We're sorry. The number you have reached, 99.5 WBAI, is now off the hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cough.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
One dilly bump are the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. One dilly bump!
One dilly bump!
One dilly bump!
One dilly bump!
One dilly bump!
And out there in Skypeland, we have Alex.
Yes, you do. Good evening, everybody.
And how are you this fine night?
I'm okay. I'm in a different location today.
Actually, I'm in the country for once, which is good, but a totally different location.
I'm actually on 122nd and Amsterdam at Columbia University.
Alex, what are you running from?
I mean, every week, you're in a different place, one step ahead of the people who are looking for you.
Well, I guess there's a lot I could be running from, and also there's a lot I could be running towards, too.
Well, in a couple of weeks, we might all be running from something, but let's, you know, every election day, we have the post-election day show of Off the Hook.
I remember 2016, I remember 2020, and I'm dreading 2024, but hopefully we get through it.
Yeah, well, coincidentally, I'm here talking about sports betting and integrity and sports and legal issues and things like that with a colleague from the NFL, a former colleague of mine from the NFL.
We're up here lecturing at Columbia, and I popped out to do the show, of course, and found a door that was open.
I think this is like a faculty lounge or something.
It was supposed to be locked, so I might get ticked out of here if somebody sees me.
I'm not sure.
That'll be interesting.
Occupying an unauthorized building at Columbia University.
Got it.
That's right.
All right, so everybody knows where to go now to join Alex in his movement that's just beginning over there.
Yes, Alex, how long will this action be going for, just the duration of the program this evening?
Yeah, that's right.
This is a direct action, civil disobedience, occupation of the faculty lounge on the ninth floor of the social sciences building here.
Thank you for that very detailed information.
I'm sure law enforcement will appreciate that.
No doubt, no doubt.
I look forward to meeting them.
Getting back to one of the issues at hand, Election Day coming up, you can still register to vote in New York State up until this Saturday, October 26th.
And early voting runs from that same day through Sunday, November 3rd.
And all the action takes place at your local election boards, various counties and towns and places like that.
You can go to the Board of Election website, which unfortunately I don't have in front of me.
I don't have the actual URL, but it's probably something very obvious.
And just go there, get all the information that you need.
But please, please do vote.
And when you vote, think carefully about your vote.
You know, protest votes are great, but ask yourself, is it going to get you anything close to the result you want?
And if so, then go for it.
And if not, then you've got to sometimes hold your nose and just do what's right for the next step, because there will be more steps coming.
Absolutely.
So, yeah, registration ends October the 26th.
That's this Saturday in New York State.
I don't know what happens in other states.
Every state is different.
So, whatever state you're in, please look up the deadlines and rules, regulations, all that kind of thing.
Alex, you're still there.
Your video is gone.
Yeah.
I'm trying to conserve my battery here, so I'm just turning off my video when I'm not going to be speaking.
I should have mentioned this is low-power mode, Alex.
We don't need to see you.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, here's an update to a story.
we talked about last week about Internet Archive, our friends over there.
They have been relentlessly hacked over the past few weeks, and it hasn't stopped since last Wednesday.
Basically, the nonprofit digital library recently suffered a data breach.
It resulted in the exposure of usernames, email addresses, and password hashes belonging to as many as 31 million users.
I had no idea they had that many users.
In addition, the Internet Archive services were targeted by a major distributed denial of service attack, DDoS, and its website was defaced.
And that led to most Internet Archive services being suspended, including the popular Wayback Machine, which collects snapshots of hundreds of billions of web pages.
Yeah, but it turns out there's still more work to be done in terms of security.
Over the weekend, many users who in the past had contacted Internet Archive support received an email informing them about another security incident,
one related to the Internet Archive's Zendesk instance.
The email, apparently sent by someone who abused a compromised Zendesk token, read,
It's dispiriting to see that even after being made aware of the breach two weeks ago,
IA, for Internet Archive, has still not done the due diligence of rotating many of the API keys that were exposed in their GitLab secrets.
As demonstrated by this message, this includes a Zendesk token with perms to access 800K-plus support tickets sent to info.archive.org since 2018.
Whether you were trying to ask a general question or requesting the removal of your site from the Wayback Machine,
your data is now in the hands of some random guy.
If not me, it'd be somebody else.
Now, those messages came from a Zendesk.com email address known to have been used for support and other purposes by the Internet Archive.
And, you know, it's really easy to kick somebody when they're down, and I think that's sort of what we're seeing here.
There's no indication to me that this is the same person or group of people that did the original hack in the first place,
but basically somebody looking for evidence that Internet Archive has not completely fixed everything.
And, of course, that's not going to happen immediately.
It takes time, it takes support.
Now, the original hack, the cyber attacks, were supposedly credited to a pro-Palestine hacktivist group named Black Meta,
but it appears, the actual hacking appears to have been carried out by different unidentified threat actors.
And that's the thing, when you have a hack like this, you don't really know who's responsible.
You might say, oh, it came from over here, but IP addresses can be forged, locations can be masked.
We may never know who actually was behind it.
The important thing is that Internet Archive come back up and get the support that it needs,
that it deserves because of the incredible services it provides to all of us.
Now, if you go there today, right now, actually, you'll see on their site, archive.org,
service availability, Wayback Machine, archive-it, and blog.archive.org, resumed.
Other Internet Archive services are temporarily offline.
Please come to our event this week.
In fact, having an event that begins right after this show ends out in San Francisco,
if you find yourself out there, it might be an interesting place to have some conversations.
So I have the info here.
It's called Escaping the Memory Hole.
It starts at 5 p.m. Pacific Time.
That's 8 p.m. out here.
Celebrate with the Internet Archive as we highlight the vital role of libraries in preserving our shared digital culture.
And it is at 300 Funston Avenue, F-U-N-S-T-O-N Avenue in San Francisco.
So any listeners out there, it might be a fun way to spend the evening.
But our best wishes go out to our friends over at archive.org.
They've done so much good.
They don't deserve this.
It could happen to anybody.
It really could, this kind of attack, this kind of compromise.
is when you're running something, a nonprofit, when you're running an organization on a shoestring budget,
depending on volunteer work from so many people, depending on goodwill and a degree of luck as well,
this kind of thing can hit you especially hard.
And it's easy to point fingers and say, oh, you didn't do everything you possibly could have done.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true of all of us.
Do we want to help or do we want to finger point?
You know, and in this particular case, I urge people to help, archive.org.
Any words?
Alex, I can't tell if you're raising your hand on that because I don't see you.
Well, I think this is just a very sad state of affairs here where you have a threat actor trying to target,
I think, you know, somebody that is providing a public service and has been providing a public service for, I think, decades now.
I mean, it's kind of extraordinary what the Internet Archive has been able to do.
And to try to compromise that effort just seems really ridiculous to me.
But this is just something we see all the time in the cybersecurity realm,
which is threat actors trying to compromise organizations, like you said, Emmanuel, that are operating on a shoestring budget.
There's a threat actor that I had been tracking for a couple of years that had targeted really persistently school districts,
like local school districts, you know, like a school district in Kentucky, a school district in Maryland,
you know, like a massive amount of school districts around the country.
And, you know, they can barely provide school lunch for the kids, let alone cybersecurity controls for their network.
It's a sad state of affairs because when you have a sophisticated threat actor targeting an unsophisticated adversary
or an unsophisticated target, you know, it's like watching a hot knife go through warm butter sometimes.
It's kind of sad.
I haven't ever done that, but I'll make a point of doing that to get the analogy.
Yes, after the show.
You know, I think that lots of times when hacks like this happen,
people behind them are completely unaware of who it is they're hacking.
They see a target and they pounce.
So, yeah, you know, that's all fair and good in the world of random attacks.
But maybe some thought would be in order for those people considering doing this.
I mean, you know, definitely expose the weaknesses.
Absolutely.
But consider who the target is and whether more harm than good is being accomplished by merciless attacks.
Right.
Like the tone is unhelpful.
It's perhaps it could be true.
But imagine, I mean, imagine if this entity, the target itself, was not just taking a defensive posture
or the public that you're appealing to in the common at large,
was going over your personal security or your virtual or digital assets or business online for you
with the same kind of scrutiny, pointing out and taking advantage of your vulnerabilities.
It's easy to look at others, but they're not doing that.
They're attending to what has been probably several weeks that have been, to say the least, annoying as an organization.
But they've been very kind of upfront and tried to keep everyone as informed as possible about the status of the archive itself
and what they're doing to ramp things up.
I think, yeah, I don't know.
These support services and things they rely on, maybe they're going to rethink them and abandon them to use something else.
So, yeah, they've been very upfront, open and honest about what's been going on.
And that just makes it all the more painful to see.
And finger wagging organizations that have limited like to to think any organization isn't working in some environment of scarcity.
as far as resources, time, skilled, skilled labor.
All of those are factors in how these things are found.
And are you pointing this out to be helpful in that spirit?
Or are you just wagging your finger at the organization who's already sort of all hands on deck?
There's actually, there's a couple of parts to this because there's the initial hack and then there's a second wave,
maybe even a third wave of people that are just piling on saying, look, this is still broken.
You are not being attentive.
And when you have a small organization, obviously, it's not going to get the same kind of attention that maybe Microsoft can afford to pour into something.
Maybe in this particular case, the best thing you can do is help and become a part of it and make it stronger.
I want to, you know, just the very fact that they are being blamed by this initial hacker for the actions of Israel.
That is the craziest thing.
The Internet Archive, that's just nuts.
That's just nuts.
And it just shows that people are just looking for any target whatsoever to get a message out,
which ordinarily is a good thing, getting a message out.
But when you're victimizing innocent people to do that, that's completely wrong.
I want to read something, though, from Chris over at Internet Archive who posted this on the blog, blog.archive.org.
In recovering from recent cyberattacks on October 8th, the Internet Archive has resumed the Wayback Machine starting October 13th.
And archive.it, is it archive.it?
I'm not, dash it.
I'm not really sure.
October 17th.
And as of today, October 21st, actually a few days ago, has begun offering provisional availability of archive.org in a read-only manner.
Features like uploading, borrowing, reviewing items, interlibrary loan, and other services are not yet available.
Please note that these services will have limited availability as we continue maintenance.
Hackers disclosed archive.org email and encrypted passwords to a transparency website and also sent emails to patrons by exploiting a third-party help desk system.
The safety and integrity of the Internet Archive's data and patrons remain our top priorities.
As the security incident is analyzed and contained by our team, we are relaunching services as defenses are strengthened.
These efforts are focused on reinforcing firewall systems and further protecting the data stores.
We appreciate your patience and support as we work through these challenges.
For ongoing updates, please follow the blog, which is blog.archive.org, and official social media channels, Twitter, Blue Sky, Macedon.
We stand with all libraries that have faced similar attacks.
British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, Calgary Public Library, and with the communities we serve.
Thank you for standing with the Internet Archive as we continue to fight back on behalf of all affected readers.
And I think that listing of libraries drives home the point that it's often those smaller, struggling organizations that are targeted by people that are just looking for easy prey.
And I just ask, think twice.
Maybe, you know, your skills can be used in a different way, you know, to expose the security holes, but also not affect innocent victims like this.
Okay, moving on.
And since we're in San Francisco, talking about that event taking place tonight, we have this story.
San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency has agreed to spend $212 million to get its Muni Metro light rail off of floppy disks.
That's right, they are still using floppy disks.
Five and a quarter inch, to be specific.
Muni Metro's automatic train control system, known as ATCS, has required those floppy disks since 1998 when they were installed, or the system was installed, at San Francisco's Market Street subway station.
The system uses three floppy disks for loading DOS software that controls the system's central servers.
We have to visit this.
We have to see this in action.
It would be like going to a museum.
It really would.
Michael Rockefort, an SFMTA spokesperson, gave further details on how the light rail operates to Ars Technica back in April, saying,
when a train enters the subway, its onboard computer connects to the train control system to run the train in automatic mode, where the trains drive themselves while the operators supervise.
When they exit the subway, they disconnect from the ATCS and return to manual operation on the street.
After starting initial planning in 2018, the SFMTA originally expected to move to a floppy disk-free train control system by 2028.
But with COVID-19 preventing work for 18 months, the estimated completion date was delayed.
Well, on October 15th, the SFMTA moved closer to ditching floppies when its board approved a contract with Hitachi Rail for implementing a new train control system that uses 3.5-inch floppy disks.
I'm joking.
I'm joking.
I'm joking.
No, that doesn't use floppy disks at all.
That's according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Hitachi Rail.
You were about to leave into action there, Kyle, weren't you?
Hitachi Rail Tech is said to power train systems, including Japan's bullet train, in more than 50 countries.
The $212 million contract includes support services from Hitachi for 20 to 25 years.
The new control system is supposed to be five generations ahead of what Muni is using now.
That sounds like a lot, but when you're talking about five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, I'm not sure five generations ahead might just get you to a CD-ROM.
I'm not entirely sure how far ahead that is.
But Muni needs many more upgrades in addition to getting rid of floppies.
They plan to spend $700 million to overhaul the light rail's control system.
But the entertaining story here is the floppy disks.
So best of luck to San Francisco's Muni system.
Go ahead, Alex.
Well, I find this whole thing really bizarre in the sense of me.
You joke about the 3.5-inch floppy issue.
But it seems to me that back in 1998, when they installed the system and they used a five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk at that point,
three-and-a-half-inch floppies, high-density floppies, were already much more – they were very prevalent at that time
and could store a lot more data and I think would read and write faster, too.
So it seems weird to me that they used a five-and-a-quarter floppy back in 1998.
Maybe you need to go into the Wayback Machine, go back to 1998, and question them as to why they made that decision.
I think I know.
I mean, I think that they probably designed this system to use a certain amount of data.
Like, they just didn't need a full 1.4 megabytes to do the basic functions that they were programming these things to do.
And at the time, this media had that format.
And I think there may have also been some benefit to using somewhat – something that was becoming an obscure media.
But those are just my theories.
Well, you know, I kind of see Alex's point here because in 1998, I remember using five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks in the mid-'80s.
Yes.
Surely they had fallen out of favor by 1998 to the degree where it might have even been hard to find.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe they found it and got a really good price.
And that's why – I can't imagine.
It's a good point.
It's a good point.
Well, the other bit of information that's missing from the story is whether these were low-density or high-density five-and-a-quarter floppies because that could go to Kyle's point, too.
I mean, maybe they could have used a low-density three-and-a-half-inch floppy, which would have been 720K as opposed to the 1.44 megs of the high-density floppy as well.
So there's –
Hard-sectored or soft-sectored?
Right.
I mean, these are important bits of journalism that are missing from that story, Emanuel.
I'll just think.
I mean, it is – it's overall a DOS environment or program that it's running.
And at the time, USB was emerging or maybe just, let's say, not totally mature, and they hadn't put in sort of like wireless and other sorts of delivery mechanisms in the design itself.
And this choice, just however limited it seems now, it may have made more sense because making something USB accessible, for instance, may have been something they thought was risky at the time or just not reliable and overkill because the capacities were wildly larger.
Well, I don't know.
Let's look at it this way.
This is 1998.
When's the last time you heard of the San Francisco community being hacked?
Maybe they made the right decision.
Maybe this was the way to go because nobody could figure out how to hack into five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives.
Well, there is definitely an argument towards that, right?
I mean, they're utilizing DOS, right?
The old disk operating system before Windows took over, right?
I mean, Windows used to be a program that ran on DOS, and then with Windows 95, you drop down to the DOS prop type VER, and then lo and behold, Windows was all of a sudden the operating system that was terrifying.
Yeah, big mistake.
Big mistake.
It was a big mistake.
It definitely was, but I think there is something to be said for running these old operating systems that still work, that still function, that the programs still work, and nobody is trying to develop exploits for DOS 5.1 or DOS 6.0.
I mean, so I guarantee you there will be problems down the line here when they do upgrade their systems, and they're utilizing some new operating system for which there are thousands of vulnerabilities already out in the wild.
So, yeah, I would say to the transit system unity, I think it's called, why don't you just ditch the floppies and stick with DOS?
It's working.
There's got to be a way to do that.
Well, you know, trains haven't really changed all that much, I guess.
I'm sure there's an argument for not doing that, but it's an interesting proposal.
They could definitely build some kind of, like, adapter that uses a technology or protocols that are equivalent but don't actually use that form of media.
But it may be costly to develop something that's bespoken, and it may be that the vehicles themselves are reaching the end of life and they're going to replace them.
Or the system itself is adapting to newer forms of operation.
New features that people demand, you know, and you have to have a modern operating system to deliver all that.
Yeah, there may be other parts of it that are cumbersome for what they want in the future.
You know, it's a valid point, though.
I can't count the number of times I've had to go back to an older operating system to get something to work properly because the new version of the program I want to use either doesn't work on a newer operating system
or has taken away features I need or has added features that wind up completely screwing up what I want to do in the first place.
So it's good to be able to roll back or just find a machine that's running something ancient and get done what you need to get done.
There are so many things that people struggle with today that I'm able to breeze through because I have access to something that is older and not on the net and just able to get the job done.
So, you know, what I see today with modern operating systems and, as Alex was mentioning, all the vulnerabilities that come with that, that's a business model
because you have to constantly be running programs to detect the latest vulnerability.
You constantly have to be updating and rebooting and reinstalling and buying more things and eventually getting a new machine because the machine won't run on the newer software.
where, you know, one hand is washing the other here and the vulnerabilities are keeping the industry going.
And I guess there's good to that, but there's also good in doing things the old-fashioned way sometimes, especially when it works.
Well, if you happen to work for the San Francisco transit people or Muni or whatever, feel free to write to us and correct everything we just said.
OTH at 2600.com.
The program is off the hook.
And we have a letter that somebody sent us last week in response to last week's show.
We were talking about PIXMob bracelets.
I believe Kyle had dissected one.
We had gone to the Jets' latest humiliating loss over at MetLife Stadium.
Yes.
And the way we got our mind off of that was wearing these little bracelets that were lighting up in unison with everybody else in the stadium.
And if you haven't been to North Korea, it's the closest you can get right now, feeling part of a mass amount of people all doing something at the same time.
And this writer, Josh, writes, I attended a concert where they were handing out PIXMob bracelets.
I wondered if I could control the device myself.
He basically found a link that he believes is very helpful, instructables.com slash PIXMob dash wristbands dash fully dash synced dash to dash music dash with dash ardu, A-R-D-U.
Yes, and the first letter of every word except for the word two is capitalized, if that makes a difference.
There's also some YouTube videos out there as well.
But basically the gist of it is I brought myself an Arduino and some IR infrared components.
I hooked them up, and with the Arduino, I was able to control the bracelet.
You should be able to do some experimenting with about $30 worth of parts and an hour or two of experimenting.
Give it a try.
Best of luck.
Thank you, Josh, for this very helpful letter, and it's good to know other people are out there experimenting with these things.
Yeah, I appreciate all of this.
I am thinking and imagining even more fun things to do with this, everything from supplementing the power for each of them with something rechargeable
or the different ways you could send infrared.
I know that some events, especially in the tech and hacker world, have really capable badges that have these same kinds of transmitters.
Also, I was imagining our friend Mitch Altman's TV Be Gone.
You could make something that broadcasts this and change a whole bunch of them in a stadium at once, sort of paint the audience with the same signal.
I don't know if it would work at a situation where they're actually using the intentional programming system,
but maybe people that recycle them could repurpose them, and you could have them activated in a more directed way.
I'm just imagining what purpose you could use them for, because it seems like an awful lot of packaging to just throw away.
Well, it was meant for Jets fans, but you know what?
There are almost an equal number of Buffalo Bills fans in the stadium at the same time.
So if you were a Bills fan, maybe if you knew how to hack this thing,
you could make it show a different color when everybody else was supposed to be showing green and cause some kind of upheaval that way.
But the other thing to realize is that was a Monday night game.
I don't think this works in the daytime.
You couldn't see them in the daytime, so it has to be something that's happening in a fairly dark place.
But even like with one or two of them, if you save them or you go to a bunch of events, you could save a couple of them.
You could use them with the same setup that the person that wrote in described to maybe silently send a signal or message or communicate different things
or maybe make an artistic display when you go out to a different event or a nightclub or something.
I don't know.
There's just so many fun things you could do with something that still works, and having all this information is just really helpful to put that creativity to work.
Well, something that still works is the concept of trashing, something that hackers have done for decades,
where they jump into dumpsters and fish out things that are of interest to them technologically or informationally.
And in this particular case, after a game or a concert, if you jump into a dumpster,
you'll probably find a whole lot of these bracelets that people have thrown away because they no longer need them.
And then, you know, you're starting to build up a stockpile of these things to do all kinds of experiments with.
So, yeah, I see a bright future ahead.
Yeah, I wonder if people resell them on auction sites or something that are otherwise, you know, cleaning up after this.
Or maybe the company themselves has some kind of offer where they'll take whatever are recovered from the stadium back and repurpose them.
Yeah.
Who knows?
Who knows?
Okay, moving on.
Here's a story also from, you know, this was not intentional.
We have all these Bay Area stories.
But this is about Facebook, how Facebook would not remove a hacker from a Bay Area woman's account until she paid them.
Now, I'm going to go through this story that basically aired on Channel 7 out there.
And you might be surprised by how I feel about this.
But basically, it keeps happening, apparently.
It's happened in the Bay Area a number of times.
An East Bay woman tried to log into her Facebook account only to find a hacker had taken control and was scamming her friends.
Facebook and its parent company, Meta, provided no help to kick the scammer out.
That is, until she agreed to pay for their help.
Facebook and Instagram users have long complained it's nearly impossible to recover stolen accounts.
There's no customer service phone number to call.
The online help pages send them in circles.
This woman became so frustrated that she marched down to Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park and banged on the door.
Yeah, she did that.
That's, that's, I like that.
That's what you've got to do.
That's my style.
You've got to do that.
I don't want to bang on Google's door.
I want to see a manager.
They don't use doors, though.
They use some kind of mind thing.
Go on.
Still no help until she agreed to buy a subscription for customer service.
Tova Ridgway of Antioch recalls how she was tricked into giving a hacker control of her Facebook page.
I thought I was talking to my stepmother.
It wasn't.
Well, I wasn't.
It was the hacker, she said.
It was insane.
The hacker changed the email and password to Ridgway's account, then pretended to be Ridgway.
Okay, they kind of left out, okay, talking to your stepmother doesn't necessarily give your stepmother access to your account.
So she had to have given her, quote unquote, stepmother, her account info.
And I'd have to ask the question, why would you do that in any circumstance?
Why would your stepmother need to log into your account?
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Anyway, so once that happened, basically, this user was sending messages to all of my friends, such as, I need money, or can you do me a favor?
Or, yeah.
So, basically, then they started selling items that didn't exist in Acura for $1,400.
Her dad's things, like a mower, a bed, an estate sale, all sorts of things.
Worst of all, Ridgway and her husband lost access to years of memories.
My dad, my best friend, my memories of my kid, me, and my husband, she said.
Her husband, Jim, said Tover was a mess for months.
Ridgway tried to retrieve her account using Facebook's automated help page.
It did email a reset code, but guess what?
That reset code went straight to the imposter's email, not to her.
Friends tried reporting the fraud, but the reply kept saying,
this content does not go against our community standards.
Ridgway said, I'm like, okay, this is, I've had enough.
I'm really stressed out.
So I jumped in the car and I ran down to Hacker Way.
Yes, ironically, that is the address of Facebook, Hacker Way.
She drove straight to the Meta headquarters in Menlo Park.
She was stopped at the door.
They're like, I'm sorry, I can't do anything about this.
I love how I'm reading her description.
I go, are you telling me you don't have anyone working for Hack Pages?
This happens every day.
And she said, no, I'm sorry, there isn't.
Yeah, they handed her a piece of paper with a QR code.
Which sent her straight back to the unhelpful robot.
For a big company like that, knowing people get hacked every day,
thousands of people getting hacked,
you would think they would have somebody you could actually talk to.
But they don't.
She was about to stage a picket outside the Meta building
when she found a surprising way to get her account back.
The tech giant has rolled out Meta Verified,
a concierge-style service meant to protect the accounts of big stars and big business.
But for $14.99 a month,
any user can get basic service with access to a live agent.
They have to verify that it's you,
but you actually talked to a live person.
It got me right in.
Now, she says she should not have to pay to get help,
but in desperation, she did.
And the result was instantaneous.
Instead of a machine spitting out an automated reply,
a live agent came on chat.
Basically, she was able to describe that her Facebook got hacked.
The agent replied,
that sounds really frustrating.
Please be assured that I'll be doing my best to help you.
Okay, you're definitely talking to a robot.
That's AI.
I can tell by the phrasing.
But it was a sympathetic AI.
And she said,
oh my gosh,
I was relieved.
The agent typed the progress in her case.
Then,
great news,
her account was back.
I was relieved.
I got my memories back.
We would have gladly paid the $15 right away just to fix it.
Yet the couple says,
Meta should not be charging money to fix problems.
I don't agree with that.
I don't agree.
Because look,
I know users are the product here.
I know Facebook is making a ton of money.
But there are like a billion users to Facebook.
And all kinds of things are happening.
It was the mistake of the user here.
Giving your account info to anybody should never do that.
There are other instances where people get hacked without even knowing it.
and I have a lot more sympathy for that.
But when you consider that this is a free service
and you want free support now for the free service,
maybe figure out a way to not be so dependent on Facebook.
For instance,
all of your memories,
really all of your memories are on Facebook.
They're not anywhere else.
That's a huge mistake.
Facebook could go out of business.
They could shut down.
They could turn into a grocery store instead.
You know,
they could do all sorts of things.
It's their computer.
Their computer systems.
You know,
it's their idea.
They get to play by their rules.
That's,
you know,
it might not be fair,
but that is the reality.
You need to have a backup.
You need to keep your pictures in other places as well.
Because all sorts of things can happen.
You could delete it by accident yourself.
And it might be very hard to get that back.
You should never give out your account info.
You should never be so dependent on Facebook
or any service.
And if it goes away tomorrow,
you lose everything.
Keep your own copies.
And,
you know,
this seems like a fairly simple solution.
If,
by some bad stroke of luck,
you do lose your account.
You do lose access.
It doesn't seem like that high a price
to get it back,
to be able to talk to a person.
You know,
judging from the amount of people out there,
if everybody was constantly calling customer support,
you'd never get through.
This way,
at least you can be assured of getting somebody.
And,
you know,
once you get what you need,
you can cancel it.
You know,
it seems like that's what they did.
And,
um,
it worked out.
It would have been nice to know this was an option,
save a lot of heartache.
Uh,
but in this particular case,
I have to say,
you know,
that,
that sounds like a,
a decent solution,
not a perfect solution.
What do you think,
Alex?
Yeah,
I,
I'm on the fence about this in,
in many ways as well.
I mean,
I,
I tend to agree that users have to take some form of personal responsibility with respect to the security of their accounts.
And you,
you shouldn't make silly mistakes like giving out your password to your stepmother or whoever is asking for it on Facebook Messenger or something like that.
But on the other hand,
I think this also speaks volumes about the way in which Meta or Facebook,
whatever we want to call it now,
I don't want to call it by the parent or the subsidiary at this point.
but I think it speaks volumes about the way that they look at their users as well,
that they're very fungible,
that these accounts,
well,
well,
people can't live without them.
And if their accounts are taken over and used for some malicious purpose,
well,
they're too busy monetizing our data and surveilling our activities to,
uh,
really give a crap about it.
And so you're just going to set up another account and then they're going to monitor and surveil that.
and they're going to continue to extract value out of that type of surveillance capitalism.
And,
um,
I do think that Meta could have some form,
perhaps even an automated system of account or identity verification.
But I think that these are all problems with these highly centralized systems where we're storing all of our memories,
all of our photos,
everything.
I mean,
I,
I,
I constantly mention this,
but most people,
my age have been on Facebook since about 2007.
This is,
that's a massive amount of time for one platform to be generating data analytics about individual persons.
It's really kind of scary how much they know about their individual users and how,
um,
how they can predict our behavior.
Um,
the dossiers that these,
these social media platforms have on people are so much more sophisticated and complicated and rich and complex than any intelligence agency would have on any particular type of target based on publicly available or open source intelligence data.
So it,
I think it,
uh,
I think some of the responsibility should be put back onto the platform to help the users out here.
Um,
and I think the fact that they don't really demonstrates their bad attitude and,
um,
and,
and they're,
they're kind of there where their motivations lie.
You know,
what I don't get is why people feel compelled to reveal so much personal information on these platforms.
Why tell the truth?
Why,
why be who you are?
You know,
isn't,
isn't the whole fun of being online?
And the fact that you can be a dog,
you know,
on the internet,
you can be a dog,
you can be anything,
you can be anyone,
get five Facebook accounts,
make them all different,
follow different people,
talk to different people in different ways.
Yes,
I know you want to talk to the people that you actually know in real life,
but you can tell them this is who I am on this particular platform.
They,
they can accept it or not.
Uh,
you can have an account in your real name,
but you can have another account that reveals other things,
you know,
under a different,
uh,
a different handle.
I don't know.
Maybe it's because hackers have been doing this for so long.
Uh,
you know,
if,
if we get kicked off something,
we just log back in under a different name.
It doesn't destroy our lives because the first name wasn't real in the first place.
Why have your real birth date?
Why have your real address?
Why have your,
your real thoughts and,
and,
and,
and pictures and things like that?
You know,
you should be in charge of your data.
You should be in charge of your life.
And when you hand that over to a company like Facebook,
things are going to happen that you won't,
like,
and you will lose your privacy and people will know all kinds of intimate things about you.
And you'll be mystified as to how it's not that hard,
you know,
to figure out how this,
uh,
got into the hands of people that really shouldn't have it in the first place.
Well,
well,
two,
two things there,
Emmanuel.
I think that part of the problem too,
is that it's hard to have some kind of identity verification system by which an account can be returned to somebody.
if they're using bogus information,
then there's nothing to verify that you can't look at somebody's driver's license or some other government issued identification card and say,
yes,
this matches the account details and we're going to hand you back your account.
it's obvious that some malicious actor was scamming your relatives through Facebook Messenger.
so,
yes,
you know,
this,
this account will go back to you with your,
you know,
Utah driver's license,
whatever.
Um,
but,
but I think that the problem though is wider here though,
because these platforms are,
have scaled so much that they really don't care about these individual users.
the users need to care about their own data.
And I think that where things are migrating over the next couple of years in particular are going to be the self-sovereign web three based identity systems that are really unruckable that are censorship resistance that nobody can take away from you.
And this is the type of stuff that I think,
uh,
we're working on within the Ethereum name service and,
um,
and on various blockchains as well.
So I,
I think that's where we're going to see,
I think a lot of innovation in this area over the,
I would say the next two to 10 years.
Uh,
I,
I really hope that these types of account problems will become entirely obsolete because we should be owning our own identities and our own accounts on the internet without having to be at the beck and call of these platforms or at their mercy.
Yep.
I,
I,
I agree completely.
Um,
okay.
So,
uh,
we have one more,
uh,
story.
This is not in San Francisco.
This is out on Long Island,
actually in the Smithtown school district.
Parents in that district have spoken out against a plan to use high tech pouches to keep middle school students from using their cell phones.
Yeah.
Interesting.
The phones are turned off and placed inside the pouch at the start of the school day.
The students then close and secure the pouch,
keeping it with them.
when students leave school,
when students leave school,
they touch their pouch to a base to get their phone back.
Okay.
This,
this is kind of confusing me as to how,
uh,
this works.
Uh,
comes from news 12.
So I'm not really sure,
uh,
how this pouch system works.
Maybe,
uh,
Alex,
you as a parent understand this,
but,
uh,
basically the cost to implement the program in the district's middle schools is $66,770 for the 2024,
or 25 school year.
Now,
some parents say that cost is too high and they want to be able to contact their children in case of an emergency.
Well,
you know,
uh,
it sounds like they,
the,
the kids still have their phones on them.
They,
the story does say,
uh,
they keep it with them.
They keep the pouch with them.
Uh,
so if that means they have the phone in case of an emergency that the child is experiencing,
i.e.
school shooting,
they can call their parents.
Now,
you know,
the parents having to call the child,
I don't know,
you know,
unless there's a shooting in the house,
why do they have to call the kids?
And,
and why not call the school to have them contact the kids?
And I'm sorry,
everything comes down to shootings,
but that's what our country is.
Um,
you know,
in the,
in the past,
if you needed to reach a kid in school,
you called the principal,
you called the principal's office and had them,
uh,
called down to the office where they picked up the landline and talked to,
uh,
the person at home about the crisis.
So you don't really need that.
A kid can go through the entire school day without a cell phone being on.
Anyway,
um,
an information sheet provided by the school district says students have demonstrated time and time again that they will not comply with simply putting their phones away.
That's a pretty honest statement there.
Now,
the patches are only being used in middle schools for now.
An expansion of the program would depend on the success at the middle school level.
Um,
and,
you know,
I have a lot of questions here because,
uh,
if this pouch that kids have with them has their phone in them,
I don't understand why they can't just turn their phone on.
Uh,
I don't know what this business is about touching their pouch to a base to get their phone,
but this paragraph contradicts itself.
They have to get their phone back,
but they have the pouch with them.
It's an empty pouch.
It's a magic pouch.
Kyle,
do you understand it?
Uh,
I think the answer that you're looking,
you're reaching for here is that the pouch itself has some kind of,
uh,
locking mechanism that's magnetic or,
or otherwise,
um,
sort of once the phone's in there,
passively contains it until it's like waved over something on their way out that the,
uh,
a teacher or administration would control.
Uh,
so they're,
um,
not able to actually,
um,
get to the device until they pass through that on the way out.
So who has the phone?
The students,
but it's in a container,
but can't they just take it out of the container?
Well,
I,
I,
without knowing the exact product,
I'm,
I'm suggesting that it may be some sort of,
um,
lockable pouch.
but we have to drive over to the Smithtown middle school and ask them,
ask,
ask the kids there what they,
what they do.
I'm okay.
All right.
We get,
we need some facts here.
If you're a Smithtown middle schooler,
please let us know what's going on here because it just seems like they picked some weird technology,
uh,
and,
uh,
spent a lot of money on it.
And I'm not really sure why.
Um,
for me,
I think that's a cell phone jammer would do the job.
I don't think that's legal.
Yeah.
Well,
I will tell you who would know about this specifically because they have,
I think the identical system at my son's school,
my son's middle school.
My son just started middle school in,
in Manhattan.
And at the orientation for the parents,
the principal was talking about this crazy pouch system that they have in place.
Uh,
I,
I didn't really pay much attention to it because we,
we don't have a phone for our son yet.
but we're probably going to get one really soon.
It's,
it really is kind of crazy too.
And you drop them off.
I guarantee your son already knows how to hack this.
So ask him.
Oh,
absolutely.
Well,
I was,
I was going to suggest,
you know,
maybe we could have him on and he can explain how the system works next week.
Maybe we have him on as a guest.
Okay.
If,
if he has answers for us,
we'll consider that.
If he has answers.
Well,
he can get answers and we're going to have him think about how to,
how to get around this system and then describe it perhaps next week.
If,
if he's up for it.
All right.
if you have answers for us,
you can write to us.
O th at 2600.com.
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