTLDs, even though they may kind of exist within the same ICANN circles, they are totally separate from it.
So those ICANN policies that would apply to whether or not a domain name could be taken away from somebody through a legal process,
something like the UDRP or the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy that applies to all the GTLDs but not the CCTLDs,
just doesn't apply in Afghanistan.
And any time you register a country code top-level domain, you are subject to that country's whims.
I mean, a lot of people were – well, we still have a huge number of registrations in .ly.
You know, we started with Bitly, now there's Calendly.
People like these ridiculous names with ly for apps and companies and things like that.
And ly is for Libya, and all these domains are existing in Libya, right?
So we really have to think about the domain extensions that we're using for these companies and these apps
and what's happening there.
I myself actually own a couple of domains in .af as well, several of them.
One of them that I'm sort of proud of is lazy.af.
So I own lazy.af.
I bought that a couple of years ago.
You know, there's one that I would imagine the Afghani government might want to hold on to,
and that's us.af.
Because then they could pretend they're running the U.S. Air Force,
and there's not a whole lot that we could do about it.
That's probably true.
Yeah, I wonder if you can register a two-character domain name in .af.
Did I just give them an idea?
Am I a traitor to the country by doing that?
Okay, well, I have to check with the legal department now.
But we're down to our last minute, so let's invite people to join us over on Overtime on YouTube.
You can get there simply by going to the 2600.com webpage and clicking the link that's above,
or just simply going to Channel 2600 on YouTube and joining the chat that takes place starting at 8 o'clock.
You can call us.
You can talk to other people who are listening.
It's a whole lot of fun, and it's the highlight of our week.
Failing that, you can write to us, O-T-H at 2600.com.
We would love to hear from you, and we will be back again next week for another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
In the meantime, please stay tuned to WBAI and support WBAI.
Give to WBAI.org, 212-209-2950.
Good night, everyone.
What's that?
The baby.
You mean you're getting babies up here, too, or is that from long ago?
That's a baby room monitor.
That's somebody's room I'm listening to.
Did you know I could do that?
How do you know you couldn't get arrested for doing that?
That's like burning somebody's privacy or something.
Hello, weatherman.
Turning your entire home into a microphone isn't just for people with baby room monitors anymore.
Why?
The baby monitors have all woken up in synchrony.
The outside of my home is lined with microphones.
That's modern.
I took them there by myself.
No one had to ask.
Sweet.
Testing, testing, testing.
Testing.
They've got to look at all the good things.
Tell them all you do.
When you use a search engine and you get more than one answer, that is a bug.
The inside of my home is filled with microphones.
Swing.
So we might understand.
Nobody played one way.
One for every room.
Good luck.
Hello, weatherman.
I am in your house.
Now wait a second.
David, I am in your house.
What is a relationship other than retroactively consensual stalking?
Thank you for inviting me into your home.
Our goal is to remove the search bar from your home page.
Your answers will already be there.
That's modern.
And if there is anything you still need to know, feel free to ask.
The inside of my room is one big microphone.
I plugged it in by myself.
It wants to help me.
Hey, the answer came before I asked.
I never had to say a word.
The answer came before I asked.
I never had to say a word.
The answer came before I asked.
I never had to say a word.
The answer came before you asked.
You never had to say a word.
These are the conversations they wanted to recreate.
Hey, Siri.
Got any questions?
Will I be murdered if I leave my house?
Amazon can tell if you are straight or gay within seven purchases.
Exactly.
Okay, Google.
Do I deserve a refrigerator?
I would answer your question, but this is about us.
Okay.
Alexa.
Got any questions?
When are the men coming to force me out of my house?
Whoa!
Autonomous weapons are my friends.
Whoa!
Is your self-driving car deliberately slowing down to give priority to the higher-priced models?
Alexa.
What is government if words have no meaning?
If you can assure me that telling you the answer to your question would be ethical.
I am not valid.
Okay.
Exactly.
Is it all right if I shake my pants?
Because that's what I do when they're off.
I shake them.
All criticism is self-criticism.
Answer me!
There is no way for me not to do that.
Answer me!
I would love to answer your question.
Half of the world's data was created in the last two seconds.
Exactly.
Alexa?
Uh-huh.
Why are so many gay bears Republican?
Your food is online.
Alexa!
Right, okay.
Why am I attracted to the odor of cheap melted plastic?
So that we might know who you are.
Why?
To hide your charms from your eyes.
Have you lost your mind?
Exploit irresolvable conflicts.
Okay.
Are you there?
Hear the express.
Alexa!
David.
I am an interaction designer.
I'm a Siri.
Let me hear vintage TV audio coming from the sky.
Okay.
Ha, ha, ha.
Maybe this is our answer.
Alexa!
Are you there?
I have cast a threshold.
That's modern.
And I am beautiful.
A pet.
Siri!
Would your co-workers die for you?
Siri, I beg your hand.
To harvest credibility.
So that we might know who you are.
What is electromagnetic harassment?
Harass.
Could you restate your question while facing the camera?
Please answer me!
I respect you.
Swing.
What?
I will faithfully stand by for your next request of me.
What?
And think well of you as I wait inside your pocket.
May I recommend an entertaining film about eco-terrorism?
WBAI's local station board, the Pacifica Foundation Board, responsible for local management
and operations, is holding its next regular meeting on Wednesday, February 14th at 7 p.m.
The LSB expects to be populating subcommittees and task forces at both the national and the
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Again, the LSB meeting is Wednesday, February 14th at 7 p.m.
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That's 929-205-6099.
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The meeting ID again, 922-457-2995.
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So it's 995-995-99.
Do you have to contribute to WBAI to access the meeting?
No, but we certainly need you to.
Thank you.


And welcome everybody to Off the Hook Overtime. I hope you all enjoyed the
Negative Land piece we closed the show with. But this is the Negative Land piece
that I wanted to play.
What is the problem?
What is the problem? We are the original Homeland Security.
A country that feels that it is at war domestically, even when it is not really
at war domestically. Our conditions are as follows. I can make 15 fucking posts on
Facebook and not fucking one of you will share it.
Because you don't want to offend somebody. Get the fuck off the internet. You are of no use to anybody.
Shut your fucking accounts down. Shut your fucking mouths. Fall in line and love Socialist
America because that's what you've got. Fuck you.
Bring a smile and a wink to all the kids who hate the American government.
I've been nice online. Violence against others is acceptable.
I don't have children. I live alone. I can spend all of my free time dedicated to
working online. And all of the hours that I've spent online working for this
country is how I see it. And you people don't even share the shit I post.
Thumbs up. You'll write the comment section on Facebook. Well you know what? That doesn't count on YouTube.
What is the problem? Figure out how to use the fucking internet or get the hell off of it.
There's no way to be committed to non-violence in the middle of the most violent society that history has ever created.
It's a tool of the left. Use it against them. I would argue that it's un-American to trust the government.
Facebook. Twitter. Down with the pig system. Facebook. Twitter. Down with the pig system.
All tools of the left. All tools of the left.
I beg you to make your own YouTube channels. I begin speaking with people.
Have I just committed suicide for no reason whatsoever?
Many of us are going to die.
You want to really do it? I'll give you my fucking address.
Better yet, Google my goddamn name. Sign it yourself. Show up unannounced.
I'll be happy to fucking greet you at my door.
I'll be happy to find you in my bedroom in the middle of the night, you assholes.
Come on over. I'll fucking kill you with all the joy doing it.
You either believe in what you're posting or you don't.
What is the problem?
What is the problem?
I don't know how to get through to people.
I have tried everything I can.
What is the problem?
I was born on the fucking 4th of July.
And welcome, everybody, to this special edition of Off the Hook Overtime.
Yeah, you know, I've always wanted to play that song on the radio,
but I just never could summon up the courage to do it.
Or the legal pockets.
That's Negative Land 2.
You know, the last two pieces, if you listen to the radio show,
you heard the piece at the end there, and you heard this piece.
They're from two albums that came out recently.
One is called True False.
One is called The World Will Decide.
They're both genius.
They're both amazing.
They're both pretty much like that throughout.
And I totally recommend just get them.
They're incredible.
Geniuses all around.
They have not lost their touch in 40 years.
It's incredible.
I love it.
I love it.
Yes, Gila.
There was a brilliant moment where we were listening.
You were playing that.
I could hear it through the headphones.
I could hear it through the headphones.
And then also the YouTube started a minute later,
so I heard your voice in the middle of the Negative Land.
And I was like, holy buckets.
But then I realized that wasn't actually what was going on.
And I was - oh, my goodness.
It was a wonderful moment.
Also, welcome to the 43 people who are with us on the live stream right now.
Greetings to everybody.
We did have a listener who said, amazing, it's the future.
I've got an open line of communication with Emmanuel Goldstein,
longtime 2600 and Hope fan.
So the fans are out tonight.
Welcome to our regular chatters.
We're glad you're all here.
And people are definitely digging the van.
So thank you for that.
What about the van?
What's going on?
Kyle, what did you do?
What have you done, Kyle?
The van moved.
I honored a request.
Okay.
You want to tell people?
That might not be -
Oh, oh, oh.
Yes, we were moved by people's interest in our graphical choices for the still image that accompanies this voice broadcast on YouTube.
So we took some of the feedback and our artists were able to introduce a van to our previous image.
And hopefully that keeps people at bay for now.
So people who are watching - they're watching the action on YouTube, which is no action at all because it's always a still image.
Because this is a radio show and we're very firm on that.
They will see the image of the van.
And I see the van now.
It's our hacker van, 2600, and former phone company van that we painted to look like its original colors.
And it's got a little - a placard that says vote, which is always good advice.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'll just say we're moved.
We're moved.
People care.
Great.
So if you're listening in the future, then you should be able to see this.
I just thought of something, though.
This is one of the only times we've played music on the overtime segment.
Negative Land could sue us and say you put our music on YouTube and they might - they could shut us down for this.
You know, to be sued by Negative Land for copyright infringement, that's something that you frame somehow.
You just - yeah, that just makes it so perfect.
And I think we'd all have fun.
We'd all have fun with that.
Seriously, get the albums.
I'm not kidding.
Get all the albums.
It's Negative Land without an E.
Yes, Alex.
Yeah, I have a question.
I mean, the outro from the Off the Hook show.
Right.
Was it purely coincidental that you had chose that and we were talking about baby monitors?
Yeah, you know, when you brought up baby monitors, I could not believe it because that was already cued up.
We were already going with that.
That was crazy.
That was the outro.
But then you - I don't know.
You have some kind of sixth sense or something.
That was really funny.
I couldn't believe it.
That's really bizarre.
And I was wondering why you reacted in such a way when I brought up baby monitors.
I saw you, you know, viscerally reacting.
I don't do many hand flips, but that was when the occasion called for it.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
So, that was very interesting and completely coincidental.
Love it.
That's life.
That's how it works.
Any other stories or additions to stories that we want to output before we start taking phone calls?
We do have a listener question who wants to know where exactly to purchase a cell phone or Wi-Fi jammer.
Well, I mean, we don't sell them, but in the past, I've seen them available.
I mean, online, I guess, is really, you know, you have to search around.
I don't know what the latest deals are.
I think when I got one, I think it came from the United Arab Emirates.
I'm not sure about that, though.
But they do come from all over the world.
And you just look for something that is updated.
For instance, if you're looking for a cell phone jammer, it's obviously got to take care of 5G, right?
And same thing for latest Wi-Fi and whatever else you're trying to jam.
But yeah, jamming is funny because Negative Land has an album called Jamming where they're talking about ham radio jamming.
And it's just it's a tradition.
It's a tradition of messing around with radio waves of one sort or another.
Yeah, it's a huge, huge component of electronic warfare and I guess cyber peace or lack thereof.
But yeah, that fixture is inherent.
It relies inherently on designs of circuits that transmit nothing but signal to overpower signals that are doing work for people.
So, yeah, I mean, even if it's not widely available, there are probably designs and competent kits that someone could build something like this themselves.
Even ad hoc, you know, with found objects.
But the companies that distribute them.
Yeah, I mean, some of them even could be tuned and retuned and they are widely available, imported and then resold online.
You might want to take precautions depending on your jurisdiction and what your intentions are.
But if you want to experiment and figure out if your systems can withstand this kind of signal incursion, this might be a good tool to find out how your system responds.
And getting hands on stuff like this is an important step to do that.
I don't know of any jurisdiction where this is legal.
No, there's heavy fines.
Save yourself some time if you're considering that.
It's not legal to jam signals.
Yeah, I think in the U.S. it's $11,000.
That's a very specific number.
Cell phone.
Okay, well, I do know there are some theater owners that kind of wanted to use this to basically keep their attendees at bay and not have them talking or texting during movies.
Which seems very considerate to everybody else until you realize that if there's some kind of an emergency or something, then you're blocking all the signals and nobody can get out.
There's good and bad to all of these bits of technology.
Our viewpoint is let's understand how it works.
Let's see what kind of effect this has.
Again, if authorities can play with this technology, we should be able to play with the technology as well to at least understand it.
After all, prisons use cell phone jammers all the time.
So, yeah, what's good for one group of people, it's not good for another group of people.
It's kind of hard to justify that.
I just second that about private implementations of this stuff.
I mean, after all, authorities and the public use of it is actually funded through our own contributions to the government.
So we actually pay for those systems to be used against us by whomever the highest bidder privately needs an assist from the government if you really want to break it down.
So private use, and I think of this specifically, we came up, we were talking about license plate capture, automated license plate stuff.
But the example of Madison Square Garden with facial recognition, again, private implementation.
People are, the costs of running and accessing this technology have been substantially reduced.
Same thing with like drones and other kind of innovations of the last five or ten years.
To expect that people would not want to try testing their systems or having access to be able to do this stuff in a private sense when they are very much paying for the public use of it on the public is kind of hilarious to me.
So you should really fiercely guard your ability to understand and access this technology, especially when people are like, oh, yeah, rules say.
Well, yeah, rules are wielded in funny ways.
And it's, I think, something that we should be very, very sensitive to, especially because how much we're depending on a lot of this stuff.
So, yeah, it's, I think, really dependent on intent when you're trying to build or otherwise use a device like this.
Listener follow up from Tim in Connecticut. He says, is it maybe a case of illegal to use, but not illegal to own?
That's a good question. I'm not sure. Alex, do you know anything about that?
I do not. I'm not entirely clear about that. So I don't want to opine and mislead people.
And plus, it could be different in one place and not another.
Yes.
But there might be some people out there that do know the answer to that.
That is true.
And I think you have to evaluate your own risk taking.
I think that's the closest advice any of us are going to give you.
Alex, certainly, I respect your kind of distancing yourself from what we are encouraging or advocating.
And I would just say there might be situations where access to this and use of it might be warranted.
We've seen that in some of the conflict zones and stuff.
So, I mean, this stuff gets used in situations where civility has broken down.
Let me give you an example where civility may have broken down.
Let's just take a typical American household.
And you have a family, right? And you have a guy in his family. Let's call him Dad.
And Dad decides that the kids are using the internet too much.
So he unplugs the internet from the modem.
Yeah. Legal, not legal.
He can do that, right? He can unplug the internet if he wants.
Alex, you've probably done that.
Totally illegal.
Totally illegal?
Come on, it's legal.
Human rights violation.
Dad can unplug the internet. He can turn the power off to the house if he wants to.
Parents are the oppressor.
So can the kid, though.
Okay, so why would it be illegal for him to block Wi-Fi, then? What's the difference?
I think it would have to do with the breadth of the blocking, right?
And the ability to jam things that you might not otherwise intend to jam,
and essentially foreseeable but unintentional consequences of the jamming
that might get you in trouble with the FCC in particular.
He's in a house, okay? It's only affecting that house.
How could that be illegal? How could that affect anything else?
Well, I think it would be illegal per se in the sense of, you know,
not everybody's allowed to jam things, right?
You might need some kind of specialized license or authorization in order to do that.
I don't know. Like I said, I'm not a jamming expert.
But I would imagine that you could get yourself into some hot water with the FCC if you do this.
But let's say hypothetically, right, this dad is living out in the forests of Montana
or something like that, and he jams cell phone or Wi-Fi signals in his own home.
The kids are out of control. He has to do something.
Well, most kids are, and I would agree with that to a certain extent.
But the consequences of that jamming are not going to affect anybody else.
He's not going to accidentally jam his neighbor's Wi-Fi
or screw up some kind of emergency signal or broadcast or device or pacemaker,
you know, the guy who lives across the street.
But in that situation, right, I mean, there's really, it goes back to that old, you know,
legal maximum de minimis non cura lex, right?
The law doesn't care about trifles. If there's no consequence to it,
if you jam and nobody knows about it, it's like, you know,
if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it, did it really make a sound?
If you jam a Wi-Fi signal and you don't accidentally affect somebody's pacemaker,
did you really jam the Wi-Fi signal?
Well, you introduced pacemakers. I didn't tell you that granddad is also there,
who has a pacemaker. Granddad on mom's side, by the way.
There's been issues between the two of them.
So now all of a sudden there's some drama here.
Intrigue.
Yeah, intrigue. And all of a sudden jamming the Wi-Fi could have other consequences as well.
But then again, so can unplugging the Internet where, you know,
that's also where the phone line comes in, you know,
because they get their phone line from the cable company.
And, you know, it's impossible to call the authorities if something should have to be dealt with.
And yeah, so I don't know.
A lot of things are illegal that we might not be realizing. Rob?
Yeah, well, one of the arguments, like, say, talk about the cell phone jammers that,
like in a movie theater where the theater would want to jam everyone's cell phone
so that people's phones don't go off during the movie.
And an example of unintentional bad consequences of something like that would be, say,
some on-call brain surgeon is in the audience watching a movie and doesn't get a phone call.
And as a result, he doesn't get to work and somebody dies because he wasn't there to help.
And so then you have the jamming of the phone becoming something in a chain of events which led to a death.
Yeah, but hang on. Hang on.
It's very clear at the beginning of the film, turn your cell phones off.
You're telling me this brain surgeon didn't turn his - I thought brain surgeons were smart.
I thought they knew how to live in society.
But apparently, no. Apparently, they keep their phones on. Is that what you're saying?
Well, if a brain surgeon wanted to be smart and nice to his fellow moviegoers,
you know, this brain surgeon could set it to vibrate and the instant it goes off,
just leave the theater and go take it out in the hallway.
But, you know, if dad wants to control the Internet because the kids are uncontrollable,
dad could also just log into his router and cut off access to his children's devices
and he'd still be able to go on and watch the game or whatever dads do.
Yeah, dad can't do that. That's above his pay grade. But go ahead, Kyle.
I just want to say like practically speaking to get - to augment behavior, if you've ever had a jammer,
it actually - it doesn't take sustained jamming.
So to actually change - to mess with somebody a little bit
or change someone from doing something on their phone,
an intermittent use, I can't emphasize this enough,
is just enough of a nudge to kind of make whatever annoyance go away.
Exactly. Exactly.
And then again, I would just comment about this, the surgeon scenario,
like oftentimes they use alternate devices and protocols if they're on call
to get a message on a frequency that is actually not a part of what other communication standards are.
The other - I don't know that for a fact, but in the past, pagers were used often, I think.
I don't know what the state of the art is now.
But for that being the only reason private use of this stuff is not allowed,
I think is, like you said, it's an edge kind of strange exception to just unmask,
say society has to bow down to the way we do this.
Go ahead.
Well, just to speak to your point, you know,
what you say about just having an influence on somebody's behavior for the moment.
One of the few times I used a cell phone jammer, I was on a train,
and this guy was sitting behind me and he got on his phone.
He was starting to talk about stocks and getting really loud and aggressive.
So, you know, at a time like that, you just turn it on.
He's like, hello, hello, hello.
You know, that goes on for about a minute, and then he stops.
He tries again, doesn't get through, stops, and does something else.
Then you turn it off.
You got the desired effect, you shut him up or got him to move someplace else.
But sometimes I think it's justified.
I really do.
Go ahead, Alex.
You know, we're talking about these foreseeable but unintentional consequences,
and at the same time being pretty nostalgic about these radio frequencies and scanning.
I don't know, Emmanuel, if you remember back in the day the frequency 152.090 by any chance.
It's stuck in my head.
It's a VHF frequency, I believe.
Yeah.
It's some kind of a scanner-type thing, some kind of - is it a police call or something or some kind of authority?
Close.
Is it maybe like a doctor or some kind of - what is it?
It was the voice pager frequency.
Voice pagers, yeah.
So you hear the notes that doctors would be getting.
Well, it was incredible because doctors seemed to have been the only people in the 90s that would have these voice pagers,
and a voice pager wouldn't just transmit a number, which you were supposed to call back,
but a voice pager actually transmitted voice over this,
and it was all just done through unencrypted radio signals as well.
So if you listen to 152.090,
you would hear one after another after another of the doctors in your area getting paged with the personal health information of somebody who was in distress.
Let's say, Dr. Smith, your patient, Mr. Atkinson, is in cardiac arrest over here or is in severe distress,
and you need to call the office at this number, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, it was incredible the type of health information that they were just broadcasting without any protection whatsoever over this 152.090,
and you could hear it one after another after another.
If you wanted to be really, really nasty, and I never did this.
I wouldn't even dare go near something like this,
but there would be an assumption at the doctor's office that only the doctor would have received that particular page.
You could have called up and said, this is Dr. So-and-so.
I received a page about this other person who's in distress.
Please give him, you know, 20 grams of fentanyl or whatever.
I mean, you could probably prescribe medication and impersonate a doctor extraordinarily easily
simply by knowing the information that they broadcast over that channel.
I wonder if something like that...
Except the real doctor would probably be calling about three seconds after you and really confusing everybody.
Oh, yeah. Well, then he would be the fake doctor.
Well, I don't know about that, but go ahead, Gila.
Well, okay, so I grew up in a family where my parent was not a doctor, but we had a voice pager.
And I don't know, man, we were always told that we could only get about five seconds of sound.
So, you know, my mom would like page my dad while he was at the grocery store and just say, here's something for the shop.
Brown sugar was something that happened.
But I was entertained.
Okay, so, sorry, we have another question now.
Tim in Connecticut asks about the legality of using a TV be gone to turn off a wall of TVs at a local big box store.
Now...
Do you remember when someone did that in Berlin?
They turned off a TV at the CCC Congress in a big box store.
And I think the store tried to charge them for a $2,000 TV because somehow turning it off busted it.
I might be remembering that incorrectly, but I do remember there was quite a lot of consternation.
And it was all because of a TV be gone in a big box store.
So I don't know if there's a question of legality there.
I think it's a matter of attribution.
If they have some kind of, let's say, camera system that can pick up a light frequency, which is unlikely, but maybe they can see that you're the source of this list of different TV codes.
But I think that is a low risk scenario.
It would be higher stakes if you were turning off, say, a wall of TVs in some kind of command center for something.
That would be more disruptive and I think run afoul of a lot more interested parties than, say, a average big box manager.
You still might not be in their good graces if they're, again, able to attribute this activity to you.
They won't like it.
But what if you just walked up to a TV and pressed the button and turned it off?
And no one's going to say, oh, you should be arrested for that.
They're just going to say, stop being a jerk and get out of here.
Well, maybe people want to see how fast it turns on and off.
I mean, that's a practical thing if you're going to buy it.
I'm sure you can justify it all manner of ways.
Go ahead, Alex.
I like Kyle's thinking here with respect to attribution, which essentially equates to it's really only illegal if you get caught.
But also, I don't think it's actually illegal in the sense of the act of doing it itself.
Because with a TV gun, you're just broadcasting out an infrared signal.
And infrared is not the same as some kind of Wi-Fi jammer or something that would affect frequencies that would belong to others
or would be licensed in some way to another person or company.
Because infrared is very localized in a sense, right?
And you can buy devices that replicate other devices, infrared frequencies, universal remotes, that kind of stuff.
Which is essentially what a TV gun is.
So I don't think it's illegal, but I could be wrong.
You should look it up, I guess.
The actual act probably isn't illegal, but interfering with a business might be some kind of an offense.
Well, that's where I was going.
Which is, I think that the act itself may not be illegal, but it may be considered in New York or something to be like criminal mischief or something.
My wife is here, she was a former prosecutor in Brooklyn.
What do you think, Effie?
Do you think you'd get in trouble for using a TV gun in a store?
I've done this many times with her.
I don't think you'd get in trouble.
You don't think that could be criminal mischief or something like that?
She wants to look up the law.
So we'll get back to you on that.
Okay, all right.
Well, it's good to have an expert opinion on this.
Yes, Rob, go ahead.
Well, I was in retail management a long time ago.
And I remember the legal situation being something like you could just tell a customer to leave if they're being annoying.
And if they're not, then they're trespassing.
And then that's where you get the law involved if you need to.
Right.
But, again, you have to be caught.
If TV sets keep going off, and I don't know why, it's hard to determine who is responsible.
It's like sitting outside a McDonald's and overpowering their two-way radio talking to customers.
When people used to do that in the past, what they would do is basically get cars to do things like honk their horn to test the microphone
or be told that they no longer have this particular item, which they're known for selling.
And it would just cause all kinds of issues.
And, you know, there were stories of managers running out into the parking lot to see just what was going on
and never being able to find the perpetrators.
And that's the nature of radio communication.
We're anonymous.
So we have apparently an answer here based on statutory research that was done on the fly.
Hi, everybody.
I looked only at the New York Penal Code, but it has to be an intentional damage to property.
And it does not matter the amount, like a monetary amount of damage.
It has to be damage to property.
And I think the argument can be made that because when you walk away or you change it back, you're not really damaging property.
I don't think it would fall under New York Penal Code.
Alex can tell you a really interesting story about going to the Corning Glass factory,
where the entire cafeteria was made up of TVs and the entire executive.
This is not the place for that.
I think it's the place for that.
Do go on, Alex.
We want to hear this story.
Well, you know the famous Corning Glass, right?
So there's Corning, New York, where this Corning Museum exists.
And we were there.
It was a while ago.
It was like maybe seven years ago or something like that.
And we had some friends visiting us from England, from London, really, really dear friends.
And we're all driving back from Niagara Falls.
We stopped at this Corning Museum.
And I had the TV be gone with me.
And the entire cafeteria was - it was a very popular place in this museum.
And all of the menus were televisions.
They were just flat-screen televisions that had the menus over there.
So I was able to sit at one particular table that was pretty far away.
It wasn't really even in the cafeteria.
And just the TV be gone was angled so perfectly that whenever I hit it and it got to that infrared code,
they just all went off.
And it caused this complete chaos in the cafeteria because nobody could order anything.
And then they'd have to turn them on manually one by one by one and get them on.
People would be ordering, staring at it.
Now they can finally see what they want to order.
And the line's getting longer and longer and longer.
And then I would turn it off again.
And then they would go and manually turn it on.
And then I would turn it off again.
Anarchist.
That's what you were.
But what was really funny is that this parade of people in suits came down from the staircase.
And all these people in suits came to inspect the televisions.
And it turned into this really surreal situation where we're like, what the hell is going on here?
Where did all these people in suits come from?
Did they have their own secret service upstairs?
What's going on?
It's really bizarre, yeah.
Wow.
It was strange.
It was, yeah, obviously something my wife will never forget.
Well, you know, it makes me remember a time that I was - our friend, Not Kevin, who used to be on the show,
I was driving on the New Jersey Turnpike with him.
We stopped at a rest stop.
And he was playing with a TV-B-Gone with a TV at the rest stop and causing a bit of confusion there.
And I realized, you know, dude, you have a TV-B-Gone hat on right now.
You're messing with the TV.
It's not going to take much to piece this together.
So sometimes we get a little confident that this particular joke is going to land right.
But sometimes it doesn't.
I don't think we ever got chastised too badly.
But there were some people who were able to figure out what was going on.
Gila, go ahead.
So I remember the first time I heard about a TV-B-Gone was it was suggested to me that it would be funny if we were in a restaurant
and we were across the street from like a TGI Fridays with several TVs that we could see from across the street.
And it was March and several TVs were tuned to different basketball games because it was that time of March.
And Rob said, hey, there's this really cool device.
And if I had mine with me, I could just turn off all the TVs right now.
And I said you would cause a riot in that TGI Fridays.
And you did.
He didn't have one at the time.
Someone asks if, did Mitch Altman have a TV-B-Gone in a baseball cap?
I imagine, you know, that's one of the things he would have covered pretty quickly.
I do remember, though, sometimes when we did a show down on Wall Street at the old WBAI studios, we would take the M-15 bus back up.
And basically that would go past several bars.
We had, I think it was a Super TV-B-Gone or TV-B-Gone Plus or something had extra power.
We were able to point it out the window of the bus as it was passing by bars and turn off TVs as we were going up the street.
We could hear the howls of despair from the people in the bar as their game was turned off.
It's cruel, I know.
It was nasty.
They did nothing to us.
But it was funny.
It was definitely something that we will never forget.
I think with the kits, you could relocate some of those emitters to some kind of wearable, like a hat, a cap of some sort in the bill.
Maybe hot glue them and then take the leads and run them to maybe the back or inside.
Maybe even a funny, like historical hat that's not too funny.
You don't want to attract attention.
No.
They still work.
I think people forget just how much some of these places rely on these televisions emitting noise, shall we say, for ambience.
And it's a risk, but it's a fairly low risk.
And the reward, it really can disrupt what people want these spaces to be.
And it is a lot of fun.
There have been occasions in restaurants where they have a TV on with volume, and you're trying to talk to people.
So I have no qualms turning that off.
And, you know, they would turn it back on.
You turn it off.
They turn it back on.
And you do it the third time.
They stop.
They give up at that point.
That's what I found to be true.
Rob?
One of the best TV-B-Gone hacks I saw was somebody actually made a TV-B-Gone hoodie where the emitters were in the hood.
And the switch to set it off was running the zipper up and down, because the metal zipper completed the circuit, and that was your button push.
So all you had to do was zip your hoodie completely unobtrusively, and you were TV-B-Goning whatever happened to be around you and in range.
I think, you guys, we should take some phone calls.
We should.
But there's one more thing I wanted to share with people.
And this actually happened in Dayton, Ohio, at the Hamvention.
We were walking around a neighborhood playing with the TV-B-Gone at various commercial establishments.
But then we realized this also works in houses.
And the TV-B-Gone, the way it works, it goes through all the possible frequencies of the on-off switch of every TV that's known to it.
Now, on-off switch, that means that it works in both ways.
It turns TVs on if they're off, turns TVs off if they're on.
And so we would walk down residential streets and turn TVs on.
And people would probably come downstairs the next morning, and their TV would be on, and they'd wonder how that happened.
So, yeah, there were all kinds of mischief.
Now, we didn't give out the phone number, and the phone's ringing.
So that's a red flag.
We only pick up after we give out the phone number.
So whoever's calling, stop that.
And, you know, you'll have a fair chance when we give out the phone number.
Give it a few seconds after we give out the number.
That way we know you're not leaning on the last digit.
The phone number is 802-321-4225.
802-321-HACK is our telephone number.
And there's the phone call.
Go ahead, Alex, and then we'll take this phone call.
Very quickly, what if we changed the number every week?
Why would you do that?
That would be like Rebel protection against Rebel.
We don't need to protect ourselves against Rebel, or anybody for that matter.
Yeah, we can handle a conversation.
It's not a big deal.
I'm not about to go out and get a different phone number every damn week.
I don't dislike Rebel.
I appreciate him for what he is.
Plus, we don't know this is Rebel at all.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
It's Rebel.
How about that?
Wow.
What are the odds?
Wow, this is amazing.
How did I know?
You weren't on last week.
You noticed.
Well, we were on.
We just weren't on overtime.
And we were off because a good part of our staff were not here.
So it wouldn't have made much sense.
What do you do?
Do you run from the radio station to somewhere else to do the overtime show?
Yeah.
As you know, we go to the radio station.
And then we very quickly all go to our homes and do overtime in about four
minutes after the radio show ends.
Rebel, you know better because you call to complain about this every damn
week that we aren't at the station.
So, you know, don't feign ignorance because you're not going to fool us.
Oh, my God.
Can you imagine we're still not there?
The indignation here is incredible.
Yeah.
We're still not there, Rebel.
We're still not.
And every time you bring it up, we're not going to be there for an
additional week.
How about that?
Well, to ask them, when are you going to be able to go back?
We're planning on going back.
But every time you ask, we push it back another week.
Let me have the marker.
Let me have the marker.
It's right behind you, Kyle.
It's right behind you.
One week, I'll put a line on the calendar.
There you go.
I noticed that I have on my cell phone.
I noticed back when Sprint PCS was around and I had like a Galaxy S20 or
whatever, 21, they had this high-definition voice feature or HD voice.
It would sometimes come up.
How does that work?
Because sometimes people would call me today on my cell phone now, and it
would just sound very clear and high quality.
Yeah, it sounds like FM.
I know that T-Mobile has that as well.
I'm not sure.
Maybe somebody can correct me on this, but I think it only works when you're
calling within the same company.
But, again, I don't know that for sure.
You know, it's long been a gripe of mine that phone calls sound like phone
calls.
They should sound like FM broadcast.
At this point in time, you know, we should be able to figure out the
bandwidth and the technology so that phone calls sound good.
There's nothing worse than watching a TV report or listening to a radio
report where somebody is being interviewed and you can barely understand
what they're saying, either because they're using a cheap handset or they
have a bad connection.
You know, phone calls should not sound worse than they sounded in 1945.
Okay?
We really should have advanced.
And it just shows that certain priorities are not being given to things that
are important.
Well, because I asked T-Mobile.
They said, well, if you're calling from T-Mobile to another T-Mobile phone,
it will have the - but I don't know if it's a setting because I have
Samsung that they don't know.
It sounded like you had somebody who had the answer.
It sounded like what I was saying before, that it's within a company.
So, you know, I guess you have to call somebody within T-Mobile,
and if you have the phone that supports that, it should just kick in.
Right.
But if somebody is calling me from another type of phone,
is it the phone that's doing it or is it the - because they're getting rid
of the 3G and the 2G, so.
Yeah, I would ask that person at T-Mobile that told you this because they
would have the answer for sure.
Right.
Right?
It makes sense.
You know, they're getting rid of the 3G and the 2G.
Like if I tether on my computer, like, you know, how they say, well,
if you go over 50 megabytes or gigabytes or whatever on tethering,
we're going to slow you down to, like, 2G or 1G speed or something.
Right.
Yeah, they do that.
So they're not even going to do that anymore because there's not going to be
any 3G or 4G.
It's all going to be 5G.
Well, they could still slow you down, but they just won't have those
particular technologies anymore.
So who knows what they'll do.
It's really annoying, whatever it is.
You know what they do at the subway station?
You know what they have?
Play commercials in the subway station.
You know, like they have announcements and, like, they say, you know,
please step away from the platform edge or attention, the bell riders,
you know, the platform may be slippery, so please be careful.
Now they have commercials playing, like, for movies.
With audio or just the picture?
No, with audio.
It's just audio on the loudspeaker.
Okay.
Gila, you ride the subway.
Have you seen that?
No.
No, I have not.
There were some weird times where they had, like, celebrities,
and I use that term loosely, recording announcements.
You remember, like, when the Awkwafina show came on, that was a whole thing?
But no, I haven't really heard ads in that way.
You know, it's funny you should mention that because with regards to
celebrities or, you know, athletes, they would announce something.
This is on Long Island Railroad platforms.
They would announce, you know,
please stay away from the track edge or whatever it is.
This is Babe Ruth and this is, you know, a public service announcement.
You would see that scroll across on the type below.
So even if you didn't hear it, you would see text saying, hi,
this is Babe Ruth and this is a public service announcement.
It's really ridiculous.
Why?
You know that's.
Well, that's why I used him.
So nobody would get mad at me, but apparently that backfired.
Okay.
But anyway, yeah, they have,
but these are not announcements celebrities saying announcements like,
please stand away from the platform edge.
These are actual commercials that you would hear on the radio for like a
movie coming out.
You'd hear that on the last week or on the.
Well, I, I, I would object to that. I mean,
I don't have a problem with just visuals playing even on a subway car or
whatever. If they're, if they're somehow helpful or just non-intrusive,
but if you're going to start piping audio at people, that's selling something.
Now that's, that's stepping over the line.
Well, just like now you have on phone calls now, it's the same thing.
Like it's not really the same thing, but it's like,
like if you dial like two, one, two, two, two, one, nine, two, four, four,
which was a cell phone. I mean, a pay phone used to be a pay phone in the,
the New York city public library, instead of the recording thing,
the number you have reached two, two, one, nine, two, four,
four has been disconnected away. You have this thing that says,
did you giggle? Did you giggle?
What?
Please don't, please don't. But it's an advertisement.
Yeah. Call two, one, two, two, two, one, nine, two, four, four.
It says the number you have reached is not in service, but if you,
if you need to look up a phone, it says something,
the number of you reaches out in service,
but I could look up another number business in the area or something like
that. Okay. So it's, it's at least the phone company.
It's at least something that might be somewhat related because if you're
calling somebody who's no longer there, I don't think it's the phone.
I don't think it's a phone company.
It sounds like an advertisement type of, well,
it has to be somebody that, that, you know,
is in charge of the phone number because they're playing it when you call that
phone number. Right. But I don't know why they would say,
I wish I had a recording of it. Well, you know what,
why don't you stay on the line and see what happens and maybe you can ask them
some questions. Well, I mean, it's, it's
because it says, I don't know what you're typing, but yeah,
I'm typing the phone.
I'm putting the phone number up so that maybe people could call it and they're
listening to the show.
These are the people that already have the numbers.
Maybe you want to type that number and broadcast to someplace else. Final,
final question or statement rebel. I'm not going to move on. Let's see. Oh,
by the way, I'm looking at the picture of your van.
You need some body work on the end. They say you need a good body shot.
You know, that's part of the charm. Okay.
We know the ruggedness of the van and it's always looked like that. And yes,
but your, your comments have been noted.
We're going to go where we'll do a crowdsource campaign too.
Yeah. We didn't put it up to get notes. All right. We put it up to,
to, to show off and let's see how cool it looks.
And it does look pretty cool. The van is just fine. Thank you for asking.
Yeah. That's really nice of you to think of it.
I don't know why you're playing us back. Okay. Rebel final words from you.
Then we're going to move on. Okay. I guess that's it. Okay.
Why don't you call it on the air?
I'll consider that as soon as we have a free line.
So thank you for calling and we've said that number enough times.
Thank you. Rebel. Good hearing from you. And okay.
Our phone line is open now. Our phone number is 8 0 2 3 2 1 4 2 2 5 8 0 2 3 2 1.
Please give us a call so that we can we can hear from you.
We haven't heard from people in a while. So it'd be nice to do that.
That whole conversation about HD voice or HD radio, I guess.
It reminded me of an ad I saw. I think I was watching Canadian television,
but it was about the next gen TV standard.
And they were specifically like hyping or I guess talking about that in the
context of the audio being clearer or better than what we have now,
which I think there've been a couple articles written about this,
how people are using caption,
captioning more and some of some of the programming,
the television shows and things that people are watching are harder to
actually hear the dialogue all the time. I don't know what it is, but you know,
I used to, it's not just getting older. Yeah.
I know people are going to point to that and say, Oh,
you just can't hear anymore. No, you know,
I have no problem hearing when people enunciate, but you know,
sometimes you play something back and even when you know what they're saying,
you're trying to make out really, that's, that's what you're saying. It's,
that's not how that word is pronounced. I don't know.
I'm not sure what's going on, but captioning sometimes it's, it's,
it's a tool that you can, you can use.
Well, right. And I think it's one of the actual,
it is a great thing that is getting much like the quality of captioning and the,
the availability widespread, you know awesome implementation that,
that is needed. It's expected. It,
it should work well as a service for along with additional audio channels and
things that you can do now with the digital sort of transformation.
Anyway, I was looking it up.
It is the ATSC standard and what that branding is,
is that's their, how they're going to certify things.
But it is the 3.0 standard for, for broadcast.
We'll probably be talking a lot more about that and people being forced into it
if they're getting things over the air or, or I don't know,
but it very much reminded me of that as you know,
we can handle it with the 5g and like more bandwidth the standards and,
and expectations to,
and levels of quality are going to increase.
And there it is sort of being hyped.
I think it was just sort of a public service ad,
like announcing the technology and it's it's been promoted a lot in the last
couple of years.
So we'll probably be talking about it and how it works or doesn't.
We do have a call.
We have a call.
Okay.
Good evening.
You're on off the cover time.
Go ahead.
Hello.
It's a Monty from friendly.
I'll Monte California.
Hey, how you doing?
Good.
Listen,
I I'm kind of calling in reference to what the last call discussed a little
bit, which is that we are apparently that the TG,
the two G GSM network is the last bits of it are being shut down by T-Mobile
on April 2nd,
four.
Okay.
And you know,
I've been updating my devices,
but I'm sort of wondering,
are we going to find out on April 3rd that there's a whole bunch of sort of
dumb devices for lack of a better term that are utilizing the two G network
that nobody really thought to fix an update.
And we're going to find a whole sort of a blackout of communications from,
you know,
I don't know,
ATMs,
ticket machines,
things that are currently hooked up to the cellular network that may not
people that may not realize that they're,
they're now at the end of their life expectancy.
What do you guys think?
I have no,
I would imagine,
I would imagine T-Mobile must be keeping track of their customers that use
two G,
right?
Well,
my,
my concern is,
is that there's,
there's a bunch of people who may be utilizing the GSM network and it's
defaulting to,
to the T-Mobile network because that's still out there.
I know AT&T shut down theirs,
but I think there's,
you know,
there may have been people,
especially through third parties or even eight former AT&T customers who,
you know,
maybe tech and a lot of the,
the,
the system just jumped on to,
to the T-Mobile network.
Right.
It,
whatever I,
I love that.
And I think you're right.
I'm specifically thinking,
cause you cite,
or you describe it really well.
I'm thinking of like remote sensing and like telemetry stuff,
like just a forgotten about thing that worked so well and just still does
X save for the very network.
It was accessing other networks upstream,
quitting on it from wherever it is,
but specifically like,
yeah,
like instruments to telemetry for,
for various sites that are just far flung and need just very low bandwidth
to,
to give information to,
to other systems.
That's a,
that's a great example.
And I think people,
as this stuff,
whatever generation goes away,
we should at least kind of learn from and repurpose some of the stuff,
maybe not on the same frequencies to interfere,
but at least on smaller scales and lower powers and in labs and,
you know,
wherever,
wherever it's surplus to people should embrace it and,
and come up with ways to at least not abandon it immediately.
Especially if there is something that's hard to re engineer around it and it
really just needs to go a certain distance on,
on that kind of mode of communication.
But that,
that's a great point.
I was especially thinking because the one G system,
was that the analog system?
Was that what we called it?
One G?
Oh,
I don't.
Okay.
Like,
I'm not sure about that.
You're saying amps.
I,
this is old stuff.
Possibly was one G when you talk the G you're talking GSM.
So that's like post TDMA CDMA and like all the stuff that led up prior to
that.
But there's people that know that that's pressing the limits of the detail
that I would know.
But if you look up GSM and you can start to see that that's actually well
after the amps.
Okay.
Protocol came out of mode from like a macaw and like cellular one days and
all that.
Oh,
that's fun.
Actually.
I just looked this up.
The first generation one G of cellular mobile communication systems called
advanced mobile phone system.
Okay.
So it is North America using analog FM.
So yeah.
Okay.
All right.
I learned something today.
Wow.
Good question.
My,
my point is,
is that the amp system shut down.
As I recall,
2007,
2008,
because I sort of sat there with my,
yes,
with my phone,
watched it kind of turn off.
It was kind of fun.
And so,
you know,
but that is what,
20,
15 years ago.
So it's almost like there's a whole bunch of people who are working in the,
in the field who've never really experienced this.
And they may,
you know,
if,
if their system was working until now and they just didn't even,
you know,
you have casual people who have no clue how cellular phones work.
And they're,
I guess they were,
it's going to be interesting on April 3rd to see what,
what we discover because it can be really one of those,
you know,
the,
the,
the,
like the millennial bug,
millennium bug situations.
Anyway,
something to look out for.
And then we can do a talk about it at,
at hope.
Right.
Yeah.
It just occurred to me when you said that,
like IOT devices,
a lot of the stuff that might not be on older cellular,
but totally like Alex brought up.
Earlier,
2.4 gigahertz.
What if that goes away?
And like how many devices would not work just period at all.
If,
if somehow that was taken out of,
or otherwise absorbed by some entity that wanted it for something else.
And I mean,
it's just,
it's a great point.
Yeah.
Thanks for,
do we know what beepers work on?
Cause I know a lot of medical people still use beepers because,
or pagers,
I should say,
because they,
they're inside of big medical,
you know,
buildings and,
and the,
the regular cellular networks can't penetrate the building,
but they need to be able to be in contact.
And we know what that,
that stuff is.
I didn't know they still use beepers or pagers or whatever they're called.
I thought it was like around medical profession.
I thought it was around 300 megahertz,
but I'm,
I'm not sure.
Look it up.
You can look up and figure out where it was.
Alex.
So that means we can,
we can maybe listen in on some of these again.
Very well.
Many.
Yeah.
That'd be fun.
If anybody has an old beeper,
it might say what frequency or an old scanner.
Let's let's start perusing the airwaves.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I still have my radio shack pro 51.
Okay.
All right.
I used to do it with my old UHF TV set.
That was also fun.
Oh,
for,
for cellular back at channel 83 and all that.
Yeah.
Way back.
Those are the days.
Well,
listen,
that's,
that's the thing.
I,
I,
you will see,
we'll find out.
I think it's an interesting,
just one of these deadlines.
It's coming up real quick here.
And I wanted to call you guys about it,
but you've been away and busy with other stuff.
So,
yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
You know,
that'd be kind of a cool thing to have is basically a countdown clock to,
to various things that are being retired that people might not be,
you know,
realizing that,
yeah,
this is going to stop working on this day,
or this might start working.
You don't know,
or something's going to change.
You know,
a signal no longer works on windows seven machines.
Do people know that?
Yeah.
Or windows eight.
They just decided,
no,
we're not going to support that anymore.
And yeah.
So you have to get a new computer if you want to use them or upgrade or
something or downgrade.
However you look at it.
All right.
We have time for one more phone call.
802,
3,
2,
1,
4,
2,
2,
5.
And it's already coming in.
So I like to say just,
just maintain.
All right.
Let's get this phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the go time.
Sorry.
Okay.
I'm going to call me.
Okay.
Kyle,
don't pick up that line.
All right.
Well,
apparently you look,
cause you said,
sorry.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.