We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed.
The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service.
Please check the number and try your call again or contact the operator for further assistance.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cough.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum Diddley Bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum Diddley Bum!
Bum Diddley Bum!
Bum Diddley Bum!
Bum Diddley Bum!
Bum Diddley Bum!
Bum Diddley Bum!
Bum Diddley Bum!
Bum Diddley Bum!
Thank you.
Good evening to everybody. The program is off the hook.
This is Emanuel Goldstein, joined by Kyle.
Hello.
And I believe out in Signal Land we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
And we have Gila.
Good evening.
I don't think we have any... Wait, where's Alex? Alex isn't here.
He is not, at least not as yet.
What is that magical chime? Could that be...
Okay. I just got a message from him saying he's in a cab.
I'm not sure why he can't be on the radio if you're in a cab.
But hopefully he is able to figure out how to connect to us.
Yeah, he insists on traveling on Wednesdays.
I don't know what that's all about.
But yeah, we're on tonight only for an hour
because we're in the middle of a whole lot of things.
As you can see, we're kind of short-staffed right now.
People are running all over the place.
And we just don't have the time for overtime at 8 o'clock.
So we're doing just the hour on WBAI, which is fine.
You know, it used to be all we did.
And we're quite happy to do this.
We encourage our listeners to support WBAI, as always.
Give to WBAI.org.
Keep this crucial voice of resistance and alternative views alive.
And look, Alex has joined us.
Alex, you managed to join us from a cab, I believe.
I am.
How is everybody?
I'm home into Manhattan from JFK.
Okay.
You know, it's incredible.
Planes only seem to fly on Wednesdays during our show.
When you returned from Sicily, that was the only time you could do it, huh?
It was.
It was.
We actually got in a while ago.
But, you know, it was nonsense with JFK and the planes
and the luggage not coming out.
And, you know, it was quite a long flight, too, I've got to tell you.
And so it feels about, you know, just after one in the morning.
And it's such a weird feeling in Rome in the morning.
You know, we went around this morning to actually saw where Pope Francis is buried
in Santa Maria Maggiore, a couple blocks away from a friend of mine's apartment in Rome.
And then you get on a plane, and then you end up in New York, and it's still light out.
And, you know, so it's one of those kind of very weird, surreal type of feelings and days.
It's a very long day when you do it that way, yes.
When you head west, you tend to follow the sun.
And you could keep going.
You could keep going to the west coast, and the same thing will keep happening.
Yeah.
I should just keep going, right?
And, I mean, why even land?
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Well, anything else that you have to share?
Actually, Kyle and I took a little trip, too, only for a day or two to Vermont last week.
And, you know, I've got to tell you, we had a lot of fun with technology up there
because there isn't a whole lot of connectivity in many places.
I mean, there is.
There's Wi-Fi.
But, you know, it's not like it is here.
You know, there are challenges.
There are mountains.
There are vast expanses of land where...
But here's the thing, you know, we had this particular challenge with our phones
where we couldn't get a reliable signal.
And I was trying to use the app called Signal to contact Kyle, who's in a different part
of town.
And I wasn't getting anything.
Wasn't getting data.
Wasn't getting a signal.
And I knew that this was an issue with my phone.
I've talked about it before on the radio, where just rebooting the phone is the way to fix
the problem.
I could not figure out how to reboot my phone because they changed the configuration.
I have a Samsung Galaxy, and a couple of months ago, they sent some kind of update down where
the look of your phone changed.
It was harder to read the amount of time that your battery had left.
A lot of people are complaining about this.
They're trying to make it look more like an iPhone, I think.
But one of the things they did, which really annoys me, is they changed the ability to hit
two buttons on the right-hand side and get a menu that says, restart your phone.
If you do that now, I'm holding my phone right now.
In fact, I'm going to unlock this phone.
And I'm going to hit the button I used to hit.
I'm pretty sure this is the button.
And look at this.
I've got Gemini.
In fact, Gemini is reading my thoughts right now, or my words.
And it's responding to me as if I'm talking to it.
I'm not talking to you, Gemini.
I don't want to talk to you.
I want to reboot my phone.
If I hit the two buttons up on the upper right, that's...
Gemini, a large language model treated by Google.
And now I have Gemini talking to me on my phone over the air.
So I can try to hit all three buttons at once.
And you know what?
I think that might be the secret, because that worked.
I didn't try that up there.
All three buttons at once you have to hit now.
I didn't know that.
And we were going crazy trying to just reboot my phone so that I could get a signal so that
I could talk to somebody on the phones that we both had.
That's how crazy things get.
Not because of Vermont, because of bad software design and updates that are forced upon you.
And it's just...
It makes people feel inept when they're not inept.
Yes, Gila.
Emmanuel, is this the same phone that you had where you kept accidentally calling the police?
Yes, in fact, that was another setting that has since been changed, where...
I forget what it was.
If I hit...
It was one of those buttons.
If I hit one of those buttons or leaned on one of those buttons...
I believe they're called convenience keys.
Yeah, well, it wasn't very convenient for me, because the cops kept saying, what do you
want?
And they were texting me.
It was ridiculous.
I think I even did it on the air once.
You did, yeah.
Some engineer somewhere says, you know, this is what people need, but they don't talk to
the people, and that's where all the problems happen.
So, yeah, it was a bit of fun, but it was also kind of annoying, because, you know, we
literally had no way of communicating with each other, even though we were both, you know...
We both had high-tech, you know...
It was insane.
It's just crazy.
And it's all avoidable.
Well, can I ask you guys, where in Vermont were you?
Why does that matter?
Why does that matter?
You're always trying to pinpoint exactly where we are, Alex.
We were in Vermont.
Always.
That's pretty specific.
We gave you one of 50 states.
That's where we were.
Well, I mean, most places in the 802 are not very populated, but if you were up near
Burlington, that would be a surprise.
Burlington, of course, Alex is showing his knowledge of Vermont.
And Burlington is the capital of Vermont.
It's the biggest city.
No, it is not the capital.
Okay, you almost fell into my trap there.
Okay, I was...
What is the capital, Alex?
I used to live in the capital.
The capital is Montpelier.
That's correct.
That's correct.
Okay.
That's right.
And he also made reference to the 802, which is, of course, the area code of Vermont.
Correct.
Okay.
But the point is, yeah, we were in a part of Vermont where this...
The thing is, it would have happened anywhere, because if my phone gets into that
kind of a mode, I have to reboot it.
But if I don't know how to reboot my phone, it gets very, very frustrating.
I can empathize with that.
It's also the case, like, you be in one part of the state and presume that the coverage
extends, but it's not the same everywhere because of the terrain.
So you can very quickly leave a place, and you can't really be confident, or it's not
the first thing you're thinking about, necessarily, unless you check, oh, is this sort of a zone
where there's no reception at all?
So you have to be aware of that, especially if you're relying on navigation and different
tools that need data.
That reminds me.
Something else happened, too, when we were up there.
This is courtesy of Google.
Google, we were in one town, and we needed to get to another town, and a mountain was
involved.
There was a mountain in the way.
So that's as much information as we're going to give you, Alex.
So we were in a...
You know, there were two towns and a mountain, and we weren't sure...
We were leaving a driveway.
We weren't sure if we were supposed to turn left or right, and Waze, owned by Google, hadn't
quite figured out where we were yet, so we had to sort of guess.
And then once we were on the road, it would either correct us or tell us to keep going.
Well, we made a right.
It told us to keep going.
We kept going for three, four, five miles, and then it told us to turn onto a dirt road,
make a left onto a dirt road.
Now, it just seems kind of strange that if you're going to a town, that you'd get there
via a dirt road.
But we said, hey, you know, it's Google.
They can't possibly be wrong.
So we made a left turn onto that dirt road, and then Waze told us to make a U-turn on that
dirt road, come back, and then make a right.
So basically, what Google did was make us drive five miles out of our way to make a U-turn
instead of saying, at the earliest convenience, make a U-turn because you're going the wrong
way.
Wouldn't tell us that.
So we thought we were going the right way.
We were wondering why we're going up a mountain.
Why are we going down a dirt road?
So this is Google logic, and they don't give you the opportunity to think like a human.
I had a very similar experience in Sicily.
It was maybe about a week and a half ago.
We were trying to meet a bunch of friends outside of Noto in a very rural area at a vegan
restaurant.
One couple with whom we were traveling was vegetarians, so they wanted to take us to
some well-known vegetarian place out in the middle of nowhere, and we all were given different
directions by Waze or Google, and all ended up in the middle of fields.
Like, literally told us to turn into a field.
This is a Fellini film if I ever heard one.
It was just, like, yeah, that's true.
It was, I mean, it was really crazy for us because I've got the kids in the back of the
car, my wife next to me, and we're driving at night, and there's no lights on.
Obviously, it's like a farmer's field down this area where there were some tracks in the
road, and we thought, okay, you know, it seems like we're going down the right way.
And you saw a clown, right?
At some point, you had to see a clown.
Well, but just literally out of nowhere, then the trail just stopped, and it was just dense
forest right in front of us, and Waze was continuing to tell us to go forward through
the forest.
We did see, at which point, a fox, a beautiful fox, like a kind of fox, if you were to conjure
any kind of mental image of a fox right now, like a classical-looking fox just ran out right
in front of the car.
We scared the hell out of it, apparently, by going down this field.
But all three families that we were with ended up in different fields trying to get to this
vegetarian restaurant.
We ultimately made it, but it was a real fiasco.
Yeah, I challenge people to try and get around without technology sometimes, because you'll
find it's actually more efficient using your wits than relying on whatever it is you're
told to do, sometimes without reason.
And, you know, it can be a great convenience, especially if traffic is involved or if you want
to know where the cops are, but sometimes we also need to rely on our wits, and I think
we don't do that nearly enough.
So, yeah, okay, we all had some adventures there, driving around, being misled by technology.
Here's a letter we got from somebody who takes issue with us.
This is from Anonymous Drivers.
For a show run by hackers and freaks, you sure have no freaking clue how to use tech.
A letter entitled, You're Hackers?
Well, okay, look, Mr. or Mrs. Anonymous, I don't think you know what hacking is.
But if you think hacking is a nice, clean, technical solution to everything, you're wrong.
Hacking is dirty.
Hacking is throwing things together at the last possible minute.
Hacking is spending half an hour trying to figure out why a driver won't work on a particular
machine, and hacking doesn't necessarily have to do with high tech in any way.
It has to do with persistence.
It has to do with throwing something together against the odds.
We do that every week.
Sometimes it sounds good.
Sometimes it sounds terrible.
But we're throwing our hearts into it.
You have no idea how many other things we're dealing with at the moment.
We're not professional engineers.
We never claim to be.
The fact that this show is on at all is a miracle.
The fact that this radio station is here is a miracle.
That's right.
WBAI is the ultimate hack because it should not exist.
It should not be in the middle of the commercial ban, but it is.
And it has been since 1960.
And we shouldn't be able to do a radio show in the middle of Manhattan, but we are.
And we shouldn't be able to have a magazine and a conference and all the things that we hold dear.
These are hacks because we are persistent.
And we throw things together and we make them work.
And again, it's not always pretty.
And I'm sorry if you're offended by that.
But we are determined to make it happen one way or another.
So anyone want to add?
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah.
I'm usually not one to toot our own horn on our own program like this.
But I think the fact that we're doing this, yeah, is pretty amazing.
When lockdown happened, listeners who were around five, six years ago will remember that we were very excited about the brand new studio that we had built at great expense at WBAI.
You know, updated technology, you know, easy to use things.
I was getting trained on the new equipment and it was glorious.
And I couldn't I couldn't wait to use it.
We were all very excited about it.
And then lockdown happened and we couldn't go to the studio anymore.
And the stuff that we had and, you know, we've we've both we've all, you know, kind of worked in broadcasting in various ways and worked with audio and worked with tech.
And we had stuff lying around our houses, the stuff where you are, Emmanuel, the stuff where I am.
And we managed to throw together things that were not in a have your own radio station kit.
They were just stuff that we were able to, you know, wire together with chewing gum and and, you know, good intentions and somehow get all this working.
And it's kept working for five years and change now.
And I think that's that's that kind of warrants recognizing as something that was not easy to do.
It's not easy to keep going.
Equipment fails.
Equipment degrades over time.
We have to figure out new things and new ways of doing things.
But I'm I'm rather proud of how we've managed to keep it going on this program and on this station.
And, Kyle, you deserve most of the credit there because you you built the board that we use here on this end.
Rob Gila, you're in a different location.
Alex, you're in a cab.
So everybody has their own hardware working with at the moment.
But this, you know, I'm really proud of of the job that you did putting this together.
The fact that we can even try to talk to people on the phone, you know, sometimes there's a home on the phone.
And, you know, a lot of times it's not even our fault.
It's it's the people that provide the phone line that are providing the home as well.
But it's it all comes together.
We have a delay system.
We have all sorts of things that really I never dreamed would be possible outside of the radio station.
And it's a whole lot more convenient to not have to, you know, trudge into Brooklyn every every week to be able to do this remotely and sound as good.
And I think we do sound as good.
So thanks to those who appreciate what we are trying to do here.
And I hope that we are doing as good a job as we can.
We certainly will keep trying to do that.
And Rob, you have something else.
Yeah.
And just also thanks for all of you out there listening who bear with us when stuff doesn't always work as planned.
And we have to fiddle with things because, you know, at the end of the day, that that is part of the fun of it is getting things to work on the fly and seeing how how good we can make.
I've had people say they they enjoy the parts of the show where things don't work as well as they're supposed to.
And, you know, when I'm when I'm watching network television, I am drawn to the foul ups that happen.
They don't happen as often now that things have gotten way too boring and predictable because they're automated here in this country.
But in other places like Canada, for instance, when I'm watching Canadian TV, occasionally there is a technical problem and it's it's fun to watch.
It makes you realize there are humans still in charge.
And whenever you hear something go wrong here, just know that there's a human somewhere tearing their hair out.
OK, so we have a bunch of stories here.
This one has to do with Mastodon, the decentralized social network named Mastodon, says it cannot comply with Mississippi's age verification law.
I don't know if people have heard about this.
It's causing all kinds of problems.
Now, that law also saw the social media network Blue Sky pull out of the state entirely.
But Mastodon is claiming it does not have the means to even comply with this.
The social nonprofit explains that Mastodon doesn't track its users, which makes it difficult to track its users,
which is what's mandated here with this legislation.
It does not want to use IP address based blocks as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.
The statement follows a lively back and forth conversation last week between Mastodon founder and CEO Eugene Rocco and Blue Sky board member and journalist Mike Masnick.
In the conversation published on their respective social networks, Rocco claimed there is nobody that can decide for the Fediverse to block Mississippi.
The Fediverse being the decentralized social network that includes Mastodon and other services and is powered by the ActivityPub protocol, Rocco said.
And this is why real decentralization matters.
Now, Mastodon pushed back questioning why Mastodon's individual servers, like the one Rocco runs at Mastodon.social, would not also be subject to the same $10,000 per user fine for noncompliance with the law.
At the time this article on TechCrunch came out, Mastodon GMBH, the community-funded nonprofit organization, did not respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, however, the nonprofit shared a statement with TechCrunch to clarify its position, saying that while Mastodon's own servers specify a minimum age of 16 to sign up for its services,
it does not have the means to apply age verification to its services, that is, the Mastodon software doesn't support it.
The Mastodon 4.4 release back in July added the ability to specify a minimum age for sign up and other legal features for handling terms of service,
partly in response to increased regulation around these areas.
The new feature allows server administrators to check users' ages during sign up, but the age check data is not stored.
And that means individual server owners have to decide for themselves if they believe an age verification component is a necessary addition.
I know, Rob, you're a heavy user of Mastodon.
What do you think of these developments?
Because as a Mastodon user in my personal life, and also our program has a Mastodon off the hook at masto.hackers.town,
and saying that Mastodon has to implement age verification is like saying email has to implement age verification.
The statement is meaningless because email is something that no one entity controls.
Everyone's got their own email servers.
You have an email provider that provides you the email access, or you can spin up your own email machine at home
and just as easily connect to email users everywhere, and Mastodon works in the exact same way.
So there is no way that you could tell Mastodon as a whole that it has to do anything.
It just exists out there, and everyone running their own small part of it is responsible for their own bit.
And as I said, we're on a Mastodon provider called Hackers.town,
which is run by just members of the community who, you know, have their own little group going and, you know, let people use it.
And it is not what could be described as any kind of commercial operation.
And it would be very tricky for, I think, them or single user Mastodon instances when people do spin up their own box at home
or basically anything that's not a massive corporation to say, okay, we're going to implement some age verification rules,
especially when, as we so often report on this program, the methods of age verification out there are all very bad,
and none of them conclusively identify someone's age.
So, Rob, if I can just follow your analogy here, if you're saying it's like email and you can't fine email for letting somebody under 16 use it,
then why does Mastodon care? Because it's irrelevant.
They wouldn't be able to be fined if they're like email, right?
There is no person to fine.
Because Mastodon GmbH or GGMBH is a nonprofit organization that develops the software and puts it out there for everyone to use,
whether they use it through a provider or spin up their own instance.
And trying to hold them responsible for what everybody does with Mastodon would be a fool's errand.
It would be like trying to track down the inventor of email and blame them for every bad email you've ever gotten.
Well, are they saying they're going to hold them responsible?
I don't believe so.
I don't think we should worry then.
Go ahead, Alex.
Hey, guys.
I'm going to have to jump off for a little bit because I have arrived at home.
I need to bring the bags up, but I'll try to jump back on when I'm done.
Well, that's a very relevant point, Alex.
Thank you for bringing that up.
You've got it.
Really moving the conversation along there.
Alex is getting out of the cab now.
Okay, well, we'll talk to you later.
I thought he was going to raise a point.
Lift with your legs.
So, you know, if it's something that is not relevant to Mastodon, I don't know what everybody's freaking out over.
Who are they going to find?
Who are they going to come after?
There is nobody they can come after.
So, why we even - you just ignore something like this.
Does that seem reasonable?
I think the possibility of them deciding they are going to go after every individual who's running part of the decentralized Mastodon network, that could be very frightening.
That could scare some people away from using what has become a very good technical resource, or it could push it out of this country.
I say you call their bluff.
I mean, what are we talking about?
If they go after every person involved, how many people is that?
That's thousands, tens of thousands, more, right?
Countless.
Even the ones within the United States doing this.
That would be a ridiculous amount of, I think, person power and a ridiculous amount of administrative tasks just to go after people who are, you know,
not the corporate entities that are capable of implementing any of these age verification measures, which are there because politicians sort of use it as a hot-button issue to rile up support and say,
we're going to protect the children.
Think of the children when, you know, as I mentioned, that is not the result of using something like this.
It just makes certain companies a bit richer while working poorly.
Wow, okay.
And this law in Mississippi, it basically says, what, do we know?
I don't have it directly to hand, but it is interesting to think that Blue Sky is now blocking Mississippi over this and deciding we're just going to not be involved there.
Because, of course, tracking down and identifying, you know, positively identifying where somebody is physically located who's on the net is also its own kind of can of worms.
Because people can use proxy servers.
They can use VPNs.
They can use all sorts of things to bounce their connections around and have where they appear to be connecting from have nothing to do with where they are.
We're seeing that in the U.K. with their attempts to block certain types of adult content from users there, which is huge for the VPN industry over there because it's now just become a thing that you do if you want to exercise, you know, exercise your right to look at grown-up parts of the internet over there.
So Mississippi is basically blocking kids from looking at any part of the internet?
So not exactly.
Basically, basically, the Mississippi law, so there's this law in Texas that does do a lot of the same age verification stuff, but the Mississippi law is significantly broader.
And basically, the Texas law is saying age verification for adult-themed sites.
Mississippi requires all users to verify their ages before using common social media sites ranging from Facebook to Nextdoor.
Okay.
In addition to the age verification rule, the Mississippi law requires social media websites to work to prevent children from accessing harmful materials and prohibits minors from using social media websites such as Instagram and YouTube without parental consent.
Are you telling me that a four-year-old in Mississippi will no longer be able to go grab a phone and turn on YouTube?
Got to get their fix of Baby Shark somehow.
I mean, Baby Shark didn't get to however many billion views by accident, is all I'm saying.
Okay, well, we're living in crazy times, obviously, but, you know, again, my view is don't take them seriously.
Just ignore them.
Make them act irrationally because people will see them for who they are at that point.
Yeah, I know it's risky.
I know it's something that, you know, we want to try and avoid, but, you know, this is part of the battle.
This is part of what we are in for when you have crazy people running the show.
And that's what we have right now.
We really do.
Okay.
Google, there was a bit of a landmark decision.
They have to hand over their search results and some data to rival companies.
They don't have to sell their Chrome web browser.
That was the fear before the ruling yesterday.
This decision by Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia falls short of the sweeping changes proposed by the government to rein in the power of Silicon Valley.
Judge Mehta said in the, yeah, Judge Mehta, in the 223-page ruling that Google must share some of its search data with qualified competitors to resolve its monopoly.
The Justice Department had asked the judge to force the company to share even more of its data, arguing it was key to Google's dominance.
Judge Mehta also put restrictions on payments that Google uses to ensure its search engine gets prime placement in web browsers and on smartphones.
But he stopped short of banning those payments entirely and did not grant the government's request that Google be forced to sell Chrome,
which the government said was necessary to remedy the company's power as a search monopoly.
Notwithstanding this power, he said, courts must approach the task of crafting remedies with a healthy dose of humility.
This court has done so.
Guys, any thoughts on this?
Well, I do have a question, which is Google search results are not so great.
Lately they've been terrible.
Oh, my God.
And that's part of my question.
Do they have to hand over, you know, the search results now or the search results from a couple years ago where you could actually find things?
And I don't know, man.
I, sorry, just I despair of what generative AI has turned so much of the internet in the world into.
And how is, I have so many questions and I can't articulate any of them right now, but I don't understand how this is going to solve anything.
You can ask AI to help you with that.
I'm sure AI will articulate better.
Yeah, one question I definitely have is what Google is required to share is certain search index information.
So basically their database of what's out there.
And it's unclear whether or not that includes the mess that AI has made of things, but also certain user interaction data.
And I would be really interested to know what that is.
What kind of information on Google's users, which I think include most people using the internet today, are they going to have to share with their competition?
A lot of people were hoping that they would have to sell off Chrome, the browser.
But I think one big reason they're not doing that is because Chrome as a browser is not a sustainable business.
It is something that slurps in data and info and everything and gets people connected to the other sort of Google services that they have out there and monetizes their users' information.
It's sort of the lost leader.
So if you try to spin it off, I don't think it would be a viable business model on its own.
It needs that infrastructure that Google has.
So it's kind of an 800-pound gorilla because it's also the most popular web browser at the moment.
And so if they did something that kind of switched it off, that would be a huge mess.
And I'm not defending the move.
I would be really fascinated to see what would happen if Google did have to unload the browser.
But I think that was part of the reasoning that Judge Meta, who has been connected to so many huge cases in recent years, did not command them to do this.
Yeah, I resent being forced to use Chrome because I prefer Firefox, to be honest.
But, you know, an increasing number of websites say, we no longer support Firefox.
You have to use Chrome.
And they kind of force you.
They push you into using a browser you do not want to use.
I don't like it because I don't have nearly as much success blocking ads as I do on Firefox.
It doesn't work as well.
And so I'm forced to sit through all this crap just to get to something I want to be able to access.
And, you know, I think we should continue to have choices.
And companies and other entities should not be just not supporting other browsers because they feel they can only support one.
Rob?
Part of the reason the ad blocking stuff works so much better on Firefox is Google intentionally defanged it on Chrome.
They updated the underlying technology behind it and behind how their plugins work so that you cannot have a functional ad blocker that will work as well as one can do on Firefox.
And this leads to a situation in which an advertising company controls this browser.
They have, you know, kind of kneecapped the ad blocking technology that's protected users from the web for so long.
And they're free to keep exercising this control.
Exactly.
And, I mean, ultimately I think that's really what it comes down to is Mozilla is, correct me if I'm wrong, a nonprofit entity.
It is.
And Google is emphatically not.
Not nonprofit, yes.
Not nonprofit.
Definitely true.
Pro-profit.
And I think ultimately that's the thing.
And it really comes down to a lot of the questions of is the internet as it is a public utility and a public good?
Or is it something to be monetized and sold to the highest bidder at every turn?
And this whole situation is also feeling very familiar to those of us who were around in like the 90s and 2000s and the days of Microsoft Internet Explorer being the monopolistic browser and, you know, implementing technology outside the agreed upon web standards for content that you put online.
So that you had websites saying, well, this site is only going to work in Internet Explorer.
You have to use this commercial product in order to access this chunk of the Internet.
Yeah, it's deja vu.
Everything old is new again.
What was that, Rob?
Just said everything old is new again.
Yeah, deja vu.
It was my first thought when you mentioned that.
But it is truly seemingly the same in that a lot of the count for its dominance is the integration into the mobile operating system.
So people with smartphones having this as a default browser built into that system software necessitates the reliance on it in that particular platform.
And there's just a lot of those phones out there.
So those I would imagine, I mean, those numbers are in large part due to the lack of choice that a lot of users experience that is in stark contrast to what you'd expect on a desktop where you do have a bunch of different choices.
And that was hard fought.
And I wonder if the same thing is itself happening again because it feels so familiar that, I don't know, it also reminds me, I was looking at a USB-C cable.
I'm reminded of the initiative in Europe to force Apple to change some of their hardware specifications.
And that pressure actually did pay off.
So some of these things, like if it's strategic and makes sense to something that is a poor business practice or behavior, there's a place for this grievance.
And I like to see more intelligent stuff.
And hopefully this yields some kind of adjustment in the business practices.
You know, I think a large part of the problem is we don't realize what we're dealing with as far as who's behind it.
Is it Google?
Is it Alphabet?
Yeah.
It's all the same entity.
You know, we have to say this is Google.
Waze is Google.
Chrome is Google.
Nest is Google.
YouTube is Google.
They all are Googles.
Let's stop calling them different names and start referring to them as their company, their parent company that is controlling everything.
And then I think you'll see, you know, some of the problems that tend to repeat.
We're talking about Chrome allowing for more ads and not allowing consumers to block ads like Firefox does.
You know, I was watching the parade from Beijing yesterday.
Did anybody see that?
It was the 80th anniversary of their military victory over Japan.
In fact, the name of this thing, it was the conference to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese people's war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the world anti-fascist war.
I'm not kidding.
That's really what the parade and the whole thing, the whole celebratory day was called.
So, you know, I'm watching this on state television from China, on YouTube, on Google, and that's good.
You know, that's what a service like that should provide.
Interrupted every eight minutes by an ad for laundry detergent.
You know, you can laugh at the name of the parade, but I think the more absurd player here is us.
We're having to inject selling products into everything.
I really don't think the Chinese Communist Party was monetizing coverage of their parade.
I really don't think so.
It just makes us look like complete idiots throughout the entire planet.
And Google's leading the way as far as that goes.
Anyway, enough of that.
That's how I feel about what they're doing, how they're polluting the Internet with consumerism, like aggressive consumerism.
Doge has put critical social security data at risk.
I think we warned that this might happen, that this probably would happen.
But yeah, members of the Department of Government Efficiency uploaded a copy of a crucial social security database back in June to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk.
There are only hundreds of millions of Americans, aren't there?
What's the population?
It's like, what, 400, 500 million?
Yeah, it's not that many.
So pretty much everybody's information put at risk of being leaked or hacked.
So a database contained records of all social security numbers issued by the federal government.
Now, that might not sound so bad until you realize that every social security number is issued by the federal government.
That's all the social security numbers.
Everybody gets one.
When you're born, you get one.
You used to have to apply for one.
But now you get one when you're born.
So they're all up there.
It includes individuals' full names, addresses, and birth dates, among other details that could be used to steal their identities, making it one of the nation's most sensitive repositories of personal information.
Now, this whistleblower named Charles Borges underscores concerns, and he since had to resign, concerns that have led to lawsuits seeking to block young software engineers at the agency built by Elon Musk from having access to confidential government data.
In his complaint, Borges said Doge members copy the data to an internal agency server that only Doge could access, foregoing the type of independent security monitoring normally required under agency policy for such sensitive data and creating enormous vulnerabilities.
Now, there's no indication yet that this database has been breached or used inappropriately.
But his disclosure stated that as of late June, no verified audit or oversight mechanisms existed to monitor what Doge was using the data for or whether it was being shared outside the agency.
We may never know, in other words.
And Alex, welcome back.
Yes, thank you.
I am back indeed.
So, yeah, I don't know if you heard our story about Doge acting like idiots and compromising all of our data.
Yeah, I walked into this story, I think, halfway through where, you know, just like every other story, I guess it was, you know, putting all of Americans' data at risk.
Only hundreds of millions.
Only hundreds of millions of Americans.
Oh, only hundreds.
Okay, hundreds of millions.
That's fine.
That's not terrible.
Could be worse.
Well, the current U.S. population, according to census.gov, is 342,423,216.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you, Doge.
Thank you very much for that.
That's more stupidity that we are seeing unravel in front of us.
Okay, here's something else.
Alex, I think you might find this interesting.
An activist has started using artificial intelligence to identify ICE agents beneath their masks, a use of the technology, sparking new political concerns over AI-powered surveillance.
Dominic Skinner is a Netherlands-based immigration activist.
He estimates that he and a group of volunteers have publicly identified at least 20 ICE officials recorded wearing masks during arrests.
He told Politico his experts are able to reveal a face using AI if they have 35% or more of the face visible.
The AI-powered project adds a new twist to the debates over both ICE masking and government surveillance tools.
It's kind of refreshing to see the tools used against them for a change.
Alex, any thoughts on this?
I mean, I think what's good for the goose is good for the gander here.
And if ICE agents are going to be using facial recognition technologies and widespread surveillance networks in order to identify people that they suspect are here illegally within the United States,
then I think it is just par for the course at that point to use the same types of technologies to identify ICE agents who are trying to evade any kind of accountability or transparency by operating by wearing masks.
I mean, that just rubs me the wrong way from the outset to have government agents enforcing the law, wearing masks without any kind of accountability.
And I think the use of technology in this way is really what we should be doing.
It's what we, I think, need to be doing more of, quite frankly.
Yes, Rob.
What concerns me about this is the use of AI.
And I would really like to see the, I would really like to know more about what AI they're using, what this underlying technology is, and how accurate it is.
Because accuracy in facial recognition is not great.
And generative AI can invent things.
And I don't think this is something we can depend on.
I'm all for the idea.
I think, you know, there should be no reason that ICE agents have the right to privacy.
Every local cop on the street has a badge number that ostensibly, theoretically, would keep them accountable for their actions.
And I don't think ICE agents have the right to any more privacy than that.
Don't cops also have their name on their badge?
Indeed they do.
And, you know, ICE agents going around, you know, without standard uniforms, they could just, you know, have whatever they want on, no identifying info.
That's crap.
But I think trusting generative AI to identify their faces, I think there's a lot of danger in that.
What I'm really curious about, and I'm surprised this hasn't become a major issue,
when people with masks on that have no identifying labels whatsoever are grabbing people off the streets,
does anybody think maybe they're not members of law enforcement?
Maybe they are just mask thugs grabbing people off the streets?
And maybe people should defend themselves against these mask thugs?
How has that not happened already?
It is happening, and there are a lot of cities, particularly where ICE has been acting significantly,
where people are pretending to be ICE agents.
They are committing felonies.
There are people who are dressing up as ICE agents and blocking their faces and sexually assaulting dozens of women
because they can, because there's no accountability right now.
And for everyone to say, oh, ICE needs to hide their faces for their own safety.
If you can't do your job with your whole chest, then you shouldn't be doing it.
And if you don't want to say to people, oh, I'm an ICE agent, then don't be an ICE agent.
It was like when I yelled at the kids who were working at the haunted house.
I was like, how do you live with yourself?
Your job is to make people scared and uncomfortable.
How do you live with yourself?
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold on a second.
You yelled at people in a haunted house?
Kids love to be scared.
You're shaming the people that bring joy to kids?
Right.
So I was a senior in college.
I'm not a huge Halloween person, but my friends were like, hey, we're going to Not Scary Farm.
And the guy I had a crush on was going, so I went.
And I was in the food court drinking something, and someone came up to me and went, ooh, and I just snapped.
And I said, how do you look at yourself in the mirror?
The haunted house had a food court?
No.
It was Not Scary Farm.
So it was like a-
I don't know what that is.
What is Not Scary Farm?
I don't know what that means.
Not's Berry Farm, which is a theme park in Southern California.
But they do a Halloween-themed extravaganza around Halloween, and it's spooky roller coasters, and there's haunted houses, and all kinds of things going on.
And I was in the food area, and someone came up at me and shook a can of beans and went, ooh, and I said, how do you say hello to your mother?
How do you look at yourself in the mirror?
You get paid to prey on people's fears and vulnerabilities.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
I'm not directly comparing people who work at haunted houses to ICE agents, but I'm not not doing that.
You know, I worked at a haunted house before we met.
Before we met, yeah.
You know, long-time listeners to this program will remember the time I had to take a break over the Halloween season because my voice was too shot to do radio because I was screaming at people.
But I had a lot of fun in that job, and in so many ways, you and I are a mixed marriage, I think.
Well, let's hope this doesn't turn contentious because there's a lot here.
There's a lot here.
I think we're spinning our wheels, though, in a tangent, so I want to get back to the masked ICE agents that are threatening the freedom of our country because this is really an issue.
And it's an issue that, yeah, I know people don't like it when we talk about things like this, but things like this are happening, so we have to talk about them.
And when this becomes normal, it's very hard to get back to a state of actual normalcy where these kinds of things don't happen.
They're not stopping at people who are in the country without authorization.
They will go after everybody using these tactics, and they will use the same excuse.
They have to protect their identity because they're afraid of how people will react.
But again, as Gila said, you know, maybe you shouldn't be doing this.
If you're not proud of what you're doing, if you're not willing to stand up for what you're doing, then you shouldn't be doing it.
There might be something wrong with what you're doing.
And I think, you know, with that in mind, it makes sense to reveal as much information about these people as possible.
Yes, I take Rob's point that the technology is not great and can get things wrong many times.
You know, I think if you identify somebody and it turns out they work for ICE, then it's probable that that's the right person.
But if it's somebody who has no connection to ICE, obviously that could be very bad.
So I guess what I'm wishing for is for the technology to get better so that this kind of thing can be done.
So that people walking around intimidating fellow citizens and non-citizens alike have to be accountable for their actions.
Is that too much to ask?
That's an awfully long pause for what I think was an obvious question.
But go ahead, Alex.
No, I don't think so at all.
And I think the masks and the pretextual reasons that we're hearing for the masks are all because what they're really afraid of is accountability.
And that's, I think, a very, very sad state of affairs for a law enforcement agency at the federal level to have, I think, across the board right now with respect to these ICE agents and their activities.
They're terrified of accountability.
And I think, given Rob's, I think, very valid concerns and putting them to the side for a moment, I think the use of technology to enhance this type of accountability is something that I think holds great promise.
Technology can be used in evil ways and it can be used in good ways.
I think it's up to all of us to take control of it and use it the way that we see fit.
And in this particular case, you know, as far as letting people know when there are actions in your neighborhood or if you're able to reveal information that would hold people accountable, I think it's on all of us to use that technology responsibly.
Yeah, it should be something that you should count on this immersion in technology.
And I think, like you just mentioned, setting up systems to understand when these types of convoys are in different areas is totally valid because you can expect certain ranges of frequencies or certain identifiers about certain types of actions that are predictable.
And I think that's fair to be aware of how the technology is being used and know what it's associated with, like what kinds of actions, even if you're not able to get direct insight into what types of communications or what types of planning, fine.
If that's obscure, there's still markers of various activity.
And for people protesting certain actions, I think that their awareness and that kind of anticipation is crucial.
Expect it.
It's the tools that are being used, the ways that people are being cataloged with cameras and stuff like that.
You should be doing just as much, especially for really, really egregious cases of abuse that you really need documentation.
You really need some evidence to hold perpetrators accountable, especially ones that with these sorts of power or abusing power through subterfuge and misidentify, like hiding their identity.
That's going to have to be the last word as we are out of time.
Another edition of Off the Hook has come to an end.
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