We're sorry, you must first dial a 1 or a 0 plus the area code when calling this number.
Will you please hang up and try your call again?
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.
Bundilly bump, but the best is fake, the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bundilly bump!
Bundilly bump!
Bundilly bump!
Bundilly bump!
We'll be right back.
We gave up on Skype.
We're not doing Skype anymore?
Yeah.
I heard Skype got canceled.
Well, it's been jettisoned from this program.
What did Skype say to get canceled?
It must have upset somebody.
Well, okay.
So where are we?
Signal Land?
Is that where we are now?
Yeah.
It's a land of signals.
All right.
I'm sorry.
Out of Signal Land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening from Signal Land.
I can't understand that dialect.
He sounds completely different.
It's a familiar Rob, but you're right.
It's got a different...
Yeah.
It's like more digital, you know?
All right.
And I'm detecting a little taste of encryption there, too.
Did you hear that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a little metallic.
Aguila, are you there in Signal Land?
I am here, indeed.
Wow.
And we have Alex, also?
Yep.
If you can believe it.
You know, that's the best you sounded in a while.
I bet.
Yeah.
How about that?
And joining us tonight is our great friend, Jason Scott, from the Internet Archive.
Jason, welcome.
Hello there, folks.
Wow.
You know, this show was supposed to be on last week, but we were preempted for a mayoral debate
that was happening in New York City.
And that's going to be one heck of a race.
And, of course, it's an important thing to cover, so expect more of that on WBAI, because
we're the station that focuses on what's relevant.
But what's relevant this week, I think, is something...
Well, actually, it's been relevant for a number of weeks.
It's what's been going on as far as censorship and memory holes, you know, things being thrown
away and never having happened.
Just to give you some background here.
The White House has ordered thousands of government webpages to be taken down since mid-January,
when Trump took power, basically leaving virtually no trace of some federal agencies' policies
regarding critical topics like sexual orientation, January 6th cases, and discrimination.
If those words even still exist.
If we're allowed to even say them anymore.
Since Trump's inauguration, the government's mass removal of data and policies it finds
objectionable has illustrated just how quickly data can disappear from the Internet, and it
sparked renewed interest in preserving information online among digital archivists.
Well, thousands, thousands of pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website
were taken down in January to comply with Trump's executive orders, although some of the pages
are back online following an order from a federal judge.
But other taken down sites include Justice Department websites related to the January 6th
sub-capital breach, information about care for transgender patients on healthcare.gov,
a gender diversity page on the TSA's website, and sexual orientation and general identity
discrimination pages on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Census Bureau's websites,
as well as many others across the government.
Now, you know, it's not uncommon for this to happen when administrations change, but this
is far more than normal.
Now, our friend Jason is part of Internet Archive, and Wayback Machine is part of the Internet
Archive as well.
That's a tool designed to help with preserving online data.
It's been used in the past when new president's administrations took down information from previous
administrations.
The site basically allows users to enter a URL, and if the page has been archived, see
what it looked like in the past, dating back to the database's founding back in 1996.
Now, Jason, I believe you are the software curator for the Internet Archive.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I've got two titles.
One is software curator.
That's kind of the day-to-day, and I'm also called the free-range archivist, which is that
I am involved in all sorts of projects at the Archive and all sorts of things, and I'm
extremely comfortable in front of a microphone, so I'm very good for speaking out about what
I can with whatever the Archive is doing.
Now, you guys have gotten a lot of attention this year because of your efforts, because
you're basically the only source that most people know of that still has an archive of a previous
.gov website that Trump has tried to completely wipe out.
Is that a fair statement?
Well, it's interesting.
You know, when Brewster Kahle founded the website in 1996, it was just, boy, I sure made a lot
of money.
Now I get to be a librarian.
That was literally what got him to do it, and so he started running this library, and
he was like, we can archive music and movies, and the way he had made his money was from
a website rating system called Alexa Internet, which had been bought by Amazon, and as a result,
he kind of still had access to grabs of old websites that they were using to come up with
those ratings, which is the most popular.
And it was only in about 2001 where he and a few people said, wouldn't it be neat if
you could type in a name of a domain, and you could see kind of like what used to be
there?
Like, it was like a little hackathon project, basically.
And what I've been saying to people is, at no point did any of this group think, oh boy,
we get to be one of the central pillars of Internet society and be the memory of the web.
And there's a famous line from Eric Allman, who did Send Mail way back when, and he said
that Send Mail was a hammer, a sledgehammer designed to kill a fly that turned out to
be an elephant in the distance.
And archiving the web, the Internet, has turned out to be an absolute infrastructure nightmare.
Now, just going very quickly, I never want to have a situation where people who are listening
think, nobody else is doing this.
The entire world is just standing by, mouth agape, while stuff is disappearing on the web.
Nobody's helping.
Everybody's alone.
No.
The archive is like the brand name that a lot of people know.
But we have so many collaborators, and we have so many other groups out there, because
people recognize this, you know, pretty intense, cartoonish, clear line situation.
And by the way, this isn't the first time, this hasn't, you know, this is not, like, entirely
new, the focus and the directness of it is.
But, you know, it was only the Clinton administration, when they came into the White House and discovered
it was all rotary phones, and there was no way to hook modems up to it.
Then you have the Bush administration, and they've created sort of websites.
And then it switches and switches and switches between these different administrations.
And there's not many well-defined rules for what's the government website?
What are the rules?
And they've all been kind of making it up as they go along.
And as we know, the Trump administration is the, I would call it the immolation of handshake
agreements of what we thought places would be.
And so the archive had been previously, anywhere between five and six months before essentially
inauguration day, going in and doing what we call an end-of-term crawl, which is just,
let's get everything we can.
Now, we do it all the time.
And here's the statistic I'm sure you're looking for.
In the last six months before inauguration, the Internet Archive had already grabbed 500
terabytes of data off of government websites in the U.S.
as just part of the process.
And we do it for other governments, too.
But what ended up happening was you suddenly started seeing these real deep cuts of not
just websites, but databases, data, and everything else.
I think that's what's got people thinking about it.
And I don't want to downplay that.
But I also want to say companies, communities, groups, they do this all the time.
You know, our web stuff, it's up forever until it's not.
And when it's not, it is gone.
It is like they turn off the, you know, it's not like somebody dumps a bunch of books outside,
you know, in a dumpster and a bunch of people see it and say, oh, my God, we've got to save it.
It's gone.
It's just turned off.
And watching that happen has been, you know, pretty spicy.
Let's go with spicy.
Well, now, you guys have been doing this, as you said, since 1996.
Is it an automated process where it just happens?
Or do you have to focus on particular sites to make sure that you're able to preserve them
before something bad happens?
So the Internet Archive is grabbing billions of URLs a month and semi-automatically at that.
And then there are volunteer groups that are affiliated or help, like Archive Team,
which is a volunteer group that I co-founded 15 years ago that goes in and tries to do deep crawls
because they hear news of this website's going down, this service is ending, and so on.
And then there are organizations that we're affiliated with, Common Crawl, Pearl, that are working on their own grabs.
And all of it is kind of being built into this format called the Wark format that then the Wayback Machine plays back for people.
So it's kind of a combination.
And if you have a URL in the Wayback, they try to hit it again every once in a while.
You know, like I forget what the exact number is, but it's like every few months.
And then, of course, there are websites like the New York Times where they're grabbing it dozens and dozens of times a day
because the New York Times has proven that they are constantly, you know, making all these dynamic changes.
And I want to say also, because of our crowd, this isn't always evil.
You know, it's just business.
It's what they do.
They're like, we have to constantly change the website.
Let's change this.
Let's do this.
Let's come up with a new brand.
Let's add an AI bot.
Let's do this.
And so as a result, the web is so fluid and dynamic, and we have moved everything there.
So if a website that used to be a building that you'd go into to get a form is now a website that says, go get this PDF,
and that PDF is constantly changing, without doing this, there'd be no record.
And so that's, you know, it's like, you know, expanding it the other way.
The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, which is the same place, which is not a government-funded organization.
It is a nonprofit that has done work with governments but also does other work with other groups.
You know, it's been cited in court cases.
It's been used to do research.
It's been used to prove, you know, it's what I'd call the gotcha machine, you know, where people are like, ah, you said this, you got rid of it.
And it's used to, like, show when somebody says, well, they never used this word way back when.
And you can go, no, here's the word.
It's a 2001 website.
So it's like the reasons and the purposes for the Wayback Machine have, like, flowered, like a thousand flowers bloom.
And that's been great.
So even on all of this, I mean, we'll talk now about this very concrete example of a very specific fire
and a very specific destruction of material on rather arbitrary and often error-bound ways,
which have lots and lots of historical precedents.
You know, the whole transgene mice thing is a really good example, right,
where they refer to transgene mice and someone just sees the word trans, so they deleted it.
It was like, it's mice.
It's genetic mice.
Those mistakes are always made by loose organizations following nebulous orders to take things down.
And it happens all the time.
And I'm, you know, very happy.
It's called the Doge effect, I believe, is the official term.
The Doge effect.
Yeah.
Yes, exactly.
You know, you, and it's funny because you can point to other cases where administrations have hired consultants
and they bring them in and they make a bunch of choices.
And some of those choices are not great.
And that's happening here.
It's just we've never had it be so transparently obvious day-to-day.
Like, it's very, like, normally we would never hear the names of anything associated with it.
We'd just hear, oh, they're shutting this down.
Oh, they're having a hearing.
But we get, in today's modern social media world, instantaneous awareness of what goes on behind the scene.
I'm not, again, I'm not downplaying it, but I'm like the X-ray-ness of modern society, even since you and I have been online, is astounding.
Well, I think a lot of that is attributable to your efforts and the Internet Archive, letting people know, hey, this is no longer there.
It's available on Internet Archive, but it's been taken down, or news reports that focus on this.
I mean, you've gotten a lot of media attention in the past couple of months, and people from all over the world are going to Internet Archive to find out what was on a particular site before Trump decided to wipe it.
Yeah, it's fascinating to me to, I mean, it's a really weird way to give people a civics lesson, I'll tell you that.
That's what the last 12 years have been, watching people, you know, I didn't know how many of my friends and my acquaintances over the years worked for 18F.
I just didn't, and I didn't know about 18F.
I'll say that right now.
I didn't know, and all of a sudden, I've learned everything about it, and I've learned it from all these folks who, they were in it, they did terms in it, and thanks to the Archive, we have a record of, like, a lot of what 18F was saying, and a lot of documents were being said, and, of course, citizen archivists.
Somebody went and grabbed 3,000 USAID PDFs and put them on the Archive, you know, and people are, you know, constantly trying to do their best.
And, you know, you get into arguments of provenance and origin, and can you prove it?
And I'm like, well, if this is a hoax, it's a heck of a hoax, because this guy had put up 3,000 documents, but, you know, any different than any other situation, you collect them as, what about this?
Did we, did this happen?
You look at this mention here of this program, and that's investigative work.
There have been some real great work by Harvard, there's a bunch of University of California folks, and there's other groups that don't come to mind, like, I don't have their names in my head right now, who, like, have sat down and said, oh, we've got to grab, you know, all of this climate data.
They're very worried about climate data, they're very worried about census data, you know, they're very worried about other data, and having some backup of it somewhere.
And I guess the big difference now is, for example, I talked to one group, we're talking about a three petabyte data set, and that's chunky.
You're not just going to go down to your $10 a month post that you're getting out of the Netherlands and put a copy there.
So, it's, sometimes the scale is a little bit impressive, and a little bit hard to really understand how much has been made, but, yeah, that's where we are, man.
We are, we are in the middle of it, we're in the storm, this is happening.
And we are seeing the downside of what I call the great internet bargain, instant access, worldwide access, and instantaneous deletion.
But also, you're showing us the power of the individual to be able to fight back.
And that leads me to ask this, can anybody do what you do?
Let's say they focus on one particular site.
Can anybody simply grab that site if they think it's going to be deleted next week?
So, Archive Team has something called Archive Bot, and that was a project I will not even, I wasn't even Walt Disney in that case.
I was like, wouldn't it be nice if, back in 2010, I think, and the idea was, wouldn't it be nice to be able to say, hey, somebody should grab this website,
and then have something do it right, but also have it super automated so we wouldn't experience, you know, a bunch of people trying in different ways.
And I think it's ArchiveBot.org.
They own all the, they own all of them, so you're not going to get sold dresses or anything.
You're going to go end up at a, it's a, I think it's ArchiveBot.com, I think it is.
Okay.
Let's see.
And so ArchiveBot, yeah, there it is, ArchiveBot.com.
You can actually see them crawling all of these different websites constantly.
Because, for example, 538 is, 538 is going away.
They've shut down 538.
Really?
Yeah.
I guess, I guess getting elections wrong for 12 cycles ends up, you know, after a while you get kicked out.
So ABC is shutting it down.
Again, not necessarily a conspiracy, not a this or that, but just, they're like, okay, we're going to get rid of this company,
but that's going to mean all this record is gone, well, ArchiveBot, there's ways for people to join ArchiveBot
and run on their own machines, a virtual machine that then gets taken by ArchiveBot
and used to download a bunch of things out there that are going on, and it's super coordinated.
That's probably the best way for people to help is to, like, run a virtual machine somewhere.
There, the Archive team is on IRC, they coordinate all the time, and at any given time, like, right now,
I'm seeing, you know, 284 simultaneous crawls.
And I'll tell you, I used to look at this page all the time because it was, like, a weird tea leaves of, like,
what's going on in life?
Like, you'd see 19 crawls for, like, a celebrity, and I'd be like, oh, doesn't look good for that celebrity.
You know, like, right now, I'm looking at it, and they're grabbing 538, they're grabbing something called Quake,
some Quake sites, because probably a site's going down.
Some gamers have figured out they're 43 and shouldn't play that anymore.
I'm seeing a couple others like that.
And, you know, oh, digitalarchives.xm.gov, you know, like, I'm seeing kind of, like, indicators of, like, out there,
and they'll do the grabbing, and they'll do it in a really good industry-standard way that will grab, you know,
all of the proper stuff, and then it's in the Wayback Machine within a week,
sometimes within a day or two, depending on the speed.
And that's probably the fastest right now.
Now, I never, ever, ever, ever want to discourage somebody out there with a hard drive and a heart
who just thinks they're going to just freeball it, they're just going to solo climb it,
they're going to just drop it right now, we're going to, like, go ahead.
You might not produce something industry-standard, but having that feeling and, like,
really understanding how these websites are and the puzzle of how do I preserve this for the future,
that's a really good lesson.
That's, like, you know what I mean?
Like, that's, like, going to the library and getting a library card.
That's, like, understanding as a citizen what you're interacting with.
So I encourage it to try it out, but there are these, like, grandiose,
beautifully done volunteer services out there doing work, too.
Is that, Jason, is that, like, people just using a tool like WGET or something
and just doing it on their own and figuring out, oh, this may be not something that's portable
to actually preserve?
Is that what you mean?
Yeah.
I mean, in terms of, like, okay, so what you hear me responding to
and kind of thematically under this is there's a lot of anxiousness around websites.
So what happened, and being online.
And, you know, something, there's, like, the lost media meme of people and stuff.
And what that is is people have realized, oh, my God, the things that matter to me
and the things I use are all digital, and digital things can be modified
and digital things can be turned off.
And they suddenly feel extraordinarily powerless, paranoid, and scared
because they are, like, oh, my God, my whole life is digital
and I don't even control the servers and it's all happening out there.
I don't have any idea.
And they want to feel that they have some, you know, some line in the sand,
some personal stake in it.
And one way to do that is buy cheap hard drives and make local digital copies
and learning how to do that and being, like, I can browse this website locally
or I can have a copy of every PDF from something that mattered to me.
And so the line I used to say was, if you see something, save something.
You know, like, go ahead and do it.
You know, digital hoarding is a reaction to feeling powerless.
A lot of hoarding is, right?
Like, you just feel like the world, you're going to come up tomorrow.
Cartoon Network's going to be down.
There's not going to be any way to, like, get my news from my favorite news site.
The guy who wrote my newsletter, he's dead.
I can't read his old newsletters.
His wife took it down.
Oh, my God, everything's gone.
That's what I want to do is, like, say, okay, do it.
Take a jog.
Do it if you feel like it.
But don't feel alone.
Well, Jason, if you haven't done this already, Internet Archive, that's a great slogan you just said.
If you see something, save something.
That's a bumper sticker for you guys.
We've used it in a couple news articles.
So, yeah.
Oh, no, that's the Freelange Archive stuff.
I have to go be the guy who says the crazy, pithy statements that they then come up with.
You know, the Archive gets pulled into, like, right now, our director of Wayback, whose name is Mark Graham, he's doing 10, 20 interviews a day because everybody has suddenly realized, oh, wow, it's not just lost hard drives.
It could be an actual group, you know, taking things down.
What do you do?
And so he's doing interviews after interviews explaining these concepts.
Now, I want to open this up to other people in Signal Land, but first I wanted to ask you one more thing.
Now, we're talking about .gov sites, but you guys, you do the whole world, right?
And, in fact, if somebody just puts up their own website, you'll find that website at some point, too, right?
Yeah, we've been doing billions and billions of websites weekly for, you know, nearly 30 years.
We have stuff going back to the 90s.
We have worldwide websites.
We have websites from many different countries.
We also have, you know, obviously websites that are gone.
We have government sites, military sites, public, you know, public nonprofit sites and museums, institutions.
You know, sometimes our crawl isn't as deep as some people would like.
Like, if we tried to crawl GitHub all the time, I think we'd be having a pretty bad time.
But we will have records of, like, how GitHub, you know, I'm not going to pick too much on GitHub.
But, you know, GitHub had that period of time when they claimed they were a meritocracy, and then they worked hard to get rid of that verbiage.
We still have a record of when they had that verbiage.
We just have a record of a phase of GitHub's pre-Microsoft life when they were wild and woolly, and it'd be harder to claim it didn't happen.
So, like, yeah, we're everywhere on that.
And, in fact, once or twice we've done something pretty cool.
We have a site called gifcities.org, G-I-F-Cities.org, which is, like, tens of thousands of pulled animated GIFs from GeoCities, which you can go search for.
And we have a collection called the - this is something - this is right up your alley, right up your alley, Emanuel.
We have something called the Military PowerPoint Complex, where we went through 25 years of PowerPoints on military sites and pulled them all out and made a collection of them.
And they are exactly as bad as you can imagine, made by Army guys who were forced to have a PowerPoint by Monday.
And we just - you know, that's like, you know, helping people to do that.
Or - and I'm sorry to drag one more in - scholar.archive.org is where we have been, like, archiving and separating out millions of academic papers, including ones that disappear and pulled them back out of the Wayback Machine.
So you can do searches for academic citations and not worry that, like, the one place they are is gone.
And it's really done well.
It's called Internet Archive Scholar, and it's really cool.
So we do other things, too.
That is amazing.
Okay, folks, out in Signal Land, any thoughts, questions?
Anyone?
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, sure.
Jason, it's always great to have you on and hear you talk about this.
And I'm particularly just - I'm wowed by the amount of work that's done by the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine.
It's really just absolutely extraordinary.
One of the things that I've been doing for the last, I don't know, month or so is I wrote a script in Bash that compares the zone files of the -
basically compares any kind of zone files, but I can use it on the .gov zone file.
So I can find things that are added newly to the .gov zone file, which is quite interesting.
I can also find things that have been removed as well.
So what I'm thinking is maybe there's a way for us to collaborate because what I think would be quite interesting with respect to the Wayback Machine would be to essentially just take the zone files and archive everything from the zone files.
That would be very helpful, right?
What I can do is generate a list of only the domains, kind of remove all the name servers, remove all the extra technical nonsense from these.
And I'd be happy to provide that.
One of the things that I saw recently removed from the .gov zone file was economicinclusion.gov.
That was just a couple of days ago.
That was an FDIC-related program that had to deal with access to financial services and, not surprisingly, economic inclusion issues.
And then, interestingly enough, today I saw something fascinating added to the .gov zone file.
And recall just a couple of weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, I found DEI.gov added as well as Waste.gov.
And then today, and this is, I guess, kind of breaking news here, something really weird popped up, creators.gov.
What the hell is that going to be?
What do you think that is all about?
Well, and interestingly enough, when I first resolved the site, creators.gov, it resolved to a landing page that stated, and I'm going to pull it up here so I don't get it incorrect in any way.
It said, creators.gov is connected with MailChimp, which is kind of a strange thing to see on a .gov website, you would think, right?
And so then a couple of hours later, I go back and check it again, and now it's throwing up a 403 code.
But this is a brand-new domain that was created yesterday, presumably by the White House, and it sounds very musky to me.
It's got a musky kind of name to it, or I guess it smells kind of musky.
It would be the better verbiage here.
But, you know, fascinating stuff, and I feel like there's a lot of ways where we could work together with respect to archiving these types of things.
I'd love to work with you on this, and I'm sure that there are others that are listening right now that have similar ideas.
Sure.
On Blue Sky, there's something called the Federal U.S. Domain Bot that tells you when the domains are being added and taken down.
So interesting.
So it's action taken by the Executive Office of the President at or around 6.10 in the morning on the 5th.
So that is actually also watched.
The Archive is actually doing a lot of that, but I would love - I love walking the basics because I like to make sure that we're doing it efficiently or that we're doing it in a way that makes sense.
But I will tell you that, yeah, you know, Blue Sky, I've been watching a lot of weird - there's one that, like, once a day shows me a weird emoji, and then there's one that shows me exactly this.
Like, oh, they've registered Creators.gov today.
I wonder how that's going.
And, oh, they took this down today.
And then you go see if it's there or not.
I encourage - I mean, yeah.
I don't mind giving it out.
My email address is jscott at archive.org, jscott at archive.org.
You can always mail me.
I get lots of interesting mail from people, and we talk about different possibilities.
There's somebody who just mailed me because he has thousands of MCA disco visions from 1976 onward, and I'm like, well, let's talk, buddy.
So, you know, I'm sure for your listeners who haven't - it's been a while since I've been on - who were like, what is this guy?
I'm like, if you do a job you love, you never sound bored.
But I've got - like, it's an interesting job because the mission is so wide, and here we are in, you know, a pretty intense time that people are thinking about it.
But it's happening a lot.
And, you know, a few years ago, did you see that thing where somebody did a census of the Internet without telling anybody?
They just did, like, a, you know, Internet census.
What's on every Internet?
And they produced, like, a - I don't know, dozens of gigabytes TAR-Z files of, like, here's, you know, this and this and that.
And I made sure we got a copy of that in our data sets collection because that's the kind of thing that just fades away.
You know, somebody did it.
Isn't it cool?
We have a couple Reddit data sets from way back when before they suddenly decided they didn't like people having data sets of their answers.
And there's data sets of weather data.
There's data sets.
And, of course, archiving of radio.
There's so much stuff out there that we're producing online.
And I always encourage people - like, you had a thing.
You had a thing, man.
You had a thing you wanted to do.
You wanted to look at domains.
What's the government doing with domains?
You set up a project.
You have information.
We collaborate.
I give the list to the way back team.
It's either redundant, a test case, or a new set of data that we can use.
Every one of those is great.
Man, do I love redundant data.
I love finding out that two or more people were working on a project because that's when you find the mistakes.
That's when you find oversights or new ways to look at it.
So, yeah, I'd love it, man.
That's when you find people to talk to and share experiences.
And it is the most awesome thing.
You're absolutely right there.
I'm curious about one thing, though.
We're always told, or we were always told, that when it's on the Internet, it's forever.
And tonight we seem to be saying the exact opposite of that.
When it's on the Internet, it's subject to being deleted at a dictator's whim.
So, which is it?
You know, it's unfortunately a reflection of humans, which is the secret of the LLMs, too, right?
You know, they're like, oh, this thing knows everything.
It's like, no, it knows what it looked at, and it's giving you back what people are like, and people are a little bit bonkers.
Well, items on the Internet are subject to fads, just like everything else.
So, what happens is you put up a website.
Everyone goes to it.
Everyone remembers it.
Hey, the spinning plate cat.
I'm making that up.
Don't look for it.
Splitting plate cat site.
Oh, that's amazing.
And then, you know, five years later, somebody didn't pay the spinning plate cat bill, and it's gone.
And if it's gone, gone.
And then you'll see, like, fan sites for it, or people will go, remember this?
And there's no protocol built into the Internet for preservation or time code.
And that has been, I've read at conferences proposals at websites for, like, we should have a time machine protocol so that the website is set up this way.
We just never did it.
Same way that robots.txt is, like, completely made up and random and how is it done, what does it do.
And we never did it.
So, like, the website's been, the web, I should say, the Internet, has been missing a function of memory all this time, and we're paying for it because of that.
So, either Space Jam stays up for 25 years, by the way, they changed it finally when the new Space Jam movie came out.
But for, like, 25 years, this website was untouched, and it was just this world of 1997-era graphics.
And then one day it's changed.
One day it's gone.
One day they've done this or that or the other thing, and it's just a different, and we suddenly go, oh, we were just, this was all a handshake deal.
We just assumed that, you know, I've been running textfiles.com for, ooh, going to get on 30 years myself soon.
And it's sitting on a server that some people donated money for in the eastern United States.
It's not really near me.
It's on a machine.
I've got mirrors.
I registered textfil.es one day just to have an off-country mirror.
I've given, I've packed everything up and put it into a big zip file for anybody to download and make their own copy.
But if I go and nobody is around, the site will go down.
And then it'll be, did I make a will?
Did I have somebody take over?
Did I, you know?
And this question, I have walked through so many awesome websites of people who are gone.
And I'm like, oh, I wish, I wish you had done something to make this last forever because there's so much of a person.
Those are my favorite websites where you walk in.
Like I'm, people can't see on the video, on the little chat that we're on.
But I'm sitting here digitizing these massive tapes.
And these massive tapes are from a guy named Bob Cooper.
And Bob Cooper was the king of satellite TV for the regular user.
He was, he was like 1970s onward.
And I just digitized a tape because somebody went to his warehouse after he died and sent me all his tapes.
And I just got to watch a satellite watch party in 1980, a 46-year-old tape of families building a 12-foot satellite in a backyard aimed at a color TV sitting on a bench where they're just like scanning different satellites trying to see what's on TV that night.
Like, like, all of that, all of that, like that, um, transience of the human experience is reflected at a, you know, at least there was a warehouse full of tapes, websites, you don't get that.
That's, I think, the one thing we really need to realize.
These things are not, they're not just built on sand.
They're built on promises and hopes and wishes.
Go ahead, Bob.
Hey, Jason, always good to see you.
Um, first of all, just to mention, you had mentioned the GIF Cities project to, uh, showcase GIF files from GeoCities.
And I know, I know that G pronunciation is going to start some fights among our listeners.
So I just want to point out that you can pronounce it with a hard G.
You can say GeoCities.
But, um, what I really wanted to ask you is, um, with these efforts of archiving these .gov sites and everything else, of course, um, what kind of, this is an amazing effort.
And this takes so much in terms of resources.
And what kind of, um, obstacles are in the way of that when you want to archive something?
Like, what, what sort of, like, pushback or, or just, uh, things in the way of just pushing a button and getting it done are out there?
Government or the world?
Um, I'd say government in particular.
Okay, so, um, let me see what I can, I mean, obviously you cannot run a site like the Internet Archive and get piles.
Like, we have a little sign outside of our entrance at our headquarters that's like, oh, so you're here with a subpoena.
Here, call this person.
Just call this number.
We'll handle it.
And I will tell you that one of the greatest things that ever happened, one of the, one of the most positive things to come out of the societal shift of the pandemic was that you could do testimony in court cases via Zoom.
Um, because, like, and I mean, these are, like, very benign things.
Company A says they never sell, they never sold cat food.
Person B says they sold cat food.
They show the Wayback Machine that they sold cat food.
Now we got to subpoena some poor person from the Wayback Machine to go, I am the Wayback Machine.
Here is how we do it.
This is what it is.
Da, da, da, da.
Well, think of that against, like, all of these different forces and people and stuff.
Like, the Archive is a very unique and interesting place and gets a lot of interesting parties contacting us.
On the whole, you know, there have been countries that have blocked access to the Archive.
There have been places that have blocked the Archive.
And there have been places that, you know, on the whole, we don't, I mean, I can say this statement,
because we definitely said a statement on this.
We don't respect robots.txt on .gov and .mil because the people paid for it.
Whoever's doing robots.txt doesn't understand the situation, so sorry.
But we're also respectful citizens.
I mean, individuals who have made websites can request that their website is taken down for privacy reasons.
You know, people will make a website and then discover they're living a whole new life.
They should not be, you know, subjected to there is this immutable way to look at their previous life without any recourse.
So we negotiate through all that and deal with all that.
The U.S. government has not really been hostile to us.
We did have a case with the, I think it was the Homeland Security, tried to subpoena a log.
We scramble our logs so it wouldn't have been good anyway.
But it was a secret warrant, so we sued them to reveal the warrant, and we won.
So that happened, like, a long time ago.
Jason, when's the last time you checked to see if the government is hostile towards you?
I think we're watching all the time.
I know I'm watching all the time.
You know, I said a not very nice thing to Mr. Musk on Twitter a few years ago where he claimed that the archive was whatever, terrible or something.
And I said a very not nice word to him.
And I remember in the meeting being like, it's all about diplomacy.
But, you know, like, obviously, thematically, in this era we're in right now, we are in a, a lot of institutions are being shook very hard.
And a lot of, a lot of things we assumed wouldn't happen, are being, are happening.
There is pushback.
There is protest.
There is response.
There is awareness.
And it's very inspiring to watch.
I expect that if anything shakes at the archive, people will know about it.
I really don't think otherwise.
But on the other hand, you know, well, again, at some point in this I am, at some point in this I am, what's the word they go, wargaming?
I'm wargaming possibilities.
I'm prepping.
And that's not really my place or to talk for the archive in that way.
You know, the archive has faced challenges all of its time, all of its life.
Years and years ago, the, we had a massive Grateful Dead archive.
And one day, the random company involved with the Grateful Dead archive said, that should go down.
And we talked with the Grateful Dead, the actual Grateful Dead.
And the agreement was, we won't put, we won't make the soundboard recordings available because those are being turned into commercial works.
But the, in the audience, tapings are around.
And we have every Grateful Dead show except for 128.
And, like, that's been, that's an example of, like, what could have been a project-ending situation.
We worked to keep it, but, you know, I mean, nothing, nothing should ever, whenever people get me at the end of the night at a HackerCon, like, like the Upcoming Hope or whatever, I go, look, man.
And it's a big, beautiful ship that I'm so proud to be a maid on.
And the way I think of it is that we land in the berth every night in the full moon, and we go, whew, that was another successful voyage.
That's the way I look at it.
Perhaps that's not a longevity look, but I'm like, I really appreciate every day the archive is up.
Two to three million people have their lives improved.
And to me, that's like, could you find another place that's happening all the time?
Like, so that's where I go about it.
But also, we're not lying down and saying, like, I don't know what's going to happen, man.
It's a mystery.
I mean, Brewster Kale got millions and millions of dollars in Amazon stock in 1996 and went, I get to be a librarian,
and then has just dumped his personal fortune into it.
And others have said, wow, what an amazing project.
And they've dumped millions into it.
And it's his life's work.
It's not a tax shelter.
It's not a trick.
It's not a startup that's going to turn into whatever.
It's like, that's his love and his life.
So he cares about it.
And we all care about it.
And we care about what we do.
Maybe we're one of the few that's still doing it that way.
We're not like, oh, man, when we introduce the new blah, blah, blah, dot cheddar, it's going to be amazing.
No.
You know?
You always get me on this line because the longer I talk about the archive, the more I'm like, I'm going to fall in love with you all over again.
Take the archive out for dinner and just watch a movie and cuddle.
I just love that place.
Jason, we are in our last couple of minutes, but we're going to continue the conversation, hopefully, over time on YouTube.
If you go to 2600.com, you'll see a link at the top of the page.
Or you can just go to channel 2600 on YouTube.com.
But I want to give you an opportunity to let people know how they can get involved, how they can help.
If archive.org needs any kind of donations or equipment or, dare I say, material, how do they go about that?
Well, I definitely want to say let's get those right out there.
Archive.org is the website.
Archive.org slash donate is a great place to send funds.
We can take monthly donations or we can take crypto, but we can also take normal human money.
And I actually made a domain called give.archive.money.
The archive also has an upload function.
You can get a virtual account there and upload things you think need to be preserved.
We also have, believe it or not, weekly meetings on Fridays in San Francisco at our headquarters.
And so you can write in about attending them.
We have some amazing people show up.
You never know who's going to show up to one of those meetings.
And what I said about Archive Team, archiveteam.org has the archive bot where people can donate computer time to be part of this matrix of downloading of websites,
both deep and just somebody thinks it'd be a good idea to get this right now.
And that will help us.
And I said, I'm jscott, J-S-C-O-T-T, at archive.org.
I love long email threads being sent to me that are not really questions.
And then I sort of work my way through it.
That's life.
So, yeah, there you go.
Jason, it's been great having you on.
And, again, as I mentioned, the conversation will continue over on Channel 2600 on YouTube at 8 o'clock.
Rob, I want to give you a chance just to remind people about 2600 meetings coming up this weekend or this Friday.
Absolutely.
2600.com slash meetings everywhere in the world.
You can find one or start one.
First Friday of every month, which is this Friday, our local one, you can find it at nyc2600.net.
Okay.
And just to remind people also, you're listening to WBAI, a non-commercial radio station in the middle of New York City,
in the middle of the commercial band, although we have no commercials.
We have you.
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And we need you to help support this place so we can bring you conversations like this and all kinds of other material on this show
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We will be back next Wednesday, 7 p.m. here for another edition of Off the Hook.
You know, my favorite congressperson right now is a guy named Al Green, for obvious reasons.
I checked, though.
He has no records out, unfortunately.
But I found another Al Green who does.
And they're about the same age, too, believe it or not.
So let's all groove to this sound.
We'll see you either at 8 o'clock or next week.
Good night, everyone.
We'll see you next time.


And welcome everybody to Off the Hook Overtime here on YouTube.
It's Emmanuel, Kyle, I think you've made it over as well.
Yeah.
And to our people in the newly christened Signal Land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Hello.
And we have Gila.
Hello.
And we have Alex.
And good evening.
And we also have Jason.
Jason Scott, here to take all the oxygen out of the room.
Well, now, is there anything that that hour went by fast?
I got to tell you, is there anything that you guys want to touch upon?
More questions, dialogue, back and forth, experiences, things like that?
I mean, I did.
Well, OK, so I will say, first of all, I remember meeting Jason Scott for the first time at Hope in 2016 and just fangirling in a really embarrassing way.
And I just, Jason, it's, I can't, like, deal with this memory because it was just so embarrassing.
And talking about playing Carmen Sandiego with my brother on the emulators and just, oh, my God, nerded out and I just did it again.
But also, I was curious.
I had a question.
Is there anything that you wouldn't take for the archive?
Well, so outside of the obvious class of, like, materially illegal material, of which there is a growing classification, believe it or not.
It's not just the basics, but it's like, like, there are now laws on the books that are nationwide, like, worldwide, where if you have stuff for certain terrorist groups,
and you make them available on your website and you do not take them down in an hour, the ISPs in that country have to take you down, have to knock you out, and you have to take them seriously.
So let's set those aside.
Like, that's just law.
That's just, eh.
Nobody, you know, you shouldn't have that, and you can't be a website on the internet and take it.
But then there's, like, so, like, I can think of several, usually what happens is somebody gets the bug, and they want to preserve something.
I'll give you two examples where I actually had to step in and be like, bro, bro, bro.
One of them was the dude had recorded every traffic cam in New York City for, like, two years and wanted to upload it.
And I was like, no.
So, choose events, if there was a protest, if there was a parade, if there was a, you know, whatever, the first day of congestion pricing, whatever.
Like, something, give me a historical narrative to this, but we cannot freewheel grab the footage of hundreds of things and support that.
Try to find supporters somewhere who will keep it for you.
And then, like, another guy had one and a half petabytes of cam girls.
And I was like, no.
We're not going to do that.
And he came back with a good one, which I was very, like, fair, which he was like, we have used facial recognition and rescued seven women from trafficking.
And I'm like, cool.
Still not going to give you the two petabytes.
And, you know, like that.
Usually it's when somebody was speculatively keeping air traffic, air traffic control.
And it's just, you know, like, it's fine, but it's just like it builds up and it's eating all this space and space is still not free.
And if it was, then we could talk about it.
But it isn't.
I had an idea that I proposed some time ago.
And I talked to the people who kind of have run it.
And which is, you know, we have this thing on online called software, you know, SDR, a popular thing at Hope to discuss.
And I'm like, man, I wish somebody set up like a TiVo where it kept like the last two or three days of the output of the SDR.
And then, like, January 6th or something would happen and we could say, cut it off, put it over here.
It's 297 gigabytes of audio recorded in this band or one terabyte.
I don't care.
You know, nine terabytes.
And we save it off and we're like, here you go.
Here's what the radio spectrum was like on this historic day.
But I haven't.
It's kind of a nightmare for them, technically.
So they haven't done it.
But, man, that's an example where, again, people want this world where, like, you find things out and you go around in a 360 camera angle and you're like, and where did he walk from here to here?
Here's the evidence.
He walked from this building to this building and it's like, these are very space intensive things.
And like I said, some people salivate and say, well, if you were a real archive, why don't you take all the traffic cams on Manhattan Island for the past two years?
And it's like, where's the check?
I mean, I guess somebody could write a check and we would do it because then they're supporting it.
You know, they're supporting.
So, like, mission-wise, we would do it.
Well, how about you have something where, you know, they, if they really want it so bad, they already have it.
You know, they can buy the two petabytes of whatever they need, put it on there, give you that drive and you stick it somewhere.
Yeah, it's like they're naming a virtual wing of a museum.
Exactly.
And I think that we would be open to something like that.
Again, a lot of, so in these cases, it's not so much mission, but only mission adjacent in terms of like, this will pull down us, this will pull us down economically in a way that would affect our ability to do our daily archiving of websites and the material that comes in.
But that's all, I mean, I'm trying to think of something where I'm like, oh, bro, no, we will probably not make available, or sorry, we will not make available when we become aware of it.
Somebody uploads something that's like, absolutely like harassing somebody.
That won't stay public, that won't stay up for very long.
Don't send us Marvel movies.
We're set.
We're set.
Don't send us Marvel movies.
Don't upload Avengers.
You're just causing us trouble.
Don't do it.
Come on.
Don't be an idiot.
That's not what this place is for.
That kind of stuff.
Where it's just like, why are you doing this?
Like, what are you trying to do?
But on the other hand, somebody will like upload something where I'm like, until 17 seconds ago, I didn't even think about this.
Now I love it more than anything.
You know, it's Doug from Up.
Where it's just like, I just met you and I love you.
Where it's like, somebody will upload.
Somebody uploaded like 300 recordings of every time a radio station changed formats.
Oh, wow.
Like a recording of the day when like, you know, you know, whatever.
The boot became alternative rock or whatever.
Stuff like that.
Or last days and then first days.
That kind of stuff.
Where I'm like, well, I did not even know that.
Or a lot of stuff I love is audio.
So somebody, it used to be on American flights.
They had actual quarter inch tape reel to reel that they would set off at the beginning of a flight and it would just play.
Like all the music you could hear through the, through the head, the armrest.
And like somebody digitized those.
Right.
I was like, okay, I love you.
Somebody did what was called a Minecraft survey.
They went through hundreds and hundreds of Minecraft worlds and preserved them.
And now we have that.
We have like, what's called the Minecraft geographic survey.
And it's like, bless you.
Um, I love when a person out there gets a mission and they're like, they're the ones who are kind of like doing that work for anybody.
I will jump.
If somebody in the chat on our little thing here, we'll hear that somebody did fry.
Somebody has made a 3,600 item Friday night, funkin mod archive.
And I'm like, didn't know anything about Friday night, funkin before I found it.
And now we have a collection and it's a game.
It's a rhythm game that came out in 2020 on new grounds.
And it's somebody made people have made mods for it over the last five years.
It still hasn't come out commercially.
And now we have a massive collection of it.
And I'm like, well, bless you for doing that.
Like, I love when somebody makes something their gig and they work on it and they really do their best.
They really keep it preserved.
They want the people to have it.
It's not competing with Netflix or Spotify or something else for commercial products.
They're never going to have this, right?
Like, somebody had, you know, I mean, a lot of these videos that I'm digitizing right now, these are like early 1980s audition tapes for child actors and commercial actors.
And they're all reading, you know, verbiage from Anne Klein says or Annie says.
And they're all reading it.
And it's like, I'm Michelle, whatever.
And I looked them up and some of them went on to careers and some didn't.
And I'm like, nobody, nobody was expecting this.
Acne medicine from 1983.
I don't know.
Like, I love it when somebody's like, I didn't know this was going to be a thing.
And now it's a thing.
That stuff is great.
Yeah, that's the thing.
You never know what is going to take off.
So those Minecraft worlds, you know, that could be the most popular thing on YouTube because somebody is into it and a billion other people are into it as well.
It's just it's important to acknowledge that and to try and preserve what you can.
You know, there's one guy who digitizes North Korean TV, puts that on YouTube.
Yeah, we have that too.
Now, my only complaint with that, he only does three hours at a time.
Now, a lot of people, that's well beyond the capacity they can handle.
I can handle the full broadcast day, which I think is about 10 hours.
So if you guys have that, I would be I would be set for the day just having that going in the background.
So sitting, sitting and so the archive can emulate flash.
You can have flash programs play in the browser if you go to an item and somebody there was a group in North Korea and I'm forgetting their name.
It was the something boys and they were a government hired propaganda group by North Korea to blast South Korea with flash animations and games to try to win them over.
And they preserved them and they're on the archive.
Somebody got their hands on and I still don't know how.
I think they what they did was they got a machine at auction, but it's like hundreds and hundreds of North Korean karaoke songs because the I'm going to get it wrong.
I would love if somebody said you got it.
I love it when people correct me.
And they're like, no, no, no.
But like one glorious leader was super into karaoke.
So they made a lot of karaoke.
Then his son took over.
His son thought karaoke was corruptive.
Now there's no karaoke.
Wow.
She didn't get thrown out.
So there's all of this North Korean karaoke music on the archive and people who listen to it are like, oh, these are just Chinese songs with new lyrics.
Like they were just stealing Chinese pop songs and being like, we all need guns and butter.
Let's all do that.
You know, like whatever.
They were singing songs about how Korea was awesome.
And I think this is why I was like hesitant to put a name on it.
I think the current glorious leader thinks they're OK again.
OK, so that would mean Kim Il-sung, the original leader, was into it.
Kim Jong-il, who liked films, by the way, probably didn't like karaoke and purged that.
And now Kim Jong-un likes karaoke and films.
So it's an enlightenment over there.
I think my favorite trivia about them is if one of the Kims touches an item, it's considered a holy relic.
So a problem they have is they'll do a tour of like a science museum or a science area or something, and he'll touch the equipment.
And if he touches the equipment, the equipment leaves because it has to go to a museum because it's now a holy relic.
So, like, you've got to place your items carefully.
What if he shakes your hand?
Well, then you're a holy relic, and I've been there.
You've all been there.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm a, you know, one of the great things about the way the archive works is discovering people who make something their deal.
And I have all these items that go, you know, somebody just uploaded a thousand things.
You should go look at it.
And I go look at it, and it's either, oh, oh, no, this isn't good.
This wasn't done right.
And I'll talk to them about it.
Or I'll be like, Jesus, this is 400 knitting magazines in Russian.
Okay, bless you.
I'll put you in the knitting magazine section.
Or we have people who are uploading pulp magazines.
That's another popular one, you know, the 1920s to the 50s and 60s of, like, you know, tales of westerns and space and romance.
So, there's a pulp magazine collection that's on there.
And the old-time radio is, like, next level.
Once I went in and cleaned it, like, I did a good job.
I fixed it up.
And we got so many complaints that I had to unfix it.
Because there were these old people who knew, bless them, go to this collection, go down seven levels,
look over here, click on this, that's how you'll get the shadow.
And they were going to bed every night listening to the shadow.
And I screwed it up.
Well, I mean, if you clean it up, if you get rid of, you know, certain pops and static and things like that,
it's not authentic.
Yeah, no, I didn't.
Yeah, I mean, that wasn't what we were even doing.
This was just me saying I cleaned it up like I put them into a little collection that said,
here's all these little special showcase-y ones.
Here's the mystery.
No, too much.
Too much.
Wow.
Yeah.
I like to collect Bob and Ray recordings.
I've told you this.
But, you know, a lot of the recordings that are uploaded are hours long.
I'd like for them to be, you know, in categories.
Like, you know, Mary Backstage, Noble Wife, or One Fellow's Family, or whatever.
The sketch happens to be just all those episodes.
But nobody has done that yet.
So if there are any people out there archiving that stuff, please do that.
On the archive, if you go to the front page, you say Old Time Radio Showcase.
One of the nice things about the archive is that you can actually put an item in multiple collections.
So my semi-bitter attempt to still clean it up is that if you go to, you know, archive.org slash detail slash the Old Time Radio,
you will find these collections where it will say, I see here one that's like The Great Gildersleeve.
And you click on it, and it's, oh, God, whatever this is, right?
Like hundreds and hundreds of episodes of The Great Gildersleeve.
And it's all in one collection, and you can play it however you want.
Like, I did it.
I did it anyway.
I just found a way to do it without upsetting the oldies who were getting really unhappy about it.
You know, and it was funny because at one point, you know, Brewster was like,
we should have the Old Time Radio people come and whatever to the thing.
And I'm like, they are all dead.
And not only are they dead, but like their family members, like their children who used to come to these things,
now they're dead.
Like it's now to the point that like the, they just are starting to die.
Like the son of the guy who played the shadow or the son of the guy who played whatever.
So, no, dude, we can't do it.
All we could do is just keep providing Old Time Radio.
I feel like artificial intelligence might be the solution here where we can conjure them up and conjure their spirit up and talk to them that way.
You know, it's funny because, first of all, I love that AI is a religious war.
But more than that, you can clearly see the tinkerers versus the people who are seeing it as a threat.
And I agree.
If you have a boss who looks at a half done nascent tech demo of anything and who literally turns around while pointing at it,
looking at his employees going, I can't wait to replace you with this.
That's a bad boss.
It doesn't matter if it's a dippy bird hitting a return key.
Like, and he's like, oh, this is going to be you.
I'm going to make so much money by not having it.
Like, that's a bad boss.
And so many of these bosses were like, oh, this showastic parrot that barely works in this tech demo, we're doing it, man.
We're getting rid of the people.
And I'm like, okay.
And in limited fashion, we have done experiments with it.
And where it really works out for is having a console where I'm sorting something and the AI has looked at the item and says, based on what I know of items, I think this is a radio show.
I think this is a political speech, but I'm not going, thanks machine, now automatically sort 105,000 items because I will be spending the rest of the year on doing that damage.
But as an augmentative, hey, the weirdo summarization machine thinks it's a newspaper, cool, fine.
But I'm also, if I can come up with a way for people to do it as well, I'll work with them on it.
It's like, that's where I'm from.
I'm like, oh, look at all this.
But, yeah, boy, it is.
I remember going to the archive in 2021 and having a big con call, and I'm like, this is coming.
And I can't tell you how to react, but I should tell you, you should have an answer.
You should have responses because this thing is going to be a 100-foot wave, and people are going to demand to know where you stand on this.
And so, you know, they've made various statements and stuff, but at least it was, you know what I mean?
Like, it was a choice.
And the thing that's coming, because, you know, I know, Emmanuel, you're always on top of the latest thing.
Do you know about static recompilation?
I do not.
So, this has been around, like AI and emulation and everything, for a long time.
Basically, what you do is, with a lot of work, you can take a binary file, especially if you know it was written in a certain way, and you can push it back to source code.
It won't be good source code.
It'll suck ass, but you can do it.
You can do it.
Well, they figured out how to do it.
So, some people did it as an experiment with one game of Zelda on the N64 about three or four years ago.
And then, a new group made it work, and I think this is the one that's the watershed.
They got Sonic Unleashed for the Xbox 360 to run native in the PC at 4K, 60 frames per second, completely configurable, everything.
And I know this because the archive has a copy of Sonic Unleashed, and it was 3% of our bandwidth.
And I was like, well, that's crazy.
Well, that means that every Xbox 360 game is now up for grabs, and what would have previously be considered, what are you going to do?
Bump up Halo 3?
Like, what are you going to do with Halo 3?
Now can be, oh no, we'll bring Halo 3 back on the PC, and someone will reverse engineer the server, and it'll just be Halo 3 is now playable again.
And it's going to just, and that's for games.
Games sell themselves.
What are they going to do when they start doing it with chatbots and programs and others, and it's just being slam ported up to the most modern era?
And we're going to see this stuff come flying in.
So I think we're on the cusp of a run, a gold rush, against old code, old binaries, old works, suddenly becoming viable because they'll run in Mac OS X, and they'll run in Windows 75 because they just work, and the resolutions work, and everything works.
So it's going to be a revolution, man, and I expect, I expect by summer for the world to have a meltdown about it.
So that'll be fun.
And one of the side effects is that Xbox 360 stuff is like gigabytes for a disk image, so that's going to become a real hot thing for people to grab.
It is going to be off the rails, because, you know, what's better than a native running version of a program that is running at full resolution and everything against a library of items, many of which are so obscure they just don't have enough support?
Because who cares? Who's going to, you know, Halo sells itself, Sonic sells itself.
But there were, like, great games and great programs for the Xbox 360 that will come roaring back to life and be competitive, like a Steam game versus this old game that was done for $75 million and bankrupted a studio 10 years ago.
Yes, sir?
There is also the issue, when it comes to these games, of competing with the studios themselves, wanting to sell, like, worse versions of that.
And you have fans, like, willing to put in the blood, sweat, and tears and labor to get something awesome, whereas the official version that you would download is, like, has a bunch of garbage added or microtransactions or something terrible.
You know, there are many games with significantly less content because, like, rights to music has expired and things like that in their new versions that would have been in place in the old ones.
And people who love the old games want the old games.
And, you know, I think you are definitely right.
This is going to be, you know, we're on YouTube now.
We can say shit, Storm.
Yeah, it's going to be really something.
So, like, part of what I do for the archive, part of my job as free-range archivist is I kind of wander out into the forest and I just go, static recompilation, man.
It's going to eat our bandwidth to living hell.
We got to have, you know, one of the things I've really been forced to do over the years with the software capsules, you know, the collections of old, old games,
is put them behind something called logged in where you have to register to download them at the archive because people are hotlinking them with four pay sites.
Like, hey, do you want this game?
Give me 50 bucks.
So we had to start doing that.
It wasn't because we were trying to prevent people from having, you know, a given game or that we think it's whatever.
It's just we're in this, right, we're in this world where the value of, you know, the same thing with the AI training, right,
where, like, one of the scenarios I warned the archive about was what are you going to do when a company comes to you
and offers you $200 million to digitize every undigitized book in your stacks?
And they get to keep it for five years and then you get to do whatever you want.
So they will have done it.
They will have funded the scanning of this old material, these old microfilms, these old whatever.
I don't have an answer.
I'm just like, it's better to be prepared to think of your response than to be on the phone looking across at three other people
and you're bored going like, ah, and I think, you know, forewarned is forearmed.
I'm sure Emanuel has a file folder, file cabinet full of contingencies.
Conde Nast comes knocking for 2600.
What are you going to do?
Yeah, yeah, we're ready for that day.
I figured you're ready for that.
You'll be on the eighth floor.
You'll be living it.
It's weird to hear that money-making tactic, given that gaming now for a lot of what I think are new players,
people that are on the current game systems, it's heavily monetized.
Like, in ways, the arcade, like, putting quarters into a machine or pinball or whatever, like, back in the day,
it's now, like, credits.
I think I never realized, like, the idea of, like, going and getting a game to have the disc
to put in that Xbox 360 or whatever, that was one thing you would buy.
Or for a PC, you would buy the license.
I mean, this is the genesis of cracked games and serial numbers and all of that.
But now it's heavily monetized to where, like, gameplay requires $20 or whatever.
Like, young people are out there trying to get credits for PlayStation or whatever.
And then someone does that to those, does linking like that.
They think, well, this is just the way it's, the way it works.
I'm providing it cheaper or whatever for people to not, to have an option as an alternative.
It's cool to think that it might upend all of that to play retro.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny, you know, we have Flash, we have Flash versions of Bejeweled
and a lot of PopCap and other things where, you know, and yeah, there's definitely a shift
when games become, like Candy Crush.
I remember talking with Moo, actually, of 4chan, who knew some of the Candy Crush guys.
And at the beginning of Candy Crush's life, like the first month or two, they were pulling
in, I believe it was $1 million in monetization a day in the beginning.
You know, like they were pulling in a million dollars of, I want the special, you know, jelly
bean.
I want to pay for the extra whatever.
And you look at all that and you're like, I wish somebody would regulate this, but then
they don't.
And, of course, in the current setup, I don't see that happening, right?
I just don't see anything getting in the way of that.
And, you know, it's destroyed families.
It's like gambling for people who are not of gambling age, because where's the learning
about financial literacy?
Like, you're basically buying game systems over and over again, whereas once you would
buy it once and then play it until you're bored of it, I guess.
Right.
Well, I mean, you run into these situations where, like, for example, DraftKings has kind
of, like, there's, I've watched some great videos on, like, how DraftKings methodically
became accepted nationwide gambling and how they do it.
And it's only a matter of time before DraftKings is doing wired gambling into consoles.
I think we're just, you know, if not this generation of video game, the next generation, it'll be
wired casino.
You'll just get, you'll just have, oh, what's it called?
What's that dumb game with the, it's the one that they put in the hotel rooms when you
go to Vegas.
It's on the television, the numbers one.
It's like you choose up to eight numbers and.
Is it Keno or something?
I think it's like Keno.
It's the one where if you actually win, they send cops to your apartment or your hotel
room because you've obviously running some sort of scam.
I remember checking into a Las Vegas hotel and they had a deal where you could give them
a hundred dollars and they would just play the hundred dollars for you against the Keno
while you were doing other things.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like that.
I'm worried about, I'm always worried about that stuff where they weaponize.
You know, and the funny part is with me, when you talk to me, you start seeing me going,
but wait a minute.
I'm against any weaponization of human frailty and victimization for the purposes of acquiring
power and capital.
Like, I just don't think it's smart, right?
Because you corrupt quickly.
You quickly, it becomes, well then, you know, it's like bug bounties.
Bug bounties are a great idea until you start having somebody in the QA department tell the
dev department to add a bug and then the QA department guy finds it and they split the bug bounty,
you know, or they add a third, you know what I mean?
Like, it's just so easy because you've invented a money matrix on top of what should be a, you
know, and it can happen anywhere.
So for me, and again, this is my own personal opinion, I feel very good when something designed
to extract an enormous amount of money out of you and even more worrying about children
or families is available in an older, older cracked or beta version that is not taking
money out of that family.
I feel good about that.
That feels like maybe they're learning the game, but they're doing it in a way that's
not the kid wakes up or the dad wakes up and discovers the kid has added $3,500 to the
family credit card and now they're not going to have a car, you know?
I mean, this is, you know, I, I really were, you know, I, and yeah, should, should you teach
financial literacy to children?
Yes.
Yes, you should.
You should teach phishing and hoaxing and, and a bunch of other things.
Um, there was, did you, you know, that hoax that went around, I think it went on for a
few years now, the one where it's like, I had your webcam on and I, you know, I was
what recorded you.
I get that every day.
The first time I got hit with that, I read it really hard and it was like, you know,
if you don't give me some money, I'm going to, you know, give this to all your friends
and family.
And I was like, literally, I looked out, out to the window and looked back and was like,
let's light this candle.
Let's, let's do this.
Let's do this.
I'm ready.
I'm ready to change my relationship with everybody in my friends list.
Jason's got the sex tape.
Here we come.
Let's go.
Let's go.
It's my sex tape era.
I was ready, man.
But for a moment, I know, but I think, you know, you got to confront.
It's like a, what?
G Gordon Liddy with the rat.
You got to confront your fears, man.
You know what?
Bring it, bring it.
I'm going to dress for dinner and I'm going to offer the buffet.
That is a healthy attitude.
I think, I think that like those kinds of scams, the ones that like prey upon you to
be alone and fearful or, you know, just a latest version of all that.
But, but yeah, like anything like this where I, um, I've never, I didn't have any kids and
a couple of my friends have kids, but I didn't, I wasn't really like the cool uncle or anything.
I always feel like, man, I wish that was the case that I was like, look, I'm going to give
you a hundred dollars and you haven't seen a hundred dollars in your whole goddamn life.
You are 11 years old and you and I, and I'm not going to say anything, but I want to see
what you do with this hundred dollars.
And then we're going to talk about what you did with the hundred dollars and what that
means.
Like, I'm like, that would be great.
I would love that.
I would love to find out because I just feel like there are life skills, you know, people
get conspiracy and they're like, I'm like, I don't even think it's that it's just, we
just don't teach financial literacy.
My father wouldn't tell me what he made for like the first 35 years of his career that
we shared overlapping.
It was like verboten.
And so I didn't know it.
And he was like a financial genius.
And now we talk and he looks at me like I'm a mouth breather.
I'm like, yeah, I'm thinking of investing in Intel.
And he just looks at me.
What?
And, you know, and I'm like, well, dad, when I was 15, could have taught me about compound
interest, bonds, gold coins, but nope, 50 years old pop.
And I don't know until it looks funny.
We are on with Jason Scott from Internet Archive.
And we're going to open up phone phone lines.
The phone number is 802-321-4225.
That's 802-321-HACK.
And you can ask your question or say whatever is on your mind.
And Gila is our first caller.
Go ahead, Gila.
Oh, that's very exciting.
Hello.
I just wanted to say hello to the 68 people who are in the chat with us right now.
My number just went a little funky.
That's a lot.
That's a lot for us, really.
It is a lot for us.
And also the general feeling in the chat is that our audio is amazing tonight.
So I also agree with that, by the way.
Everybody sounds fantastic.
And people have had a lot to say, and I just wanted to share one specific thing, which
is that our friend Fun Socks has called for a Jason Scott OnlyFans.
To which I have responded with my Jason Scott OnlyFans, which is onlyfans.com slash Archive
Daddy, which is currently, you can subscribe to it for free.
There aren't any items.
The main reason being, I went back and forth on this one, and I decided one of the, but
there's an interesting lesson in there.
So, you know, like I own Archive Daddy, but one of the things I thought about was I don't
want any situation where there's any wedge with which for any groups or institutions or
whatever to wedge in and go, look what kind of people they have.
This guy's running a Daddy Archive thing.
And so I didn't do it because I was like, okay, I think I could really walk the line on it.
I think it would be fun.
But do I want to have my boss trying to answer a reporter or another doing it?
He says, could I donate to your endeavor?
I hope you mean the Internet Archive.
That's archive.org slash donate.
If you want to donate to me, you know, donate to Archive Daddy, my PayPal is jason at textfiles.com
and my Venmo is textfiles.
Feel free.
But no, you know, and I was really, but I was interested, you know, the OnlyFans thing
was a really good example of like what I was saying before.
However, I'm always like, well, what is this world?
Is that the world now?
People are doing OnlyFans and they, can I do a cheesecake-y old guy fetish?
Because I do get fans who write to me, who are attracted to me.
And I'm like, oh, I could maybe do a balance.
I could do like a cute whatever.
I'll do this, you know, I love, as anybody who's come to Hope knows, dressing up is what
I love to do.
I love sartorial suits and things.
And again, the camera's not aimed in the right position, but I'll do it to them anyway, which
is that you can see over here, you know, who in their office has all of their shirts
and jackets ready to go just in case, you know, so like that's a, that's the way I do
it.
I love buying beautiful outfits and having all these pieces.
And so I'm like, maybe I could do something with it.
How would I do it?
And it just becomes a problem to solve.
It becomes like, how would I digitize radio?
How would I fix this problem here?
You know, like that, that's just another thing.
But then I got smart and said, this, there's too much identity attacks we see now.
People go after it.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I would say we feel the same way, especially with all kinds of feedback and ideas for whether
it's events or publishing.
We get the input or like you said, the contingencies for when the universe feels that you're a wounded
animal or something and they move in, right?
Like, there's plenty of ideas.
But when you've worked on a thing, you feel a responsibility to your, you know, readers,
your supporters.
And it could be fun.
But you can also say, like, you also have that obligation or check on yourself, like, but
that's not what we do.
And that's not what people would expect.
And that wedge you're talking about, it's very real, especially the ways it's used against
people really just doing honest things.
And it also can confuse when we're actually appealing, saying, no, this is actually what
we need.
This is how you can actually materially help and be in alignment with what we do.
Yeah.
And it's tough.
It's tough because, you know, I mean, I know about the semi-successful but not longevity,
you know, side beverage business, you know, and other approaches to, like, something like
2600, because, you know, you have an era, you know, the Emanuel era, and then what happens?
Do you do a turn in the road?
Do you shift it?
Do you go about it a different way?
Do you fix this or do you do that?
And every step you take, you're constantly attack, you're constantly balancing people who
want nothing to change, people who can't believe you're not changed, people who read up any
legitimate attempt to go to the next level as a signal that you are no longer what the
thing you were, and so on.
And you're constantly battling that.
And I think every institution, because now, I mean, 2300 Enterprises is an institution.
There are people for whom it has been there their whole life.
Anything, any change is traumatic, right?
For them, it's, that's their National Geographic.
That's their, you know, New York Times.
It has always been there.
It has been there for decades before them.
And they're, you know, somebody, some kid missed 9-11.
He's 19.
And he's always known about 2600.
And he's always known that there's these hacker cons.
And he's always known that computers can do this and that.
But he's never touched C code.
And he's never played with a phone box.
And he does not understand why payphones are a thing.
And he doesn't understand that bit.
But he still feels, like, I get kids who write me fan mail for textfiles.com who are, like,
15 years old.
Like, kids who are, like, 15 years old who are, like, going to textfiles.com.
And to them, it's, like, it's, like, a historical reenactment village, as far as they're concerned.
It's, like, they're going to visit, you know, some 1800s village.
And they're just, like, wow.
People just were like this?
And I'm, like, yeah.
35 years ago?
But, yeah.
And that's always a mind.
That's also why I've worked so hard to make it that you can just grab textfiles.com and put it up on someone's USB drive or put it into a local website or whatever.
I'm, like, make it your thing.
Have a fun time with it.
And also what I learned tonight, textfiles.es.
Congratulations on getting that.
That's a Spain domain.
So I'm glad you got that.
Yeah, textfil.es, textfil.es goes to textfiles.
And, yeah, that was just in case, for some reason, somebody passed a law or something and they just seized away my domain.
We want to come back to this institutional knowledge and even what, like, we've had these conversations internally.
What is hacking now versus what it has been, what it was in its foundational, like, genesis?
But we do have a phone call.
Well, I do want to let people talk to us.
So do we want to see?
I hope we still have a phone call.
They've been on hold for about 10 minutes now.
Sorry for all the delay.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook overtime.
Go ahead.
Hi.
Can you guys hear me?
We hear you fine.
Or at least I can.
Okay.
Yeah.
For Jason, I'd like to know, does the Internet Archive contain any old discussion threads from Usenet news groups, The Well or Echo, by any chance?
So, funny story there.
All right.
Well, first of all, we have a lot of Usenet.
We definitely have Usenet.
So there's piles of Usenet.
Now, there was a collection called the UT Zoo Collection.
And the UT Zoo Collection was up for a very long time.
And that was, like, news files going back to, like, 81 up through, like, 89 or whatever.
It was, like, almost a full grab of the non-binary news groups of Usenet.
And I took it down because a guy and his lawyer were, like, subpoenaing us to have things taken out of it.
And we were trying – we were starting to do it.
And I was like, you know what?
This is bad.
You know what?
A bunch of people have grabbed it.
So I'm going to make it – I'm going to take it out of circulation.
But I'm going to leave up an indication that it exists.
And John Gilmore just gave me some – and, oh, before I took it down, I went to a bunch of people and said, grab this.
Get it out there because I'm still me.
But the UT Zoo Collection, like, literally, like, University, you know, Tiger Zoo Collection of Usenet is, like, a really good early historical collection.
We have Reddit.
We have Usenet grabs from other websites that have done Usenet grabbing.
Not so much the binaries.
Binaries are always the nightmare.
And I suspect over time people will hand us more and more of these.
Again, this guy.
I mean, this fucking guy.
So miserable.
Like, just having – and here's the thing.
All the messages are boring.
They're not even like – like, it's not even something juicy.
It's not like he threatens somebody or he's selling drugs or he calls himself something.
It's just literally like, I was using DR-DOS to make a format of this thing.
And now it's a set of two drives and it's this.
And he's like, I want it removed.
And he's got the money for a lawyer.
And I said, you know what?
I would rather bring Streisand effect attention to the fact that this guy doesn't want people to see this.
And just take it.
Just take it.
So that's my – yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe I'll put it back up again with the stuff explicitly removed and let people be able to find it.
These are the rubber hits the road.
When the face hits the road stuff that I'm always, like, struggling with.
But there's a lot of stuff out.
I can say that if someone is interested in the UT Zoo Archive, it is findable without too much work on places that you're not responsible for.
Yeah.
It's the – oh, I see.
Yeah.
I was really cranky about it.
Wow.
I really was cranky.
I put it up.
I said, this happened.
Yeah.
Who are these people?
Yeah.
I was – boy, I was really saucy that day, wasn't I?
Ooh.
But that's to encourage other people.
Yeah.
I see it's got – it's on IPFS and it's on a billion other things.
And, man, I've never – I understand the right to not, you know,
there are so many different reasons why a person wants to change their past.
And some of them are very legitimate.
And other ones are, you really need to think of this through.
Like, I get why you're not comfortable, but you should think this through.
And it ranges, right?
It ranges.
And it's – that's where we're – we're always going to have those cases in the world
of archiving, of preservation, of journalism, of historians, of support, of psychiatry.
You know, you build a community and in the community there's somebody who is making the
other members feel uncomfortable.
How do you handle that?
How do you deal with it?
That's where we always run into, like, these difficulties and edge cases.
It's not unique to anything at all.
So that's – anyway, that's – that's, you know, if you ever start something and
suddenly, like, six months to a year in, you're like, oh, well, guess what?
It's – it's – everybody gets it.
Everybody gets it.
Does that address all your questions, caller?
I just have one follow-up.
Sure.
Has anyone uploaded PDF files of any out-of-print magazines at all, like, say, Utney Reader,
Whole Earth Review, Fact Sheet 5, Gray Areas, or just any magazines?
There's a lot of great magazines that don't exist anymore.
And I just wanted to know, are there any online archives of those?
So we got a couple.
I'm sad to hear all those magazines aren't printing anymore.
I just didn't know they were all stuff printing.
If you go to archive.org slash details slash magazine underscore rack or type archive.org,
the magazine rack, you can console yourself with half a million issues of magazines over
the last 120 years.
So there's also computer newsletters.
There's also fanzines.
There's zines.
They're all up there.
That's one of my private and private personal projects, is to make sure as much of that is
welcome as possible.
You know, what I just realized tonight, though, being involved in a magazine, I believe you
alluded to it, Jay.
So what did that scene used to be called?
It wasn't the magazine scene.
It was something else.
What was it?
Zines?
Zines.
Because you take away the what?
The magazine.
Yeah.
Very nice.
We had this worked out decades ago.
You cooked that one up just now, didn't you?
I just realized it now.
Yes.
Yes, sir.
Go ahead, Kyle.
One thing you were pointing out, too, you showed me recently a list of all the technology
magazines, current technology magazines.
On Wikipedia, there's a list of American technology magazines.
But it's a handful.
Yeah.
And if you think about it, I think, I don't know, I'm theorizing the reason, but it is
that all of this stuff has mainstreamed.
It's become ubiquitous.
The divide itself is less of a chasm.
And essentially, there's been less demand for printed public, like, state publications
that cover that in specific terms.
Yeah.
But guess what they hold on to?
Guess what people hold on to years later?
They have printed magazines.
They don't have the PDFs.
You know, even though we have PDFs as well, basically, the printed word survives through
centuries.
So that's interesting.
I would be very surprised to hear you have any other opinion on this.
Which is fine, by the way.
I mean, I definitely think you should print until you go into the ground, because that's
really worked out for you.
Just like running my website without any CGI bin and having it be 100% static and having
it stand at HTML 1.0 and still work in links and still work on old machines.
And I don't run SSL on textfiles.com.
It's working out for me.
I have had more hackers who have been like, why isn't it SSL?
And I'm like, dude, well, I love arguing with them.
But I'm like, you know what?
SSL, anyway, I love having people flip out about that.
And I'm like, there's plenty of SSL mirrors of the internet, of textfiles.com.
That's true.
That's true.
Yeah, don't worry about it.
It's out there, man.
If you want to grab it, there's a billion ways to do it.
But at this point, textfiles.com is so representative of a web that is so gone and was built at a
time when I really thought there'd be a website for each thing.
Oh, here's the BBS history website.
Here's the telephone poles website.
Here's the I want to go biking website.
And I have a bike and I want to take care of my bike.
And it turned everything just glorped into this current bizarreness.
And I don't like it.
I also don't guilt people or think that they're bad for using these new approaches.
I'm like, but there are other ways.
Just like, yeah, I mean, you really, I've always, I've always loved this about you, Emmanuel.
I've always loved your relationship to staples and even when on like, by my count, 20 different
occasions, either your printer, your distributor, or a chain has tried to kill you.
Oh God.
You, you have been like, yeah, my counter offer is I'm not going anywhere and you're fired
and we're going to get back on there.
Like, I've loved that.
I've loved that.
Not only, not only do you fish without a lure, you have changed lakes, poles.
You have changed everything.
Cause you're gonna fish.
We, we haven't had to service our pallet jack once since we bought it.
And we are, we are going to move paper until we need to, and then we'll get it fixed and
continue.
I want to thank the caller for their call.
Our phone lines are open again.
Uh, 802-321-4225.
Um, but you know, on that subject, Jason, um, um, you know, I've noticed over the years
that those publications that have advertising, those websites that have advertising that survive
on advertising, they're all surviving on a lie.
Okay.
And, uh, basically they have to convince people that more people are looking at their, their
words than really are looking that you need to pay us in order to be a part of that somehow.
Whereas, you know, the, the, the publications and the websites that might be a bit old fashioned
might not be as, as glossy and glittery.
Uh, they're at least sincere and they're at least more prone to tell the truth and, um,
to basically, um, um, share their particular perspective for no other reason than they
want to, they might not get to be millionaires by doing that, nor should they, uh, it's basically
communication.
And that's, that's, I think what we thrive on.
And, and, you know, uh, some version of the patronage system exists more than people
know.
There's a guy and I really don't want to, I, I'm going to, I'm going to not make, I'm
not, I'm not going to make him findable, but he is famous for doing a major project that
took many years and he has updated it.
And, um, it's not, it's not in print and it's not in computers.
I'll just hint that.
And he's worked on it for many years and he's worked on similar things for many years and
he works really, really hard.
And he was really getting, I could sense talking to him.
He was a little lonely.
So I brought him onto my, um, one of my areas that I chat with people.
So we'd have other people to chat with, not people in his field, but people who also work
on projects and at one point I'm like, dude, how, how are you, how are you getting by?
How are you, how are you able to get mayonnaise on your sandwich?
What's, what's going on?
And he told me, I know, uh, there's a guy who owns a comic book store who just sends me
the money for my rent.
The project isn't in comic books.
The project isn't involved at all in printed matter or anything, but this guy is like, the
world needs you.
So I'm just going to give you a few hundred bucks, uh, whatever, and you'll live in a
dumpy apartment and you can do your work and I will make sure that happens.
And it just, you know, um, Don Joyce of negative land.
Um, I was involved in clearing out his apartment after he died.
And I found out that like the landlord was going to demolish the building after we moved
all the stuff out.
And I found out he wanted to have demolished it 10 plus years ago, but he understood this
is Don Joyce of negative land and over the edge.
And so he never raised Don's rent and he just let him live there until he died and then demolished
the building and did the renovations and the next step and all that upgrading quote unquote.
So like that was like those, those conditions exist everywhere.
And I really work hard to like, let kids know, don't assume you're a failure because
you haven't yet found yourself in a position that many people find.
Like there's people who just send me money to like buy equipment that I need.
Like, it's not a case of like, Oh, Jason Scott does this, this, and this, and he gets
the, it's like, sometimes people are like, you know what?
We need to scan more of this.
I'm going to send you two grand, go buy a scanner for this.
Type of material.
People are out there all the time, helping other people and they don't want publicity
and they don't want mentioning and they don't want to be highlighted.
And you're not at fault for wanting to do something.
And it's going to take a little bit to build, build that up.
And, you know, I mean, we've all been there.
So for me, you know, like I said, I love, I love the whole, I love, I love that 2600 comes
on paper.
I love it.
For those who don't know, by the way, Don Joyce was a member of Negative Land and members
of Negative Land were, or maybe still are involved in a radio show called Over the Edge, which
airs on our sister station, KPFA in Berkeley.
Jason, do you know if it's still on the air?
It is still on the air.
Wobbly took it over.
Okay.
But it is, it's, it's much less frequent now, but he still does it.
So it's more like a testimony more than a thing.
So instead of every week, it is every, you know, few weeks, but he still does it, still
does the theme, still does these amazing shows.
And of course the archive has, oh, like 1000 something shows of it.
I'd be surprised if you didn't have much more than that, because they've been on forever
and, uh, and their shows are three hours long, I think on Thursday nights.
Right.
So what happened with the archive is that we had somebody who had taken all the old air
check tapes that Don had done.
So we had like 1050 or something.
And then another family came along and said, we have a bunch from the eighties and they digitized
those.
And so those are up.
So it's archive.org details OTE.
And that is tens of, you know, many thousands of hours of these shows.
And they're amazing shows.
They really are a really unique form of radio.
And the archive has all of them up that we have acquired.
And then every once in a while, someone will, you know, produce a new one or do a new piece
or whatever, and it'll show up.
Um, yeah, I was incredibly privileged once to, uh, be in their studio while they were
doing a show, uh, back in the 1990s and just, you know, seeing it all come together.
Don was incredible with just the, the sound effects that he would just throw into the
mix and they would always work.
Yeah.
He'd have, uh, you know, a bunch of carts and he just, um, uh, it's like a collage of
sound that lasted several hours and the listeners were involved.
They would open up the phone lines and somehow the listeners, uh, were able to contribute
just the right thing at the right moment.
And it sounded like it was all planned and prepared, but it was just happening spontaneously.
And I was, it was true magic.
It was really magic to hear that.
For, for, for a short time before I burned out on it, I was like writing descriptions for
some of these shows.
And, um, by the way, it looks like, oh, it looks like it's going every Friday on KPFA at
midnight.
So it's Thursday night or Friday morning or Friday night.
Cause it was, it was Thursday night.
Yeah.
I don't, it good question.
I think it's 12 AM on, it says 12 AM Friday.
So it's probably yet Thursday.
Okay.
That's still traditional slots.
So found sound and, um, some of them may be reruns and some other things, but they're
definitely still running and, um, and, and we're keeping a lot of them.
Um, Don would do these, like, again, it's one of those things that's very hard to, like
for somebody who's never, who, for anybody who's listening to this on the, on the, on
the old YouTube and they've never done it, um, going into the over the edge collection and
choosing a show is like, you listen to it and it is absolutely out of this world, especially
from the early 1990s before they were no longer able to add phone callers.
So they were able to add phone callers.
So they would wire in phone callers and throw them through crazy delays and things.
And it would be like, there'd be a theme.
It'd be like UFOs landing or visiting the beach.
And he would have all these surf records and samples of people talking about suntan and
sun cancer.
And then also people who would just be let in and they would contribute to it.
They would, they would write in and they would do a whole, you know, piece about it.
And my favorite thing listening to them was that sometimes it became really hard, especially
towards, um, his sixties.
It became harder to get ahold of Don.
So people would call him in his show.
Cause that was the way to reach him and live.
He's kind of conducting business.
So in the background, you're hearing like a voice repeating, going surfing bird, surfing
bird, surfing bird, surfing bird.
And like the sound of these waves and you're hearing Don talk to somebody and the guy's
like, yeah, I'm supposed to bring the tapes over Monday.
And he's like, yeah, you can do that.
Try to do it between two and five, five, five, five, five.
And then the guy would be gone and it would be the next thing.
And it was like, Don's just doing his email through the phone.
People are calling it and like letting him know they're going to drop the stuff off or
he's going to do whatever crazy.
Yep.
It was like, it was truly a treasure.
And like I said, it was really nice to find out in the aggregate that his landlord understood
the resource, the gift he had.
And that is a, that is a good landlord.
Hold on to one if you have a good landlord, but not many people do.
We have a phone, another, another patient phone caller.
Good evening.
You're on off hook.
Over time.
Go ahead.
Hi, I have a question for you guys.
Make it quick, Rebel.
Make it quick.
It's a very busy night.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Scott, how does the archive...
His name is, his last name is Scott.
That's awfully rude to refer to him by his last name.
I think you...
Dude, I have been, I have been called, I have been called Jason and Scott.
Yeah, but I think he should say Mr. Scott to you.
Go ahead, Rebel.
Okay, Mr. Scott, I know I have a question for both you guys.
How do you take websites, like old websites?
Is every website on the internet on the archive, and how does that work?
I mean, what, I mean, how do you, like when, like 2600, when it updates, do you, 2600, give
you guys the thing, or do you...
We don't do anything.
He does all the...
Well, Internet Archive does all the work.
It comes by and grabs our site, right, Jason?
Yeah.
So, the way that the Internet Archive Wayback Machine tends to work is one of two ways.
So, let's set it aside first for just how does the Internet Archive itself do it, which
is we have crawlers, we have dozens and dozens of machines that every day, 24-7, are going
out to websites.
And we collect the URLs for those websites from news stories and social media postings and
contributions from people who can put it into a forum saying, hey, have you guys grabbed
this, and if we haven't, we start grabbing it, and also, like, running through things like
domain lists and so on, and looking for websites.
And then we do a crawl, and depending on our funds and power over the last 25 years, we will
either do a very deep crawl, we'll grab every page going down to the bottom, or maybe we'll
only grab the first three layers of a website.
And then we put that into a list, and anywhere between two to six months later,
we'd grab it again.
Now, if we decide that certain websites are very dynamic or very historical, like government
websites or the New York Times or the front pages of other news organizations, we might
grab it 20, 30, 40 times a day, and it ranges.
And the difficulty of knowing the web's current character and grabbing what is new and changed
is why there are a dozen people spending all of their waking hours trying to solve those
engineering problems.
This year, the archive will have one trillion captures that we know that's happening this
year.
So, we are faced with an enormous amount of effort.
So, 2600, you know, we might, if we go and look at the website on the Wayback Machine,
and I say to it, well, tell me about, you know, 2600, it'll have a certain number.
And it says, well, we've grabbed 10,378 times between October 18th, 1996 and March 2nd, 2025.
And so, I can see we're grabbing from them every day.
Like, I can just see they're grabbing.
But I also see from just the way our system is designed, we're not finding much different.
So, we're grabbing it, but it's actually the thing.
We might not have exact duplicate data, day-to-day.
Instead, we've said, nope, nothing's changed, nothing's changed.
Oh, something changed.
So, I see here, you guys changed stuff on February 1st, 4th, 10th, 12th, and so on.
Oh, we don't talk about that.
We don't talk about that.
That was an accident.
Jason, I can't tell you the number of times you've saved our ass when we deleted something
we didn't mean to delete, and we found it on the Internet Archive and grabbed it and
put it back.
Like, this year.
Yeah.
Yeah, but this is a uniquely difficult technical problem.
How do you track the Internet's changes?
How do you decide what's important, what isn't?
How do you deal with, and then I could sit here with like a 3,700 item list and say, how
do you deal with blank?
How do you talk about blah?
You know what I mean?
Like, it is an enormous engineering problem.
It is probably one of the most difficult engineering problems out there, and we do not get it
perfect.
Now, there are other sites, archive.is, archive.today, archive.ch or something.
Many of them are run by individuals.
Many of them are pseudonyms.
Many of them are in weird countries.
They are trying to be similar to us.
They are tiny, and sometimes they will get things we don't, but we will always absolutely
smear them in terms of size.
I think there's at least something like 60 petabytes of data in the Wayback Machine.
I'm looking at archivebot.com right now, which you mentioned on the show, to see what's crawling.
And boy, there's a lot of .gov sites that are being, including one I see, archives.gov.
What's archives.gov?
Archives.gov is the National Archives, which just had its entire top half let go.
That is, by the way, you want your civics lesson there, Emanuel.
Archives.gov doesn't just keep track of the archives.
They keep track of the official presidential papers.
They are also the ones who acknowledge whether or not we have added an amendment to the Constitution.
You have to have the National Archivist agree that the Constitution has been changed, which is what Biden tried to do.
And the archivist literally said, no, I don't agree.
But that was like a case where he tried to do it.
And the archivist came back with like, no, it's got these other problems and these other things.
That's the official archives of the United States.
And yeah, Trump has modified a lot of the people at the top level now.
He also believes he has access to papers that should be in the storage that he chooses not to.
But no, that's what archives.gov is.
So we have been archived.
That's how we've been able to keep track of like what, you know, you know, obviously there's been some very, like I said, what I keep calling cartoon line where like the park service changed the language on the Stonewall Monument.
And we are, we represent a way for you to easily see.
We actually even have a changes feature to say, what's changed between these two dates?
And it will actually print like red and green stuff to say, oh yeah, look, they took this word out.
So we do provide that.
But is it perfect?
No.
And most people who know what they're doing know that.
Like they look at it and they say, oh, they've only grabbed it six times last year.
So we don't know what day this changed.
We just know between October and July, something happened.
So it's, it's an imperfect, but often solitary tool.
So that's how we do it, man.
And of course, people can contribute from the outside certain amounts.
We don't take full outside contributions, but we have organizations that we partner with and have them provide us stuff.
It's a bear.
It is, it is not just a problem.
It is the problem.
I see in this archivebot.com site, the very last one is mill.ru.
Mill.ru, Russian military, I guess.
How's that going?
I don't know.
It's the very last one.
So maybe, maybe people are just grabbing that on a daily basis.
But it leads me to another question.
By the way, thank you to that caller.
We're going to open the phone lines again.
8-0-2-3-2-1-4-2-2-2-5 is our phone number.
Jason, do you get dot mill sites as well?
Yes.
Absolutely.
Tons of mill sites from all sorts of countries and places, the equivalent of their military sites.
But all the mill, dot mill sites that we can have, that's where we had that PowerPoint complex that I talked about.
Right, right.
I think if, actually, if you even type it into the search, yeah, if you do a search for military PowerPoint complex, it will go immediately to the Internet Archive's collection of, you know, the military PowerPoint complex, military industrial PowerPoint complex, 57,000 ones that we found.
If you go there, it looks like it says 1,217, but I think that's because if you go to some of them, it's like your collections of, yeah, it is.
You go in and it's like, here's what the Marines have for PowerPoints.
Here's, you know, 500 PowerPoints from the Marines.
Here's many from Fort Bragg.
And they are so bad.
They are so terrible.
They're clearly made to fulfill, to, you know, cross a checkmark, a box off of, like, did you give a talk about it?
Yes.
Yes, I did.
I didn't like giving it.
Nobody likes looking at it.
Yeah.
Wasn't there one section of the Internet that kind of closed itself off to the public?
I thought it was part of the dot mill domain or TLD.
Is everything accessible to us anymore?
Well, I mean, a website, a website, a website is often different than the government computers.
I mean, I feel like with your audience, they know this, but, like, the public-facing Internet is like the gift shop as opposed to the bunker where they store the books.
And people should understand that, like, with a few exceptions, generally these websites are like the gift shops.
Here's information on our place.
Here's whatever.
One thing we've been mirroring for quite some time is something called the CIA Reading Room, which is, like, millions of documents the CIA has put up.
And clearly they decided to just dazzle them with everything because they've just put up so many documents.
And I've got this kid who is just absolutely, you know, he is grabbing hundreds of thousands of these things.
And, you know, that's a, you know, honest to God, it's a real fun, great thing that's happening.
And there's some really cool, deep stuff in there.
There's people who do FOIA requests.
They put them up on the archive.
If we're the back end of Court Listener, which is the way to, like, access court documents, they are all with us.
I'm trying to think of if there's anything else that's, like, people might not even know we're doing.
We are the blind program.
Like, copyright doesn't apply to books for the blind, and we keep copies of those books for the blind.
So, like, we do that.
I didn't know that.
Copyright doesn't apply.
Yeah, it's an interesting quirk of copyright that you can, like, the blind are allowed to freely duplicate blind accessible books between each other.
There's a system in place, I believe it's called DAISY, that you have to register.
So, it's a DRM encumbered situation.
But, yeah, it's like, where's your, you must have, you must have 2600 for the blind.
We don't, but we certainly support if somebody does that, absolutely.
I would not be surprised.
I would not be surprised to find out in some way it's made.
You never know.
But it's called DAISY, the DAISY format.
And it's just a way to, it allows print disabled folks who are registered as print disabled to be able to read books, audio renditions and other renditions.
Or it can be put on a braille device.
And if your eyes are really, you can, you can be registered.
We get into the whole thing, which I, I'm very happy this discussion happens now, which is disabled does not use, not always mean gone.
A person is not always visibly disabled.
It's not, my arm is missing.
I can't lift my arm.
Or it's not, I'm blind, duh.
I just can't see anything more than two centimeters from my face.
And I need screen enlargers to understand that.
So, if you're registered as having, as a print disabled reader, you can get access to many, many, many, many books out there.
And, you know, the phone freaks have always had a little bit, you know, a little dance with the blind.
So, I'm sure they all know this.
We have another phone call.
We're on with Jason Scott of Internet Archive.
And good evening.
You're on All For The Overtime.
Go ahead.
Hi.
Sketch Cow, Cyber Geek.
Wait, what was your handle?
Cyber Geek.
Cyber Geek.
I can't say I do, but I'm sure.
No, Sketch Cow.
I'm talking to Sketch Cow.
Oh, you're bringing that up now, are you?
Okay.
I've forgotten more than most to remember.
But if you're calling me Sketch Cow, you're an IRC dude, right?
We're talking Jay Dyson, Cancer Omega.
Oh!
Jay Dyson, rest in peace.
Yeah.
Jay Dyson ran a really great – Jay Dyson was a hacker who ran a mailing list.
And what was the mailing list called?
It was hosted on disc.org.
Right.
And what he did was this guy created a mailing list that was like an open space for journalists and hackers to talk.
And the idea was foster communication between these two groups because then a journalist can say, you know, I'm hearing this.
And some hackers could step in and go, you're calling that that, but it's not that.
And the idea was to, like, prevent a lot of embarrassing print stories.
And Jay Dyson ran it.
And then what did you get from me?
Dude, I'm not going to – okay.
I can cheat and say I think you said in the chat that you got some floppies.
Did you give me the festival floppies?
No.
Oh.
Did you give me any floppies?
Nuclear.
Nuclear secrets?
The –
I discovered that Al-Qaeda was downloading parody information.
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
That's what made you famous because you didn't tell anyone that you were running Rotten.com with the bonsai kittens until you printed that article, which got picked up by the New York Times, the London Times, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm hearing so many trigger words here.
Al-Qaeda, Rotten.com, bonsai kittens.
For the record, I worked for Rotten.com.
I did not create – I would never take the credit for Rotten.com away from Soylent.
What a wonderful – God, what a wonderful – you know, I sat with Soylent recently and Soylent was like, nobody remembers Rotten.com.
And I went on to TikTok and I did a search for Rotten.com and I'm showing them shots of all these kids talking about their trauma for Rotten.com.
And he was like, okay, fine, fine, fine.
People remember.
I don't want to –
I can attest that there is a Rotten.com mouse pad holding up the layout and design trackball for 2600.
So it's ever-present.
Okay.
I just wanted to remind Jason that whenever you talk about discovering the nuclear thing, you can tell everybody that my name is Bobcat and everyone in this room knows me.
Okay.
You got it, buddy.
All right.
Thank you.
Thanks for the call.
Take care.
That's right.
He calls us sometimes.
That was kind of weird.
It was like an episode of Lost where you realize, wow, this person is actually also that person.
That's the magic of the hacker world, isn't it?
All right.
Let's take one more phone call because, boy, we've been at this a long time.
But it's – you know, Jason, we could talk to you all night long.
I don't know what motivates you to talk to us, but, boy, you have some interesting stories that people just love to hear.
And we're looking forward to having you at Hope, which is happening in August this year, August 15th to 17th.
Yeah, I'm so pleased to see – I'm so pleased you're taking the leap.
I hope it works out for you for, like, a yearly event.
And that's just so much more intense.
It makes it so much easier to suggest to people that they speak there because then I'm not like, wait a minute, is it a Hope year?
Because you could speak at Hope, and then by, you know, two years in, you're like, wait a minute, I forgot all my things from two years ago.
There was a thing that I've always brought up with you, which is that since your college days, you have always been about the medium of radio and the medium of print.
And there's been, like, a lot of people who, like, you know, in the eras beyond that, they've walked away from that, right?
Like, they're not dealing with print or they're not talking about radio.
But you've always found – the reason I love coming on this show is because this has been an honest – like, there's no –
You're not running some crazy ersatz network of 47 things that try to sell me supplements 20 times an hour so that you can push for a second home in Malibu or –
You know what I mean?
Like, you're doing this because you, like, want to wake up.
You know, you and Kyle sit up and say, let's do the show.
Let's tell the story.
Let's do the thing.
Let's talk about what's new.
Let's get it out there.
Somebody's out there driving.
Somebody's out there at their house.
Somebody's listening.
Somebody just, like, turned on the radio.
Like, what am I listening to?
What's with this guy?
And that's – and the same thing with the 2600s.
What's this thing sitting on a bench in a college?
What's this thing in this kid's shelf?
What's my big brother keep subscribing to?
This is kind of interesting.
It's seeing a world like that.
So, of course, of course, I will always support that.
Yeah, you know, it is magic.
When I went to college at Stony Brook, that's where I got involved in radio.
They had a great radio station there.
They still do.
I'm still involved with that radio station.
Non-commercial, alternative thoughts, all kinds of different cultural inspirations.
And I was involved in no less than four different publications on that same campus.
And then that led to another one that allowed me to do typesetting for 2600.
So it all kind of was kind of set right in front of me.
So I've held on to those values because, you know what, they haven't been replaced with anything better.
There are alternatives, sure, but there are so many bad parts to those alternatives.
And we still have the freedom to use this old technology and do something good with it and hope that there are people out there who appreciate that.
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's, like, very much a case of I try to respect when somebody has what they're doing without looking over their fence at what they think are greener pastures.
And that they're willing to destroy something amazing they do in pursuit of some made-up, you know what I mean?
And I've seen it too many times, where it's like, okay, I've brought in a new crew.
They're going to help me.
There's a really great YouTube video on plagiarism, that HMBobberguy, and you could see what it was, was that folks worked hard, built up an audience, people trust them, and then they get a little tired.
Or they're like, maybe I need to, like, earn money for this.
They hire outside people, and you watch the value of their reputation get mined like it's a pile of peat moss, and we end up with just bad memories.
Yeah, it's even well-intentioned, non-hired people coming in because they think they know better and need to do it in what they think is the best way for the future.
And this is something related to the conversation around institutional memory and charting a course.
Like, what is needed?
Because we talk about this, too, about how kind of diluted the word hacking has become.
There's people doing, like, drive-thru hacks, and, you know, everything is a hack on social media or anywhere.
So, the way it's transformed or mainstreamed, and I think some of our past speakers have talked about, like, the punk club no longer being punk, we are still pretty diehard at doing what we do.
And at the same time, we're needing to share that institutional memory to people that will not, like you say, kind of, even in, like, non-hired, like, well-meaning ways, try to chart a course that actually isn't aligned with what has been.
Even if that isn't what is needed, like, if hacking is, like, no longer a mystery, no longer something hackers want to know about or that we wanted to share about, then, okay, then maybe that it is just, you know, like you said, 40 diet pills or whatever, you know, and that's the destiny.
But it isn't necessarily, like, the urgency is to get people interested in what the spirit of what was.
I had the great honor of sharing with you and the founder of the magazine, Dave, and hearing about the progression on campus, your jobs, your relationship with him, and that kinship, the spirit you had, it was great.
I want to get more of this captured.
We'll definitely have to have more conversations on tape.
But it was so interesting to hear also about the antics, the pranks you got up to, because you were using the means of production to reserve the right to confuse on campus, shall we say.
And that was so beautiful to see it being the practice run for an actual, actually quite serious publication, which we know today.
Well, I don't know how serious, yeah, they're serious moments, but certainly there's a lot of levity as well.
But yeah, I mean, you know, as long as there are people around to appreciate these things and to contribute as well and be a part of it, it's going to survive.
And that's what's kept us going in so many different forums.
You know, the conference won't exist if people don't come to the conference.
The magazine won't exist if people don't read the magazine.
The radio show won't exist if people don't support the station.
So as long as there's people out there that do all of that, then we can keep doing what we love to do.
And, you know, there's really nothing more that we need than that.
And that's, you know, that's the magic of it.
And I just wanted to give out the website for the Hope Conference, because I didn't do that before.
Hope.net for people that are interested.
And if you want to give a talk, great.
I believe our initial deadline, we haven't announced this yet, but our initial deadline is the 17th of March for speakers.
Now, it's not going to close after that, but that's the initial deadline, which means if you've submitted something and we confirm it, it's going to be on the schedule.
Even if we get, you know, 200 more talks, we're not going to bump your talk for another one because you got it in early.
So that's the advantage for that.
All the information is on Hope.net.
But mostly we need people to spread the word.
And let's make this, as Jason said, an annual thing.
The idea of making it an annual thing is that it becomes kind of a habit.
Like every year there's a hope.
Every year we can have these traditions build.
It was great having it every two years.
In the hotel, it was much more difficult because, you know, Manhattan and all kinds of really rapid fire decisions that had to be made in the hotel.
Here on a campus, it's a lot more spread out.
It's a lot more laid back.
The people there actually have technology that works and they support what we're doing and we can do a much better job at it.
And we've made it super easy for people to get to.
So that is the magic.
But for that magic to exist, we have to be strong.
We have to have a bunch of people that volunteer, that give presentations, that do workshops, that run villages, and, of course, attend because that's what it's all about.
And then we can keep doing all kinds of things in this period where I think we've never needed it more than now.
So I really, really hope this is the year that everybody comes together and helps build a really positive community.
Yeah, we really want to get as much input and we welcome ideas, feedback.
What kinds of things are people talking about?
We are living in a time that is incredibly fragmented and it would be really nice to hear a lot more conversation.
We want to know what are people interested in?
What do you want to hear about?
What do you want to discuss more of instead of just what everyone else is deciding hacking is?
Anyway, there's a phone call waiting if you want to.
Okay, let's take this one last phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off-the-hook overtime.
Go ahead.
They waited all that time to hang up?
Yeah!
They just hung up now.
Heck yeah!
That's dedication to the bit.
Wow.
Well, you know, people do that.
People do that.
I tried.
I've been doing call-in shows for a long time and people have held on for a half hour just to either say a single word or to hang up.
But you know what?
That misfortune is someone else's benefit because you can call in right now.
You have a minute to do it.
802.
Never mind.
I won't give out the rest of the phone number.
Let's take this phone call.
And you are on off-the-hook overtime.
Go ahead.
Speak up.
Is anyone there?
Kyle, do we have a caller?
Can you hear us, caller?
It's the same caller.
The same caller.
Well, caller, you have a problem with your microphone on your telephone.
So don't call us again until you fix it.
Or, or, I assure you, we're just like you.
We put our pants on one leg at a time like everybody else.
You're not in the, you're not in the, you're not in the, you're not in the, you're not in
Mount Olympus with the gods.
Let's give them one more chance.
You're at the diner with the hackers.
Go ahead.
Let's give them one more chance.
It's the same caller.
Good evening.
You're on off-the-hook overtime.
Go ahead.
Hi.
Oh, my God.
You got it working now.
Yes, it got working now.
I did not hang up on you.
I pressed the button and it went off for a moment and then came right back on and I heard
you talking, but then you hung up on me after you thought I'd hung up on you.
We did not hang up on you.
We have witnesses.
But never mind.
Let's get past this.
What's on your mind?
Okay.
Are you, I hope, familiar with Pacifica Fightback?
There's always a fight back going on at Pacifica.
I'm not sure what this one is.
Pacifica Fightback is an organization that has been going on for many years.
And anyway, Michael Novick, a distinguished anti-racist, got the following notice from their
hosting provider, we are, hello, we are contacting you on behalf of the Namecheap legal and abuse
team regarding your Namecheap account.
It has come to our attention that there is a high number of similar emails queued on the
survey by the Unhoruk hosting account.
Please be informed that we have disabled the PHP function in order to prevent further misuse.
It seems that the emails were sent automatically from the account with each automated request
in order to avoid the issue from being repeated in the future.
It is suggested protecting your website from automated requests using anti-spam software,
e.g.
Capture.
Please start by protecting the following form.
I think Rob has something to input here.
Let's, Rob, what do you have on this?
Yes, Eleanor, you had sent us this, you had forwarded us this in an email, which I was
actually drafting a reply to you.
But basically what's going on with that is something that Michael had on his website,
which was doing something that was putting stress on the system.
And there is nothing anybody outside the situation can do.
This is something that Michael has to work out with his hosting provider and whoever,
if anybody, is doing his website work.
It is a completely internal thing, and none of us out here are able to help with that.
Wow.
Well, he doesn't really understand everything.
Yeah.
So what Michael needs is the services of somebody who does know this stuff,
but that's not a service that we can provide, and certainly not over the span of a phone call
or an email.
This is, like, something that he needs to get looked at.
Okay.
Well, thanks for getting back to me with that information.
Okay.
Best of luck to that.
Even if it wasn't good.
Well, sometimes that's how it works out.
But thanks for your call and for looking out for people.
That's important.
And I think that's going to do it for phone calls tonight.
Jason, any other – we don't want to take your whole evening up here,
but anything else that you want to share with us or thoughts, opinions?
Well, I'll tell you.
You tell you, no.
You know, I like to think as an older gentleman who's been involved with telephone calls all his life,
you know, I thought I had that strength, that armor built into me.
But, man, being told that your phone call was not good – recovery's a road one step at a time, sir.
And I'll be beginning that journey.
May we have many more not good phone calls in our life to look forward to.
Thanks to everybody on the stream.
It was very fun to watch all of your comments go by, what's going on there.
And, of course, like I said, all of you, all of you, Kyle Emanuel and everybody else,
you're all a gift to spend time with.
People won't know that, like, I got the flu and then I had, like, a persistent cough.
And it was like, Jason can't do it this week.
Oh, but now we're not doing anything this week.
So I'm glad we stayed persistent and we were able to make this happen.
And I hope the time between now and the next time is much, much, much shorter.
Yes, we've been trying to do this interview for a month now, and I'm glad we finally did it.
But we always have something to talk about.
And, Jason, we look forward to seeing you at Hope, obviously, and that you'll be super involved in that.
You always make every room more fun to be in if you're in it.
Yep, I am the master of the uncomfortable silence and the long pause.
I'll be ready for it this year as well.
You know, I just want you to describe one thing, because this isn't apparent on the video.
But you were giving a talk last year at Hope.
And at one point, you just stop and make a comment about maybe being assassinated at this moment.
Because something very weird happened at that moment.
Can you describe that for everybody?
Oh, did you know or did you just want me to share?
Oh, I know. I was there. I was there.
But I don't think people who get the video would know what it was.
So if people happen to find this video, and it's about, you know, how to deal with an ever-shrinking legacy,
and it's a memorial for great people like Cheshire Catalyst and Ed Piskar,
but also, literally, and, you know, I usually am pretty smooth with things happening in front of me
and stuff happening around me and so on.
But, like, there was a group from another country who had clearly bought group tickets to come to the Internet Security Conference.
Like, they were dressed as if they were going to an Internet Security Conference.
So while I'm talking out on the podium, I just suddenly see, like, what was it, like, 15 dudes dressed formally, slowly filing in.
And I got a real elevator in the Avengers movie feel.
Just, like, more and more and more of them.
And then finally I'm like, is this it?
Is this how I go?
Is it just...
Because, I mean, they were clearly not overly interested in me.
Like, they were sitting down, clearly, because it was like, now we go to the show, and now we sit down in the lot.
But it wasn't about my talk or my subject.
And, yeah, you see me literally brain freeze because the limbic part of my system is like, dude, just so you know,
your audience has just changed.
There are 15 young gentlemen dressed really formally sitting down in groups staring you down.
Well, Jason, it was more than 50.
We had 70 people from that particular group.
Wow.
And they were moving around together a lot of the time.
Yeah.
They all had the same haircut, which was basically no hair.
And they all dressed very similar.
So when they started filing in, and there was more than 15 that were filing in.
It was probably at least 30 or 35.
It did look scary because they were all filing in in exactly the same way.
And it was...
Yeah.
And they were all quiet because they didn't know what I was talking about.
They were very polite.
They were very polite.
There were no problems at all with them.
But it was just...
It was something to behold.
I forget...
Kyle, do you remember what country it was they were from?
Was it UAE or something?
I feel like it was UAE.
Qatar is...
It was UAE or Qatar, yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
It was a bunch of people which, bless them, I'm sure they paid for some of the conference
and helped it.
But, man, that is not something you...
Like, I was...
That particular talk was about people who were gone.
So I was trying to be very respectful of them.
And I was making sure I wasn't misphrasing who they were.
So my mind was, like, way up in the clouds.
And then I looked down, and it is literally just rows of people filling in, like, 25 minutes
in.
And I'm like, no.
No.
No.
That is like tapping at the glass at the third floor.
That is like I can hear a door creak.
I can...
Powers are going off across the street.
What's going on here, buddy?
And luckily, it was cool.
But also, like, they just got up and left.
Like, they didn't chat with me.
They weren't like, wow, we've really had our minds changed.
It was just...
Off they went.
Yeah, that was a good moment.
And I'm sorry that it doesn't come across on the...
You know, I haven't seen the video myself.
I don't know if the camera operator was on top of it.
And actually...
No, no, no.
No wide shot.
No, it's no wide shot.
So I...
Just the...
Just the guy...
In case people watched that talk and wondered what Jason was referring to, that's what he
was referring to.
Yeah, that's where it is.
All right.
Well, Jason, I hope we have moments like...
Well, maybe not exactly moments like that, but magical moments that we remember and fun
times at Hope this summer.
And I think August is going to be a fun time to do it.
I think that what I really love about Hope is that Hope assumes people first, technology
second.
And so it really comes across when you're there watching the event, you know, I think
of like the electronics anarchists who are like running their own little shop in the
corner of like all these people working together.
And then you go to another spot.
You know, actually, I did talk about you on my podcast because I was impressed with the
classrooms.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Like for this hacker con, it's like, look at us over here.
We're kind of freaky.
I'm going to talk about this and that.
I've actually got my talk ID.
I have to submit it.
It'll be like fun, goofy humanist talks.
But then you go up there and it's somebody talking like with actual lab equipment and
people like doing labs and like discussing technical issues.
So it's like, look, if you want to go into a cinder block room and for 60 minutes or 120
minutes, become knowledgeable in a structured manner that doesn't have a drink on the podium
and isn't about whatever, there's room for you there.
And that's amazing to me.
I love that for some people, they want to go to a class and there was space for them
too.
So there's like room for everybody.
It's not, if somebody comes there and doesn't feel welcome, they got to ask, they got to
ask a hard question about how they deal with people because they really, the arms are really
open at hope.
I can't stress that enough.
So really, I hope to see you there.
I'm the guy in the suit.
Yeah.
Great to hear that.
One of a few people in suits, but we try to make it as inclusive as possible, as welcoming
as possible.
And, uh, you know, you can stay on campus in a dormitory.
I think, uh, the, the, the price was $78 a night to stay in a dormitory, which is really
pretty good.
Um, and, uh, then there's a hotel down the street as well.
Uh, so there's all kinds of options, but it's just, it's a fun time.
It's a, it's a fun weekend.
It's kind of like camping out in the middle of Queens.
Uh, but, um, all sorts of fun activities and how, how good it gets.
That depends on you.
We can, we can keep growing as much as people want to grow.
Because it's a huge place.
Yeah.
And right now we have really good buildings set up where we can, um, uh, do all kinds
of fun things.
So.
Oh yeah.
Anybody who didn't go last time, but they went the date the time before you've basically
built a hacker town square.
Yes.
And I love that.
Yeah.
Hey, what's up?
Yep.
Just wander from one building to another and chat with people along the way.
What, what, what's the, what's the question?
Oh, sorry.
We do have a listener question, which is, is Jason going to be hosting hackers got talent?
I don't see any situation where I'm not hosting hackers got talent.
It's only if I'm sick, dead, or, uh, there's no hope.
Or there's no talent.
Yeah.
Or there's no talent.
Yeah.
I don't think that's going to happen, but we'll see.
Again, more info, hope, hope.net.
That's where all the info is.
And you can write to us.
O-T-H at 2600.com.
If you have further questions for Jason, he is reachable.
Uh, your email address again, Jason is what?
Uh, J Scott, J S C O T T at archive.org.
Let's use that one tonight.
And anybody out in, um, uh, signal land, any, any final words for, uh, Jason or for anybody
else?
Just, uh, thanks for sticking with us, uh, this on a longer than usual episode of overtime.
Yeah.
Oh, the time just flew by.
It really did.
This is a record for us, I think.
Is it?
Oh my God.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, it is.
Okay.
Thank you, everybody.
Only on the records.
Thank you, everybody, for listening and for being a part of things.
And, um, we will see you again soon.
Bye.