You have reached a number that has been changed
or is no longer in service.
Please check the number you dialed and try or call again.
670-11.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bon Diddley Bom, for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bon Diddley Bom!
Bon Diddley Bom!
Bon Diddley Bom!
Bon Diddley Bom!
We're joined tonight by Kyle, all the way on the other side of the room.
Yes.
Take your time.
Out in Signalville, Signal Land, we have Alex.
You do indeed.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Well, it's been one of those weeks, hasn't it?
You guys following the news?
You follow the news at all?
No, no?
I make an attempt sometimes.
Uh-huh.
There's been a lot of crypto news lately.
Have you been following crypto news?
Because it's a word I can't say, but it has to do with a bat, and it's kind of crazy.
Um, yeah, and okay, there was this incident in Manhattan involving this poor guy who was held captive in a neighborhood downtown by two people.
Actually, maybe as many as three people, and there might have been other people coming and going.
And basically, it all boiled down to people who were in business together, and one person wanted the other person's, quote-unquote, Bitcoin password.
Now, those of us who know anything about Bitcoin know that it's not really a Bitcoin password.
It's, it's, um, um, how would you describe it, Alex?
It's, it's, it's a different kind of a passphrase from a different kind of organization.
Yes, they were obviously looking to access the wallet that was holding the Bitcoin or whatever digital assets.
This person who was, who was, I may be getting ahead of the story here, but the person was obviously kidnapped and abducted and held unlawfully for some period of time with the purpose of extorting that individual
so that they would provide a large number of Bitcoins or other digital assets to the captors.
It's, um, it's a bizarre story because of the way the media has been handling it.
Um, they treat the people very differently when they have money.
Now, this guy was described, the, the main perpetrator was described as the, uh, Bitcoin king of Kentucky.
And, uh, I'm not sure if that's a compliment or, or what exactly that is, but, uh, it's, it's an interesting way to describe somebody.
Um, they, they talked about all these, um, um, horrible things that were happening to the, to the poor victim from Italy.
Um, and, uh, they would cap it off by saying, but the, the, um, um, the perpetrator was known as a nice person.
And he was worth over a hundred million dollars as if that is a measure of how nice somebody is, how much they're worth.
I think we know that somebody can be worth an awful lot of money and still be a horrible, terrible, psychotic, insane individual.
I'm just speculating, but I, I'm, I'm pretty sure we all know that.
So anyway, these guys, um, uh, held this person captive in, oh, here's, here's another, um, um, issue.
It's got nothing to do with the story really, but you guys know the Nolita neighborhood.
I've heard that phrase so many times.
I swear I have never heard anybody describe that part of Manhattan as Nolita.
I've heard it described as a little Italy.
I've heard it described as Soho.
It seems like this, uh, Nolita name is, is just being kind of pushed right now.
Um, I don't know.
Is it a trendy thing or am I just out of it?
I think you're out of it.
Yeah.
I've been hearing it for years.
I've never heard you say it, Alex.
I've never heard you say, Hey, let's go to Nolita.
I don't know.
Tell us what Nolita is for those, uh, who are ignorant like me.
I believe it stands for North of Little Italy, right?
Is that, is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, you can figure it out.
I know that now.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you can figure it out.
It's kind of pieced together like that, but why do we need another name?
And we have Little Italy, we have, we have Soho, we have all kinds of, all right, whatever.
I'm getting off, off the, off the track.
Just think about how many syllables it is to say North of Little Italy.
Yeah.
I never had to say that.
Why would I say that?
It was on, say Nolita.
This happened on Spring Street, which goes through Little Italy.
So, you know, all right, you know, it, it, it doesn't matter.
Uh, so this kind of a thing though, where people are being abducted and held captive, uh, for
a password, it kind of seems to be the theme of where we are now, because whether you're
at a border or whether you're in, uh, some, some person's apartment in a made up part of
town, uh, it just seems like passphrases are what are being demanded of us.
And, you know, obviously this victim did not have to give that information out and, and
he did not, uh, and was able to escape fortunately.
Um, and, uh, of course people at, at borders in our definition do not have to give out that
information.
There's such a thing as privacy.
Uh, but this whole thing with, um, with, with, with cryptocurrency, it's just, um, you
know, it, it, it takes getting robbed to a different place, you know, before you'd have
your pocket picked, you'd even have your, your, your bank account accessed, um, through
some kind of cybersecurity issue.
Uh, but now if you have knowledge in your head to some massive amount of money, which
exists now because of cryptocurrency and how, uh, how it's able to, uh, uh, spike quickly
and become worth, um, I mean, Bitcoin has doubled in value since, since Trump got elected,
which is a crazy thing to acknowledge.
And I don't know what it means, but with almost everything that comes out of this administration,
I believe it's a scam.
I believe that people are, are, are ripping off other people and, um, uh, it's kind of
not real.
It's kind of, um, uh, vaporware.
Uh, but this is the reality we live in now where, uh, somebody just visiting another city
can, um, can be tortured for a password to currency that only exists in a digital world.
I don't know.
I just feel like, uh, the world's making less and less sense.
Alex, go ahead.
I mean, look, as, as somebody who works, uh, for the Ethereum name service, this is the,
this is something that's constantly on, on our minds.
This is, I, I, I would disagree with you in that.
Torture?
What is that on your mind?
Torture or, or vaporware?
These kids, well, I disagree with the, the idea that digital assets are all vaporware.
I know that's an unpopular opinion in some of these circles here, but digital assets
have real value.
They have real functions and they are highly sought after.
And that's why you see these kidnappings on the rise.
And this is a constant problem now.
And this is a constant, wait, how many times is this going on?
People are being kidnapped constantly?
Quite a lot.
I mean, if you've been following the news here, I mean, just this year, there's been,
I don't know, um, at least four or five of these kidnappings and, um, and extortionate
type of ransom demands.
Lots of these involve very severe physical violence as well.
In fact, in January of this year of 2025, one of the co-founders of a company called Ledger,
who wasn't even with the company anymore, was abducted in Paris, I believe, and held hostage
for a number of days during which he actually was mutilated.
And he had his finger severed and sent over to the company ledger to show that they had
really meant business.
He was eventually rescued, I believe, by the French authorities.
But this has happened time and time again, and it's been happening for quite a few years
now.
And these kidnappings and these, these ransoms are on the rise.
It's also not surprising to me in some ways as well, because if you think about these types
of criminals and the opportunities that they have, you know, people still will go out and
rob banks.
It's an, it's an odd thing, but if you listen to the police scanner, you know, banks are still
robbed in Manhattan and New York all the time, but you don't get away with that much money.
When you rob a bank, you'll get away with, you know, maybe $20,000, $30,000.
You're going to be on videotape.
There's lots of security.
You're probably going to get caught.
It's like a really kind of desperate thing that you do, and you're not going to get millions
of dollars.
These aren't the bank heists that you would see.
Whereas nowadays, if you focus on people that you know have a high number of digital
assets that are worth a large value or whether highly valued in fiat currency or real money
that is not cryptocurrency, if you hold that person hostage and you force them to essentially
open up their wallet and transfer those digital assets to you, you could be getting away with
millions of dollars in quite literally seconds.
That's how it works here.
So it's really not surprising to me that we see these kidnappings on the rise.
And in fact, in the United States last year, the Department of Justice had actually indicted
a criminal enterprise of bad guys that were going around the country and breaking into people's
homes, engaging in home invasions and unlawful imprisonment of people that were known to
have large numbers of digital assets, high values of Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever other
digital assets.
And all of this money is tractable to individuals because it's on a public ledger system.
This is what the blockchain is.
There's full transparency about what happens on the blockchain.
There are some blockchains that are associated with currencies like Monero that are a bit
more opaque and very, very difficult to trace.
But it's quite easy to figure out if you're not really careful about how you store your assets,
where and who they might belong to.
And that's why these kidnappings are on the rise, because these are high value targets.
You can get away with that money really, really quickly.
And then if you're smart about it, you would have sophisticated laundering techniques in
place so that when the money hits your wallets, it quickly goes out and is laundered and you
can turn it into fiat currency in some other way.
So these are sophisticated operations.
Is it the view of the cryptocurrency community that the onus is on the end user to be responsible
for their own security?
Because to me, this seems like a big security hole where you can just get a passphrase or
a series of numbers from somebody and get instant access to their entire fortune.
And there's nothing anybody can do about it.
You could do the same thing with a bank account as well.
Can you?
The FDIC kind of insures bank accounts.
And like you said, robbing a bank.
There's a big difference.
Robbing a bank.
Like you said, you get caught.
You're on video.
Here, there's none of that.
It just seems to me this is a massive problem and it doesn't seem like anyone really is doing
anything about it.
But but let's say let's say Rob has 10 million dollars in his bank account and I can access
his bank account.
And I'm not talking about going into the bank and accessing his bank.
I'm talking about accessing his bank account digitally.
You know, I can transfer money out of his bank account in the same way.
He may have some kind of FDIC insurance that would provide him compensation for the loss.
But that would be really only if the bank itself was robbed.
So it's just I think the fact that you can you can transfer so much money so quickly when
it comes to digital assets that makes it an attractive target as opposed to banks.
And of course, the the onus is on the end user to account for their own physical security,
because who else would do that?
Emmanuel.
Oh, well, we're not just talking about physical security.
We're talking about the security of their wallet.
We're talking about using the right the right methods to make sure that, you know, your
transactions aren't being hijacked or intercepted in some way.
And I think that's a bit much to ask for people who don't have a lot of technical ability.
Are we just assuming that everybody engaged in this has to be an expert as well?
Well, you should understand how the technology works.
You have to be very, very cognizant of scams.
Scams are increasing.
They're sophisticated.
They're very realistic.
AI systems are propelling the volume and velocity of these types of scams to make them even more
realistic.
But let's say you have an account on something like Coinbase or Bitstamp or, you know, one of
these exchanges.
They're obviously going to take extra special cautions to try to protect their users, but
their users are going to be continually targeted.
And because you may have information, like perhaps, let's say, I mean, and this is a really,
really big problem, I think, that has happened right now.
And I think it leads us to a very critical issue here with this show, which is that Coinbase
was recently breached over the last couple of weeks, or at least we learned about this incident
fairly recently.
And part of that breach, as I understand it, was the information about customers and their
private details, their addresses, their names, their phone numbers, their driver's licenses.
I think that that's data that was part of this breach.
And that's part of the KYC system, that is, to ensure that these cryptocurrency exchanges
are not used for bad purposes, like money laundering.
So KYC is standing for Know Your Customer requirements.
So the federal government, as part of these banking regulations, is requiring these cryptocurrency
exchanges to hold the private information of all of their users in their system and verify
that information through their KYC processes, through their Know Your Customer processes.
If that data is not held securely, as it does not seem to have been in many ways, perhaps
with Coinbase recently, that now raises a massive amount of what used to be just physical,
I'm sorry, what used to be just digital security issues, but now are resulting in potentially
physical security threats to holders of digital assets.
That's really serious.
That's really dangerous.
And it's not going to end well.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, this brings to light why I think I've, or one of the reasons I've always been really
dubious about cryptocurrency.
I mean, money itself has basically been digital since far before cryptocurrency became a thing.
You know, 30 years, 33 years ago now, the movie Sneakers was telling us about how it's
all just data now.
It's all ones and zeros.
And that was true, but there was also accountability built into the system.
The FDIC, the world's banks and treasuries and credit companies and everything were tracking
where all the digital virtual money was going.
So if you were robbed or if you were the victim or the perpetrator of something like this,
people could look back on the records and track this stuff down to a degree.
And then cryptocurrency came out.
And I think a certain crowd were really excited about it because let's decouple it from all
that.
Let's take tokens of exchange currency and bring it back to the individual to wrangle and let's
have blockchains and all this distributed stuff, which was interesting in concept.
But in practice, it becomes something like this, where it's not just the government or
the bank that has your info, it's everybody.
And that's going to put the physical security of people who are known to have a lot of these
video game points in their pocket.
And it's really, I don't think it's a positive development.
And, you know, I don't actually have $10 million in my bank account, but what little I do scrape
together, I think, will never, as far as I can control it, be involved in any of this
because I do not want to be in the Wild West again.
I do not want to be in the ancient societies where, you know, you had to carry around chunks
of actual gold and you're always going to be at risk of having, you know, getting knocked
over the head and having your bag of gold taken away from you.
Well, you know, it's, it's, I'll admit it's good for people who invest a little bit and
see a good return.
But I would advise anyone who is embarking on something like this, never invest more than
you can afford to lose.
It is very much like gambling.
It really is because things can go haywire at a moment's notice or things can double and
triple at a moment's notice.
Um, it's, that's when I say it, it doesn't feel real because that's not generally how,
uh, the world works as far as, um, um, uh, appreciation of value of anything.
Uh, so this is something that, you know, we're all learning about, but, you know, my concern
is that we're not really paying attention to the dangers as much as we should.
And when you have situations like what happened in Manhattan last week, um, it just points to
like, uh, like, uh, Alex said, a really serious issue, uh, that apparently is happening all
around the world and that needs to be dealt with.
Did you have anything else?
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I, I couldn't agree more.
And I, I think that the, but, but I, but I disagree with the characterization of, of all
of this just being related to gambling.
I think there are very real life reasons why holders of digital assets would want to, to
hold certain assets.
You know, there are tokens that have governance functions associated with them, especially
with respect to Ethereum, as opposed to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is really just about the value of the Bitcoin itself.
That is more akin, I think, to gambling, although it does have its use cases for transactions and
other things.
But Ethereum is a system, Ethereum is a blockchain system that allows for smart contracts and
interactivity on that particular blockchain.
What we're doing within ENS also has a lot to do with the protection of user privacy and,
and establishing user sovereignty over your own data, protecting your own data, making sure
things are private, making sure things are trustless, making sure things are permissionless
and out there and open and accessible.
We're, a lot of what's being built right now on the basis of blockchains is, is the vision
of the internet before it was corrupted by surveillance capitalism.
So I, I don't think that we should discount this entire world as being just a world of degenerate
gamblers.
It certainly has that aspect to it.
And I think if you go back to 2016, 2017, in the world of these initial coin offerings,
there were a lot of scams and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
But we certainly evolved from that.
And I like to think that we're on a right direction and trying to course correct where
the internet is going and where it's been.
We're trying to learn from our mistakes in terms of what we let happen to our data and
what we let happen to the internet.
And we're doing that on various blockchains.
Well, I'd like to see it just become more secure as far as people being able to transfer
money without fear that something is going to intercept their transactions, which happens
quite a bit.
I, you know, people should not feel fear about having knowledge in their head that, that can
be very much desirable because, you know, how the, the, this poor guy, how does he escape
that?
You know, you can, you can leave your bank card at home.
You can leave your, your login information somewhere else.
But, uh, if, if you're, you're, um, uh, Bitcoin accessing whatever you use, if that's something
that is always within reach and people know that you have it, uh, it just seems like it's,
you're, you're never safe.
You know, as long as, as long as you have that connection, you're never safe.
And a lot of people don't seem to, uh, for instance, I've, I've, I've, and again, I admit
I'm not an expert on this.
I don't have time to be an expert on this.
Uh, but, um, Alex, perhaps you can tell me when there's a wallet out there, digital wallet
out there, it's possible for anybody to look at that wallet and see what kinds of transactions
have been made with that wallet.
Is that, is that correct?
Not necessarily.
It depends on how the wallet is configured in certain ways.
Right.
So, you know, certain transactions may be traceable only back to an exchange and then the exchange
hosted wallets might be more difficult to figure out who's doing what with that.
So if you're on some kind of centralized exchange, like Coinbase, it might be more difficult to
track.
But if you have your own wallet ID and you're not going through an exchange as many people
did, especially in the early days, uh, I was told it was possible with that ID to see
all the transactions to, uh, you don't know what they're for.
You don't know the name of the person.
And what, but if you know that this person has this wallet ID, which you would, if they
gave it to you to give them money or something, you would then be able to see all the transactions
that they, they had with other IDs.
You still wouldn't know who they were, but you would know if the person was transferring
lots of money.
And, and to me, that's a, that's a flagrant violation of privacy, but it's, it's the norm
in this world.
And that's what, what bugs me.
Well, it's, it's a public ledger system on a blockchain.
That's what a, what a blockchain really is.
It's like a public ledger.
If you think about Ethereum itself, right?
It's like a gigantic spreadsheet operated by a computer that can be never be turned off.
Right.
You know, our, our, our dear friend Virgil, um, had, you know, when I got into this world,
he had described Ethereum to me as trying to solve some of the world's most boring problems.
Right.
And if you think about the problems that you can solve with a spreadsheet that exists across
the entire globe, those are the problems that Ethereum can solve.
And you can do a hell of a lot with that.
And it's, it's quite interesting and fascinating to see what builders are building these days.
And there's, there's a lot of that going on, but by virtue of it being a public ledger
system, there is not a lot of financial privacy attendant to those particular transactions.
But what it does allow you to do is have trust with the people with whom you are engaging
and transacting and knowing that, you know, the source of their funds was somewhat legitimate.
Um, it came or originated from someplace that, you know, you can track and trace all of this,
but when you do try to engage in some kind of technological measure of financial privacy,
you know, mixing your currency or routing it through something like tornado cash, well,
then the government doesn't like that because they want to see where all your transactions
are because, and, and starting in the Southern district of New York in this July, we have
the prosecution of the developers, the software developers of tornado cash, which was an Ethereum
based cryptocurrency mixing system that enabled financial privacy on the Ethereum blockchain.
So, you know, it's hard to, for us to, I think, have it both ways in this sense.
Well, I, I gotta tell you, just the concept of me using something called tornado cash, um,
I'm supposed to feel, feel serious about this. It just, it just seems really wacky.
And yeah, I love it. I love the chaos. I do. Um, but, uh, I just have to, have to warn people, uh,
be careful what you're getting into because it might not be what you think it is.
And that's, I'll, I'll leave it at that, but let's, let's move on to another, uh, crypto story
because boy, there were a bunch of crypto things that happened. Of course, I'm talking about, uh,
Donald Trump's insane $148 million meme coin dinner. You guys heard about this, right?
Oh yes. Did any of you go to this? Stop trodling Rob. Rob's just giggling, but, uh, you're not
answering. No? Yeah. All right. I didn't. I missed that. I was watching my hair. Uh,
yeah, well it was, um, it was a black tie gala at, um, his Virginia golf club. Um, and it's, uh,
for the, uh, biggest buyers of, uh, Trump's, Trump's coin. Um, the top 25 wallets, because
that's how you refer to people these days, the top 25 wallets were promised a private reception
and guided tour. Uh, there were 220 attendees, uh, amongst them were crypto influencers.
I gotta say by default, if you're a crypto influencer, I don't think I like you, uh,
just because of that label, um, industry executives, such as Sandy Carter of unstoppable domains
and former NBA star Lamar Adam, who used the occasion to praise Trump as the greatest president
and promote his own token Odom dollars or whatever. It's all just so sleazy. My God. Uh,
anyway, um, uh, 25 year old Nicholas Pinto, whose dad drove him to the event in his Lamborghini,
uh, left underwhelmed and still hungry. And you know, I feel for you. I feel for you. Nicholas
Pinto. He said the food sucked. Wasn't giving any drinks other than water or Trump's wine.
I don't drink. So I had water. Um, my glass was only filled once. Trump made only a brief appearance.
Uh, Pinto said he didn't talk to any of the 220 get a guest, uh, maybe the top 25, which is exactly
what the story reports. Yes. The top 25 wallets. Uh, all in all, Trump was there for 23 minutes.
He delivered a brief address, rehashing old crypto talking points, then left on a helicopter before
taking any questions or pictures with his meme coin contest winners. Uh, phones were not locked
in RFID pouches and security was lax. According to Pinto, once Trump left, they didn't really care
about anything else. I don't know. Uh, things like this really, um, really make me wonder just where
we're heading. Uh, you combine, uh, you combine cryptocurrency with the most corrupt president
in history. Where is that going to go? You know, I don't think it's good for the industry.
Does anyone? Gila?
I don't think it's good for anyone or anything. And I was earlier, I was reading something about the
gentleman who was, um, tortured in Nolita, which by the way, side note, um, there's a book I read as a
kid. I learned the term Nolita from a book from the late seventies. And, you know, it's not like
you're going to say, oh, it's that house. It's in Nolita. It sounds fancy. Uh, it's not new, but
that the Trump media organization has announced some kind of plan to raise, uh, 1.5 billion dollars
by selling shares of the organization and converting that into cryptocurrency. I maybe
specifically Bitcoin. I'm not a hundred percent sure. I fail to understand how this is not all
just a huge pump and dump scheme, which because there's no real oversight, no, um, uh, insurance
behind it. I, that's not the word I'm looking for, but there's accountability. Thank you. That's the
word. No accountability. Um, it's all made up. It's to me, and I apologize, Alex, but to
me, crypto reminds me of whose line is it anyway, where the numbers are all made up and the points
don't matter. If you say this is going to be worth $2.5 billion today, and then tomorrow it's
not worth anything. That's a real thing that's happening. And I also fail to understand how any
of the president of the United States actively attempting to enrich himself and his family
publicly in the middle of all of this flying to this event in Marine one, um, which by the
way, the food looked gross. I saw a picture. It looked gross. I, I fail to understand how
any of this is a move in the right direction. I don't think anyone's going to argue that it
is. I really don't. Not this, not this event, certainly. Um, but it's just, it's indicative
of the kinds of people who are attracted to this, you know, the people with dollar signs
in their eyes. And, um, I would just proceed with extreme caution. If you're venturing into
that world, extreme caution. Um, all right, moving on. Uh, I wanted to talk to you actually
just for a second about something that, um, I've been looking into recently because, um,
you ever message somebody you haven't talked to in a while and you don't hear back from
them and you wonder, do they hate you now? Or, you know, did they disappear or maybe their
phone is broken or all sorts of possibilities that, um, um, seep into your head. Uh, and you
don't have any information. You don't have an actual response. You can't find out. Of course,
you can always call the person, but for some reason we don't do that anymore. Uh, waiting
for an answer. How many of us have done that? We've texted somebody and you don't get an
answer. Well, if you do this on the app that we all know and love called signal, which is
encrypted end to end. And it's, you know, what all the cool kids use. Um, there is a more
than zero chance that the person is alive and well, and does not hate you, but has not seen
your message. Why is this? Because many times people stop using signal and they go to another
app, they go to another messaging app and they message people there. They might even
uninstall signal from their phone unless they delete their signal account. Their messages
are still going to their signal account and they don't even know it. And, and you assume
you will see the two check marks that indicate that the message has been received. However, the
check marks will not fill in, which indicates that the message has been read, but if they have opted
to turn that particular feature off, those, those, uh, check marks will never fill in, uh, because that
is an option to not have people know when you've read something, which I think is tremendously
intrusive right there. Uh, but this, this whole thing with, um, uh, with signal, I think it's a glaring
issue, glaring security problem, uh, maybe not a security problem, but just a, um, uh, a feature
problem where if somebody changes their mind as to what they are using and they have decided at one
point to use signal and they didn't delete their account, all the people that assume they're still
on signal are being ghosted and they have no idea that that is what's happening. Have you guys ever
experienced this or did you know this was part of how signal worked? Oh yeah. I'm a member of my
family, uh, tried signal, uh, you know, a long time ago I had, uh, I had encouraged them to use it and
they did for a little while and then decided to no longer use it and just uninstalled the app.
And when you are a signal user, um, uh, the, the signal basically goes to, um, lets every other
signal user know that, uh, when we're communicating with this person, um, use the signal protocol,
use the signal app, um, instead of plain old texting. And if you don't delete your account,
the signal still thinks that you're receiving your stuff there and, uh, and doesn't, uh, and doesn't
let people go back to just regular texting easily. And, uh, yeah, so it is, it is a usability,
uh, knit, I guess would be, uh, would be what it was called, but, um, and it can be a pain,
but it is one of those things that if you're going to stop using it, yeah, you have to delete
your account. You can't just uninstall the app and expect everything to work again.
Okay. But when do they tell you that? Because nobody told me that. And, uh, you know, I just was,
was looking around the net, seeing if anybody else experienced this. And I found a whole lot of
people have and it's caused real problems. And my question here is how could we fix this?
What kind of feature could they install? I'm thinking something that alerts you if a message
hasn't been read in a particular amount of time. Uh, but of course that would, um, uh, negate the
possibility of not having that feature where people know that you've read a message, which again,
I find to be intrusive. Um, it seems like the signal has some responsibility to let people know
that their message is going into a black hole, but they might not even have access to that
information. So, I mean, it could be just a design flaw in the way this technology is implemented,
but it's causing real problems where people think they're being ghosted and they're not,
and other people aren't getting messages. And it just, it adds to the disconnect that we're all
feeling where we can't figure out how to talk to each other anymore. And it's just, this is,
this is the perfect storm right here where you, you're, you're, you're doing the responsible thing.
You're using a secure service. It's, it's, it's encrypted end to end. And for whatever reason,
sometimes people decide they'd rather use something else. And it just feels like everyone's being
punished for, for people making that decision. Am I being too harsh?
I, I, I don't think you're being too harsh. I think that's a reasonable thing to expect from
a product like signal. Um, the only like one thing I could think of is maybe they could institute some
sort of, uh, if signal notices that you haven't signed in for a while, uh, it might, uh, it might
send you some sort of, are you still using this sort of message or send people, uh, sending to you
some sort of note that this person hasn't been seen on signal for a while. Other apps, uh, I know
telegram will, uh, let you know, if you look up your chat with somebody when the last time is they
were seen on the service. So when the last time they logged in or were using it or whatever.
And, uh, I think I, I don't know if signal does something similar, but that might be something
interesting to look at.
That's a good idea, Rob, actually. Uh, in fact, what signal does, um, once, once a month, I think
they send me a reminder to enter a pin and, um, I can, I can, uh, get away with not entering it,
but it'll keep nagging me. And if I enter the pin, it'll say, okay, I'll remind you again in a,
in a month. Uh, it's, it's somewhat annoying, but it proves that they can reach out and determine
that you are still there. And yes, something like that, where if you don't answer that question,
maybe send some kind of stock remark to anyone who has tried to message you in the last couple
of weeks that this person may not still be using signal, try reaching them a different way.
I, you know, that would solve the problem. I think yes, Alex, perhaps what we could do is take
a cue from the crypto world here. Oh, for God's sake, Alex, let it go. And we, we could, we could
mandate that all of these instant messaging applications have their kind of know your
user type of requirements where they, they warehouse all of this personal information and
data, their driver's licenses, their home addresses. And then it all gets leaked and, and, and, uh, the,
the dark web has it and all of our information is out there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, why not?
Right. I mean, it's already out there anyway. Right. And then, and then if somebody doesn't respond
to a signal message, we can, we can put something in the mail to them directly. Right. They've got
postcard from signal or, or, or telegram or something like that. I think, you know, somebody has got to
keep the postal service in, in play here. Moving on. Uh, the, um, Oh, by the way, uh, Gila, I just,
uh, found out that, um, no leader has only been around since the late 1990s. So it is new for me.
It's new. That's recent. Nothing to say. No, I mean, that's that, that's fair. It was part of a
really funny, how I met your mother episode long joke, which came out in what year? Hmm. Uh,
Oh six. Yeah. You see, I basically, uh, when I was a child, I memorized all of the little, uh,
town names within Manhattan. And I, I did that once. I didn't think they would be changing them.
So I guess I have to do it again. Town names though. Uh, what do you call them? Neighborhoods,
towns, villages, whatnot. Go ahead. When I was a kid, there were Italians in little Italy,
which is no longer the case. Demographically speaking. I know some who would disagree, but regardless,
we're not gonna get into that right now. Um, okay. So, um, you might've heard that, uh,
Trump's latest thing is to, uh, stop, uh, student visas from being applied for, from foreign countries.
Yeah. Uh, it's, it's part of his war on education, uh, and Harvard in particular. You know, I was looking
at this, um, Indian website, uh, which basically is addressing concerned college students, uh, and,
and the many questions they, uh, they have, what are the latest restrictions all about? How does this
affect me as an Indian student looking to study in America? What recourse is available? Uh, but here's
a question that really, um, uh, leaped out at me. Can my social media accounts really be used to deny
me a visa? And the answer is it does seem so. The Trump administration made global headlines in April
by canceling the student visas of hundreds of international students due to their participation
in pro-Palestinian protest on campus. Some had made social media posts in favor of the Palestinian cause.
American authorities have stated that students are given leave to study in America and not to engage
in political activism. Uh, several Indian students were hit by these visa cancellations. Uh, to be clear,
these, these, uh, moves were subject to legal challenges and were subsequently reversed. However,
they have established precedent as well as the general intent of the administration. And what
they apparently are doing now is going well beyond that and targeting people who have even criticized
the Trump administration, uh, in one of their social media accounts. But my question here,
and it seems to be something that nobody is really addressing. What if you don't have a social media
account? What if you say you don't have a social media account? What if you have a social media
account that is in a different name and doesn't have your real info in it? All the things that we have
been encouraging people to do over the years. What if you do that? You know, how do they know when you
apply for a visa, what your social media handle is? Where is that information stored? Unless you give it to
them, it seems fairly easy that you can just decline and not be a part of that. You can also
delete your social media accounts. So there's no record unless I go to, uh, you know, to look at the
Wayback Machine or something. Any, any, any thoughts on this, Alex?
Coincidentally, I was, uh, answering some questions from a colleague, actually a former colleague of mine,
who is a professor that is coming to the United States and has to apply for a visa.
And he asked me about the social media disclosure policies because this individual doesn't have any
social media accounts whatsoever, never believed in it, never used it, never touched social media.
And so I wanted to know, well, do I need to disclose my instant messenger accounts? There's a
signal account or a WhatsApp account accounts of social media. I mean, what would you guys say? I
would say, no, instant messaging is not a social media account, but that raised then the issue of
if you, if you stayed on your application and you go for your interview and you have zero social media
accounts and zero social media presence, does that in and of itself then raise a red flag to the
interviewer that you might be lying or you might be holding something back? Because I think
that's the outlier case these days. The people that don't have social media are, I think, by far the
minority.
So you're saying that we could actually be living in a world where you're a suspect if you don't
participate in this lunacy called social media?
Yeah, well, absolutely. And I'll give you another case study as to where, or rather an example as to
where this has happened before in the past. When I had to undergo a lifestyle polygraph examination to
obtain my security clearance many years ago when I worked in the intelligence community,
there were certain people, myself included, that were called in for extra questioning for
a separate session of the polygraph. Mine had to do with, with other issues, you know,
but there were a couple of people that had never used drugs before in their entire life. And on their
SF-86 information, they claimed that, you know, they've never used drugs, they've never touched
marijuana, they don't do this, they don't drink, they don't have any alcohol. And these were, you know,
very, very straight-laced people that were about to join the intelligence community. And because that was
the outlier, they were subject to additional questioning under a polygraph because it's somewhat
unbelievable to think that nobody has ever touched alcohol or marijuana or whatever the hell it is,
you know, throughout their entire life. So, yeah, you know, by not engaging in something,
you can subject yourself to additional scrutiny. Okay, but you're describing going into the intelligence
world, going into the United States, is it going to reach the point where they subject tourists to
polygraph tests? No, I don't think so. I think just administratively, that would be,
that would be an issue. But I wouldn't be surprised given that, you know, when I came back into the
United States, was it on Friday after being in Barcelona last week at JFK airport, when a massive
number of flights were coming in, there were literally two passport control officers working.
I mean, it took, you know, it was totally absurd. So it's just the idea of the amount of processing and
additional resources it would take to examine all of these people and their social media presence.
It's really no wonder to me that Trump is trying to just cancel student visas indefinitely and
indiscriminately. Because that just puts an end to the issue. You don't have to actually address the
real consequences of your decisions at that point. Rob, did you have something?
Yeah, I was at one point in a job hunt where an interviewer reacted with incredulity when I told
them that I didn't have a Facebook. I, of course, I'm an enthusiastic social media user,
but I've never been on that particular one. And they're like, what do you mean? Everyone has
Facebook. And, you know, I'm like, I use this other stuff, but not Facebook. And but like, my,
my personal social media has always been very findable and connected to my, you know, my, my legal
name, my, my, my pseudonym, my whatever. And I can also confirm that as someone who has never
done drugs or tried alcohol or any of that, like, that does make you the outlier in very many
situations. And it's kind of funny to think of people being considered for something like
the intelligence community, when they're worried about people having some sort of compromise on you,
that, that this would be like, a little too weird for them.
You know, it's interesting to say that, though, because I just recently had a conversation with
somebody, where I was asking, how come I never know, when there's a demonstration against whatever
it is, this administration has done, I find out about it after it's happened, I read about it in
the papers, but, you know, I'm looking online, I can never find out. And I'm told, are you on Facebook?
And I don't look at Facebook, I'm sorry, I'm not in that world. And I'm, I was told, well,
you're not going to find out then. So we have actually reached the stage where we're segregating
knowledge for things that people are actually interested in. And saying, if you don't use
the platform that meta is running, and give them your info and trust them and just dump all your
privacy there, you're not going to be a part of the community that's fighting those things. It
doesn't make any sense. It's so absurd. But we have to take a good look at how we get information out,
how we communicate with each other. Because if we're, if we're locking people out, because
they don't use a particular, a particular platform or service, we are hurting ourselves. And we're
hurting our society, I think. All right, Kyle, did you have something?
Well, I'm hearing so many different topics in this discussion. It's, it's, it's really interesting.
There's, there's many aspects to it. I'm thinking about the, the sort of outlier case Alex
was just talking about, but that, uh, I would just say may have something to do generationally.
Like you'd have to qualify because I think it comes in waves. There are people that were a lot
of the, that are, um, that grew up when, and never really got into this because it didn't exist.
There are people that grew up with it as a ubiquitous thing who are choosing not to use those
things. So those outliers may have different reasons and it may, um, fluctuate. So to have an,
as an, as an across the board rule, I think is, is sort of difficult. And I also was thinking about,
um, just generally how communication is suffering in, in the, uh, uh, I guess paradoxical or ironic,
uh, nature of that, uh, in contrast to how many different modes of communication we have.
Um, and I think, I do think that protest thing that you were just talking about is mostly because
of, um, the need for those actions to go where people are. And that's, uh, maybe speaks volume
for what I just said about communication suffering, uh, in general. If you're not actually able to
connect, if you're not comfortable, people are not, um, actually communicating openly, then,
um, it'll break down. And, um, if those modes change and shift over time, um, people have to be
aware and they can't be sort of stuck or locked in or, um, at the effect of things that aren't actually
working the way they're supposed to. Uh, but I, I just think that it's just a huge, um, uh, problem
in the midst of having so much ability. The cost of communicating is so much cheaper than it was
when, um, this is about telephone system. And, um, we really, we have to sort of answer,
answer some of these questions with, um, with some thought so that we are communicating because
I really think that's vital. And, um, uh, I personally think that you got to just do whatever
you have to, whatever's comfortable for you, um, as far as what you use and what you don't,
and also spread it out or, um, feel free to abandon things or, or just, uh, idle with your
use of them if things change or shift. And I mean, maybe that's not for you. Maybe you don't want to
subscribe to any of it. Um, it's amazing over time, what people do choose. I've had conversations with
people that were on one thing and then didn't, didn't really start something until, uh, start
using something else until some of these, um, decentralized systems started up so that there's
different, uh, choices that people make over their time. And I'm not, I'm not going to judge
them based on those choices. I mean, yeah, there are a bunch of activists I knew who used, uh,
Twitter, private messaging, direct messaging to plan their actions. And I didn't think that was
very secure. I don't think Facebook is very secure. Um, a lot of it seems nonsensical,
but I'm not going to judge based on that. It's, uh, we all have our choices. What I'm saying is
don't lock people out because you decide to do something else and don't shame somebody for using
something, uh, if you don't use it, but stay in communication. Yes. We have so many ways now
to communicate with people and, uh, we communicated better in the fifties when we only had telephone
lines. So, um, yeah, I want to close very quickly before we go to, um, overtime on, uh, channel 2600
on YouTube, uh, with this, uh, story about, uh, representative Marjorie Taylor Greene getting
into a spat with, uh, Grok, the Twitter AI. Um, yeah, basically, uh, a user, um, asked, uh, if,
um, um, based on, on what Marjorie Taylor Greene was saying, if she could be considered a Christian
and the bot said, whether she's really a Christian is subjective depending on personal and theological
views. Her faith appears genuine to her, but public actions create controversy.
Greene, of course, uh, got into an argument with, with, uh, with the AI saying, uh, the judgment
seat belongs to God, not you as a non-human AI platform. Grok is left-leaning and continues to
spread fake news and propaganda. When people give up their own discernment, stop seeking the truth
and depend on AI to analyze information, they will be lost. All right. So you and, uh, Elon just, um,
duke it out somewhere. I just, I just will watch from the, from the sidelines. We are out of time.
Um, you've been listening to off the hook here on WBAI. You can write to us OTH at 2600.com and
please support WBAI by going to buddy.wbai.org and pledging whatever you can afford on a monthly
basis, a small amount that you won't miss that will add up to a bigger amount every year and keep
us going. Uh, we'll be back again next Wednesday, 7 PM here on WBAI. Again, tune in at eight o'clock on
YouTube channel 2600 for overtime, where you can call us and, um, we can continue the conversation.
Now the corporation stopped. Stop pushing for school. Been a multiple shooting. Downtown at the bank. Reluctantly the panic.
Picking the cat's. But it did not affect. The steady set of jobs. Oh, the state office looked. It looked like Hollywood. With makeup, bleeding. Over the crowd. Whoa. He blew his line. Face in the camera. He suffered the fuss.
All I've had a tank
All I've had a tank
Even I took time
The most cyanide
Cyanide's on his side
He finally found
The big wall in his life
Shining up his engine
He just right up for it
At the top of the speedo
The front full done point
There's plenty of people
Running around
But come on
Hoping at best
One last stand
Machine gun
And pitchfork at press
Oh, for time
Even at some time
But it isn't so easy
So easy for no more
Chaining up his thing
At the top of the tower
The big horse is leaving
And you lost me
Driving your heart
Away with the flowers
All night I'm in it
I'm waiting for a horseman
And who's ever faithful
And who's ever faithful
I'm not the only one
I'm not the only one
I'm looking to say the facts
I'm watching the sky
For mankind's friends
Cold holds up here
Cold holds up here
Men are the only ones
For mankind's friends
Cold holds up here
Pearl holds up here
And why do you do so
Thank you.
And welcome, everybody here on YouTube.
Manual, I made it.
For some reason I seem to only be in one ear.
Well, maybe that's my ear, that's a problem.
Kyle, did you make it?
Somewhat, yeah.
Okay.
And out there in Signal Land, I see Alex.
Yes, here.
I see Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
And I see Gila.
Good evening.
And can we confirm?
We are on YouTube.
We sound good.
Okay, good, good.
Well, that was quite a lively conversation.
And now we're ready to share our conversation with our YouTube listeners.
Anyone want to add anything for the previous hour?
Crypto means cryptography.
Yeah, I still agree with that, though.
You know, I hate to lose that shorthand, but I think it's gone.
You could always make up another word, you know.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
And do we have a phone call?
All right, we already have a phone call before we even gave out the phone number.
We shouldn't allow that, I don't think, but...
We knew who that is.
Yeah, let's just get it over with.
802-321-4225 is our phone number.
Don't call it now.
And I think whoever it was hung up.
So, okay.
Well, now maybe they heard me and took offense.
802-321-4225.
So, may the best caller win.
Whoever calls first, you'll be the first.
And that's the person calling now.
Is it the same person who called before?
It is.
Okay, so we learned absolutely nothing from that.
And good evening.
I see we have a slight hum, but not anything near the hum we had before.
Who's there?
I hear a big hum, but I hear you fine, Emmanuel.
Okay, Rebel, let me ask you a question.
A few weeks ago, when we had the major hum, you said you didn't hear the hum.
And now that we have a little hum, you say that you hear the hum.
So, are you just trying to drive us crazy?
Well, I didn't hear it as much.
I mean, I didn't hear it as much, but I did hear.
And I sometimes hear like blowing, like static, like blowing kind of static.
Like when you talk, you know, sometimes when you talk, you'll hear like this.
Kind of a blowing static-like thing?
Yeah, people describe my voice that way.
So, that's what you're hearing.
What's on your mind?
Okay.
Okay.
I'd like to know, if there was such thing, back in the old days, I'm talking about like
in the 80s and 70s, when call forwarding was a thing, can you do double call forwarding?
Meaning, if you had a phone in Staten Island, and you had call forwarding, you forwarded your
line to somebody in the Bronx.
And they forwarded, yeah.
You can have what's...
Somebody in Queens called Staten Island, but it forwarded to the Bronx.
Can a person in the Bronx forward from his line to somebody in Manhattan?
Absolutely.
Well, ask yourself, ask yourself, why wouldn't they be able to do that?
You know, the phone company back then didn't have the ability to know that you were actually
originating the call someplace else.
They'd see an incoming call, and they'd follow the command that was programmed on that particular
phone line and forward it someplace else.
People used to have phone forwarding trees, you know, where it would just go from one place
to another.
But, you know, you never really gained anything from that because there were certain lines
that the phone companies drew called LATAs, local area transit, something like that.
Right, yeah.
And if you crossed that line, you paid an extra amount.
So it didn't matter if you were 50 miles from that line or 50 feet from that line.
If you called a phone on the other side of it, you paid the extra.
So unless you had some other type of service that you took advantage of and implemented call
forwarding there, there was no advantage to having these call forwarding trees.
If somebody knows different, please correct me.
But that's how I remember it.
Well, I mean, you can't call forwarding trees.
I mean, don't businesses kind of do that?
Like, you know, you're in Staten Island, you call the Bronx number, but, you know, they
had it forwarded to Queens, but, you know, the Queens number had theirs forwarded to Manhattan.
So when you're calling, you think you were calling the Bronx from Staten Island, but you're
really calling Manhattan.
Well, yeah, and that was all the same zone.
So there was no problem doing that.
But, of course, businesses would always pay by the minute.
They'd pay more.
So business lines were more expensive.
Right.
I mean, that's why businesses do it now.
Like, for example, I called a doctor's office here in Queens.
I called a regular local, you know, 718 number.
I didn't get the doctor's office.
I got some answering service.
Well, not answer, but just the main number for their clinic, I guess.
And, you know, I don't know.
I guess that's forwarded to whatever.
What time did you call them?
What time did you call them?
Oh, I called it during the day.
So maybe it was code forwarded and busy, where if the person is on the phone and the doctor's
office in Queens.
Or they might have been, you know, all out for lunch or something.
Right.
And code forwarding no answer.
Uh-huh.
Or they can just program it to go.
Yeah, they can do things like that.
That's very common.
Right.
Let's see.
To me, the hum, I'd like to demonstrate.
Well, people now have phone numbers, like, people move from Manhattan to Queens, and they
still have their Manhattan number.
Uh-huh.
You can bring your number with you almost anywhere now.
Right.
You know, it's just like, you know, everything's like, what else?
Um, let's see.
Maybe prepare next time, Rebel, for what you need to say.
You have 30 more seconds before we move on.
Okay.
All right.
Look, how did, do you know about computer networking?
Like, back in the oldies, how did computer networks, like, what was the topography of,
like, a, um, of a Ethernet?
Like, you had five computers at one location, or in, let's say, it's a local area network,
in one room.
Um, but then you had five computers in another room, and another five computers in another
room, all connected to the same mainframe, or whatever, whatever.
Do those, do each of the five computers hook up into, like, some sort of a special box or
switch, and it's like a node, like, on the computer system, you can know what room that
computer was in.
Like, if somebody emailed you, you know what I mean?
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but, uh, you would know what computer you were
on, or, uh, the, the network would know, assuming it's a, it's a full computer, not just, you
know, a terminal connecting to the network.
Like, a terminal connecting to a mainframe, let's say.
Like, in college, I had this.
Right.
Where there would be ten computers in one room, ten computers in another room.
Yeah, your, your terminal would have an ID attached to it, so anything you did at that
terminal would, uh, would have that stamp on it.
Right.
And that ID would be, uh, those group of terminals in that one room.
Another ID would be another group of terminals in the other room, the other place.
And then, now, how does that work?
I mean, like, how does it, like, each room, each group of terminals have come into, like,
a special thing before it goes to the mainframe server or whatever?
It often would require you to understand a little bit more about the building and the
way, um, the overall campus, let's say, is set up and where the edge and core of the
network are defined.
And some of what you're asking also has to do with the structure or structured cabling,
like, how many cables go where for what size of a building or series of buildings.
And then, how, um, directly they're connected to what you're talking about, like, where core
equipment would be or a mainframe would be.
And, um, if there's a switch in one building that is, uh, collecting all of the
terminals connections and then connecting directly, uh, to another building or another part of
the network that might be identified somewhere, but you as a user would have to discern that
and, uh, gather that information versus people that, uh, work on that and designed it.
They would map that out to facilitate constructing it.
So, yeah, you're kind of, you have the right idea.
It just depends on how many terminals, because when you exceed a certain number of ports on, on, on,
on distribution hardware, like an edge or other sort of switching system, you exceed the capacity
and you'd have to have several of them.
And then they have to have a link that actually gets to that other equipment.
Like you're talking about where a course, which would gather everything and be, um, connected
to larger machines, like, uh, as you said, a mainframe system or, and now nowadays, a lot
of it would be like probably connected through that core switching and internet uplink to other
sorts of cloud services, depending on again, how it's designed.
It reminds me of my, my first ever experience with computers at, uh, at my old high school,
Ward Melville high school, um, where, um, they had a computer room and, uh, there weren't
any computers in the computer room.
They were just terminals and they weren't terminals with screens.
They were, they were printed terminals.
Uh, these, uh, what were known as deck writers.
They printed 300 baud on computer paper using dot matrix.
I'd never seen anything like that.
Uh, and it was really interesting.
And every one of them had a particular label.
Uh, so, um, I, you know, I'd have to find my old printouts, which I still have somewhere
and see how they labeled each terminal.
It might've been TTY or something like that.
Probably was TTY.
Uh, and each, um, um, each school had a room like the room at my high school.
Uh, some had even slower terminals that went 110 instead of 300.
Some had, um, uh, had CRTs instead of printers, but they all had, um, I believe it was,
uh, called a multiplexer, uh, that basically, um, coordinated all the signals from all the
terminals and sent them down the modem to a place called lyrics timesharing, uh, which
is where the computer was.
And it was where all the high schools on Long Island, uh, would, would basically connect
and they'd be able to talk to each other.
Now, every one of those, those schools had their room labeled.
So I guess to answer your question, yeah, you know, you would, you would label the room,
uh, a particular, in our case, you labeled it Ward Neville High School.
You'd, you'd label it Half Hollow Hills High School.
You know, you, you label all kinds of different things depending on who was using it.
And then in that room, each terminal would have its own label as well.
So anything you did, if you, uh, use the, for instance, the, uh, talk program, this
is on a PDP 10, um, you would, uh, show up as coming from a particular, uh, teletype.
And it literally was a teletype then, uh, and, uh, what, what, uh, particular school you
were coming from or, um, uh, other routing information.
And, uh, that was magic.
That was really magic to see all that unfolding and not have any experience, uh, with computers
before.
And, um, that magic, you know, it's still out there.
You just gotta, you gotta look for it.
And I think you, uh, you should keep exploring that, Rimbledon.
At Hope.
Were you talking the whole time?
No.
Okay.
I was not saying maybe it'll be at Hope.
Maybe it'll be at Hope.
Yeah.
It's possible.
It's possible.
What about on a wide area network?
A wide area, like Blockbuster Video.
They have like two or three terminals in each store.
Not anymore they don't.
They don't.
Why do you pick something that's out of business?
I don't know.
Well, no, I'm saying as an example of old Todd, like in the nineties and stuff, how he did it
before cloud computing, before the internet, like they had, each store had like two or
three terminals.
Did they identify each store to their mainframe in wherever, whatever state it was in?
I've talked too much.
Does anybody else want to take this one?
I think it's just basic networking building blocks.
The way it's always worked is kind of the way it still works, where, you know, individual
computers will connect to a small subnetwork and a bunch of those small subnetworks will
connect to a bigger subnetwork.
And those bigger subnetworks will connect.
And, you know, you go, you go further and further along that line until you've got the
really big backbone networks that connect the networks of networks of networks of networks
together.
And, you know, it's just the scale of it.
It was on small scales back in the day.
It's kind of that way now.
Okay, Rebel, I hope that was helpful.
And please keep us in mind for your next series of questions, which undoubtedly will be similar
to this one.
Have a good night.
And our phone number is 802-321-4225.
Hurry up and call because people call quickly and then we can't talk to you because you wind
up going to voicemail.
Yeah, it all depends on the connectivity type.
And I think he was starting to get at intranets, how companies basically create their private
network using uplinks.
Oh, he was evolving in front of our lives.
Yeah, we're going through it.
Alex, go ahead.
No, I think it was basically just he was talking about land versus land issues where lands are,
you know, the tricks in the name, right?
It's local area network as opposed to wide area networks.
So the local area networks always got some kind of physical connection, whereas the wide
area network maintains that connection through some kind of externality, like a lease line,
you know, back in the day where the Internet or VPNs, things like that.
You guys think the Internet was a good idea?
I mean, I'm starting to wonder.
Yeah, I know.
It's not too late to destroy it.
A friend of mine once asked if maybe teaching Santa to think in the first place was a bad idea.
So somebody called and hung up.
Was it the same person who called and hung up the first time?
So there's a series of people calling and hanging up.
I guess I guess people get impatient if we don't talk to them immediately.
Listen, if we pick up the phone and we don't talk to you immediately, it means you're on hold
and we're going to get to you.
Yeah.
You might only get one chance because, you know, it's competitive.
And we have another phone call.
All right.
And good evening.
You are on Off the Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
Hello.
This is Luachu from Washington, D.C.
I hear the hum again.
Yeah, I don't know what to tell you.
It's weird because we don't hear the hum when we pop the channel up without the phone.
And we did last time.
And now we hear it a little bit, but we don't hear it as much.
If you can tolerate it, we can hear you.
Hey, I mean, as long as you're intelligible, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, this is...
I need a new dial pad for my 2500, which I...
Go ahead.
Yeah, let's hear it.
Go ahead.
Oh, I was going to hear your...
Yeah.
Are we on delay as well?
It sure seems that way.
Why don't you tell us what you'd like to say?
It might be a problem with me because this is an internet phone.
It's not a landline, which would have low latency.
Okay.
But this is the 72 type dial pad, which is not the one that has buttons that push it all the way.
It just...
It'll be a little click.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
There you go.
Understood.
Thank you.
Okay.
Wow.
Yeah.
Something interesting with this dial pad.
It seems to me that with this one, the 72 type one, I can actually dial faster than I might with just a touchscreen on a mobile phone.
Let's try this number.
Open up.
Restart.
I don't know what's going on.
Okay.
I just, I just, I was just demonstrating how fast I can dial.
Yeah, but we didn't hear anything.
Okay.
You couldn't hear anything?
We can't hear touchstones if that's what you expect us to hear.
No, we heard nothing.
Yeah.
I was just demonstrating how fast I can dial.
Well, you dialed so fast that it was inaudible.
Hmm.
That, we hear that.
Yeah, we hear that.
Fine.
Those are touchstones.
We're going slow.
We hear clicks.
Oh, well.
Yeah, we hear a little clicks.
Interesting.
So maybe when you do it fast, there's no tone.
Oh, very fast to me.
Oh, well.
Yeah, there's something going on here.
There's a mystery.
Oh, well.
Alex has something to contribute.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, so let me ask you, Kohler, if when you're practicing dialing fast, does it actually register
as a number dialed, or do you still receive a dial tone after dialing all of those fast
numbers together?
I did.
I can dial out that fast.
I did dial that fast when I was calling your number, yeah.
Well, it must be a quirk with my ATA.
I think some of the settings were...
I changed some of the settings previously to try and get the broken dial back.
The dial pad working better, but oh well.
Well, we have a phone, too.
Should we try and dial that fast to see if we have the same problem?
Go ahead, Kyle.
I don't know if we can dial it.
Did you hear that?
Kohler, did you hear that?
Yeah, I could probably do it faster.
But you heard the tones.
Why don't you try it one more time?
Who?
The caller or us?
The caller.
The caller.
Okay, go ahead.
Try it one more time.
Okay.
Here we go.
No, I just hear little clicks.
Can you dial half the speed that you just dialed now?
Maybe not as fast.
We heard one touch tone.
Now, what if you dial it really slowly?
I think it's because of the duration that I'm holding it down.
I need to hold it down longer for it to register on your side of the line.
That's bizarre.
Yeah, I heard that.
That was 1-800-555-1212.
No, that was 802-321-4225, the number for the show.
And that proves I don't know touch tones.
See?
Some people do.
Some people can do that.
I cannot.
Some people could, yeah.
I remember fiber was really good at that.
Does anybody want to try?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Let's do one more.
Do one more number.
A well-known one.
Are you saying you can read touch tones, Alex?
Sometimes I can figure it out.
Okay.
Kyle, why don't you send a number his way?
What?
Just a number.
One number.
Just any.
Just one number.
Let's see if he gets it.
What number was that?
Four.
That was a four.
It was a five.
That was close.
Okay.
Yeah.
Close doesn't cut it.
Close doesn't cut it.
Caller, do you want to be tested on this?
No.
I have no idea.
All right.
See, I'm not alone.
I'm not the only one that doesn't know touch tones.
I know pulse.
I can do pulse on a good day.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
It's just a pulse for each number, right?
Well, yeah.
You don't have to minimize my skill.
Yeah.
It's, you know, I studied this and I've gotten better at it.
Oh, yeah.
My ATA should support dialing with my flash hook.
Uh-huh.
I remember the day I discovered that, that I could flash the switch hook on a phone and
dial numbers.
And, of course, the first thing I did was dial 11 to see what would happen.
And I got some angry operator somewhere.
But it was a great way around.
Do you remember phone locks that used to be on rotary phones?
Uh-huh.
Teachers would do this.
I guess they had phones in the classroom.
And they put a lock on it so you couldn't actually dial.
But if you knew the trick where you flash a switch hook, you just would have to get good
at flashing it the right number of times.
And you could call anybody.
I used to do something at Staples.
They had, like, a phone that you would be able to pick up and it would dial customer service
for you or something.
And then it had no phone pad, no dial pad, rather.
So, you know, you couldn't dial from it.
But if you got them to hang up on you, you could get a dial tone.
And then I would use the switch hook to dial out from Staples and make long-distance calls.
Well, you're very good at getting people to hang up on you.
So I have no doubt that you did well with this.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's right.
I was also in the days of the...
Sorry.
Back in the days of the analog phone system, after a phone call, when the other party hung
up, you would get a dial tone again.
And I think that stopped when everything went over to ESS, where when the other party hung
up, you would just get a deadline and you would have to hang up and pick up your phone
again if you wanted a dial tone.
One of the best practical jokes that I recall friends of mine playing on other friends of
mine, or one person in particular, was convincing them that they were doing that, and that when
the person hung up, it was tripping down to their dial tone, and that allowed them to
make calls anywhere in the world.
And in actuality, what it was doing was tripping down to his own dial tone, and he made all kinds
of calls all around the world and got an immense phone bill the next month.
Or his parents did, and he was grounded.
Yeah, good times.
Good times.
Anything else, caller?
I'd like to bring up a video I just saw on YouTube today, it's from a week ago, it's
called Old Payphones Get New Life, Thanks to Vermont Engineer, by, from the channel, MyNBC5-WPTZ.
It's about this electrical engineer who started his own mini phone company, you know, he just
had a bunch of old rotary phones.
He wired them, so they hooked them up to a cellular modem, and just let people make free
calls on them, you know?
Similar to, what's that, what's that place?
I forgot what they, I forgot who they were, but they were doing something similar around
the Bay Area in California, I think.
Yeah, I think I know who you mean.
I think I do.
Yeah, they were in the magazine.
I don't think any of us know the name, though.
There are several projects like that, regionally, people will take an interest, and this is something
I really think is important, or it's a counterintuitive way for, I think, especially Americans to look at
infrastructure, specifically stuff that was traditionally structured around a private business, and providing
things free of charge, or just making them work as a community effort is, it's actually, it's relatively
easy to do, especially with stuff that's there, that's just sitting.
If you want to make a smaller version of it, or one with limited functionality, but functionality
nonetheless, it's worthwhile.
You could maybe just provide a little teensy bit of what that service ever was under a traditional
business model, but it's at least not just falling into disuse, even though it hasn't fully
decayed, if that makes any sense.
I mean, I'm thinking of phone lines specifically, because upkeep and all that is hard, but I would
argue even under those business models maintaining this, they maybe weren't maintained as well
as some of these efforts, but there have been a variety of different efforts to revive infrastructure
like phones that are just sitting, and not really being used, and yeah, it's cool.
It's cool to talk about, and if more of them worked, maybe we'd actually have a phone booth emoji.
You're pushing for that, right?
You want a phone booth emoji?
It just occurred to me the other day.
How do we do that?
Do we know the person in charge of emojis?
It's a Unicode consortium.
How do we find the consortium?
Where do we track them down?
There's actually a whole, Alex knows, but yeah, there's actually a whole process you
go through to propose new emoji, and then they consider them or whatnot.
Well, instead of phone at the top, it should say 2600.
Well, it could do that, but Alex, tell us more, Alex, because you know the consortium,
apparently.
Yeah, there was a process to do this, and I had a colleague who proposed the troll emoji,
and I managed to go through the process and get it sorted out, so he would be a resource
in this for sure.
All right, and what's the process?
Is it Enviral Fund?
I don't remember exactly, yeah, I don't remember everything he had to go through, but there
was some submission-type thing, you know, as Rob indicated.
I don't remember exactly what it was, but I do know somebody who proposed one and got
it through.
Well, in seriousness, it's an iconic piece of, like, a utility, and it seems unfair that
they were supplanted by phones that use emojis and actually never got a proper due.
That's all, in seriousness.
It's a nod to the past.
It's a recognition of old technology, and it symbolizes communication.
It's what we all should be embracing.
Even if it's, like, trading books or turning into, like, a mini library or some kind of other
kind of art installation, they're worthwhile, and people recognize them.
We really do appreciate them here, and they're in all parts of the world.
So if you have one that you can access, make use of it, turn it into a community good.
But with regards to the consortium, Alex, how do we summon them, and is there some kind
of a ritual that we need to engage in?
Because we'll do it.
I think I might have some contacts over there through this person, too.
So that might be the place to start.
Okay.
Well, if it involves lighting an open flame, do that outside.
Yeah.
We don't want that.
It usually is.
It usually does, so.
All right.
All right, Cole, any final words?
Yes.
Just check out Old Payphones Get New Life.
Thanks to Vermont Engineer on YouTube.
Pretty interesting video.
And also, System Source, the computer museum at System Source in Maryland.
They're going to be having an Apple II conference.
I don't remember exactly what it's called.
But I've seen it.
I really do not want to run the risk of butchering their name.
Okay.
But check it out.
Okay.
In the Washington DMV area like me.
Okay, great.
Well, thanks so much for the call.
And we'll be in touch.
All right.
Take care.
All right.
And just remember, you know, all the idiotic people running our government with, uh, to
bowing down to Trump.
You've got to realize, there's a, there's a, it takes a certain amount, if you have a certain
amount of intelligence these days, you know, you'll figure this guy is not who he says he
is, who he should be.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
There's only the idiots who have to support him.
All right.
Thanks for your, thanks for your call.
All right.
Good night.
Take care.
All right.
Uh, 802-321-4225 is our telephone number.
Go ahead, Alex.
I think the next caller should have to demonstrate to us, uh, how slowly they can hit the touch
tones.
Just to kind of balance.
Do you really want to assign homework to callers that haven't even called us yet?
Yeah.
I mean, uh, usually do that after they call us.
Let's see.
I want to see like a slow dialing contest here.
All right.
If that's, if that's what people want, 802-321-4225.
I think that's just called toning the conference.
Exactly.
Yep.
And I think you need to explain that, that term to people who might not know what a conference
is.
Yeah.
You have to explain that term to people who might not know what that is.
Okay.
So back in the day, uh, we would have, uh, teleconferences in the freak community.
Um, and these would be, uh, gathering places where people from all over the country could
call and just chat on a, on a shared line by some means or other.
And, uh, people, uh, trolls actually, uh, not to the emoji would call these things and
just hold down a touch tone.
So nobody on the line could hear one another.
And that was called toning the conference.
We didn't have much of an imagination back then as far as naming things, but, but it,
it, it, it's lasted.
You can still do it.
You can still tone people, I guess.
It's just a little harder.
Yeah.
That person was called a toner.
No, don't let him into the conference.
He's a toner.
Yeah.
Among other things.
Um, I do have this book from the eighties about TV theme songs, and there was a section
in the back about how to play TV theme songs on the touch tones.
Oh yeah.
So if we, you know, if, if we get to a point where we really need to fill some time, we
could, you know, play the Adams family on the touch tones.
Well, Mary had a little lamb is too.
I can do that one.
I can do that one.
Two Oh nine, nine.
I think that's what it is.
Nine, eight, one, two Oh nine, nine.
Yeah.
You just have to, you know, do it at the right speed.
So 802, three, two, one, four, two, two, five.
Well, with, um, with cell phones, I don't think you can determine the speed.
I think it's, it's all set at a particular predetermined length.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I don't know if holding down a button on a touch screen does anything anymore.
It is like the caller was saying, um, touch screens are not as precise.
You can't, you don't have as much control when you're, when you're dialing.
Um, it's, it's the reason that, uh, I think people are starting to revolt against touch
screens in automobiles because, you know, you need buttons and switches when you're driving
a car so you can feel what you're doing.
Okay.
Um, this is me.
I think.
Okay.
I'm calling on my cell phone.
If I turn down my microphone, it'll be a lot less confusing.
Except not to me because I'm hearing myself a half second later.
But what I want to do is try playing the touch tone song.
Um, hang on.
My screen disappeared.
Okay.
God damn it.
It's harder when you can't hear it.
Hang on.
Okay.
You get the sense.
You get the idea.
Yeah.
Was that 981-2099?
What now?
Was that 981-2099?
I don't know what you're saying.
Well, what do you mean?
Those are the numbers I was hitting.
I was going 085 back and forth.
That's all I was doing.
Oh, you're really bad at this.
Identifying touch tone.
I guess so.
But if I had, if I had a landline, I'd be able to do that very easily because I can hear
it.
You know, it's just one more thing that's gotten harder with cell phones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We can pull in on our landline.
Yeah.
Well, you have to know the tune.
You have to study it.
Okay.
We're going to close things up if we don't get more calls.
So 802-321-4225.
Got a couple of minutes and I don't mind early night.
That'll be nice.
Yeah.
And if you don't want to call us on the phone and talk to us, you could always call 833-WBAI-NYC
and throw in on WBAI's fundraiser.
Keep us going or go to buddy.wbai.org and keep us going that way.
BAI still needs your support, still needs every bit of support that's available out there from
its generous listenership.
It does.
And I do want to, speaking of listenership, say hello to the 48 people who are currently
with us online, we're glad you're here and, pardon me, I have a hiccup.
Um, yeah.
Can we get one more like?
There we go.
You want me to pick that up?
And good evening, you're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Okay, if nobody else will call in, I guess I'll call in again.
Well, you realize, Rebel, this is next week's call for you.
So, use it now.
Uh, but you can't call next week.
Okay, let's see.
You understand that, right?
If you call next week, then you'll be banned, and that just keeps getting worse.
So, okay, another Rebel call tonight, but that means no Rebel call next week.
Go ahead.
Okay, let's see.
Um, calling Verizon is very annoying, um, because they don't think, oh no, what do I want to say?
Um.
Why don't you ask this question before you pick up the phone?
Um, I forgot.
I was going to give it to you.
Um.
I can't hang up because this is legally his call, you see.
So, yeah.
Let's see.
I should have been better prepared.
Um.
You've, you've, you've screeched the show to a dead halt.
Do you realize that?
We can't move forward now.
Um.
You realize, why don't you get a wired look?
Okay.
This is June's call.
Who pays for, okay.
Why does WBI have an 800 number?
Aren't they going to, why do, why would they need to pay for the.
They don't have an 800 number.
We have the 800 number.
No, no.
They do too.
So, calling to donate.
Why would you have a number that you have to pay for to get donations?
Well, if, if, if we can somehow have an 800 number that's donated to us, I imagine they
can have the same thing.
They're a lot bigger.
So, who, oh, so somebody's paying for all their calls?
Sure.
Somebody has to be paying for everything.
So, somebody's paying for, for these calls.
Hmm.
I see.
Look, because it's like 10 cents a minute when you're calling me, Andrew.
Like, if I called the 800 number for this show, I, I, you, whoever's running that 800
number, they would be paying 10 cents a minute or something like that.
I, I, I couldn't tell you.
I have no idea how much it costs or who's paying for it or, or, or what.
We're just the voices on the other end.
You can't do a CNA on an 800 number, can you?
A CNA?
Do they even still exist?
I don't think they do.
No, like, have them a name and address.
Like, you could go to a phone number and find out who, like, 802-321-4225.
Oh, that belongs to Google.
You got us.
We're Google.
But, but you go to an 800 number and see what company that 800 number belongs to.
Yep.
Historically, there were ways to do that with, uh, with a toll-free number.
I don't know how much luck you'll have with it now, just as, uh, the same as with, like,
trying to CNA an individual.
CNA, by the way, for those, uh, who are frustrated that they're not getting an explanation, uh,
stands for customer name and address.
And it was a number that every phone company would have where you would call up.
Sometimes you need to use an authorization code.
Sometimes you wouldn't.
And you would simply give them a phone number, and they would give you the name attached to
that phone number, and if they had it, the address.
The opposite of what information would give you.
And it was, it was, uh, widely valued by hackers everywhere.
Hackers and phone freaks would, uh, trade CNA numbers and use them so they could, uh, uh,
basically see what particular numbers belong to whom.
Especially if it's, like, a modem that picked up during a scan, or a fax machine, or something
else that was, um, uh, mysterious that, um, we needed more information on.
There's the Kohl's Directory.
Yeah, the Kohl's Directory did the same thing, pretty much.
It was, uh, it was a massive book, but you had to subscribe to that, and that was expensive.
There were some libraries that actually had Kohl's Directories.
Um, I think I might have one somewhere.
Uh, and they're, they're bigger than phone books, actually.
They're bigger than phone books, and they're hardcover.
Bring it to Hope.
I, I should bring the massive book to Hope?
Yeah, that sounds like fun.
I, I could do that, I suppose.
Well, I'm going to be going to a, uh, uh, in this, in July, I'm going to be going to
an odd country this, this summer, um, besides going to Russia again, you know.
Okay, hold on, hold on.
An odd country.
I think we should try to guess.
Uh, will you, will you let us guess?
Okay.
Uh, but you got to give us some, some kind of a hint to start with.
Well, it's a stand country.
Well, that narrows it down quite a bit.
I'm going to go with Tajikistan.
Uh, you're close.
No, I'm either right or wrong.
It's not a close thing.
Well, no, it's not right, shall I tell you?
No, no, we got, we got people here.
Go ahead.
Who's next?
Is it Uzbekistan?
Oh, you said Uzbekistan?
That's what he said.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
Damn it, Rob.
Oh, wow.
Way to go ahead.
Way to make me look like a fool.
I'm going to remember that.
And then up to, and then up to Nova Sibirsk, Russia, which is the capital of Siberia.
Yeah.
Third largest city of Russia.
And that might be your new home if you're not careful.
So, uh, yeah.
When are you doing this?
July?
July?
Probably July.
Maybe, yeah, probably July.
Well, it's not winter, at least.
So, uh, there's that.
Well, no, that's, uh, I'm not going to go in, like, September or October.
But, uh, Nova Sibirsk, and it's going to be interesting being, like, 10 hours ahead of New York City times.
Uh, yeah.
Yeah, I guess it will be.
You'll have that on us.
Anything else, uh, before we wrap it up for next week?
Five, 500, 500 miles from Russia, 500 miles from China, 500 miles north of Afghanistan?
Pretty interesting.
I'll, uh, tell you something interesting.
Um, you are going to be pretty far away from Moscow when, when you go to Siberia.
Uh.
Oh, yeah, I know.
But if you, if you go to a train station, you will note that all of the clocks are on Moscow time.
Because that's how they work.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
They, they, basically, every clock in a train station is coordinated with the Moscow time zone.
Other clocks in other parts of the, of, of villages will be on local time.
But in order to keep the trains from confusing everybody, they have everything on Moscow time.
Oh, so the train Siberia Express runs through there, I'm sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sure does.
Yeah, and that's, um, uh, yes, the third largest city I visited Moscow, the largest city in Russia
a few years ago, then I visited St. Petersburg two years ago, and now I'm going to visit
the third largest city in Russia.
Wow.
Well, you pretty much will have seen it all by then.
Not much left.
Yeah, and it'll be the last time, because it's really, I just applied for the visa again,
because the visa expired last year, so.
Well, I hope they let you back in.
Yeah.
All right, well, Rebel, this is, uh, going to do it for next week's call.
I'll, uh, talk to you again, hopefully in two weeks.
Okay.
All right, be well.
And our phone number remains, 802-321-4225.
This is what happens when people don't call.
We get people doubling up, and, um, now I got to keep track of that.
So, uh, let's give it a couple minutes for people to call in.
Go ahead, Agila.
Um, our friend and frequent commenter, Funsox, was talking about calling in.
He said, but I don't have anything to say.
I said, that's never stopped anyone before.
Um, Funsox says, the only thing on my mind is being scared to visit the USA at the moment.
Um, so I wanted to share that.
So, you know, save you the international call.
But, um, just putting that out there.
Okay, we have a phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off-the-hook overtime.
I don't believe he finally hung up.
Yeah, he'll do it occasionally.
You, you, I, I would note that you seem to have a, uh, somewhat increasing generosity of spirit towards him.
Uh, it's, it's more just being wound down, you know.
Eventually we all give up.
Yeah, well, he, he, uh, one of the reasons I, I called is that, uh,
uh, he whose name we dare not say, uh, doesn't seem to be particularly stupid, but very, very lazy.
He's obviously on the internet.
He obviously has the tools necessary to call up a search engine.
And all of the questions he's asking, uh, with regard to networks and, and computers, et cetera, are, the answers are all available on things as, as, uh, simple as Wikipedia.
But isn't it, isn't it better to have a conversation and, and discuss these things?
Well, it depends how much other people's time you want to take up.
Well, that's true.
That's true.
I mean, he's not only taking up your time, but all of the people who may call to, to listen to a fruitful discussion, uh, either on the air or over time.
Um, go ahead, uh, Kyle.
Kyle has something to say.
Go ahead.
I would, uh, I would agree.
Wikipedia is actually fantastic for learning about different technical things, either that were, once were with the telephone network or with modern, or as they exist now with modern protocols or any kind of programming information.
You can look up Wikipedia on Google and find it there.
Basic electrical stuff.
What?
What's this about Google?
I say, please don't use Google.
Didn't you just say to use Google for Rebel to look up things?
I think he meant that as like a general stand-in for search engines.
Okay.
Yeah, there are other very decent search engines available where you don't have to, uh, be tracked and give up, uh, your, your personal information.
Kyle.
Um, in-
Trackable information.
Absolutely.
In defense, though, of, uh, what he's asking, we do try to, like, bring people in that may not understand a lot of those topics, and it is worth just answering the question from as much as we might know off the top of our heads.
But it would be probably, uh, a more challenging conversation if we were talking about things that aren't necessarily factual and maybe a little bit more philosophical or, um, political even or social, like social cultural, like how people are using technology, how people are misusing technology.
Anyway, go on, call it, uh, yeah.
Yeah, so, uh, just, uh, just, uh, with regard to search engines, I, I, uh, primarily rely on DuckDuckGo, uh, and configure it to my own settings rather than using the defaults.
Uh, it's, uh, it's very private.
It's, uh, it's, uh, a very decent search engine.
I mean, there, there are others, uh, out there, you know, I don't need to go into that, but there's some very good search engines.
And, uh, would the conversation with he whose name we dare not speak, uh, included some of those discussions in depth of other things?
Uh, they might be worth listening to, uh, but as, as it is, they just, I, I'm sure most of the people listening find them annoying.
Um, one of the things I, I wanted to call you about, uh, you, you've gotten into several discussions, uh, in overtime and, and on the air about, uh, cassette tapes.
And I don't know if you're aware, if you're not, uh, here's some information for you.
Um, NPRs has a program called Radiolab.
Um, and they, um, they, um, they've done a series of programs called Mixtapes, Mixtape, um, one word.
Uh, you can search it out and find it.
Um, it, it's sort of a, a subset of programs.
I believe it's, uh, three or four at this point, um, of Radiolab.
Um, and it has its own page.
Again, you, if you get to the Radiolab page, there's a, uh, a tab up the top for Mixtape.
And, and you can go to a page of just those, uh, programs, which are all downloadable, uh, as well as listenable through, through your browser.
Um, I, I prefer to download them and archive them.
Um, but either way, you know, they're listenable, uh, and given your interest in cassette tapes.
Oh, one, one of the things about cassette tapes that also crosses, uh, things you've spoken about is one, one of the programs, uh, sort of chronicled how early cassette tapes being passed from user to user in Eastern Europe kind of predated the Internet.
And, and, uh, sort of spawned the, in, in its own way, spawned the Internet.
Uh, it's a very interesting episode of the series.
Oh, I'll have to check it out.
Sounds, sounds interesting.
Yeah.
Uh, as I say, just search it and you'll find it.
It's the, the subject matter, uh, is, uh, cassette tapes or are they playing things from cassette tapes?
Both.
Okay.
Both.
They, they, they, they have some of the old cassette tapes as, um, as this started in Eastern Europe, as a way, it was a way for them to, uh, pass music, American music around.
Uh-huh.
Because they, there was, there was no Internet at this point back in, in the 70s.
Well, it's a way we passed music around too, I recall.
Yeah, but, but they did it, uh, basically by, um, getting it, getting it off the air, um, and, and then, um, taping it.
Uh-huh.
And passing the tapes around.
Yeah.
Well, they'd have to, is it, it's just one tape got passed around or did they make copies of the tapes?
No, no, they, they, it, it sort of, uh, uh, I'm trying to think of the, the, the word, it, it, it, it was, uh, a way of multiplying, uh, so one tape would get passed around and then, uh, transmitted and taped by a number of people and, uh, then those tapes would get passed around.
Quality wasn't very good, but it was a way of getting the music, um, spread.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was magic.
Yeah, so, um, I wanted to make you aware of that.
Okay, I'll check it out.
Also, uh, two other, two other references for you, if you're not aware, um, On The Media has been doing, um, a series of programs called The Divided Dial.
Uh, again, uh, there, there's a subpage, uh, uh, from the On The Media, uh, page, uh, On The Media is a, uh, both, you'll find it on the NPR page and on the WNYC page, um, and then there is a separate page, uh, a subpage that, again, with, with a, uh, a tab up at the top, uh, of, of the main page.
You go to the, the, the, the subpage, and it's only the Divided Dial episodes on that page, um, again, take, uh, downloadable and listenable through your browser, um, which is a very interesting look at, um, the propagation, uh, of shortwave as a communications media and medium, and, and, uh, its transition from, uh,
an early sort of global communications broadcasting media medium to, uh, a, a far right, um, free speech, uh, which became a, a far right wing, radical right wing medium, uh,
$50 an hour, and, and, uh, it, uh, branded himself as free speech, uh, without any restriction.
Yeah, we were on that station for a while.
Oh, were you?
Yeah, yeah, uh, uh, what, about 10 years ago, 15 years ago?
Something like that, yeah, someone was rebroadcasting us.
Yeah, no, but we actually, um, uh, we, we were part of that, because we're on the schedule, uh, I remember this, and it just, it got to be too much, got to be too much coordination,
and somebody had to pay for it, and, uh, I don't know if we were paying for it, or somebody else was, uh, but, yeah, like the caller said,
there were a bunch of right wing shows on there, and it's got, it, it just got more and more like, you know,
you're on some kind of conservative talk radio thing.
I know they had other shows as well, but, um, yeah, there was a lot of wacky stuff, too.
Yep, and, and apparently it's, it's, uh, still in operation.
I wouldn't be surprised, I mean, you know, there's a, there's a lot of call for that.
Uh, do you spend a lot of time listening to any shortwave today?
I know it's, it's not all right wing conspiracy stuff.
No, I, I don't, but, but it was mentioned in, in, I, either the last episode or the one before that,
the, uh, the, the, the woman who, uh, basically produced the program and, and, uh, uh,
is the, the voice of the program as well, um, this has been like a, a, a long-term project for her,
um, said that, uh, they actually put the program out over this station.
I can't remember the call letters.
Um, she, she said, uh, they've received communications from people, uh, thanking her for putting it out
over the shortwave, uh, that, that it, it was a very pleasant break from, from the usual fare that
is, is, is found there.
I, I think the station is WBCQ, the planet.
Does that sound familiar?
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sounds right.
Um, I was wondering if maybe you had heard of this, uh, SDR project out of the Netherlands
where you can connect online, uh, to a shortwave radio over there and tune it yourself and multiple
people can tune in at the same time.
You can find out exactly what is broadcasting on every frequency.
You can chat with people about what else is broadcasting or anything that you find.
Uh, there's, I, I don't remember if she mentioned that within the program or in a, uh,
in the interview that I heard with her the other day, uh, uh, uh, Brian Lehrer had her
on, I think it was Brian Lehrer, uh, had her on as, as an interview, uh, subject and, and,
uh, she may have mentioned it there.
Um, I remember, uh, maybe about 10 years ago, uh, I had some contact with a guy who was a ham
operator.
Uh, and of course, at that point, things had really gone digital.
So, and it was, uh, everything was mobile and, and, and, and a hand, you know, a handset
that he carried around with him.
Um, and he was explaining to me basically that, that, uh, it was pretty much like that,
that, that, uh, things had changed quite a bit from a guy sitting at a bench out in his
radio shack in the backyard, uh, talking into a microphone one-to-one and, and that it had
all been, I guess you'd call it multiplexed.
Yeah, this, um, phenomena is, uh, I think known mostly as like web SDR.
It's the ability to use someone's antenna, uh, not necessarily owning all of that equipment
and you can do it, um, host it.
And many people do host them on their websites and allow users that are on the internet to,
um, scan and even do things like chat and stuff like that.
And the one that we really like a lot is the university, uh, Twente University in the
Netherlands, uh, their electrical engineering department has a really fantastic kind of
low, um, uh, low, and it's not a flashy webpage.
It's very functional.
No, it works so perfectly though.
It really does.
I'll give out the address in a couple of minutes, but, um, you can, I was listening to, to BBC
radio for on long wave, which is an awesome thing to do.
Those are frequencies below shortwave, uh, and that's, that's big in Europe.
Uh, but you can listen to anything that happens to be broadcasting that they can receive in
the Netherlands.
I was listening to, uh, a radio Pyongyang from North Korea, uh, and they still use interval
signals.
So it's like, it's like really old school, uh, but there are all kinds of other things to
find.
And yeah, you'll find, you know, the conservative right-wing, uh, conspiracy stations from the
United States, but you'll also hear pirate stations that are playing music, uh, with full
AM dynamic sound.
Uh, so it's, it's almost like it was before, but it's so much easier to use and so much
more open for more people to use it.
Is that all one to many or, or one to one?
What do you mean?
Each frequency?
Is this, this SDR setup, is it, uh, basically you're just, uh, getting onto an antenna and
becoming your own, uh, shortwave broadcaster?
No, you don't transmit, this is all receipt and what happens with those SDR, um, setups,
they allow you to sample the entire radio frequency spectrum.
And it actually has a visualization sort of, I think what's called a waterfall, but that
graphic, um, allows you, you can zoom in and out on that spectrum.
Um, and, um, a lot of the different frequencies are tagged and labeled, um, so that you can,
uh, uh, zoom in and identify various parts of the radio frequency spectrum, listen to that
channel, um, and then chat with other users that are also maybe listening to that channel
or other channels.
And, um, yeah, it's mostly, uh, just to, uh, monitor shortwave.
You showed me something on this Kyle once, I think we were monitoring a data signal and
decoding it at the same time.
And it was displaying a graphic that, that wasn't my imagination.
That really happened, right?
Yeah.
The pulsing of, uh, transmissions on different frequencies can actually create artwork on
that, uh, visualization I was talking about.
I'm not sure exactly how that works, but it is done.
And occasionally you do see things that look like an image.
Yeah.
We haven't really, uh, dived into this very deeply.
We're very new and novice to it.
It's been something that, um, we've featured at events and we are, but we've been aware that
this technology has become much more affordable and much better.
Um, and so, like you said, it's not the one-to-one sort of person, uh, with a license,
just, um, using sort of, uh, a dial tuning an older piece of equipment.
This is all, um, more like computer controlled and, um, external devices that are then part
of, uh, whatever someone's antenna installation might be.
It's what I like to see where new technology is helping to boost old technology so that
more people can appreciate what shortwave is all about.
Uh, and, and they don't have to put up their own antenna.
They don't have to get a shortwave rig themselves and they can, they can, they can
discuss it with other people and we never had that ability so easily before.
So it's really cool to see that.
And it gets more people listening to the radio frequency spectrum.
Yeah, there, there, there is something exciting about that.
My one contact that, that I remember that I have memories of, uh, you can probably tell
from my voice.
I'm not 22.
Uh, you could be back, back, back in the, uh, I guess this would be the,
early sixties, late fifties.
Uh, uh, a friend of my parents had a, one of these radios that had, uh, AM, FM and shortwave
on it.
It was a fairly smallish radio.
And did it have names of cities printed on it?
Uh, no, it, it, it just had frequencies on the dial.
It may have had names.
I, uh, I don't remember, uh, if there were any in small print on the dial.
It wasn't that large radio.
Uh, although they did have another friend that had a, a cabinet type radio that, uh, was in
their living room.
Yeah, probably, um, I'm guessing it was probably vintage 1930s.
Uh, uh, I would have seen this probably in the late fifties.
Uh, and, and it had, uh, a big part of the dial, um, what was shortwave on that radio.
But, but, but the radio I was talking about, about the, the, the first friend, um, I remember
being at their house and listening to, to the radio and there's something about thrilling
about just pulling signals out of the air that are, that are from God knows where.
Absolutely.
And people today don't really get to appreciate that.
Even, even with television, he used to be able to, to, uh, DX on, on TV, pull in signals
from, from, uh, well, we're in New York.
We pulled in Philadelphia and Boston.
Sometimes you can't do that.
I had a, I had a, uh, a couple of crystal radios when I was a kid and, you know, sure.
There's something very exciting about pulling in Chicago or, uh, uh, further West, you know,
when you're just a kid and, and, uh, you're trying to pick it, pick something off the crystal.
Um, and then a little later I had a tube radio.
I used to, uh, uh, I was a, a fan of Gene Shepard.
Oh, wow.
Gene Shepard.
Yeah.
On WOR?
And, and, and I, I would, uh, get to bed.
I, I, I, I, I had this little, uh, wooden case radio next to my bed and, uh, I, I had
unscrewed the, the light bulb inside so, so wouldn't light up.
And, uh, uh, uh, patch, patched a set of headphones into it and, and pulled the earpiece off and
stuck it in my pillow.
So when my mother looked in on me, she, I would look like I was asleep and, and, and I
would, uh, listen to that and, and listen to Gene Shepard, but also with, with that tube
radio at night, because it was an AM radio, Shepard was on WOR.
Right.
Um, you, you would, on that tube radio, pick up stations from all over the country.
That's, that's amazing.
Yeah, he would go on for 45 minutes.
He'd go on for 45 minutes at a time, just, just rambling about one thing or another.
It was always interesting.
A lot of those recordings, I don't know if you're aware of this, but, but a lot of air
checks of Shepard, you can find online.
That's true.
And download them.
Uh, you know, we also have, we have a show on our station, the golden age of radio, Sunday
nights, where we play a lot of Gene Shepard.
Yes.
I'm aware of that.
Um, you wouldn't happen to be a, uh, a Bob and Ray fan, would you?
Uh, I enjoy them probably more now than I ever did.
Okay.
I appreciate them.
Uh, finding their stuff online is possible, but, uh, not, not as possible as finding, uh,
Shepard's stuff.
Right.
And, and his stuff is not all that easy to find.
Uh, I'm fortunate that I have a, a bunch of, uh, I think about six or seven, uh, CDs
that are chock full of, of Shepard air checks.
Uh, and, and I've downloaded a bunch of stuff myself, uh, from the sites that, that were still
up at the time.
Well, you may want to give, uh, Max over at WBAI a call on Sunday nights, because I know
he has access to a lot of Gene Shepard, uh, and probably stuff that, that you haven't
been aware of.
Uh, that raises an interesting question, uh, about the operation of the station.
Mm-hmm.
When there's an issue, uh, on the station with broadcasting or, or, uh, the streaming dropping
out, there seems to be no number to call.
There's no way to call anybody at the station to let them know the stream's gone down.
Yeah.
Um, uh, it's, it's the same as almost everywhere else where it's hard to reach people by voice
and we depend on, on email and texts and things like that.
Uh, so I wish I had an answer that would, um, be satisfying, but it's, we share the frustration
because I know there has been a huge problem with the stream lately.
Uh, I don't know if it's fixed.
I think it was better today.
Uh, but it's been really hard to get, um, uh, you know, I had trouble with it on, on Sunday
night.
Um, uh, I, I listened to, uh, um, all mixed up.
Okay.
And, and, uh, there was problems with that, with the stream.
Um, and, and that seems to be a chronic problem.
Uh, also that it, uh, it's an annoyance for me, but, uh, it doesn't seem to be a chief engineer
anymore who, who's responsible for, uh, keeping an eye on the, on the broadcast as, as it goes
out, um, the, whoever's, uh, engineering, uh, pre and post, uh, all mixed up, uh, seems
to be stepping all over the intros and outros, uh, and, and the archive, uh, is precisely,
uh, cut off at, at the hour plus eight seconds.
Uh-huh.
And, and so, uh, uh, Boshan's outros get stepped on virtually with every, uh, program.
So it's hard to catch a, uh, a really clean, uh, archive copy.
You, you might have better luck reaching Peter Boshan himself.
I know he, he also is on WPKN in Bridgeport.
Yeah, he, I've, I've tried to, to, uh, find him and reach out to him without success.
Yeah.
Um, uh, Rob, did you have something as well?
Yeah.
Um.
Nothing to do with the broadcast.
Okay.
It's all on, it's all on recording.
Hang on.
Rob has something.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Um, just, uh, to let the caller and everyone else know the, um, as you said, it's not easy to
get people, uh, on the phone anymore, but, uh, if you want to contact the station, you
can go to WBAI.org and, uh, click over to the staff page.
Um, there are links there to directly email our interim GM, Bob Henley, and our interim
program director, Keziah Glow.
Um, and if you, if you, if you, uh, contact those people with, um, issues like this, they
will get forwarded to the right place.
Yeah.
By the way, I don't know, uh, if it's your phone or your mic, but I could barely hear
you, uh, for some reason, Emmanuel's volume is good.
Yours isn't.
Hmm.
I'm sorry, Rob.
That's, uh, just, uh, luck of the draw, I guess.
I blame myself.
Well, he seemed as loud in my ears as I am in my ears.
And, um.
Not, not, not coming through on the line.
Well, uh, he advised you to go to the WBAI.org webpage.
I, I was able to check it out, but.
All right.
Well, listen, we have to go, uh, this has been, this has been great.
I'm going to give out that link.
So, uh, get a, get a pencil and paper and, uh, and, and, uh, check out some shortwave
online, which is a lot of fun.
Uh, and, uh, keep listening, please.
And, and, yeah.
And, and, and let people know about, uh, the, the, uh, programs that, that I gave you
the info on.
Uh, I think your, your listening audience on, uh, or your radio audience, uh, which is quite
a bit larger, I, I would hope, um, would be interested.
Uh, uh, and, and the, uh, the NPR programs are, are terrific.
Uh, that's a whole other discussion I'll have with you some other time about NPR and NBAI.
Yep.
Uh, I, also, also, if, if you have a half second left, another, another resource, because you're
very on target with security and privacy, uh, and, and for that reason, I think, uh, uh,
off the hook is, is perhaps one of the most important programs that NPR is broadcasting.
Um, there is a, um, a, a program called, not a program, well, a podcast, uh, called Security
Now.
It's put up, if, if you know security, you know Steve Gibson, um, who is the, uh,
uh, uh, coder of the, the, uh, what to call him, uh, the genius who wrote Spinrite, uh,
which, uh, that, that's a whole other discussion, but Spinrite is a program everybody with a computer
with mass storage should have.
Um, it's grc.com, and if you're not familiar with, uh,
um, Security Now, you know, go to the Security Now page, um, just about everything you've
talked about with security has gone into in depth, uh, on, on that site, and it's all
archived.
Okay.
I'll, I'll, I'll check it out.
SecurityNow.com.
No, yes.
No, it's grc.com.
Oh, grc.com.
Sorry.
Got it.
Grc.com.
The Gibson Research Corp.
Okay.
It's one of the few three-letter, uh, addresses that are out there.
Yeah, really.
I'm, I'm surprised.
Because, because he was early on it, uh, he's the guy who came up with the term spyware.
Okay.
Well, that's definitely something.
He's the first guy who discovered, uh, spyware in ads.
Cool.
So he's been around for a while, and he, he's very knowledgeable, uh, takes his time laying
things out.
All right.
Well, thank you for our most interesting call, and please keep listening, and, uh, we'll talk
again.
You guys hang in.
All right.
See you later.
Take care.
All right.
That's going to do it for calls.
Now, I'm going to give out that, um, address that I promised to give out, um, and, um, just
to let people know, uh, what we're talking about here.
Uh, it's called Wideband Web SDR, as Kyle was saying, uh, on this page, you can listen
to and control a shortwave receiver located at the amateur radio club ETGD at the University
of 20.
That's T-W-E-N-T-E.
That's in the Netherlands.
In contrast to other web-controlled receivers, this receiver can be tuned by multiple users
simultaneously, thanks to the use of software-defined radio.
I have no idea how many it can, uh, handle, but, uh, I've never had a problem.
I've never, uh, been, been denied.
Um, and, uh, what I'm going to try to do, and maybe with the help, I couldn't do this
over the radio because it's not legal to broadcast radio over radio, but over the internet, I don't
think that's an issue.
Uh, so, um, what we're going to do is we're going to turn audio on, and that's the sound
of static.
Ain't that cool?
Uh, okay, so there's no signal there.
Um, you can also change a lot of settings.
Say again?
You can change some of the settings.
You can change which kinds of modulation it uses, uh, like AM.
AM, I think, works a little better for certain frequencies, and it just, it's a really good
crash course if you've never played around, um, listening to shortwave.
Well, right now, I am listening to 14,589.80 kilohertz on upper sideband, uh, and that's,
if there were a station, I'd be able to hear it on, on that frequency.
Now, um, the way shortwave works, uh, the stations broadcast for a little bit of time,
and then they stop broadcasting on one frequency.
They might move to another frequency.
Time of day determines, uh, when is best for them to broadcast on certain frequencies.
The higher numbers tend to be in, in daylight hours, lower numbers tend to be at night.
Um, that's about the extent of the knowledge I have.
Would anyone like to suggest a frequency or a range, and we could see if we can find something?
Don't look so interested.
No, I, uh, I don't, I mean, whenever I would play with shortwave, it was always with a physical
radio that I had, and I never really paid attention with it.
I would just kind of go up and down the dial and see if I could pick anything up.
I used to travel with the shortwave and see what you could pick up in, in various countries.
Uh-huh.
That was fun.
Well, um, okay, let's, uh, let's see what we can, uh, do here.
I'm going to change the frequency, uh, at this hour, that was not me.
I don't know what that was.
Uh, at, at this hour, I would go into the 6,000, uh, kilohertz area.
So let me, uh, enter the frequency 6,000 and see if I get anything.
Oops.
Uh, hit return.
Hang on.
I don't think it worked.
Uh, dot zero, zero.
There we go.
Okay, there's nothing there, but I can tune up.
And let me try doing that.
Going through the frequencies here.
You'll hear a Morse code.
You'll hear, um, data.
Hmm.
Okay.
That's something.
I don't know what that was.
I'm reading up to 30 kilohertz might be okay.
I'm going to, uh, on a whim, just go to 5, 9, 7, 5, dot zero, zero.
Because I know that's been a frequency I've used in the past.
What if you try 6, 5, 7, 7?
I'm sorry.
Say again?
What if you try 6, 5, 7, 7?
6, 5, 7, 7.
Okay.
Dot zero, zero.
Oh, my God.
What is that?
How did you know about this?
That's curious.
Yeah, what about 5, 5, 9, 8?
Wait, wait, wait.
You just didn't pull that number out of nowhere.
No, I didn't.
Uh, what is that?
You got to tell us.
Well, try, try 5, 5, 9, 8.
See if it's the same.
Okay.
Is that a woodpecker?
Okay.
A woodpecker is a jamming device that, uh, some governments use.
Radio, radio-free flatulence or something.
5, 9, what?
Uh, 5, 5, 9, 8.
5, 5, 9, 8.
I'm hearing lightning.
But that's, uh, that's about it.
Let me go to the, uh, chat box.
And the chat box will, um, tell us what frequencies people are, um, listening to.
Okay.
One person is saying 198 kilohertz, which is longwave.
Let's try that.
Hours of fun.
You can just do this all night long.
There you go.
Remember that crypto money helped elect Donald Trump.
There was something called the Fair State Action Committee that a lot of crypto entrepreneurs donated to.
Well over $100 million went into that.
And there was huge backlash during the Biden era against regulators.
Regulators, the cryptocurrency industry, many of the people in it felt beleaguered, felt under attack.
So I think that might be Radio 4.
That might be BBC Radio 4 longwave, which is not shortwave.
It comes along a large land area, but not nearly as large as shortwave.
And shortwave, as I understand it, can also be really dependent upon the weather in a lot of ways.
That's true.
I'm scanning around longwave now.
It's a ton of fun.
It really is.
And you can just do this all night long.
But I'm going to give out the address.
It's web, SDR, that's W-E-B, S-D-R, as in Software Defined Radio, dot E-W-I, dot U-T-W-E-N-T-E, that's University of 20, dot N-L, and then colon 8901.
And you need that.
It won't work without that.
So once again, web, S-D-R, dot E-W-I, dot U-T-W-E-N-T-E, dot N-L, colon 8901.
And if none of that makes sense, just look for University of 20, T-W-E-N-T-E, shortwave, and you'll find it that way.
All right, so that's some fun.
Hopefully people can amuse themselves with this.
Yeah.
Yeah, why not?
That is a lot of fun.
Yeah.
I was doing some scanning as well.
It doesn't seem to be very active on this frequency right now.
So maybe a good time to end.
Oh, I think it was a good time to end 20 minutes ago.
But yeah, we'll end now.
OTH at 2600.com.
Wrong show.
OTH at 2600.com is our email address.
And please write to us.
Give us your thoughts, opinions, suggestions.
And tune in next week, 7 o'clock WBAI, 8 o'clock on YouTube.
Any final thoughts, people?
Just we got a comment in the chat from our friend Lex, who says,
I haven't heard radio static in ages.
It's a surprisingly pleasant white noise.
Isn't it?
I enjoy it.
No.
I enjoy it all the time.
And people are posting frequencies, I understand.
So yeah, there you go.
This is how you find things.
By tuning around, saying, hey, what's this?
And you share the frequency.
Other people tune to it.
And before you know it, you're sharing all kinds of common interests.
Yeah, please send us frequencies that you find interesting to otw at 2600.com.
And maybe we'll talk about it.
Or we'll check it out ourselves.
We always like tips on things that are out there in the air and online, too.
That's right.
Oh, if you want to submit a talk proposal for Hope, the deadline is Monday.
Yeah.
June 2nd or 3rd, whatever.
Whatever day Monday is, that's the deadline.
So go to the speaker section of Hope.net.
You'll see all the guidelines on how you should put together your proposal.
We have more proposals than ever before.
A lot of good talks.
And we want to get even more.
So please add your ideas.
And we'll hopefully be able to include you.
You can get tickets to Hope at the Hope webpage, either in person or virtual.
And I know there are people who are a bit hesitant to travel.
And we totally understand that.
If you're coming from a foreign country and you don't want to be subjected to the searches,
seizures, detention, having your social media analyzed and scrutinized, then maybe attending
virtually is the best option at this stage.
But please help us spread the word about Hope so that we can continue doing this as we evolve
out of the hellhole that we currently find ourselves in.
Yeah.
Any questions or additions?
Anyone?
OTH at 2600.com.
That's our email address.
Yes.
Yeah.
I think I said the wrong one.
That's an H as in hat.
Okay, you got to tell us what that is.
That's two-way communication, Alex.
Yeah.
So what frequency is that and what is it?
This is 476.437.
And I don't remember what it is.
I programmed it in.
It's my channel 11 on this TID radio.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
You're not on the website?
You're on something else?
Yeah, no, it's a physical scanner.
Okay, well, that doesn't help us because we're talking about a particular website,
so no one else can listen to what you're listening to.
No, they can listen to it if they tune in, if they're in New York and they tune in to 476.437.
Yes, which is a totally different thing than going to a website that's in the Netherlands
and listening to shortwave.
You might be able to type that frequency, and that's possible.
I don't know about it.
That's what I thought you were doing.
But only be in proximity there.
This is a physical scanner here.
Yeah, so this is some kind of emergency services.
So you're sharing something that nobody else can do.
Unless they're here and they have a physical radio scanner.
Yes, nobody else.
Yeah.
But thanks for sharing.
That's kind of cool.
No problem.
We are going to get out of here.
And I want to thank everybody for listening and for calling, and we will see you next time.
Good night.
Good night.