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The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call, we couldn't be at much worse.
But if they could, they would.
One really bump, but the best is back the worst.
I hope the thunder's good.
One really bump!
Two would do it.
Two would do it.
Go home.
One would do it.
Four would do it.
Two would do it.
Two would do it.
We'll be right back.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Hey, Kyle.
And out there in Signal Land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
You do?
Good evening.
And, Alex, I believe you should be the one to announce this news to people.
Actually, we have some good news.
People could just stop what they're doing because this doesn't happen very often.
We have good news that we'd like to start the show with.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, it is one of those rare occasions where we're saying something optimistic, reporting on something nice, right?
It's great to do that every once in a while.
I feel like every decade we get this opportunity.
Well, it's my absolute pleasure to tell everyone tonight that's been following the story so closely for so many years now.
And this goes back six years.
It goes back to 2019.
If everyone remembers the story of Virgil Griffith, who was prosecuted by the U.S. government, a member of the hacker community, a member of the blockchain, cryptocurrency community.
I think one of the real higher-ups in the Ethereum Foundation and somebody who's been part of the hacker community for how long, Emanuel?
For decades, probably going on 30 years, right?
At least.
At least.
All right.
Whoever's got the echo on, please turn it off.
It's not our first day.
At least 20 years, 25 years, or probably beyond that.
That's how long I've known him.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's pretty extraordinary.
So Virgil was, very, very sadly, incarcerated for, I guess, the last four years or so and change here.
And it was for a conspiracy charge to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Essentially, what Virgil did was he went to North Korea and he gave a talk.
He gave a talk that involved writing on a whiteboard and talking about technology.
He talked about blockchain technology.
He talked about things that were eminently Google-able, information that was available to the public.
And he gave that information very freely at a talk.
And he did all the right things that you're supposed to do when you go to a place like North Korea, a country that is sanctioned.
And he self-reported to the U.S. Embassy that he went to North Korea when he came back to Singapore because he, again, was, this is somebody who is quite honestly, I digress for a moment here.
And you can chime in about this too, Emmanuel.
But Virgil, in getting to know him over the last several years, it's been extraordinary to become one of his close friends and allies because he's quite possibly one of the most brilliant and most kind and most generous people I've ever met in my life.
I mean, this is a guy that has a Ph.D. from Caltech, of all places.
Val Kilmer passed away last year.
If anybody's ever seen the movie Real Genius, one of Val Kilmer's great roles, I think, that is set really in a place that is supposed to resemble Caltech, you can imagine the type of mind that Virgil has.
So I'll pass it over to you for a second, Emmanuel, if you want to talk for a minute about Virgil and his background.
Well, if you want another fictitious character, Sheldon Cooper actually went to Caltech and was a theoretical physicist there in Big Bang Theory.
So, yeah, that gives you an idea of maybe the hostility that he felt in court because people, judges in particular, felt he was a wise guy or smarter than them or just somebody who knew better.
And in actuality, you know, Virgil, like me, sometimes can be rather naive as far as what people's motivations are.
And you might think people are helping you when they're not helping you at all.
And in this particular case, I think he trusted our system much more than he should have.
I went to North Korea, too.
I went to North Korea in 2008, I believe, and broadcasted right here on WBAI.
I have to say, you know, at fear of condemning myself here, I think I helped the North Korean regime more than he did when I went over there.
There was a day when, it was April 15th, in fact, it was Kim Il-sung's birthday, and everybody went to see him lying in state in this massive building.
And, you know, it was a big deal.
It's like, you know, Christmas and Fourth of July rolled up into one.
And everybody, you know, no matter what you think of the regime currently, everybody bows down to Kim Il-sung, the founder.
And so, you know, we had to literally do that as tourists, go in there and bow our heads.
But on the way in, the door was coming shut, and there was a soldier who was also coming to do the same thing.
And I opened the door and held it for him.
No, that is helping the hostile regime of North Korea in the eyes of idiots who would think that anything you do that is somewhat kind or helpful is a crime.
And, you know, the thing that he was charged with, what you read before, makes him seem so guilty, makes it sound guilty to, you know,
the average layperson who thinks North Korea is just filled with evil people, yeah, anything you do,
just answering a question or holding a door is seen as, you know, helping that regime.
It's absurd.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
He should not have served a day in prison, let alone however many years of his life were taken by this.
That's where the true crime is.
I think that's right.
And I think we're, in our digression, I think we possibly put the cart before the horse, so to speak, right,
because we haven't gotten through all the facts for the listeners.
I think that may not have the full story here.
And so when Virgil went over to North Korea and then he self-reported that he went there and gave a talk,
he did all the things that the State Department told him he should do if he goes to North Korea and comes back,
and then the FBI wanted to talk with him,
and he thought he was doing the right thing by talking with the FBI.
And I think we all remember that night when he went and talked with the FBI.
And then it wasn't a great thing.
Then they wound up arresting him and prosecuting him for the transfer of knowledge to North Korea,
or rather the conspiracy to transfer knowledge over to North Korea.
And this was a prosecution in the Southern District of New York.
This is a very, very difficult thing to fight.
And the day before trial, there was a decision made that he should actually plead to the charge.
And he pleaded to the charge to avoid going to trial.
It was a very, very difficult and, I think, fraught decision for Virgil to make.
And to see him actually plead to that charge into allocute in court the very next day was,
I could see it was painful for him to do that.
Sentencing obviously doesn't happen right away.
It happens months after.
That was in September, I believe, of 2021.
And sentencing was supposed to happen in December.
During this time, Virgil was also already incarcerated in the MDC over in Brooklyn,
a metropolitan detention center.
Not a nice place to spend any appreciable amount of time, of course.
Then sentencing was kicked back to February.
Then it was pushed back again to April of 2022, at which point Judge Castell of the Southern District of New York
sentenced Virgil to a pretty harsh sentence.
It was towards the lower end of the guideline sentence, but it's still a very, very harsh sentence for going over and speaking about technology.
He gave him five years and three months.
That's 63 months in prison for going over and talking about technology in a place where you're not supposed to talk about technology.
Now, I do want to mention something about the government's case here, too,
because people who hear this and say, well, it might be a very dangerous thing to transfer knowledge to North Korea,
no matter how slight, especially if it relates to knowledge about nascent technologies, innovation,
things like that that could be considered trade secrets, et cetera.
Now, one thing I do want to mention, this is not something that has been widely covered or reported by the media in any respect,
because it's a bit of a technicality, but I think it's an important technicality for everyone to understand.
And that is that as part of the government's case, when they were preparing for trial,
they made a stipulation to the court and the stipulation, which is an agreement with the defense.
The stipulation was to a certain fact that nothing that Virgil ever did or said while he was in North Korea
at this conference in Pyongyang gave the North Korean government any additional knowledge or capabilities
that it didn't already have.
That's pretty significant.
That's a significant stipulation.
And you would think, well, why would the government make that agreement?
Isn't that the whole case?
Well, the lawyers in the Southern District of New York for the U.S. Attorney's Office, I think,
and I have to say, are probably some of the best and brightest attorneys on the entire planet.
But they knew what they were doing when they made a stipulation,
and they used it as a weapon by which they could prevent Virgil's defense team from introducing evidence at trial
about North Korea's preexisting capabilities.
And so at that point, Virgil's ability to mount a defense becomes much more difficult
because the judge agreed with a motion to limit the types of evidence that Virgil could put in front of the jury
at that point about the preexisting capabilities.
But then you have to ask yourself, well, what the hell was this case actually about?
If the government agreed that Virgil didn't provide any knowledge that benefited the capabilities of the North Korean government,
what's the big deal?
What's going on?
Why did this case even happen?
The case was sliced so goddamn thinly.
And this is what people don't understand.
The government's case was all about whether when Virgil spoke at that particular conference in Pyongyang,
there may have been individual North Koreans that listened to that talk and learned something about blockchain technology
and therefore could have been some kind of conspiracy to transfer knowledge over to North Korea.
That's it, everybody.
It wasn't about the government.
Our government stipulated that Virgil did not provide anything to the North Korean government,
yet he has been continually branded as some kind of North Korean sympathizer in the media over and over and over again,
and very, very falsely and erroneously, and I would say maybe even defamatorily.
But that's wrong.
And so that's very important to know.
So fast forward until last summer as well.
I'll keep going in the story, the saga here.
Years after that, my law firm and I had filed a motion, my old firm, frankly,
to have Virgil resentenced on the basis of new federal sentencing guidelines that had come out fairly recently
that applied retroactively to people who fit the bill as being very low probability for recidivism,
that is, for being a repeat offender.
And Virgil ticked all those boxes, and we suggested to the court that Virgil be resentenced.
The Department of Justice opposed this motion,
and they put in a very strong opposition to Virgil being resentenced to a two-point reduction,
which is the amount to which he was entitled based on these new guidelines.
And it was an uphill battle because, quite frankly, the judge in this case, Judge Castell,
who's a very tough judge, really didn't like Virgil.
And we knew it was going to be like turning a tanker to try to win this motion.
But we did win the motion.
We won, and we had Virgil resentenced.
And we took a little bit more than seven - it was about seven months off of his sentence,
so a little bit more than 10% off of the entirety of the sentence.
And that was a great day.
It was a great victory.
And that's what enabled the news today, which is that Virgil has come out of federal prison.
He's come out earlier than we had expected, and he is on his way.
If I could just stop you right there.
Okay.
Is it you, Alex?
Are you doing this?
Yeah.
Do you have wired headphones?
Yeah.
Please put headphones on.
You can't be listening to the show through your speakers.
Yeah.
I'm trying to sort this out.
I don't know why there's all of a sudden an echo.
Because you're listening through computer speakers, and we just figured that out by looking at you.
I've always been doing that for years.
All right.
Well, you've been covering up really well up until tonight, so please continue covering it up.
What I'm trying to say is that Virgil should have been released last August based on what you just told us.
I remember we talked about this on the airwaves.
He was ready to be released based on that earlier sentencing guidelines.
And even then, they kept him until April.
So it's really unconscionable the way they've treated him.
Well, in a sense, this was more of an administrative thing.
He could have been released earlier had he chosen the halfway house that was available, that had spots, that had seats.
Unfortunately, he had chosen Baltimore, and Baltimore was completely oversubscribed.
And the halfway houses that were around that particular area had also been oversubscribed and may have lost their funding within recent years as well.
So everything was really crunched up.
But assuming that we didn't win this motion, then it still would have been quite a long period of time before he was able to have been released.
So, yeah, it would have been nice if he would have come out earlier than today.
But this was the date that they gave us, and they held to it.
And so I think there's something admirable about that.
There was always some kind of possibility that this could have been pushed back further, and it wasn't.
Okay, but, you know, I don't think we owe any thanks to people for just not torturing him more.
You know, he should never have been in there in the first place.
He should have been released last year.
He should never have actually been sentenced in the first place.
As you said, he simply gave a talk, a very basic talk.
I mean, basically something a single-line Google search would have told anybody.
That's, you know, that's the extent of it.
It's cultural exchange.
And the real reason, in my view, he was in there in the first place is because Trump in his first term decided that he wasn't going to allow Americans to go to North Korea anymore.
When I went, it was allowed, and I went as a European citizen, too.
And so I was protected, but he went without getting the permission of the authorities here in the United States.
And I think that was the big deal.
I think that is what really upset the authorities, the fact that he basically didn't obey them.
Is that accurate?
I don't think it's accurate, actually, because even though he could have been charged with the travel ban for traveling to North Korea, that wasn't one of the charges.
That wasn't a charge to which he pleaded either.
So I think he also had conversations with the State Department about going over to North Korea, and they were quite well aware that he may have been doing this.
In fact, remember, Virgil was very upfront about all of this.
He even, I think, posted his visa online and the fact that he was going over to North Korea.
And people had gone over to North Korea in violation of the travel ban as well and never received this type of treatment.
The other thing that I think is really worth mentioning as well, and this goes back to the fact that Virgil is somebody who has very high academic qualifications.
This is Dr. Virgil Griffith.
We call him Virgil.
He's part of the hacker culture.
But he's also Dr. Griffith.
This is somebody who studied long and hard for these types of credentials.
And oftentimes when academics go to places, let's say you're an academic and you accidentally give a talk in a sanctioned country or, you know, accidentally is really, I think, maybe a silly word for this.
But you go give a talk to people in Iran about, I don't know, something like hydrothermal energy or, you know, nuclear enrichment or something like that.
And you say, oh, uh-oh, I shouldn't have done that.
You go and self-report to the U.S. government.
Generally what happens is that if this is your first time doing that, especially if you have some kind of academic credentials, you would get what's known as a warning letter from OFAC or the Office of Foreign Asset Controls,
which is the U.S. agency that really deals with sanctions and sanctions enforcement within the United States.
And you get a warning letter that said, we know what you did.
We thank you for telling us about that.
Please don't ever do that again.
And if you do it again, it could be a violation of the law.
Virgil never got one of those warnings.
Instead, he got arrested at an airport traveling on Thanksgiving Day to go see his family.
Well, hold on a second.
And then he had a nightmare.
Hold on a second.
He did visit with the FBI.
He did get questioned by the FBI for going to North Korea without permission.
And I think by doing that, he got on the radar.
And it took them months because that happened earlier in the year.
And then Thanksgiving, as you said, is when he was arrested.
But had travel to North Korea not been a thing, he wouldn't have ever been on the radar in the first place where they could have taken months to figure out what they could charge him with.
And in this particular case, put him away for years.
You know, I just think that when you when you have that kind of a travel restriction, it definitely makes it a lot harder to travel to that place, which I guess is the point.
But I think that's really what what what caused him to be victimized here.
Now, I think I see your point.
Right.
So initially that you're thinking that might have been what the FBI had in mind.
I'm not sure.
I don't know if that's the case.
That could quite possibly be the case.
I think they might have had sanctions issues in mind from the outset.
But I'm I'm pretty sure that was the case as well, because it did seem like they focused on that.
And that's that's ultimately where the case went.
But it's just been what what people also don't realize is that even though he was sentenced to five years and three months in prison and we were able to reduce that,
he didn't spend that amount of time in prison.
This has still been what is essentially a six year saga for him.
This is this started in twenty nineteen.
And it's been very, very arduous, very difficult, very fraught.
It has not been a cakewalk being over there.
So but I'm I'm happy to say, too, that, you know, I have had the privilege and I think the very,
very good fortune of being Virgil's lawyer throughout this process before he pleaded and then thereafter and helping him with a lot of these post conviction issues,
navigate the system, file a motion to have himself resentenced in front of the judge, winning that motion and dealing with a lot of his technical infrastructure that he had
that was still, I think, in place for Ethereum and the Ethereum name.
Alex, you just self muted.
Oh, there we are.
But as part of this process, Virgil and I have have really become quite close.
We've become very, very good friends.
And I consider the work that I've done for Virgil and seeing him come out today to just be one of the most awesome things that I've done in my legal career.
You know, every every decade or so, you get some kind of reminder that you can do good things as a lawyer and that you're part of a really noble profession and that you have these really awesome powers to to affect change.
Today was one of those days, I have to say, that I'm really, really proud of being a lawyer.
And we all should be proud of your efforts, because no doubt it would be much, much worse had you not gotten involved.
And it's just, you know, it strikes me to think how many other people are victims of the system in this way.
We know Virgil, you know, we've known him for years.
We were aware of how amazing a person he is, but he's certainly not the only one that is being victimized in this way.
Rob, you had something. Go ahead.
Yeah, I'm almost worried to ask this because it has the potential to bring the room down.
But now that he's out, what can you tell us about the situation around his release conditions, parole, that sort of thing?
Not too much right now.
Well, so at this moment, Virgil is probably still en route from Michigan down to Maryland,
where he's going to be reporting to a halfway house, I believe, tomorrow or the next day is when he needs to report there.
At that point, he'll have to meet with a parole, I'm sorry, a probation officer, I think it is,
or somebody with the U.S. Probation Department.
At that point, then we're going to know a little bit more about the terms and the conditions
and the limitations of what he can and can't do.
But until then, I think we can say, and this is one way that I think that was very apt how Virgil had put it,
is that, look, the saga's not over here.
We're still going to have really burdensome probation requirements, reporting requirements.
There will be parole as well.
There's also export restrictions that the Department of Commerce had placed on Virgil as a matter of course.
Anybody who is convicted of violations that relate to sanctions have export restrictions placed on them.
And these export restrictions are very burdensome.
They actually relate to Virgil until 2032.
So they were 10-year export restrictions, and they prevent Virgil from actually working on
or creating anything that would be exported outside of the United States.
And it prevents him from exporting anything made in the United States outside the United States as well.
Well, he came at a good time because I think trade is kind of dead in this realm.
That's pretty funny.
I'd never thought about the effect of the tariff wars on Virgil's Department of Commerce export restrictions.
But, sure, it might make things easier, especially if everything's homegrown nowadays.
But I think that's going to be something tough.
That's going to be something difficult to navigate.
This is also why his father and I have been working behind the scenes for many months now also to try to secure Virgil a pardon.
And we've been front and center about that on social media and telling people about this.
And this is something that's ongoing.
We've made great progress towards a pardon for Virgil.
And I think that it would be an exercise of the presidential pardon power that would be in this country's best interest
because this was a prosecution that I believe was wrongheaded and un-American from the outset.
This was about speech.
This is about curtailing speech.
It's about preventing information about technology from being dispersed and disseminated basically out of the mouth of an American citizen
just because he happened to be in a foreign country.
And I think that this was something that should not have happened.
And so I think that we're going to continue to work towards hopefully securing some kind of presidential pardon for Virgil.
It wouldn't make this all go away, but it would at least make some of the sting and the aftermath of this a lot more palatable.
All right.
Well, let's hope that president is listening now because of what I'm about to say about the things that he's been up to for the past, actually, couple of hours.
I don't know if you folks even heard about this.
You remember the name Chris Krebs?
That's the guy that served under the first Trump administration and was honest in his appraisal of the fact that there was no fraud,
no significant fraud, certainly, in the 2020 election that propelled Joe Biden to the presidency.
Well, today, Trump issued an executive order for him and security expert Miles Taylor to be investigated for treason.
Folks, it's happening.
It's turned into a witch hunt now against individuals that have wronged Trump in one way or another.
Imagine an executive order asking the Department of Justice to basically probe these people and look into their being guilty,
their possibly being guilty of treason, treason, punishable by death.
Yeah, this is what he said.
Chris Krebs, this is a man who weaponized his position against free speech in the election context.
Next, the president further added that the order, quote, instructs your Department of Justice to investigate them.
As for Taylor, he said, I think it's like a traitor.
I don't know how he means that exactly.
It's like spying.
He wrote a book, Anonymous, and I always thought it was terrible.
And now we have a chance to find out whether or not it was terrible.
I don't even know what the hell he's saying.
But the scary part about this is that this is a true weaponization of the Department of Justice,
where individuals, citizens of this country can be targeted by the most powerful person in the world for prosecution
because he doesn't like what they said.
It's what we've been warning everybody about for years now.
And here it is finally happening.
Anyone you know can be targeted.
This is crazy.
Now, Alex, does the Department of Justice have to do this?
Can they refuse?
I think they can refuse.
I think if they refuse, though, they're very likely going to be subject to termination,
and they'll find somebody that will investigate them.
I'm just learning about this now and reading about it now.
As you mentioned this, Emmanuel, this is totally insane.
I mean, this is really, really scary.
This is also what's, I think, most frightening about this.
This is what Trump promised he would do, that he would go after his political rivals in this respect.
But this isn't a political rival.
This is simply a person who was asked, was there fraud, and said no.
That's it.
Yeah, that may be the case.
But saying no makes you a political rival to Trump.
This is a classic case of perception is reality here.
The president's perception of his political rivals are the people whom he's prosecuting now.
That's terrifying, right?
I mean, it doesn't even have to sound an objective fact here, whether you're a political operative or not.
This is somebody who was a federal official who opined on objective facts and now is the subject and target of an executive order.
And it also looks like it's targeting his company and removing the security clearances from the company that's employing him.
But I think if - is that correct as well?
I think it's Sentinel-1 or something like that.
I'm just kind of getting up to speed here.
But this is a total weaponization, I think, not even of the Department of Justice.
This is a weaponization of the executive office of the president.
That's really something that the American people should not be countenancing.
Now, we've seen the reaction that very big companies, very powerful companies, have had when being threatened.
We've seen how state governments have responded, not here in New York, fortunately, but in other states.
We've seen how various universities have responded to intimidation tactics.
And the thing I notice is that they're very quick to cave.
And I can only imagine, in the case of these two individuals, any connections they have, any companies they're affiliated with, are also going to cave because they're scared to death.
And that is where the true harm comes in.
This can just go nowhere, and their careers could be destroyed.
They could be living in fear for now, maybe for the rest of their lives.
We're seeing the same thing, certainly, with immigrants, people holding green cards.
People here legally, I'm not even talking about people who aren't here legally.
There is so much fear now, and it's having an effect on who we are.
It's having an effect on how we live our lives.
Now, you know, this last weekend was great because a million people turned out throughout the country to oppose this crap.
But that's just the first step.
It's got to grow from there if anything is going to come of it.
I mean, can you imagine?
This guy, or these two people, were considered enemies of the state by Trump.
What do you think WBAI has thought of when we're on the air 24-7 critiquing one thing or another, revealing one thing or another,
and basically being a pain in the ass to anybody who's in a position of authority?
And we've been doing that since 1960.
If that's not a reason to go to WBAI.org right now and pledge to keep this place going,
I can't think of any other reason I'd ever be able to come up with.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, just confirming from other sources I'm looking at here, the security clearance for Chris Krebs,
which has been revoked, includes any given to staff at the company Sentinel-1, where Krebs is currently working.
And this also revokes the clearance of DHS official Miles Taylor, ex-DHS official Miles Taylor,
and it also includes any security clearance for individuals at the University of Pennsylvania, where Taylor is a lecturer,
according to the White House, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.
So this isn't going just after two people.
This is going after a huge swath of people with nothing to do with this.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And the fear and intimidation, it's planting in all of us.
You know, it will basically be a deciding factor if somebody wants to go into this line of work.
They will think about what they say, what they do, because of what could happen to them.
All theoretical.
But that is really where the intimidation comes in.
And, you know, this is just one instance, one example.
I mean, Trump fired the head of the National Security Agency.
Think about that.
Think about what that means.
This happened last week.
Fired Timothy Howell, the head of the National Security Agency, and Cyber Command.
And it's, you know, just because, what's her, who's that lunatic he's been hanging out with lately?
Laura Loomer.
Laura Loomer.
I mean, she's, I will say it, she's out of her mind.
And he talks to her once, and she convinces him to fire the head of the NSA.
Right, and imagine, given his track record with replacing many of the people that he fires, who will he come up with, either as an interim solution or as someone that will be there on a permanent basis beyond even his term?
Like, the level of quality that he comes up with is so doubtful to me.
Maybe someone can prove otherwise, but I don't imagine they will be very well credentialed, or at least if they are, I don't know they'll have a lot of our interests in mind.
Oh, what, the people?
No, of course not.
We're not even on the radar here.
What radar?
They got rid of that.
You know, you would think we'd be talking about Trump tanking the stock market, but no, that's actually in the back page now.
Everything is, you know, I did see something in the New York Times today, though, which, you know, for those of you interested in studying media and its biases and things like that, basically, I think it was the S&P index, whatever that is.
I don't know the first thing about any of it.
They said they had their best day today since 2008.
And the best day after all the crashes and all the numbers went down into smaller numbers, you know, it made me think.
Okay, try this analogy.
You light a match to your house, and you're burning your damn house down, and then you decide, you know what, I'm not going to burn my house down, and you put it out, and now your house is half burned down.
Is that a good day, the day that your house stopped burning down?
I mean, is that the best day since 2008?
No, you still have half a house that's burned down.
It's not a good day.
I was thinking you take all of your money, and you burn all your money, and then you walk down the street, and you find a nickel on the ground.
You say you had your best day since you lost all your money.
And you burned it yourself.
That's good.
I like that one better.
Okay, analogy time, folks.
So write to us, OTH at 2600.com, if you have an analogy for what the hell is going on out there.
And also, you know, there's another story.
I think, Rob, you found this one about what YouTube has done, also out of fear.
Yeah, YouTube, owned by Google, they quietly scrubbed the phrase gender identity and expression from its public-facing hate speech policy,
prompting concern from LGBTQ plus advocates who warn the change removes clarity around protections for transgender and non-binary users.
But according to the company, in true Orwellian style, there is no change to policy.
Now, I don't know how you can erase words from a policy and then say there's no change to the policy.
They say, though, our hate speech policies haven't changed.
They said they told this to the reporter.
This is according to a user mag story.
But clearly, those words are gone.
So, yeah.
A spokesperson for GLAAD told The Advocate,
The larger implications of YouTube's actions should concern everyone.
When a company or political leaders decide that certain groups of people are to be seen as less than others,
it too often results in real-world harm.
YouTube and other platforms should be protecting LGBTQ creators and users during a time when right-wing extremists and others are seeking to harm them.
You shouldn't be taking away words.
You should be adding words because there are a lot more potential victims here.
I really would like to know the logic, though.
We haven't changed anything.
You took the words out.
They're not there anymore.
How is that not a change?
Yeah, I hear they've also raised the chocolate ration to 20 grams, so that's exciting.
Oh, good.
Thank you.
Thank you for that glorious bit of news.
You can always bet on the insecurities of straight men.
All right, Elon Musk.
I haven't talked about Elon Musk enough yet.
The Elon Musk-led team, this is how we say it now, the Elon Musk-led team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE,
has rolled out AI to monitor workers' communications for perceived anti-Trump sentiment.
That's according to Reuters.
That's not according to some paranoid, crazy person yelling in the street.
No, that's according to Reuters, who actually might be crazy people in the street right now.
Yeah, looking for anti-Trump sentiment, using AI to find it.
The technology is already being used at the Environmental Protection Agency, run by well-known fascist Lee Zeldin.
The move marks an extraordinary use of technology to identify expressions of perceived disloyalty in a workforce already upended by widespread firings, according to Reuters.
DOGE had this to say.
Nothing.
They said nothing.
That's what I meant.
How would you know if...
I just wanted that to sink in.
If a leader was bad, like there's no fail-safe for this.
Right?
If the leader becomes bad to these disciples, how would they even know if there was a critique, if you're scrubbing any kind of discourse?
Well, a simple answer to that, Kyle.
The leader can't become bad.
Right.
But what if they become bad?
But that's not possible, Kyle.
No, I know that's not possible, but in the event that they become bad over time, not now when they can't ever become bad, but later, after this time, the later time when they become bad, and you're a disciple, and you're like, hmm, I don't like the bad, how do you even know if you put these things in place?
I just don't see the engineering prowess here.
I am perceiving disloyalty, Kyle.
I am perceiving disloyalty, and I'm not even artificial intelligence.
No, I'm loyal to the idea that you want to know if something has gone wrong, especially if it never goes wrong.
That's fine if it never goes wrong, but in the event that it does, how do you know?
I'm coming to the conclusion that none of us would make good federal workers, like, ever.
Go ahead, Gila.
Probably not.
I mean, I'm assuming someday they have bagels at the EPA office, and then the following week someone writes in about the orange juice went bad, and everyone on that email gets fired because they heard orange, they heard bad, they made certain assumptions.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
It's AI, man.
Nobody knows.
Okay, so that's scary.
That is just damn scary that that is what people who work for the government are being faced with right now.
Now, the government may have always been able to look at your email if you're a government employee, says Sarah Block, a partner at employment law firm, McGillivary Steele Elkin.
She said this to Fortune magazine.
I think agencies were not doing that.
They could, but they weren't, as far as looking at emails.
But now the stakes are higher, and the willingness to skirt laws is brazen, referring to government skirting laws of privacy and things like that.
It's a prohibited personnel practice to discriminate against someone for partisan political reasons.
It's essentially political discrimination.
Yeah, that's what we're looking at.
Rob?
That sounds about right.
I mean, has there ever been a rule spelled out on the books that you had to like the president to be a federal worker, to be a good federal worker, even?
I can't imagine that it has, but the idea now that this is just okay, this has been laid out in hard-coded algorithms.
So, yeah, this is terrifying, and everyone should be terrified, whatever side of whatever you might be on.
I think that actually has me thinking about the staying power of systems like this.
So, if you're installing this kind of mechanism, imagine a regime following, of course, our system of elections and how little real fraud there is in our election system.
Let's assume we have a wonderful election and a regime that you don't necessarily like.
Like, let's say, I don't know, one that's more blue than your liking comes into power and has access to these same things.
They don't go away from one place to another.
And here, I don't want to get too philosophical or quasi-religious, but this is that comfort with paradox where we are in hell, but we also can create a sort of heaven or utopia, but it's through action.
And that dual, like, that push and pull, like, their idea of utopia in government has all of these things cleansing it, so to speak.
But when those are reprogrammed and retooled but implemented in exactly the same way, does not their utopia become a sort of waking hell?
Implemented by a perhaps bluer regime.
That's the thing, like, they're installing all this stuff.
It's like if they put in, like, fire sprinklers that also had, like, their favorite soda or something, like, and they didn't, and then they, like, they decided maybe, okay, we actually don't need fire sprinklers.
We're just going to have soda or, like, I don't know, cotton candy or something.
Some crazy thing gets put in under one regime, then it comes back to bite you when you actually need it to do the thing or not be, let's say, complicated in this way.
I don't know if that's actually an analogy.
We're going crazy with analogies this hour.
But I just find it interesting that they find themselves so clever in installing these things they don't realize that the very same sorts of impacts that Democrats might be decrying or being upset about or that we're pointing out really changes the nonpartisanship of government employees will come back if these things aren't removed.
And many, many times the technology, the technology stays, can be retooled and reprogrammed and become something that eliminates their voices in what should be nonpartisan positions.
This is an excellent point because, and we've said this many, many times, it doesn't go away.
When something is developed that's intrusive, the next regime, even if it's diametrically opposed to everything the current regime stands for, they'll keep that technology.
They won't give it back.
They won't disconnect it, and it'll become a permanent part of our society, and it'll become something that appears normal to, I mean, think of kids today.
You know, to them, surveillance is completely normal, and it was not when people our age, or my age at least, were growing up.
And when something becomes normalized, you might be surprised that something you feel is outrageous is no big thing anymore, and that's somewhat sad.
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, there are distinct federal laws on the books right now that, you know, really restrict political activities with respect to federal employees.
You know, this is something when I was a federal employee that I was schooled on, especially because I had worked in defense and intelligence, but it's something called the Hatch Act.
It prevents you from wearing things like political buttons or, you know, it's questionable whether sometimes you can drive a car with a political bumper sticker into a certain federal employee parking lot without violating the Hatch Act.
I mean, there are all these guidelines and parameters about what you can and cannot do politically as a federal employee that have been in place for many, many, many years now.
And, in fact, there's even restrictions on what certain types of federal employees can do even outside of the federal workforce.
So, if you work at CIA, FBI, or NSA, you're actually barred from any active participation in partisan campaigns.
Like, that's how serious the Hatch Act is taken in the federal workforce.
And these types of activities really just make a mockery of federal law that's been on the book for decades.
Well, I think a lot of laws or habits are being made mockeries of in recent days, weeks, even years.
And, yeah, you know, I don't know where it's going to go from here.
I'm really kind of shaken by the story of people being investigated for treason who have differed with Trump.
It's going to extend to members of Congress, former holders of the Office of President, for sure, and common citizens, you know, people that we know.
That is what we are looking at right now.
So, we have to stick together.
We have to not back down like the big companies are doing.
And we've got to be their biggest nightmare.
Massive pains in the ass that are always out there and always one step ahead.
I think that's really, you know, the only hope that this country has at this point.
We only have two minutes.
And, Alex, are you smoking a cigarette, Alex?
My God, I've never seen you do that.
I haven't seen you do that in like ten years.
Is it that bad?
Well, maybe it's a cigarette.
I don't know.
Oh, okay.
Well, it depends.
But, all right.
But, in the last minute and a half that we have, any final words on Virgil?
Because that's the good news.
That's the news I'd like to leave the show with is that Virgil is finally free.
Yeah, Virgil is finally free after a six-year ordeal.
He still has hurdles to jump through.
This is certainly not the end of it.
But, as he himself has said, you know, the board is in a different position now and we're in much more control of the pieces.
He's in more control over his life.
He has freedom.
He can go out to eat things.
You know, he told me today that it felt like he was waiting to be reborn when coming out of prison
and that the outside world was very, very high stimuli for him.
So, this is, you know, I expect great things to come from Virgil.
He's done great things in the past.
He's a thinker.
He's a doer.
This is exactly the kind of person that we're proud to have as part of the hacker community,
that we're proud to have as part of the blockchain community,
and we're proud to have working with us in the future to make this world better.
About that outside world, I hope it's not too much of a shock, what we're giving him at this point.
Rob, quickly.
Is there a way for people who want to send Virgil a nice message of support to do that?
Well, at this moment, we have not publicly released any details of his address yet,
but I think that people should check back here regularly.
Listen to WBI.
Listen to us next week.
Okay.
And we might have more.
And we basically are out for tonight, but we have Overtime coming up on YouTube.
Go to Channel 2600 on YouTube or check the link on the front page of 2600.com.
Next week, we'll be doing a call-in show here on WBAI, so that's always fun.
Mark your calendars for that.
Don't be afraid of your freedom.
Freedom.
I'm free.
Do what I want.
Any old time.
I said I'm free.
Do what I want.
Any old time.
I said love me.
Hold me.
Love me.
Hold me.
Because I'm free.
To do what I want
Any old time
And I'm free
To be what I choose
Any old time
I say love me
Hold me
Love me
Hold me
Cause I'm free
I say love me
Hold me
Love me
Hold me
Cause I'm free
To do what I want
To be what I want
Any old time
And I'm free
To be what I choose
To get my blues
Any old time
I say love me
Love me
Hold me
Love me
Hold me
Cause I'm free
Do you hear what the men say
These are the words
Me from my granddaddy
Come
These are the words
Me from my granddaddy
He said nothing in this world
Like when I'm unknowing free
Free from the lock
I'm missing free from the key
Free like a butterfly
Free like a bee
These are the words
Me from my granddaddy
Said it's nice to be free
Nice to be free
Free from the lock
I'm missing free from the key
Don't feel afraid
Don't feel free
Cause I'm free
Do what I want
Any old time
Cause I'm free
Do what I want
Any old time
Don't feel free
I said I'm free
Do what I want
Do what I want
Any old time
I said I'm free
To be like you
To get my boots
Any old time
Cause I'm free
I'm free
In the old time
I'm free
Cause I'm free
I'm free
Any old time
In the old time
I'm free
Cause I'm free
Thank you.
And a great big welcome to everybody on YouTube. This is Overtime, Emmanuel here. Kyle, you
over in the other part of the studio?
Obviously, yes. It's me.
Out there in Signal Land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Hello, yes. Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening. I just saw the van move.
Okay, I don't know about that. Yeah, we have a little van on our screen here on YouTube.
That's the only video you'll see. It's not even video, right? But it moved?
Do you want it to move again?
I don't know what's going on. You can move the van? Oh, my God. The van's gone.
Okay, and we have Alex, too. Alex, did you make it?
Yes, waiting patiently during the van repartee you've been having for an introduction.
You're wearing headphones, Alex, so that's great. Thank you for that.
Well, I wanted to ask, does this sound better?
You sound great.
Yeah, and you look like a professional.
It might help. It might help everything.
Well, think about it. If you're not playing audio through your laptop speakers, it's definitely going to help.
In Alex's defense, I think our noise canceling from the previous software, which will not be mentioned, might have been handled.
What the hell's going on there now? Whoever's moving furniture.
Can I please not be interrupted for like a second?
Yeah, stop moving things.
Yes, continue. I'm trying to hear you.
We switched software, and there might not be the same noise canceling features with this software.
That's my only point.
So if he had been doing things one way all along, our change may have made it more difficult for him to continue doing it the way he had always done.
But I like the way he's doing it now.
Yeah, it's more pro.
Look at him with the headphones on.
Yeah.
And I'll bet he won't mute himself nearly half as much.
I don't know. We'll see about that.
I don't know. That remains to be seen.
But I will say, though, that I think noise cancellation does have something to do with it, though, because I had the same setup before, but I just yesterday did a macOS update.
And I think that that might have changed the drivers or something that I'm using for this particular mic.
Something definitely changed because it's not just you that was having an echo.
I was actually doing an interview about Virgil with a reporter earlier today, and they were like, why am I hearing an echo?
Who's echoing?
And then it was me, but inexplicably me.
See? It's not just me. It's every reporter.
I know, but that's true.
But I had done a test with Rob.
I don't know if you remember that.
Right before the show, I did a sound test with Rob, and I specifically asked, do you hear an echo?
Because I was on a call earlier, and he said no.
He didn't hear an echo.
For all of our sake, and yours, make that a habit.
Make that a regular thing.
Just do that with Rob.
Do whatever you have to do, just so you put it through its paces, lest there be an update or something.
We can adjust if we know what's going on.
But checking for functionality, always a wonderful thing.
I know all our listeners appreciate it.
Okay.
That was the problem.
We tested, and we did not hear the echo.
And then on the air, we heard the echo.
All right, folks, I'm going to put a tone out now, and we're going to go live, so we don't
have people hearing this crap about us doing our sound test.
All right, we're live in three.
Okay, I've got to reset the van.
God damn it, Kyle.
Are we ready?
Yeah, let's go.
Quiet out there!
Who let all these, like, spectators in?
It's almost 8.05.
We're late.
We're late.
Oh, I thought we started at 8.05.
Three, two, one.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is overtime here on YouTube.
I'm Emmanuel, Kyle over there, Skyplan, Signalland, Rob Tee, Firefly, Gila, and Alex.
I'm over everywhere.
Good evening.
Wow, what a show that was, huh?
That was something.
No doubt, no doubt.
Okay, this word for people who are aiming to call in tonight.
If you call in tonight, you can't call in next week on the BAI call-in show, all right?
Those are the rules.
So you can call in to the BAI show if you don't call in tonight.
We're going to keep track.
And, yeah, and bans will be enforced if people violate this.
Because there are so many people that want to call in, and, you know, it's not fair if
the same voices are the ones that, you know, have the quick dialing fingers and all that.
We want everybody to have a chance.
There are some people who listen to us on BAI who still have rotary phones.
And I don't think I'm in danger of being corrected on that.
I'm pretty sure that's true.
I mean, I'm pretty sure we'd have a rotary phone if the option existed.
All right, Hans, who has a rotary phone in their house right now?
Are we the only ones, really?
I have part of one.
What does that mean, Rob?
You have part of one?
I have just the dial of one.
That's not how it works.
You need the whole thing.
What happened to that old candlestick phone that you were going to wire into our doorbell?
There's no dial on that one.
It's too old for that.
Yeah, but the really old ones didn't have dials.
You just picked it up, and the operator picked it up.
And you'd say, get me Stetson 625.
Whoa.
Yeah, I think Rob is going to go get it because it is actually a very cool piece of equipment.
And not that one.
I'm sure all the radio listeners will appreciate hearing it.
That's a butt set.
That's an orange butt set.
Everyone has one of those.
Every hacker, that is.
A rotary butt set.
That looks a lot like the one I have.
Wait, did he steal ours?
No, we have an identical one.
So does that qualify as our having a rotary phone in our house?
That's pretty good.
It's close.
It's close.
I'm going to say yes.
I'm going to say no because it doesn't ring.
Okay, that's true.
It doesn't have a bell.
Yeah.
If people are interested, getting analog telephone adapters and setting up rotary phones with equipment that can interpret pulse dialing is really fun.
And it can make older phones really useful with, say, you have a cable line or a regular landline or you're implementing something with voice over IP.
All of those phones still work on those systems.
And if you manage to, if you get, you know, a phone call, you could just pick up an extension like it was installed in the old telephone network.
So these are not useless items.
They can be repurposed and even made wireless.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There are enough microcontrollers out there with wireless abilities.
You could probably set up your own wireless rotary phone.
Kyle, can I go down the hall and call into the show on one of the rotary phones just to demonstrate the sound differences between today and yesteryear?
I'm not going to stop you.
You can.
You can say no.
Why not have, like, all the most interesting things to say?
I guess I can make pleasant conversation with our guests.
Oh, yeah.
Well, to a degree.
To a degree.
Yeah.
You'll run out probably in about 45 seconds.
I mean, there's one right there, not even, like, three steps outside the door.
Although I think that's a different line.
I have one in particular.
Yeah, go grab that one.
Yeah.
The 302 or the 50.
Oh, I could go for really old.
For the 1940s.
I could do that.
Well, let me see what I can do.
Those are on a crate under the copier.
Yeah.
And we wonder why Rebel calls in with these, like, bizarre exercises for us to engage in, right?
You know, we're just encouraging this kind of behavior here, Kyle.
Well, playfulness on the telephones, it's totally encouraged.
Oh, absolutely.
And I think we even have a network.
There's a lot of lines and phone wiring that isn't used anymore.
And I've set up, we have at least four of those running on a battery as an intercom.
They don't have ringing ability yet.
But people basically come up to us and, like, say, hey, I've got this bag of phones.
And we've basically acquired a lot of old phones.
And I think this is a common thing.
Many people will get telephones and basically begin collecting without actually consciously trying to.
They're interesting objects nonetheless, right?
And somebody in the chat had asked whether rotary phones still work.
And I think the interesting thing about rotary phones is so long as you're connected to a copper line, right, that's connected into the telephone system, a rotary phone should always work.
Because you dial it by hitting the switch hook, right?
It's just basically hanging the phone up and down really quickly using a switch hook, which is how you dial those numbers.
Exactly.
Like modern modems, like cable modems, anything running like the DOCSIS stuff that has the ability to offer phone service, a lot of those can interpret pulse dialing signals.
And as I said, ATA, analog telephone adapters, which are used to make analog phones IP capable, let's say, basically allowing them to connect over IP networks.
Those are often used to bring them into, like, a voice over IP setup.
And it's interesting, too, because there are very good reasons to keep pulse dialing active, not just so people can hook old phones to it, but there's, like, old emergency equipment connected to the phone network that would still use pulse dialing to get out, like, vital calls.
Like, certain, I believe, phones in things like elevators and things like that, where you press an emergency button and it connects you to help.
There are, I believe, still some of those out there in the world that would use pulse dialing to do that.
Well, I'm back.
I got an all circuits busy error.
All circuits are busy to our phone number.
What the hell?
Was someone else calling?
No.
So, wow.
So Google Voice doesn't work.
Isn't that something?
Let me check what lines are plugged into.
That doesn't make any sense.
I got a dial tone.
I was making the call.
So, folks, how many of you out there have been trying to reach us and never can because you get an all circuits busy recording?
I tried it three different times.
It takes a while.
That's not me calling in.
Someone else is calling in.
And if we could ask you to not call in while we're figuring this out, that would make things a whole lot easier.
Unless it was Kyle testing something.
I'm not really sure.
I mean, that's an excellent question.
I would assume that it was someone trying to call in unless you hear otherwise from Kyle.
But, you know, we know how engaged our listeners are.
Yes.
Did I not specifically ask people not to call in?
And someone's calling in right now.
Yes.
Well, let that peter out.
And we're not going to pick it up.
But I was calling 802-321-4225.
That's the number, right?
I called the right number.
Did I not?
You did.
All right.
As fun as this is, like, in fairness, I can't do this here and troubleshoot that there.
Well, there's no troubleshooting.
It would have been nice to maybe plan a little bit.
There's no troubleshooting.
I called the number.
But I called the number.
Look, this is what everybody has to go through.
I called the number from a dial tone.
It did not work, period.
So there's no other way to dial a number.
Yes.
Okay.
Just got a question from a listener.
Josh Miller asks, pulse dialing requires physical switch of the hook.
Is it AI proof?
I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
What I'm wondering, this might be a network issue where some networks are blocked from our phone line.
Because I'm going to try it from a cell phone now.
And somebody tells me it's going to work.
And it does.
I hear it ringing right now.
So, for whatever reason, a landline, a certain landline, is blocked from getting to our phone number.
So we're figuring this out live on the air.
So that's kind of interesting.
But wait, what's the local carrier still Verizon, right?
It's still Verizon, but we don't have Verizon per se.
We're using Verizon lines and Verizon equipment.
But it's some other company whose name I don't even know.
I got the same thing.
Yeah.
We got to play with it.
Well, we're figuring it out.
On the air, we're figuring it out.
This is some kind of a restriction on a landline, either from a certain company or from...
If anyone out there has a Verizon landline, try calling us 1-802-321-4225 and see if you get through.
Yeah.
So let's issue the challenges to listeners instead of us.
If they can't get through, what do they do?
They can't call us to tell us that.
Call us on your other phone because you have so many phones.
You assume they have another phone.
Oh, if you have a Verizon landline, you're diehard.
You have many backups.
Do we...
Okay.
I really wanted to try it on a regular landline, but we have another landline, too.
Yeah.
We have two landlines.
No, you can't do that.
Maybe we have five landlines.
No.
It's not going to work.
Is there a rotary phone?
It won't work?
The rotary phone won't work?
It's right there in the hallway, but that's also the line that you would be picking up.
I mean, like I said, we have not set this up so that we can use it.
All right.
Nobody should expect us to.
It's set up so people can call us.
Gosh.
Gosh.
Is that a bottle of whiskey there?
I could use it.
No, not yet.
Oh, boy.
We got at least an hour and 15 minutes more.
We'll set up a third line.
All right.
By golly.
We're done playing with the phone, so folks, you can call in now.
See how much fun it is?
8-0-2-3-2-1-4-2-2-5.
I just wanted to demonstrate a damn, what do you call it, rotary phone.
That is weird because a regular landline should work.
I don't get it.
I don't think it's the pulse dialing, though, in our defense, to clarify.
No, it's not the pulse dialing.
It's the phone line.
This is the way the line is set up as it is now, but it's pretty complex.
It's not like a normal standard setup, as you said.
It rings immediately.
It's almost like you have long distance turned off, even though it's not long distance anymore.
But we don't have long distance turned off.
I dialed the number with a 1, thinking I could get a little further.
I did get to a ring.
You have to dial the 1.
You have to dial the 1.
Okay, okay.
10 digit dials.
Maybe I'll try a carrier access code.
I could try that.
Or get the operator involved.
Okay, let's pick up this phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the go of your time.
Go ahead.
Hi, Emmanuel.
Somehow Rebel, I think you're behind all the trouble we're having.
And of course, you know this means you cannot call the show next week when we're on the air.
But all that said, how are you?
Good.
I was just going to mention, I'd just like to know, what is a tie line?
I'm talking in the 80s.
What is a tie line and a foreign exchange line?
Like back in the 80s, there's like foreign exchange lines and tie lines.
How did that work?
Well, I can tell you this.
This is a trip down memory lane for me.
At the other radio station at Stony Brook, we used to have a tie line.
In fact, the whole campus at Stony Brook had a tie line.
You would dial 1-2-0 on campus.
Now, keep in mind, you would dial 9 to get off campus.
But in this particular case, you dial 1-2-0 and you hear another dial tone.
And that dial tone was in Queens.
And that meant you could just dial a seven-digit Queens number and you'd be connected.
I used to use that 1-2-0 tie line to connect my family to my grandparents who lived in Queens.
You know, I pushed down two buttons on the key system.
One would call the local number at home.
One would call the 1-2-0 and then the seven-digit number in Queens.
And people could talk.
It wouldn't cost anything because that was the system they had.
All right, whoever did that, that's a demerit.
You get two.
Was it us?
Was it on our end?
Kyle, was it on our end?
Did I just demerit ourselves?
I can neither confirm nor do I.
I can't defend.
There was a tie line gets you a distant dial tone.
Now, there was another tie line, too.
1-2-3.
Yeah.
And that got you, I think, the Albany tie line.
And it was far more distant.
And you could make phone calls there.
And I think it might have worked in Washington, D.C., too, for some reason.
There were other examples of this.
I'm not sure if that's the same as a foreign exchange line.
It might be a subtle difference.
I'm sure somebody can call or say on the chat what it is that the difference is.
But does that answer your question?
Or are you still talking?
Okay.
Yeah, you're still talking because you didn't listen to anything I said.
I, you know, I heard what you said.
Did you?
Okay.
Okay.
Well, we'll call one thing Lyndon Hill and we'll call one thing Claire Collins.
Why are we doing that?
On one...
No.
I think it's one thing.
It's one thing.
We had a PBX in the Lyndon Hill campus.
You dial nine to get an outside line.
Okay.
And then you dial eight for the tie line, which you could get eight and you get this
Claire Collins campus, the different campus.
Oh.
You get the PBX.
That's like a tie line.
Wait, question.
When you say you dial nine, then you dial eight.
You don't dial eight after the nine.
You dial eight instead of the nine, right?
No, no, no, no.
You dial nine to get an outside line.
But if you wanted to get the other campus, if you wanted to dial somebody in the other campus,
you dial eight to get their PBX.
Instead.
Yes.
Okay.
That makes perfect sense.
That's a tie line, right?
I believe it is.
I believe it is.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but that, yeah.
Okay.
But what is a foreign exchange line?
That's what I don't, I don't know the difference between the two because it sounds like it's
the same thing, but it probably isn't.
Okay.
So you don't know what it's like a line in a distance, like a line in New York with it.
We can theorize or Gila might have the answer because she's raising her hand.
Go ahead, Gila.
No, I was just going to ask if it's when a phone from a different country comes to live in
your house for a while.
This is a serious program, Gila.
We may call it overtime, but it's not a hockey game.
It's an actual program where we try to educate people.
All right.
I'm sorry, Rebel.
I'm sorry.
The childish antics that go on here sometimes.
Rebel, you're being drowned out and I kind of like it.
But please keep talking.
What about when you call something like an airline and you call it like an 800 number
and then it's like all representatives are busy, but they have a location in Atlanta,
one in Pittsburgh, one in Dallas.
They try to get the nearest who is available.
How does that work and what's that called?
I don't know what that's called, but you just made me think airline would have been a great
way of describing a phone line that was a cellular phone if it weren't for actual airlines
already using the word.
That would have been landline and airline.
Wouldn't that have been cool?
In a different world, that would work.
As for how they route you to the nearest representative, I imagine they have technology that knows, you
know, read your area code and puts you in touch with the person that is likely to be familiar
with the area that you're in.
Just a theory.
No, like back in the 80s, I would call it like U.S. air.
And maybe they have an office in Pittsburgh.
They have an office in Charlotte.
Maybe they have an office in, I don't know, New York City.
And when you call it, if the people, all the people in Charlotte are busy, then on New
York City, they'll connect you to Charlotte.
If they're busy, then they'll connect you to, you know what I mean?
It's called programming.
Yeah, they just program.
If this is the case, then it'll do that.
Yeah, I guess, you know, that's how they do it.
Gila, do you have an answer this time?
I have actually put away childish folly and I have a real answer.
Okay.
I found a document from AT&T titled Foreign Exchange.
And here's the information that I have.
Foreign Exchange is offered when an end user requests a telephone number from a different
central office and the exchange is located within the same local access and transport
area.
There are three types of foreign exchange.
Foreign exchange service provides telephone number and dial tone from an exchange other
than the exchange normally serving the customer's location.
Foreign district area service provides a telephone number and dial tone from a district area other
than the district area normally serving the customer's location within the same exchange.
Or foreign prefix service providing a telephone number and dial tone from a central office other
than the central office normally serving the customer's location within the same primary exchange.
So it sounds like it's distance related.
Yeah, like their customer line is basically patched or like cross-connected on from one central
office to another, bypassing the sorts of billing and call setup stuff in that local central
office.
They're just basically that those pair are connected to a trunk or something that goes directly to
to a distant office for all of those calls to be handled there, not in the nearest proximity as is normally
done with the plain telephone number.
Yeah, and I imagine this is all related to the crazy-ass billing they used to have with the phone company.
They were basically, you know, there were regions and you could be right next to a different region.
And if you call the number there, you know, just across the street, you'd have to pay per minute.
And, you know, calling Queens from Long Island is considered a long distance.
And it was a different time.
So you had to do things like this, especially if you were a business with a lot of contacts
in a different region.
You didn't want to have to pay for every single call and every single minute.
You would have a dedicated line that you could use and simply pay a set fee for that.
So hopefully, Rebel, that answers your question.
Well, actually, we used to have, if you'd get another, if you dial 7, you'd get the New York City line.
Like, because I did, I remember back in the 80s, I did 958 on the New York City line.
Right.
And I got it from New York.
I don't remember what I did with it, but I don't want, I wonder what happens if you call that number.
Probably nothing, because I did the same thing.
I would do 958 on the 120 tie line.
And calling the number, it would just ring, because it was only meant for outgoing calls.
Right.
So the Westchester County line, you'd dial a certain number to get out, and then we'd get
your New York City dial tone.
Exactly.
Yeah.
In some cases, and, you know, I tried this, and I was really mischievous in my college days.
But basically, if you call into anything that automatically calls out, sometimes it didn't check
for a dial tone.
And you would wind up being connected to the person who was dialing out.
Now, there was a bank on our campus that had a phone like this.
Basically, you know, two ATMs, and there was a little hotline phone between them.
You'd pick up the phone, and it would auto-dial the bank's main headquarters, because presumably
you had a problem with the ATM.
I don't know how we did it exactly, but we found out what the phone number was of that
phone, and we started calling it.
And it would just keep ringing and ringing and ringing.
And back then, you could ring a phone all weekend, and it would not disconnect.
It would keep ringing.
Nowadays, you get maybe 12 rings, and it disconnects because no revenue is being generated.
But eventually, somebody picked up the phone.
You would hear the rotary dial, because, yes, they used rotary dial back then.
And after the 10 digits or so, they would think they were talking to the bank.
And so, we would start talking as if we were the bank.
And, well, hilarity ensued.
Let's just put it that way.
Nobody was hurt.
Nobody was hurt, but it was a lot of fun.
And I won't go into more details than that.
Okay, so you're going to have a foreign exchange in another city.
Like, what about, like, if you have a foreign exchange, like, you're in New York City, and
you had a foreign exchange line in Atlanta.
Can you pick up a, get a foreign exchange line and get an Atlanta dial?
Of course.
Yeah, of course.
You get one in London, and I don't know where Alex went, but I'm sure he could talk about
having foreign dial tones in different countries.
Absolutely.
It's kind of, you know, it's like a VPN for phones, you know, way back before they existed.
Yes, Gila.
I mean, I was going to say, it's pretty much like that.
It's, I feel like Google Voice is a lot like that now, you know, because you're not in Vermont.
I, you know, not to dox you too bad, but you've got a local Vermont number now.
Yeah.
Right?
Well, I sort of do.
Yeah.
That's, I mean.
Can't reach it from its own line, but.
Understood.
So much of what's happening.
Also, I do have a fun story that our friend Tim in Connecticut dropped in the chat, but
I don't want to, you know, interrupt Rebels time.
Rebels time is almost over, but go ahead.
All right.
Tim says overflow.
I was working one night and had the local police show up at the guard shack saying that
someone or something in a multi-building campus was calling 9-1-1.
It was resolved by having the 9-1-1 operator transfer the call to a fax machine to complete
the call.
The person was trying to fax internationally and somehow missed the 0 on the 0-1-1 in the
country code.
Because what they did was they dialed 9 to get off the campus or whatever.
And they didn't dial 0-1-1.
And they dialed 1-1.
So 9-1-1.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So that, and, you know, a lot of campuses are programmed, even though the 9 is for getting
the outside dial tone.
If it sees a sequence 9-1-1, it'll still connect you to 9-1-1 as if you had dialed the first
9 and then dialed 9-1-1.
So I hope that makes sense.
Yes.
And those glory days when a fax machine would call a number and then just keep trying to
send until the electronic signal was acknowledged by another fax machine to receive it.
So if you called a regular phone with your fax machine, they would just keep getting the
beeps and keep getting the tones and there was no way to stop it.
I don't know about you, but my fax machine still does that.
Hey, I sent a fax three days ago.
What's the most recent any of you sent a fax?
Wow.
Aw.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Maybe at least 10 years ago at an old workplace.
You know, there are state bureaucracies where faxes are used every single day and you damn
well better have a fax machine if you want to do anything with them.
Yeah.
And, you know, I find it amazing that they're basically the same technology as they were
back in the 80s.
You know, not really much faster.
And I've never gotten the color fax, you know, and it serves a purpose.
That it does.
I suppose it does.
Rebel, anything else?
Yeah.
I remember it looks like businesses would have TWX numbers with these 910 air vehicles.
That's right.
And what if you called that from a regular phone?
I never tried that.
I never tried that.
TWX.
I'm going to ask you a question.
Is TWX the same as Telex?
I think it was the precursor to fax machines because I remember seeing it in the 80s.
Didn't answer my question.
I asked about Telex.
I think they're the same thing.
I think TWX and Telex are the same thing?
I think it's their abbreviation for Telex.
Okay.
Rebel, just wait on chat.
I'm sure somebody will correct you.
But I don't think they're the same.
Okay.
Well, I mean, what I used to see in like brochures from the 80s, businesses would have their phone
number and then it would say, instead of a fax number, it would say TWX.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
I don't know who had those machines.
I think they said Telex.
And it would give a 910 number, area code.
Wow.
Yeah, I think in the early days of 2600, we might have actually somehow had a Telex number,
but I have no idea how we, I think it interfaced.
It interfaced with some kind of online service.
I know we had an MCI mail address.
That was fun.
So have you ever had any experience with foreign exchange lines in the 80s?
What's the fascination with foreign exchanges?
You know, I told you everything I know.
When I call things, when I call things, I call a local number and I get somebody in
Atlanta.
Like, I call a 212 number and I get somebody in Atlanta.
Well, that's their good luck, isn't it?
No, I mean like a business.
I would get the Atlanta office instead of the New York City office.
I don't know this, Rebel, but I would venture to say that's probably a different technology
in sort of like a, what do I want to say, like corporate phone network where it's not
formally arranged with the telephone company, but rather it's a part of the IT or telephony
network that the company implements.
So they'll have their communications set up so that numbers that dial in get routed through
their internal phones extension and numbering systems.
So you could theoretically end up in all kinds of places.
You could end up on somebody's mobile phone.
A lot of people work from home at some of these companies.
So they could just add and remove people as they hire or rehire employees to that routing
plan that's managed with their communications tools.
So I don't know that it's something that they necessarily as a company are hiring through
a product that the telephone company or whatever provider they're using sells or has as a function,
but rather they implement it in their own corporate sort of network plan.
I don't know that, but I would guess that it's become so democratized and so affordable that
the company themselves can manage their phones in ways that allow them that kind of flexibility.
It's really desirable and they don't want to be paying extra fees to do it.
They probably just pay for whatever minimum thing they need to get outside lines from a
telephone provider to have a functioning number and then do the rest themselves virtually.
Rob, go ahead.
So to answer the earlier question, TWX is Telex.
Telex is the underlying technology and TWX was AT&T's name for their Telex service.
And do you want to guess what TWX stood for?
Twix?
Close.
Teletypewriter Exchange Service.
All right, Rebel, we've given you a lot of information tonight.
Please process it.
What about Centrix Service?
What about it?
What is that?
I mean, it reminds me of that.
Maybe like all the people, if I call a number in like a local New York City, maybe all the
people in New York City are busy and then it routes to another city or another location.
I don't think that's what Centrix is.
Centrix is, you know, like a PBX, but a big one.
And it was run by the actual phone companies, Bell System, Baby Bells, that kind of thing.
But we're going to leave it there because we want to open up the phone lines to somebody
else.
And can we get Alex back?
Where'd Alex go?
Alex, unfortunately, was called away on an emergency and will be away for the rest of
the show.
You know, this happens every week.
I'm trying to sense a pattern here.
It's either an airplane.
It's either a foreign country or it's an emergency of one sort or another.
Wednesdays.
Yeah.
All right.
802-321-4225 is our phone number.
And while we're waiting on another call to that, I can just remind folks that the WBAI
pledge drive is ongoing.
And if you'd like to go to buddy.wbai.org, you can become part of what keeps us going,
what keeps us doing what we do on the airwaves, also here on Overtime, and everywhere we do
things.
And it's more important than ever to give that a look in, if you can help us out, buddy.wbai.org.
And the fact that we're asking you to do that while not even on WBAI should tell you that
we mean it.
You know, it's not just something that we're doing because we're forced to do it, because
we're not forced.
We believe in this.
And if we see you in the street, we will say it.
We will say, have you called WBAI and pledged your support?
Sure, some people are annoyed by that and find it very aggravating when we won't talk
about anything else.
But it has to be said, because the WBAI is an essential voice, and it needs to be preserved,
maintained, and it needs to thrive.
Because God knows what's waiting for us in the weeks, months, years ahead.
Boy.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I'm just thinking about some of that.
And yeah, you know, you dread turning on the news to find out what's going on now.
You know, that case of this poor guy who was sent to El Salvador by mistake, has every
right to be in this country, has a family.
And the Trump administration admitted it was a mistake and basically said, there's nothing
we can do.
There's nothing we can do.
So you're basically saying, if somehow Trump wound up in El Salvador, there's nothing we
can do to get him back.
Good to know.
Let's arrange a trip.
But for God's sake, don't lie to us.
This is pure evil that you would kidnap somebody, put them in a foreign country, in a prison, a horrible
maximum security prison, and say that you're powerless to rectify your mistake.
It's just, it boggles the imagination.
I mean, think about it.
You expect us to believe that you cannot talk to the people running the prison in El Salvador,
who you talked to before in order to get permission to bring all these people there,
but you can't talk to them to get one back.
Like, it's just, how dumb do they think we are?
And now, people in the administration are starting to hint at something that we've been
talking about, that, yeah, doesn't matter if you're an immigrant, American citizens will
soon be eligible to be sent to foreign prisons.
People born in this country.
Now, they'll start by saying violent criminals, and we'll all say, yeah, you know what?
Send the violent criminals there.
We don't care.
And then they'll keep expanding it.
And eventually, it'll just be anyone they feel like.
So, we better wake up.
Well, we don't have enough prisons in this country?
I mean, are you kidding?
Well, think about it.
This whole country is practically, all right.
Getting them completely out of the country and forgotten about.
Nobody's going to visit them in El Salvador or wherever we wind up sending people.
It's tantamount to torture, and it's something that would have been inconceivable, unimaginable,
just even a year ago.
We talked about normalization, how kids become normalized, or how things become normalized to
kids that we think are unusual, you know, like surveillance cameras everywhere, all sorts
of things.
This is one of those things.
It's very, very dangerous.
Sorry, I didn't mean to go down such a dark road.
I just, it just came up.
Go ahead, Gil.
No, I feel like that's kind of just the state of affairs of the world right now.
I did want to share a comment from the chat, which, one, I think everybody who's chiming in
with information about Telex, this is just fun from Yermaw419.
Telex and TWX could not communicate directly with one another because the keyboard coding
schemes and transmission speeds were different for the two systems.
Of course they were.
I just think that's pretty spiffy.
Some things never change.
Um, also we're talking about, uh, people thinking that driver's licenses from other states were
fake because, um, talking about fax machines and a listener whose name I'm so not even going
to try to read because it's, what is that called?
What is what called?
The type of, um, I'm not sure.
With the zero and the X and the, oh, oh, late speak.
Yeah, that, uh, it's just, it's, it's a lot.
So, um, talking about faxing and trying to renew a driver's license by fax and they just didn't.
And then I, uh, made me think of how my driver's license when I first got one was, uh, printed
on a dot matrix computer, dot matrix printer and then laminated, uh, in the office.
And yeah.
Speaking of driver's licenses.
There's, uh, you are aware of this, uh, real ID deadline that's looming in one month.
You will have to have a real ID driver's license or you won't be able to fly within the country
or you can get a passport card.
That's the same thing somehow.
Uh, but people are scrambling.
People are, are actually, I heard about this.
People are selling DMV appointments to other people so that they don't, they don't miss
the deadline.
It's that hard to get an appointment to get a real ID.
And the real ID contains more information about you.
It's, it's more security.
Um, it's, um, again, this is something that I don't think we would have considered normal
only a little while ago and now everyone's got to have one.
Okay.
So I'm going to push back on that a teeny tiny bit because the real ID, but yeah, they've
been saying this for a few years.
Real ID was supposed to get rolled out like this in 2021.
I want to say, and then they kept pushing it back because of the pandemic.
Um, yeah, I mean, Rob, it took you the better part of two years to make it happen because
of some paperwork stuff.
Yeah.
But, um, but that was, we, we, we happened to be getting our passports, um, Gail and
I, and the passport.
Now, if you get a U S passport, it comes with a passport card.
You can, it comes with it if you ask for it.
And I definitely recommend people do that.
Yeah.
And, uh, since my state ID is not a real ID and it would have cost me more when renewing
my state ID.
Plus I would have had to do it in person instead of just automatically do it online.
So I just got a non real, I guess, ID from the state, but I've taken to carrying my passport
card around in my wallet.
It's like a daily ID.
Yeah.
I do that too.
And a lot of people don't realize what it is, you know, but it's better because it doesn't
have an address on it.
Uh, it has your name, has your picture, but it's accepted.
My real question though, is, is if you don't have a real ID, do you have a fake ID?
Is a non real ID, a fake ID?
You know, we're speaking with language here.
No, it's a state ID.
It's a state ID.
So the state might not be real.
Got it.
Go ahead.
Aguila, let me have a phone call.
No, I mean, that was what I've taken actually since January 20th.
I've taken to carrying around my passport card at all times, just in case.
And I do have a real ID.
Um, when my driver's license expired a couple of years ago, I got a real ID and it was a
very humid day and my hair is too big for the photo.
Wow.
Um, and just so people know, if you do have a passport card, you can escape to Canada.
You can't escape to Europe on that.
You need a full passport for that.
So just, you know, if you're walking around with one thinking that, uh, that's your pass
out of here.
No, you have to have more unless you're going to Canada, which I do recommend.
All right.
We have a phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook overtime.
Go ahead.
Sorry for the wait.
Hello guys.
How are you?
Oh, it's our friend from Queens.
Do you have a bone to pick with us tonight?
Because usually when you call us, you say you have a bone to pick with us.
I don't have a bone.
I do, but I'm going to talk about, uh, what Reverend was talking about.
Okay, cool.
Let's do that.
About timelines back in the seventies and eighties, there were hotels in Europe, you
would call a two-on-two number in the United States, and all of a sudden you would hear
a local dial tone, then you would hear, uh, MF tones, and then all of a sudden you would
be talking to someone in Europe, and if you said, oh, sorry, I called the wrong number,
they hang up, and then you get a dial tone in Europe somewhere, and you can call anywhere
in Europe, using touchdowns.
Wow.
Yes.
And also we had a bunch of colleges had, you know, into timelines, like, uh, also,
you know who also had a timeline?
Uh, you had an 800 number, and then it would answer, you hear another dial tone, and you
would hit there, like, one for Ohio, two for this, Xerox had a bunch of timelines that
people used to use.
Makes sense, yeah.
Without a security code, so they, and they did that for years, and they never realized
that people were using that as long-distance, uh, enhancers.
They did not have, you know, like, a passcode on it.
Go ahead, Gila.
Um, I, we're getting word from the chat that they can hear us fine, but the callers have
been low, so if we can crank up the callers at all, that would be good.
I will try.
Thank you.
Well, am I sounding low?
Well, now you're sounding high.
Yeah, I was just going to say that, uh, Xerox had it, and General Motors, General Motors
also had it.
If you hit eight, you would be connected to a local, uh, radio station to listen to their
ads.
General Motors would, uh, would allow their executives to call in on an 800 number and
then listen to different ads throughout the country.
And then if you hit number nine and do it back in the mid-80s, uh, you would be able
to make calls anywhere in the country.
Free.
You know, I remember, I remember a General Motors 800 number.
It's called TravelNet.
And, uh, it was, it was a great way to make phone calls all over the place.
Um, yeah.
Good, good, good, good times.
Yeah, listen, but today, listen, you don't have pipelines anymore.
Everything is internet-based.
So, if you call a company in New York, they have, and by the way, phone numbers don't,
just like IP addresses, doesn't mean that it's going to be in New York.
I can have a 2-1-2 number and transport it to a cell phone in Ohio somewhere.
So, you know, just because I say to you, okay, 2-1-2 or 3-1-2, which is Chicago, in today's
world, it has no more meaning because the national number plan, it no longer is going to be
really exist except, uh, you know, that was ministered, ministered by, uh, Bell, you know,
Bell Telephone, you know, AT&T.
But now, it doesn't really matter anymore.
I, I hear you, and I, I mourn the loss of that because it was one of the coolest systems
ever.
Well, they did a great job, but you know what you do, and by the way, in the old days,
uh, you know, area codes had us, either had a one or a zero, so the computer, you know,
the relay stuff could say, okay, I see 3-1-0, I know that's going to be, I got to get 7-1-2
because that's an area code.
But today, an area code could be anything.
I think you could have 4-8-6 or 7-8-9, stuff like that.
You mentioned 3-1-0, that's one of the later ones, because it used to be that it couldn't
be zero as the third number, but they, they expanded to that first, I think 2-1-0, San
Antonio was one of them, uh, and then it was like, pretty much anything goes, and that's
when the magic was lost.
Right, yeah, well, listen, they started when they, uh, listened, 7-1-8-2-1-2, they ran out
and, and you know what, they did it so stupidly, the, uh, what do you call the Federal Communications
Commission, said there was something about where they just couldn't, they couldn't just
get another area code, they had some crazy rules, but just to say, a lot of, a lot of history
back then, and a lot of stuff which just clued together, like, uh, you know, making, uh, you
know, the way they would have, uh, MF tones.
All right, guys, look, have a great evening.
Do I have a ball to pick with you?
Tonight, I'd rather just talk about technology, talk about policy.
I agree, I agree, I agree.
Did we just hear Morse code?
Yes, you just heard an FM repeater.
Okay.
I got a, you know, you heard my FM repeater just come up in the background.
Cool.
All right, well, keep doing what you do.
Well, I got a reset.
I'm laying here on my bed in my bedroom, and I got a couple of receivers listening, and
you just heard a repeater just ID.
Wow, that's awesome.
Yeah, but, uh, listen, I don't agree with you on everything you guys do, and I'm not
here to bust your chops.
You know what, there's too much crap going on.
You know what, my head's burning up on all of this stuff.
Yeah.
I feel like I'm going to show up pretty soon.
Uh-huh.
Because the world is BS, so I want to talk about, you know, technology.
It's pleasing.
Right, yeah, you said it.
Yes, no argument there.
All right, hey, you have a great night.
We'll talk to you next time.
Okay, buddy.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
Yeah, definitely.
The technical stuff, it can be more predictable than what's going on.
Well, this is something comforting about having the technology work around you, whether it's
old technology, new technology.
And set up the way you like.
I think our caller is a ham.
Oh, he's definitely a ham.
They are on the radio and on the radio.
By that, we mean ham radio operator, not dispersing characters or anything like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
Like, yeah, technical license.
I do detect the sound of another phone call coming in.
Yes, we're getting a call now.
All right, and this call is now in our queue, and I will greet it by saying good evening.
You're on Off the Hook over time.
Hello, I just wanted to let you know that I do have a Verizon landline, but I don't have
long-distance service on that line.
Oh, okay.
You know, I wonder if our line doesn't have long-distance either, because we just get that
recording whenever we...
You know, we didn't try a different phone, but we should try that.
So, a long time ago, I had long-distance service with some special deal that if you signed up
on the internet, you could get a good deal, but they discontinued that, and now I don't
have any.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Well, I still have a...
I still have a cell phone now.
Uh-huh.
Is that it?
So, this is a call from not the landline, though, just to be...
Right.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
They don't have long-distance...
You do have an 800 number, or a TOFI number.
Yes, I don't know if we get...
I could try the toll-free number.
Right, the 888 number.
That actually might be a way to test it on the line that we were trying earlier.
Right.
Okay, well, it's no fun if Alex isn't here.
So, we'll have to do it when he's back.
Is there anything else?
Caller, where are you calling from?
What part of the country or world?
This is the Bronx.
Oh, the Bronx.
Cool.
I like the Bronx.
Mm-hmm.
Did you have anything else?
Well, I just wanted to say, yeah, that a lot of the things that happened today are not normal and not acceptable.
Uh-huh.
Yes, I have to agree with that.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Amen.
All right.
I called mainly to tell you what you asked about trying with the Verizon landline.
Yeah, thanks for clearing it up.
Are you saying, though, from the Bronx, it's long distance to call?
Yeah, I guess so.
To call Vermont, it would be long distance, even though we're not in Vermont.
That's funny.
We've had other callers that have noticed similar things in the degradation or the sort of deals drying up as far as what is offered for those kinds of lines.
I have to say, you have a pretty good connection.
This is a cell phone you're calling us on?
It is.
Wow, you have a good connection somehow, because I hear a lot of bad connections, and this one is actually pretty good.
That's good.
Yeah.
Well, definitely keep listening and raise some hell in order to get the tranquility that you so desire.
Well said.
Thank you.
Thank you for your call.
And Gila, go ahead.
I have a message for Kyle.
A listener named Eric Griswold says, tell Kyle I went up to the Connections Museum in Seattle, and it was awesome worth a visit.
That's fantastic.
I'm glad that they did.
That place is a lot of really good volunteers these days and has really transformed to become an institution.
It's full speed ahead with all kinds of maintenance and projects and bringing old equipment back to life.
They have a very strong presence on Mastodon and are publishing a lot of what they're doing much more freely than ever when I was a volunteer there.
So please check it out.
If you can't go physically, see what they're doing online.
You'll get really inspired.
I know they have a DMS system and so many other things they're powering up.
I think the Connections Museum in Seattle, Georgetown to be specific, is the best telecommunications museum in the United States.
I've said that.
And if you believe I'm wrong, prove me wrong.
Tell me of a better one.
I'm not going to stop you.
Well, of course, you're not going to stop me.
No, I'm totally biased.
That's your old stomping class.
I love that place.
But I've been there.
I've seen it.
And I've experienced it.
And I say that.
You know, there's one on Long Island, too, in Comac.
I've been there.
That's pretty good as well.
But there's something special about the Connections Museum.
Now, if there's something even better, I want to hear about it.
I want to see it.
I want to help spread the word.
But you got to spread, you know, let us know.
Well, what I would add is it's really the connections within the museum, not just socially or with people from all walks, whether they were someone that worked as a telecommunications worker and they're a pioneer.
I think that internally within that museum, the way things are strung together, the way the different examples of equipment from different periods that were in central offices all over the state of Washington and all over the country in much in the same way as they were installed all over the country.
They're incredibly illustrative of how it actually works, how call setup works from era to era, whether it's like a panel or like electromechanical stuff or the crossbar systems with relays and all of that.
Yeah, it's so complex to actually see it work when you can actually see and hear it.
Yeah.
And the sense of hearing if if the central office is working, it was something that I learned in being there and being around some of the pioneers that were volunteering at the time.
We're talking about telephone pioneers, which are people who used to work for the front.
Entirees mostly.
It's not the case anymore.
There's a new generation, a lot of newer volunteers that are incredibly knowledgeable, some of which have not actually worked for the telephone system proper as it was.
It's good to mix those two communities.
No, it absolutely had.
They each have such knowledge and enthusiasm, too.
That was a lot of incredible work that was done to embrace that curiosity.
And people like me were able to go there and hear those stories and actually get what they were saying when, OK, you know, you hear something change in the crossbars or some aspect of the system makes a different sound.
You got the sense of what it was like years ago and in a place that was just humming with with noises and clicks of relays and things like that.
So if you want to see how things connect and a lot of these different switches that are examples there from different eras connect to one another in the museum.
And those are those are that's the real, I think, magic of how that those demonstrations are set up.
And really, it earns the title of the Connections Museum.
There's a lot of connections there.
We have as connections with X's, by the way.
So keep that in mind.
We have a phone call.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Hi, it's Bobcat.
Hey, are you going to hang up on me?
Do you want us to?
Is that your thing?
No, that would be a bad thing.
You hung up on me last month.
I didn't know I wasn't supposed to call in because I wasn't listening.
Oh, yeah, because you called the radio station after call.
Yeah, we have rules.
We have rules.
I didn't hear the rules.
All right.
But OK, first, I'm also shadow banned in the chat on the YouTube.
That would be nice if you remove that.
OK, I have no authority over that.
And that's that's another issue.
But go ahead.
OK, the most important thing I have to say is for Rob.
But we're going to save that for another minute from now.
The what?
It's for Rob T. Firefly.
Oh, it's for Rob.
OK.
Yes.
I'll save that.
OK.
Chris Krebs is not being investigated for treason.
He's being investigated for abusing his federal authority, which he did by announcing two days
after the election that it was perfectly free and fair with no investigation.
OK, you don't do that.
If anybody who's done forensics knows, let's let's take some time and figure things out.
OK, you can look through the whole history of that if you'd like.
Another thing.
I'm sorry.
Alex is not on.
But we need to get pardons for everybody who's been convicted of cryptocurrency garbage like
Chris Bowden.
Look up Chris Bowden, captain, who's in Minnesota, who got put in prison for trading several thousand
dollars worth of Bitcoin back in the early days of Bitcoin.
But he didn't care.
He didn't know that if someone said, oh, I'm a I'm a Coke dealer, that you shouldn't sell
him crypto because he was like, it's just crypto, just money.
But he got convicted for money laundering and he spent time in prison.
OK, he was running a hackerspace that was amazing.
And he went to prison for that.
Chris Bowden.
So look that up.
Now, let's go.
We'll go right to Rob.
Rob, OK, you rage quit X.
You deleted your account.
Yes.
I own your account.
I'm you.
And you can you should go on there right now and try to figure out what's the password to
get your account back.
I because I'm just going to keep posting pictures of little X, Elon's son, Trump's grandson,
apparently.
Like, and you should just never rage quit things.
It's bad security.
You park it.
You don't rage quit.
Hang on.
So basically, what if Rob had never had an account on Twitter?
Are you saying we're required to have accounts everywhere because somebody could impersonate
us?
I could.
Everybody can be impersonated.
But there's links everywhere, all over the Internet, even from Rob's original Twitter account, linking to the account that I now own.
Well, you know, that's not much of an accomplishment.
You can we can be you as well.
It's you know, that's the nature of it.
Yeah, I can I can address this.
Yeah.
So what what Bobcat is saying for those not following is he took the screen name that used
to be mine on Twitter.
Twitter and he's asking me if I want to get it back by guessing the password.
And the answer is no, I don't want to be on Twitter.
And that's why that account was deleted.
So, you know, if you want to be Rob T.
Firefly on there, I guess there's not a hell of a lot I'm going to do about it.
But, you know, if that's the sort of thing you need to do with your time, feel free.
But it's, you know, it's not it's not it's not going to get me to guess this password or play around with it, because, you know, I I also like long ago, I quit a job.
I no longer go to that place.
You know, you want to try showing up as Rob T.
Firefly at his job?
Yeah, let's just make this complete.
Why not?
You know, I I'm not sure what the what the end game is here of what you're trying to do here about that.
No end game, Rob.
I'm being nice to you.
I'm telling you.
This is you being nice.
Wow.
I hate to get on your bad side.
Oh, please, Rob.
What's the password?
I'll bet it's I'll bet it's password.
Try that swordfish.
If I were going to guess, I would say swordfish.
But, you know, that's that's just a basic mathematical fact of humanity.
First of all, what is what is anybody from taking the thing that is linked to you?
It's no longer linked to me, though, although you did find a picture of me to put up in the user pic.
And it's not a bad picture.
We can find pictures of anybody.
It's not hard to do this.
The only thing the only thing that Bobcat might have here is the fact that there's a history that Google probably still has of that account when you were actually using it.
So it's it's a legitimate security concern for people who wipe their accounts and walk away.
But what I just assumed Twitter would do was not allow it to be used again.
Are you using the same username that he used?
Twitter doesn't care.
Yes.
Yeah.
Twitter doesn't let you reuse passwords and names.
Gmail doesn't.
That was one of the first first things that happened, though, when Twitter was bought is that parody accounts were like running rampant.
Right.
I know that kind of basically fits the I don't know.
It tracks with what Twitter is.
Right.
But for accounts that are not used anymore, they don't allow you to just, you know, take them over.
I know we've been trying to get hope on Twitter for years.
We don't care anymore.
But that particular account had not been used in years.
And Twitter's own rules.
This is actually pre Musk said that after a certain amount of time, you could simply ask for the account if it wasn't being used.
And they don't do that.
And that account is just sitting there forever.
Now, in this particular case, the account was deleted.
But I still think, you know, it's only fair to, you know, to not just let anybody grab it because you see things like this will happen.
I should let Bobcat know that I also have in the past deleted my Reddit account, my LiveJournal account, my MySpace.
Oh, and don't forget your dating apps.
Oh, yeah.
My old dating apps, dude.
You got to you got to get on those because.
Rob, do you mind if we open this up to everybody so that they can all guess your password and maybe somebody can grab your account and lock it so that nobody does this again?
If anybody would like to Bobcat, are you since this is your account, are you going to grab a grant public permission for folks to try and try and use your own name?
It's your it's your name.
You don't have to ask permission.
Yeah, it's not my account, though.
It's Bobcat's.
And I don't I don't want to go granting permission for things that he owns.
I don't think he was counting on that kind of a response.
Yes, I was.
OK.
All right.
Well, then the question stands.
Do you grant permission for anybody?
Rob, if you didn't get grab your account already, if someone else has taken it, someone got the password already?
Are you kidding me?
I don't know what's going on.
I set it up so he could take it back and not.
I don't want it back, dude.
I don't think you have a saying.
You don't have to use it.
I don't want it.
I don't want you.
You want to have your ID and then do whatever they want with it.
It's a I'll tell you what my I'll tell you what my idea is.
My idea is my own personal Web site, which has a page on it linking to all the social media I do use.
There's a note on there that I'm no longer on Twitter.
And so people looking for me out there can, you know, read that and know that they're not going to find me.
Yeah.
That's only if they go to your Web site.
If they go to your Twitter account, they're going to get this.
So it's not my Twitter account anymore.
They might think it is.
So now this favor Bobcat was doing has turned into an actual issue that someone else has it because they guessed the password.
Wow.
This is turning into something.
I don't think Bobcat actually meant to be like antagonizing.
He was actually trying to put it on the table like, hey, I got your account.
You can have it back if you guessed the password.
Hootie rebels now have your account, Rob.
I worry about things.
No, I don't dispute.
I don't think Rob couldn't care any more or less than he did at the beginning of this call.
I understood that.
But it's still now in even further removed hands, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Well, maybe you could sue Twitter for impersonating you.
I wonder if I could report myself to Twitter for not being myself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do that.
We're sorry, Bobcat, for misreading, you know, your offer.
Okay.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
Rob's original Twitter account, which still exists, Rob T. Firefly.
No spaces, no underscores.
That's not my original account, though.
I'll tell you what that is.
That's an account that somebody out there made at some point during the heyday of Twitter
because they kept trying to find me on there and that was not my account name.
So they put that up with some spare address.
Wait, somebody trying to find you put up an account with your name on it?
Yeah.
This was in very early days of Twitter.
They put up an account because, okay, my username was Rob underscore T underscore Firefly.
And somebody else was like, I was trying to find you at Rob T. Firefly without underscores
and you weren't there.
So I put up this page and all it said was that, you know, this isn't Rob T. Firefly.
He's over at this other one and put up my correct screen name.
So that was not my original account.
People keep doing you weird favors that I don't understand.
They really do.
The internet is full of weird favors.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, you don't live in this neighborhood, but I'm going to buy a house
and put your name on it so people can find you.
It's just really weird.
I mean, look somebody up and find them the usual ways.
Wait, wait, wait.
Bobcat, is it the no space Rob T. Firefly?
That's the account that you acquired?
No, he acquired my actual former username with the underscores.
Which Rob said earlier.
I'm sorry, Bobcat, say that again?
Bob T. Firefly with no spaces.
Can you just repeat that one more time because we were talking over each other?
Okay.
Rob underscore T underscore Firefly.
That's the account you had.
It was Rob's account.
It was Rob's account.
So like Pam, we all know Pam.
Well, we don't all know.
We're going to Jim Vicente's memorial service.
And so that, if you go to her, it says that thing, and then you click on it and it goes
to the one I now own that he used to own.
And now usernames are not the same as user IDs.
Correct.
User IDs are a number in Twitter.
So that will never match.
But anything anyone ever said to Rob, if someone goes back and looks through time, it will go
to the account that he owned that I now own.
Wait, are you saying you getting this account, you now have access to all his previous messages?
No.
Oh.
Because that's, that's connected to my public ID.
My public ads, I think, is, is now, uh, now ads to this new account.
So other, other people, uh, other people pinging me on Twitter publicly, um, are now pinging
this new account that is not me.
Exactly.
And now that makes it very bad that you can be abused because some stranger now has your
number.
Now, if you didn't get it, figure it out yet, sign on and put in the proper password.
Someone else who's listening to us will grab it.
And hopefully, hopefully do the right thing like I did and tell him about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, uh, this has been interesting.
Thank you for, uh, for a most entertaining conversation.
It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a form of hacking.
Yeah.
I'll give you that.
Well, it's also a lesson in how to strategize, like how to manage, uh, changing over and there's
different implications and different ways some of these platforms are structured.
So, right.
Yeah.
It's, you know, when, when somebody deletes something, someone else can make something
again with the same name.
That's, I think we knew that, but seeing it actually happen, maybe, uh, it'll give
Obviously everybody did not know that.
Well, I think Rob might've known.
I don't know.
We'll, we'll, we'll interrogate him further, but thanks.
Thanks for the call.
Go ahead.
Rob, we both know a famous female engineer who did the same thing.
And I got her name too.
And rage quitting is a bad idea.
Think about the security and, uh, problems when you just kill yourself on a, on an internet
site.
How many people are you being on Twitter now, Bobcat?
Um, I'm like 90 people on the phone, but I'm like three people on Twitter.
Oh boy.
Okay.
Take, take yourself back.
Uh, uh, president.
I, I Huxley college sage words.
All right.
Thanks.
Uh, thanks for all that.
Um, we have a lot to think about and, um, and, and, uh, um, reminisce about too, but,
uh, okay, cool.
Uh, that's going to pretty much do it for us here on over time.
It's been entertaining hour and change.
Uh, any final words from anybody?
Um, I, I will say the general consensus from the chat is that they are not impressed.
Um, cheers to people to overflow who said, Hey, I saw you were at work.
So I cleaned your house for you.
Uh, and XX who said, Hey, you weren't in your car.
So I drove it around for you.
Um, yeah, I, I, I believe that, uh, I also personally am underwhelmed by this particular,
like active care for your particular, um, well, you know, you know what it feels it's,
it's like, um, if I had an apartment that I lived in long ago and there are quite a few
of those in the world and somebody else was like, well, I live in that apartment now,
so I'm going to tell people I'm Rob and I live here.
Also, he's telling you that you, he's telling Rob that he's Rob and he, it's, it's bad enough
being one of me.
He has to like move in with us because there's not a lot of space here, uh, to clarify the
other, uh, point that was made in that, that previous call.
Uh, yes, he's right.
Um, um, um, Miles Taylor is the person that Trump is accusing of being a traitor to the
country.
Um, Chris Krebs, um, was accused of, let's see, um, uh, being a wise guy as well as a fraud
and a disgrace.
Wasn't he appointed by Trump?
Yeah, he was, but either, either way, having an executive order, uh, to investigate you can
ruin your life.
Okay.
So maybe, uh, treason isn't on, uh, on the table right now, not nothing to say.
It can't be in the future.
Um, this is unhinged behavior and it's something that's really, really disturbing.
And it's also a portent, a portent of what's to come.
If, uh, we don't get our act together.
I look forward to new callers next week.
Hopefully people in the chat or on YouTube are able to listen to WBI at 7 PM Eastern time
next week, we'll be taking calls there.
So if you have a question or you'd like to make a comment or you're just up for chatting
based on whatever we're talking about next week and, oh my gosh, who knows what it'll
be next week.
But yeah, uh, please, if you've never called before, we'd love to hear from you.
We'd love to broadcast your beautiful voices far and wide from, uh, uh, 99.5 on WBAI as
well.
Um, I'm not sure if we'll be overtime.
No, we won't be over.
No, there's no overtime.
But thereafter, you're always welcome to be a new fresh face caller here on YouTube.
We love talking to people, regulars and brand new people that, uh, are out there.
Thanks for all of, uh, your comments and thanks for exploring telephone museums and, and the
telephone network proper.
It has changed a lot, but it's also very similar to the way it was.
There's a, you know, the taking old stuff, you know, just like it, it's just old.
Let's just leave it.
Yeah.
It's, it's phone network.
Just leave it.
I mean, that's more work.
We'll just charge the customers and yeah, the telephone company always gets their money.
That's true.
So yeah.
So the more things change, the more, the more they're the same.
And that's a good note to end on.
I think, uh, please write to us at off the hook O T H at 2600.com.
And, um, yeah, uh, we're going to announce some, uh, some hope speakers pretty soon.
Uh, uh, you're still welcome to submit your, your talk ideas and presentations, go to hope.net
for all the instructions.
Uh, we have some big announcements coming up.
Hope is taking place this August at St. John's, St. John's university.
And, um, it's going to be awesome.
It's going to be amazing.
Go ahead.
And, and if, uh, people buy their hope tickets this month, what happens, Emmanuel?
Oh yes.
Uh, 10% of your, uh, ticket cost will be donated to the electronic frontier foundation, which
is an incredible and fantastic organization doing all kinds of things.
Everything from, uh, sharing about exciting projects that protect privacy to litigating
and, uh, um, spreading, uh, awareness about people's rights and, uh, and how to handle things.
There's a lot of, uh, uh, changes, a lot of things that we're covering and that we're following.
And we really appreciate the EFF for all of their efforts for helping with guidance, things like traveling.
We're going to be talking a lot more about this in, in the weeks and months to come, and we hope you'll stay tuned.
And in buying that ticket, it does help contribute to, uh, the EFF and their mission.
So please, this would be a great month to buy a ticket to hope.
Yes, it would be.
And we do need some more ticket sales.
We've been kind of, uh, lax on saying that because we've been just so damn busy.
And we're terrible at self-promotion, unfortunately.
Uh, so please, uh, hope.net, um, uh, if, uh, you can't make it to the conference, we have,
uh, digital tickets as well.
Uh, and, uh, we, we, uh, have some fantastic speakers already lined up.
We'll be announcing that pretty soon.
Uh, also, uh, accommodations.
I understand the, uh, discounted hotel rate has sold out.
Uh, doesn't mean there aren't non-discounted rooms available.
You can try the hotels that are nearby.
Uh, and, uh, there are other hotels that will be announced as well.
In addition to the dormitories on campus, which is really pretty awesome.
It's a great way to be a part of the conference.
It's just stay on campus, uh, super cheap and, um, uh, well worth it.
So, um, hope.net has all the info.
It's going to be updated frequently.
Uh, and, um, we'll have much more to say.
Shout out.
All right.
I guess none of us has anything to say.
Shout out.
Lots of love to all the hackers out there.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Absolutely.
Good night, everyone.