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One day, let me go.
Let me go.
Let me go.
Good evening.
We go.
Good evening.
Alex?
Alex?
Good evening.
And we go.
We go.
That's okay.
We go.
Is everybody.
Are you comfortable?
I'm not.
We go.
You might hear that.
We are getting tender.
Alex?
Because of the decimation of NOAA and various other agencies, I haven't gotten a good weather
forecast in months.
Literally, when they say a shower is coming, it doesn't come, or when they say it's going
to be nice, it rains.
So what you said just now is extremely valuable because what you are is an individual and
individuality is all we have left.
So it's going to take all of us sticking our heads out the window and saying, is it
raining?
Is it not?
And telling the rest of us to get us through this thing so that we can have weather forecasts
again, because we don't have it anymore.
We just don't have.
And God help us when hurricanes start coming.
All right.
So we've been fighting technology, as we always do.
We love it.
We love fighting technology.
It's so much fun.
Alex, you just had some fun today with Gmail, didn't you?
You found out your mailbox was full.
Yeah, I found out from you.
Apparently, that's something that doesn't work either.
Because you said, how come nobody sent me email?
And I sent you email.
So I did not take kindly to being referred to as nobody.
Uh, so I said, uh, I looked at, at mail logs because I can do that.
I can look at mail logs.
When you run your own server, you can look at mail logs.
And I saw that a message I had sent to you had been rejected by Gmail because, uh, the
recipient's mailbox is full.
But the thing is, apparently Gmail, uh, doesn't tell the recipient that their mailbox is full.
Or if they do, maybe they, they email them.
And, uh, because their, their, uh, email box is full, that message never gets to them.
I don't know.
I don't know how you, uh, it got full.
I'm getting warnings from one of my Gmail accounts saying, uh, and it's all spam from
Gmail and I'm not going to do their work for them and, and, and weed out all their crap.
I ignore it and I'm going to continue to ignore it and use them as little as possible.
Yeah, it was a pretty awful experience.
I just thought you guys were ignoring me.
And I mean, I'm just, we were ignoring you.
That's no, don't, don't, don't, uh, let this go to your head and, and, and make it seem
like we were, uh, engaged.
No, no.
Uh, but in this particular case, there was an email sent to you.
Um, and, um, it, it was, you know, I didn't get a bounce.
I didn't get notified.
I had to look at those, at those logs.
You can't do the same thing as a Gmail user.
You can't look at logs and say, Hey, what happened to that message that I sent to a distant
server someplace?
You know, what, what was its fate?
I was able to see the fate of the message to you.
Um, and, um, I just, I hope you didn't miss many messages.
Well, I don't use that email address, excuse me, for very many things anymore.
So I, I probably didn't.
So it's a very old email address that I've had from Gmail for over 20 years now, but yeah,
it is full.
I didn't get any notification from Gmail that it was going to be full.
Um, at least I, I don't think I did.
And if they did, they probably emailed me about it as it was, or after it was at capacity.
So fairly, fairly idiotic situation that, um, I had to deal with, but I'm, I'm glad to see
that I wasn't entirely ignored.
Well, um, uh, Kyle and I, we had a bit of an adventure with, uh, technology.
We were trying to watch, we were trying to watch a film.
Um, and you know, it's a simple thing for most people, but for us, it becomes very complicated
because, uh, we, we always are doing things in ways that are different than what we're
supposed to be doing.
Uh, in this particular case, we had a Blu-ray and, uh, it was region B region B is not the
region we're in.
We're in region a, just like for DVDs.
We're in region one.
We're always the first no matter what.
Uh, so region B is, is mostly for Europe, uh, a region two for DVDs also for Europe.
So anyway, uh, we have a region free DVD slash Blu-ray player.
So this isn't a problem for us.
This is actually one of several.
You've had a, uh, uh, DVD player that was region free and then you got a Blu-ray one that
was region free.
Yeah.
They tend to break.
Yeah.
They, well, or they change the media, but it wasn't so much that we were fighting it.
I think it was that, you know, how, you know, how to, you figure out like what the trick
is to something.
Right.
It was remembering that.
Well, because it comes with instructions.
It comes with instructions.
We never remember where we put the instructions.
We find the instructions after a while, and then we read the instructions and follow the
instructions and they don't work.
And that's, that was the problem we were facing, uh, a half hour trying to get this thing to,
to get out of the region that it was previously in because we had watched something from a
different country and we were in a different region and it seemed to have gotten stuck there.
And no matter what we did, we were following the instructions.
We went online, talked to a Gemini artificial intelligence and, and got chat GPT involved.
Uh, and they all had, you know, suggestions, but they weren't working.
That was, that was the big problem.
And I think we mutually recollected there was a trick beyond the instructions and it was
probably this very same scenario entirely.
Uh, it's just what exactly did we have to do?
And, and I think it stems from the thing itself going into a state that's other than sort of
on or off, like maybe a standby or something in the software itself of the, the player.
Yeah.
Turning off the Blu-ray player isn't enough.
That doesn't reset it.
You have to unplug it.
And how long do you have to unplug it for?
That's, that's a question too.
That's open to debate by great minds.
And we were trying all of that.
Um, and eventually, eventually, uh, we got to, uh, the point where we were able to,
uh, put the disc in or actually, uh, uh, close the tray without the disc being in,
unplug it, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in, uh, open the tray.
Uh, and, and there, there was, there was some point where, uh, it involved not having the
disc anywhere near the machine.
Uh, that seemed to be key because once we introduced the disc later, it suddenly saw it.
And that was not suggested by any website, by any artificial intelligence, uh, being out
there.
It was just kind of like a hunch that we have to do it this way and we can't let this touch
that.
And we have to wait and we have to pray.
And yes, it worked.
It also involves putting a disc in from that previous region.
I think we had to go back to the previous region.
Yes.
Because of the state it was left in, it was like, okay, we didn't deliberately like turn
it off and unplug it and put it in a drawer.
It was just left.
However, it was left after watching something and then this, uh, old region and it needs
to confirm what region it was in.
And then before you like go through the process of changing, this is a region free player.
So it's, it's meant to do this, but it wasn't, it wasn't working.
And eventually we were able to trick it into, but it's, it's something that we bought completely
legitimately, you know, this is a legal thing to have.
Uh, but we are trained as consumers to believe that this is the way it should be.
Of course, you can't watch something from Europe in the United States, you know, you
have to wait for it to come out in the United States, uh, but you can't buy it in Europe
and bring it over here.
No, that's for, for some reason.
And this goes back to, uh, the early days of DVDs.
In fact, I was in court over this, uh, where, uh, they wanted to control very, very strictly
how people were able to view DVDs.
The whole thing is so absurd and crazy.
We've always had this problem.
Even going back to, uh, videotapes.
We had, uh, PAL, NTSC, CCAM, different formats, but those were actually different video formats.
The, the video signal was different here.
It's artificial.
It's completely artificial.
They do it because they can.
Now there is an economic reason for this.
When you release a film, you release it at different times in different parts of the
world.
So yeah, it probably makes sense that you, uh, not have it be able to be played in a different
country.
Uh, if it's, uh, already on DVD in a, in a, in a second country, but you know, I don't
know many films that are being released on the big screen while they're on DVD in other
countries, but whatever, you know, they can, they can have that, but I think what they should
do is implement something where after a certain amount of time, it just works everywhere.
And, and, and don't tell me that's not possible.
They can't figure out how to do that.
Of course they can do that.
So, okay.
The, the, the film comes out the first six months, you can restrict how people watch it
on media.
And then after that, it becomes part of the collection of films.
You're still buying it, you know, you're still renting it or whatever it is people do
these days.
And, um, uh, then you're able to see whatever you want to see.
You can buy something overseas, you can get a different region and not feel like you're,
uh, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're breaking the law or, uh, have wasted your money
or anything like that.
Well, it's this, yeah, the workaround being this, the source of aggravation.
And in that process, you start questioning, what is the point of this?
This is, it shouldn't be a workaround that I have to suffer and remember and, uh, understand
the, the quirks and idiosyncrasies of this whole mechanism.
It should be that the player itself just reads all of it, uh, natively without switching
anything.
Um, it's designed to let alone have a button on a, on a remote or something.
But that is what the device is for.
We have this big piece of hardware that is designed to play the zeros and ones that are
on that particular disc.
And there is something, some, some, uh, routine in there that tells it, no, don't do that.
Prevent that from happening.
Do exactly the opposite of what you would put on earth to do.
And, uh, and, and we'll just have to dance in circles and figure out how to make something
work.
So it was ridiculous that we had to spend all this time with devices that we legally purchased
to see something that has been out, uh, since what, 1980, man, it looked really good.
Who were they protecting?
I don't understand it.
Once, once we got to actually enjoying it, it was, oh, it was so worth it.
Spectacular.
It was so worth it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, uh, since you asked, uh, the elephant man by David Lynch, it's, it's incredible
in black and white.
It looks incredible.
Um, it was worth every, every moment of torture we had to go through.
I've heard people say that.
And it's kind of fitting too, that you have to go through an ordeal to watch it.
It shouldn't be this way.
It really shouldn't be.
It's, it's never been this way with, with audio, you know, um, imagine CDs, different regions.
Imagine a vinyl with different regions.
You couldn't play, you know, a British version of an album in the United States because it's
a different region.
And of course you can't do that.
You know, it's very easy to be trained to believe something is normal and it's actually
absurd.
And I think we should ask ourselves this, particularly with technology.
You know, are we doing something that makes absolutely no sense just because we're told
to by people with lots of money?
They question everything and, and, and we as hackers can figure out a better way.
Gila, go ahead.
And then Rob.
I mean, I was going to say, don't speak that into existence because if somebody hears you
say it, they'll be like, oh, that's a really good idea.
Region specific CDs coming soon.
Do you really think that has a snowball chance in hell of surviving at this late stage?
I don't know.
It's funny that you both talk about CDs though, because there was an instance where Sony,
Sony music tried to produce CDs or what they called CDs, but they were not standard audio
CDs with easily accessible Redbook audio.
Like, like the standard says you have to make, they had an extra layer of DRM and were meant
to prevent you copying them and doing all sorts of things.
But it also meant that a lot of legitimate CD players could not read the data on there.
And so not only consumers, but the industry as a whole said, no, Sony, you can't do that.
And they, they basically, uh, got bitten about it and, uh, had to back off and, uh, go back
to producing regular CDs.
I do feel sorry for them because of the, the losses they have suffered in the years since
that, you know, that they've, they've fallen apart.
They've gone bankrupt.
Yeah.
This really hurts them.
I'm, I'm, my heart bleeds.
Okay.
So anyway, um, we have, uh, other things to talk about tonight.
Um, you know, one thing that's happened is that listener mail has piled up.
So, uh, we're going to try and get through some of that tonight and you can add to the
pile, uh, by writing to us, OTH at 2600.com.
That's our email address.
Um, and our mailbox will never fill up Alex because we control the size of it ourselves.
Um, all right.
Um, let's see, uh, in, in regards to, um, the talk of ice and raids and things like that,
uh, Tony writes, who are the obscured immigration agents?
Well, because they're always covering themselves with masks.
You don't know who they are.
I would suspect that they've hired outside contractors in many roles for these arrests.
The, uh, three percenters and other similar movements have been awfully quiet.
These are the militia type people.
Uh, perhaps they found a new hobby working as contractors for immigration.
Would it not make sense to compare silhouettes against known folks in those circles?
Well, um, that's an interesting, um, thought and, um, makes me kind of feel like, uh, you
know, law enforcement here or, or big brother.
And I, I don't really want to go down that road either.
Uh, all I know is when you, when you go around wearing masks and doing things that intimidate
people, um, you don't land on the right side of history.
You generally do not.
And, um, we in the present ought to figure out what's actually going on and who's actually
behind it.
But you also raise an intriguing point.
Yeah.
They're hiring, they're hiring all kinds of people.
Has anyone out there looked into getting hired by them, seeing the kinds of questions that
they're asking or the kind of people they're looking for?
I'm not saying get hired, be careful because they'll hire you in a, in a second.
And I'm sure they're desperate.
Uh, but I am, I am curious, you know, what their, um, what their bar is, if they have
a bar, uh, and, uh, how they're asking, uh, what circles they're moving in, you know, um,
every bit of information is power.
So anything we can find out, and we have so many intelligent people out there that can analyze
and process information and trends and things like that.
Uh, we shouldn't be intimidated.
We should be thinking this is something we deserve to know.
We have every right to know, and when we know it, we share it because, uh, that, that's
how hackers work.
So, um, good thoughts there.
Good, uh, good ideas.
Um, okay.
What else we have?
Um, okay.
This, um, maybe you can help me with this.
Uh, this concerns, uh, YouTube.
We do, uh, overtime, which follows this show from eight o'clock on, on channel 2600 on YouTube.
And, uh, there we are not constrained by radio rules and we, uh, take phone calls and have
all kinds of other discussions as well.
Um, I'd like to share a specific episode of Off the Hook, and I assume you mean Off the
Hook Overtime, uh, with my mates at the local group of computer volunteers here in Italy.
Uh, it's the episode from the 3rd of March, 2025, where Jason Scott from the Internet Archive
is interviewed.
Um, I would have preferred to share the video from YouTube, but it's not video either.
I don't want to scare people.
Uh, since, uh, this includes captions, even if these are also in English, uh, it would
also help to understand, um, uh, who is, those who are not conversationally proficient.
Uh, however, even if the playlist for Off the Hook on YouTube indicates there are 71 episodes
available, uh, I can only see the first 10 of them, and the message appears that 61 videos
are unavailable, uh, and they're hidden.
Um, could it be possible to make those previous episodes available, um, from, uh, Kudo?
You know, I'm in the dark on this because I don't pay any attention to what's going on
on YouTube, and I don't think our show is archived on YouTube.
Maybe somebody can correct me if I'm wrong.
I know, Gilly, you've got your hand raised high, so why don't you just correct everything
I've said that's wrong so far?
It's not everything you've said that, that, but, um, weirdly enough, our, so Off the Hook
Overtime absolutely lives on YouTube, and imagine my surprise when last week I found that there
are currently episodes of this particular program available on YouTube.
However, it's only about the last 10, kind of like on Spotify or something.
Um, so right now, it says there are 61 unavailable videos that are hidden.
Now, as not an owner of the channel, I don't know how much more I can learn about this particular
situation, but yes, um, apparently this is a podcast that lives on channel 2600, and there
are 10 episodes right there.
Yeah, this happens because YouTube themselves grab podcast feeds and convert them into YouTube
videos, and that's what's going on here.
If you search on YouTube for Off the Hook Podcast, which I know sets your teeth on edge,
Emanuel, um, the, uh, you'll see this feed that, uh, that the, um, person who wrote to
us is referring to, and yeah, it only holds on to the last 10 episodes.
Um, it is not a permanent archive.
If you want a permanent archive of Off the Hook as it goes out over the radio, you can always
find that on our site, 2600.com slash Off the Hook.
Um, that is the way to share it with, uh, with your pals.
Now, okay, but he raises a good point, or, or she raises a good point, um, that, um, there
are captions, and, uh, we don't have captions, uh, on our local storage, but it's, it's kind
of a nifty, um, uh, feature to have if it's automatically generated.
Um, so I, I, I couldn't understand why people would want to have that and, and, and see it
on YouTube.
So, okay, I stand corrected.
Our shows are also on YouTube.
Um, why aren't all of our shows on, on YouTube?
Because I, you know, people have videos on YouTube.
They have thousands of them.
Uh, we should have more than 10.
What's, what's making them fall off?
That is a very good question.
And, uh, I guess it would, uh, speak to how it works when, uh, when YouTube pulls these
things down.
Um, I can tell you, like Gil and I work on podcasts apart from Off the Hook and, uh, we
have it actually set up on a channel we control to pull them in on YouTube and that holds onto
them.
Um, the best I could tell.
So the, uh, it, uh, it must be something to do with like claiming the podcast feed as
your own and gaining some measure of control of it over there.
But I don't, I don't know enough about this to say for certain.
And that's pretty much where we usually wind up, uh, turning the car off and getting out
because, uh, we, uh, we know something about the technology.
We don't know everything about it.
We don't have time to get completely engrossed in it.
So if somebody out there has tips, they can send us as to how to do this better.
You know, we're all ears.
We'd like, we'd like to do that, uh, because we want our material to be available.
Uh, we always have it stored on our own servers, uh, but we don't mind if it's on YouTube as
well, as long as they don't throw commercials onto everything.
Um, and, uh, I know that their, um, uh, their captions, Google has this kind of puritanical
view of words, uh, and they, they block out certain words.
Uh, and I, I think there's a way to turn that off as a creator, but not as a viewer or listener.
Uh, so those kinds of things that, that, that rubs us the wrong way as well.
But, um, we're definitely open to this and if anybody has a method of creating captions,
we'd love to do that for all of our previous shows as well.
But, you know, we don't have hours to spend to do that ourselves.
If there's some AI solution to this, uh, we'd love to know about it.
Yes, Rob.
It's, uh, it's interesting that you mentioned the, uh, censorship issue because that is
a really important consideration in the automatic captions on YouTube.
I was doing some, uh, looking into this a while back and found that, uh, in terms of accessibility,
uh, basically even things that are allowed to have swears in it, we can't do that on the
radio, but you can look up plenty of things on YouTube that are full of adult language,
but YouTube's automatic captions will refuse to translate them into something viewable.
So if you're a person who can hear the audio, yeah, you can, and you can absorb all the
swears you want, but if you're a person who needs the captions, you don't get to have the
swears.
You could look up famous songs by like Rage Against the Machine that have very famous,
uh, choruses that we cannot say, um, on this, on this radio program, but, uh, on the official
uploads on the music videos, you can listen to the song.
You can hear all the swears.
If you're reading the captions, it will say censored you.
I won't do what you tell me.
Hold on a second.
All right.
This is starting to annoy me here.
We understand, uh, where the FCC is coming from.
It's been that way for a long, long time.
We can't say certain words.
We proved it right here on this radio station.
Um, but Google does not own the content that you upload to YouTube.
You own that content.
They have no right to tell you what words you can and cannot use.
So who are they to suddenly block out words they deem objectionable?
Oh, sure.
I'm sorry.
Uh, you know, the, the answer is probably we have to protect the children.
It's not about the children.
The content, all, not all content is for children.
In fact, there's even a checkbox saying this content is not for children.
Uh, so, uh, how are they able to get away with, with censoring language?
Um, Gila.
So, yes, I have a lot to say about this.
I was, um, listening actually to a YouTube creator.
I appreciate a lot talking about self-censorship in a way that has crept into a lot of creator
stuff, um, between TikTok and YouTube.
There are things that get demonetized if there are certain words that are heard and, you know,
they won't give them to kids under 18, which also often means that things get demonetized
that can be a really, uh, it can be a death knell for a creator in a lot of ways.
And since none of the stuff on channel 2600 is in fact monetized, thank you.
Um, the, so that is less of a concern here, obviously, but when you hear people who refer
to things like, uh, grapes and sewer slides and things of that nature, this, this whole
second language that has come in to replace actual regular words that we need to use to
converse as human beings.
I think it's an infantilization of the world in general, under the guise of protect the
children, which we're dealing with in so many ways.
And it's not like they're not going to hear it if they don't hear it on YouTube.
But what we're forgetting here is that it's, it's there in the video, you know, you could,
you could go, you can make a video on YouTube, use every profanity you can imagine in different
languages, whatever you can, you can just go off for an hour if you want and people will
hear it.
Children will hear it, but they won't be able to read it on the tech.
Whose idea is this?
Who is that protecting?
And this is a huge issue in the world of accessibility.
I've worked in the field of making media alternatively accessible for people with certain needs.
And there is, there has been a longstanding tendency, um, even in terms of like captions
for TV shows and movies and things to sort of infantilize the disabled.
Um, the, you know, the deaf community, you know, doesn't get to have those swears because
on some level, the general consensus of the media industry seems to think that they couldn't
handle the swears as if they were not adults who, you know, can use language just as, uh,
just as the rest of us do.
And it's a, it's a huge problem.
Wow.
Okay.
Well, you just gave me an idea.
If the, um, uh, if members of the hearing impaired community can come together, uh, maybe
a class action suit could be launched because this is, um, uh, discriminatory behavior where
you're not allowing people, uh, to see what is actually being said that other people who
are not hearing impaired can hear, you know, uh, what, why, uh, why is that, uh, why are they
being treated differently?
It's, um, you know, I never even thought about this much until we started talking about it.
I didn't realize that it was that much of an issue, but this is, you know, it's a, it's
another example why we shy away from using other services because they do stupid things
like this.
It's fine to have the content there.
We're all about sharing and it's not about monetizing.
And, you know, if I can say anything to, to creators, if they still listened to us at all,
um, it's not about the monetization.
Yeah.
It's nice to, to, to, you know, get a 75 cent check or whatever from Google.
Uh, but that shouldn't be, um, uh, the reason why you do what you do, you do what you do because
it's you and you want to create something.
You want to express yourself in a particular way.
And if people appreciate that, that's people speaking, not big corporations and they will
play by your rules.
So, um, just don't let yourself get manipulated by, uh, small checks because that's all it's
going to be.
So I'll go, it's going to be tiny checks, you know, unless you go viral and then, okay.
But then, you know, if you go viral, you can set your own terms anyway.
So you really have the freedom, no matter what, to do things the way you want to do things.
And I hope people do that.
All right.
We have, uh, one more letter.
I'm going to get this a little bit longer.
So, uh, let's spend a little bit of time on this.
It's about signal.
Actually, I just came in a few weeks ago.
Um, we wanted to clear up some things concerning your comments about the signal app.
Uh, there are two major issues where we think there are misunderstandings.
Uh, one is that a message is marked as delivered, even if the contact no longer has signal and
that signal does not deactivate accounts from their server.
Okay.
Uh, on the first point, contrary to what was said on the show, uh, signal does not mark a
message as delivered to a contact if that contact no longer has signal.
Okay.
I think the phrasing is what's important here, but let's continue.
Uh, if there is only one check mark on a message, that means the message was only delivered to the
signal servers and is now waiting to be delivered to the contact's phone or desktop client.
If there is no signal client for the server to deliver the message, the message has nowhere
to go and remains on the server waiting to be delivered.
Uh, messages do not sit on the server forever.
Uh, they're deleted after a set time if never delivered or, uh, immediately deleted from the
server after delivery.
Um, while the message is on the server waiting to be delivered, the one check mark will remain
as the status of the message on the sender's phone.
Uh, there have to be two check marks for a message to have a delivered to contact status.
And then there are two filled in check marks.
That means the message was read by the contact, uh, which only happens if that option is activated
for both the sender and the contact.
So if someone sends a message to a contact who no longer has signal, the message will
never have two check marks.
Um, if, uh, one only sees one check mark, the sender can assume the contact is either
temporarily offline, maybe in a subway, uh, or, uh, ran out of data on their phone or their
phone is turned off, uh, or after an extended period of time, um, if only one check mark, uh,
it remains like, uh, you know, weeks or months that contact no longer has signal, but nonetheless
with only one check mark, the sender will know at least the contact has not received
the message yet.
Uh, for those with disappearing messages on, depending on the timing of the disappearing
message, it's possible.
The sender could see the message disappear from their own device, only ever seeing one
check mark and not know if the message was delivered if ever after the message disappeared
off their own device.
But we won't get into that, uh, if a person deregisters their account before uninstalling
the app, which hopefully they did, the server will mark the account as inactive.
And if someone tries to send that contact a message, they will see a notice along the
lines of this contact is not slash no longer a signal user, or this person isn't using signal.
I think the second one is better because, you know, that's telling some information about
the person if they ever were a signal user.
Um, the problem of course, uh, is if someone breaks or loses their phone, uh, it gets stolen,
uh, or they simply uninstall signal without deregistering first.
I think that's what we were talking about.
Um, in these scenarios, there is no way for signal to know that information and signal of
course would not want to deregister someone who is away for an extended period of time.
Uh, whether they're digitally detoxing temporarily in the hospital, uh, or, um, or something else
and, uh, needs to give some, uh, leeway on how long before kicking someone off the server.
But signal does keep track of the last time a device connected to the server.
Uh, so for a desktop client, uh, connected device, those get deactivated after 30 days of inactivity.
Uh, one's phone though, since it's the primary device gets deactivated from the server after 180 days.
It used to be a year.
So to recap, in the worst case scenario, if a contact no longer has signal for whatever reason,
the sender will perpetually see only one check mark on the message indicating it was not delivered
to the contact yet.
And then after no more than 180 days, they will know for sure the contact no longer uses signal.
Hope this is helpful and the information can be shared with your radio audience.
And yes, it is helpful and, uh, it's, it's, it's pretty accurate, I think.
Um, but the problem comes, and I think this is what we were discussing,
is that many people don't get rid of signal in the right way.
They simply stop using it.
They don't deactivate their account.
So what happens is you send somebody a message and it will go to that particular app, uh,
which the person is not checking and that particular app will say, okay, I received it.
It doesn't mean the person read it.
You won't see the filled in check marks.
Uh, but as mentioned, not everybody has that feature.
Uh, so the problem is not with signal so much as, as with the, um, uh, the rules that are,
uh, involved with this type of technology, uh, where you still can receive messages,
even if you're not using the app.
And there's no way to really tell if you're using the app or not.
How, how do you do that?
It's an impossible situation.
I know that.
Uh, but it still leads to all kinds of problems.
For instance, um, there have been many instances I know of where I've been sending people messages,
never hearing back from them.
And I found out later they were using a different messaging app and not checking their signal
app or their phone was lost and that had the signaling app on it.
And that's a huge security issue.
If somebody just lets their phone, um, uh, fall into, uh, some other, uh, a person's
hands or loses track of it in some other way, or it gets stolen.
Um, yeah, then, uh, you have to deactivate your signal account or, or regain control of
it somehow to lock that person out.
A lot of people don't do that.
It's, it's about education.
It's about knowing what kind of security you need to implement for your own privacy.
And many times we don't do a good enough job.
I've seen other people, you know, uh, when I say, you know, you never respond to my signal
message.
They open signal at that point and there are all my messages.
They're seeing them for the first time, you know, and that's certainly not the ideal way
to use that service.
And, you know, it's a great service.
It, it, it works, you know, just, just the other day I, I, I got put onto a signal chat
and it's a very talkative signal chat.
And all of a sudden all my signal alerts, which by the way, a custom, I can, I can customize
my audio.
I like doing that for different apps and signal makes that very easy.
Uh, but I was getting a hundred of them a minute.
It was ridiculous.
I had to turn it off.
I had to mute that one particular conversation or at least change the, um, uh, the, the alert
tone.
It was so easy to do that as opposed to almost every other app I work with.
Uh, it was so incredibly, uh, simple to simply modify that so that it wouldn't bother me.
It would sound different or not sound at all.
And that's the kind of, uh, configuration we need to be able to have access to.
Alex.
Yeah.
So, you know, one, one thing I I'll say about signal is that, you know, unlike email, it
doesn't fill up unless your device is filling up, you can continue to get instant messages.
They're not going to charge you on the basis of how many messages you have coming through
your device.
I mean, I, I like this notion of end to end encrypted messaging being used for chats that
are timely, relevant, maybe chats that would be, uh, about, let's say like a radio show that
happens every week instead of email, um, you know, especially a show about hacking and
hackers and things like that.
And technology, maybe a signal chat could be a way of communicating going forward as opposed
to using a deprecated, uh, system like email.
Okay.
First of all, who are you to deprecate email?
Uh, a user that, that was totally screwed over today by email because you weren't paying
attention to what Google was trying to tell you, even though they didn't actually try.
No, it's, I'm trying to take Google's side for once.
It wasn't an email, it was Gmail.
It was Gmail.
Yeah.
Gmail is not email.
I want to say that.
Or Fmail.
It just, it just, Fmail?
Okay.
You didn't know about that?
No, no.
But look, email is different than, than signal or texting.
It's a different form of communication.
You can't replace one with the other, you know?
Uh, and, and, and not everybody wants to use that.
Uh, email is, is, is much more versatile and it goes across many, many different platforms.
And, um, you don't have to use one particular service.
I, I, I still disagree.
I think it's, I think using email is silly.
Our, we've had so many problems with this, with, with email, not just inboxes filling
up, but emails disappearing, emails being filtered out.
Yeah, but that's bad habits.
That's why we have problems with, because of bad habits.
Certainly it's, it's email filtering systems that, you know, assume the worst with respect
to, let's say a new domain name that you might register or something like that.
So there's all these problems that we don't necessarily have solutions for because it requires
having access to certain technology or appliances that are outside of our control and that are
centralized somewhere else.
I mean, it's all well and good if you run your own mail server over there, manual, but
which I believe, I believe others should do as well, or there should be more people running
it for people who can't do it themselves.
Because I'll tell you, I use, I use a, a mail reader called Mutt on a Linux machine and I
don't have any of these problems.
And it's, it's, it's, it's just so efficient and fast to communicate.
And when I'm using, uh, uh, texting or signal or anything, it's not nearly as fast or efficient
or easy to go back and look something up.
For instance, you know, one thing that I, I really, you know, I know a lot of people like
this, uh, this feature where you can erase something that you said in the past.
Well, you know, I'm a party to the conversation.
I don't want you erasing our conversation.
I want to have that conversation.
I want to be able to look back on that conversation.
I don't want people meddling and, and editing the past, but you know, I know when you're,
when you're, um, uh, doing all kinds of cloak and dagger things and, you know, you want
your security to be, um, preserved.
It's essential.
It different reasons.
It's different reasons for, for having these different, um, applications.
Well, I mean, look, it's an issue of privacy too.
I mean, the thing about email is it's not end to end encrypted unless when, and let's just
not end to end encrypted.
I mean, the email goes over in clear text.
I mean, we can use PGP, but that becomes a nightmare with any kind of, with multiple parties
in an email chain.
It's been 150 years.
Haven't we come up with something besides PGP by now?
I mean, seriously.
No.
Yes.
We have, we have, um, end to end encrypted messaging apps like signal that we could use,
you know, instead for, for chats that are much better.
Okay, fine.
Then why can't that be used for email?
Uh, it's a key management issue, really, I think.
But, um, but anyway, you know, unless you have something else, I think a good segue here
though, when we're talking about technologies that are used to preserve privacy, perhaps
I'd love to address what I saw today in court in the Southern district of New York, if that's
a good time to talk about this.
Well, it sounds like you're about to be taken to court, but okay, go ahead.
Let us know what's going on.
I very well may.
Uh, and, and I think this is an incredibly important case that really the mainstream media, and
I think a lot of the hacker culture has not really.
Really, Alex, what are you, in the street?
What's going on over there?
I don't understand why every time I start talking or I'm on an important phone call, it's like
there's an ambulance that seems to be stuck underneath.
I'm nine floors up right now as well.
So it's not like I'm, I'm at the ground floor.
Well, let me explain how sound works.
It goes in all directions, doesn't matter how many floors up, you can be on top of the
Empire State Building, you're still going to hear sirens.
You can still hear sirens, but it's so piercing.
It goes through the windows, it goes up, it just refracts from, from building to building.
It's really, it's really something crazy.
You've shared it with the entire metropolitan area now, but please.
Well, that's right.
This continue before the next one comes.
So anyway, I think this is an extraordinarily important case that is of great relevance
to both the open source community and the hacker community.
I'm talking about the Tornado Cash case.
And a lot of people like to be dismissive of anything that has to do with cryptocurrency
or blockchains.
But, and so let me give you a little bit of background here.
Tornado Cash is a decentralized cryptocurrency privacy protocol that uses smart contracts and
allows users to obfuscate transactions on a blockchain.
It makes them harder to trace, right?
It gives you something that would be known as financial privacy.
Everything on a blockchain is open, it's public, it's on a ledger, and nobody would want to
see, nobody would want their bank account to be completely open and public if you're making
lots of transactions on the blockchain.
So this issue of trying to solve for financial privacy is really, really difficult.
So how do you do this?
So somebody came up with...
Can I just ask you, Alex, before you continue, why wasn't that done in the first place?
Because that seems so intuitive that you wouldn't want your whole...
What, Kyle, you have the answer for that?
No, I'm just trying to find out.
Is this a so-called, like, mixer of cryptocurrencies that, like, takes stuff that's attributed on the
ledger to one person and mixes it through other transactions?
Well, you leapfrogged over my question, but okay, fine.
Alex said...
I was just participating in the conversation, but...
Yes, yeah.
Well, as you are allowed to do, Kyle, you know.
And in a sense, you're right, Kyle.
It's kind of like a mixer.
What it does is it pools transactions together.
So it's very difficult to see, you know, what currency belongs to what particular person
or what transaction belongs to what particular person after it's gone through this pool in
Tornado Cash.
And it's a completely open-source project.
It was started in 2019 in Boston at a hackathon.
And all of the cryptographic underpinnings, the supporting tool chains, everything's been
open-sourced since the protocol's inception.
It's been available for review and used by pretty much everyone.
And this open-source nature of Tornado Cash is really central to its operation as a decentralized
privacy protocol.
It works on Ethereum and other blockchains.
The user interface and code repositories are all hosted publicly.
And the project is governed by a DAO, or a decentralized autonomous organization.
So there's a lot of implications here to the hackathon community and to the open-source
community.
As I promised, let's dive into the stratography here.
So there's significant legal implications here for software developers, because what
has happened here is that the developer, Roman Storm, was charged by the U.S. Department
of Justice for money laundering, for sanctions violations, and for unlicensed money transmission.
Now, these are charges for an open-source software developer that could carry around 20 to 25 years
in prison if he's convicted on all of these charges.
The closing statements were today.
And so this case right now in the Southern District of New York, before Judge Faiola, is
with the jury.
We could have a verdict in this tomorrow.
But the problems here are very, very big, because the legal implications for software developers
in the open-source community, especially those creating privacy tools or protocols that
can be used for lawful or potentially unlawful purposes.
So the core legal questions here are whether developers, builders, hackers can be held criminally
liable for writing code that they release as open-source if other people subsequently use
that code for illegal acts, like money laundering, sanctions evasion.
And we were talking about Signal and things.
Before Signal today came up in the defense's closing statement, because this is an end-to-end
encrypted application that's used by drug mules and drug lords and bad guys and all these
nefarious individuals.
Hey, I use it too, you know.
And you use it.
That's a good case in point as well.
But are we prosecuting the developers of Signal for creating a tool that is then used by bad
guys?
Because what happened here was that North Korea and the Lazarus Group in particular had used
tornado cash to launder lots and lots of stolen digital assets, stolen cryptocurrency.
And the government's case was essentially that, well, these developers knew what they were
doing.
When they deployed this to the Ethereum blockchain, they knew what they were doing.
They had control over the code.
They had control over the DAO.
They had control over the user interface in the front end.
And therefore, they should have taken measures to try to shut this down, even though they really
didn't have that particular type of control.
So there's going to be, I think, a lot of chilling effect here on the open source community,
because being charged with these types of very, very serious crimes, essentially for
writing code, is really terrifying here.
And this is a case, too, that harkens back to the DCSS case that involved a certain hacker
magazine, 2600, that was sued by the Motion Picture Association of America for publishing
source code in this magazine that had to deal with the decryption of the content scrambling
system that was found in DVDs.
I think you remember exactly what I'm talking about.
Yeah, I'm thinking of Jan Johansson, who was in that very situation.
He wrote the software and was being faced with possible charges because some people might
have used it, even theoretically, not actually, might have used it in a bad way.
Absolutely.
So this is a case that really has the same exact legal principles at play in the DCSS case
that involved 2600.
Now we go back 25, really 26 years later, because I think that case started in 1999,
if I recall correctly.
I remember you being on the stand in 2000.
And actually, that's how I know how old you are, because I remember you had to state your
age while you were on the stand.
And everybody gasped audibly in the in the audience.
Nobody nobody knew how old you are at that point.
So I don't think there was an audible gasp in the corner.
I don't think anybody cared.
Well, from where I was sitting, I heard some gasps.
But that's that's neither here nor there.
That won't be reflected in the transcript either.
But but in any event, the issue, though, is this this this notion of source code and writing
code being free speech is this something that's protected by the First Amendment?
That was an issue that was squarely at play in your case and the court in your case, which
was Universal Studios v.
Ramirez, that was the caption of it, came down and said, well, look, it has to do with the
purpose of of the code.
And because the purpose of that code was to decrypt DVDs, it didn't really have strong First
Amendment protection afforded to it.
But if you take the inverse of that now and you say, OK, well, here's this developer,
25, 26 years later, who created privacy enhancing technology so that people's transactions could
be secure and and away from prying eyes on the blockchain and that's misused by all these
bad guys.
You know, is that now protected by the First Amendment?
Should it be?
Yeah, you're leaving out one important detail.
We lost our case.
You did lose your case.
That's right.
Yeah.
And and and it really had to do with an injunction.
You went up to the Second Circuit.
I remember I was there.
This is one of the cases that really cemented my desire to go in and become a lawyer.
And, you know, five years later, I was a member of the bar.
So but it's the same exact legal principle.
In fact, your case was cited in the briefs that had to deal with whether or not this indictment
should have been dismissed.
Wait, I'm in that court now.
Really?
Maybe you should be.
No, I mean, my name.
The case is being cited.
Yeah, the case was cited in the briefs.
And and when the court denied the motion to dismiss the indictment, your case was cited
because it's it's being alleged that the primary purpose of this particular source code was
really to evade sanctions and to facilitate money laundering and all these other things.
And it didn't have to do with privacy.
But how can we allow something like Signal or even WhatsApp?
Let's say, right.
You know, Meta owns WhatsApp.
They create end to end encrypted messaging applications that the FBI cannot crack into,
that law enforcement cannot crack into.
And that's used by bad guys all the time.
But yet we're prosecuting one open source programmer, one developer who faces over 20 years in prison
if he's convicted on these charges.
I think it's different and distinct in that those are direct communications.
But there are similarities in the structuring of of how it's implemented with regard to the decentralization.
And that that actually comes back around to your question of why texting and person to person communications
weren't implemented in with the same level of encryption.
But it's a choice that in the financial sense allows the transactions to be direct
and not rely on any kind of centralization, whereas Signal does have a centralized system, I believe.
We are going to have to continue this conversation on overtime.
It's a good reason for people to join us in overtime.
Go to YouTube.
Yeah, go to YouTube.
We don't endorse YouTube, but sometimes it's a useful vehicle for us.
And enter channel 2600 or just click on the link that's on top of the 2600.com web page.
And you can listen to more of this chit chat and maybe even join us with a phone call.
And support community radio and WBAI as much as possible.
And we'll see you again very, very quickly.
In short order.
Buddy.wbai.org or give to WBAI.org.
And I believe, Rob, you have a reminder for us as well?
I do.
2600 meetings are happening all over the world this Friday.
Check out 2600.com slash meetings.
NYC2600.net for the local one here in New York.
Okay.
Alex, you know, one final thing.
Last week I played an outro.
It was called Four Electronic Dogs by one Laurie Anderson.
And you did not care for that, I believe, is the expression you expressed rather vehemently.
So I've done my pants.
And I've come up with another Laurie Anderson song that I hope you like better.
It was cacophonous last week.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that's what some people might say.
But I don't say that.
I don't say that at all.
And this is for you.
Good night, everyone.




And we are live on YouTube. Kyle, did you make it okay?
I made it. I don't know about okay. I mean, all right. Yeah, yeah, mostly.
Rob Gila? We are here. Are we on YouTube?
YouTube has yet to catch up. We have just gone live. It is just starting, thanks to the delay.
I went live a while ago. YouTube is so far behind.
What you're hearing happened already. That's, you know, it says live, but it's not live.
Okay, but we now hear us on YouTube, and we're sounding good.
Alex, are you now a fan of Laurie Anderson?
That was better than last week's, but it was still pretty discordant and annoying.
All right, we'll keep trying. We'll go through her entire catalog if we have to.
We'll find a song that you like.
All right.
We'll whistle as you walk down the street.
Fantastic. I'd love just the random German thrown into the song.
That was a nice touch.
German is hardly random, Alex. It's very purposeful, but I can see how you might think that.
But, I mean, why would you torture the listeners in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut?
I think you just answered your own question, because it's New York, and Laurie Anderson is New York.
I mean, we want to encourage people to support WBI, not to turn the dial as soon as they tune in.
Well, it's a process, all right, and many people, it takes time for them to realize what is truly amazing and what is not.
All right. Well, if you say so.
Yeah.
Okay, so you want to continue talking about the Tornado Cash people?
Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm happy to talk about it, and I'd love for listeners to call in and ask or to talk about it.
I'd love to hear their feelings on this, too, because I really do think that there's going to be a real chilling effect here on the open source community,
especially if developers can be prosecuted for people misusing their code.
This is going to have very, very significant ramifications for people who are builders, people who are developers and real doers,
and that very much describes our community.
I have a question, Alex.
Sure.
Is there any indication from your vantage whether folks who had availed themselves of this technology or code itself using that code base,
has anyone that has implemented it had a sense that it's disrupting their model,
whether it be a business or other venture, that basically this will be broadly felt from people who were taking advantage of what was being given away?
Or are there other sort of competing services that maybe don't open source the means with which they use this for transactions?
Is there any kind of concern that it's more the type of service they're providing and less about publishing the how of it?
Or I don't know.
Where does this fall comparatively, I guess, is my question.
Well, that is, I think, a really great question.
And I think I know the answer to it partly, but not entirely.
I mean, there are other privacy-enhancing technologies out there with respect to various blockchains.
There's Monero.
There's Zcash.
There are things that have been around for a while that enhance privacy.
And, in fact, the government brought these up in their closing statement as examples of why something like Tornado Cash wasn't needed.
But it completely misses the point that for specific types of currency and transactions that happen on, let's say, the Ethereum blockchain, there is no financial privacy other than spinning up a new wallet and creating a new wallet and then having your transactions associated with a brand new wallet that isn't associated with you.
So, this issue of financial privacy is something that really needed to be solved.
And it really goes back to this hackathon in 2019.
And the hackathon had to deal with privacy technology.
And Tornado Cash was the winner of this hackathon at ETH Boston.
And they won this award.
And then they actually received venture capital money from Dragonfly, a VC fund, into their company called PepperSec.
And it was through this company very openly in the United States.
This was Roman Storm, who was the CEO of the company.
And they developed this and they open sourced the software and the protocol and they allowed everybody to inspect it.
And it was incredibly effective and very, very well used.
And it wasn't disrupting, I would say, the traditional finance systems or networks because they haven't really adopted or exist within the Ethereum blockchain.
So, this was, I think, a very popular service on Ethereum.
And it has, obviously, a financial use case associated with it.
And the government had alleged a financial motive with respect to Storm, claiming that he personally profited from the sale of these torn tokens that were funding the operations.
And that they could have essentially turned off the lights and the spigot for Tornado Cash once they knew that it was being used by bad guys.
By stopping to pay developers, by shutting down the front end, changing the code on the front end, making it more difficult for people to access, even though because it was deployed as an immutable contract on the Ethereum blockchain, people could always access these transaction pools in one way or another.
So, it's a really tricky case.
The closing statements were today.
I thought the defense did a great job at raising reasonable doubt here with respect to the motivations of Storm and PepperSec when they created this Tornado Cash system.
And the government also did, I think, a very good job at presenting their case and lining up the evidence that shows that, you know, these guys knew that bad guys were using this and didn't really know what to do in response to it.
So, you know, this raises another issue.
If you create something and you know that bad guys are using the system that you created, what's your legal obligation at that point?
Is, you know, and let me go back to something that harkens back to the first day of trial here.
And this was, I thought, a really great analogy that the government came up with.
And they said, trying to explain to the jury how Tornado Catch works with respect to mixing up transactions on the blockchain.
He says, you know, imagine you're in an action movie.
And these types of images and stories and things are always great for juries as well.
So, he said, imagine you're in an action movie and the police are chasing a bad guy down an alley.
And the alley's got all these twists and turns.
And the camera's going from one angle to another.
And it's jerking around and you see the bad guy and he's wearing this black hat and a green hoodie.
And he's going around these various angles and you're chasing him.
And all of a sudden he goes around one corner out into an open street.
You follow him around that corner and boom, you lose track of him because now he's in a sea of people all wearing black hats and green hoodies.
And you have no idea who the bad guy is anymore.
The prosecutors in the opening statement said, that's what Tornado Catch does for bad guys.
It allows them to hide amidst everything else.
Now, if I were on the other side of that, if I were on the defense side, I think the way in which I would have approached retaliating,
rebutting that argument would have been to accept it as true.
Because that's a really great analogy as to how Tornado Catch works.
That's exactly how it works, in fact.
If you think about it, yeah, you're chasing a bad guy.
That bad guy goes into the sea of other people that look just like him and you can't figure out who they are.
But what the government failed to tell the jury at that point was that that other sea of bad guys,
I'm sorry, that other sea of people into which he ran that had a black hat and a green hoodie, they were not bad guys.
They were the legitimate users of this privacy-enhancing technology called Tornado Catch.
Because if only bad guys used Tornado Catch, it wouldn't work.
You need legitimate users.
You need real transaction pools to be mixed in with in order to mask your transactions.
It doesn't work if only bad guys use it.
So I would have said that is exactly right.
Remember exactly what they said.
But just also remember that other sea of people, those are the legitimate users.
But that's not what the defense did in the opening statement.
That's what I would have done.
But, of course, hindsight's always 20-20.
Nonetheless, I thought it was a good analogy.
And I'd love to hear what our callers think.
You could have leapt up in the middle of court and said that.
You know, it works in 1950s movies.
If you were Jimmy Stewart, you would have done it.
Yeah, that would have been something.
That would have probably made the papers as well.
So why are they picking on Tornado Catch?
They can't be the only ones that can be accused of this.
Well, I think it's because it's the most popular one.
And it's the one that nation-state-level threat actors and a lot of fraudsters had used to launder money.
And the fact that some of these bad guys were doing this, they're claiming the Tornado Catch founders profited from bad guys using this to launder their funds.
Now, there's a lot of bad evidence out there that indicates perhaps that the Tornado Catch guys knew this.
But even if they knew that their technology was being used by some bad guys, again, what are the legal implications?
What are the legal implications for a signal knowing that massive amounts of drug dealers use this to communicate with their drug users?
Okay, let me just ask a simple question here.
So they're saying Tornado Catch benefited directly from these bad guys.
Did Tornado Catch know when they benefited from these bad guys?
I mean, could they tell, oh, this is money from a bad person or this is just money that came in from somebody?
How can they distinguish?
Yeah, it would be tricky to tell, but there were always these big spikes of transactions associated with Tornado Catch in the wake of major breaches like the Ronan Breach, the Axie Infinity Breach, et cetera.
And hundreds of millions of dollars was being laundered through Tornado Catch in that respect.
And it was known that the Lazarus Group, which is associated with North Korea, used Tornado Catch to launder money.
And there really wasn't much that they could do about it.
But again, going back to the signal analogy, what is signal supposed to do about nefarious characters using its end-to-end encrypted messaging technologies?
Yeah, I'm just, what I'm trying to get my head around is what did the government expect them to do to avoid being put in this situation?
If they can't identify who the bad guys are, how can they stop providing service to the bad guys?
Well, that was one of the things that came up today in the closing statements as well,
because the government was recounting some testimony from an expert witness that basically came up with an idea as to how Tornado Catch could have solved for this issue.
But they decided not to solve for this issue, so therefore, they must have had the criminal intent to profit from this.
It's really, it's a non sequitur, it doesn't follow.
And also, this particular expert's idea was a bit insane.
They wanted to create a user registry of everybody that could be a legitimate user of Tornado Cash,
and then only allow these legitimate users to use the service, which defeats the entire purpose of having financial privacy on the blockchain.
So creating a white list, essentially, of users, or an allow list of users, really would defeat the entire purpose.
This user registry was kind of a crazy idea, everybody chuckled at this.
Yeah, I mean, you know, parallel that to, say, a whistleblower not being taken seriously unless he registers himself as a whistleblower with the, you know, union of whistleblowers somewhere.
And, you know, nice files are kept.
That way we know it's not just anybody.
It's not somebody hacking into a system.
It's somebody who belongs, you know, in there.
It works for a company and, you know, actually has access to that information.
That would be kind of absurd, wouldn't it?
Because it would sort of take away the whole purpose of revealing something that people don't want you to reveal.
Well, I'll tell you this, too.
And here's another weird connection that this case has to 2600 and in particular to the Hope Conference.
And this was just a bit of a shock to me, too, because I was sitting through the first couple days of testimony because there was testimony from a witness that was associated with the Ethereum name service that actually the government had called and subpoenaed a grant recipient of ENS.
So I went over there to watch the testimony, and the government called an FBI agent by the name of Joel DiCapua to testify on the government's behalf that tornado cash was being used by a bunch of bad guys to launder their money.
Now, that FBI agent, Joel DiCapua, was a speaker at the last Hope Conference a couple of years ago.
Actually, I think it was, yeah, it must have been, I think it was the 2002, I'm sorry, 2022 Hope Conference.
It was the first one that we had at St. John's.
And he was a speaker on a panel that I put together, along with Jay Kramer, who was the head of the Managing Director of National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in New York,
and Sagar Ravi, who was the head of the Computer Crimes Unit at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York,
who he's since left, but that's the office that's prosecuting this particular case.
And Joel DiCapua was an FBI agent that focused on cybercrime, and we were talking about the changes to the U.S. Attorney's Manual that prevented, or rather suggested, I should say,
suggested that U.S. attorneys should no longer prosecute white-hat hackers for cybersecurity-related research.
So researchers should not be prosecuted.
And that's what we were talking about, this giant sea change and how the Department of Justice was approaching hackers and being more friendly.
And he had great things to say at that conference.
He talked about Aaron Swartz and how he's missed and how his voice would be really greatly appreciated these days with respect to things like content moderation,
disinformation and misinformation on platforms.
And he had a lot of really heartfelt comments, and I think his comments were really, really well-received.
And now that's the same exact FBI agent that's on the stand testifying as a government witness to prosecute a developer of open-source software.
So it's a really kind of crazy, small world.
Well, it's also a world where, you know, you have to think about who you're talking to.
I mean, are you surprised the person that you solicited to be on a panel in front of a bunch of hackers,
basically telling them to trust DOJ, to trust the feds, is now somebody hopefully you would not say that about?
Well, I think his words were sincere when he was at the Hope Conference.
I don't think that they were.
What happened to him then?
Well, I think he has a different view of this case.
I think a lot of people have differing views of this particular case.
And his role in the case was very limited as well, was to investigate various things that went over into the tornado cache system.
And, you know, and whether threat actors were using that particular system.
And he was a fact witness.
It also is not for him to decide which cases are prosecuted and which cases are not.
If you think about what the FBI does, they're fact finders.
They go around and they investigate facts.
They bring them to the lawyers.
And the lawyers are the ones that make the decision based on this notion of prosecutorial discussion
as to whether or not to bring a case against somebody.
Right.
But, I mean, if you look at DOJ now as compared to where they were in 2022, it's not the same organization.
It's been corrupted.
And people say things that they never would have said before just to survive.
And this holds true of every part of that agency.
You know, I don't relish saying that.
But, you know, the proof is in the news every single day.
Look, I don't disagree with that.
I think I have a better view of the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Southern District of New York.
I think they're very aggressive, but they're extraordinarily smart and capable lawyers.
I do think, though, that they overreach and that they bring cases in this particular venue that shouldn't have been brought.
I think Virgil's case is a case on point in that respect.
I think there was very, very tenuous connections to New York.
And I think this particular case as well has very tenuous connections to New York.
So I think venue might have been proper in Seattle, which was where Roman Storm lived.
But I'll tell you, it's a terrifying prospect to me when writers of code are being prosecuted for people misusing that particular code.
And it may be out of their hands as to whether or not they can stop this.
This is an extraordinarily frightening precedent that I think we're facing right now.
And whether the jury acquits or not is, I think, going to have really massive ramifications to the open source and the developer and the hacker community.
Did you have any predictions based on what you saw today?
Were you able to tell any expressions from the jury or anything?
Yeah, well, I'll tell you, the jury is hard to read.
It's really a mixed bunch.
Some people are, I think, really on the ball and taking notes.
Others are kind of laid back, seem to be a little bit more passive.
But everyone was paying attention during these closing arguments today because that's where you have this opportunity to really wrap up the story in some cohesive manner.
I think that the defense really did a great job today in raising the skeptic of reasonable doubt here and explaining what reasonable doubt is in terms that a jury could understand, something that would make you reasonably in your own life hesitate about a particular decision.
I think that I would be I'd be very happy but surprised to see an acquittal on all three counts.
I think that the sanctions count of these.
And remember, these are all conspiracy counts as well.
So I didn't actually have to do the thing.
It's just conspiring to do the thing, committing some kind of overt act, excuse me, in furtherance of a conspiracy.
So I think the money transmission charge, I wouldn't be surprised if the jury acquitted on that.
I think on the money laundering charge, I think it's 50-50.
And I think on the sanctions charge, the IEPA violation, that's the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, conspiracy to violate that particular statute, which was the exact same charge that Virgil faced.
I'd be surprised if there was an acquittal on that.
I'd be happy if there was.
But I think it's a tough case for the defense to fend off.
So we will see.
Look, we might have a verdict tomorrow because the jury, I don't think, deliberated at all.
I think they're going to come in tomorrow and deliberate for the entirety of the day.
There's only three charges.
They could have a verdict in a day.
I think if they come back really quickly, it's probably not a great sign.
But if they take their time and really think about these issues, I hope that they come to the right conclusion, which, to my mind, would be not guilty.
All right.
Interesting.
Well, no doubt we'll have some news next week.
And we'll keep following us.
So Tornado Cash.
And where can people find out more about this?
Because there's been precious little coverage of it.
Yeah, I think that's right.
A lot of the crypto news outlets like Coindesk, everybody's been covering that.
But the mainstream media and the mainstream tech outlets have not been paying the attention to this case that I think it deserves.
So I'm glad that we spent some time on it today.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, even the tech outlets aren't covering it, which is weird.
You'd expect them to see the importance of it.
Yeah, it really, really is.
And, again, major implications to the open source community if this results in a guilty verdict.
All right.
Shall we take some phone calls?
Yes, we shall.
Well, before we do, can you test the dial tone?
Let's see how clean a line we have here.
I always like to check these things.
Oh, there's a bit of a hum there.
Let's see if we can get rid of that somehow.
It's a little loud this week.
We want to go in as silent as we can.
Sometimes we have to touch certain things.
I'm sure the heat doesn't help.
Here it's kind of, like, wavering.
It's such a...
You can keep that on.
That's a nice sound.
It's going to sound fast for a reorder soon.
Yeah.
But there is a louder hum this week than there was.
That's better.
You've got to tell me when to stop.
It's going to do a reorder.
All right.
Let's try one more time.
Hold on.
Hit a button.
See?
That's good.
That's good.
Leave that.
It's not bad.
It's not bad.
It could be way better.
Don't touch anything, and we'll be fine.
Someday.
Someday.
I should warn people.
And don't call yet, because the line isn't even operational yet.
You will hear a hum as you're talking to us.
So please don't tell us you hear a hum.
We know you're going to hear a hum.
But the people listening won't hear the hum, and the archive won't hear the hum, and we won't hear the hum.
Yeah.
You hear the hum, so we don't have to.
And if Rob or Gila or Alex say something, you might have difficulty hearing them.
So please turn down the stereo, whatever you've got going on, so you can hear their gentle voices in the distance.
And to the three of you, please talk as loudly as you possibly can when addressing the caller.
We shall do our best, especially considering that when we unmute, you could probably hear our air conditioner as well.
Well, that is the workaround for everything.
A considerate person would turn off the air conditioner, but we'll talk about that later.
802-321-4225.
We want them to be there to listen in a healthy state.
The phone line is now active.
802-321-4225.
That didn't take long, did it?
And let's see who or what we have.
Are you ready?
Do we have a call, Kyle?
Oh, they hung up and called back.
Yeah, that was the end of one call and beginning of another call, I think.
Let's jump in.
Good evening.
You're on off the cover time.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Hi, Emmanuel.
A rebel.
You know, it's actually good to hear your voice because we talked to you two weeks ago.
You were in Siberia.
And right after we talked to you, a plane in Siberia crashed.
So we wanted to make sure...
Well, a plane in eastern Russia crashed.
It's Siberia.
You were both in Siberia.
And we're just making sure you weren't responsible for it.
Oh, well, there was an earthquake in eastern Russia today.
Yeah, what the hell are you doing over there?
Are you still there?
Oh, you're back.
Okay, so...
Yeah, I'm back.
Well, the earthquake definitely has nothing to do with you then.
Right.
So how was Siberia?
Good.
I mean, I went to Tashkent, Uzbekistan first.
Uh-huh.
Well, you have to see that.
I mean, how do you miss that?
Well, yeah.
And then I took...
You know, I took a train.
I was going to go to, like, this place called Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
It's, like, two hours away, which ended up being four hours away because this train was
so hot.
It was 105 degrees.
And they said, well, the train's going 35 miles an hour because it's so hot that something
about the tracks can't handle it or something like that.
And this train had no air conditioning.
It was one of those Soviet-style trains.
When I first walked onto it, I thought I was in, like, India or something.
Yeah, that's what those trains are like.
They're old and they're rugged.
But...
Right.
And then...
I'm confused, Reb.
I thought Siberia was supposed to be cold.
You're telling me it's hot.
No, no, no.
This was...
This was...
This was...
It was Vickersham.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And I took the new train back, the regular fast train, the new modern train back.
So...
Let's see.
So, what else?
You know, there was a...
Somebody on Zoom got hacked and the MTA, the Transit Authority...
Uh, okay.
That doesn't really sound like a big headline, but, um...
What...
What...
What happened?
All right.
Well, here...
Let me read you this article from the Risk Digest.
Oh, you don't...
What?
The Risk Digest still comes out?
I haven't read that since the 1990s.
Wow.
Yeah.
Hank...
Hank...
Hank...
Hank...
Hank...
Hank...
You okay?
According to sources...
Is Peter Neumann still editing it?
I don't know.
Hmm.
The MTA's New York City Transit...
Okay.
Why are you talking like that?
I'm imitating you in the 90s.
Are you trying to say that I talk like that in the 1990s?
No, because one of the archives, it's slower.
I don't know why.
Well, maybe you should tell us which one it is.
We have the technology.
Now we can fix that.
Oh.
Uh...
You pick one show to make fun of me from and expect me to know what you're talking about?
It's actually a couple of them.
Well, cassette decks weren't where they are now.
So, yeah.
It was a little bit tricky.
Basically, they zoom feed.
Like, they had Zoom.
You know, they were talking from one location to another.
I can't believe they expected me to know that.
They forgot a setting to set some option, and somebody got in and, you know, made all these
remarks and, you know, posted some, like, I think, X-rated material.
So...
This is what happened on Zoom.
Well, if you don't set...
If you don't know how to use settings and, like...
Right.
You know, what options to set.
Uh-huh.
Well, they're too busy running trains, so, you know, as long as they do that properly.
Right.
And, you know, there's a 2600 meeting this Friday.
That's what Rob said.
Yeah.
Right.
And, uh...
Yeah.
And hopefully they'll talk about the Hope Conference, because I'd like to volunteer for the networking
thing, you know, because, you know, I'd like to learn how, you know, computer networks
work.
So, you know, I'd figure it's, you know, volunteering, like, the network part of...
You know, Rebel, you just reminded me, the Hope Conference is coming up.
Boy, I gotta check the calendar more often.
We just put the schedule up today, so if you go to hope.net, you'll see the schedule of all
the talks, which is pretty awesome.
We have such an amazing group of people, and it is going to be a ton of fun.
We started this thing called the Hope Scholarship, where basically people who can't afford to
go to hope wind up getting scholarships from people who want to donate tickets to them.
And so far, we have covered everybody who has asked to get a scholarship.
I believe we have.
We might need some extra people to come and donate so that students and people that can't
afford the ticket price can basically go to an event that could change their lives for
the better.
Hope.net has all the info.
It's happening August 14th.
Wait.
August 12th.
Wait.
Oh, my God.
I'm having a heat stroke here.
15th, 16th, and 17th.
15th through 17th.
I knew 15th was in that somewhere.
15th through 17th.
Okay.
So you remember by realizing it is the 16th incarnation of this event, and the 16th will
be in the middle of this year's event.
No, I was remembering the first hope, which I think was August 13th and 14th of 1994.
Well, we've been throwing back a lot to the original event, so...
You know, someone tuning in just now would think I live in the 1990s, because I keep mentioning
the 1990s, but I really don't.
I really don't.
So this is the latest hope we've ever had.
It's never been this late in the year.
It's right before...
It's that week when summer ends and school begins.
There's a weekend between that, and that's where we are at St. John's.
And it's going to be awesome, because, you know, we'll have the run of the place.
We won't be crowded out of the dormitories, and we'll have all kinds of space to just hang
out, and it'll be a blast.
And it's a ton of fun.
You're in New York City, but you have all this space, and you can go to New York City anytime
you want, to Manhattan, that is, or you can hang out at the Hacker Conference and do all
kinds of fun things.
You're 10 minutes away from the biggest Chinatown in America, which is something to say and something
to experience.
Yeah.
And all of that surrounds this site where we'll have just that incredible lineup, and you get
this opportunity to ask questions, to participate, to learn new skills.
There's a lot of room for breakouts and workshops, things that teach you something that you might
come away with a new skill or may not realize you had a skill all along.
It's just that kind of experience.
But really, the conversation, the discussion, the dialogue, we'll be sharing it.
We'll be capturing it.
You'll be able to basically be in proximity to people that are pursuing and curious, really
excellent topics, excellent information, and they're using this event as a way to share
it with the world, to bring people's sort of collective knowledge up to speed with whatever
that is that they're passionate about.
So we really, we're looking forward to that, and we know that everybody there physically
really has this incredible experience talking to people and sharing.
Can I just, speaking of incredible experiences, can I just point something out right now?
We have Rebel on the phone, and he's turned up, and he hasn't talked over us once.
Rebel, what did they teach you over there?
No, they obviously taught you some good manners over in Siberia.
But I was just going to say that you could also network with people to get IT jobs at
the whole conference.
That is true.
Absolutely.
There are a lot of people that use this period in the summer to attend events, and they are
essentially on vacation or taking a little bit of time away, but you never know who you're
talking to.
And if you're looking to get a start, looking to change or shift your careers or enhance some
of your skills, and maybe because you've realized your job is encompassing more in the field
of information or technology, and you just, you could get ideas, you could get names and
suggestions, references, that kind of thing is always going on, and absolutely a big part
of what I'm saying.
You're absolutely right.
It is through the course of socializing, hanging out with people that you'll understand where
they're coming from.
You'll be able to share stories, and you never know what it might lead to.
It could really change your life and help you.
And that's really the goal, is to get people to mix it up, get people to become familiar
outside of maybe their line of work doesn't really intersect with what you do necessarily.
This is a great opportunity to have a shared interest, to get around, check out different
things, but also mingle a little bit and just find out what's going on, find out where you
could learn more about something, or like you said, get some leads for a career shift
or some kind of opportunity that might be out there for you.
Yeah, I have to say, of all the hopes that we've done, this is the 16th, this might be the
most challenging.
And I say that because, not because of the people we're working with, because it's been
a dream, and we really have such a great staff, but just the climate is, and I don't mean
the climate change climate, that's a problem too.
I mean the, you know, the society, what's going on, everyone's at each other's throats,
and there's this just overly hostile, combative tone in the air from so many different directions.
And that's one of the reasons we decided to go annual, because we felt people needed
an outlet, a way to learn more about technology, to take power over technology, and to feel
like their voices matter.
But, you know, we've had all kinds of challenges involved in people traveling here from other
countries.
People are very reluctant to do that.
We've had all sorts of pushback from various places.
And, you know, people that say you shouldn't even have a conference in the United States
as long as the United States is in the state it's in, which to me seems very self-defeating,
because, well, if you just stop doing whatever it is you do, because the government is doing
bad things, what do you do?
You know, you either leave, or you just wind up cowering at home, and I don't think either
one of those is an answer.
You need to come back stronger than ever.
You need to keep saying the things that you want to say, learning about the things you want
to learn about, and not being intimidated.
And, you know, I can't stress that enough.
I understand, you know, people from Canada, people from Europe, why they don't want to come.
And, of course, you know, we have the virtual attendee for people that want to be a part
of things and can't make it here.
And you have so many good reasons not to come here because of what they're doing at the
border.
That's, you know, understandable.
But for the people that are here, you know, I think it's up to us to make things stronger,
to make things better.
And it's not easy.
It's going to take time.
It's going to take effort.
But, you know, not doing this for 2025, I think, would have been a mistake because,
you know, who knows what 2026 is going to be like.
But I do know we'll be stronger after this conference for doing what we do.
And I just hope we see more and more people come by and do that.
And let's not, you know, let's not be too judgmental about what hackers stand for or what
people should be doing, because this is all new territory for everybody.
There are some people who are mad because we have somebody from Doge as one of our
speakers.
Well, you know, this is a great opportunity to ask some questions.
This is a guy who, you know, who basically was fired from Doge for being honest.
And, you know, it might not be enough.
That might not be enough to to make up for his sins.
But, you know, he's going to be asked some hard questions.
And, you know, it's it's a it's a great opportunity to have that dialogue that you wouldn't
have ordinarily.
And, you know, you don't have to approve of every single speaker.
We have hundreds, you know, like up to 200 speakers.
You don't have to approve everybody who's there.
We have, you know, Joshua Aaron, who was on a couple of weeks ago, who wrote the IceBlock
app.
Well, some people are mad at that because this guy is, you know, sticking his thumb in the
eye of big government.
We're trying to, you know, throw people into gulags and things like that.
So we're going to have a wide variety of viewpoints and voices, and you're not going to agree with
all of them.
And there's, you know, all kinds of reasons why you could come up with reasons not to come
up with excuses not to partake in this.
But I think it's so important that we engage in the dialogue and have these conversations
because not doing it, that option just it really seems to hurt us more than anything.
So I really hope this conference proves that we're here to stay and we can do this on an
annual basis, because then I know that we're going to survive whatever it is that's ahead.
But if we if we cave in, like I'm seeing so many big companies and universities and other
entities do, that's that's not a good look.
That's not a good future.
So this is it's a big opportunity.
I just would reiterate that it's it's about I think the the moment in itself, it feels like a
lot of things have accelerated.
We'd like to be up to pace, essentially, with how fast things have occurred, how accelerated a time
we live in has really appeared.
And and to do this kind of event, we really we create a moment where you can increase the
frequency like this is like high frequency, you know, a ton of information, a lot of interactions
that that ability.
I mean, we encourage people to bring information, bring things you want to share.
We'll have an incredible network.
We'll have access to the Web and all these discussions will be going on.
But, you know, if you have stuff you want to share, if you have equipment, if you want to set
up machines, if you want to trade some some a data set or some machine learning set up in the
1990s, if you want, yeah, retro stuff, older, newer, all of it.
We want to be a hub for this.
We want this activity to be facilitated in a way that we can move a lot of information,
get get people empowered, get people starting projects, finishing projects.
You know, if you if you want to spread, you know, distribute stuff, if you've written something,
if you want to just basically get that out to the world, we want all of that activity to
go on and we're going to do our best to set up the systems to facilitate that.
So by all means, if you have equipment you want to bring like rebel, just intimated retro
systems all the way up to current systems, whatever capacity you can possibly bring with
you, we'll we'll try to accommodate and hook you up.
And basically, we want to facilitate as high bandwidth as high frequency communication, both
in person and digitally and all of it that incredible fervor is what we want to set the conditions
for and that includes the discussions, hallway discussions, as well as those in the lecture
halls.
We want all of it to be captured and distributed and really just accelerate what is going on
in the face of of what we all have sort of witnessed politically or in the media or globally.
Be that as it may, we want to continue in that spirit of matching pace with with with a world
that is itself feeling like it's moving incredibly quickly in certain directions.
Let's let's get all of that activity in one place.
And that's I think what we're what we're appreciating about what will coalesce next month.
And I can't say enough about our volunteers who make this happen, who pour themselves into the
organization and the operation of a conference like hope.
It's huge and it's it's just it's almost unbelievable the hurdles they are getting over
in order to be able to do this themselves.
People are going through so much that we don't talk about that you wonder how how they're able to
continue to put in so much and give so much.
And it just says something to the the type of people they are.
And I'm honored to be in their midst.
But we need more.
We need more people.
We need people to join us and to become part of this magical community.
And, you know, hope conferences are always a place where you can try that out and you can,
you know, basically try your hand at running a particular part of it,
becoming involved in something that maybe you never were involved in before,
because that is the only way this is able to happen is by people volunteering their efforts
and pulling resources and just creating a unique event that people will remember for the rest of
their lives.
Hey, if you only go to one hope conference, you will remember that for the rest of your life.
There are people who have gone to all of them.
There are people who have gone to many of them.
And that's why we are so keen on opening this up to students and to people who otherwise could
never go to a hope conference.
You can help make that happen by donating a ticket to them.
You know, we never tried this before, but I am blown away by the number of people who have done
this because, you know, there's all kinds of reasons why you might not be able to make it this year,
whether it's work-related, health-related, government-related, you know, country-related.
There are all kinds of reasons, but you can share the experiences that you've had in the past or
just your ideology with somebody that you've never met and basically change their life.
You know, they will meet people, they will hear things, they will become involved in the community that
they may stay involved with for decades to come, and you can make all that possible.
And I'm just so grateful that we have so many good people in our community that no matter what
happens, I'm not worried as long as we're all around.
So hope.net has all the information.
Rebel, I'm going to give you a couple of minutes to say whatever else you need to say,
and then we're going to open it up.
Okay, yes.
And I think, yes.
And I think 2600 meetings should be called 2600 gatherings now.
What's different?
Well, I mean, meetings sound too, like, formal, you know?
But they never were formal.
They always were exactly the way they are now.
Right.
I mean, it's more of the gathering then.
I suppose.
But, you know, you should have suggested that back in 1987 when we started them.
Right.
Yes.
A lot of stationery has been printed up since then.
What if you dial zero on your phone?
You had to dial phones.
What if you dial zero?
Say what now?
He's asking.
What if you dial zero when you were testing out the phone, like, on your phone there?
What if you dial zero?
You want us to call the operator?
Yeah.
What if you dial zero?
Well, I don't want to call the operator.
They can get angry.
Would you get a 9X operator?
I don't know.
Now I'm curious.
I'm not going to do it, though, because I'm scared.
Okay, well, when I hang up, you'll should try it.
No, I'm not going to do that.
Kyle, keep the phone away from me.
Don't let me do it.
Calling the operator when you don't have a reason to call an operator is a crime.
No, you can say, may I have long distance?
I may have the area code in Pittsburgh or something like that.
It's 412.
You don't need an operator.
I can tell you.
All right, all right.
Ask for the country code and city code in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
How's that?
Oh, boy.
Yeah, okay.
Let's talk about Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Well, before you do that, I'll just briefly talk about Russia.
But Siberia, the Nelvisibirsk, the Siberian city, it's so nice.
It's just like St. Petersburg.
Everyone's helpful.
I was looking.
I was at this restaurant.
It was like this nice, like, it was kind of like the restaurants we go to on St. Mark's.
They were like, you know, like everybody's like all chill there and like hip and everything.
I said, you know, this waiter's wearing this hat with her, like a little, it's like a graffiti deal,
like a New York City kind of a graffiti kind of a.
And, by the way, there's all, every country you go in Europe, even in Russia, New York City Yankee hats.
What is with the New York City Yankees?
I mean, you know, New York City Yankee in Los Angeles.
Yeah.
You know, I saw somebody on the plane.
I said, hey, you like the Yankees.
You know, I like the Mets.
And they didn't understand what I was saying.
Well, the Mets need to send more hats over there because there's no reason they wouldn't like the Mets.
Anyway, yeah, so everybody was hopeful.
The guy, you know, showed me, hey, well, go to this store and this is where I got it.
And I'm trying to look for the store and, you know, I didn't find it.
I went to the restaurant the next day and I said, oh, did you find the store?
Did you find, you know, whatever?
And I said, no, I couldn't find it.
And they said, oh, you know, I'll take you to it after you're done eating.
So he literally, after I was done, he literally took me to where it was.
He actually went out of his way.
I mean, this was in, like, some building and it was, like, one of those underground kind of things.
That's probably why I couldn't find it.
People do things like that everywhere.
They really do.
And it's amazing.
Yeah.
He literally went out of his way and took me to the store.
And it was, you know, they were deafening each other up.
It was just like New York City.
It's amazing.
I mean, that's what I liked about it.
Yeah.
And I told, when I came back, you know, I told the customs person, you know, you go through
Exit Customs or whatever.
Uh-huh.
No, I said, you know, I want to defect.
They actually took me seriously.
So it was a good time.
So wait, did you actually defect or not?
Yeah, don't say that to a customs person.
Yeah.
Fortunately, I didn't.
But Metro is so nice.
But it's just so comfortable.
Wait, do they have a Metro in that?
Siberia.
In Nova Zambia, Siberia, yeah.
I mean, it's like two lines, but it's just like, you know, Moscow.
Well, okay.
On that note, do they use the same cars?
Yeah, they do.
Yeah, because I'm familiar with those cars.
I think they're green, right?
No, they're like blue, old Soviet cars.
Blue.
Yeah, that's it.
And you'll find those in Belarus.
I think you'll even find them in Ukraine as well.
I found them in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Yeah.
Well, I'm glad you're back and that you had a good time.
And look forward to talking more at Hope.
Yeah.
Dial zero.
Get a dial phone and dial zero and see what you get.
All right.
You know what?
Maybe we'll try it.
I don't know.
I think it's...
You can't do it with me on the line, though.
Yeah, that's...
Yeah, you saw right through that.
Okay.
But we are going to take another phone call.
It was good hearing your voice.
Okay.
All right.
Take care.
Okay.
So, you want to try it, Kyle?
Well, first of all, we have to get it out of time.
Will it reveal something?
No, I don't...
Well, you know what?
I'm not sure.
I don't know where this phone is.
Yeah, you know what?
It might.
It might.
You're right.
I'll try it.
I'll try it off air and then I'll let you try it on air.
Okay.
No, I think I know what it's going to do.
And it might actually reveal the weird-ass phone company we use out here that we don't want
anyone to know about.
Gila, go ahead.
Oh, yes.
We do have a question, a Hope-related question from our friend, Tim, in Connecticut, who asks,
is there going to be a smartphone app this year?
Is there going to be a what now?
We don't know.
Smartphone app for Hope.
Oh, that's a good question.
You know, I was going to ask that question myself earlier today, but I didn't.
We don't know exactly yet.
A lot of, oddly enough, a lot of the best efforts from organizing the schedule that way come
from the community.
Someone's just like, hey, look what I did, and they share it, and it's actually incredible.
And so we've taken to having direct links in the past to just basically advertising this
will be posted.
And usually when someone comes up with, sorry, I'm doing two things at once, comes up with
the best one or one that we want to go ahead and reference, we'll place it on the wiki or
place it on the websites in a prominent way.
And we've indicated in the past, I think, my point was we've had links to it in the program
and that last time, I think, we didn't even put a direct link or people didn't want QR
codes, so we just said that there would be one, and eventually I think there was one.
So we don't have information on that right away.
If there's something, though, that you think we can benefit from, that you have expertise
in, we are open to hearing about that.
And that goes from everything from, you know, apps to badges to the things we haven't even
thought of yet.
Everyone pitches in and comes up with some unique part of hope that becomes tradition.
And this is a great opportunity to become part of that.
Go ahead, Rob.
No doubt someone will.
Yeah, now that the schedule has been posted on the site, that info is there if anyone
who would like to volunteer their talents wants to pull that data into any sort of form
that would be helpful, such as a phone app.
Yeah, there you go.
That's all there.
Hope.net.
We have another phone call?
Yes, and I was going to say we could also try that dialing.
I think it's safe enough to try the zero, but we can take this call first.
Yeah, let's take this call first.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I'd like to know if I choose to buy a ticket in person on the first day of the
conference, what time would they go on sale?
Actually, that information is on hope.net, too, under the news section.
It should be the first page you see.
They have hours.
It's starting on Thursday and running through the weekend.
Oh, okay.
So, like, 10 or something like that.
You have to look at the site.
I don't have the site in front of me, but if you go to hope.net, you'll see it.
I do have the site in front of me.
Rob has a site in front of him.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, registration is open on Thursday the 14th from 4.30 to 9.30 p.m., and then 8.30
a.m. on Friday and onward.
And I should point out, it's going to be $25 more.
Oh, really?
$25 more?
Okay.
All right.
Well, that's good to know, but the virtual, that'll stay the same.
I mean, that price doesn't fluctuate, right?
I'm sorry, say again?
The type to attend virtually, that price will remain the same, right?
Yes, that will remain the same.
Okay.
And are you still going to be providing the printed programs at the venue?
We're going to try.
We're working on that right now, actually.
Yeah, we're doing our best.
Okay.
Yeah.
Because it is good to have something to hold in your hand.
I agree.
I agree completely.
We feel the same way, because everyone asks, and there's all kinds of chaos and questions,
and everyone wants to get oriented, and it's a great way to just get a whole bunch of stuff
in one place for everyone to be aware as they get acclimated with the venue.
So, absolutely, we'll have something like that.
Fingers crossed.
Okay.
And the last thing, during the show tonight, you read a letter from Italy, and you said
the person was concerned that he wasn't able to access old episodes of Off the Hook.
On YouTube.
And I didn't hear you mention the WBAI archive.
As far as I know, that has tons of episodes of Off the Hook.
I'm surprised you didn't mention that.
Well, I wouldn't mention, because we already have the archive on our local server, and the
BAI archive lately has been kind of corrupted.
A little glitchy.
Yeah, we've been hearing all kinds of reports about that, but there's no need to go there,
because we have everything saved locally from 1988 on, and it's always there.
But what the letter was referring to was YouTube, where our shows also show up, but they do the
auto-captioning thing.
But then we got into this whole thing about censoring auto-captioning and the problems
that YouTube has, but it would be great if we could somehow introduce captioning on our
copies as well.
Of course, we need to have some kind of video display of that.
You know, there's all sorts of ideas people have that we are willing to support.
Right.
What was the problem with the episodes on the WBAI archive?
I didn't hear about anything being corrupted.
Yeah, what we heard over the past few months was that shows were only five minutes long,
or that they were glitching out while people were listening to them.
I'm not sure if it only affected live streams, or if it affected the archive as well.
I believe it affected the archive as well, from what I was told.
Okay.
But the thing, we can guarantee the ones that we have locally are fine.
So that's why we recommend that.
So that is the best place to go, to your website for the old episode.
Yeah, we have all of them there.
Okay.
All right.
Well, look forward to the conference, and it should be a lot of fun.
It will be.
It will be.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
Thanks.
And people who are worried about getting there, it's easy.
Don't fret about it, because it's not in Midtown Manhattan.
Yes, we know that.
It's not in Midtown Manhattan, but that's a good thing.
We used to be in Midtown Manhattan before they tore down the Hotel Pennsylvania.
I wish I hadn't done that, but they did.
But, you know, Manhattan is hugely expensive, very crowded.
If you are driving, you don't have any chance of finding a cheap place to park.
And at St. John's, we have free parking.
So you can actually go to St. John's, park your car for the weekend, and you would save
as much money as the admission fee for the conference.
Yeah, because you'd have to pay extra just to park your car if we were in Manhattan.
Not to mention, venues are extremely expensive.
We're probably talking three or four times the admission fee would be necessary for having
this in a venue in Manhattan.
That would be more crowded and more uncomfortable as well.
Well, I could just go on and on about the advantages of having this in Queens.
You know, we never intended to have it in Queens, but we were forced to look around after the
hotel was closing.
We discovered this awesome place, and it really has worked out.
This will be our third conference there.
And, you know, it's near the airports.
If you're flying in from different parts of the world, it's near JFK.
It's near LaGuardia.
You don't have to stay in Midtown Manhattan.
Yeah, I know it's inconvenient if you stay in Midtown Manhattan and commute back and forth
every day because you want to be near Broadway.
Do the Broadway thing after the conference.
You have plenty of time.
And the commute isn't that bad, but, you know, doing it every day I think could be, you
know, a bit much, but it's still, you know, less than an hour.
It's, you know, I've been to conferences where I've had to take buses into the countryside,
where I've had to go underground, where I've had to endure a heat of like 120 degrees.
It's, you know, you go through all kinds of things to get someplace.
But when you're there, you're in a magical environment.
And that is something that we can guarantee you is a magical environment if you've got
to hope.
Yes.
There's a lot of decisions we make that may not be things that are forefront for you,
but we have to make those decisions to sustain ourselves.
You don't know, but there are a lot of aspects of hosting something like this that require
us to think of a lot of eventualities, a lot of aspects of it that accommodate everyone.
And the idea is for us to be able to sustain ourselves such that it's a comfortable environment
for the sharing of information in this way and so that we can continue on.
And as we've said, you know, we're always or at least currently we're recruiting.
We want as much help.
We want as much participation.
And we're thinking long term.
This is an important short term thing to nurture.
But we are thinking how to sustain it over time.
And we've made those decisions.
And this is the best place to do this.
This is the best way for us to move forward in this moment and for as long as we possibly
can.
The cool thing about St. John's is we can stay fairly small and be fine or we can grow 10
times the size we are now and they can handle that as well.
And there's, you know, there's no pressure.
It's what we as a community decide to do.
It's just very relaxed.
And also everything works.
Yeah.
At the hotel was not the case.
Yeah.
There are a lot of our volunteer groups that people have been involved with, I'm sure, over
the years from way back at the hotel.
And just what we've evolved into, the way we're able to manage this is kind of, it's
still a very busy event.
I mean, as someone, I spend a lot of time helping out and it is more relaxing when you
check in with people and talk to people that are, albeit incredibly busy, oftentimes stressed,
oftentimes haven't slept enough or had enough food.
But though the unexpected things, the extreme stressors, I think are not as evident and you
can see it.
Some people actually enjoy themselves while working or volunteering and yeah, the reshaping
certain things.
I know from a network perspective with, like you said, in all the auditoriums and lecture
halls, just what is built in and ready for the type of event that we host on a campus
like that, it just, it makes the most sense.
And from many of the people that worked at the hotel previously, I think that it's noticeable
or at least they recollect the kind of heavy lift it was to like run cables or run, you know,
set up furniture, you know, get things reoriented to accommodate us in the best way.
Those folks, I think when you talk to them now, they have an appreciation just for how accommodating
the campus is for lectures, for discussions and talks.
So, so it's, it's been, um, really worthwhile, I think for some of the things that we were
just getting installed and, and, and ready to go in the nick of time.
Um, now there's a lot, um, we, we've done it a couple of times as you said, and there's
just a lot more familiarity and it is, um, I think logically something that we're able
to do as much as it is really a heavy, heavy lift and we expand, we do all this stuff
organizationally, but we're able to, um, provide the, the things people expect and do it with
a level of competence that is reliable, that's predictable and, and a lot less awkward in some
cases.
So we're, we're very pleased to, to do our best in this environment to, to host it.
So, Gila, go ahead.
You're, you're muted, Gila.
I know.
Cause Rob had the mouse.
Um, sorry, dear.
So, uh, do you want to remind people that hope runs on volunteers?
And if you want to volunteer in any way, drop a note to volunteers at hope.net and they'll
be happy people on the other end who will be glad to hear from you.
Yeah.
Um, any, anything that happens at hope happens because of our volunteers and the more people
who get involved, the better it is.
So volunteers at hope.net.
I did have a different question, which I'm assuming I know the answer to, um, someone asked,
what do the hope badges look like this year?
And I'm guessing we're not going to find out until August.
Pretty much.
Yes.
We're not going to disclose information like that.
Yeah.
802-321-4225.
We have time for one more call.
If it comes in soon.
We do need all types of volunteers.
So if you want to MC and like introduce talks, you want to, you know, you have a specialty
or skill that you, uh, want to bring to it, please get in touch with us.
When you, when you, um, uh, write in to volunteers at hope.net, please tell us what, what it is
you'd like to do, what you're good at, uh, what you'd like to try.
And, uh, we'll see if we can find a fit for you.
There's also a very good page on the hope site, uh, about the travel.
And, uh, you're talking about this possibly being intimidating for folks, but it's got
all the info there.
If you're coming in by plane, it's a, you know, you can see how to get there from the
airports.
If you're coming by train, if you're coming by bus, if you're driving, if you're coming
from the local hotels, if you're coming internationally, there's a good set of, uh, details and everything
on the hope site on the, uh, travel page that, uh, you will find enlightening.
Please look at that section because we busted our asses making that, uh, work and it's, it's
very, it's very, um, um, I guess helpful.
I hope it's helpful, but we'll see.
We have a phone call and good evening.
You're on off the hook over time.
Go ahead.
Hello.
Hello.
It's Lou Ichu from Washington, D.C., our nation's capital.
Yes.
So I know.
Uh, yes.
What's on your mind?
I promise.
I promise it's just as sweaty down here as it is up here in New York.
No, I think it's probably worse down there.
Oh, well.
Yeah.
So about tornado cash, which is brought up, uh, earlier on the show in an overtime, cryptocurrency
mixers are not a magic bullet.
They have been, uh, transactions have been reversed by various three-letter organizations.
They escape the name of me right now.
There's so many.
Um, yeah.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I, I know that.
And I, if I recall correctly, I think some of the first mixers were the subject of some
academic research that I then published on, on these mixers.
And then obviously that let the bad guys know, knew that the transactions could be reversed.
And then so better mixers came out.
I've been involved in a number of digital asset traces for stolen digital assets, where the
assets went through various mixers, not necessarily tornado cash, but, um, tornado cash seems to
be the most effective privacy enhancing technology on the blockchain for breaking up the block of
your particular transactions.
And, uh, and, and that's perhaps why they're, they're going after them.
But yeah, mixers have been around for a while and there's legitimate use cases for them and
there's people that abuse them.
And the danger is to going after the developers rather than the criminals when those types of
systems are abused.
All right, well, in data news, well, there was that app, T, spelled like the beverage that
was allegedly had their database out in public and people on 4chan were able to just cut and
paste stuff from there and post it on the board.
In other news, uh, I think that I saw this on the register six days ago, so that would
have been a day after over time, but Unmarker, it's a new program, uh, created by two computer
science students at the University of Waterloo in Ontario that is able to erase the steganographic
watermarks that are typically encoded in AI generated, generated, generated artwork and
maybe video.
I'm not sure.
Interesting.
Wow.
Yeah, that's an interesting, uh, idea.
There's software already, um, for artists for trying to protect their, uh, are exactly.
I was going to mention nightshade, but you could probably use that on AI generated art to achieve
the same effect depending on what steganographic techniques are employed.
Alex, you have something to add?
Alex, you had to unmute yourself.
I'm sorry.
It was my fault this time.
Hold on.
Oh, yes.
There you go.
I was very confused there for a moment, but, uh, I wasn't aware that they were using steganographic
encryption techniques to embed data within AI content like that.
But the detection of, of the use of steganographic encryption goes back to the early 2000s, really
back in, um, in the wake of September 11th, when everybody was still concerned about terrorism
those days.
And there was this fear that terrorists were going to communicate by way of hidden messages
embedded in like a couch for sale or something like that on Craigslist.
And that was going to be the go word.
So there was a lot of research done into the detection of the use of steganographic encryption,
uh, by hiding messages and images and things.
And in particular, I worked with a guy at Dartmouth's Institute for Security Technology Studies,
whose, uh, his name is Hani Fareed, uh, F-A-R-I-D.
And he did a lot of research into the detection of, of steg in this area and now has progressed
on and moved on from Dartmouth.
I think he's over at UC Berkeley now, but he's really evolved the, his tool set for detection
mechanisms to be able to detect the generation of, of deep fakes and AI generated content.
So I think he's taken the detection of a steg itself.
I don't know what the hell's going on outside my, my window now.
Um, and now using it to detect AI generated content.
So I'm going to go on mute here.
I don't know what the hell is happening.
All right, Alex.
Thank you.
Uh, thank you for that.
Uh, any, any other, uh, words, caller before we go?
Well, I know how the, uh, Microsoft where works.
Essentially what the companies do supposedly, I'm not sure.
Is that every, every, everyone has a different standard.
So Metter's got a standard.
Google's got a standard.
They all have different names, but they all share the same technique as they actually encode
their information in the spectra of images generated using their models.
Now, what is spectra?
I might be wrong.
So somebody please correct me on this, but essentially what it is, is a graph represent.
You can graph it out, uh, as a spectrum of, let's say, chroma.
Oh, I'm not sure about chroma objects, but let's just say color.
Color, right?
So you graph out the color that is used in the image.
There's different, uh, waves and peaks.
And what the companies do is that they encode the information there as amplitude in a certain
region, such and such.
And, well, Unmarker is able to just detect that and distort it, not entirely erase it.
And it's like a graphic, of course, so nobody will be any the wiser.
Very cool.
Do you have information about, what, what is the software called again?
Unmark, you said?
Unmarker.
It's on GitHub.
Cool.
Okay.
It sort of reminds me of something I heard at the very last Shmo Con.
It was a guy from, uh, a presenter, uh, who worked at Microsoft and he was, uh, explaining
a standard for, for doing essentially this, assigning AI-generated images, or not just AI-generated,
but images in general to validate, well, uh, where did this come from?
And in the context of verifying, uh, journalistic imagery, uh, supposedly the BBC finds their,
uh, content using this system.
And, like I said, I was listening to this and I thought, well, what if somebody just erased
this metadata?
Because it is metadata, it is stick in the graphic, and just like the FunMarker, uh, software,
um, you can just obliterate it.
I'm not sure if this is something that is going to work.
A method that will be viable in the future.
I believe that we should be able, uh, as people, we should at least be able to discern,
is this real, is this fake?
I mean, I'm, by now, I can, I, I pretty much, uh, learned the writing style of ChatGPT and
these other models.
I have a pretty good idea of what an AI-generated artwork looks like.
It's not perfect.
But it'll get better, I'm sure.
It will have to be, uh, even, even more.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
We used to think, we used to say, oh, these computers are never going to be able to draw
some things, uh, like that.
Well, here they are.
So, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll see how it develops.
Yep.
I look forward to it.
It'll be, it'll be fun.
It'll be interesting.
It'll be a challenge.
Well, and.
I have.
Go ahead.
Thus, the tools.
Thus, all of these different tools for analyzing this stuff.
Go ahead with your last, uh, statement.
Yeah, I need to remember, I need to pretend like this is ham radio, and, or, just radio in
general for this matter, and wait a bit for.
Because this is an internet phone, it's an analog phone, it's an ATA, so, yeah, there's
a bit of delay.
Interesting.
Okay.
Well, at least it's a phone, you know, it's, a lot of people don't use phones anymore, either.
Well, I have something to say about Telex.
I'm sure Rebel would enjoy this, but I have an update on the Library of Congress tape recorder
that I think I brought up on the show two weeks ago.
Okay.
Three weeks ago, I don't exactly remember.
So, I have it right here in front of me on the top, it says Library of Congress.
Vision for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.
It's not the U.S. government, so, I have stolen from the government now.
Well, I'm back here, the model number C-76.
I've done some research and actually looked up these things.
I mean, there's a bit of writing about this specifically for musicians and stuff using
this to manipulate tape loops, but they all are talking about one of these machines that
has a white case, and it's almost all model number C-1.
This one I have right here in front of me is actually the model number C-76.
The difference is that instead of being white, it's all orange, which I guess would be a useful
improvement for people who are visually impaired.
On the back here, it says,
It's a cassette book machine manufactured by Telex Communications Incorporated, Rochester, Minnesota,
for the Library of Congress.
I looked up this company, Telex Communications, based out of Minnesota.
The Wikipedia article is pretty short, but it says that they used to, did historically manufacture
hearing aid, so that's sort of accessibility tech.
This machine is probably a continuation of that range.
They were bought, sold, as it says in the article, and now they use the brand to sell avionics radio
and dispatch systems.
So pretty interesting.
Telex, let's see, Telex Communications.
Did they manufacture Telex terminals?
That's what I was trying to find out, but the information is pretty smart, so I'm not sure.
Well, I would imagine they did with a name like Telex.
I mean, that's what I know them as.
Yeah, right, but that was a pretty interesting connection.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Well, thanks again for the call and giving us so much to think about and discuss.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I was going to say something about Rebel.
It's best that you not go down that road.
Oh, I don't.
Again, this is all information that is easily findable on Google.
It's all on the Internet.
I mean, well, somebody should please go ahead and build him a time machine
so that he can get answers to all his questions about telephonic equipment.
I mean, this is crazy.
It always, the conversation always seems to generate to that.
Oh, well.
We're going to leave it there, but thanks for your call, and we'll talk to you again soon.
All right, and that's going to do it for us, because we're tired, hot, and sweaty.
God, Kyle, what do you think it is in here, 120?
No.
No, we shouldn't speak Fahrenheit.
34, 35?
Sure.
All right.
Well, we don't have to stay here, so we're going to go.
Do you want to hear zero, though?
Oh, yeah, we're going to do that, weren't we?
Just get it over with.
Come on.
Let's get it off.
What?
That's it?
That's it.
A reorder?
What happened to the operator?
I want the operator.
They're busy.
That's not busy signal.
That's an all-circuit's busy.
I don't want to get into it now.
No, they're busy.
Oh, yeah, I guess you're right.
For more information, or to write to us, oth at 2600.com is our email address.
Please go to hope.net for more information about the conference, and show up at a local
meeting this coming Friday, 2600.com slash meetings for a full listing all around the
world.
We will be back next week, 7 p.m. on WBAI, 8 p.m. here on Channel 2600.
Please keep your eyes open and question everything that you see, because...
The operator is out of order.
That's it.
Yeah.
When you can't find an operator anymore, you know everything is falling apart.
All right.
Thanks, everybody, for listening and for calling.
That was fun.
It was.
Good night.