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How are you doing? Out in Skypeland, we have Alex.
Yes, you do. Hello. Good evening from London.
Okay, we're in London this week.
And joining us also this week is our good friend, Greg Newby.
Greetings. I'm up here in Northwest Canada. How is my audio lag today?
It's a bit of a lag, but not too bad. Not too bad at all.
You are in the Yukon territories, I believe.
Indeed. Connecting over the Starlink network.
Okay, well, we have a few things to say about Elon Musk. We'll get to that right away.
I just want to say, Greg, I'm so happy to see you. I will explain to people why I'm saying that in just a few minutes.
But first, I just wanted to go over some of what's been happening in the last week.
Because it's been quite a lively week. A lot of interesting stories.
Now, we talked a week ago about this J.D. Vance dossier that was leaked to the press.
And that the press was not releasing because they thought it was boring.
Nothing really unusual to be revealed.
And we thought it would be a good idea to just kind of let people decide.
And apparently, this reporter named Ken Klippenstein agreed.
He was a former reporter at The Intercept.
He released the dossier.
He posted on Twitter.
And almost immediately, Elon Musk suspended him from Twitter.
In fact, kicked him off Twitter permanently.
This, according to Newsweek, the headline reads,
Elon Musk suspends reporter who published J.D. Vance's dossier.
So I guess, you know, I have to issue an apology because I called Elon Musk a free speech absolutist.
And apparently, he's not a free speech absolutist.
He's a free speech sometime type person.
And if Democrats are being attacked or having information revealed about them, that's okay.
But as soon as it happens to anything Trump-related, yeah, that's a problem.
That's a problem.
So that's not the definition of an absolutist.
So Klippenstein wrote,
Here's the dossier the media refused to publish.
As I said, he's a former reporter at The Intercept.
He published the dossier to his Substack website about three hours prior to his account being suspended.
Last Thursday, the dossier has been offered to me and I've decided to publish it because
it's of keen public interest in an election season, said Klippenstein.
It's a 271-page research paper.
The Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance.
As far as I can tell, it hasn't been altered.
But even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable.
I'll let it speak for itself.
So we can't show you the link.
So we either have to read the whole thing or we can give you the link on the radio.
You know what?
I'm going to give you the link.
Here's the link to download the dossier yourself and make up your own mind as to whether or not it's interesting.
Something the media, unlike in 2016, the media shied away from sharing information about leaked content.
www.kenklippenstein.com.
I'm going to spell that.
K-E-N-K-L-I-P-P-E-N-S-T-E-I-N.com.
And for those who don't know, dossier is spelled D-O-S-S-I-E-R.
So one more time quickly.
www.kenklippenstein.com.
Slash P.
Slash read the J.D. Vance dossier.
With dashes in between the words.
And J.D. as one word.
I don't know what the P is for in the middle of all that.
But Alex, any thoughts on this?
What do you think about his account being canceled as a result of him simply posting a link to this?
I mean, we've had people post links to things before.
You know, our friends at Distributed Denial Secrets, they've had their Twitter account not able to post links, I believe.
Or maybe they got kicked off of Twitter entirely, I believe.
This seems heavy-handed, though.
Any thoughts?
Yeah, it does seem very heavy-handed in many respects as well.
I mean, I think that this document in and of itself does have some kind of inherent useworthiness associated with it,
given that it was a document that was prepared by one of the major political parties in the United States
to vet the vice presidential candidate for the United States.
So I think the contents, the documents, even the organization's particular document would have worthy content about it.
So the decision to ban this particular account that posted it, the reporter's account,
and I think being a reporter as well makes this even more problematic because it seems highly selective.
It seems very, very much to me that this is about the selective use of the application of the principle of free speech.
And free speech may apply to some, but this is the problem of free speech, right?
I mean, it cuts both ways.
You've got to take the crunchy with the smooth.
You have to acknowledge that the freedom of speech applies to that which you agree with and that which you do not agree with.
So I think the idea that this Twitter account was canceled simply for sharing this type of information is entirely wrong.
It's wrong, but it's revealing.
It shows you who people really are, the people who are being open and sharing information
and the people that want, above all else, to control the information.
And they pretend that they're all for free speech, but when that free speech starts to affect them in a way they don't like,
they clamp down and they show what hypocrites they truly are.
Greg, did you have any thoughts on this?
Well, probably nothing to add, but now I'm a little curious what's in the documents, so maybe I'll take a look at that.
Yeah, you'll have to download it and find out.
We don't have the time to read through it all, but there's some interesting things in there.
I found a few good snippets.
I started quoting it on Twitter, but nobody reads me on Twitter, so I guess it doesn't really matter.
Moving on to another story involving hacking and the campaign, we've talked about Iran being behind the hack of the Trump campaign
and how they tried to pass this information on to the Democrats who weren't interested at all.
But what's interesting about this, going to the Daily Beast, the indictment that was unsealed this Friday
alleges that the three Iranian men gained access to the email account of, well, hang on a second,
who's account did they, the Trump campaign official, which allowed them to steal debate preparation material
and information on possible vice presidential candidates.
So Roger Stone was one of the people whose accounts was compromised, probably because of a lousy password.
But the other interesting part about all this is that they were able to trick people by pretending to be Ginny Thomas.
Yeah.
She's prolific.
I believe she communicates.
She does a lot of correspondence.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Of course, this is Clarence Thomas's wife, the Supreme Court justice.
Um, yeah, um, so, uh, that, that account wasn't, uh, created, uh, was created in April 2020,
wasn't used in the hacking efforts until, uh, this year, um, between April and May of 2024,
the email was used as part of a phishing campaign that targeted, among others, uh, a former security advisor
to a former president, uh, in addition to being the wife of a Supreme Court justice,
uh, Thomas is a conservative, conservative actor, singing next to Donald Trump's then chief of staff, Mark Meadows,
on January 6th, 2021, urging him to overturn the election as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
Um, so apparently by, uh, pretending, uh, and I'm, I'm, I'm sorry if I sound a little flustered here.
Uh, I, I printed this article from the Daily Beast, but they don't have a good printer interface,
and half of the article is just, um, uh, not there.
It just didn't print at all.
You know, it's, it's 2024.
We really should be able to figure out how to get webpages to print.
Um, but, um, that was, that was one of the weak links, was people believing that, uh,
a communication that allegedly came from Jenny Thomas was real and, and basically handing over,
uh, data or access due to something so simple.
Thoughts?
It's timeless.
It's a fantastic technique.
Uh, uh, uh, going for what people are expecting, uh, and playing on that, um, sense of, uh,
sense of, uh, security that, uh, it inherently gives people.
Yeah.
And then, you know, to whatever end you're, you're seeking.
Go ahead, Alex.
Uh, you know, I, I think building upon what Kyle is saying is that the issue here really
to, to me is that you have this really unique situation of not only somebody who comes with
trust and who is a known voice in the community, but also has a, a, a, a, a different type of
authority, some kind of, um, I think additional sway in the community because of the person
to whom she's married, Clarence Thomas.
I mean, it's terrifying to me that you can have somebody who's so politically active with
and, and known to be politically active in just one party, not in some kind of bipartisan
type of situation where, uh, let's say we're talking about generally human rights, where
she's known to be active or known to be active in women's rights or civil rights or something
like that, but we're talking about just the conservative political party, the conservative
political party realm, the Republican party.
And that's to weakness and an adversary, a foreign power saw this weakness and has exploited
it to our disadvantage already.
That is extraordinarily telling.
It's something I think that is really damning about the state of the separation of powers in
the United States when it comes to the judiciary and the executive branch, and also the fact
that we are able and willing to count the, the, um, political participation of our spouses
to, uh, Supreme Court justices in such highly partisan manners.
But that's okay for some reason.
Um, when, when I was in law school, when I went to law school, the judicial canonized,
of ethics was something that was to be, uh, extraordinarily revered.
They were, because they were so rigid, almost, um, monastic in the sense where judges would
take such great measures to ensure that there was no even appearance of impartiality.
The actual impartiality is, is something obviously to be avoided, but in the judiciary, even the
mere appearance of impartiality was to be avoided.
And it just seems like that has been thrown to the absolute wind when it has come to the
Supreme Court with respect to the conservative justices there and the operations of, uh, of
their spouses.
To me, it's extraordinarily sad and it's a weakness and it's a weakness that has been exploited
now on a foreign adversary.
And, uh, the word karma comes to mind because here you have, uh, the wife of a conservative
Supreme Court justice being the weak point to allow Iranian hackers to get access to the
campaign of Donald Trump.
I mean, you know, if I had written that in a book, nobody would believe it.
It just, it just seems so, um, I guess, satisfying if you, if you're waiting for them to fail,
but, uh, it's, it, it, it, it basically shows the dangers of, um, of people, um, um, just
believing what they're, what they're, uh, what they're told if somebody, uh, um, asks for access
or demands access based on, uh, a name only, uh, and, um, that's a name that really even
shouldn't be a part of, of, of something, uh, of a campaign.
If you're, you know, if, if you're part of a family that includes a Supreme Court justice,
it just doesn't seem right to me to, um, uh, be connected to political campaigns that the
Supreme Court could very well have some kind of say in.
Um, so yeah, that's, uh, that's, that's part of the craziness that's going on right now.
And one more story, uh, before we, uh, move on to our, our, our main event, uh, this concerns
a, uh, paralyzed man, uh, who is unable to walk because the maker of his powered exoskeleton
told him that the exoskeleton is now obsolete.
Yeah, this is, this is quite a story.
Uh, it comes from futurism.com, a former jockey who was left paralyzed from the waist down after
a horse riding accident, um, was able to walk again, thanks to a cutting edge piece of robotic
tech.
Uh, it's called a rewalk personal exoskeleton cost a hundred grand.
Now, one of its small parts malfunction, but that caused the entire device to stop working.
He was desperate to gain his mobility back as anybody would be.
He reached out to the manufacturer life ward for detail, uh, for repairs.
They turned him away claiming his exoskeleton was too old after 371,091 steps.
My exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy.
And, um, the reasons why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and
make more money.
That's according to Michael straight, who's been dealing with this nonsense that the issue
was caused by a piece of wiring that had come loose from the battery that powered a wristwatch
used to control the exoskeleton.
This would cost peanuts for life ward to fix, but it refused to service anything more than five
years old.
I find it very hard to believe that after paying nearly a hundred thousand dollars for the
machine and training that a $20 battery for the watch is the reason I can't walk anymore.
He wrote that on Facebook as the infuriating case showed advanced medical devices can change
the lives of people living with severe disabilities.
But the flip side is that they also make their owners dependent on the whims of the devices manufacturers
who often operate in ruthless self-interest.
And in some cases, these companies can shut down entirely, leaving a patient stuck with
proprietary tech that needs specialized software or hardware to maintain.
One man, for example, was forced to spend enormous amounts of time and effort to teach himself
how to repair a device that managed his debilitating cluster headaches after the company that made
it one belly up.
Others lost their sight when the manufacturer of a bionic eye stopped supporting the devices.
Yeah, you know, right to repair.
It's not just cars.
It's a lot of other things as well.
Not just computers.
It's people's lives.
It's getting worse.
Yeah, I think this is like repairing of different types of older machinery and biocompatible assistive
devices.
I think it's only going to expand over time.
Like, you really have to support the ability for things that are more or less durable or
repairable to continue even if there isn't this support.
And this is so common that it's actually demanding that.
And that's where a lot of the right to repair policymaking interest is coming from.
And it really is deserving of that kind of emphasis because it should be even in the designs and
in the spirit of some of these products being relied upon in this way that they're designed
for, like, repairability and maybe modularity and maybe with sort of open or semi-open software
interfaces that people can modify it if they need to add things that aren't part of the original design.
We've been talking about this for years.
In the end, it's the consumer, it's the end user who should have the power and the ability to make decisions
as to what they want to use, how they want to use it, whether it's an operating system, whether it's a program.
If it's theirs, if they bought it, if they paid for it, they should be able to continue to use it
despite whatever quote-unquote advances are being made by one company or another.
One example that comes to mind is Signal, the communications app that just stopped working for Windows 7.
Because they decided it was no longer worth their while to have it on there.
Even though it would work just fine, they just disabled it.
And that's a way of forcing people to upgrade their operating system when they might not want to.
Sometimes your computer can update its operating system.
Sometimes you have to buy a new computer just to get an updated operating system
so you can run a program that you were already using.
You know, it's let the user take the risk if there is a risk.
Let the user make the decision.
Let the user be educated as to why it's a good idea or a bad idea.
But these strong-arm tactics of just making things not work anymore.
You know, like earlier this year, I was complaining about a TV set that decided that it was no longer going to support playing Netflix.
Yeah, this TV is outdated for this app.
Even though it worked fine the day before, no, somebody updated something and decided, you know, it doesn't matter.
The people that bought this, they don't matter.
Anyway, this is the dystopian nightmare that we've kind of entered in where the manufacturing perspective on products
is that their responsibility completely ends when it hands it over to a customer.
That's Nathan Proctor, head of the Right to Repair Project at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
He said this to 404.
However, that's not good enough for a device like this, but it's also the same thing we see up and down with every single product.
People need to be able to fix things.
There needs to be a plan in place, he added.
A $100,000 product you can only use as long as the battery lasts.
That's enraging.
Fortunately, fortunately, LifeWard eventually capitulated and Mr. Straight was able to get his exoskeleton repaired.
What a weird sentence that is.
But that was only after an intense campaign in which he went on local TV, got highlighted in a horse industry publication.
Okay, well, that's it right there.
If you get highlighted in a horse industry publication, the sky is the limit.
Because I'll tell you, as a publisher myself, there is nothing like the horse industry publication world.
All right?
You're in there.
You're set.
And don't mess with them either.
Don't say anything that might offend horse industry publications.
Yeah, I mean, think about their audience, but don't think about their audience too hard.
Their audience is not horses.
You know that, right?
Yeah, I know.
All right.
I just want to make sure.
Anyway, so they gained steam on social media.
But if it wasn't for that, if it wasn't for that, he could still be unable to walk after paying $100,000 for an exoskeleton.
I can't even imagine.
I'm sure you guys out in Skyplan have some things to say about this.
Greg, go ahead.
Yeah, I've actually known and worked with a number of disabled people over the years, people that were quadriplegics, had various other limitations.
And I can tell you that from the person's point of view that's in this wheelchair or using a mobility device, whatever it is, when that device stops working, their life takes a dramatic nosedive for the worst.
Suddenly, they're not mobile.
They're not able to get by.
They're not able to go to work.
Maybe they're not able to communicate effectively.
They're not able to, you know, ingest information effectively.
So I have a lot of, you know, sympathy for someone who found themselves suddenly unable to make use of this life-changing technology.
One thing I did want to mention was at a recent hacker conference, there was a presentation by someone goes by the handle Cryptastic Hacker, and that's C-R-I-P-T-A-S-T-I-C, Hacker.
And that person has a YouTube channel with various videos, and what they talk about is making use or leveraging California's right-to-repair law, which is SB244.
I think we know there are other right-to-repair laws across the country now, and leverage that right-to-repair to get the company involved in this person's mobility device, which is a power scooter, to help out with providing materials.
The unfortunate part is that he did have to be a reasonably good engineer to actually apply some of the fixes, but the good news story there is that the right-to-repair did end up being convincing for the company involved.
We're getting all kinds of incredible allies in this fight to get control of technology, tractor drivers, you know, farmers, truck drivers, people who know their machines, they know the technology,
and they want the ability to be able to fix things themselves, change things themselves, not have to, you know, pay a fee for ridiculous things like, you know, in cars these days, they can charge you extra to be able to accelerate a little better,
even though that's not something that they're giving you, you already have it, they're just disabling it.
You know, one day they'll charge you extra to be able to open the passenger side window.
You know, they could do that.
They can do all kinds of things.
That's what technology allows for.
It doesn't mean that we should allow them to take advantage like that.
Okay, any thoughts on this, Alex?
Then we're going to move on to the big story of the day.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, from my perspective, I think that this really highlights the need, especially in the regulatory medical device space,
that these types of things should be highly regulated in some way, at least maybe even from a contractual standpoint,
because what you're dealing with here is an armed-like transaction between a person who needs this type of medical device and technology
in order to perform basic life functions like mobility, moving around,
and another, on the other hand of this contract, the other business corporation that designed this and created it.
And I think that there maybe should be very basic contractual terms that would require them to keep and maintain this particular type of device
that is so expensive, $100,000 or more, for at least X number of years, right?
So I think that there are ways that we can solve this, either in a regulatory fashion or by virtue of imposing these types of contractual obligations on the other side.
And this is a great reason why you need regulation sometimes, because if you don't have them, companies do whatever they please.
Exactly. I mean, people bang on about the administrative state and regulations being too burdensome,
but this is exactly the type of situation where a regulation established a certain baseline
by which a company was supposed to abide in terms of the upkeep of its product and the maintenance of its product
and the evolution of its product as well.
So when you're paying $100,000 for something, you would expect to get, I guess, at the bare minimum,
some upgraded firmware every couple of years.
You certainly would expect not to be just discontinued within six months or a year or something.
So I think it, number one, underscores the importance of regulation.
And number two, underscores the importance of negotiating a contract with these companies,
regardless of whether or not there is a regulator in place.
Okay.
We're going to move on.
And you can write to us off the hook, OTH at 2600.com.
Please send us your thoughts, email, stories, suggestions, or things that you've noticed, anything about technology.
We'd love to hear about it and talk about it on a future show.
Now, this week, something very interesting happened.
Actually, it started last week.
I sent Greg an email and didn't hear back.
I usually hear back from Greg right away, but I didn't hear back.
I sent him a text message via signal on an unrelated matter a couple of days later.
And you know how you get the two checks when you send a message on signal?
One is for getting on the network, and the other is that it actually made it to the device.
I only saw the one check.
So that was weird.
So I figured, you know, maybe Greg is out hiking with his dogs in the Yukon somewhere.
Who knows?
There's all kinds of adventures that Greg can get up to.
But when the weekend came, and still nothing, I started to do a little bit of digging.
And I actually, I ventured someplace I really am very, very wary of, and I feel uncomfortable even setting foot in there.
Yeah, I went to Facebook, and I started looking around for any kind of clues of what Greg was.
And that's when I found out that Greg was in North Carolina in Asheville or near Asheville in the midst of one of the worst hurricanes in history.
And that's why I was so happy to hear your voice, because you're safe and sound.
You're back in Yukon now.
But boy, Greg, tell us, what did you go through?
I'm sorry, Greg, you're muted.
You're muted, Greg.
Any better now?
Yes, much better now.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I'm wearing my better headset, and for some reason it's not connecting to Skype.
So, yeah, this was a planned trip.
Visit parents every year, twice a year, that sort of thing.
And I knew there was some weather coming and considered postponing my trip, but I had set up a couple of appointments there for things that are hard to do in the Canadian region, including a medical appointment.
So I was like, well, I'll try to make it and hope the weather forecast is overblown and not going to be really that bad.
And, of course, as we know, it turned out to be at least as bad as projected, as forecast, and also the damages were well beyond what were forecast there.
So I was in North Carolina on Wednesday, and, again, forecast for rain.
The rain started Thursday, and this was well ahead.
It was about the time, but it was well ahead of when Hurricane Haleen was really over the land.
So the arrival on land in the bend of Florida was sometime on Thursday, but the rain was quite hard in North Carolina.
And then on Friday, well, we didn't know because by then the power was out, but on Friday where I was, which was somewhat west of Asheville near Brevard, North Carolina, which is pretty close to the South Carolina border in the hills of western North Carolina,
it turned out that the worst effect of the hurricane in terms of rain were felt in that region.
And, of course, you don't really know – it's a little bit of a gamble.
You don't really know what you're in for when there's a hurricane coming.
I'm sure most of us have had hurricanes pass over us at various points or remnants of hurricanes.
So it was very rainy.
And the story that I had from my family was that the power seldom goes out, and when it goes out, it goes out for a few minutes or maybe a couple hours, and then it's back on again.
So the power went out Thursday morning for about an hour or two hours, came back on again.
We're like, oh, well, this is okay.
This is survival.
Mobile service was fine.
Internet was fine.
Everyone out in this region has DirecTV rather than – or I guess in addition to streaming services, now it's all working.
Then Friday morning, when the winds really picked up and the rain was just torrential, you know, buckets falling from the sky of rain, at around 6 or 7 a.m., the power went out.
And at about the same time, the mobile coverage went out.
The cellular coverage went out.
And the Internet went out.
The, you know, Fios equivalent, you know, fiber and DSL all went out.
So that all went out on Friday morning.
And I think that's when, you know, when reality started to set in.
We did venture out just a little bit on Friday and managed to get a little bit of information, and that included hooking up to a neighbor's whole house generator and getting the television online.
And that was with DirecTV.
We were getting a regional station or sort of a local regional station of western North Carolina.
So we were getting some pretty good information at that point.
But we didn't know too much about the full extent.
And we did not try to venture out on Friday other than just up to the corner to see what happened.
And so it became evident over the following day or so that the major damage was due to the area rivers.
And what happened was the rivers were dozens of feet on the order of 25 to 30 or so feet above flood stage, which is a lot.
And these were relatively modest rivers, not like the Mississippi River or something like that, just a small regional river, maybe 20, 30 yards across.
But it was well over its banks, going over the road, eroding the road.
And so what ended up happening as a result was a whole bunch of trees that had their root systems eroded, and they fell over on the power lines.
And you also had roads where the asphalt and whatnot of the road surface were undercut by the current.
And so the roads would, you know, fall into the water.
So this was the type of physical damage that we were dealing with.
So I think – and I'll finish a brief summary, and then we can have a little discussion about it.
What happened then that was a big surprise to me was the cellular network went away.
And I don't know.
I've been trying to figure out.
I don't know exactly what the reasons were.
I suspect there were multiple reasons going on.
The mobile towers tend to be – well, towers, you know, built-up steel towers.
They tend to be on high ground towards the top of the mountains, right?
So you would think that they would be fairly resistant to terrains and floods and things like that because they're not going to be alongside the road or alongside the river.
They're up high.
But we did lose a mobile service, and so we had no bars.
It wasn't that we, you know, had connectivity to the tower, but then the tower wasn't connected to the outside world.
We had no signal in the area.
And we've learned since then that that was region-wide.
So lots and lots of these mobile towers lost their capacity to broadcast their carrier signal, let alone connect to anyplace else.
So what I suspect – and I'd be curious if people here know something more or if we find further information – is that a lot of these towers must get their power from the grid,
and or they must get a lot of their connectivity via terrestrial means, you know, fiber, underground fiber, as opposed to the old school that we're used to way back when,
where the mobile towers were not connected to the terrestrial network, and they were just talking to each other, you know, tower-to-tower communication.
And we still see some of that.
If you look out at a mobile tower, often you'll see a sort of a drum-looking antenna on the side,
and that's a microwave or a similar frequency connection to another tower, and the towers are talking to each other.
And historically, that's the way MCI worked, an old phone company that was competing with AT&T back in the 80s especially,
and other companies have done that as well.
So evidently, that's not what's happening anymore.
These mobile towers seem to be on the power grid without redundant diesel generators on site,
and they seem to require the – at least portions of the terrestrial network, not just operating in a self-sufficient manner.
So this was a major outage, and it was out for a while.
The roads were problematic, a lot of trees across the roads and power lines across the road.
And as you've probably seen in the news, they're going to be probably months in reconstruction
and certainly weeks just to get all this infrastructure back online, the mobile towers and whatnot.
I have one interesting little side story that was fascinating to me.
On the news, they talked about getting emergency towers in place, and I've never heard that before.
We know that at, for example, a big football game, they might have temporary mobile setups that they put in place, temporary mobile repeaters.
And so we did see a tower come online.
I think it was Friday night – actually, I think it might have been Saturday night, but I guess it was Saturday night.
A signal suddenly popped up, and I connected on my phone, and we had a great phone call.
I got connected back, got a bunch of SMS, got a little bit of data, but not a lot of Internet through.
Like I got some emails that came through, but I couldn't view websites.
And it was an AT&T network operator, and none of my family could use it.
They were all on Verizon.
So that was a little bit weird that it wasn't allowing the roaming at all.
But I was able to get connectivity.
And then that signal disappeared about six hours later.
So I don't know what that was, if they were driving around, setting up a tower temporarily, or, you know, exactly how that worked.
And I also don't know how it was connecting to the rest of the cellular network.
But they did have – the phone company evidently did have some mechanisms in some places for overcoming their tower damage,
but it was not something that was saving the day other than on a short-term basis.
No, clearly not enough.
A spectacular failure of communications and infrastructure.
And, Greg, just so people know, how far away are you from the ocean?
Or how far away were you from the ocean in western North Carolina?
Oh, it's – I would have to measure to get a good distance.
But it's on the order of several hundred miles, maybe 300, 400 miles.
This is – if you look at a map of North Carolina, the Asheville is west of Charlotte.
So it's, you know, getting towards, you know, places like Knoxville, Tennessee,
and it's on the border with South Carolina towards Greenville.
And Tennessee was hit hard as well.
So that's the reality we're living in right now, hundreds of miles away from the ocean,
but you can still have your town decimated by a hurricane.
Now, what you described with the cell phone outage,
it's basically something everybody in the region was experiencing.
There's a town called Canton, North Carolina.
I don't know if you're familiar with it.
But its mayor was completely outraged by this.
Its mayor, Zeb Smathers – that's really his name, Zeb Smathers.
And, yeah, that's North Carolina – basically was fit to be tied for seeing this happen.
I must also express my deep frustration and anger with the failures in cellular communication,
particularly the inability to rely on services when we needed them most, he said.
From the very start of this crisis, our ability to communicate with basic emergency services was crippled,
and there is no excuse for this.
Now, you might say, you know, Zeb, this is a hurricane.
These things are going to happen.
And, yeah, I agree.
That's what you can expect.
But this kind of complete outage cost lives.
It absolutely did because people weren't able to communicate at all.
And there was, as you said, there's no redundancy.
Now, you know, I don't know if landlines survived well.
Did you have access to any landlines?
It was one of these VOIP setups.
And what we saw, even though we're – this is with my parents and where they were, all the utilities were underground.
But we didn't have to go very far out of the community until we saw that the phone and power were up in, you know, telephone poles, you know, elevated over the land.
And so they all got cut.
So they did have a landline that was providing their internet as well as their voice service.
And that went at the same time as the power went because it was all on the same towers or in the same telephone poles.
Right, right.
And that's the luck of the draw.
But to have an entire network go out, that is something – we're not used to that.
That's fairly unprecedented.
And, you know, you have a central office that serves whatever remaining landlines there are.
That central office has a generator backup that will provide power for days, if not weeks, after an outage.
You do not have that with cell phone towers, especially the way you describe them, where they're hooked up into the grid.
So if everything goes out – and this includes, you know, fiber optic because that requires power as well.
We've talked about this many times where local phone companies try to get you to give up your copper line,
replace it with a fiber line that has a battery that will last maybe a day as opposed to your copper line that will last weeks without power
because the generator in the central office is what's powering the line for you.
So we're seeing all this happen, and I'm not surprised, unfortunately.
It's just – it's the worst possible combination of events, but it's a prime example of bad planning.
Yeah, it definitely is going to take a bit of, like, better planning and further investment going forward.
It seems to be probably, like, the product of having upgraded and added capacity for some of the newer broadband,
mobile broadband services and devices that people are, you know, expecting to be able to use anywhere.
Expanding that to have a wider footprint is one thing, but to have it connected in ways that work in the event of something like this
is a little bit – a step further than just deploying new systems, if you know what I mean.
So it may have the capability to run in different modes and connect, as we described, tower to tower
or using schemes that balance the load.
But certainly in an emergency, you wouldn't want to prioritize stuff that takes up precious little whatever data there is,
and especially if local municipalities are relying on dedicated services or other lines that need power and to be up for responding to it.
So, I mean, the scheme itself, it may be fragile in its current state, but certainly, like you said, with planning could be improved upon.
And if it's, you know, a newer type of cellular service, that stuff is probably built in.
It's probably a feature that just has yet to be fully realized in production.
Go ahead, Greg.
Well, part of what I was surprised about – I didn't tell this part of the story earlier –
was that if there's a tendency for production services that you think would know better to rely on the commodity internet.
And this was really surprising to me, and I don't think there's a lot of excuse here.
So two related stories.
One is gas stations.
So the power is out, and some gas stations have generators.
The power came back on, you know, closer to the cities, you know, earlier, like it always does, than the surrounding areas.
And some gas stations were able to open.
Now, I saw lines of 30 to 50 cars with sheriffs, you know, directing traffic and stuff like that.
And so what I learned pretty quickly was that, first of all, there was some, I think, voluntary rationing.
So some gas stations were limiting to $20 worth of gas or 20 gallons, and some were cash only.
What then became evident was that some of these gas stations were able to take payment cards, you know, credit cards, debit cards.
Because they weren't using the commodity internet, they were using probably a KU band satellite dish on the top of their station.
So stations that had chosen to maintain that redundant technology or maybe were in the first place using that satellite technology rather than only relying on the internet were able to have business open, you know, and to keep things going.
And that's pretty important when you have not only gas stations but also, you know, supermarkets, hospitals, all that sort of thing.
One thing we've been talking about, I think, throughout the discussion tonight is batteries.
And I'm curious what thoughts you might have about the role they could play, especially with the emphasis on things like solar and more distributed alternate power sources.
If you were able to modify and allowed to increase the battery size on something that allowed communications or if people were running a business like that but increasing their options as far as powering when there is no power.
Because that seems to be the recurring theme is that everything is relying on that, whether it's data running on the assumption of there being power, when there isn't, if people have things they can switch to or use as a resource in a bind like this,
they can then start building other things that they're going to need, priorities and the like, into that availability of some kind of power.
And I think I feel if more people are able to do it themselves, I mean, what do you guys think about that?
Well, scaling up backup power can be pretty expensive.
And so having the ability to have batteries that get you through a blip in the power or maybe a few-hour outage is one thing.
Having battery backup to get you through a multi-day outage is another thing.
And more likely what we'd see, and I did see quite a lot of this in the community I was in, is a system where you have batteries and backup generators.
And so the batteries cover the blip and maybe an hour, maybe a couple of hours, but the backup generators come on and they, you know, they keep you going.
So that's, and that's probably able to sustain.
We had a neighbor with a propane generator.
He had 10 days worth of propane and he got a delivery top up after two or three days.
So he's good to go for quite a while.
And hospitals, I think, are in the same type of situation.
So I know there's another comment and then I want to talk about airports a little bit too.
Okay, we only have about four minutes, so we're going to have to make it quick.
But I just wanted to ask you quickly, you're using Starlink right now from UConn.
Was anyone using Starlink in that area?
I didn't see evidence of Starlink dishes and I was kind of surprised that that wasn't more common.
And I think it might just be a basic economic decision in that if you have DSL and you're paying, you know, maybe $50 or $100 a month,
then maybe going the extra cost of Starlink, even if it's not that much more, might not be that appealing.
I bet a lot of people are going to be calling up Starlink over the next week or two, though, as a backup.
All right.
Well, quickly tell you your airport story.
Yeah.
So this was, again, a very, very, very big surprise to me.
So the Asheville Airport was the airport I was scheduled to fly out of and scheduled to fly out on Sunday.
And the regional news as of Saturday night and Sunday early was saying, yeah, the airport's open.
They have power, but they don't have network and they don't know if they'll be able to get planes out.
And the TV screens were all off in the airport, things like that.
So I went to the airport and subsequently ended up flying out from Charlotte on Monday.
We went to an airport 150 miles to the east where they were more up to capacity.
So the surprise was that the airlines in Asheville Airport were using the commodity Internet for their critical operations.
They had no backup system.
They didn't have radios.
They didn't have satellite dishes.
They didn't have, for example, airplanes that could carry messages back and forth or get alternate communications equipment into place.
And I think the airport operations were more resilient.
The air traffic control seemed to be able to function in some way.
I don't know what all their backup mechanisms are.
But the airlines themselves were just dead in the water.
They couldn't board people.
They couldn't check boarding passes.
They couldn't issue tickets.
They couldn't change seats.
None of the regular stuff that they do.
And when I was there on Sunday morning, the security gate was closed.
Like, they were so far away from being able to put people on planes and get planes in and out that people were not even working.
When I got there on Monday morning, the security gate was open.
There were personnel from one of the several airlines that operate out of that small airport there.
And the other airlines weren't even – they weren't even present.
I think they showed up later in the day.
So the reliance of an airport on commodity internet for their basic operations was a surprise.
And I really felt it was something that if I was in an airline doing a continuity of operations plan for that airline,
I would certainly not be relying on the commodity internet for critical communications.
Absolutely not.
Wow.
A lot of lessons to be learned from here, lessons that I think they should have already learned.
But I hope it all gets cataloged and detailed because there's so much to draw upon.
But, you know, just in closing, these are things that people should always have available to them.
Obviously, cash in case the ATMs or credit card systems stop working.
Having paper copies of important documents, you know, like the deed to your house maybe in case it gets challenged somehow.
Landlined, you know, again, I feel like, you know, I'm a dog with a bone here.
But having a landline is at least a possibility that you might still be connected.
Even if it gets completely torn down with everything else, it's still going to last longer than a cell phone network that goes out.
And, of course, BAI listeners, a radio, a radio, because, yeah, you might be able to stream things from all over the world.
But when you lose electricity and connectivity, you can't.
When you have a radio, you turn it on.
If there's a battery, you're going to get a signal.
And you'll be able to do it anonymously.
And it's, you know, I've been listening to radio from North Carolina the last few days.
And it's been so eye-opening and so revealing how important radio is.
And with that, you know, I'd like to encourage people to support WBAI.
Give to WBAI.org because we are your community radio station here in New York City.
And when something hits the fan, you know we're going to be there to tell you all about it and to give you advice and help.
Greg, thank you so much for sharing this.
I'm so happy you're safe back in Yukon.
And please, no more daredevil adventures into the wrath of nature.
Indeed.
Yeah, thanks for a great discussion about this stuff.
The aftermath continues.
I think there will be lessons learned.
I think the odds of accountability increasing and people getting smart about preparedness, unfortunately, the odds are against that happening.
But certainly there are a lot of lessons learned.
OTH at 2600.com is our email address.
We will see you here next week on WBAI.
Have a good night.